Concerning Intellectual Property: A Conversation Between Ellen Seiter and Pat Aufderheide (Part One)

The grassroots efforts to block the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) represented simply the most recent and most highly publicized skirmish in ongoing struggles over the nature of intellectual property law and how it impacts the new media landscape. If intellectual property law might once have seemed to be a narrow and somewhat obscure focus for legal scholarship, it has become more and more central to the field of media and communication studies, as it has become part of the everyday reality of fans, artists, and teachers, struggling to figure out the extent of their Fair Use rights. As more and more of us are producing and circulating media, sometimes within, sometimes outside, current legal frameworks, intellectual property constitutes both an enabling mechanism and a constraint of our expressive possibilities. Seiter's book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production, co-authored with Bill Seiter, was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.   Pat Aufderheide's  Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, co-authored with Peter Jaszi was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011. Both represent indispensable guides to the current legal landscape  by veteran communication scholars (working in each case with a lawyer) which address how IP law impacts the production, circulation, and consumption of media. Both combine pragmatic understanding of the often contested status of current law as well as a theoretical understanding of how these decisions impact the future of communications.

My goal here was to spark a conversation between Aufderheide and Seiter, which explored some of the key themes in their books, and addressed some of the central controversies around intellectual property. I could not have imagined the commitment they would both show to this exchange and the depth of insights they brought to their interactions with each other. My job now is to get out of the way and let this exchange unfold over the next five blog posts.

Ellen’s section on copyright opens with the sentence, “One of these days you are going to receive a Cease and Desist letter.” This would not have been true at earlier moments in history where the communications and creative practices of most people would not have been exposed to this kind of legal scrutiny. So, what do you think are the consequences of this wide-spread engagement with legal struggles over intellectual property? How might larger public concerns inform our current understanding of this area of the law?

Pat: In fact, most people today are not going to get a Cease and Desist letter (though many more are likely to get a Content ID match or a takedown on YouTube, of which more later.) Ellen’s book is of course written for professional artists, who are more likely than the general public but still not very likely to get one. But one cease and desist letter sent to one person echoes through the culture, and then mythologizes into a full-blown lawsuit before you can stamp out a rumor. (We document some of this mythmaking in our book.) So it’s an excellent way to begin, to get people’s attention, demystify them, and also help them put themselves in a position where they are even more unlikely to get one.

Ellen: Google reports receiving over a million copyright notices per week, and these are passed on to users through takedown notices, usually within 24 hours. We wrote our book to speak to young, technologically savvy and admittedly ambitious media artists, who do post aggressively and frequently on line and, especially when they are enrolled at a college or university with a lot at stake as ISP providers do tend to police the students very stringently-- cease and desist or we will take down your email account. Pat is right that there can be a panic around these things-- many of my students in my anime course (who are avid amateur media makers) for example, worried that the campus police would be knocking on their door the minute they downloaded a bittorrent file, while others were very creative. So it is fairly common for intense young filmmakers eager to be discovered to get such a letter and we wanted to defuse the fear and use the specter of the letter as a teachable moment. According to Google’s transparency report, Comcast’s NBCUniversal rank near the top of senders of copyright notices. Now that YouTube and NBCUniversal are partners on projects like streaming the Olympics, we can expect that Google will become more and more friendly with the major media conglomerates. In fact, they have begun penalizing recipients of takedown notices by moving their content down the search engine algorithm.

Pat:Yes, it’s wise to know what to do with bullies, and many cease and desist letters are acts of bullying, as are many takedown notices on YouTube. And that’s why these days people in general need to know what their rights as users are under copyright.

You’re so right, Henry, that this didn’t use to be the case. Before 1978 (and Ellen’s book is great at many specifics of this story), when a 1976 overhauling of copyright went into effect, many works were not copyrighted at all. Many copyrighted works had not had their copyright renewed. Copyright was relatively short. All that is changed. These days, copyright is default--everything I just typed is now copyrighted to me. And copyright is looooooong--this paragraph is copyrighted to me until 70 years after my death. The monopoly right I hold on this paragraph extends to derivative products--so don’t try to make a poem, a song, or a play out of this paragraph. If I send you a cease and desist letter (I’ll see if my lawyer buddy will send it on his letterhead), I’ll talk about the “statutory damages,” or extra fines, you might get slapped with if you’re found to be infringing my monopoly right. They can be as high as $150,000 per infringement, although they never actually are.

Ellen: I have watched the growth of copyright intimidation since I got an MFA in filmmaking in 1976 at Northwestern. In those days we borrowed found footage and music for soundtracks freely, shot on 16mm, and screened our work in lecture halls and art galleries like Chicago Filmmakers and even festivals did not look very closely at any kinds of rights clearances. Through thirty years of teaching, much of it in production classes, I have seen the rights culture grow but also the scale of students’ ambitions. We just wanted a hundred or so other cool experimental filmmakers to know our work-- now students angle for overnight stardom and a contract from CAA, and this does lead to trouble. This type of individual-- who we wrote the book for -- has a lot of nerve, frankly, and does not intimidate so easily.

Pat: Artists face particular challenges in the remix era, in which everything is both copyable and copyrighted, and it’s wonderful that they they are so assertive. Our dream, and I think Ellen’s as well, is to make sure they know their (and others’!) rights, they don’t accept copyright bullying, and they don’t unnecessarily self-criminalize. It’s always sad to me to see someone fiercely declare their courageous act of piracy when it might be a perfectly legal fair use. For every courageous person, there have to be ten who didn’t take the “risk,” and self-censored.

This issue matters to everybody, actually, because copyright law intersects with ordinary creative practice--not just making the great American painting or writing the great American novel or making the great American movie, but everyday tasks such as composing a birthday slide show, or making a poster for the meeting, or writing a comment on somebody’s blog, or posting a clip from your trip to the club last night on your Facebook page.

When people are intimidated by what they understand--or misunderstand--to be copyright-driven limitations on their ability to create, they stifle their own thinking, much less their creative actions. This is what Prof. Peter Jaszi and I learned from in-depth studies of creative practice in ten different creative communities, as we discuss in our book.

When they understand that copyright protects both new users and copyright holders, in the service of creating more culture, they are able to exercise their First Amendment rights with greater confidence, and this has deep ramifications in creative practice. It changes how they think about their creative choices, long before they shape a creative act.

So copyright, as one branch of what has come (in my mind, unfortunately) to be called intellectual “property,” is part of the apparatus that shapes our individual contributions to the culture. Like trademark and patent law (also part of that sphere of law that lawyers just call IP), it both constrains and rewards cultural expression. As participants in this culture, we are stuck caring about IP policy, if we care about the future of our culture.

Ellen: I differ from Pat in two ways in my focus. First, I think the bad guys will ultimately be companies like Google (owner of YouTube) and Apple. They are the next giants of media monopolization and increasingly participate in takedown notices. Google is so big by now (Apple, too) and we are so intertwined with it, that there is little way out of their terms of service. Their financial and political alliances will make them argue for free posting when it suits their interests, litigate the hell out of competitors over patent infringements when THAT suits their interests, and send out takedown notices when it is to their political and business advantage to placate copyright holders. Meanwhile they will be implacable about their own terms of use or adhesion contracts, and make up a lot of their own rules about how people access content, what is taken down, what is hate speech (as we have seen in recent weeks), and when they cooperate with governments and when they don’t.

Pat: Thank you, Ellen, for pointing out that Google isn’t necessarily not evil in this story. I don’t want to be sanguine about the future of Google or any other companies that have created path dependence or effectively offer utility services. Terms of service have a grisly ability to override rights, and vertically integrated companies have special opportunities to take advantage of customer goodwill.

People often put up with outrageous terms of service because they’re not fully aware of what they’re giving up. This is why we think it’s so important to understand what’s at risk. At the moment, copyright policy is dangerously unbalanced, tilted in favor of monopoly rights holders (I can’t in conscience call them owners, since I don’t think they own their copyright, I think they’ve been given a limited monopoly over that stuff by the government). At the same time, large media companies strongly assert their political influence over the policy process. So it’s a very unpredictable and hazardous process to try to rebalance copyright directly via legislation. It’s also very chancy to try to get more balance in the law through lawsuits, since they typically occur around outlier cases, and you can never count on a judge thinking the way you do. So practice becomes extremely important as a way to shift balance. That’s why we wrote the book--to help people take that action to rebalance via practice.

Without the empowering knowledge that they have First Amendment rights within copyright, many frustrated people who create using other people’s materials--such as remix artists--imagine falsely that they are committing a criminal act. They call themselves “pirates,” and believe they’re standing up courageously to repression. But copyright law actually permits, under fair use, people to employ other people’s copyrighted material for the creation of new culture. Our book goes into the basic logic to make a fair use decision, but basically you need to ask two questions: 1) am I using this material for its original purpose or am I repurposing in order to do something different with it? and 2) am I using the appropriate amount to accomplish my goal? And this doesn’t even have to be creating new work. Archivists and librarians routinely repurpose copyrighted material without paying for it, employing fair use successfully and without being challenged.

Pat Aufderheide is the Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author with Peter Jaszi of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, July 2011), and author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She heads the Fair Use and Free Speech research project at the Center, in conjunction with Prof. Peter Jaszi in American University's Washington College of Law.

Ellen Seiter holds the Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches courses on television and new media history, theory and criticism in the Critical Studies Division. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993) and Remote Control; Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989). Her latest book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.

Announcing Futures of Entertainment 6 Line-Up

We are pleased to announce that the Futures of Entertainment 6 conference will be held on Friday, Nov. 9, and Saturday, Nov. 10, at the Wong Auditorium on MIT's campus in Cambridge, MA. Registration is available here. Also, note there is a pre-conference MIT Communications Forum free and open to the public on Thursday, Nov. 8. Some details below.

At the two-day conference, each morning will be spent discussing key issues faced by media producers, marketers, and audiences alike, at the heart of "the futures of entertainment." Each afternoon, we will look into how some of those issues are manifesting themselves in specific media industries.

Here is the schedule outline, as well as some of the confirmed panelists who will be joining us at the event. More information will be released regularly from @futuresof on Twitter.

Thursday, Nov. 8

7:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m.: MIT Communications Forum Pre-FoE6 Event at Bartos Theater New Media in West Africa Panelists: Fadzi Makanda, Business Development Manager, iROKO Partners Derrick "DNA" Ashong, leader, Soulflége Colin Maclay, Managing Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University Moderator: Ralph Simon, head of the Mobilium Advisory Group and a founder of the mobile entertainment industry

Friday, Nov. 9  7:30 a.m. Registration Opens

8:30 a.m.-9:00 a.m.: Opening Remarks from FoE Fellows Laurie Baird and Ana Domb

9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Listening and Empathy: Making Companies More Human Panelists: Lara Lee, Chief Innovation and Operating Officer, Continuum Grant McCracken, author, Culturematic, Chief Culture Officer Carol Sanford, author, The Responsible Business Emily Yellin, author, Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us Moderator: Sam Ford, Director of Digital Strategy, Peppercomm

11:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.: Coffee Break

11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: The Ethics and Politics of Curation in a Spreadable Media World--A One-on-One Conversation with Brain Pickings' Maria Popova and Undercurrent's Joshua Green

12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.: Lunch

1:45 p.m.-3:45 p.m.: The Futures of Public Media Panelists: Juan Devis, Director of Production and Program Development, KCET Public Media Andrew Golis, Director of Digital Media and Senior Editor, FRONTLINE Rekha Murthy, Director of Projects and Partnerships, Public Radio Exchange Annika Nyberg Frankenhaeuser, Media Director, European Broadcasting Union Moderator: Jessica Clark, media strategist, Association of Independents in Radio

3:45 p.m.-4:15 p.m.: Coffee Break

4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.: From Participatory Culture to Political Participation Panelists: Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media, MIT Dorian Electra, performing artist ("I'm in Love Friedrich Hayek"; "Roll with the Flow") Lauren Bird, Creative Media Coordinator, Harry Potter Alliance Aman Ali, co-creator, 30 Mosques in 30 Days Bassam Tariq, co-creator, 30 Mosques in 30 Days Moderator: Sangita Shresthova, Research Director of CivicPaths, University of Southern California

6:15 p.m.-6:45 p.m.: Closing Remarks from Maurício Mota and Louisa Stein

Saturday, Nov. 10 7:30 a.m. Registration Opens

8:30 a.m.-9:00 a.m.: Opening Remarks from Xiaochang Li and Mike Monello

9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Curing the Shiny New Object Syndrome: Strategy Vs. Hype When Using New Technologies Panelists: Todd Cunningham, Futures of Entertainment Fellow and television audience research leader Jason Falls, CEO, Social Media Explorer Eden Medina, Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Mansi Poddar, co-founder, Brown Paper Bag David Polinchock, Director, AT&T AdWorks Lab Moderator: Ben Malbon, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab

11:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.: Coffee Break

11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m.: Rethinking Copyright: A discussion with musician, songwriter, and producer T Bone Burnett; Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California; and Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California

1:00 p.m.-2:15 p.m.: Coffee Break

2:15 p.m.-4:15 p.m.: The Futures of Video Gaming Panelists: Ed Fries, architect of Microsoft's video game business and co-founder of the Xbox project T.L. Taylor, Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT Yanis Varoufakis, Economist-in-Residence, Valve Software Christopher Weaver, founder of Bethesda Softworks and industry liaison, MIT GameLab Moderator: Futures of Entertainment Fellow and games producer Alec Austin

4:15 p.m.-4:45 p.m.: Coffee Break

4:45 p.m.-6:45 p.m.: The Futures of Storytelling and Sports Panelists: Abe Stein, researcher at Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; graduate student, Comparative Media Studies, MIT; columnist, Kill Screen Peter Stringer, Senior Director of Interactive Media, Boston Celtics Moderator: Mark Warshaw, President, The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company Other Panelists To Be Announced Shortly

6:45 p.m.-7:15 p.m.: Closing Remarks from Heather Hendershot and Sheila Seles

7:15 p.m.: Post-Conference Workshop--The Futures of Transmedia Studies: Collaborations in and beyond Higher Education

For more information or to register to attend the conference, check out its home page.

Learning Through Practice: Participatory Culture Civics

The Media, Activism and Participatory Politics Project, which I direct, released a new working paper this week: Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Sangita Shresthova's "Learning Through Practice: Participatory Culture Civics." The report is based on extensive interviews with members and leadership of two innovative organizations, The Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children (the group responsible for Kony 2012), which won the Chase Manhattan Bank's Community Giving Competition on Facebook on two consecutive years. The report describes these organizations as providing an important bridge between the expressive and social dimensions of participatory culture towards some more active engagement in civic and political life. As the summary of the report explains:  

We present the civic practices of the HPA and IC, defined as activities that support organized collective action towards civic goals. We group these civic practices into four clusters. The distinctive cluster of “Create” practices (including Build Communities, Tell Stories and Produce Media) strongly builds on the organizations’ foundation within participatory cultures. The other three clusters (Inform, Connect, Organize & Mobilize) have more in common with traditional civic organizations, but remain informed by the unique nature of PCCs. All of the practice clusters make extensive use of media, and particularly new media. In fact, engagement with media is a crucial dimension of PCCs.We argue that, while different in many respects, both HPA and IC combine civic goals with the shared pleasures and flexible affordances of participatory culture.

This research was funded by the Spencer Foundation as part of their initiatives to better understand mechanisms for promoting civic learning, but it has also been developed in dialogue with the work of the MacArthur Foundation's Youth and Participatory Politics network. I featured the initial survey data from YPP here on my blog a few months ago, and we will be sharing more reports emerging from our involvement in that network in the next year, including further research on the fan activist networks around Nerdfighters and Imagine Better, the Students for Liberty Movement, and the political lives of Islamic-American youth in the post-9/11 world. These reports will compliment our previous released study of the DREAMer movement. This report was also meant to extend upon earlier analysis we've developed around HPA and IC, including this essay published as part of a special "Fan Activism" issue of Transformative Works and Culture, and this report on Kony 2012 published here on Confessions of an Aca-Fan.

You can read the full report via the pdf embedded below:

Learning through practice kligler shresthova-oct-2-2012 from amandafo

Some of the key conceptual breakthroughs of the report are represented by a series of models, reproduced below, which describe some of these organization's core civic practices. For us, it was striking how much central forms of networking, storytelling, media production, and other communication acts were to the ongoing operations of such groups. We have been struck all along at the ways that these groups have been effective at recruiting youth who may already be active in other kinds of interest-driven and friendship-driven networks, tapping and enhancing their existing skills and social connections, and then deploying them towards social change agendas.

We began this research, and had completed our field interviews, prior to the events surrounding Kony 2012, though it has taken us a bit later to fully analyze our data and produce this report. In some ways, Kony 2012 forced into sharp relief both the strengths and limitations of these emerging kinds of Participatory Culture Civic Organizations. Here's how the report's conclusion addresses these concerns:

The events surrounding IC’s release of KONY 2012 revealed the limitations of IC’s “outward facing” abilities. On the one hand, the film’s incredible “spreadability” was a testimony to IC’s ability to speak to a much wider public than previously imagined. On the other hand, the criticisms directed at KONY 2012 challenged members, often forcing them to adopt new practices. For example, while IC members were usually well-versed in spreading the word, they sometimes had difficulty moving beyond the official story told by the organization and usually did not critique its representation of events and issues. In the days following KONY 2012, we observed highly engaged IC members forced to “drill deep” to respond to difficult questions concerning the campaign. Collaborating with each other and often without support from the organization’s leadership, IC members struggled to research questions concerning IC’s relations to the religious right or its stand on gay rights. They then used social media to share their findings with each other.

IC members’ struggles around KONY 2012 call attention to an additional civic practice, which seems largely absent within IC and perhaps other PCC organizations -- “rebuttal”, or defending your own position in the face of opposition. In more traditional political organizations, members are socialized to perceive their position as opposed to another political party. In internal discussions, members may discuss counter-arguments to their position, and learn how to defend their beliefs, ferociously if needed. The HPA and IC tend to operate differently. These organizations rely on community relations, friendship and fun. They thrive in environments that are generally perceived as supportive and welcoming. Members tend to offer polite feedback, not sharp critique. They often try to avoid discord. These characteristics are part of what makes PCC organizations so inviting and hospitable to young people. At the same time, IC should have anticipated some of the criticism it received, yet it failed to prepare its rank and file to respond to the push-back on its KONY 2012 campaign. Their training in personal and collective storytelling, say, had not given them the background they needed to engage in the less consensual political debate. Moving forward, we suggest these organizations may have to consider how to cultivate this ability, while at the same time maintaining the warm environment that usually renders it unnecessary.

We hope that these closing critiques offer some ways forward for the new kinds of Participatory Culture Civic organizations we are studying and we plan to be spending more time looking at the ways such groups might foster stronger critical literacy skills, especially those around investigation and argumentation, in the future.

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins' Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project based at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her work has appeared in several scholarly journals and her book on Bollywood dance and globalization (Is It All About Hips?) was published by SAGE Publications in 2011.

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik is a Doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She works with Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito on the Media, Activism, Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, as part of the Youth & Participatory Politics (YPP) Network, where she is investigating how youth’s involvement in participatory cultures and new media encourages their civic engagement. The case studies she works on focus on organizations and groups building on networks of fandom, online and off-line, with the aim of encouraging and sustaining young people’s involvement in civic life. Neta is currently working on her Doctoral thesis on alternative citizenship models and their potential for youth civic engagement. She holds an M.A. in Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.

Digital Detournement: Jamming (With) the Simpsons-Banksy Intro, Jonnystyle

The politics and poetics of remix culture remains an ongoing interest of this blog. It's no secret that my own interests in this issue goes back to my early work about fan culture in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (some twenty plus years ago) or that I regard meaningful and ethical appropriation to be one of the core media literacies of the 21st century. I recently had a chance to sit down with Moritz Fink, a German-based researcher who has been doing some provocative work looking at The Simpsons in relation to the larger history of cultural jamming politics, a project which seeks to rethink culture jamming not simply as a disruption or interruption of mass media feeds but also as having the potential to "jam with" popular culture, creating something new out of the raw materials provided us by mass media producers. Anyone who has thought about The Simpsons and especially its relationship with Rupert Murdock's Fox Network recognize that there's something curious going on here: The Simpsons both embodies a highly successful commercial franchise, one which extends across conglomerate media, and at the same time, it often models subversive and resistant relationships to corporate culture, going back to its roots in alternative comics. Early on, Matt Groening embraced the grassroots entrepreneurialism represented by the "Black Bart" T-shirts which transformed the Simpsons into a vehicle for Afro-Centric critique of white culture.

As we were talking, Fink shared with me a really compelling and more recent example of how The Simpsons sought to incorporate a street art aesthetic (by employing Banksy to design a special credit sequence) and then how this incorporation was taken up and critiqued by another remix artist (Jonnystyle). This seemed like a very "teachable moment," i.e. a rich example which many of us might draw into our classes as we seek to explain cultural politics with our students, so I asked if he would be willing to write up and share his analysis through this blog. I am very proud to be passing his piece along to you today.

Digital Detournement: Jamming (With) the Simpsons-Banksy Intro, Jonnystyle

by Moritz Fink

How many culture jammers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is four: one to hold the camera, one to call the news, and another two to install a huge neon sign that reads turn the lights off day.

No, I don’t mean to make fun of culture jammers. In fact, I’m with former Dead Kennedys singer and culture jammer Jello Biafra’s notion: “A prank a day keeps the dog leash away.”[1] Especially in world saturated by media images and corporate-sponsored messages, culture jamming appears to be the most compelling form of rhetoric to make a voice of dissent heard. What I find irritating, however, is the common identification of culture jamming with a cliché of cultural pessimists and sticks-in-the-mud.

Initial to the theorization of culture jamming was Mark Dery’s groundbreaking 1993 essay, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. For Dery, culture jammers answer Umberto Eco’s call for “communication guerillas”: “Intruding on the intruders,” he writes, “[culture jammers] invest ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent.” Dery’s portrayal of anti-corporate or anti-consumerist activists such as the Billboard Liberation Front and Adbusters magazine under the catchy label culture jamming went viral. It just worked -- both as an umbrella term and popular buzzword.

But differentiating between a culture industry in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and the consumers, who get “seduced” by it, gets increasingly difficult. The end of network television and the rise of the Internet as a new participatory medium are but the two most evident developments that indicate how profoundly the cultural infrastructure has changed during the 1990s. Thus, if we still cling to the notion of culture jamming as a practice of would-be revolutionaries who perceive the (mass) media as a monolithic entity and one-way communication tool, we’re rendering the term obsolete instead of updating it for the 21st century.

I would like, therefore, to argue against a definition of culture jamming that privileges the countercultural (though it is undoubtedly part of the concept). Culture jamming has never just referred to a jamming of culture (as negation); it always included a jamming with culture (as artful appropriation). Adbusters, for instance, has never been only a form of cultural criticism and disruption; it has always been a form of cultural production, too. Although Adbusters represents an anti-corporate stance, it is an active part of the media landscape as we see it today. Vice-versa, the culture industries -- despite their capitalist raison d’être -- do not necessarily reinforce a capitalist ideology; some of their products involve anticorporate or anticonsumerist messages, for example, in forms of satire.

The year the Adbusters Media Foundation was born, 1989, also saw the debut of the television series The Simpsons, one of the most popular forms of satire today. A double-coded text, The Simpsons isn’t only a mainstream product and brand that brings millions of dollars to its producers as well as its mother network, the Murdoch-owned Twentieth Century Fox. At the same time, it’s a text that appropriates other artifacts of popular culture and satirically comments on their cultural meanings and contradictions (including parodying itself and its own context of commercial television).

In one of The Simpsons’ annual Halloween episodes, for instance, the people of Springfield face an armada of gigantic turned-to-life billboards and corporate mascots that literally intrude into their lives, rampaging through the town and destroying their homes. Finally, it is Lisa who successfully turns off the invaders (ironically by performing an anti-ad jingle together with the singer Paul Anka -- what Planet Simpson author Chris Turner compares to the tactics used by culture jammers). Lisa is “intruding on the intruders,” if you will; she beats the corporate monsters at their own game. In the final scene we see Springfield’s news reporter Kent Brockman talking into the camera (and thus implicitly addressing the viewers of The Simpsons): “Even as I speak, this scourge of advertising could be heading towards your town. Lock your doors! Bar your widows! Because the next advertisement you see could destroy your house and eat your family.” Then Homer appears in the image’s frame and adds the televisual commonplace, “We’ll be right back,” and The Simpsons cuts to commercials.

Of course, it’s not that The Simpsons invokes its audience to turn off their TV sets (you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you, right?). But the popular show has successfully redefined the boundaries of what can be said and done on and with television by offering trenchant social satire and sophisticated media parody. On the air for more than two decades now, The Simpsons has inspired several generations of what Alvin Toffler, back in the 1980s, envisioned as “prosumers” (a neologism coined of the words “producer” and “consumer” that has become reality at least with the development of Web 2.0).

If prosumers create texts that evoke a level of critique or challenge towards the corporate media, we can discuss these texts as forms of culture jamming. To illustrate this point, I will show you a video clip that I found on YouTube during my research on the cultural meanings of The Simpsons. It is a mashup of the special Simpsons opening sequence created by the show’s writers in collaboration with British street artist Banksy for the 22nd-season episode “MoneyBART” (2010). But before we start, here’s the original…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1iplQQJTo

…and here’s what became out of it: The creator of the mashup clip, who goes by the name of Jonnystyle, took the original intro sequence with all the self-ironic, postmodern shticks it sported in typical Simpsons-style, and transformed it into a critical response on both The Simpsons and Banksy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUwV3brLbYI

Mmm... Subversion

To be sure, the original title sequence is interesting in its own regard. It starts like every Simpsons intro -- the opening credits, the show’s theme, snapshots of life in Springfield. For those who watch The Simpsons now and then, however, it is already clear that this is not going to be an ordinary day in Springfield, not a normal Simpsons episode (no, I’m not referring to the new HD opening here -- it was already introduced one year before, during season 20.) If they hadn’t known before from the Internet or TV Guide, viewers may first note the visuals through which Banksy’s pseudonymous signature was added to the Simpsons text. We see a billboard with a “Banksy” tag on it; or Bart writing repetitively “I must not write over the walls” in what is known to Simpsons fans as the “chalkboard gag” (after all, Bart is writing all over the walls). While these visual jokes are supposed to conjure up the anarchic spirit inherent to street art, Banksy’s political voice becomes especially explicit as the Simpson family gathers around the couch. With a sinister tune, we are shown what is underneath the happy cartoon show. In a dungeon-like, premodern setting, a battery of workers, apparently Asian children, produce Simpsons material: animation cells, Bart Simpson dolls and other merchandise articles, Simpsons DVDs, and so forth. Clearly, in a highly satiric fashion, Banksy’s grim portrayal references the show’s outsourcing to South Korean sweatshops.[2]

So far, so good. But what to make of this media fragment? Of course, a mere one-minute, forty-four second farce may seem negligible in contrast to the show’s economic status as cash cow for Twentieth Century Fox, a subsidiary of the massive conglomerate News Corporation.[3] After all, it’s only with Rupert Murdoch’s blessing that The Simpsons is able to broadcast such a trenchant form of satire. Although The Simpsons is provided with more creative freedom than virtually any other program in mainstream TV, it is still filtered by Fox’s executives.[4] And yet, what could be more indicative of The Simpsons’ meaning as pop cultural institution and avant-gardist than inviting of one of today’s most popular culture jammers and enabling him to criticize the show’s own exploitative practices. Postmodern chic? Perhaps. But certainly, a win-win-situation for both The Simpsons and Banksy.

