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

The current situation of fan fiction represents an interesting point for thinking about how change may be occurring. The fan community has deployed the concept of “transformative works” to justify their practice through advocacy groups such as the Organization for Transformative Works, where-as the industry seems internally to have decided that they cause more damage to their consumer relations by aggressively shutting down fan fiction so the number of cease-and-desists have slowed down. What do you see as the risks and benefits of these two ways of dealing with the conflicts we are discussing?

Pat: I love the Organization for Transformative Works. These people are heroes/heroines, and they are among the folks who have gone to the Copyright Tribunal to demand (and win!) DMCA exemptions. They made it possible for all makers of noncommercial videos for any reason to break encryption for fair use without penalty. They showcase great work, explore important issues in a scholarly way, and pave the way for others.

Whew.

OK, where were we? So they are great examples and exemplars in the fan community. The industry response to me also seems very healthy, and an appropriate recognition of the simple fact that fair use exists (and works for the industry, hello Viacom and Colbert Report).

I think asserting rights is good, and recognizing rights is good.

Ellen: The problem with fan production on the internet is that they have encouraged everyone to offer up lots of free labor-- whether it’s fan fiction, or Facebook reporting on the last music video you liked, YouTube fan vids or new worlds (just heard about an entire one recreating Game of Thrones) on MindCraft. It’s all very fun and creative, but I am more worried about getting paying work for the next generation, and I don’t see that happening without speaking up for unions and guilds. And authors still need to be able to get a decent payment for published works. In the long term, I think we have to look at how even fan fiction is free publicity, and even if it’s a labor of love, we still want to consider the possibility of getting paid for fan work.

Certainly things are very much in flux on how the big studios and publishers handle these relationships to get the most out of fan word-of-mouth without alienating fans for shutting them down.

Many feel that the category of the “public domain” has been endangered as the terms covered by Copyright have expanded dramatically, yet as a consequence of this expansion, we are dealing with more and more “orphan works,” where there is no one any longer asserting ownership over these materials, yet artists and the public are not legally protected if they wish to reproduce, recirculate, or remix them? See for example some of the issues which Nina Paley has encountered in her use of classic jazz recordings in her film, Sita Sings the Blues. The archive plays an ever more central role in contemporary culture, which critic Simon Reynolds has argued, is entering a moment of “retromania.” What mechanisms might best allow us to address the contradictions between current legal efforts to extend copyright and current cultural trends which encourage artists and audiences alike to build on past works?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zcTgyGpens

Pat: You’re right that archives are central to new creation, always have been, and will increasingly be important to people who never thought about them before, because of the growing capacity for DIY media creation. There’s the orphan works problem; there’s the “greedy generation” problem (private archives run by the descendants of the creators, requiring clearance and even approval of the final product for access); there’s the pricing problem (some archives and media holders don’t have prices acceptable to smaller-scale productions and certainly don’t have any way to deal with noncommercial work; people who want to pay, but can’t pay a lot, often find nobody will get back to them, even to refuse); and there’s the problem of just trying to find out where stuff is and who owns or controls it. And then of course there’s the fact that many social-media materials and digital-only works such as music that only appears on iTunes are disappearing without being archived anywhere.

Of these problems, orphan works was probably the most tractable. Win-win legislation was proposed and had a life before contention among the stakeholders (including photographers who became intransigent for fear someone would make an unlicensed use of a photograph for any purpose) made the deal fall apart. That’s a benchmark. If you can’t fix orphan works in Congress, you probably can’t get any more ambitious than that with that remedy, at this point in time.

Rick Prelinger showed us all a beautiful model in his Prelinger Archive, which is housed within the Internet Archive. He took his entire collection of audio-visual materials, a substantial portion of which is public domain but which he makes available easily, which had been his living for decades, and digitized it all at lower resolution. It’s all available for any noncommercial use you may make of it. (Film students use it every semester.) He sold the actual collection to Getty, which will sell you the material you want to use at market rates and at a high resolution (they return a portion of proceeds to Rick). Rick’s deal is generating more money for him than the previous form of his business did, and now customers do their own shopping and selection of materials without his help.