We don’t know much about the production of the Simpsons-Banksy intro. It is pretty obvious, though, that Banksy only contributed to the storyboard of the sequence but wasn’t very much involved in the visuals of it. It is all Simpsons, nothing really Banksy-esque about it. Everything is shaped in the smooth, iconic Simpsons look.

Banksy’s Exit Through the Simpsons Gift Shop

What the original sequence lacks -- or, perhaps, what it is not able to provide given Fox’s restrictive policies -- is, however, achieved by Jonnystlye. On an animation cell we see the Simpson family sitting on the couch, and Jonnystyle writes himself into the Simpsons text. Homer transforms into a Simpsonized version of Jonnystyle’s recurring character, a big-headed cartoon with a moustache (in fact, at this point, it still could be an actual Simpsons “couch gag”). We see a hooded cartoon character (apparently Banksy), tagging a billboard with the slogan “Banksy” (still, perfectly realized in Simpsons iconography). Then appears Jonnystyle’s alter-ego and starts to chase the masked stranger. As both characters literally jump out of the frame, they morph into animated sketches on a scratchpad. Jonnystyle pulls down the black cloak of the Banksy avatar to reveal Mr. Burns, whom he smacks back into virtual space of the original Banksy-Simpsons title sequence.

Then comes my favorite part. While in the original intro sequence we see a machine that incessantly produces Bart Simpson dolls, in the Johnnystyle version the same machine vomits a hooded Mr. Burns figure. In the next scene, we see an array of these action figures in a supermarket shelf, completely arranged in Simpsons design and packaging that features the name “Banksy.”[1] As the camera zooms out, it shows the Fox logo, modified to read “20th Century Fox -- Gift Shop” along with the brand logos of Ebay and Toys “R” Us as well as Polygone (which refers to a mall in Montpellier, the French city where Jonnystyle is from). To great effect, the shot parodies the original ending of the Banksy-Simpsons intro in which the Fox logo is depicted as huge monolith in the midst of a prison camp secured by barbed wire fence, watching towers, and searchlights. Also in mockery of the original, in the very last scene of the Jonnytstyle video, we see -- as usually at the end of The Simpsons’ intros -- an animated TV set with the credits (actually it reads “Copyright of Matt Groening” in the Jonnystyle clip) blended in, as well as a sledge hammer on top of it. As The Simpsons intro theme ends, the credits on the television screen read “Diverted by Jonnystyle.” We hear birds singing peacefully as the lower part of a real-life figure (Jonnystyle?) enters the scene, grabs the hammer, and with a loud BANG smashes the tube. At the point the screen bursts, we realize it actually was a real-life TV which just has been battered to pieces. Awesome.

So, what does the Jonnystyle video clip tell us? On one level, it illustrates many aspects of participatory culture in the Web 2.0 age. Not only is the clip circulated via YouTube, it also jams with The Simpsons with the same creative wit and pop cultural sensibility that The Simpsons has tapped into and taught its audience since the show’s inception, and especially before it became little less than a global institution of popular culture. In short, Jonnystyle embraces the series’ genuine aesthetics in order to write his own voice into the Simpsons text.

On another level, Jonnystyle revises the original sequence in that he provides us with several layers of critique. This aspect of culture jamming built into the remix clip is what I find particularly interesting. First of all, it is pretty obvious that Jonnystyle confirms Banksy’s original criticism of The Simpsons as a corporate brand in the age of globalization with everything that this entails. In addition to that, however, his video foregrounds Banksy’s own hypocrisy in this respect. Isn’t, after all, Banksy himself a brand?, the video implicitly asks. In this regard, it is no coincidence that Jonnystyle demasks Banksy as being Mr. Burns (read: the embodiment of capital and big business on The Simpsons). In linking Banksy with big business, Jonnystlye echoes the common accusation among street artists of Banksy being a sellout.

The sellout debate suggests another parallel to The Simpsons. In fact, a lot of Simpsons fans decried the series’ selling out as it went mainstream during the early 1990s. This parallel, then, is also present in Jonnystyle’s depiction of the Fox logo that comes along with the affix “Gift Shop.” Perhaps this allusion to Banksy’s 2010 pseudo-documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop was unintended, but regardless, it captures well the overall tone of the Jonnystyle video.

Digital Detournement

According to Jonnystlye, his work is a sort of “détournement,” and I think this label helps us to understand what the video is doing. Originally, the term détournement refers to subversive aesthetic practices executed by the Situationist International, a French art collective of the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the leading figures in the Situationist circle was the Marxist intellectual artist Guy Debord. Mostly known as author of Society of the Spectacle, which is widely considered to be one of the central texts of the student revolts in France in 1968, Debord also wrote a number of political essays. In co-authorship with fellow artist Gil J. Wolman, Debord elaborated on the concept of détournement in a 1956 piece titled “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Typical of left intellectuals at that time, Debord and Wolman bathe in philosophical -- especially Hegelian and Marxian -- language to describe their vision of a dialectical form of appropriative art which approaches a so-called “parodic-serious stage.”[5] In other words, their concept calls for subcultural appropriation that negates the ideology of the dominant (capitalist) culture.

Détournement, according to Debord translator Ken Knabb, means “deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose.” At this point, I do neither want to go into detail of Debord and Wolman’s original conception of détournement as a revolutionary practice (e.g., what they refer to as “literary communism”), nor do I want to suggest that the Jonnystyle video operates according to the Situationists’ and Debord’s vision of détournement. For Debord and Wolman, the film medium was a powerful vehicle for détournement, and Debord’s own films, like his 1961 Critique de la séperation (“Critique of Seperation”), suggest what he understands as a filmic form of détournement. In fact, the usage of clippings and images from other films or newsreels and the aspiration for Brechtian distanciation effects as we see it on Debord’s films creates an avant-garde aesthetic that is very different from Jonnystyle’s entertaining riff.

Nonetheless, there are two factors that strike me in this regard. First, Jonnystyle (like Debord, a French native-speaker, albeit unaware of the historic background of the term) refers to his video as a form of “détournement,” by which he means subversive content disguised as a piece of “official” culture.[6] Second, Jonnystyle’s reformulation of the term is situated in a media environment that differs significantly from what Debord calls a spectacular society back in the 1960s. As Henry Jenkins points out, we live in a media culture where contexts converge, “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”[7] Hence, mediated détournement in the age of Web 2.0, what I propose to call digital detournement (the removal of the accent should imply the updated account of the term), does not so much come out of the motivation to negate the media per se, but rather to challenge the culture industries that distribute and sell the media content. Forms of digital detournement aren’t meant to disrupt communication channels; rather they understand these channels as their infrastructure and use the possibilities provided by the digital media age, such as YouTube, to circulate their subversive comments on the corporate media.

The Jonnystyle video is illustrating many aspects of this new media generation. Rather than taking snippets almost randomly from the realm of media, Jonnystyle deliberately appropriates one specific and also very popular media fragment to write his own narrative into it, and circulate the product in DIY fashion on YouTube and Vimeo. His ways of modifying the original, as well as circulating his mashup, then, are not acts of cultural pessimism. As I mentioned before, Jonnystyle embraces The Simpsons to create a new work that is sophisticated both in its aesthetics and critique vis-à-vis The Simpsons and Banksy. And, at another level, Jonnystyle’s critical voice -- represented by the virtual unmasking and butt-kicking of Banksy and the demolition of the tube (read: The Simpsons) at the very end -- emerges through gestures of culture jamming.

These different levels tell us a lot about the understanding of pop culture today as it is illustrated by the work of Banksy and, probably even more significantly, by The Simpsons. Jonnystyle does not “hate” the culture he criticizes -- rather, he is an insider. Jonnystyle adopts the materials and even the style of the culture he toys with. Yet all this reworking isn’t done with a bitterness; it is executed in a affectionately playful way and with an eye for the detail.

Conclusion

The Simpsons exemplifies one of the major contradictions of mass culture today -- that is, how mainstream can a product become, and yet still considered “oppositional”? Perhaps The Simpsons’ writers saw a connection there when they asked Banksy to do something for the show (indeed, Banksy’s rise from underground artist to major pop phenomenon is somewhat similar to The Simpsons’ cultural history). Or, was it because they were fans of Banksy? Of course, it would be just as plausible to suggest that Matt Groening & Co. figured it would be cool (let alone would pay off) to have a really famous guest star and hip cultural phenomenon for the show.

All this brings us back to Jonnystyle’s digital detournement. Jonnystyle appropriates the text, not only to artfully jam with it, but also to add a critical perspective to it -- to jam the capitalist culture that is behind it, so to speak. In creative ways, he demonstrates his individual counter-reading of the original text. What Jonnystyle does is to implement a perspective of correction. His work articulates contradictions the Simpsons text necessarily entails. That Banksy considers himself a culture jammer is certainly just one of the paradoxes Jonnystyle reveals about the original intro. At the end of the Jonnystyle clip, the television screen -- surely one of the major foci of the Simpsons series -- gets smashed with a sledgehammer, an option the consumer-critical Simpsons by nature cannot and will never suggest.

---

[1] From my interview with Jonnystyle, I learned that he had taken original Mr. Burns action figures from The Simpsons to remake--and thus repurpose--them in that fashion.

---

[1] Qtd. in Mark Dery, “Culture Jamming.” http://markdery.com/?page_id=154.

[2] Banksy and The Simpsons’ writers were criticized for their morbid and degrading representation of Korean animations studios as sweatshops. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2027768,00.html.

[3] See Linda Holmes. “‘The Simpsons’ Tries To Get Its Edge Back With A (Kind Of) Daring Opening.” http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/10/12/130509380/-the-simpsons-tries-to-get-its-edge-back-with-a-kind-of-daring-opening.

[4] This is also true for the Banksy-intro, even so, as Simpsons executive producer Al Jean mentioned in an interview with The New York Times, about 95 percent of Banksy’s original storyboard made it into the final version. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-simpsons-explains-its-button-pushing-banksy-opening/.

[5] Guy Debord. “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Trans. Ken Knabb.  Bureau of Public Secrets. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm>

[6] Interview with Jonnytsyle conducted via email in June 2012.

[7] Henry Jenkins. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU P, 2006, p. 2.

Moritz Fink is a doctoral candidate in American Literature and Cultural History at the University of Munich. His dissertation project explores the cultural meaning of the television series The Simpsons in relation to cultural convergence and culture jamming. His areas of interest are media and television studies, cultural studies, disability studies, visual culture, political humor, and satire. Outside of his academic career, he’s a passionate musician and graphic designer.

Communication and Technology: A Sylabus Designed to Support Networked Learning

Lsst time, I shared some of my current thinking about the challenges of designing an "open-laptop exam" and the new approach we have sought to apply to my lecture-hall scale class on new media and culture this term. Today, I share the actual syllabus for the course and the ways we have set it up for the students.  

A key thing to notice here is that we introduced the notion of new forms of learning from the very first day of class, making it part of the course content and not simply part of the course mechanics. We have also introduced assignments -- such as one around Wikipedia -- which focus students on how networked communities do work together to achieve shared goals, again in anticipation of what happens when we move into a more collective mode for the second part of the class. Our goal has been to be as explicit and transparent as possible about each element of the class design and to link it to the larger concepts this class seeks to explore. It might be harder to be this reflexive about the process in a different kind of subject.

Second, I designed the requirements to give students an increased sense of control over their performance in the first half of the class, when they are functioning primarily as individuals, by having multiple paths to success, and we have also designed the discussion sections and topics across the term to have an emphasis on the investigative process, so that when we turn to collective problem solving in the second part, they will already have worked in teams of various sizes to think through basic issues around digital culture which have a strong applied dimension. I plan to share some samples of these small group activities later in the term. So keep an eye on this blog.

I am reluctant to say too much about the class itself while it is still in process. But I will say that so far, we all seem to be having fun with this new approach and the students seem, if anything, less anxious than they had been under more traditional assignment structures. But, we are still in the more familiar, individualized portion of the class, and I do not yet know what happens when we make the shift at the mid-term, just a few weeks from now.

COMMUNICATION & TECHNOLOGY

ANNENBERG COMM 202 - FALL 2012

Monday & Wednesday, 2:00pm - 3:20pm

ASC G26 (The Auditorium)

INSTRUCTOR:

Professor Henry Jenkins

TEACHING ASSISTANTS:

Rhea Vichot

Andrew Schrock

Meryl Alper

CLASS OVERVIEW

This class is intended as an introduction to issues of media, technology, culture, and communication as read through the lens of contemporary debates concerning the Web and digital culture more generally. Each class session will explore a central question that has emerged from popular and academic responses to the ways our society has dealt with introduction of the Internet, with readings drawn from a range of sources including journalistic and scholarly writings and major policy statements and white papers.

We will start with a focus on your own experiences as part of a generation that has grown up in a world where digital media use -- and opportunities to participate in networked communication -- have been widespread. We will explore what impact these experiences have had on your styles of learning, your sense of privacy, and your social interactions with your peers.

From there, we will broaden our consideration to think about the process of media change, drawing examples from both the history of the Internet and from the history of earlier communications technologies (from the printing press to the telephone, photography, the phonograph, film, and television). In this unit, we will consider what factors shape the embrace or rejection of new technologies, whether change is even across segments of society or across different parts of the world, and whether new media has encouraged greater interests in forms of cultural and civic participation.

In the third section of the class, we will sharpen our focus to deal with specific sites of media change, especially those concerning the intersection between old and new media, including those concerning advertising, cultural production and distribution, news, and political debate. Here, we will consider two core concepts – “Web 2.0” and “Piracy,” both of which represent points of conflict between the interests of media companies and their publics.

COURSE DESIGN & LEARNING OUTCOMES

The design of this course has been very much shaped by its content. Research is suggesting some fundamental shifts in the way knowledge is produced in the digital era, having to do with the access of participants to small and large scale networks which collaborate and debate information together. As a consequence, this course progresses from students seeking to identify your own strengths as learners and participants within a digital culture towards students making contributions to a larger collective intelligence process.

For the first half of the course, then, you will be graded individually while during the second part, you will function as part of knowledge communities (small scale teams) which will be graded collectively based on their effectiveness at responding to more complex challenges. For the first part of the course, you will be expected to do each of the readings and be ready to share what you understood from them. For the second part, more reading is assigned each day than could be done by an individual student with the expectations that the teams will divide the labor appropriately to insure that each group has mastered the material. The teams will be able to rehearse their collaborative skills through discussion group activities across the term, each of which are designed to apply the course concepts to specific aspects of contemporary digital culture.

PARTICIPATION

Because this class is structured around inquiry and dialogue, students will be expected to attend class sessions and respond to questions from the instructor. We will be calling on students individually across the semester, so you need to come to class prepared to contribute, and we will be keeping records of who volunteers and how well you respond to the questions they are asked.  This course is as much about teaching new ways of thinking as it is about conveying specific bits of content, so you need to be able to sharpen your ability to contribute to some of the central debates impacting contemporary culture.

READINGS

All course materials can be found on Blackboard. Many of these materials were originally published in digital formats, some of which take advantages of the specific affordances of the web, so students are strongly encouraged to read them online, and be selective about what materials they chose to print out in order to be environmentally conscious.

LAPTOP POLICY

You are expected to bring and use laptops, tablets, or other wireless devices during the class. While you are discouraged from doing non-class related activities that might distract you or your other students from the learning process, we will be actively deploying online resources throughout our discussion.

ASSIGNMENTS & GRADING

All assignments are due to your TA at the beginning of your discussion section. Your TA will explain the format and method for turning in your assignments in the first week’s discussion section. All assignments should include a list of citations (see Academic Integrity Policy below). You will receive graded feedback on your papers and graded scores on your exams. Students will automatically lose one point for each day the paper is late, unless arrangements have been made prior to the due date with your TA.

Fifty percent (50%) of the class grade will be based on individual performance (prior to the midterm exam) and fifty percent (50%) will be based on collective performance (after the midterm exam). Your final semester grade will be an average of the two letter grades derived from both columns below.

Semester Breakdown

First Half (8 Weeks) - Individual1. Participation in online forum (7 points + 3 additional)

2. Participation in class (10 points)

3. Attendance + participation in discussion section (7 points + 3 additional)

4. Autobiographical essay (5 points)

5. Reporting on Wikipedia (10 points)

6. Midterm Exam (20 points)

TOTAL POSSIBLE: 65 points

Second Half (7 Weeks) - Teams7. Collective Problem Solving (5 points per week for 4 weeks, 20 points total)

8. Collective Participation (10 points)

9. Final Exam (30 points)

10. Individual Reflection (5 points)

TOTAL POSSIBLE:  65 points

A+: 58 points or moreA: 55-57 pointsA-: 50-54 points

B+: 48-49 points

B: 45-47 points

B-: 40-44 pointsC: 35-39 points

D: 30-34 points

F: Under 30 points

First Half: Individual Performance

In the individual performance section, you may choose from a range of different mechanisms for acquiring points and thus demonstrating your mastery over the course materials. This formula allows you to play to your strengths as a learner and to focus your energy in ways which allow you to best demonstrate what you know.

1. Participation in online forum (Up to 10 points)

Every week, you will be expected to use Blackboard's Forum to share a core question or thought that emerges from the assigned readings. These questions can be a paragraph or so and informal, but they are intended to help the instructors better understand how the students are relating to the class materials and content.  You will get a Check if you make a substantive comment, which poses questions about the core premise of the readings, which uses outside examples to expand our understanding of the core concept, or otherwise shows creative and critical engagement with the course content.  In rare cases, you may receive a plus if your work goes well beyond what is typical for the class on a given assignment. You will not receive any points if the work turned in is perfunctory. You will be expected to post seven times prior to the midterm exam, so most students will receive 7 points on this assignment, but you may receive up to 10 points in cases of exceptional performance.

2. Participation in Class (Up to 10 points)

Our regular meeting sessions will be a mixture of lecture, screening, and discussion. You are expected to attend and be prepared to participate, and the instructor will be calling periodically on each student throughout the term. You will receive points based on your ability to meaningfully contribute, whether voluntarily or when called upon.

3. Attendance and Participation in Discussion Sessions (Up to 10 points) The Discussion Session is a central element in the class and attendance is mandatory. Regular attendance at all sessions will gain 7 points; students may acquire up to 3 additional points if they actively participate in the class discussions. Students lose one point for each class session they miss.

4. Autobiographical essay (Up to 5 points)

The opening sessions of the class explore the debates around the issue of how new media technologies and practices have shaped the current generation of students with some writers speaking of “digital natives” who have become very adept at navigating the online world and others dismissing the “dumbest generation” for its lack of familiarity with more traditional kinds of print literacy.  You should respond to one of the essays we’ve read or videos we’ve watched in class which stakes out a position on this issue.  You will draft a short (5 page) essay exploring their own relationship to new communication technologies and practices. There are many valid ways of approaching this assignment. You might describe a particular program you use regularly and how it impacts your day to day activities. You might trace your evolving relations to computers. You might describe a specific activity that is important to you and talk about the range of technologies you deploy in the pursuit of these interests. In each case, the paper is going to be evaluated based on the ways you deploy your personal experience to construct an argument about the nature of new communication technologies and practices and their impact on everyday life. The more specific you can be at pointing to uses of these technologies, the better. You do not need to make sweeping arguments about "Today's Society" but you do need to argue how particular technologies and practices  impacted specific aspects of your own experience. For some sample essays that achieve our goals for this assignment, see:

Henry Jenkins, "Love Online" http://www.technologyreview.com/web/12979/

Hillary Kolos, "Bouncing Off the Walls" http://henryjenkins.org/2009/05/bouncing_off_the_walls_playing.html

Flourish Klink, "The Radical Idea That Children Are People" http://henryjenkins.org/2009/06/the_radical_idea_that_children.html

5. Reporting on Wikipedia (Up to 10 points)

Identify a Wikipedia entry that has undergone substantial revision. Review the process by which the entry was written and the debates which have surrounded its revision. Write a five-page essay discussing what you learn about the process by which Wikipedia entries are produced and vetted. How does the discussion and debate around the entry draw on the core principles of the Wikipedia community? Again, this paper is intended to combine research and analysis. You will be evaluated based on the amount of research performed, on the quality of the analysis you offer, on how you build off concepts from the readings and the lectures to help frame your analysis (including, ideally, direct references to specific readings), and on how well you understanding the nature of the new communications environment.

6. Midterm  Exam (Up to 20 points)

The exam will be open-notes. It may include a mix of identification terms, short answer, and essay questions. The terms and essay questions will be selected from a list circulated in advance. The Midterm Exam will cover material from the first two units.

Revisions & Extra Credit

You will be allowed to revise ONE of the two essays to be considered for a higher grade. The paper must be turned in no later than two weeks after the original paper was returned. The grade will only be raised if the revisions substantively address one or more of the criteria for the paper's evaluation. Students who simply correct cosmetic or grammatical errors identified by the grader will not receive a higher score.

Second Half: Collective Performance

Following the midterm, students will be divided into teams organized around their discussion session.  The teams will be assessed based on their collective performance on the assignments.  The class is designed so most, if not all, of the synchronous work of the teams is done within regular course meeting times, minimizing the need for outside meetings. Teams are encouraged to experiment with tools such as Googledocs, Skype, and social media in order to coordinate their efforts beyond the regular sessions.

1. Collective Problem Solving (Up to 5 points per week, for a total of 20 points)

Each week, the teams will be asked to use the discussion section time to work through problem sets as a group, pooling your knowledge from the class and beyond in order to answer complex questions which you would not be able to address as individuals. The TA will function as a coach helping the team develop strategies for dividing up the problem and developing a coherent response in the hour devoted to the discussion session. Students teams can acquire up to 5 points each week based on the thoroughness, originality, clarity, and accuracy of their responses to the problems. We will work through four problem sets together in discussion section before students are asked to coordinate and collaborate in responding to the exam. You are expected to attend and participate actively in these sessions; you will not receive any point earned by the group in an activity on which you were absent from class.

2. Collective Participation (Up to 10 points)

Each team will gather a collective score based on their regular attendance and participation in the lecture and discussion sections. While the instructors called on individual students by name throughout the first part of the term, we will now be calling on teams. Each team should determine its own name and develop strategies for delegating responsibilities for answering questions. Teams can acquire up to 10 points based on their participation and class attendance.

3. Exam (Up to 30 Points)

Student groups will be given three questions at the beginning of lecture on Monday, December 3 and will be responsible for completing them by the end of lecture on Wednesday, December 5. It is expected that groups will use the Monday lecture slot to start planning (and possibly writing) their answers and the Wednesday lecture slot to finalize their answers. Groups are allowed (indeed encouraged) to work on the exams in-between the two lectures. The questions on the exam will resemble the questions groups will have worked on in section except that they will require that answers synthesize material from throughout the second half of the semester (though you are welcome to include material from the first half of the semester and/or outside sources). A collective score (up to 30 points) will be given to each team based on the thoroughness, originality, clarity, and accuracy of their responses. (Note: Students are allowed to *consult* with members from groups other than their own while working on the exam, but they must acknowledge all consultation, and groups must write original answers with cited sources. More specifics on permissible and impermissible collaboration will be provided with the exam).

4. Individual Reflection

For the remaining 5 points of the collective performance grade, students have two options. Individuals can choose either option and this is the only portion of the collective performance grade that students will be graded on individually. The instructors would prefer you choose the first option, but you will not be penalized for choosing the second option.

Option 1: Adam Kahn, a doctoral student at Annenberg, studies group collaboration and is interested in using COMM 202 in a research study he is conducting. For Option 1, all you have to do is fill out a few (no more than 4), brief (no more than 10 minute) surveys throughout the semester. These surveys are ungraded...by completing all of the surveys he administers, you will receive the full 5 points (you must complete all of them though to receive any points). To protect your confidentiality and grades, Professor Jenkins and the TAs will never see your responses to the survey. On the surveys, you will be identified only by your USC ID number. This will allow Adam to let the teaching staff know at the end of the semester that you have completed the surveys, but at the same time protect your anonymity, as Adam has no way to translate a USC ID number into your name. By participating in the surveys, you are also allowing Adam to associate your grades (again, identified only by USC ID number) with your survey responses.

Option 2: If you do not want to participate in the research study, you can write a 5 page paper comparing your experiences taking tests as an individual with taking tests as a group.

ATTENDANCE POLICY

Attendance at all lectures and discussion sections is expected and has been built into the grading of the class. In lecture, we will not take attendance per se, but if you are called upon and are not able to answer because you missed class, you will not receive points for that session. Flexibility for dealing with emergencies is built into this mechanics since there are multiple ways to gain the number of points required to make an A in the class.

For those assignments which require/allow collaboration, students are required to disclose all people who contributed to their process and identify all outside sources they drew upon in developing their answers. Failure to do so will be considered academic dishonesty.

SEMESTER SCHEDULE & READINGS

PART 1: LIVING AND LEARNING IN A NETWORKED CULTURE

Week 1, Day 1

Monday, August 27

Are You a Digital Native?

• No readings.

Week 2, Day 2

Wednesday, August 29

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

• Nancy Baym, "Making New Media Make Sense," Personal Connection in the Digital
 Age (New York: Polity, 2010),
 pp. 22-49.

• Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic, August 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

• Clay Shirky, “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?,” The Wall Street Journal,  June 4 2010,

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html

Week 1 Discussion Section

Course Mechanics; Autobiographical Essays

Week 2, Day 3

Monday September 3

NOTE: NO CLASS. Today is Labor Day.

Week 2, Day 4

Wednesday, September 5

How Are Educators Responding to the Challenges of a Networked Culture?

• Screen: New Learners of the 21st Century

• Ilana Gershon, “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 16-49.

.Henry Jenkins et al, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (MacArthur Foundation, 2006), http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Week 2 Discussion Section: Would You Break Up Online?

Week 3, Day 5

Monday, September 10

What Does Learning Look Like in a Networked Culture?

•Henry Jenkins, “Spoiling Survivor,” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 25-58

Week 3, Day 6

Wednesday, September 12

Do Youth Still Care About Privacy?

• danah boyd and Alice Marwick, “Social Steganography: Privacy in Networked Publics,” Presented at International Communications Association, May 28 2011,  http://www.danah.org/papers/2011/Steganography-ICAVersion.pdf

Week 3 Discussion Section: Facebook and Privacy

NOTE: Paper 1 is due.

Week 4, Day 7

Monday, September 17

Is the Web Making Us Lonely?

• Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” The Atlantic, May 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

• Eric  Klinenberg, “Facebook Isn’t Making Us Lonely,” Slate, April 19 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/04/is_facebook_making_us_lonely_no_the_atlantic_cover_story_is_wrong_.html

• Sherry Turkle, “Does Technology Serve Human Purposes?,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, August 22, 24,  26 2011, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/an_interview_with_sherry_turkl.html, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/does_this_technology_serve_hum.html, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/does_this_technology_serve_hum_1.html

Week 4, Day 8

Wednesday, September 19

Should Schools Ban Wikipedia?

• Henry Jenkins, “What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, June 26 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/what_wikipedia_can_teach_us_ab.html; June 27, 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/what_wikipedia_can_teach_us_ab_1.html

• Andrew Lih, "Community at Work (The Piranha Effect)," The Wikipedia Revolution (New York: Hyperion, 2009), pp. 81-132.

• Quora. “What does Jimmy Wales think when a university professor states not to cite Wikipedia as a source?” http://www.quora.com/Jimmy-Wales-1/What-does-Jimmy-Wales-think-when-a-university-professor-states-not-to-cite-Wikipedia-as-a-source

Week 4 Discussion Section: Wikipedia Mechanics

Week 5, Day 9

Monday, September 24

What Are We Using Mobile Media For? (Guest Lecture: Meryl Alper)

• “Pew Internet and American Life Project: Mobile” (2012) https://ca.edubirdie.com/blog/pew-internet-mobile Research highlights related to mobile technology in the US

• Jill Palzkill Woelfer and David G. Hendry (2011). Homeless young people and technology: Ordinary interactions, extraordinary circumstances. interactions, 18(6), 70-73.

• Chris Danielsen, Anne Taylor, and Wesley Majerus. (2011). Design and public policy considerations for accessible e-book readers. interactions, 18(1), 67-70.

PART 2: UNDERSTANDING MEDIA CHANGE

Week 5, Day 10

Wednesday, September 26

How Have Earlier Cultures Dealt with Media Change?

• Lynn Spigel, "Television in the Family Circle," Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). pp. 36-72.

Week 5 Discussion Section: Advertising New Media

Week 6, Day 11

Monday, October 1

Why Do Interfaces Matter? (Guest Lecture: Adam Kahn)

• Vannevar Bush. “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 101-108.

Week 6, Day 12

Wednesday, October 3

What Roles have Hackers Played in Defining Digital Culture? (Guest Lecture: Andrew Schrock)

• Doug Thomas, “(Not) Hackers: Subculture, Style and Media Incorporation,” Hacker culture (pp. 141–171). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 147-171.

• Heather Brooke, “Inside the Secret World of Hackers,” The Guardian, August 24 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/24/inside-secret-world-of-hackers

Week 6 Discussion Section: Hacking and Culture Jamming

NOTE: Paper 2 is due.

Week 7, Day 13

Monday, October 8

Why Does It Matter What We Call the “Web”?

• David Thorburn, “Web of Paradox,” The American Prospect, December 19 2001, http://prospect.org/article/essay-web-paradox

• Handout: Key Statements about the Nature of the Web

Week 7, Day 14

Wednesday, October 10

What Roles Does Participation Play in Contemporary Culture?

• Henry Jenkins, "Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, May 28 2007. http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_%20propositions_towards_a_cultu.html

.Lawrence Lessig, “REMIX: How Creativity Is Being Strangled By the Law,” in Michael Mandiberg (ed.) The Social Media Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 155-169.

Week 7 Discussion Section: YouTube’s Many Communities

Week 8, Day 15

Monday, October 15

What Can Science Fiction Teach Us About the History of Technology?

• Rebecca Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice,” Neo-Victorian Studies, Autumn 2008, http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/Autumn2008/NVS%201-1%20R-Onion.pdf

Week 8, Day 16

Wednesday, October 17

Has Networked Culture Gone Global? (Guest Lecture: Alex Leavitt)

• Toshie Takahashi, “MySpace or Mixi? Japanese engagement with SNS (social networking sites) in the global age.” New Media & Society, May 2010 vol. 12 no. 3, 453-475. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/12/3/453

• Shaojung Wang, “China’s Internet lexicon: The symbolic meaning and commoditization of Grass Mud Horse in the harmonious society.” First Monday, January 2012, vol. 17 no. 1. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3758/3134

Week 8 Discussion Section: Review for Midterm

Week 9, Day 17

Monday, October 22

Midterm Exam

PART 3: THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

Week 9, Day 18

Wednesday,  October 24

What Roles Do New Media Play in American Politics?

• Cathy Cohen and Joe Kahne, “Participatory Politics New Media and Youth Political Action,” Youth and Participatory Politics Network, 2011, http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/publications/YPP_Survey_Report_FULL.pdf

• Ryan Lizza, “Battleplans: How Obama Won,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza

• Daniel Kreiss, “Developing Technologies of Control: Producing Political Participation in Online Electorial Campaigning,” Paper presented on September 21, 2011 at the Oxford Internet Institute “A Decade in Internet Time” conference http://danielkreiss.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/kreiss_controltechnologies.pdf

Week 9 Discussion Session: Working Together in Teams

Week 10, Day 19

Monday, October 29

How Does Media Spread?

• Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “Why Media Spreads,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

• danah boyd, “The Power of Youth: How Invisible Children Orchestrated Kony 2012,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danah-boyd/post_3126_b_1345782.html

• Ethan Zuckerman, “Unpacking Kony 2012,” My Heart’s in Accra, March 8, 2012, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/unpacking-kony-2012/

• James Gleick, “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian.com, May 2012, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a-Meme.html

• Ilya Vedrashko, “A Site That Went Viral and the Numbers Behind It,” Hill Holliday Blog, http://www.hhcc.com/blog/2010/07/a-site-that-went-viral-and-the-numbers-behind-it/

Week 10, Day 20

Wednesday, October 31

How Generative are Online Communities? (Guest Lecture: Rhea Vichot)

• Mark McLelland, “‘Race’ on the Japanese internet: discussing Korea and Koreans on ‘2-channeru.’” New Media & Society, 2008, 10(6), 811 - 829.

• Gabriella Coleman, “Anonymous: From Lulz to Collective Action,” 2011, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/anonymous-lulz-collective-action

• Whitney Phillips, “The House That Fox Built: Anonymous, Spectacle and Cycles of Amplification,” Television and New Media, forthcoming.

http://hastac.org/blogs/whitneyphillips/2012/05/20/4chan-article-published-house-fox-built-anonymous-spectacle-and-cyc

• Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production.” In M. Knobel and C Lankshear (Eds.), 2007, A Media Literacies Sampler. 199 - 228.

Week 10 Discussion Section: Tracking Viral Success

Week 11, Day 21

Monday, November 5

Have There Been Twitter Revolutions?

• Ethan Zuckerman, “The Cute Cat Theory Talk at eTech,” My Heart’s in Accra, March 8, 2008, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/

• Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

• Evgeny Morozov, “Think Again: The Internet,” Foreign Policy, May/June 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/think_again_the_internet

Week 11, Day 22

Wednesday, November 7

What is Web 2.0?

• Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0," O'Reilly Media, September 30, 2005, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

• Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired, June 2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

• Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “What Went Wrong with Web 2.0?,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

• Geert Lovink, “Capturing Web 2.0 Before Its Disappearance,” Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (London: Polity, 2012), pp.1-23.

Week 11 Discussion Section: Kickstarter as a Web 2.0 Company

Week 12, Day 23

Monday, November 12

What Will Be the Future of Advertising?

• Cory Doctorow, "The Branding of Billy Bailey," A Place So Foreign and Eight More
(San Francisco: Running Press, 2003), pp. 86-98.

• Daniele Sacks, “The Future of Advertising,” Fast Company, November 17, 2010, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/151/mayhem-on-madison-avenue.html

• Campfire, True Blood - http://vimeo.com/8268162

• Weiden & Kennedy, Old Spice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg0booW1uOQ

• Burger King, Whopper Sacrifice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXxhEjnJA0

• Barbarian Group, Subservient Chicken (Burger King) -http://vimeo.com/16742192

• Hill Holiday, Mad Men + Newsweek - http://vimeo.com/44876203

Week 12, Day 24

Wednesday, November 14

Are Pirates a Threat to Media Industries?

• Nancy Baym, "The New Shape of Online Community: The Example of Swedish Independent Music Fandom," First Monday, May 16, 2007, http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1978/1853/

• William W. Fischer, "The Promise of New Technology,” Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment (San Francisco: Stanford U. Press, 2004), pp. 11-37.

.Cory Doctorow, “Music: The Internet’s Original Sin,” Locus Online, July 4, 2012,  http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/07/cory-doctorow-music-the-internets-original-sin/

• “Artist Revenue Streams, The Future of Music Coalition, http://money.futureofmusic.org/

• “Piracy Online,” RIAA, http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php?content_selector=What-is-Online-Piracy

Week 12 Discussion Section: Curation Policies

Week 13, Day 25

Monday, November 19

Are Video Games Art?

• Roger Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” Chicago Sun Times, April 16, 2010, http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

• Mike Snyder, “Are Video Games Art? Draw Your Own Conclusion,” USA Today, March 12, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/story/2012-03-12/video-games-smithsonian/53502696/1

• Ian Bogost, “Art,” How to Do Things With Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 9-17.

• The Art of Video Games, Smithsonian American Art Museum, http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/

Wednesday November 21 NOTE: NO CLASS. Today is part of Thanksgiving holiday.

Week 14, Day 27

Monday November 26

Is Print Culture Dying?

• Sven Birkerts, “Resisting the Kindle,” The Atlantic, March 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/resisting-the-kindle/7345/

• Matthew Battles, “In Defense of the Kindle,” The Atlantic, March 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/in-defense-of-the-kindle/7346/

• Ken Auletta, “Publish and Perish,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta

• Ted Striphas, “The Past and Future Histories of Books,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 19 2012, http://henryjenkins.org/2012/03/the_late_age_of_print_an_inter.html

Week 14, Day 28

Wednesday, November 28

Has Networked Communication Changed the Ways We Tell Stories?

• Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 22, 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

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

• Nick DeMartino, "Why Transmedia Is Catching On Now," Future of Film Blog, Parts 1 (July 5, 2011), 2 (July 6, 2011), 3 (July 7, 2011).

http://www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/future-of-film/Why-Transmedia-is-Catching-On-Part-1.html,

http://www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/future-of-film/Why-Transmedia-is-Catching-On-Part-2.html,

http:/www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/future-of-film/Why-Transmedia-is-Catching-On-Part-3.html

Week 14 Discussion Section: Mapping a Transmedia Story?

Week 15, Day 29

Monday, December 3

Planning Strategy for the Exam

Week 15, Day 30

Wednesday, December 5

Complet

This article is translated to Serbo-Croatian language by Anja Skrba from Webhostinggeeks.com.

For a Polish translation, see http://www.pkwteile.de/wissen/wprowadzenie-do-technologii-komunikacyjnych

Yes, You Can Use Your Laptop on This Exam...and Your Knowledge Community, Too!

In February 2011, I shared with my readers a pedagogical problem I was facing in a large undergraduate lecture class on new media and culture:

I made the announcement that the exams in the class would be open book, open note and that I was planning to distribute a list of potential questions in advance from which I would draw in constructing the exam, a practice I have used for more than 20 years without any great confusion....

No sooner did I announce this policy than I got a question I've never been asked before. A student wondered whether open book, open note, meant open laptop. I needed time to reflect on this and said I would answer in the next class period. Actually, it took me a few to get back to them with a response. Given this was a class on technology and culture, I decided to use this as a teachable moment.

So, I started by breaking down the computer into two elements. First, there is the computer as a stand alone word processing machine. I certainly would have had no great objections to students using the computer to write their answers or even to access their materials.... But, in an era of networked computing and wireless classrooms, allowing students to use a laptop during an exam suddenly would allow students to access any information anywhere on the web and more significantly would allow students to trade information with each other throughout the test in ways which would be extremely difficult to monitor.

As I thought about it, the challenges of designing a meaningful test under those circumstances intrigued me. What would it mean to create an exam which could be taken not by individual students but by networked groups of students -- either the class as a whole or a specifically designated study group? Could we enfold ideas of collective intelligence into the design of tests? Could we create challenges which demonstrated their mastery of the material through the search strategies they deployed and the knowledge they produced together? In theory, such an exam holds promise as more and more jobs require the capacity to pool knowledge and collaborate with a team of others to solve complex problems, and learning how to mobilize expertise under these conditions should be a key goal of our educational process.

I was not able to come up with an approach fast enough to implement it that semester. Readers to the original blog post made a series of suggestions, though most of them seemed to work better on the scale of the seminar or small group classroom rather than the lecture hall. But, my theoretical commitments meant this question was not going to go away. I also know that the question has haunted some of my readers, one of whom shared this interesting blog post with me via Twitter last week, which deals with other conceptions of what an open laptop exam might look like.

Ironically, having failed to create opportunities for collaboration inside the exam space, the students did what might easily have been predicted: they formed study groups outside class and worked through responses together. Many students had written entire answers to the provided questions in advance, and simply copied their answers into a blue book. In some cases, as many as thirty or forty students got the same question wrong and in the same way, suggesting just how expansive the study network (scarcely a study group) had become. The question may no longer be whether learning is going to be networked, but rather how much control faculty are able to exert over the networks where learning and studying take place.For me, this is part of the implication of the recent cheating scandal at Harvard.

Adam Kahn, a PhD student in the USC Annenberg School, read the blog post and reached out to me, suggesting that he would like to help me think through these challenges, since he is doing work on a body of research known as Transactive Memory, which is interested in the ways groups of people solve problems together. Kahn had been a student in my New Media Literacies class my first semester at USC. We've worked together off and on for the past year, developing a conceptual essay about the problem for a forthcoming book on higher education. There, we developed a blue print for how we might need to reinvent the lecture class process in order to support the emergence of knowledge-building and problem-solving communities of the kind required to successfully complete a networked exam. Here's part of what we said in that essay:

Because students add and drop classes for the first few weeks of the semester, it is important to not form student groups too early, as group turnover can hurt transactive memory (Moreland and Argote 2003). Thus, the semester will begin with core concepts and common texts the instructor feels everybody should know (Lévy’s shared knowledge). The course’s first midterm would be a traditional, non-collaborative exam, comprising a certain percentage of the grade. This diagnostic test can allow the instructors to gauge student’s relative abilities when putting together teams. Members should be assigned, with the goal of diversifying skills and knowledge.  Allowing students to self-select would almost certainly increase group homogeneity bound as membership would be to existing friendship ties, i.e. those who shared the same interests and activities outside the classroom.

After this exam, though, the group becomes important. At this point, the reading list will grow so that it is too much for any individual to read. Students will have to become mutually dependent to survive.

Because transactive memory forms around face-to-face communication, we must provide students a time to meet. Large lecture classes often have smaller discussion sections. Normally a teaching assistant facilitates a discussion and/or clarifies confusing points from lecture. However, this hour might be better spent allowing team members to meet to discuss the readings they divided amongst themselves and relate them to the common lecture themes of the week. The teaching assistant would also stress problem solving and coordination skills, helping groups refine strategies and learn from their mistakes, more like a coach than like our traditional model of a teacher. Although the ideal team would be self-regulating and self-guiding, the teaching assistant could also help them to assign roles or divide labor, if needed, to insure that each member pulls their own weight.

The teaching assistant can provide one question each week that would be representative of those on an exam, allowing group members to synthesize their different readings and learn how the other students think--their strategies for identifying the core stakes of a problem, mobilizing knowledge, testing data, assessing conclusions, and communicating results. These questions could require students to do online searches, tap into knowledge from other classes, or draw on their extracurricular expertise. Through these test runs, students would learn each other’s specialization, build trust, and coordinate their efforts on tasks similar to the group exam.

As they enter a collaborative test-taking process, students face the challenge of resolving conflict and committing to a shared answer, especially working under time constraints. Outside of the classroom, affinity groups develop norms, such as those surrounding contributions to Wikipedia, to which they can appeal to resolve such conflicts. So, for example, Wikipedia articles strive towards neutrality, which is often achieved through inclusion (that is, featuring all competing perspectives) rather than exclusion (arriving at a consensus response) (Lih 2009). Student’s experience of testing may be that there is a right answer the teacher is expecting and thus, they may be less receptive to test taking strategies which include a broader range of possible answers. Having multiple collaborative activities will allow each group to develop its own norms and protocols for resolving disputes and finding an answer students feel they can stand behind.

The final exam is designed to tap a range of different kinds of expertise. Think of the individual problems as possessing the sense of “meaningful ambiguity” which, McGonigal (2008, 214) argues, motivates the problem solving activity around alternate reality games: “by asking players to cooperate to make meaning out of an ambiguous system, the game-based hive mind celebrates individual perspective even as it embraces the larger, intricate intelligence that emerges only at the scale digital networks afford.” For such experiences to be compelling and satisfying, McGonigal (2003) argues, they have to introduce problems that seem within reach of the network of players. She notes that an empowered team often seeks to move beyond the game and tackle real world social problems, only to be disappointed that such problems may not, in fact, be resolvable given the group’s resources and capacities. Exam questions would need to be open ended enough to allow many different paths to a solution and yet ultimately something that participants can comprehend and resolve.

Assuming that the lecture meets twice a week, the questions are given out at the beginning of the first lecture and are due at the end of the second lecture. This will allow students to use the first lecture to start working on the answers and divide the labor. Then students can go home and seek more information on their own, and work more on the answers if they so choose. They coordinate efforts so that each student plays to her strengths and so that there is a robust system of checks and balances to identify and eradicate misinformation. Preparing for the exam may be much more like getting ready for a guild raid in World of Warcraft than like studying for a traditional test. The second lecture can be used to finalize answers. Also, by spanning two lectures affords groups at least two face-to-face opportunities to interact. Students can write their answers using an online tool, such as Google Documents, that allows them to write simultaneously in a single document. In this way, they can make changes to each other’s work (knowing who wrote what) and see changes being made to their own work. Changes can be tracked over time and reverted back to if needed....

Educational researcher Dan Hickey and his research team at Indiana University (Hickey, Honeyford, and McWilliams forthcoming) has been trying to explore what forms assessment needs to take within a participatory learning culture and concludes that assessment should “focus on reflections rather than artifacts.” His group has developed a range of activities that might follow a project or exam, asking students to reflect on what strategies they tried and why, rather than simply evaluating them based on what they produced. Of course, students will have different capacities to articulate their reflections. McGonigal (2008, 222) has similarly argued that working in large-scale teams to solve alternate reality games encourages “meta-level reflection on the skills and processes that players use to meet new challenges.” At the end of the day, the test might function as much as a probe to encourage students to continue to think about the process of their learning than as a simple assessment of what they, collectively and individually, know.

Well, this semester, we are going to be putting these ideas into action, as I teach my lecture hall subject a second time. I will  be sharing my syllabus next time.

I have ended up dividing the class into two parts: for the first part, students will be developing shared knowledge, that is, knowledge which will be required of every member on the team, and they will be performing as individuals, demonstrating their own mastery over the materials. In the second part, they will be sorted into teams which will work together on all future assignments: the discussion section times will be opportunities for the students to work on problem sets together with coaching from the Teaching Assistants, and the final week of class will be given over to a culminating activity which will require teams to work together to respond to the prompts.The midterm is approaching and soon we will be making the cognitive shift from individual to collective effort.

From the start, the class has emphasize new ways of learning in a networked culture, drawing heavily in the first few weeks on materials produced by MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning initiatives. I want to get them to take an inventory of their own skills and competencies as learners, the ways they use new media in the context of their lives, and to engage critically with the debates surrounding the so-called "digital natives" and their new media literacy skills. For this to really work, I am having to abandon the lecture as the primary mode of presentation in the class. Instead, I am moving towards something closer to the way Socratic Method works in Law Schools. On most days, we are reading essays which represent conflicting perspectives on core debates around digital media and culture, hoping to foster critical thinking and research skills.

As I developed this approach, I struggled with the issue of "freeloaders" -- that is, students who are willing to let the others do all the work and coast to a better grade. There's a limit to what I can do in terms of evaluating individual performance if we are going to really place such a strong emphasis on group performance, but I will be monitoring and evaluating individual attendance and participation in the discussion session and exam, and I will be asking participants to list everyone who contributed to a particular project (which can, in fact, include people who are not in their assigned group, as long as their participation is fully disclosed.)

There's a lot we still have to work through, so I would welcome feedback from readers about this approach and I would be especially interested to hear from anyone who has tried something like this process before. I promise to report back on how the class is going and share some of the problem sets we create later in the semester.

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part Three)

Today’s civil rights movements, such as the struggles over the DREAM act, are more likely to play out in digital media than through broadcast media, and once again, the debates seem to want to focus on digital media as technology, rather than as a set of social, cultural, and political practices. What lessons might we take from your work on 1960s television to help us understand the role of new media in contemporary political resistance movements?  

Let’s remember that television news in the early 1960s was the era’s “new media,” as digital media like Twitter and Facebook are today.  Any successful social change movement is going to want to exploit and make use of the newest communication tools of its era.  Today it’s social media.

These forms of media obviously do somewhat different things than “old media” like television – the form of communication and contact is different, appeal to audiences is different.  I hear the term “Twitter Revolution” and it puts my teeth on edge.  Twitter no more caused the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement than television caused the civil rights movement or the anti-Vietnam war movement.  In both cases, social change movements used the communication tools of the day and certainly the tools have an impact on how one can communicate, who one can reach, how quickly we can organize, and all the rest.

What concerns me is the centering on the technology as technology and the utopian discourses that surround it all.  As far as digital media, I think Morozov’s The Net Delusion is a useful corrective to the notion that new social media are inherently liberatory.  Social change movements create the impetus for social change – and that requires the hard work of organizing.  Television coverage and social media tools help, but they don’t substitute for organizing and getting lots of people together in real time and space pressing a change agenda and dialoguing with others and confronting others about it.  Some of this can occur in virtual spaces (I think Facebook and Twitter can be great organizing tools – mostly because they are fast and efficient), but I still would argue that social change activists do have to get into the streets and into public spaces as Occupy did – and as the civil rights movement did. 

One of the most important contributions of your book is your focus on reception, specifically the ways that different groups (not simply black vs. white or north vs. south, but different groups of white southerners, say) used television content to stage debates about what forms of social change were or were not acceptable. Too often, we end up with pretty univocal accounts of how southerners responded to the civil rights movement. What were some of the core points of difference that surface when you look at audience response to these broadcasts?

It’s pretty easy to stereotype white Southerners in the civil rights era: either benighted, evil or buffoonish racists or latter-day Atticus Finches taking on the good fight for victimized blacks.  I was interested in really trying to understand how white Southerners responded to the fundamental challenge to their segregationist world view when national media, network television in particular, throws a nationwide spotlight onto race relations in their locales, in particular Birmingham and Selma.

Working with the very large number of letters to the editor I found in Alabama newspapers, along with editorials and commentary that directly addressed media coverage I wanted to analyze and provide interpretive readings of these responses.  One thing I found was a significant degree of media awareness and savvy among white Southerners – they were far more aware of the workings of the media than were non-Southerners or African American commentary in the black press.

In fact, during the key civil rights years (early-mid 1960s) I was struck by how little discussion of the media I found in the black press.  It was like, since the media wasn’t a “problem” for the black empowerment movement, the medium as medium tended to disappear.  The media was telling the truth, “reflecting” what was really happening in the South, so there wasn’t the felt need to interrogate how the media was operating.  At least, that’s my attempt to hypothesize about the dearth of discourse about media in the black press during this period.

The situation is very different in the Alabama press.  Lots of attention to the role played by national media and particularly the “new media”: television.   And since most of these Southerners didn’t want to believe that what they were seeing on their TVs was true, they had to explain what was going on.  There were a lot of accusations that King and the movement merely wanted “publicity.”  Publicity for what?  Well, King was power mad or wanted to curry influence in Washington.  The movement’s stated reasons for the publicity campaigns couldn’t be grappled with.

These Southerners were, of course, correct that King and the movement staged marches and demonstrations to get media attention: they needed publicity on a national scale.  The movement, on the other hand, could never admit that they were staging “media events.”  White Southerners could see this, but for the most part had to stop right there.  To engage the next question: why do these marchers want this national attention, what are they marching for and against, would lead to scary answers.

If the Southern white worldview is founded, as it was, on the premise that segregation works for everyone and that blacks are just as content with the situation as whites, then to really engage the fundamental question profoundly threatens that worldview.  So many white Southerners had to evade and look for other things to focus on: the “Northern-ness” of network television, for instance.  Or media bias: why the focus on bad race relations in Selma when blacks and whites are killing each other in New York subways?  Why doesn’t the media focus on racism in the North?  Valid questions, but they do help to evade the big issue about Jim Crow and voter disenfranchisement.

Occasionally with some letter writers and editorialists, the media images broke through: especially during the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, particularly when white volunteers got murdered.  In a number of cases, there were anguished concerns about the “image” of Alabama that the rest of the country is getting: what does this say about Alabama?  Who are we?  How are we going to have to change?  I see these as cracks in the hegemonic segregationist armour and clues to how a previously naturalized worldview starts slowly to disintegrate.

As a historian of reception practices, the one thing I wanted to try to do was avoid taking a condescending attitude to these segregationist discourses and the people who were producing this discourse.  It’s easy to feel superior and know that these folks were on the wrong side of history.  They didn’t know that.  I

n some ways I found Northerners, particularly those who responded to the East Side/West Side episodes that explored race relations topics in Northern locales, as equally blinkered.  Even though these episodes were clearly marked as occurring in New York City and its environs, numerous letter writers would discursively locate the problem back to the South.  The real race problem was there; Southerners were the ones who should be watching these shows to learn about the plight of black people.   “Dumb” white Southerners were the problem, no matter where blacks faced oppression and discrimination.