That’s an example of how you can be a good actor in archival space, while also monetizing your assets. It also depends on the (sometimes quixotic) kindness of strangers, since ‘90s dot-com rich guy and Internet philanthropist Brewster Kahle hosts the material online.

Other archives are struggling to find out how to accommodate the emergent environment’s opportunities without losing their current advantages, and they have not yet come up with something.

So users need to think about what they can do themselves, with material that may not be being offered conveniently to them. If they have independent access to the materials (say, a DVD of a movie or a download of a song), then they can explore fair use. You can see why fair use rises to the top of my list, given the paucity of options. If their uses would not be fair, or if there’s no independent access, they don’t have great remedies at the moment.

While I could imagine a lot of better ways to do things, they all have a “if pigs had wings they would fly” character, in this environment.

For the most part, you have both focused on the nature of intellectual property within the U.S. context, yet America has increasingly imposed its copyright regimes on the rest of the world, whether or not the core premises of those laws are consistent with their own cultural traditions or needs. What do you see as the transnational implications of the struggles we have been describing?

Ellen: I think the most worrying development on the horizon is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that is supposed to reflect American priorities, i.e. copyright holders. The TPP is being developed with great secrecy, and it has not attracted the notice it should because the name sounds like it is about container shipments when in fact it is a radical change to copyright in signatory countries. The results as it is currently outlined would block access to open materials, permit “digital locks” on content like songs and TV shows, and put all kinds of restrictions to open access in place. It is more dangerous than SOPA and PIPA because it is being written by stakeholders, handled like an international trade agreement, and only large stakeholders are in on the drafting and revision process. See this recent post in Slate

Pat: I think that the international environment is very complex, and as Ellen points out the U.S. federal government has tied international trade issues to copyright policy and its enforcement in a way that has privileged monopoly rights holders against users’ interests, European interests have also been important in unbalancing copyright further.

“Harmonization,” as it’s called--getting more conformity across national copyright regimes--has so far been pretty much a story of expanding monopoly rights. It’s possible to imagine harmonization on the exceptions/limitations side. Certainly that’s what many activists called for around the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty, which is about counterfeiting (including digital “piracy”). Large media interests had insisted on sweeping IP issues into a treaty that was supposed to be about hard goods, pushing for ever greater imbalance. The activists were very nearly excluded, but their protests contributed ultimately to rejection of ACTA. The rejection demonstrated, one hopes, some interest in Europe in the value of its exceptions and limitations.

At the same time, you see great interest internationally in changing copyright policy to expand user access to copyrighted material with clauses that look and sound a lot like fair use. In 2008, Israel actually imported US fair use lock, stock and barrel. The Australians introduced “flexible dealing,” which in some situations can be used in ways somewhat like fair use. In early July, 2012, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled on clutch of copyright cases, setting precedents that make Canadian fair dealing--a version of exemptions in which kinds of uses are itemized more precisely--look much more like U.S. fair use. David Cameron in the UK has suggested that the UK should import fair use, since it is so conducive to innovation and the UK economy needs innovation.

Meanwhile, all copyright regimes do have some exceptions and limitations on monopoly rights. Often, they have gone unchallenged and undefined. For instance, “right of quotation” is a rather vague and widely included exception, rarely litigated.

A highly significant feature of the international landscape, in practice, is that outside the US, copyright penalties do not include statutory damages. This is very important, because it damps down litigation. There is little to be gained by taking a copyright dispute through the courts, if the outcome is getting the user to pay the license fee--which would only be a tiny portion of the costs of litigation. In fact, copyright litigation in Europe is very sparse. So that makes it much easier for Europeans to use their exceptions and limitations, because the risk, in practice, is lower.