One of the surprising discoveries you made was that while the networks did cover aspects of the March on Washington “live,” they cut away from what we now see as the key moments in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. What do you think motivated that decision?

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

All three networks carried significant amounts of live coverage of the March on Washington which occurred, by the way, on a Wednesday.  Nowadays it’s no spectacular feat to get masses of people to Washington for a march, but they always happen on the weekend.  Try to get a quarter of a million people to the national Mall on a weekday!

Along with the live coverage during the day, CBS that evening provided a prime time news programme that both recapped the events of the day and provided background about the March.  For people interested in the March, CBS’s prime time coverage is probably where they first got their sense of what happened.  Now this is the pre-sound bite era.  The news special provided long excerpts for quite a number of the speeches that preceded King’s.

Finally we get to King who provided the final speech of the day.  King’s speech can be divided into two halves: the first part provides some rationale for why people are massed at the Mall and why blacks are not satisfied with the racial status quo or the pace of change.  The second part of the speech is the one we all know: the soaring oratory of “I have a dream” and King’s vision of an America redeemed.  So, when CBS news personnel make their decision of what to excerpt from the speech, what do they go with?

Believe it or not, they cut away just as King launches into “I have a dream.”  When I first saw this news programme at the CBS News Archive, my jaw just about hit the floor when I realized that the most important words of the most important speech of the 20^th century ended up on the cutting room floor.  It’s a pretty major journalistic gaffe.  But why?

I suggest that in 1963, reporters and news personnel didn’t know what to do with “I have a dream.”  King isn’t speaking politically any more; he isn’t given a list of grievances.  He is preaching.  Drew Hansen in his book about the speech really helped me to understand what the journalistic decision-making must have been.  King was no longer a political leader, he was now a visionary prophet, akin to Isaiah in the Bible.  This wasn’t a King that journalists were familiar with – outside of black churches, no one had really heard King speaking like this.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part Two)

You suggest that the news media made “common cause” with the civil rights movement in bringing some of their concerns to the American public. What motivated the national news media to embrace this story? What were the limits of their commitment to the cause?  

It was a limited common cause. Around issues such as integration of schools and public spaces, along with voting rights, the media was largely supportive.  But Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also embraced those goals.  The news media, television in particular, tended to be very positively inclined to JFK and was as well to LBJ in the early period of his administration when he appeared to be trying to carry out the Kennedy agenda, particularly the Civil Rights Act that passes in 1964.  The legislative goals of the movement were “legitimated” by the fact that there was significant support among both Democratic and Republican officials outside the South. These were somewhat less partisan times, certainly in media coverage.  Television news deferred quite a bit to the president.

But one thing surprised me as I examined TV news coverage.  Reporters tended to become far more critical of civil rights activists and civil rights campaigns when things turned violent.  In reading transcripts of NBC coverage of the sit-in movement, I was surprised to discover that the reporter refused to identify who was being violent.  The reporter kept using the passive voice so it wasn’t clear that white segregationists were the ones pummeling sit-in demonstrators.

At other times, however, when the violence was so clearly marked between victim and aggressor, there was less criticism of the civil rights activists.  When voting rights marchers in Selma were brutally gassed and beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in full view of a battery of cameras, there was no attempt to suggest that the marchers were participating in creating the mayhem.  However, in another news story from Selma that I viewed, the CBS reporter was somewhat critical of very youthful demonstrators who, unlike their elders, did not present docile bodies, but ranged around the streets and back alleys during their march.  In general, there appeared to be more anxiety about the activities and potential threat of black youths (who were, of course, fundamentally important to the success of civil rights campaigns, particularly those of direct action and civil disobedience).

It’s a weird paradox: TV news was drawn to the civil rights story to some extent because it provided dramatic visuals of violence and a powerful good versus evil narrative, but reporters tended to criticize the violence that drew them to the story in the first place.

You write in the book about “a moment [in the 1960s] of non-stereotypical, respectable middle-class blacks” on fictional television. What factors gave rise to this moment and which led to its decline? How do these fictional black characters relate to the idealized civil rights subject that you suggest was constructed through the evening news?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcOlcDUQ29M

It seems that every era of media representation of African Americans is attempting to respond differently to the era that precedes it.  I open the book with a consideration of The Beulah Show and Amos ‘n’ Andy, the early 1950s shows featuring blacks in starring roles.  We tend to consider them to be stereotyped and degrading images of blacks.  At the time, however, the thinking about these representations was somewhat more complicated.  Beulah, the black housekeeper to a white family, was seen by some (including some in the black press) as equal to her employers, middle-class in deportment, not using dialect, and in general a good role model.  In developing Amos ‘n’ Andy for television, CBS very deliberately elevated them and the Kingfish to middle class status presumably to make them appear less disrespectable and buffoonish.  Nevertheless, both shows, and especially Amos ‘n’ Andy, were subject to high profile protest by the NAACP, and were off the air by 1953.

Prime time becomes a very “white-washed” world from then on till the early-mid 1960s.  Network programming philosophy was: appeal to the most, offend the least.  Black performers tended to cause controversy – witness the case of Nat King Cole and his 1957 variety show which couldn’t secure a sponsor.  The “integrating” of prime time entertainment programming is, of course, a direct result of the civil rights movement.  It was becoming more of a problem to not show at least occasional black performers or black characters.

Herman Gray came up with the concept “civil rights subject” when he was writing about how television tended to remember civil rights.  The civil rights subject in his original formulation is the latter-day beneficiary of the movement: an exemplary figure signified by hard work, individualism, middle-class status.  The Huxtable family of The Cosby Show is the quintessential example of this concept.  What I argue in my book is that this “civil rights subject” is also evident in television representations (both in news coverage and in prime time entertainment) during the civil rights era.  The most notable early example in prime time drama is Bill Cosby again!  In 1965 he’s paired with a white partner in the Cold War espionage series, I Spy.  Cosby’s character can’t just be a spy, though: he’s a Rhodes scholar who speaks eleven languages and is clearly superior to everyone around him (except that his white buddy gets all the girls).  I Spy gives us a colour-blind, post-integrationist world where our two heroes can range around the world to Cold War hot spots (typically in Asian countries that look “exotic”) and represent a black-and-white America that doesn’t have anything to do with racism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6YH3j01Ou8

Bill Cosby’s character is the opposite of a victim, but another form of early 1960s programming did focus on blacks-as-victims – the “social problem” dramas that appeared in direct response to both the idealism of the Kennedy New Frontier and also industry anxiety about tougher regulation by the new FCC chairman, Newton Minow who castigated television as “a vast wasteland.”  One show I look at, East Side/West Side, focuses on the crusades of an idealistic white social worker in New York City.  One very high profile episode examines the plight of a young Harlem couple dealing with the lack of jobs for black men and horrendous ghetto housing conditions (their baby dies after begin bitten by a rat).  Even though the couple is obviously poor and living in degraded conditions, they are presented to us as middle-class seeming, dignified, hard-working, eminently respectable – although James Earl Jones, as the husband, portrays a barely contained rage against his oppression.  The characters, nevertheless, are presented to white viewers as ones deserving of help – the only thing standing in the way of their achieving middle-class status and integration into the white world is employment discrimination and slum housing.  So there’s that similar appeal that we see in news and photojournalism coverage: helpless but worthy blacks, enlightened, caring whites as potential rescuers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn5kDvpiibA

But shows like East Side/West Side were a bit grim for prime time Nielsen families.  The quintessential civil rights subject after Bill Cosby in I Spy was Diahann Carroll in Julia, which came on air in 1968 and was the first TV series to star an African American since the days of Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah.  Julia was colour-blind integration fully achieved.  She’s a nurse with white co-workers and she lives in a LA apartment building with white neighbours.  Except for mostly humourous instances of “prejudice,” Julia and her adorable young son personify a world of interracial harmony.  The show was controversial because as network television’s first high profile attempt to center a show around African Americans, it ran up against the rapid shifts in the black empowerment movement and what was going on with race in the US at that point.  By 1968 with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts having passed, the attention shifted North and there’s more of a focus on economic oppression and “de facto” segregation and the situation with black inner city “ghettos.”  The movement also shifts into more confrontational directions that are more discomforting to liberal and moderate whites.  Julia was a popular show but arguments swirled around it suggesting that the show was out of touch with what was really going on: the show wasn’t “telling it like it is.”

You see the book as seeking to correct some common misunderstandings about the role of television during the civil rights era. What do you see as the most widespread misinterpretations of this period?

I think it’s similar to the misunderstanding about television and the Vietnam War.  Television did not embrace the cause of the anti-war movement and thereby lead the US population to demand the war’s end.  (See Daniel Hallin’s The “Uncensored War.”)  Similarly television didn’t cause the success of the civil rights movement.  Television was not a mouthpiece for the movement; news coverage did not transmit or reflect the positions, perspectives, and arguments of the movement in some simple, one-directional sort of way.  I see this over and over again in histories of the civil rights era: the nation saw it on television and the nation acted.  This reifies the medium, gives us television as a neutral mirror reflecting what’s in front of the camera.   No attention to television as an institution and industry, or to textual construction, or to reception practices – all the issues that we as media scholars explore.  This is preaching to the choir when I say this to fellow media studies folks, but I’m hoping my book gets read by non-media scholars, too!

Was network television in general sympathetic to the legislative goals of the movement?  Yes.  But as I’ve already noted, so were powerful political players.  Was the movement sympathetic to many of the movement’s strategies, including demonstrations, direct action, civil disobedience?  In general, no.  For instance, in the run-up to the March on Washington, the media (and not just television) was very critical of the prospect of a hundred thousand and more black people converging on the nation’s capital.  The recurring news peg was “violence is inevitable” and “mass marches won’t sway congressional votes anyway.”  When violence didn’t occur on the day of the march, the live coverage became largely celebratory with images mostly focused on dignified, middle-class-looking marchers – ideal “civil rights subjects” – who presented docile, smiling, and unthreatening images.  But newsmen covering the event continued to insist that the quarter of a million marchers wouldn’t sway votes, so what was the point of the march.

So I really want to undercut and question a certain amount of technological utopianism and determinism that I see in civil rights historiography and also in popular memory.  Television coverage was crucial to the movement, of course; the movement did not, however, fundamentally control either the medium or its messages.  The medium and the movement were not one and the same; that fact tends to get lost.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Televisionand New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part One)

Many of us may think we know the history of the role which American broadcast television played in fostering public awareness and rallying support behind Martin Luther King and his 1960s era Civil Rights struggle. We can all picture in our heads the black and white fuzzy images of King's powerful remarks in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, for example, and we know that people across the country must have watched those amazing words in their living rooms. Not so fast, argues Aniko Bodroghkozy, the author of a new book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement.  Bodroghkozy certainly argues that television played important roles in sparking the consciences of viewers around the country as the networks and the activists made reluctant, tentative, highly compromised "common cause" with each other to transform the civil rights struggles into a prime time spectacle. But, some of what you believe happened -- starting with how the networks covered the March on Washington -- turns out to be a bit more complex than popular memory and imagination might suggest.

I have had the joy of watching Bodroghkozy develop from a young graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying under John Fiske and Lynn Spigel, to the author of an important first book about the ways the student protests of the 1960s engaged with television, through to the publication of this masterful new book, which represents the culmination of more than a decade's work in the archives. Bodroghkozy has already written the definitive accounts of the controversy surrounding The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the reception of Julia by black and white viewers, both essays often assigned in television history classes around the country. Her work moves back and forth between news and entertainment programming, showing the ways that they were sometimes aligned, sometimes contradictory, in their depictions of the current state of race relations in the 1960s. Her work is surprisingly nuanced in dealing with the diversity of perspectives within the network journalists, within the civil rights movement, and with white southerners, as the country sought to resolve deep rooted conflicts around segregation. She offers rich readings of key programs and broadcasts which are contextualized by contemporary responses from newspapers and letters housed in archives, combining insights from social and political history alongside those she brings to the table as a gifted broadcast historian.

The book's consideration of media and political change is well timed, offering a rich historical counter to current debates about the role of new media in informing recent struggles, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement. For me, it especially resonates with the work that my Civic Paths team at USC has been doing on the DREAMers, undocumented youth whose current civil rights struggles are informed by their saavy use of YouTube and various social media platforms. But, as the country's first black president seeks re-election,  Equal Time offers us some great resources for placing into perspective various attempts to mobilize popular memories of the Civil Rights era.

The following interview demonstrates Bodroghkozy's careful, nuanced, yet engaged mind at work, describing some of the ways that Equal Rights helps to revise our understanding of this important era both in the history of American politics and in the evolution of television as a medium.

You can also follow this link for an interview with the author on public radio.

You begin the book with a powerful quote from Martin Luther King: “We are here to say to the white men that we are not going to let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” To what degree were the tactics King brought to the civil rights movement designed to encourage and shape television attention? What did King and the other civil rights leaders hope to accomplish by getting access to broadcast media?

King’s quote is really noteworthy because he and civil rights leaders of the era so very rarely talked openly about their strategies to elicit television coverage.  To be open about their “media campaign” would have appeared manipulative, anathema for a movement that was attempting to appeal to the moral conscience of the nation.  King and the SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his organization) understood the power of strong visual images and the need to communicate a stark message of moral clarity – and to communicate that message and those images to a national audience that could put pressure on congressmen, senators, and the president to pass federal legislation around civil rights and voting rights.  Accessing a national audience was key.

You have to remember that in the early 1960s, there were few truly national media outlets.  There were the picture magazines, Life and Look, which reached a huge readership, and to a lesser extent the newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.  None, of course, had the reach of network television, which by the early 1960s had over ninety percent penetration in U.S. households.  This time period is also when the networks finally begin to invest significantly in their news divisions (CBS and NBC inaugurate their half hour nightly news shows in the fall of 1963 and throughout the early/mid 1960s large numbers of prime time news documentaries, special reports, bulletins and the like).  So you’ve got network news becoming a serious journalistic venue reaching unprecedented numbers of citizens.

King and the SCLC in particular appeared to intuitively understand the nature of television news and the need for dramatic pictures.  They knew to schedule marches no later than about 2:00 in the afternoon in order to work with the demands of the TV news room: film had to be flown to New York, printed, edited, and readied for broadcast for the nightly news.  And they knew that the news cameras would stick around only if the marches and demonstrations led to confrontation and even violence.  The movement did need to create situations in which white racists would beat and brutalize civil rights activists.

On the one hand, one could say that the movement was manipulating the media as well as Southern white police officials like Birmingham’s Bull Connor or Selma’s Jim Clark by creating a setting for confrontation (and certainly segregationists argued that these were all publicity stunts).  On the other hand, blacks had been beaten, lynched, and brutalized “in the dark corners” for decades and decades.  Staging this brutality out in public and inviting new forms of national media to witness it was a novel and clearly powerful tactic that both assisted the movement in making its larger arguments about Jim Crow and black disempowerment, but also played to the strengths of television as “new media.”

Was the goal to reach white viewers, black viewers, or some kind of community which included people of multiple races?

The goal clearly was primarily to reach white viewers, particularly outside the South.  Frequently network news stories about civil rights would be “blacked out” on Deep South TV stations.  Steven Classen has written superbly in his book, Watching Jim Crow, about the case of Jackson, Mississippi’s WLBT-TV which systematically censored network news stories about civil rights or race relations and eventually, after long legal struggles by civil rights activists, finally had its broadcast license revoked by the Justice Department in 1969.  King would frequently appeal to “the conscience of the nation.”  He was obviously referring to the mass audiences produced by media like network television and to nationally distributed magazines.

The movement really didn’t need television to appeal to African Americans (either in the South or the North).  There was a very robust black press that was very effectively distributed to black communities.  News weeklies like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier had national reach with black train porters often working as an informal distribution system to get these newspapers to black communities around the country, and especially into the Deep South.  The movement needed to reach and impact whites outside the South in order to make the case that segregation in Birmingham, Alabama or Albany, Georgia or voter disenfranchisement in Selma, Alabama weren’t regional issues to be solved at the state level, but rather national problems of concern to all Americans to be dealt with in Washington.  And Washington politicians would only care if they were hearing from constituents en masse.

It’s also important to remember this was the Cold War era and to some extent the movement was aware of the global audience. We aren’t really in the satellite era yet (although the Telstar communications satellite goes up in 1962 and live satellite transmission is possible).  The 1963 March on Washington coverage is transmitted live to most European countries.  Nevertheless images are traveling more quickly in this era and there’s lots of concern about how global audiences are making sense of the “leader of the Free World” oppressing its black citizens.

Does television mean something different in the context of this movement than newspapers and print based media?

I think the distinction is more “visual media” versus “print media.”  My book was going to press just as Martin Berger Seeing Through Race came out.  He examines the photojournalism around the civil rights movement and comes to some similar conclusions to mine about network news coverage.  In both cases, the emphasis is on dramatic images of moral clarity: good versus evil, clearly marked.  It calls to mind Peter Brooks’ arguments about “the melodramatic imagination” and the moral occult: in a secular era, we need narratives to give us that clarity that used to be presumably provided by the church in the pre-modern era.

Both television news and photojournalism assumed a white viewer.  The preferred images are of helpless, supplicating or brutalized black bodies that need assistance.  The white viewer is hailed into the position as saviour or rescuer.  The white viewer, whose conscience is being appealed to, is called on to do something, respond in some way to come to the aid of the helpless black victim.  Berger very usefully traces this trope back to abolitionist iconography with the widely circulated image of the kneeling, supplicant slave holding up his chained arms.  In television news coverage, black civil rights activists are almost always mute; only King is authorized to speak.  Preferred images include docile marchers, praying bodies, and, of course, tear-gassed, whipped, beaten bodies.  Print media had a significant role to play as well and Richard Lentz in his (terribly titled!) book Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King does a great comparative analysis of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report in their coverage of King and the movement.

But ultimately I think the power of the civil right movement comes from its visuality and the movement’s intuitive grasp of how to communicate via imagery.  Print media, I think, functioned in an ancillary role providing background, context, and information to the images.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part Three)

  As you note, there has always been space within the Batman canon for some kinds of alternative interpretations of the character, for “What If?” or Elseworld stories, for alternative histories and authorial differences. Do you see the space for multiplicity within the superhero comics narrowing as Hollywood interests exert greater control over the future of these characters? If so, why?

I don’t, because I think comics are currently and will probably remain a niche interest.

That Morrison’s run on Batman -- an extended, fannish love letter to the character’s seventy-year continuity, including obscure, one-panel references to specific archival stories and reworkings of previously-repressed comic narratives – took place at exactly the time Nolan was helming his own separate and distinctly authored Batman franchise, demonstrates that comic book continuity remains relatively independent from the Hollywood version.

There are overlaps and crossovers – Nolan’s franchise borrowed from specific graphic novels, and Morrison incorporated references to the Nolan Batman into his own story –  but comics run on a parallel track, for a different (and far smaller) audience than movies, and no doubt also far smaller than the video game market.

It is certainly possible to identify a Nolan influence within Batman comics of the last seven years. Lucius Fox is now both regularly written and drawn to evoke Morgan Freeman. Joker is now commonly depicted with knife scars up both cheeks.  A rougher, more cockney Alfred, clearly inspired by Michael Caine, features in one recent graphic novel. Batman regularly appears as a more armoured character, and the Tumbler, his tanklike Batmobile from Nolan’s movies, has frequently appeared on the pages of comics. Characters like Riddler, Penguin and Killer Croc have been re-imagined, within certain titles at least, in a more ‘Nolanised’ style. A new title called simply The Dark Knight was launched in 2010.

However, I would characterise this as ‘influence’ rather than ‘control’. Nolan’s interpretation of Batman and his world has joined the matrix of Batman texts and images, as Adam West’s did in the late 1960s, and facets of the ‘Nolanverse’ will inevitably appear within other Batman stories, just as the comic books became more flat, Pop and cartoonish during the TV show’s successful run. That was a fad, and it faded, and I think the influence of Nolan’s specific Batman will also fade in time, though it will remain part of the broader kaleidoscopic matrix, or mosaic, of what Batman is, and will continue to crop up now and then.

One of the underlying arguments of my book is that meanings occupy places on a spectrum, rather than binary oppositional positions, and that they flow, change places and cross over like energy running around a circuit, rather than like light switches that are either on or off.

So there are constant overlaps and internal contradictions throughout Batman’s history that undermine any sense of clear boundaries and definitions.

The Dark Knight Returns, which is held up as one of the key texts of the ‘purist’, dark, military Batman, and also regarded as ‘faithful’ in tone to Kane’s original, is itself an Elseworlds story and a possible future. The 1970s Batman of O’Neil and Adams is believed to have rebooted the character from the sillier, more playful aesthetic of the 1960s, but it is surprisingly easy to find elements of camp and queerness in those supposedly ‘gritty’ adventures of the ‘Darknight Detective’ and Robin, the Teen Wonder.

And while the New 52 of October 2011 ostensibly reboots Batman into a more contained storyline and space after the complexity and ambiguity of Morrison’s previous run – we are told now that Batman has only been active for five years, which clearly rules much of his history out of continuity – it retains the official line that there are 52 multiple universes, including several in-continuity alternate versions of Batman. So while the New 52 reboot seems to be a move towards control and ‘straightness’, in every sense, at the same time it embraces multiplicity and a sense of possibility.

The dynamic between multiplicity and control in Batman’s universe is not a matter of off/on, then, but push-pull; a constant tension between energies in different directions, rather than a binary which clicks all the way to one extreme, then all the way back to the other

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxlf3ad9q5c

As someone who has written a lot about the meanings of the Joker, especially in relation to Nolan’s film, I wanted to get you to reflect a bit about the Joker/Obama phenomenon. What do these images suggest about the connections you draw between the Joker and folk cultural logics and practices?

I would be tempted to see the Joker/Obama images as an example of the state of contemporary folk culture epitomised by the Joker in modern comics – a distorted, limited, unfunny version of the older folk culture Bakhtin describes, which genuinely belonged to the people and the marketplace, and roamed freely, generously, with healthy mockery of official rituals and structures.

The posters of Obama in the guise of Ledger’s Joker do not strike me as witty or even meaningful. They seem to have no particular conviction behind them; no clear message or purpose.

The first instance of the Jokerised Obama was defended by the Republican students who designed it as simply a pop culture image to get attention, rather than a political statement.

The creator of the most famous Joker/Obama image, Firas Alkhateeb, also claims no political purpose and has said he simply produced it because he was bored. The ‘socialism’ caption was added by someone else, who downloaded Alkhateeb’s image from Flickr. Even with this addition, the poster strikes me as having very little focused meaning. The combination of Ledger’s Joker, Obama’s portrait from the cover of Time and the word ‘socialism’ do not seem to cohere into any resonant message. The racial connotations of the image also seem to be accidental, rather than intended by Alkhateeb, who claims he was simply experimenting with a photoshop technique.

So I would associate this image with the expression of closed-down, contained carnival that Bakhtin tells us evolved from the seventeenth century onwards; a reduced carnival-grotesque, an ‘individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation... laughter was cut down to cold humour, irony, sarcasm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regenerating power was reduced to a minimum.’

Mockery and foolishness have a useful social purpose, whether we agree with their political aims or not, but to my mind, the Jokerised Obama says nothing positive or helpful, whether for the left or the right; it only offers sneering, empty sarcasm and ugliness. ‘The result,’ as Bakhtin says, ‘is a broken grotesque figure.’

This is very much the Joker of recent, ‘dark’ Batman comics, whose jokes trail off without punchlines, who seems lonely, cold and barren, rather than a joyful, ‘gay devil’, who wants to spread his playful energies across the city.

If it does have a value is, it is perhaps that – like Ledger’s Joker – it destabilises meaning and questions oppositions.

Arguably, the Jokerised Obama image problematises our expectations of political propaganda posters– that they should have a clear intention and carry a coherent message – and works to question and interrogate political oppositions based around personality, celebrity and iconic individuality, through the creator’s stated indifference and lack of any motivation beyond playful experiment. We assume that the combination Joker + Obama must be meant as either celebration or criticism; inherently, though, as far as the creator’s intentions go, it is neither.

The slippery refusal of this image to carry any obvious meaning – its refusal to make sense, its obstinate unwillingness to be readily decoded, despite the fact that it fits the conventional icon + slogan pattern that we are so used to understanding immediately and reading competently in advertising and propaganda – does perhaps have a certain subversive power.

Nolan’s Joker claims to be an agent of chaos, empty of any political agenda or intention, rather than a ‘schemer’, but the fact that his terrorism is clearly carefully planned subverts even this idea of meaningless, motiveless crime. He denies the forces of order the opportunity to classify him as ‘chaotic’; that would be a category in itself.

The Jokerised Obama, by contrast, is assumed to have an agenda and political intention, but in fact, in its original form, was created genuinely without motive, for the sake of appearance alone – an exercise in photoshop that could presumably have been applied to any photograph of any face – rather than parody or propaganda.

As such, the Joker/Obama image, like the other artefacts that swarm and circulate around the film, from news stories to viral marketing to fan-made Bane memes, adds an interesting intertextual echo to the network of meanings that make up The Dark Knight, and the broader Dark Knight trilogy as a whole.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice's Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part Two)

Your book seems to be as much focused on working through some core theoretical debates in media studies using Nolan and the Dark Knight as it is on using theory to explicate this particular franchise. What makes this film series such a good vehicle for asking these kinds of theoretical questions?

The longevity of Batman as a cultural icon and his visible role in popular culture for several decades, across various media, means that recent articulations of Batman are particularly rich examples for considering the role of authorship and the nature of adaptation. I draw various comparisons in the book’s first two chapters, which focus on these questions, between Batman and other popular texts, to demonstrate the extent to which Batman is a broader and more diverse archive of images, interpretations and variants than other stories and franchises.

Batman has been circulating for fifty-eight years longer than Harry Potter, for instance. Unlike other pulp heroes such as Tarzan and the Shadow, he has remained popular throughout every decade since 1939, by changing and adapting to fit the cultural concerns, the audience and the new media of each period. Unlike, say, George Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air, which was published at around the same time as Batman’s first appearance, Batman cannot be pinned down to a single primary text or definitive version, but exists as a shifting, fluid, multiple figure (within a fixed template of identifiable features).

So the idea of adapting ‘Batman’, this seventy-three year-old archive of stories across various media forms into a feature film, raises more questions than usual about the role of the author and the nature of translation.

It challenges the notion of the director as author, and suggests instead that Nolan’s creativity lies in his role as editor or ‘scriptor’, collaging and compiling existing Batman stories and imagery into a new form.

It also problematises the straightforward, one-to-one relationship that is often assumed between primary text and adapted text, as Nolan’s trilogy adapts from several graphic novels, is shaped by previous Batman films and TV series, and in turn influences Batman in other media such as comics and video games.

I am not treating Nolan’s franchise as exceptional though, but suggesting that it provides a particularly visible and vivid example of the way all texts operate within a ‘matrix’, and offers us a way of seeing, with particular clarity, the dialogic process of  authorship and adaptation.

As you note, the core comic book readership is too small to successfully open a major Hollywood film (witness what happened to Scott Pilgrim) so the producers need to  expand the market to more casual viewers, some of whom may be anxious that they lack the basic background knowledge to fully understand a film about a character with a long history in other media. Do concepts like fidelity, continuity, and consistency have any negative consequences for expanding the viewership?

Not in this case, because the ‘fidelity’ of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy to the existing mythos of Batman was extremely selective, and therefore easy for producers to manage and for a broader audience to understand.

Grant Morrison’s run on the main Batman titles from 2006-2011 is more ‘faithful’ to Batman in that it engages with, interrogates and re-incorporates every key articulation and incarnation of Batman from 1939 to the present day. Morrison’s Batman RIP does capture a mosaic cultural icon, and it’s a complex, fragmented narrative that I think would be difficult for a broader, non-fan readership to understand.

By contrast, Nolan’s Batman was ‘faithful’ to a small group of titles from a relatively narrow period, within a specific aesthetic and approach. His films are directly informed and shaped by Denny O’Neil’s short origin story ‘The Man Who Falls’ and his Ra’s al Ghul tales from the 1970s, by Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Year One from the mid-to-late 1980s, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, and by a handful of other 1990s storylines such as No Man’s Land and Knightfall.

A movie adaptation that was truly faithful to ‘Batman’, even in terms of his diverse depiction in comics alone, would result in a kaleidoscopic, encyclopaedic film that might be extremely interesting but would be more of an art project – and perhaps more suited to another medium rather than cinema.

The discourse of ‘fidelity’ at work around Nolan’s movies, particularly Batman Begins – which needed to establish his approach – was more about stressing a distinction between this reboot and the previous Schumacher films, and using ‘fidelity’ as an anchor to a certain tradition within Batman comics. This tradition – dark, tough, masculine, ‘realistic’ – is only a specific strand of what Batman is and has been.

The Dark Knight series had to initially overcome negative perceptions of some earlier media versions of the character, especially the 1960s Batman television series and Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin. The problem in both cases had to do with their camp aesthetic and thus anxieties surrounding homosexuality in relation to the character. So, what are some of the ways the filmmakers signaled a new approach?

The widespread use of the term ‘reboot’ alone helped to signal that Batman Begins was a new approach. ‘Reboot’ is a complex term, and one that media scholar Billy Proctor has been working to define and explore in a series of recent articles, but there is a general understanding that it implies a new, clean start within the existing system. The essential Batman template remains, but the previous characterisation and story are overwritten (though I argue that the older content always shows through).

The producers circulated the distinction between Nolan’s Batman Begins and the late-1990s Joel Schumacher movies (which in turn were broadly associated with the 1960s TV series) in a variety of ways, through publicity materials, interviews, previews and trailers; and these meanings were embraced and confirmed by journalists and fans, creating a powerful discourse that separated Nolan’s project from the previous Batman films.

My book discusses in detail the way this forceful, coherent message of a new, ‘dark’ Batman was articulated – through the visual materials such as shadowy poster designs and a logo based on a rust-coloured throwing-knife, through leaked details such as Bale’s rigorous physical training regime and the focus on actual hardware and stunts rather than CGI, through specific disavowals of the Schumacher approach in interviews with Nolan and his colleagues, and through the tough, no-nonsense tone and language used in reviews and features.

The producers were aided in this approach by the fact that this ‘dark’ Batman was an already-established construction – within fandom, certainly, and to an extent in the broader popular consciousness –  and was already set up in opposition to what I call the ‘Rainbow Batman’, an incarnation of the character associated with play, camp, queerness and colour.

The filmmakers were not creating a new set of meanings but rearticulating an existing distinction between ‘dark’ and ‘camp’ which had been played out between the 1960s TV show and the 1970s Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams Batman, and then the 1960s TV show (again) and the 1986 Frank Miller Batman.

As such, then, the producers could harness the idea of ‘fidelity’ (to the 1970s O’Neil and 1986 Miller Batman, which in turn claimed fidelity to Bob Kane’s 1939 Batman) to insist that they were going back to the ‘original’ and that their version had the benefit of authenticity.

My own view is that the ‘Rainbow Batman’ is equally authentic, ‘pure’ and valid, and that it can equally be evidenced as ‘faithful’ to the comic book texts –  albeit of a different period, and by different creators.

Indeed, I argue that the ‘dark Batman’ consistently defines itself in relation to the camp version, and always brings that brighter, Day-Glo variant back to light when it tries to bury it – in repressing it, it makes it visible again – and further, that every version of Batman exhibits a dynamic struggle between these tendencies towards camp and control, play and seriousness, queerness and containment.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice's Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part One)

Since 2001, Will Brooker has emerged as one of Great Britain's top thinkers about cult media, having tackled Star Wars (Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans), Alice in Wonderland (Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture), Bladerunner (The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic) , and Batman (Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon). Brooker's work starts where Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott's Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987) or Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio's The Many Lives of the Batman (1991) left off. Both of these earlier works sought to explore difference and continuity in the ways "popular heroes" or "migratory characters" evolve over time, across media, and across media audiences. Brooker's work has pushed this tradition to a whole new level -- his writing moves fluidly between history, textual analysis, media theory, and audience ethnography, tracing the ways media franchises (old and new) have left their traces upon popular culture. Such an approach is interested in issues of authorship and fandom, in both how formulas emerge and how elastic they are in responding to shifting tastes and interests. For me, this represents one powerful model for how we can take a comparative media studies approach towards the texts which matter most in our lives.

This summer, I ran into Will Brooker in London where we were both speaking at 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. Brooker shared some reflections on the construction of Christopher Nolan as an author around the then impending release of The Dark Knight Rises. Anticipating the cultural significance of the film, I asked him if he'd be willing to conduct an interview around the release of his new book, Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, and he agreed. Will being Will has been tweeting to the world about the difficulty of my questions, so now you have a chance to see for yourself what I asked him and how he has risen to the challenge.

What neither of us could know at the time we started this process was the degree to which the opening of this new film would be linked to an act of unspeakable violence. So, this first part of the interview offers some of his thoughts about the tragedy, while subsequent parts will dig deeper into the theoretical issues around multiplicity and seriality in the Dark Knight series.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. In what ways did the Aurora shooting impact the meaning of the Dark Knight film franchise? Conversely, how did the intertextual construction you discuss in the book play into the ways that this news story was covered?  

It’s hard to say, a month after the shooting (at the time of writing), how that event has affected the way Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is framed and discussed. The intertextual nature of Batman, as a ‘mosaic’, did shape the news response to the Colorado events, in that reporters dug back through the archive of Batman texts to find any possible echoes or precursors that could be foregrounded as ‘causes’ of the violence. So a single page from Frank Miller’s 1986 Dark Knight Returns, depicting a shooting in a cinema, was identified as a possible influence.

It’s ironic and unfortunate, I think, that it takes a violent tragedy to prompt reporters to treat comics seriously and study them so closely.

My sense is that the Colorado shootings are currently seen as a footnote to discussion of the third and most recent movie, and that this news story serves as a kind of tag or hypertext link, a postscript that is still pulled into view when we talk about Dark Knight Rises.

It would be impossible not to acknowledge that the shooting is now part of the broader intertextual matrix of meanings that both surrounds and constitutes the Dark Knight trilogy.

That trilogy is essentially a construction and circulation of texts, including the feature films themselves, the stories about Ledger’s death and the ‘Jokerised Obama’ images, the comic book adaptations and the DVD extras. The Colorado shootings, on one level, join that cluster of meanings around the three films.

I think the question is how closely this story will stick and how significant it will seem, over time: whether it will drift to the wider outskirts of what Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy signifies, as a more distant footnote, or whether it will play a more major, longer-term role in shaping how the film is discussed and remembered.

I’m hoping for the former, for a range of reasons.

Firstly because I would rather not see a criminal given the notoriety he seeks; second, because the discussion around the shootings and the film seems to fall into a ‘media effects’ category, which I don’t find especially useful; and third, because I think those involved in the Colorado event, and their families, would probably rather not have their loss trivialised as a ‘Batman shooting’, and have their own personal tragedy permanently associated with a movie.

The shootings were not the first tragedy associated with these films. In what ways did the death of Heath Ledger become part of the meaning of the Dark Knight franchise and how have the producers sought to manage the morbid associations with Ledger's death in handling this current situation?

My impression is that these two tragedies were managed by the film’s producers in very different ways. Ledger’s death can be understood within the already-established context of Brandon Lee’s accidental death during The Crow and Oliver Reed’s during Gladiator, and if anything I think it was seen as adding poignancy and mystery to Ledger’s performance and his role as Joker, and in turn, did the film’s publicity no harm.

I don’t believe any connection was explicitly made in reviews and production materials, but the rumour (circulated by fans and journalists) that Ledger’s intense preparation for and immersion in the role led him to emotional torment, drug abuse and possible suicide echoes the movie’s association with brutal ‘realism’ that was articulated in production discourses through foregrounding of Bale’s physical training regime, the dangerous stunts, the avoidance of CGI, and the military hardware.

I don’t think there was any attempt on the part of the producers to exploit Ledger’s death, but I equally don’t recall any obvious attempt to contain or limit the stories surrounding it, whereas my sense is that the producers aimed to disassociate the film text from the Colorado shootings, and to short-circuit the interpretations of negative cause-and-effect between the two, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The idea that The Dark Knight could have been so ‘realistic’ and absorbing that it consumed and possessed one of its lead actors was, I think, allowed to circulate because of its exceptional, isolated nature and because of the way we perceive Hollywood stars as unique and distinct from ourselves.

That it could have influenced a previously unknown individual to murder other ‘regular’ people in a suburban cinema carries quite a different meaning, because it is too close to the everyday lives of the average viewer and comes across as a reproducible event, rather than an isolated exception.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice's Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education

Today, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab released Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education.A PDF of the full report is attached below/ This report represents the collaboration of a working group composed of "a mixture of researchers, teachers and school administrators from a variety of disciplines, schools, and states," who wanted to better understand how we might best prepare educators in order to incorporate "participatory learning" models into their classroom practices. This working group emerged as part of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

The report includes case studies of innovative professional development initiatives ( Vital Signs, PLAY, Scratch, Ask Ansai, the Participatory Assessment Project) with a larger exploration of what it might mean to adopt a more participatory model for working with teachers. These "best practices" are shared in a robust multi-media format, which allows you to see media materials produced by these programs and their participants, and in some cases, here educators describe their own experiences.

Ioana Literat, an Annenberg PhD candidate who helped to coordinate the working group's activities, summarized their key goals and findings in the report's introduction:

The principal goals of this working group were to:

• Provide a common forum for professional development conversations centered around participatory learning
• Foster interdisciplinary dialogue among vested audiences in participatory learning
• Identify synergy among members and facilitate learning from each other
• Construct a common framework for participatory models of professional development
• Extract best practices and lingering challenges in the field
• Build a collection of case studies exemplifying these best practices and share them with the larger community of stakeholders in participatory learningOur collective experiences in the realm of professional development and our dialogues within the context of this working group led to the identification and explication of four core values that we consider key to effective participa- tory PD programs. We believe that these four values, along with the design principles that they inform in practice, are an essential take-away from this multi-stakeholder conversation.Thus, in our view, the values that shape the design of participatory PD are:

1. Participation, not indoctrinationThere is a critical need, in the field of education, to transition from professional development for teachers to professional development with teachers. Participatory learning relies on a model of “distributed expertise”, which assumes that knowledge, including in an educational context, is distributed across a diffuse network of people and tools. We believe that professional development for teachers should similarly be conceived and implemented in a non-hierarchical, inclusive and partic- ipatory manner, thus modeling the type of dynamic pedagogy that characterizes participatory learning.
2. Exploration, not prescriptionIn order to inspire this sense of ownership and co-design in the participants, PD initiatives must allow ample room for personal and professional exploration. Attention must also be paid to what teachers want from a professional development experience, rather than just what is required of them. By allowing teachers to explore who they are and what their professional goals are, the PD program can provide educators with an opportunity to connect to the content and to display their own individuality in the process.
3.  Contextualization, not abstraction:  PD programs should be tailored to the specific questions and particu- lar career goals of the participants. We acknowledge the tension between the desire to create scalable and flexible initiatives, and the need to cater most effectively to specific disciplines and levels of instruction; this challenge is all the more acute when it comes to sharing strategies for integrating media and digital technologies into the classroom. However, we believe that there is a way to reconcile this tension. By addressing the common core standards teachers need to fulfill, while in the same time accounting for the various disciplines and grade levels, program designers can craft versatile PD initiatives that represent – and feel like – a genuine investment in professional growth.
4.  Iteration, not repetition:In order to sustain ongoing learning, the design of successful PD programs must provide opportunities for constant improvement, trou- bleshooting, and evaluation. In this sense, assessment emerges as a problematic yet nevertheless vital topic in the realm of professional development implementation. We hope that assessment practices in professional development will increasingly mirror the participatory shift in program design and reflection. These values offer a blueprint for an innovative type of professional devel- opment. By incorporating these values into the design of professional development programs, researchers and practitioners can efficiently craft initiatives that are participatory, non-hierarchical, personally and profession- ally meaningful, relevant, flexible and sustainable.

Pd working group-v5a from amandafo

If you'd like to learn more about participatory learning, let me also recommend you check out the current issue of Knowledge Quest: The Journal of the American Association of School Librarians, which is focused on "Participatory Culture and Learning," which includes a essay asking "Can Public Education Coexist with Participatory Culture?," which I wrote with Elizabeth Losh. Other contributors include Allison Druin, Buffy Hamilton. Antero Garcia, Howard Rheingold, James Paul Gee, and Kristin Fontichiaro.

Fan Studies at the Crossroads: An Interview with Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (Part Four)

Hurt/Comfort, which is a major focus of this book, has gotten far less attention than slash in recent fan scholarship, despite Bacon-Smith's assertion that it is at the heart of fandom. Why has this genre been neglected and what do you see when you examine it?

 

Lynn: H/C seems like the last subgenre to remain determinedly in the closet. Slash has been written about. BDSM has come out of the closet with a flourish thanks to 50 Shades of Grey. Hurt/comfort remains less discussed and more hidden – perhaps because it is less displaced and therefore more vulnerable to shaming. In some ways, H/C is a more primitive drive than even sex. We are all, at some level, still helpless and frightened little children, dependent on others for comfort and, quite literally, survival. H/C fic taps into those primal needs, expresses the depths of pain and fear, and then rewrites the ending of the story to include the healing that may never have happened in ‘real life’ but is continually wished for. The increased ability to comfort and heal oneself seems to result from the unfolding of the narrative, and especially from the willingness to accept the support and comfort of the group after the telling.

While H/C fanfiction carries the built-in displacement of using recognized fictional characters instead of being autobiographical, the genre seems less displaced than slash. In the Supernatural storyfinders community on Live Journal, posters commonly request fanfic about their own physical and emotional afflictions, explicitly seeking mastery through reading H/C fic about their own challenges. Writers in the genre are less likely to tie their topics to their own experience, maintaining the distance that displacement offers, but some do discuss their motivations as the same drive for mastery.  This tendency to consciously recognize the individual writer or reader’s motivation may be part of the need to keep H/C secret.

H/C fic tackles themes that cultural norms strongly discourage us from expressing openly – namely vulnerability and rage/revenge. Acknowledging vulnerability only makes one feel more vulnerable. For women especially, rage is disallowed and unacknowledged, the human desire for revenge something nobody wants to accept. Incorporating all of these themes into H/C fic is both subversive and personally dangerous, but the drive to do so is powerful. Bacon-Smith recognized the role of emotional expression as integral to coping and healing twenty years ago when she identified hurt/comfort as the heart of fandom, but she also recognized her own negative reaction as one of the reasons that heart remained so hidden.

I think the genre’s secrecy has made it less visible to researchers. It seems, at least at first inspection, to be a smaller genre than slash, but that may just be a reflection of the layers of protection that have grown up around it and the fact that fanfiction which tackles H/C themes may not be labeled H/C. It may be labeled slash, het, or gen, yet essentially be hurt/comfort.

Kathy: It’s another one of those things that seems to reflect badly on women – the desire to see our men bloody. It’s a real turn on for (some) women to see men vulnerable, exposing aspects of themselves that are normally so closely guarded.  H/C knocks down those barriers, and it’s sexy as hell. It’s another glimpse into female sexuality.

You talk throughout the book about the "fourth wall" that many fans feel needs to exist between the producers/stars and the fans. What do you see as the value of this "fourth wall" and in what ways has Supernatural threatened the "safe space" of fandom as it has sought to reconfigure the relations between the industry and the audience?

Kathy: I should preface this by saying that I’m all for fourth wall breaking.  Fan practices serve as critical engagement with the text and breaking that fourth wall encourages dialog which enriches both sides.  That said, it can be done well or poorly and I think Supernatural in particular has done it both ways. “The Monster at the End of This Book” acknowledged fan practices (detailed knowledge, writing fan fiction, factions within fandom, criticism of story lines) and allowed the characters to playfully respond.  Where it erred, in my opinion, was in choosing to portray a particular fan “Becky” who is over invested, inappropriate, and eventually crosses the line into plain creepiness.  She eventually becomes a sad figure of derision and all playfulness is lost, all dialog suspended.

As far as protecting the “safe space” of fandom, I don’t think it was ever really in jeopardy.  The actors don’t have the time or the inclination to hang out in fan spaces (with a few notable exceptions – Joss Whedon commenting on a fan video or members of various bands acknowledging that they’ve regularly read fan fiction about themselves) and showrunners are more interested in what fans think about particular episodes – what works and what doesn’t. There was some anxiety in the SPN fandom when Becky was portrayed writing slash, but this anxiety was more over “outing” fans and exposing their fan practices to non-fans (among them family, friends, co-workers).  Given the levels of shame that surround being a fan this was certainly understandable.

Lynn: Fans see the value of the fourth wall as keeping their valued (and yet shamed) practices secret – and thus safe – from outsiders, including the actors who might be starring in their fanworks. As recently as Comic Con in July, someone asked Supernatural actor JaredPadalecki, “What do you think of this?” and showed him (and the entire gigantic Hall A audience) a piece of fanart depicting him and his costar Jensen Ackles in a slashy embrace, both shirtless in only low-slung jeans. Padalecki, ever the diplomat, replied dryly, “I never wear jeans without a belt.”  Fan response (directed toward the fan who crossed the line)  was predictably scathing.

When Supernatural first changed the rules by depicting fanfiction – and even Wincest – in canon, fan response was mixed, but the ever-present fear of being “outed” as a kinky, slash-writing fangirl prompted many meta posts and some powerful fanart, including a widely-circulated comic expressing a fan’s fear of her husband’s disapproval of her fannish community and interaction after seeing the episode. Most of Supernatural’s forays into fourth wall breaking have been affectionate insider portrayals of fans, poking fun but also affirming fans, and often giving them the role of hero or heroine at the end of the day – or even having them end up in bed with the creator of the show himself (or at least the character who was not-so-loosely portraying him). That changed with a much reviled episode in Season 7, “Time For a Wedding.”  Becky the fangirl somehow morphed from an overly amorous but ultimately heroic Wincest-writing fangirl to a scheming, manipulative stalker, who drugged Sam Winchester and tied him to a bed ala Misery. Fandom was not divided this time – gone was the affectionate poking fun, and in its place was a mean-spirited, seemingly misogynistic and shaming censure. That episode is how not to do fourth wall breaking – at least not if you want to keep your fans.

You spent considerable time interviewing the production team around Supernatural about how they perceive their fans. What surprised you the most about their response?

Kathy: Given the continuing tone of most mass media coverage of fans and fan practices (crazy, needy, cranky, a force to be courted but not necessarily embraced) what we found most surprising was how appreciative the production side was of the fans and how normalizing the encounters were between fans and producers at every level, and how willing they were to understand fan practices.  In many cases we'd get just as many questions about the fans from the production side as we asked.  The actors would often ask us to clarify something - the level of investment, a particular fan practice.

Lynn: What surprised me most was the level of appreciation and respect. Fans continually step up to the microphone at conventions and ask the actors “What’s the craziest thing a fan has ever done?” Actors continually shake their heads and say “Actually our fans are really cool.” That’s not to say that we haven’t heard cautionary tales about fans being outed to actors as ‘slash-writing perverts,’ with very real repercussions. Bacon-Smith writes about the Professionals actor who became close to many of the female fans writing fanfiction about his character, but was so disgusted by his discovery that some of them were writing slash that he banned those fans from his ‘inner circle’ and attempted to get them banned from fandom itself. He didn’t succeed, but that and other cautionary tales have been passed down through the decades and continue to inspire fear in fans of all genres. We heard similar – and more recent – stories from several fans we interviewed for this book, but none of these occurred within the Supernatural fandom.

In our own experience interviewing the Supernatural production team, we never heard a negative reaction. Surprise, even shock – but not censure or judgment. Most of the people on the creative side had worked out where the boundary should be between them and fans. They had been able to locate areas of commonality and connection, but also maintain a distance, especially from fan activities that they understood were intended as fan-only spaces. The vast majority self-identified as fans themselves, and could empathize with fannish passion, even if it seemed jarring when directed at them. They tended to code fans as same instead of different, and thus to avoid too much stereotyping.

What might the back and forth between Supernatural fans and creatives suggest about the future of fandom, given the increasingly personal exchanges facilitated by social media as opposed to the more controlled, regulated access fans historically had in an autograph line?

Kathy: I would caution against reading too much into the “personal exchanges” or the power of Twitter and Facebook.  The technology is quicker, more immediate, and gives the illusion of intimacy,  but by and large these are still anonymous exchanges – the 21^st century version of the snail mail fan letter.  It allows producers to have a better idea of what appeals to fans (and what they will absolutely hate), but I don’t think it influences the actual product all that much.  Fan service is just that – in many cases merely a marketing tool. (A fantastic example of this would be the MTV sponsored video asking fans to vote for Teen Wolf as favorite summer show.  The video plays up the slashy relationship between the two main characters.)  Which is not to say that actors who tweet birthday greetings are doing it simply to further their careers, or that meaningful relationships don’t occasionally occur, they certainly do.  I just think too much has been attributed to social media exchanges between fans and producers.

Lynn: It’s a mixed blessing. While the lines of communication are more open than ever, they are also filtered and constricted and misunderstood on both sides. Many of the actors have confided their struggles with how to use Twitter and Facebook effectively – they’ve found out how easily one sentence can be misconstrued, and how sensitive fans can be about what the celebrities they fan are saying to them (and might think of them). If a celebrity tweets you back, it’s too important to dismiss – if it’s received positively, the fan is euphoric. If it’s received as a negative, the fan is crushed – and in turn may lash back at the celebrity to save face and self esteem.However, the new expectations for communication are not going away, and are likely to expand as platforms proliferate. Both sides are likely to continue struggling to accommodate as technology and associated cultural norms change faster than any of us can keep up with them!

Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and teaches in the Counselor Education program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

Katherine Larsen teaches courses on fame, celebrity and fandom in the University Writing Program at George Washington University. She is the principal editor of the Journal of Fandom Studies.

Dr Zubernis and Dr Larsen are co-editors of the forthcoming Fan Culture: Theory and Practice. They have also published four articles in Supernatural Magazine.

Fan Studies at the Crossroads: An Interview with Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (Part Three)

  Before we continue with our regularly scheduled interview, I wanted to share with my readers this very interesting segment of PBS's Off Book series, which explores many different dimensions of fandom and fan studies, featuring among others, Francesca Coppa and Whitney Phillips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9Zum7azNIQ&feature=player_embedded&list=PLC3D565688483CCB5

Now, back to Zubernis and Larsen...

I am struck by the ways you use collages of fan macros and juxtapositions of fan meta to comment throughout the text on your key themes. In a sense, the voices of fans function as a Greek chorus to comment upon and challenge academic claims. What do you see the value of these kinds of insertions of fan voices into your analysis?

Lynn: As we struggled mightily with the aca-fan boundaries in ourselves and our writing, we wanted to find a way to bring fan voices into the book as they were actually expressed, whether posted online or told to us directly, in the hopes of conveying the messages the fans intended to convey.  We included fan interviews, in the same way that many fan studies researchers have, with full disclosure that the interviews would be part of an academic text. However, as many have acknowledged, fans who are talking to an interviewer are always speaking to an outsider, and what they say is limited and modified by that knowledge. So we alsosampled from fan meta discussions that had been publicly posted, wanting to bring the fan voices over without interpretation before adding our own analysis. Including fan voices from discussions within the community, even though these were public posts and accessible to outsiders, we hoped would provide a less censored and more genuine expression of fan opinion, thoughts and emotions.

We also felt that much academic analysis had focused on fanfiction – our own included. (The recent issue of TWC on vidding is a delicious exception). Yet fandom is such a visual medium, and so much is conveyed in photos and art and vids, instead of in text. We wanted to incorporate icons and photo/art posts to bring some of that visual language to the printed book. And again, we felt this was a way to bring fan voices into the book in a “pure” form, uncensored and unedited. We had become fascinated with the use of icons as a language all its own, especially in the early days of LJ, when fans changed their icons on a daily basis to comment on fandom current events – and now on Tumblr, as fans comment visually on a minute-by-minute basis to do the same. Our incorporation of this visual language into the book, we hoped, would allow fans to do the same, essentially ‘commenting’ on what we were saying in the text.

You deal explicitly here with the idea that fan practices operate as a kind of therapy. I have to admit to feeling some discomfort with this move, given how much fans pushed back on Camille Bacon-Smith's use of a similar analysis twenty years ago, suggesting that discussing fandom as a site of therapy was necessarily pathologizing to fans, since, minimally, it implied that fans were somehow in special need of therapy. How does your analysis differ from Bacon-Smiths? What has shifted about fandom or about the discourse of therapy which makes a re-engagement with this model productive at the present moment?