At the same time, it’s frustrating in Europe for creators, because they hope to cross national borders with their work, and each country has different copyright policy. No one has ever done a survey of where there is overlap in exceptions and limitations; that would be an extremely valuable service.

Since the U.S. is the largest market currently for creative works, many makers of work that is pitched internationally conform to U.S. copyright policy. This certainly is common among documentary filmmakers. In general, it seems to work pretty well

Editor's Note: I hope you have enjoyed this conversation between two extraordinary media scholars discussing the current state of intellectual property law. If you would like to see further discussion around this topic, let me put in a plug here for the upcoming Futures of Entertainment conference, to be held at MIT, on November 8-10. I will be participating there in a conversation about IP issues with Jonathon Taplin, the director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and with composer/musician T Bone Burnett. You can learn more and registered for the event here.

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.

Concerning Intellectual Property: A Conversation with Pat Aufderheide and Ellen Seiter (Part Four)

In some ways, independent media-makers seem caught in the middle of this struggle, seeking ways to protect their own creative products, but also often at the mercy of bigger corporate interests. What do we gain by looking at the issues from their perspective?

Ellen: It is crucial to preserve the civic participation element of digital media, the social consciousness of so many independent media makers, and the necessity of keeping content free to use by teachers. This is why Pat and Peter’s “Best Practices book is so incredibly helpful” as well as the whole Reclaiming Fair Use book (which includes an amazing set of best practices materials at the end.)

Pat: I think the interests of people like journalists and documentary filmmakers look a lot like the interests of many noncommercial creators. Many noncommercial creators are actually invested in some control over their work. One of the things you can learn from the professional communities that have created codes of best practices is that balance is possible; it’s possible to have some control, and also for other people to use your work without your permission. Context is everything.

One thing that’s interesting to watch in this process is the role of attribution or credit. It seems that no matter where you go--and my colleague Peter Jaszi has been to the backest of the beyond in Indonesia to look at folk art practices--people really want attribution. They may or may not care about payment. But recognition is huge. Look at the concern that kids on the Scratch remixing site have. The computer automatically credits their work when another child uses it, but that’s not enough for many of the kids; they want the new creator to recognize them and even say why their work was useful in the new work. (I’m cribbing on this last one from the work of Andres Monroy-Hernandez, btw.)

Even though attribution is so important to people--it often wards off copyright claims--it’s not required or even mentioned under fair use in the law. It happens to sway judges, but not because it’s in the law but because it shows good faith so they have a reason to think of you as well intentioned.

So again, practice matters. I think in our emergent DIY universe, attribution will be extremely important.

Many of these issues came to a head earlier this year around SOPA. What is your analysis of the debate around this law? What do you see as the fallout from what happened when citizens weighed in more heavily in response to this proposed legislation?

Pat: The SOPA/PIPA debate suffered from some of the Copyright Wars problems. Many creators were enlisted by large media companies, which informed them that piracy was going to take the bread out of their children’s mouths. Many Wikimedians and Wikipedia users saw the struggle--and let others construe it as such--as being about why information wants to be free. Meanwhile, the threats to the very communication infrastructure, as Google folk were painfully aware, were very real. The largest Internet companies and think tanks/NGOs did a good job of making that clear.

The polarization between copyright maximalists and copyright minimalists around SOPA/PIPA will, I think, make it harder to have a rational discussion when, as it inevitably will, the bill returns in some form. Some legislators were outraged at the blackouts, which occurred at a time when serious negotiations taking into consideration the concerns of critics, were going on, and derailed them.

One lesson of the conflict was that it’s important to develop a discourse in which balanced copyright is featured, rather than a moral-panic atmosphere. It is important to address the challenge of making copyright workable rather than construing the problem as either embracing or rejecting copyright’s monopoly rights as property. It is also clear, by the way, that people don’t have enough information about the basics of Internet infrastructure. The reason why fooling around with the Domain Name System was a terrible idea just wasn’t clear to most people.