Lynn: Several things have shifted, and our hope is that these shifts are reflected in our analysis of fandom as a site of individual change. The first shift is simply the passage of time. We’ve had twenty years since Bacon-Smith’s ethnography of fandom in Enterprising Women, and since Joli Jensen challenged ‘fandom as pathology’. Much has been written since that time in an attempt to carry on Jensen’s defense of fandom as not inherently pathological. I think aca-fans (and perhaps fans as well) are slightly less defensive at this point in time, allowing a more open exploration of the therapeutic elements of fandom – hopefully without engaging a defensive reaction that wants to discount the possibility of anything therapeutic for fear of lumping all of fandom into the ‘needs therapy right the hell now’ category.

The second shift is perspective. The fan studies field has moved toward a more auto-ethnographic approach, and we wanted to continue that movement.  One of the reasons it was important to us to write from an insider (or at least a hybrid) position, was to minimize the knee-jerk defensive reaction of both fans and academics to the suggestion that fandom can be therapeutic, at least long enough to consider the possibility. We weren’t standing on the outside looking in, examining a community of fan women under a microscope and trying to figure out what makes ‘them’ tick. (Otherwise, we’d have been standing in line behind Ogi Ogas and company and incurring fandom’s defensive – and quite justified – response).  Because of the strong sense of internalized shame around fan practices like slash and hurt/comfort fanfiction, the assumption of negative judgment by outsiders is quickly made.

Bacon-Smith’s account of fandom is consistently even-handed and non-judgmental, but even seemingly insignificant comments can appear otherwise when it’s clear they are made by someone who is an outsider. When Bacon-Smith recounts her discoveries – of fanfiction, of slash, of hurt/comfort – she does so from an explicitly articulated motivation of “curiosity”. Even this can raise the hackles of someone who knows the value of secrecy and the risk inherent in being different. We are rarely curious about something we understand, and just the fact of non-understanding can be threatening, and thus perceived as coming from a position of aggression, or at the very least of unintended threat. In keeping with the ethical position of an ethnographer, Bacon-Smith rightly maintains the outsider position, periodically reminding her subjects that she is not, in fact, one of them. Thus, when she analyzes fans’ motivations, there is at times a subtle “fly under the microscope” dynamic that is created. Bacon-Smith, to her credit, is candid about her own struggle with some types of fannish participation – her emotional reaction to discovering hurt/comfort, for example, is one of extreme discomfort. She remarks at one point that she wanted to close her eyes and cover her ears, so she could shut out the material. She recognized h/c as the “heart of fandom”, but her personal feeling was that she did not want it to be.  Her reaction is perfectly understandable to anyone who’s ever been overcome by their own empathy, but because it was an outsider’s reaction, it takes on a tone of judgment: this thing you do is something I don’t want to see or hear or know about.  This carries the risk of shaming, which is perceived as a threat to the women who are already feeling ashamed of what they’re motivated to create and express.

Because of this risk, we wanted to make it clear that we were part of the community we were studying, not just as observers, but as participants. We read – and wrote – gen and slash and het and hurt/comfort. We went on fan pilgrimages and attended conventions and stood in line for photo ops and autographs. Our hope was that by sharing our own often-shamed fan practices, we could analyze the therapeutic aspects – as well as all the other aspects – of fandom with less risk of judgment. (And possibly less objectivity, which we saw as a trade-off). Bacon-Smith says she was pushing back against what she perceived as Joanna Russ’ over-valuation and over-estimation of the importance of slash in fandom, and against what she perceived as Jenkins’ under-estimation (at the time) of the importance of slash and sexuality. She consciously attempted to cast a wider net and use a larger sample, trying to show the diversity and variety of fan practices and motivations. We wanted to cast a wider net still, enabled by the way online fandom has expanded fan participation and provided numerous fan spaces -- which are all accessible if you’re already a fan. Like Bacon-Smith, we didn’t attempt to write until we’d been immersed for years, since even from the inside, fandom reveals itself slowly, like the peeling of an onion.

Part of the shift in perspective, and thus the return to a consideration of fandom as therapeutic, is also the greater incorporation of fans’ actual voices in the text. Fans talk openly within their own communities about the therapeutic value of fandom, in a million different idiosyncratic ways. “Fandom saved my life” is a phrase repeated so often that it’s a mantra of sorts; almost every fan can identify some way in which this is true. That does not, however, mean that all – or even most – of those ways are literal. It’s not that fans are more often suicidal, or more often depressed, or lonely, or isolated, or socially awkward, or unattractive, or any of the other stereotypes hurled our way. Some fans are, because some humans are. Some fans have dealt with trauma with a capital “T”, just like many non-fans. Some fans have been impacted by trauma with a small “t” – the seemingly small, relatively ordinary, bad things that befall all of us over the course of all lives, and sometimes have a seemingly out-of-proportion impact on sense of self, identity, mood, etc. Outside of fandom, people work through their “stuff” by talking to a close friend, finding a hobby, seeing a rabbi, taking up a sport, writing in a journal, joining a book club, finding a therapist. They look for a sense of community and acceptance and belongingness; they seek validation, searching for that sense of “I’m okay.”  We all do this – we all need this.  Within fandom, the motivation is the same. Fans look for acceptance and validation and a sense of belonging, and find it within the fandom community. They work through their “stuff” by sharing their experience with other fans, sometimes in autobiographical posts and sometimes in more displaced form in fanworks. We looked mostly at fanfiction, because that is how we happened to participate in fandom ourselves, but other fan spaces and types of fanworks offer similar means to change. The difference between fans and non-fans is not in the need for therapeutic change, but the means employed to accomplish it.

The third shift is also of perspective. Kathy comes from a background of literary analysis. I come from a psychodynamic theoretical background, which is often the psychological lens used in fan studied, but I was trained as a clinician as well as a researcher, so a wide range of theories colors both -- cognitive behavioral therapy, group dynamics, narrative therapy, positive psychology. My background influences the way I conceptualize ‘therapy’ and what constitutes a ‘therapeutic’ modality –  like Seligman, I tend to view therapeutic change as normative, a developmental process that allows all of us to grow and change over time – not as something focused solely on pathology.  My work as a therapist also influenced my perspective. Fifteen years of clinical practice working with clients taught me more than grad school about how people hurt and how people change. I saw firsthand the power of reworking life scripts through narrative change and expressive writing, so the parallel process that played out for fans through fanfiction was striking. I’m indebted to the anonymous reviewers from TWC who gave me constructive criticism on an early iteration of these ideas and helped me recognize the glaring omission of hurt/comfort fic in my analysis (which focused mostly on slash).

I hope we made it clear that we recognize that fans write fanfiction and make fanvids and create fanart and do everything else fannish for a thousand different reasons. Many of them have nothing to do with a dictionary definition of therapeutic change and everything to do with having fun and being creative. At the same time, having fun and being creative and expressing oneself is, in the broadest sense, therapeutic. So is belonging to a group, and exploring sexuality, and consolidating identity, and expressing emotions.

Kathy: I'm just going to add to this that I think that we're all in special need of therapy. Don't we all do things that could be characterized as therapeutic? Some people exercise, or throw themselves into work, rescue animals, travel, knit, whatever.  We bristle at the idea that fandom is therapeutic only because we spend so much time pathologizing it.  Lose that shame and I don't think this suggestion remains that bothersome.  I used to spin wool and I found every step in that process enormously therapeutic,from getting the fleece off the sheep to knitting the final product.  It was soothing, it connected me back to the land and linked me to (female) traditions, and it was empowering - taking back the means of production and making something that I wanted rather than having to settle for what was available to me in stores (not unlike fan practices, when you get down to it). I don't think anyone in my spinning group would have disagreed if I had said that I found it therapeutic.   In all likelihood they would have just said "Of course!"

While my generation of fan scholars sought to downplay conflict within fandom, you devote considerable space here to the consideration of "fan wank." How are you defining "wank"? What role does it play within fandom? And what does a close consideration of this phenomenon contribute to our understanding of fan practices as a whole?

Kathy: Wank, as we're using it, is simply the same kind of contentiousness that occurs in any group. I think the first wave of fan studies needed, for good reasons, to see fandom as a united front, a powerless group seizing power.  The "us against them" construction of fandom served a purpose, but it also set up a utopian view of fandom as a safe haven for those othered by mainstream culture - what  Sandvoss, Gray, and Harrington characterized as the "fandom is beautiful" phase of fan studies. I think it's important to acknowledge that fandom is not one homogenous whole, otherwise we run the risk of doing to fans the very thing many have gotten into fandom to challenge - the notion that we all consume things in the same way and that we are all comfortable in the one size fits all garment we've been handed by our culture.  This was initially a problem for us, the tendency to see fandom as a uniformly happy place -  because we were limiting ourselves to certain corners of fandom based on our own interests. We repeatedly overlooked all the other fan spaces that didn't like the things we liked or weren't engaging in the practices we were engaging in.  It's easier to overlook the fact that there are people strenuously disagreeing with what you are doing in fandom if you limit yourself to certain Live Journal orTumblr communities.  One of the great things about fandom's migration to the internet is that it allows for niche communities, but it also means that as researchers we need to cast a wider net if we want to understand a fandom - including its contentiousness. I became fascinated eventually with Fandom Secrets because it was a space where disagreement was voiced. And since all posts are anonymous, it was also a place where the performance  of  disagreement highlighted  how difficult it is for all of us - both fans and academics - to acknowledge it.

Lynn: When we first encountered the fandom mantra “You can’t stop fandom from wanking,” we were honestly a bit surprised. We were still, at the time, in our fandom honeymoon phase, with the corresponding tendency to view fandom through rose-colored glasses as a place of inclusion and mutual support. The level of fan-on-fan aggression that periodically broke out was striking to us, simply because it seemed to fly in the face of those norms. We felt it was important to include an acknowledgment of fan wank in the book because it is present in all fandoms, and impacts the way the fandom as a whole functions, and how fandom is perceived by those outside the community as well.

Fandom is, by definition, a group. And group theory tells us that whenever humans are in a group (which we are constantly motivated to be, lest we succumb to our evolutionarily ingrained fear of being rejected and thus eaten by a saber tooth tiger), there will be intra-group aggression. Hierarchies develop, as people define themselves and their place through shoring up in-group and attacking out-group behaviors. When shame is added to the mix, it serves as fuel to the fire. Fans are on the lookout for outside criticism, and will censure their own if a fan is perceived as behaving in a way that invites that outside censure.  The constant accusations of “You’re doing fandom wrong” are an example of this type of censure, which attempts to shore up the safety of the group by policing fans who are too “extreme” or who do something that attracts outside shaming.

Many of the fan-actor encounters you discuss throughout the book occur at the professionally run Creation Cons. I wouldhave said previous fan scholars have had some bias towards focusing on the activities which occur at fan-run gatherings. What have we missed in not dealing with Creation Cons as a space for fan engagement and participation?

Lynn: Our experience at fan-run conventions and for-profit conventions has been vastly different, with each space offering something unique to fans. The fan-run gatherings have been intimate, in many ways duplicating the feeling of a ‘safe space’ which online fandom offers. Since our experience is limited to Supernatural cons, the fan-run conventions were almost entirely female gatherings, reiterating the online female fan space. Fan-only gatherings allow the same kind of genuine communication that online fandom offers, with the added benefit of face-to-face and physical interaction. We can squee together, commiserate, read badfic out loud and laugh together, or put our plastic Winchester dolls into compromising positions for each other’s amusement and titillation. Fan-run cons are validating, the sense of acceptance and belongingness heady.

For-profit cons are organized to bring fans face-to-face with their fannish objects in the form of actors, writers, musicians, etc.  This interaction mirrors the newer forms of online interaction between fans and celebrities on Twitter and Facebook, but with the added intensity of “personal” and physical interaction. This interaction, of course, is not really personal at all, but highly structured and boundaried. Fans, however, find and savor moments of connection, however brief. What surprised us about the for-profit cons is how much of the experience is not about the celebrities – much like the fan-run gatherings, these cons are as much about fans coming together as they are about meeting actors. The celebrity moments are emotionally satisfying but fleeting; the rest of the three-day weekend is spent meeting up with other fans, sharing stories and squee and support.

Kathy: I think a significant part of the equation has been left out by excluding the actors and creators.   There still seems to be a strong bias toward looking only at fan behavior among fans, and fan practices as enacted in the enclosed world of fandom, but if we're going to talk about the increasingly intimate relationship between fans and producers, we need to talk to the producers directly.

One of the things that’s missed goes back to the idea of fan shame. You see it enacted at fan conventions where the actors are present - fans policing other fans, voicing their disapproval when certain fan practices are mentioned to actors.  The fan fiction questions, for instance, are almost always booed. At one convention we attended someone had posted rules of behavior in the women's room on all the stall doors.  Fans want to get close, but they also want that gaze to work in only one direction for the most part. This isn’t something you’ll necessarily see if you’re only looking at fan interactions with other fans – or even fan reaction to fan/producer encounters posted online.

You argue that some early accounts of slash, which were focused on the reconfiguration of male identity, missed the degree to which it also involves the reconfiguration of female identity. In what senses? Explain.

Lynn: Some early theorizing of slash focused on the transgressive potential – the desire of women writers to reconfigure males in a way that would challenge cultural stereotypes of masculinity and allow males to express emotions and experience greater levels of intimacy than the culture allowed (and which women might have wished for in the men in their own lives). These motives probably remain true, but seemed to us to tell only part of the story. Women want men to feel, to emote, to allow intimacy – but women also want to be able to feel themselves, to express their genuine emotions and desires, to achieve the intimacy which only comes from being real with someone. Perhaps, we thought, women were telling and reworking their own stories in slash, displaced enough to allow open expression, and told over two male bodies who were, simply because they were male, freed from certain cultural expectations. Bacon-Smith identified similar motivations twenty years ago, but did not analyze these individual motivations extensively, instead emphasizing the cultural change which might result from women reconfiguring the discourse of power and desire. We wanted to build on what Bacon-Smith said about fanfiction being a displaced way of expressing fans’ real life fear, rage, desire, etc – and about slash providing an additional degree of distance for safe exploration of their own identities and life narratives.

Again, we aren’t saying that all slash is about reconfiguring female identity – or male identity. Sometimes, as has been said so perfectly, it’s merely normal female interest in men bonking.

 Kathy:  I agree and I would take that further to say that I'm not sure that it does reconfigure female identity so much as it exhibits what was always there.  It’s just being publically enacted.

Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and teaches in the Counselor Education program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

Katherine Larsen teaches courses on fame, celebrity and fandom in the University Writing Program at George Washington University. She is the principal editor of the Journal of Fandom Studies.

Dr Zubernis and Dr Larsen are co-editors of the forthcoming Fan Culture: Theory and Practice. They have also published four articles in Supernatural Magazine.

Fan Studies at the Crossroads: An Interview with Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (Part Two)

What you call "fan shame" is a central issue running through the book. What factors make fans feel shame about their passions and what strategies have fans adopted to deal with that shame?

Kathy: I think on one level the factors that excite fan shame in both men and women still stem from our own discomfort with championing anything that smacks of mass culture. I began my career in 18th century studies, looking closely at the beginnings of mass/popular culture as we know it today, so this debate is all too familiar.  And it hasn't changed all that much.  Mass=crass and we try to distance ourselves or to find some way of rehabilitating our own interests.  We used to do this ourselves, framing discussions of what we were doing - going to fan conventions, interviewing actors, watching the show - as "research". And I don't think it's limited to people who purportedly make their living studying "serious" texts.

I'm often amazed at the pushback I get from students who sign up for a class on fan culture and then spend the better part of the semester denigrating the topic.  I got one particularly harsh comment last semester from a student who complained that she felt ashamed that she was not getting an A in a class whose topic she felt was "not impressive" (The title of the course was Geeks, Fanboys and Stalker Chicks).   It was the topic more that the grade that she felt reflected badly on her.  I was also struck by an article I read recently about the Swedish couple who wrote The Hypnotist.  They each had careers as “serious” authors before teaming up to write crime thrillers under a pseudonym.  Their outing caused something of a scandal in Sweden. As one of them said, “it was like we broke the biggest taboo” by crossing the cultural divide.

On another level there is the explicitly female brand of fan shame that grows out of the cultural push back against women's pleasures.  This hasn’t changed all that much and I think evidence of this can be found in the resonance a film like Hysteria has with audiences, and the fact that it's a comedy, as if that is the only way we can even discuss female (sexual) pleasure.  And "deviant" or unchecked sexuality almost inevitably comes into discussions of female fans, still.  An article on the death of a fan at Comic Con   includes a description of the woman as a 53 year old  Twilight fan.  The first comment left on the article describing her death was "It's a good start." and many of the others question what a woman her age was doing at Comic Con, and why she wasn't home with her kids.  I have my doubts whether this would have been the reaction if we were talking about a 53 year old man running to get back on the line to buy playoff tickets.  Combine this with the fact that popular culture has traditionally been coded female and marginalized from its inception in the eighteenth century, and shame becomes the natural reaction. It doesn't help that mainstream media continues to report on fans in a sniggering, derogatory fashion, and that shame is only reinforced. I'm surprised at how often the media that exists to report on entertainment, as an arm of the industry itself, engages in this sort of rhetoric.  An example would be the piece by Eric McCormack in a recent Entertainment Weekly.  He was asked to write about crazy things fans have said to him over the years.  And right now IMDB has a collection of photos of fans taken at Comic con titled Photos from Comic-Con 2012: The Cute, The Crazy and The Creepy. This is on a website that is read predominantly by fans.

Lynn: I think fan shame is multiply determined, and plays out differently depending on type of fandom (sports, media, literary, sci fi, etc.) and gender. I had an interesting conversation recently with Dan Wann, who researches sports fandom – we’re both psychologists with similar backgrounds, but he researches a fandom that skews male and is probably the least shamed type of fan behavior, while I research a fandom that skews female and seems to encounter shaming at every turn, including a whopping dose of internalized shame. While we both recognized these differences, we were also able to identify many common motivations and challenges across fandoms and genders. Nevertheless, the degree of ridicule that a male sports fan experiences – even if he paints himself half green and half white and goes to an Eagles game half naked – is vastly different than the potential ridicule tossed at a male media fan who paints himself green and white and goes to Comic Con half naked as an alien something-or-other. Eagles fans, no matter how extreme their presentation and participation in their chosen object of affection, are rarely described as “creepy.”

The strategies fans adopt (both consciously and unconsciously) to deal with internalized shame mirror the ways all humans react to shame. Fans sometimes construct impenetrable boundaries around the perceived shameful behavior, thoughts and feelings, attempting to avoid outside ridicule by keeping their fannishness secret and hidden. For female fans, this seems to be a primary strategy – thus the emphasis on the “safe space” of fandom and the stringent policing of those boundaries. The first rule of fandom is “Tell no one about fandom,” after all. Bacon-Smith recognized the ‘conservation of risk’ inherent in female fandom twenty years ago, locating both the risk and the reward in the need to express forbidden emotions (rage, revenge, fear, sexuality) and rewrite cultural scripts that challenge the status quo in a dangerous manner.

Io9 recently ran an article describing the behavior of "self-hating" fans. To what degree do the behaviors described here represent a male counterpart to the kinds of female "fan shame" you discuss throughout the book?

Kathy: Well, you read enough articles like the ones on IMDB and Entertainment Weekly and the logical response is to differentiate yourself from "those" fans.  If you follow the links back through that article you arrive at a New York Times book review that sneers at sci-fi fans throughout, beginning by saying  "Colson Whitehead is a literary novelist, but his latest book, Zone One, features zombies, which means horror fans and gore gourmands will soon have him on their radar. He has my sympathy."  The sympathy comes from having essentially stupid people reading his work.  Glen Duncan, the author of the review, bemoans the mass market reader: "Broad-spectrum marketing will attract readers for whom having to look up ‘cathected’or ‘brisant’ isn’t just an irritant but a moral affront."  He’s at pains to establish himself as an intelligent cultured reader and that is done at the expense of all those he deems as less discerning.  This kind of treatment of fans might be expected from the New York Times (and they certainly live up to the expectation) but it's everywhere. Even the things that seem to celebrate male fandom/geekdom have to show fans as laughable (I'm thinking here of things like Big Bang Theory, Community, The IT Crowd, etc.). This isn't male fan shame so much as it's a response to our rejection of any sort of investment in mass culture.  It's not deviant female behavior, it's "just" mass culture.

Lynn: Some of this is the shame that crosses gender boundaries – of liking something popular, because ‘popular’ is still overtly devalued (and covertly consumed voraciously) in our culture. Some of it is the result of being passionate about something, which tends to result in rants and nitpicking and what one commenter to that article calls “snobbishness”. Being an “angry nerd”, as another commenter puts it, is sometimes the corollary of passion. When we love something, we’re invested in keeping it just the way we like it. It’s meeting our needs, so god forbid someone (producers, writers, networks, other fans, etc) changes it – then, we fear, it won’t meet our needs any longer. And that, frankly, is terrifying when you’re passionate about something and invested in the emotional pay-off that it’s providing.

Some of this is the (also cross-gendered) wank that comes from internalized shame – the criticism that others are ‘doing fandom wrong’ is usually a fear that someone else is liking something even ‘more’ shameful, or engaging in a fan practice that’s even ‘more’ embarrassing – often one that reiterates the stereotypes that fans are constantly trying to challenge. “They’re weird, but I’m normal” is the underlying projection.

The part that might be more common for female fans is the desire to keep a particular fandom community small, selective, and insulated – and secret. That secrecy is difficult to maintain if everyone and their brother and sister has suddenly discovered your particular little corner of fandom. This desire intersects with the dislike and mistrust of anything that’s ‘too popular’, so fans often have a love/hate relationship with their fannish object going ‘mainstream’. On the one hand, it keeps the band/show/film/book/whatever on the air or on the shelves or in the concert venues; on the other hand, it expands the audience and makes the fandom less intimate, and perhaps less safe. The desire to be part of something ‘special’ – selective and exclusive – is a basic human one, not unique to fandom certainly. But it plays out in fandom in obvious ways, creating wank when it does.

Early on, you describe the ways that the underground status of fan fiction has provided some protection for the women who participate. What do you see as the consequences of the amount of publicity which 50 Shades of Gray has received as a commercial best-seller which originated as Twilight fanfic?

Kathy: It certainly furthers the image of deviant female behavior, as well as reigniting the criticism of fan productions as bad, poorly executed and lacking in value, pandering to the masses. It's conjured the worst stereotypes and then been used as proof that all those stereotypes are actually true.

Lynn: Fandom – or at least the fan spaces that I tend to inhabit – has had a relatively strong negative reaction to 50 Shades and its runaway success and mainstream media coverage. A recent post in LiveJournal asked fellow fans the blunt question – “Why do fans hate 50 Shades of Grey?” Fans responded that they don’t like having what is widely reputed to be badly written fiction representing the entire genre of fanfic. The derision and bad-writing ridicule leveled at 50 Shades seems to reiterate the already condescending “oh, it’s fanfic, it’s not real writing” attitude that fans struggle against. Fans also don’t appreciate the glare of mainstream attention focused on the safe (and secret) space of fandom, as non-fans who heasr about 50 Shades’ origins go online to investigate this “new thing” called fanfic.

Much of the media coverage of 50 Shades includes derogatory comments about fanfiction, including this tidbit:"Fan-fiction is the written word equivalent of taking two naked dolls and mashing them together to make what you think sex looks like when you’re 10 years old. And it’s written at that level…..The book has been called “mommy porn,” a label that denotes that grown women can’t enjoy pornography unless it’s poorly written garbage re-purposed as more poorly written garbage. But also it makes us think our mom likes fan-fic, and I respect my mom too much to believe this."

That article also makes some of the same points that we touched on in Crossroads – that discovering fandom is, for some women, also a discovery of an alternative discourse on sexuality that is freeing and liberating and normalizing.  It may not be well-written, but 50 Shades has provided some of the same for non-fans.

And so it’s no surprise that 50 Shades of Grey has become so wildly popular with women of all ages because we’ve been made to feel repressed and believe that porn is just this primitive, icky thing guys watch. If porn is a cave-drawing and 50 Shades is Monet, I think we need to invent fire already so we can burn this thing down.

Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and teaches in the Counselor Education program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

Katherine Larsen teaches courses on fame, celebrity and fandom in the University Writing Program at George Washington University. She is the principal editor of the Journal of Fandom Studies.

Dr Zubernis and Dr Larsen are co-editors of the forthcoming Fan Culture: Theory and Practice. They have also published four articles in Supernatural Magazine.

Fan Studies at the Crossroads: An Interview With Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (Part One)

Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen's new book, Fandom at the Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships is already generating buzz in the academic and fan communities where I travel. For one thing, it is an academic book about Supernatural. Some years back, when I asked my fan readers to "pimp their show," on this blog, I was met with a systematic campaign on behalf of this CW-hosted drama. Following the sound advice of my readers, I checked out the first season of DVD and shared my impressions here. I still consider Supernatural one of the most under-appreciated genre shows on American television -- at least among critics and mainsteam viewers -- but I have also come to appreciate the dedication, creativity, and passion of its fans. This book, however, is more than the study of a single fandom. It raises some substantive challenges about the theories and methods which have shaped fan studies as a field over the past twenty plus years.  I will be honest: Parts of this book made me a little uncomfortable, because they trod close to either spaces which I made conscious decisions not to discuss in my own work (real person slash and incest themed stories, among them) or because they are returning to old debates which have ended badly before (fandom as therapy, primarily), but I think Zubernis and Larsen handle these issues with sympathy and nuance and in the end, I felt some important new insights emerged as a consequence of revisiting some of these spaces. I especially appreciated their ongoing engagement with the concept of the Aca-fan and the ways that this framing has and has not brought about better relations between fans and academics. And the authors had unprecedented access to the cast and producers of the series, interviewing them at great length about the ways they perceive and interact with their fans and also the ways that those interactions have impacted the production of the series.

One very valuable contribution the book makes is to revisit Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, which came out the same year as my Textual Poachers and remains, to my mind, one of the defining works in the field of fan studies. Over the years, the book has been controversial within the fan community for several reasons: its rhetorical structures (which cast Bacon-Smith as "The Ethnographer" exploring the fan phenomenon from the outside), its treatment of fan productivity through a therapeutic lens, and its focus on Hurt/Comfort as the "heart of fandom." All of these are issues worth raising, and Zubernis and Larsen offer some fresh new perspectives on these topics in Fandom at the Crossroads, but I also think there is an enormous amount of valuable material in Bacon-Smith's book, which sometimes has gotten unjustly neglected by more contemporary researchers. She offers us a vivid picture of a key moment in the history of American media fandom. I always recommend that my students read Poachers and Enterprising Women side by side to see how researchers with different theoretical and methodological commitments deal with the same topics. Fandom at the Crossroads returns to Bacon-Smith and mines it productively, building on and reworking some of its key concepts, and considering how they might help inform our engagement with such issues as "fan shame" and going back to a theme central to Enterprising Women, the "management of risk."

In the interview that follows, Zubernis and Larsen share some core insights about how they approached the project, how it relates to the larger Fan Studies tradition, and how and why aca-fen need to work past their discomfort with certain aspects of their subject matter. I am sure people will find what they have to say here both thoughtful and provocative, and I look forward to the response this post will generate.

In many ways, Fandom at the Crossroads is as much a book about Aca-fandom as it is about fandom. You are critical of some of the ways that Aca-fans describe their relationships to the academy and to fandom. What are your primary concerns here?

Kathy: We began the project out of a feeling that academics weren't "doing it right" in the sense that there was a lot of theorizing going on that seemed to have little relation to what fans were feeling and doing in fandom.  We were concerned that pleasure had been taken out of the equation and that fans' voices were being lost in the rush to apply theory.  While some of that theory definitely applied, and still applies, there are also other reasons people come to fandom that did not always fit neatly into the dominant theoretical models.

Lynn: We were also frustrated with how little aca-fans wrote about the ‘fan’ side of their identity; while it seemed most theorists were now proclaiming that they were fans as well as academics, few were talking about what they actually did as fans. This seemed to imply a lingering sense of shame about the fannish part of the aca-fan identity, or perhaps a fear that cosplaying as a Klingon or waiting in line at Comic Con at 3 am or spending money on photo ops with Jensen Ackles might negatively impact one’s credibility as a researcher. We wanted to “confess” the fan side of our identity up front and in detail, instead of in general claims of “I’m a fan myself.”

We also felt that some types of fannish motivation were under-theorized – that there had been an early emphasis on fandom as subversive in a societal sense, challenging gender and other norms, which had continued, but less on fandom as individually transformative. We wanted to build on some of Bacon-Smith’s early ideas about fan participation, community and writing as a source of emotional expression and narrative change, but as a site of individual change as much as cultural change. We also wanted to explore the drive for individual change as healthy and universal, not pathological – while at the same time recognizing the very real impact of oppressive societal norms and the realities of women’s experiences of violence, pain and loss.

How do you deal with your own fan participations throughout the book? You write, for example, "the Squeeful Fangirl...has no place in an academic text, and yet it is precisely that fangirl who informs everything we write about. How do we go about banishing our subject from our text?" And you conclude, "What we learned is that 'co-existence is futile."  Is there no way to write as an academic about how we know what we know as fans?

Kathy: Yes, but we are then writing as academics and not as fans. It's like trying to speak with two different accents at the same time. It can't be done.  And in any other field, I don't think we'd even try it.  I love Byron, but I wouldn't write an academic paper about how I have fallen hook, line and sinker for the "bad boy" persona he projected.  I could perhaps analyze the reasons that persona was so appealing during his time, but I would not discuss my own infatuation.

And I also think there is always a danger that we do disservice to one group or the other.  We've certainly been guilty of this no matter how much we were aware of it and tried to avoid it. Even the act of trying to describe the split runs the risk of privileging one group over the other. To say that I "write like a fan" when I'm participating in fandom and that I “write like an academic” when I write about fandom has the appearance of placing one above the other rather than simply acknowledging that there are two different audiences involved.  The moment we pull ourselves out of fandom to begin writing about it as academics, we assume a superior position - we are outside and above.  It's no wonder fans distrust us.  On the other side, if we didn't write as academics, then our colleagues wouldn't take us seriously.  It's impossible to please both audiences simultaneously.

Lynn: There is, but as Kathy’s comments make clear, it requires a lot of painful fence-straddling. We attempted to write from a hybrid perspective, because we felt it was important and would add something unique to the knowledge base. Writing from an outside perspective, as Bacon-Smith acknowledged thirty years ago, affords a different, and necessarily limited, view of a culture. While ethnographic accounts of fandom uncovered and explicated an amazingly detailed study of the culture, even after years of immersion in the community, there were things that remained hidden to an outsider. What Bacon-Smith refers to as the “heart” of the fandom community, the hurt-comfort genre, is eventually understood by her as an ethnographer on a rational level, but she remains someone who had to overcome an initial revulsion, describing the process as having to desensitize herself to the content and wanting to cover her eyes and ears at one point. The difference between writing from the outside and writing from the inside is similar to the difference between sympathy and empathy. We didn’t need to work towards understanding; we understood many fannish motivations already. We had no need to imagine ourselves in the shoes of fans. We had our own.

What we didn’t realize, at first, was that attempting such an insider perspective distorts one’s point of view as much as taking an outsider one. We were often too quick to assume we understood something simply because we’d experienced it ourselves – or so we thought. In reality, while we gave frequent lip service to the vast variety of ways to “do fandom”, we repeatedly fell into the trap of using the lens of our own experience too broadly, obscuring the reality of fans who were participating in fandom indifferent ways and in different spaces than we were. Ultimately, the attempt to write from both an academic and a fannish perspective turned out to be much more difficult than we’d anticipated. And all that scrambling back and forth over the fence left us with a lot of splinters.

Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and teaches in the Counselor Education program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

Katherine Larsen teaches courses on fame, celebrity and fandom in the University Writing Program at George Washington University. She is the principal editor of the Journal of Fandom Studies.

Dr Zubernis and Dr Larsen are co-editors of the forthcoming Fan Culture: Theory and Practice. They have also published four articles in Supernatural Magazine.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Turkey, Greece, and Italy (Final Leg)

  Istanbul, Turkey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeQ-wjDH4F4

Ok, guys, repeat after me: "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)!"

We were never planning on going to Turkey at all on this trip. In fact, we had several groups from Turkey invite me to speak there and I had to turn them down because it was just one more country than it seemed realistic to reach on our already over-crowded, overly ambitious speaking schedule.

But, then, well, we discovered the only cheap way to get from Bologna to Athens was via Turkish Air, and they offered you the discount only if you had a layover in Istanbul -- no doubt a scam they have worked out with the local tourism bureau but okay, if we are going to be there anyway, we might as well extend the time a little and try to take in some of the local culture. So, we were in Istanbul for a good deal less than 24 hours, but we didn't actually sleep very much while we were there. :-)

And, the fun started just down the street from our hotel, where we saw this factory outlet store that sold discounted Magic Lamps (apparently) and also fez. We had to bring back a bright red fez for our son because we have it on very good authority (Matt Smith's Doctor, no less) that "fezzes are cool," and of course, they are.

And then, of course, we felt an urgent need to eat Turkish Delight on a moonlit night (hearing a certain set of song lyrics echoing in our heads), and we discovered the enormous range of different kinds of Turkish candies on offer, most of which come in long strips, which the candy butchers snip, snip, with scissors before dropping chunks into custom-selected sampler boxes.  By now, my sweet tooth is legendary all over Europe, so I was certainly not going to resist this kind of temptation.

And everywhere we went in Istanbul, we would encounter these roaming carts which sold nuts and sunflower seeds. I am a closet sunflower seed fanatic -- a "seeder" as they call us on the bags that I buy in the States -- but the process of biting open seeds and spitting out the shells is not something I'd ever consider doing in public. So, I was fascinated to see so many people wandering the streets, consuming those salty little devils, and dropping their shells where-ever they happened to be standing. It would seem Seeders in Turkey enjoy many of the same rights that smokers used to enjoy in the United States. I suppose it's only a matter of time, though, before people start to protest second-hand shells.

As we continued our walk, it took us through the grounds on the edge of the Topkapi Palace, the primary residence for the Ottoman Sultans and their Harem. At dusk, the Palace proper was closed, but the park grounds enjoy heavy foot traffic as families and young lovers had pick nicks on the grass, and as people wandered around enjoying the cool(er) summer night air.

From there, our walk took us along the rocky shores of the Bosphorus River, which forms the boundary between the part of Istanbul which is in Europe and the part which is Asia.  Some people were fishing along the river, some were roasting corn or meats, and still others were stopped to watch the sunset over the opposite shore.

But, everywhere you looked, there were stray cats, many of the adorable kind, who no doubt live off the scraps all of those other activities left behind, especially the fishing. Of course, if they could convince the cats to eat the sunflower shells... but that's another story. Anyway, some one told me that cute cat pictures were popular on the web, so I decided to share a few of them here.

After a late night dinner in a local cafe, as we watched the closing Euro-Cup game, we grabbed a few hours sleep and then we were at it again the following morning, when we visited the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (popularly known as the Blue Mosque), one of many outstanding examples of Islamic architecture to be seen in this historic city.

And, while we were exploring, we stumbled onto several more examples of the kind of warning sign slapstick we've been tracking across the trip. Here, for example, is a sign which seems to be warning us to beware of people who have really big black hands.

While this image would appear to either warn us that hooks will come from the sky and carry us away, or perhaps, the sign is meant to suggest that it is a trapeze artist crossing zone.

But, then, I might be misunderstanding something. I've been told for years by European that their more concrete signs, which take advantage of a universal pictorial language, do not require specific cultural knowledge, unlike our more abstract American signpost. Is it possible that, in fact, these pictures do require a certain amount of interpretive work before they make sense to people who do not come from that culture?

We lingered as long as we dare, taking in as much of Istanbul, as our very limited schedule allows. I promise my friends in Turkey that we will find a way to get back there again before much longer, and this time, we will actually let you know we are coming so we can schedule some talks.

KEA,GREECE

The thing you need to know about that day was that we had to be at the Lavrio docks by a certain time in order to take a ferry out to Kea, a small island off the coast of Athens, where my friend and colleague, Andrew Horton, owns a cottage. (Horton is among other things a media scholar who writes about Greek cinema, screenwriting, and especially film and television comedy. I wrote an essay about Mel Brooks which will come out in A Companion to Film Comedy Horton edited with Joanna Rapf, which is due out in November. Horton runs an exchange program which brings American screenwriting students to Greece to learn from some of the country's leading filmmakers, having made Greece a home away from home for most of his professional life.)

They only run the ferry a few times a day and this was going to be the last one for the night. Cynthia, my son, and I enjoy watching The Amazing Race together, so the program had become a key reference point for us all trip. The cameras on the program never show the contestants having to go through customs, opening up space to describe all of the other aspects of international travel they don't tell you about on American reality television. This day proved to be a particularly challenging one, full of obstacles of all kinds. There was a mad rush to the airport, followed by a huge line, flight delays, a flight to Athens, delayed bags, struggles to change currency, and then, by this point, it looked like there was no way we were going to get to the ferry on time. So, we sat in the back of a cab, which was racing towards the waterfront many miles away at a breathless speed, and my wife and I were rehearsing our confessionals. It's a staple at such moment on Amazing Race for contestants to reassure each other about how much it has meant to them to share this time together and see the world, even if they were unable to complete the race, and we were making jokes about being eliminated the minute we stepped outside the cab. As it happened, thanks to the reckless disregard for human life displayed by our taxi driver, we made it to the ferry station with minutes to spare.

Let's just say that Kea was everything I might have ever imagined a Greek fishing town to be like: the waters of the Aegean Sea are as blue, the churches are as white, the people are as friendly, the terraces are as steep,as anything I've ever seen in a travel brochure or a movie about coastal Greece.

We had Andrew's cottage to ourselves for several days, during which, for the most part, we slept. I have joked that our experience on this Greek island was very much modeled on the Lotus Eaters sequence in Homer's The Odyssey.  Grapes grow off his roof, and we could see the fishing village spread out below us.

We would walk down the hill twice a day to eat, then climb back up the steep, winding, path, and plop back down in the bed again.

Sometimes, we read or watched movies from his large dvd library, but to be honest, we mostly slept. By this point in the trip, I was that tired and the island was that restful.

ATHENS, GREECE

For much of the trip, we had been speculating about what the political and economic state of Greece would be by the time we got there. The Greek elections had only just occurred, and depending on the outcome, there had been much speculation about whether the Greeks might abandon the Euro, unwilling to accept the austerity measures being proposed by the leadership of the European Union. Greece had been one of the countries hit the hardest by the economic crisis, and it was not hard to see the signs of their desperate conditions everywhere you looked. Basic city services seemed to have been cut to the minimum, with the result that streets were lined with garbage and buildings were becoming overwhelmed with graffiti.

There were jobless and homeless people everywhere, and their plight was summed up for us by a particularly vocal old woman who seemed to be declaiming about the fates in an oratorical style that would have done her ancient ancestors proud. I have no idea what she was saying, but she hit my heart strings pretty hard, just with the rising and falling pattern of her voice, as she shouted and shouted into the face of a seemingly indifferent city.

Athens was hot -- hot as Hades! Even first thing in the morning, the sun bears down mercilessly on the Acropolis, and the reflections off the white marble of the Parthanon are blinding.

There is a classical legend about a battle between Athena and Poseidon to determine which God would rule over the Acropolis. Poseidon smote the rock with his trident and out sprang a fresh water spring. Athena, however, made olive trees grow and won the competition. We've argued that Poseidon got cheated: the olive trees really do not provide much shade on a hot day and everyone we saw on top of the mountain was carrying bottles of water. But, then, it looks like Hades rules over all, at least in the summer.

Here, you see the Temple of Hephastus and the Greek Agora, the other essential site for the tourist wanting to experience the world of Ancient Athens.

By the way, a funny thing happened to us on the way to the Forum. Cynthia and I were sitting on a bench in the shadow of the Temple of Hephastus, who, you will recall, was the blacksmith and engineer of Olympus, when all of a sudden we hear someone calling my name. It turned out to be Andy Lipmann, Michael Hawley, and a bunch of other faculty, staff, and students from the MIT Media Lab. I learned later that they were in Greece to attend Nicholas Negroponte's wedding. This was somehow the least likely and the most likely place to run into folks from MIT on the entire trip!

In a museum on the grounds of the Greek Agora, which some have described as the birthplace of democracy, we were intrigued to see some examples of the kinds of ballots used for voting in classical Athens. As you can see, they are little clay discs onto which were scratched the name of the candidate that each voter supported. Candidates, we were told, often created many such discs and passed them out to the voters as part of the campaign process.

These other two artifacts were found inside the National Archeological Museum. The first is an example of the kinds of masks worn by performers in the greek theater -- in this case, this is a grotesque buffoon of the kind who might appear in a Greek comedy.

And this is a marble statue of Hermes found in Siphnos. The sign explains, "Hermes was, among other properties, the patron of travelers, therefore herms were erected at roads and crossroads. The Phallus carved not the front face of the pillar is both a symbol of pleasure and an apotropaic element." In case you are wondering, apotropaic means that it was designed to ward off harm and evil influences, or to bring good luck.

I was hoping that Hermes would watch over us as we began to get ready for our return to the United States.

I mentioned last time that I was starting to spend more and more time hanging out in Mickie D's in Europe. As I did so, I started to develop some interest in the processes of localization and the ways that the franchise has begun to adjust its menu to reflect cultural differences in regions around the world. Here, for example, is a sign for the Greek Mac (spotted in Athens). As you can see, if you look closely, the Greek Mac consists of two hamburger patties wrapped in Pita bread, with yogurt sauce, tomato slices, and onions.

Below it, there's a sign for  Il Mac (as seen in a fast food establishment in Rome.) which uses parmesan cheese.

And in Paris, we saw people eating the McBaguette  -- the name tells the whole story, but here's a news clip announcing its debut, which I found on the web.

So, maybe Quentin Tarantino was onto something when he has his gangster protagonists in Pulp Fiction exploring the cultural nuances of what's on the fast food menus of Europe. Just thought you'd want to know.

ROME, ITALY

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

It used to be said that all roads lead to Rome. In our case,our entire grand tour of Europe ended up there. Cynthia and I had been boning up for this leg of the trip by working our way back through our boxed set of dads from HBO's Rome, not to mention Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday,  at night in our hotel rooms. Rome is of course much to vast and diverse a city to do justice to within a few days time, and its culture spans most of written history. We made a conscious decision that this trip we were going to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on Ancient Rome, and would hold off on Renaissance and Catholic Rome for future adventures.

But, first, I need to do two final presentations. First, I gave a live webcasts to librarians and information officers working in U.S. Embassies around the world as part of their "Window on America" series. After some brief opening remarks, the program's host asked me to respond to questions sent by Twitter from many different countries, primarily focused on the impact of new media on learning and literacy, on books publishing, and on civic and political participation.

Later in the trip, I had a chance to sit down and talk with David H. Thorne, the current U.S. Ambassador to Italy, and a key member of the Obama 2008 campaign, where we had a great exchange about the impact of new media on American electoral politics.

The U.S. Embassy also underwrote my talk at the European Institute for Design, which was hosted by Max Giovagnoli. Max has run the Ted X Transmedia conference in Rome. Here's a video of Max talking about his own work as a transmedia designer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmsXIGwEQz8

He is also the author of Transmedia Storytelling: Imagery, Shapes, and Techniques, which takes a theoretically informed perspective on the challenges designers face in seeking to construct a transmedia narrative.  Max was a most agreeable host who, even after listening me drone on for several hours about my research, and taking us out to dinner, was nice enough to take Cynthia and I for a midnight tour, which offered us an amazing vista of the ancient Roman ruins.

The school had hired a translator who was used to working with diplomats and so was incredibly slow and precise, which drug out my talk past the breaking point, probably for everyone involved, but the audience was incredibly polite and patient, leaving quietly if they needed to do so, but a high percentage of them stuck it out to the end of the presentation.

While we were visiting the design school, I had a chance to review some of the amazing works being done by their students, who are working with games, transmedia, comics, and video/film production, and often making playful use of images and techniques from global popular culture. If you follow this link, for example, you can see a dynamic public art project developed in collaboration with Warner Brothers to mark the release of the Amazing Spider-Man movie in Rome.  After all of the many Spider-Man sightings on this trip, I am convinced that Spidey represents the modern day equivalent of Hermes, the Patron of Travellers. I also did a video interview which recently made its appearance on the web.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLe_VWsqS9o&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuwFDnDC4bI&feature=youtu.be

Getting into the spirit of my ongoing exploration of slapstick signs in Europe, Max recently shared with me this especially vivid "No Entry" sign located near the entry to the IED.

We then had two days, more or less, to play tourists in the ancient Roman empire, and we decided to split it between seeing the sights in Rome proper and taking a day trip out to Pompeii. Here, you see me standing in front of what is probably Rome's most recognizable landmark -- the Colosseum.

We quickly discovered that warning signs in the ancient world are as hysterically funny as their modern day counterparts. Here's a sign, for example, inside the colosseum, which I suspect was intended as a warning for visitors not to try to feed or pet the Tigers.

And here's a mosaic which Cynthia saw at an exhibition on glassblowing in the ancient world which seems to be offering a similar message about the risks of trying to get too friendly with crocodiles.

And finally, here's a "Beware of Dog" mosaic from the entry way to a house in Pompeii. It actually says "Beware the Dog" in Latin, though the letters are hard to see here, as they have faded through time.

The message I took from all of this was that the ancient world was encountering creatures from all over the world, but they had not yet figured out that a great many of them bite.

While we are talking about animals, here's another gratuitous cat picture, this one taken amongst the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian.

We saw brides and grooms wandering around a good chunk of Europe, including in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, on the grounds of Versailles, under the bridge of Sighs in Venice, and I could have filled an entire blog post just with pictures we took of loving young couples, but somehow, this image of a bride and groom walking in to the future together, captured near the Roman Forum, was too special to resist.

I have always been interested in Trajan's Column since Scott McCloud described it in Understanding Comics as an important predecessor of the sequential arts. A series of carvings depicting the he epic wars between the Romans andDacians (101–102 and 105–106 AD) spiral around the 98 foot tall column. It's hard to tell from what vantage point anyone could actually process the sequence of images, but McCloud argues, convincingly, that they break the action into a series of panels, which then are laid out sequentially, so that we are invited to read across them to construct the narrative.

This memorial is not from ancient Rome, but it's a great illustration of the ways that subsequent Italian governments sought to mobilize the glory that was once Rome to create its own powerful myths of national origins. Constructed between 1885 and 1911, on the northern slope of the Capitoline Hill, Il Vittoriano manages to take every cliche about ancient Rome and pile them together to create one massive spectacle.

While wandering around the various museums dedicated to antiquities, we stumbled upon this wonderfully complicated looking Coffee vending machine. We all know how much the Italians love their coffee, but this seems to be a coin-operated equivalent of Starbucks, allowing you to order an astonishing array of hot caffeinated beverages.

POMPEII, ITALY

The following day, we made our way by train out to Pompeii. Somewhere along the way, my pocket was picked and my wallet was stolen, which I only discovered while I was wandering around inside the ancient ruins, so we ended up having to sit up most of the night before we left to head back home on the phone canceling credit cards (or trying to do so) and dealing with various bureaucracies, and then, trying to figure out how we were going to pay for our hotel room and our cab to the airport. It was needless to say not the most fun we had on the trip. Ironically, we made it all the way across Europe without losing a bag, only to have our luggage get significantly delayed flying into LAX, and we only had to deal with robbers our last day abroad. We must have done something to cross Hermes (or Spider-man, depending on which is now the operative deity for international travelers.)

It's hard to imagine a better last place to visit in the grand tour than Pompeii, this ancient Roman city, which was partially burried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It has both haunted (and titilated) visitors for several hundred year's now, and it offers us a unique window into the everyday life of the ancient Roman empire. Ironically, given the massive destructive force the volcano unleashed on its residents, Pompeii remains much better preserved than the ruins in Rome or Athens, both of which were subjected to human vandals through the years. Nothing I had read about Pompeii prepared me for the scale.

We spent an entire day wandering its streets, walking into one house or business establishment after another, from the fast food restaurant depicted here (with its multiple ovens for cooking food for commercial dining) to the public baths and the brothels (with the very explicit erotic art which scandalized the Victorians and has been tourist bait ever since.)

Part of what I will carry away with me are the brightly (even garishly) painted walls

and the well preserved murals, which give us a taste for the aesthetic sensibilities of the different classes which lived together in Pompeii.

As we were leaving Pompeii, we walked past a warehouse where the archeologists store some of the assorted old artifacts they are working with -- including a large number of Amphora, and in this case, one of the plaster bodies left behind by the city's human inhabitants. These casts were created by pouring plaster into the large number of air holes left in the volcanic ash around Pompeii, which turned out to be the airspace left behind when the victim's bodies decayed. These casts offer us an incredible glimpse into the human pain and suffering that the eruption wrought on the residents of this once great city. I had seen Voyage in Italy at the Bologna Film Festival, which has a remarkable sequence showing the casting process, which gave me an even more vivid understanding of what we were looking at here.

And this concludes Henry and Cynthia's Excellent Adventures. We will  now return you back to our regularly scheduled blog posts.

THE END

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Hungary and Italy (Again!)

Budapest, Hungary Cynthia and I had really enjoyed traveling by rail inside many of the countries we visited this trip, so we decided to take the train from the Czech Republic  north to Hungary, passing along the way through Slovokia. We alternated between reading and looking out the window as the train click-clacked through farm country, small towns and villages, and lush forests, giving us a much bigger picture of what Eastern Europe looked like once you got outside of the major cities. America has somehow lost its historic relationship with the railroads, but in Europe, people of all classes and backgrounds travel by train, the trains are clean, affordably priced, and comfortable. So, what's not to love.

Around the time we passed into Hungary, something changed though. The temperature outside got hotter and hotter, there was no air conditioning working inside the train, and the windows did not open to allow outside air to circulate. The train was becoming a sweat box and the scaldingly hot temperature (I say scalding because the air was so humid that it felt like we were sitting in boiling water) began to percolate our brains. Needless to say,the experience had cured us of our romance with the rails.  By the time the train arrived in Budapest, we were melting into a puddle and in a punch drunk stupor.  Then, our host, Ellen Hume, swooped down upon us, with fresh bottles of cold water, with a driver to take our bags and an air conditioned car, like an angel of mercy!

Ellen Hume is probably the most resourceful person I have ever met! She covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal; she ran PBS's Democracy Project, where she became a major advocate for citizen-driven and resource-based journalism; she helped direct Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, and she ran a major Boston-based initiative on Ethnic news media. And, for a year and a half, she worked with me as the Research Director for MIT's Center for the Future of Civic Media, a initiative funded by the Knight Foundation, a collaboration between Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Media Lab.  Below you see Ellen and I together on the grounds of the Buda Castle.

Budapest, Hungary's capital and largest city, was historically two cities named, predictably, Buda and Pest, which are separated from each other by the Danube River (as you can see fairly well in the photograph below). When we arrived, we dropped our bags off at our hotel, which was near the river on the Pest side, and then walked across the bridge to visit the historic center of Buda.

Our experience of Buda was dominated by the Buda Castle, built in 1265, and long the home of the Hungarian Kings and Emperiors, and the Castle Hill. The architecture of this area, as the image below suggests, is commanding, giving us just a taste of what life might have been like during the hayday of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

The closer you get to the Castle proper, the more you get a taste of Medieval Hungary . It was too late in the day to get inside the buildings, but we wandered the grounds, enjoying the sight of this falconer in traditional garb and especially the view looking out across the Danube, a vista which gave us a clear sense of why this location was originally chosen to support a fortress.

A distinctive feature of Budapest's architectural tradition are the brightly colored Zsolnay tiles, shown here covering the roof of Matthias Church. The Zsolnay company has manufactured parcelain and ceramic tiles since the early part of the nineteenth century, though it has struggled to hang on during the current economic crisis in Europe.

Budapest became the country's capital in the late 19th century as several local towns were united to create one large urban area. Most of the public buildings were built during this period, and by the early 20th century, Budapest had developed a reputation for being one of the most cosmopolitan areas in Europe. For all of those reasons, the city's look and feel was strongly influenced by a particular inflection of Art Nouveau. These grand old world buildings exist side by side with monstrosities from Stalin- and Khruschev-area Soviet monumentalism, not exactly the most satisfying combination in the world, but a physical reminder of the transformations (political, cultural) which Hungary underwent across the twentieth century.

One of the best bits of advice we received upon launching on our grand European adventures was to "look up!" The most spectacular aspects of Europe often are above eye-level -- especially the decorative details along the roofs and top floors of buildings. We were constantly struck by the distinctive national styles that define each of the European countries, despite, what might seem to us by American standards, as very limited distances between them geographically.

Note, for example, the bee-hives on the building above, a key motif in the architecture of Budapest, which historically stood for all the work going on inside.

And, the same would be true of the ceilings inside buildings, such as the one below from the Hungarian Parliament, which is ornately decorated as a showcase to the wealth and power commanded by Imperial Hungary.

Of course, not all of the decorative details are along the skyline. There is also an attention to style which extends to the sidewalks and public plazas of the city, which often become staging grounds for personal and shared rituals.

We turned one corner and found an entire group of ballroom dancers waltzing inside a fountain which was shooting water up all around them. Did we mention yet how blasting hot it was when we were visiting Budapest?

Ellen took us to visit the Grand Market Hall at Nagyvasarcsarnok. Sometimes described as "a symphony in iron," the building was designed by Gustave Eiffel (of the Eiffel Tower fame). I always enjoy visiting farmer's markets and food halls as I travel because they give us such a strong sense of the everyday lives of the people who live in each place we visit. Here, Ellen and I are admiring a shop dedicated to Paprika, in all of its many manifestations. Paprika is the core spice used in Hungarian cooking. I especially enjoyed Paprika in a bowl of authentic Hungarian goulash. My mother used to prepare goulash when I was a child, but it bore very little relationship to this dish, which was a rich, spicy , bright red soup. I have to say how much we enjoyed our meals in Eastern Europe -- both the roasted meats and dumplings we had in Praha and the soups (hot and cold) we tasted in Budapest .

Ellen and her husband, John Shattuck, took us to a a Ruin Bar. These bars have been springing up over the past ten years or so in the old District VII neighborhood (the old Jewish quarter) in the ruins (hence the name) of abandoned buildings, stores, or lots. The area had been largely left to decay in the aftermath of the Second World War, and it has only recently come alive as the hub for the city's hipster nightlife. The ruin bars, many of which operate without a license, allegedly rely on monetary compensations handed directly to local law enforcement, and feel like something out of a post-appocalyptic science fiction film. Somehow, the Mad Max movies or Escape to New York came to mind, but there is also this distinctive Post-Communist feel that is not really captured by the analogy. The walls are covered with graffiti; the furniture looks like it was picked up off the streets, there are Christmas lights and old computers and rusting bathtubs and plastic gewgaws everywhere you look. There may be a band playing in one of the darker corners, and the whole place is teaming with people of all backgrounds and ages. Ellen had promised us that the ruin bar would be one of the highlights of our trip to Europe, and it certainly was.

Here, you see Ellen, John, and I drinking Unicum, the local drink whose family history was memorialized in the film Sunshine, and Cynthia and I (below) surrounded by the graffiti at Szimpla Kert, which was the original and still the largest of the ruin bars. John was the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor  under Bill Clinton, where he helped to establish the International Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic, the former CEO for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and the current president of Central European University, which hosted my talks in Budapest.

Central European University operates with a heavy endowment from George Soros, and was designed to be an instrument fostering a greater sense of cultural understanding and appreciation of human rights, a meeting place for students from across Europe, and indeed, from around the world. Its students come from more than a hundred countries, and its faculty represent thirty different nations. I spoke in the morning with the students from their summer program (again, featuring probably the most ethnically and nationally diverse audience I encountered on my trip) and in the afternoon, I gave a public lecture (again, the Content talk) at the Open Society Archives, a research facility dedicated to preserving the records of the Communist era.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW9750DLJ54

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkeIrH3DA8o&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YkR4qgjAvA&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wbg4FcV4pE&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh5l1k7izmQ&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph7EbCNAICI&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvjQpn9vo-c&feature=relmfu

Ellen and John were nice enough to host a lovely salon and dinner in their home, which brought together a mix of intellectuals, artists, writers, and political leaders, which gave us a great taste of the cultural life of Budapest's intelligentsia.  I was especially delighted to reconnect with Tibor Dessewffy, the Hungarian Director for the World Internet Project. I had met Tibor when he was a visiting scholar at the USC Annenberg School, and he provided us with some very helpful critical feedback on our Spreadable Media manuscript.

Each leg of the trip was shaped by the personality of our hosts as much as by the personality of the cities themselves. Our experience of Praha was primary focused around culture, especially the rich heritage of film and the graphic arts. Our experience of Budapest, in part because we were spending time with people who have enormous expertise on foreign policy, was focused much more on the political history of the region, especially on the struggles to define a national identity in the wake of many decades of foreign dominance (by the Nazis and the Communists) and the current struggles to protect free expression under an increasingly repressive regime. Our sense was that Budapest is a city which still struggles with the legacy of the Cold War in ways that Praha seems to have moved beyond, but what do I know, I was only there for a few days.

We were lucky enough to get a guided tour of some of the political landmarks of the city by Jeff Taylor, an American art history professor at SUNY Purchase who is an expert on international art forgery, and who sometimes takes tourists around the city to give them a counter-history to some of the national monuments. You have to love a tour guide who quotes  Edward Said in his opening remarks.

Jeff's guide of the Museum of Terror helped to debunk and deconstruct the official accounts of Hungary's experiences with the Nazis and the Soviets, drawing out what was not explicitly stated, filling in what was intentionally occluded, and otherwise, poking fun at the ways history was being mobilized to support the country's current leadership. In particular, the bulk of the museum dealt with the Soviet era with very limited space given to the Nazi period, and little to no mention made of the ways that the Hungarian government had officially partnered with Hitler in the early days of World War II.

Jeff also showed us some key monuments, both those which survive from the era of Soviet dominance, and those which reflect the fall of Communism, as it has been framed from the Hungarian perspective. Here, for example, you see me clowning around at a statue dedicated to Ronald Reagan. Seeking to explain that it was as much American popular culture and consumer goods as it was American foreign policy which contributed to some of the political shifts that impacted his adopted country, Jeff has launched the Two Ronalds project, playfully paying tribute to American president Ronald Reagan and American fast-food brand icon Ronald McDonald, by having guests take their picture next to this statue, once they have inserted a Big Mac into Reagan's open hand.

When the good folks at  Central European University learned of my strange obsession with understanding the comics cultures of Europe, they tapped their collective networks and got me in touch with Robert Vass, an independent comics artist in Budapest, who took me to his local shop, gave me a guided tour of its contents, and a mini history of comics publishing in Hungary under Communism and its aftermath. I am still absorbing much of what I learned and trying to parse my way through the various comics I purchased, but I have found this Wikipedia entry especially helpful in understanding the local comics scene there.  One of my favorite books was Matyas a Kiraly: kepregeny-antologia.  Matthias Corvinus was the Renaissance era King of Hungry who has been credited with helping to promote arts, science, and law in his country, and who was later named one of the most important saints in the region. Here, we see his statue outside Matthias Church, which, we saw earlier, was in the Buda Castle region.

During communism, many of the comics published were literary and historical adaptations, which was seen as less "political" than some of the themes that dominated comics elsewhere in Eastern Europe.  I am always intrigued how strands in American comics which had largely died out in my country continue to exert influence in other parts of the world, and I've discovered that Hal Foster's Prince Valiant offered a compelling model for many Eastern European comics creators.  This collection of contemporary alternative comics drew inspiration from Matthias's story but pushed it in radical new directions, demonstrating that Hungarian comics can be so much more than classics illustrated. Here's a sample page from the collection which I found online. The building depicted here is the Matthias Church.

BOLOGNA, ITALY

My original plan for Bologna was to spend a week sitting in dark theaters and watching beautifully restored prints of great old movies at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Organized by the Cineteca Bologna, this film festival organizes retrospectives intended to deepen our understanding of key figures and chapters in the history of global cinema. For example, among the topics this year, there was an extensive series of films by Lois Weber, perhaps the most important female director of the American silent cinema whose films are deeply shaped by the political and spiritual values of first wave feminism, and by Alma Hitchcock, the wife of Alfred, but also a well known scenario writer in the late silent and early sound British cinema.

The festival also featured a series showing the coming of sound in Japan, which included several films whose soundtrack captured the performances of famous Benshi. In the Japanese tradition, silent films were narrated by live performers, who might recount the story, embody the perspectives of the various characters, direct attention onto key details, or offer their own moral (and sometimes ironic) commentary on the action. These benshi were so popular in their own day that they helped to slow down the coming of sound in Japan, when they resisted the shift to new technologies that might mean their eventual unemployment and the end of their tradition. During this transitional period, some of their performances were recorded, which gives us a chance to better understand their mode of presentation and the diverse ways they shaped spectators' experience of silent Japanese movies.

There was a series of films showing how America and Europe had dealt with the economic crisis of the early 1930s and another showcasing the work of Ivan Pry'ev, who was one of the most popular directors of musicals in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist period (fascinating historical documents which might include celebrations of the heroicism of wives who renounce their husbands for acting against the interests of the State or which might open with vast musical numbers involving farmers singing as they drive their tractors across their fields.)

My favorite screening series, though, was a retrospective of the works of Raoul Walsh, whose career spans from silent films (such as The Thief of Bagdad and The Big Parade) all the way into the 1950s (represented here by Band of Outsiders, Pursued, and Distant Drums). The festival decided, wisely, not to focus on the Walsh films which are perhaps best known to retro house audiences -- his films of the late 1930s and early 1940s with Humphrey Bogart (They Drive By Night, High Sierra), James Cagney (White Heat, The Roaring Twenties), and Errol Flynn (They Died with Their Boots On, Gentleman Jim), but rather to focus primarily on the transition from silent to sound cinema. As a result, I got to see The Big Trail, for example, an epic western which made effective use of deep focus photography to cram every frame with action and details, and was filmed (and shown) in an early wide screen process, Grandeur,  Me and My Gal with a wet-behind-the-ears Spencer Tracy and Sailor's Luck which managed to perfectly merge the screwball and anarchistic comedy traditions. Another highlight from the festival for me was Frank Borzage's Man's Castle, also with Spencer Tracy, a dark and twisted romance set amongst the homeless camping out in Central Park during the early depression.  Kristin Thompson wrote a typically thoughtful and detailed account of her experiences at this year's festival.

The film festival has become a favorite academic junket, drawing together many of the world's leading film historians, who enjoy hanging out together, watching obscure yet interesting movies, having long conversations over plates of pasta, and grabbing a quick Gellato on the way back to the hotel, before starting the process all over again the following morning.

Bologna has been gaining in recent years on the other great Italian retrospective festival, Pordenone, which is held each year in October, and which showcases almost exclusively works from the early and silent film periods. Bologna has a more diverse program, including silent and sound films from around the world, and has the virtue of falling during the summer, when American academics can get away for a more extended period. So, this year, I had a chance to catch up with old graduate school instructors (Donald Crafton, Kristin Thompson, Susan Olmer, Richard Abel) and classmates (Charlie Keil, Leslie Midkiff-Debauche, Matthew Bernstein, David Pratt) as well as more recent friends who I see in Los Angeles (Janet Bergstrom, Virginia Wright-Wexman, John Huntington).

While in Bologna, I had a chance to sit down in person with Wu Ming 1 (and for part of the meal, Wu Ming 3b). I had interviewed Wu Ming 1 and his collaborators for my blog some years ago, where he spoke with me about his interests in "multitudinous authorship, crossmedia storytelling, world making, identity games, RPG guerrilla warfare, old/new media collision, copyleft-oriented practices, media hoaxes and so on).” This creative collective has written some top-selling novels, such as Q and 54, but they have also spearheaded the Luther Blissert cultural movement, which has conducted any number of pranks and hoaxes to shake up the media establishment in his country. Wu Ming 1 wrote the introduction for the Italian language edition of Convergence Culture, and we've remained in close contact ever since. We had a great discussion, comparing the ways American and Italian activists have responded to the economic crisis, debating my current interests in fan activism, pondering the reasons why social media has played out differently in America and Europe, sharing Wu Ming's new transmedia projects, and above all, assessing current struggles over intellectual property. We were also joined at this meal by Giovanni Boccia Artieri, an expert on social media, who is on the Faculty of Sociology at the University Carlo Bo of Urbino.

Artieri was instrumental in getting me invited to speak at his university during the festival. Wu Ming 1 attended and has shared these notes and audio files of the presentation. This photograph, taken during the talk, gives a hint at the very very baroque environment in which my remarks were delivered.

Afterwards, I was taken to lunch by Veronica Innocenti, who has written extensively about television seriality,  and some of her faculty colleagues.  Meanwhile, Cynthia had some of the American film studies crowd for a day trip to nearby Ravenna, a town overflowing with sixth century churches, which include intricate mosaic work.

Here, you see Cynthia with Virginia Wright-Wexman, Susan Olmer, Donald Crafton, and John Huntington, taken by their tour guide on this exposition.

Bologna, itself, is a delightful place to visit, characterized by long arcade-like walkways and narrow winding streets, often full of bikes and motorcycles.

I was much taken by this fountain, near the center of the city, which seems racy even by European standards, whether we are looking at the ways the women are shown fondling their own breasts (part of the mother's milk fixation observed earlier)

Or the proud display of certain elements of the male anatomy.

Somehow, the juxtaposition of the two leaves this fountain a particularly charged space in my memories of European waterworks. I would say that this guy's "having a party in his pants", if he was wearing any.

I mean no great insult to Italian food, which is everything you imagine it to be, and then some. We dove deep into one great plate of pasta after another across our various legs in Italy, and I think my number one take away from the trip is Prosciutto and Melon, which goes down really well in the sweltering heat we had been experiencing since Budapest. But, by this point in the trip, we had been in Europe for going on two months, having one exotic meal after another. And, I found myself more and more being drawn towards American fast food places, like the McDonalds depicted here. McDonalds functions as the unofficial American Club across Europe -- a place you can go where you recognize pretty much everything on the menu and where you know precisely what you are going to get, where you can -- usually -- get ice in your drinks, where people around you are speaking English, and where you can strike up a conversations with anyone at any table and likely get some fresh news from home, assuming your sense of home is North America between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

My graduate mentor, David Bordwell, was scheduled to participate in a panel near the close of the film festival, having a public conversation with Dave Kehr, who currently writes a column on dvd releases for the New York Times, who maintains maintains the  blog Reports from the Lost Continent of Cinephilia, and who recently published a book of his film reviews from the Chicago Reader, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade. The panel was supposedly about the current state of Cinephilia, though our discussion ranged pretty broadly across historic and contemporary film cultures. As the title of Kehr's works suggest, he thinks that something vital has been lost in contemporary audiences' relationship to cinema, reporting dwindling attendance at retrospective screenings in New York City, and expressing concern that fewer and fewer classic works are making the transition across each new media platform. My own response was, characteristically, a bit more optimistic, so the exchange was a lively one, which I enjoyed very much. It was also fun for me to be speaking some place where I seemed to be better known as the author of What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic than for Textual Poachers or Convergence Culture, and it was fun to use my extensive knowledge of other forms of media fan culture to tweak some of the pretensions of the art house crowd.

http://vimeo.com/44974590

COMING SOON: THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Germany (Round Two) and the Czech Republic

  Delmonhorst and Breman, Germany

Our travels next took us back through Germany -- to the town of Delmonhorst in Lower Saxony. Here, I participated in a conference, organized by Martin Butler and centering around the "precarious alliances" which shape the relations between authors, readers, editors, publishers, translators, critics, archivists, and booksellers, among others, each of whom helps to shape the nature of literary production. This was an intimate event -- roughly 20 academics, mostly European, a few American -- sat around in a seminar room for three days and talked about each other's work. For me, this kind of prolonged engagement was a rare treat, especially when coupled with the fact that the topic -- which centered mostly around print culture -- was a little askew to what I normally look at  and most of the papers, by and large, focused on pre-20th century forms of publication. I gave the opening keynote, using J.K. Rowling's complex relations with Harry Potter fans and readers, as the central focus of my analysis, but giving the group a taste of what publication means in the era of "spreadable media."

The other keynote talks came from James L. West Jr. (Penn State), who has helped to manage the republication of the works of F. Scott Fitzergerald, and shared some of the behind the scenes negotiations which shape  posthumous publications (and along the way, told some great stories about consulting with Baz Luhrman on the forthcoming, now delayed, Great Gatsby movie), Wil Verhoeven (Gronigen) who spoke about "print capitalism" and the establishment of "political modernity" in England, and Claire Squires (Stirling), author of Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain, who described the ways new modes of digital publishing and online book selling were disrupting older printing practices.  Other memorable presentations include a critique of the rhetoric of participation as deployed by some contemporary marketing projects by Martin Butler (Olderberg), a talk on the packaging of best selling genre fiction in Post-socialist Russia by Ulrich Schmid (St. Gallen),  a discussion of the political and cultural debates surrounding the Booker Prize by Anna Augustcik (Oldenburg), and a talk about the construct of the impoverished author in early Modern France by Geoffrey Turnovsky (Seattle). These exchanges, which dealt with print as a medium and as a set of cultural practices, rather than as a fixed canon of great works, were refreshing for me and seemed to open a path forward for future multidisciplinary conversations around similar topics.

Cynthia and I especially enjoyed getting to know Verhoeven and his partner, Amanda Gilroy, who drove down  precisely to meet me. Gilroy recently published a fascinating essay dealing with how she used fan fiction writing activities to get her students to engage more closely with the works of Jane Austin, an essay I know would be of particular interest to many of our readers.

The conference organizers allowed a fair amount of downtown for us to explore the city and its surrounding area. A few blocks from our hotel, there was a beautiful park, where we ran into this brace of ducks.

And in the town proper, we had yet another Spider-man sighting. It would seem that for a U.S.-based superhero, he gets around!

One night, a party of the speakers went into Breman, nearby, for dinner and a stroll around the historic districts of this German city, which was referenced by Ptolemy as early as 150 AD.  Like many German cities, Breman was heavily bombed during the Second World War, but it has made concerted efforts to restore some of the beautiful old buildings.

Praha (Prague), Czech Republic

When I arrived in Praha, I was greeted with posters depicting me as a somewhat paunchy superhero, flying high above the  Žižkov Television Tower,  a local landmark. These posters had been made by Luis Blackaller, a former MIT Media Lab student, who now lives in Los Angeles and occasionally sits in on my classes.

The poster had been commissioned by Jaroslav Švelch, who had spent several years as a visiting scholar through the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, and now teaches on the Charles University Faculty of Social Sciences. Svelch had helped to organize a day-long symposium, Transmedia Generation: On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergences, in honor of my visit. We were grateful to receive funding from the U.S. Embassy in Pradha to help support this exchange between American and Czech based scholars.

Here is my talk (a variant on the one I had given at the Telefonica conference in Madrid).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTdZN4UUXY4&feature=youtu.be

Sangita Shresthova, a former CMS Masters Student, who now heads up our Civic Paths research team at USC, flew in for the event. Shresthova is part Nepalese, part Czech, and grew up in Praha, as she notes in the opening segment of her talk  about Bollywood dance and its fan following around the world. I featured Shresthova's book, Is It All in the Hips?: Around the World With Bollywood Dance, earlier this year, on my blog. 

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

Here's  Švelch''s own talk which shared some of his research about fan subbing practices, especially concerning Game of Thrones, in the Czech Republic.  Švelch' has a background in translation studies, even though much of his recent work has dealt with computer games and other aspects of digital culture, so this project allowed him to combine several of his interests.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AabX2ZA-5MQ&feature=relmfu

I was especially intrigued by this presentation by Nico Carpentier (Free University of Brussells), who has been exploring what we can learn about new forms of participatory culture by digging more deeply into the literature around participatory democracy. I was a bit nervous when I saw the title of his talk, "The Dark Side of Online Participation," but I left enormously excited by the work he is doing. Carpentier argues that legitimate claims for advances in opportunities for meaningful participation are drowned out by a rhetoric of participation which as often as not is little more than marketing. He wants to create some conceptual models which allow us to appraise what kinds of participation are on offer, seeing meaningful participation as involving the redistribution of power and the flattening of traditional hierarchies and inequalities. This is precisely the kind of work which should be done right now at the intersection between critical and cultural studies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spOs-kwNw3U

I made no secret of my excitement over discovering Carpentier and his work when Sangita, Nico, and I shared a panel together for the symposium's final session, which dealt with the political and educational implications of the research we had presented.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IJx7OycB84&feature=relmfu

Since I have been back in Los Angeles, Carpentier and I have been working on a dialogic piece which explores more fully the similarities and differences in the ways we are thinking in our current projects about the nature of political participation.

To be honest, the conference was, in some ways, an excuse to have  Švelch and Shresthova show Cynthia and I around Praha. After speaking to so many different groups and meeting so many new people, it was a luxury to be able to hang out and have fun with two old friends.

I would say that we painted the town "red," but somehow that might have a different connotation when talking about a post-socialist country. But, we had a wonderful time wandering the streets and taking tram trips together as they tried to introduce us to as much Czech culture as I could possibly absorb in a few days time.

As I sit here some weeks later and try to put into words my scattered impressions of Praha, I feel like it comes out as something like "Pretty, Shiny, Golly Whiz!", where-as something of the beauty and splendor comes through in Cynthia's photographs.

As Jaroslav, Cynthia, and I were walking along the banks of the Vltava River, we ran straight into two other Comparative Media Studies affiliates --  Zuzana Husárová and Amaranth Borsuk  -- both visiting Eastern Europe to attend a conference about digital poetry and storytelling. Here, you see the Praha Castle towering over the river, while on this sunny afternoon, you can see all kinds of boats out cruising along the river.

This is Jaroslav's photograph of Cynthia and I in front of some of the old buildings which survive from the 1891 Jubilee Exhibition. We were here visiting another late 19th century panorama, in this case depicting the Battle of Lipany (fought in 1434). Our exploration of late 19th popular amusements also took us to visit a Hall of Mirrors, also from 1891, and also very much still alive as an attraction for contemporary tourists.

We were fascinated by the old world charm of Praha, especially the decorated facades of buildings which date back to the Art Nouveau period.

One of our discoveries on this trip was the work of the Czech Art Nouveau graphic artist, Alphonse Mucha, whose paintings, illustrations, advertisements, postcards, and designs captured the spirit of Prague as it entered into the 20th century. I found this video on YouTube which shares some of Mucha's story and work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWvrIvs7LKY

But we were also very much taken by the aesthetic of contemporary Praha street art.

We were very much amused to stumble upon this fine establishment, dedicated to preserving the memory of this classic 1970s vintage American cult series and the lifestyle which it embodies. Starksy and Hutch was very much an active fandom when I wrote Textual Poachers, though I don't run across many references to it today. I wanted to share this image in honor of all of you old school fans out there!

Visiting this former Soviet block country brought back a rush of memories for me as a child of Cold War America. Perhaps the most powerful concerned the CBS Children's Film Festival, a staple of my childhood.  (You can learn more about the program on this Kukla.TV fan website. )This program ran every Saturday afternoon, just as the morning cartoon shows started to give up the ghost, and spill over into programming intended for adults. The program was hosted by Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and dedicated to sharing films focusing on the lives of children from around the world. When I looked the program up on the web, I was struck by how many of the stories I remembered most vividly had come from Czechoslovakia, which was known during this period for its production of children's films. Here, for example, are segments from two of the films shown during the Children's Film Festival:

Adventure in Golden Bay   Dobrodružství na Zlaté zátoce (1956)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xih0OcQgjc8

Captain Korda  Kapitán Korda  (1970)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82yaOhzjbtk

Many of the other films shown on the series came from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Poland, Eastern Germany, and a range of other Warsaw Pact countries. These memories have left me very curious how it was possible for so many of these films to air on network television during a period of time when political tensions between the United States and Eastern Europe were at such a level of intensity, and also to ponder what impact this early exposure to global diversity might have had on my generation's relationship to the rest of the world. Certainly, there are children's film festivals hosted by museums and cultural institutions around the United States today, but there is no such commitment from commercial broadcasters to insure a more cosmopolitan diet for contemporary youth.

A window display of wooden marionettes suggested the continued process of cross-cultural exchange, as Charlie Chaplin, Harry Potter, and Jack Sparrow hang alongside Old World witches and trolls.

The Czech people have long been among the most accomplished puppet makers and performers in the world, and this fascination with puppetry has often influenced their filmmaking, resulting in a strong tradition of puppet animation. Looking for more information about the puppet shops and theaters we saw in Praha, I stumbled onto this website, which also shared a delightful cartoon produced by students in their summer program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIQsmLTv6UY&feature=player_embedded

While I was in Praha, I was interviewed by Pavel Kořínek, who wanted to get my thoughts about the current state of Comics Studies, as an emerging field of research. He was nice enough to give me Český Komiks 2000-2010, a wonderful collection of contemporary Czech comics.  Here's a useful Wikipedia entry that overviews the history of Czech comics. Jaroslav helped to fuel my growing interest in this graphic tradition by taking me to a small museum dedicated to the works of Kaja Saudek, perhaps the most important Czek underground comics artist of the 1960s and 1970s. Saudek was inspired both by the traditions of mainstream American comics, especially superheros but also Walt Disney and Carl Barks. He was also transformed by his encounters with the work of R. Crumb and Richard Corben. Here's what came out when these worlds collided. Saudek's work conveyed something of the spirit of the youth culture which contributed to the Prague Spring movement in 1968.

Jaroslav and Sangita also took me to Terryho ponožky (Terry’s Socks), located by the box office at the Světozor art house cinema just off Wenceslas Square. Terry's Socks was named after Terry Gilliam who famously left a sweaty pair of socks on a Prada movie theater's stage after a public appearance. Terry's Socks is by reputation the best place to shop in Prague for DVDS. I went there in search of what I could find of the Czech New Wave film movement, and brought back some real treasures. As it happens, Americans who want to know more about the explosion of cinematic creativity which hit Praha in the 1960s can now buy a number of classic works in Criterion's Pearls of the Czech New Wave box set, released earlier this summer. See below an especially memorable sequence from Věra Chytilová's 1966 film Daisies, which is included in the anthology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm9Gh8Fpy0c

While I was in Praha, I was contacted about appearing on one of the Czech Republic's late night news program. They featured me for a full half hour, sharing my thoughts about new media literacies, digital activism, and participatory culture. What surprised me was that the interview ran in real time with the reporter Peter Fischer interviewing me in Czech, which was translated off camera into English, which I could hear on my ear phone, and then I spoke in English, which was then translated into Czech for the television viewers.

Here, you see Jaroslav and I sharing a last cool drink together in the Prague train station before Cynthia and I departed on an 8 hour rail journey to Budapest.

Coming Soon: Budapest and Bologna