What do we see as the most effective mechanisms for changing current policies around intellectual property? Which mechanisms do you think give the most hope to copyright holders? to grassroots participants? To independent artists?

Pat: I hope I’ve given some idea in this discussion of the importance of education, and an investment in understanding creativity as a social act. I think more constructive political actions will follow a shift in habitus, to invoke Bourdieu, around creativity in culture. Some of that change is happening around the spread of DIY culture, but it needs to be accompanied by a claiming of Constitutional rights in copyright to avoid a construction of DIY culture as the consumer end of commercial culture.

Ellen: I do not feel optimistic. The size of Google and its moves to enter the realm of mainstream TV, film and publishing as a distributor does not bode well. Politicians are, of course, very dependent on media distribution companies for their own election campaigns and this will always hamper what can be achieved in terms of legislative action.

What do you see as the value of attempts such as Creative Commons or Copy Left to imagine alternative copyright regimes as opposed to shifting interpretations of existing laws and practices?

Ellen: Creative Commons, for anyone new to this debate, is a non profit corporation founded by legal schlars Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle and their collaborators. It has helped thousands of artists and scholars to share their work in a way that protects their rights while also letting others freely use, distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work, as long as they give you credit. It has been a powerful force in keeping the Internet and publishing more open. The “Share Alike” license offered by Creative Commons means that you can find work (photos, music, etc.) to use in your own project but then your project must also comply with the “Share Alike” model. It has been a lifesaver for academics and amateur video makers. I still have the feeling that CC licenses primarily work for content creators who have another means of making a living-- a day job, if you will-- like academics. Or a trust fund. Some other revenue stream. With the increasing globalization of Big Media-- there are going to be increased challenges.

Pat: To the extent Creative Commons is seen as one of the tools people have to rebalance copyright, a tool that resides on the monopoly rights holder side of the equation, I think it’s great. If it’s seen as either a guerrilla attack on copyright or the dawn of copyright-free culture, well, that kind of thinking stops people from getting to any kind of a solution.

Copyleft work generally has done a great job of putting copyright issues on the map. If people get so frustrated that they despair of rebalancing copyright, they will, I’m afraid, move from idealism to cynicism. So it’s important to avoid alarmism, moralizing, and utopianism, if we want to find ways to foster culture-creating for a digital, DIY environment. Dreams are great, ideals are great, but solutions for waking-world problems always deal with the highly imperfect environment we live in. Ellen’s book is full of great practical advice for just that.

Part of what has given some moral and ethical complexity to the debates about copyright is that the industry often seeks to defend the “rights of artists” but in practice, artists are often forced to sign their rights away to corporate ownership and may be as badly exploited by studios and labels as they are threatened by infringement by unauthorized consumers. Where do the artists themselves stand in current debates around intellectual property?

Ellen: Yes, the entire history of the film/TV/music industry is full of exploitation of artists. If young people today were better educated about the bloody struggles to get unions, they would understand more about their value. Artists’ have a fighting chance when a contract is involved, and an even better chance if they are members of a guild, a union, or some kind of professional association that can educate them about their rights-- and this takes some time. Just because artists’ are ripped off by studios and music companies, however, does not mean we want to do away with employment contracts, because that is what the entire structure of labor protections are based on. There is a lot of lawyer-bashing in the DIY community, which I think is extremely short-sighted. Of course there are corrupt lawyers out there. But we need to get past some of the early utopianism of this movement and also take a long, hard look at what is happening in terms of shrinking employment and the myriad ways young people are enticed to work for free. I am hoping some of the pushback on unpaid internships by educational institutions will begin to make for some policy changes. We need lawyers like Peter Jaszi and Michael Donaldson, and it takes about one second for a talented kid to figure out why he might want to be represented by a professional agent or attorney once the prospect of real financial remuneration comes through.

Pat: Yes, I agree with Ellen that people need to know the history that won them the rights they have. I also think doing this work has allowed me to meet many creative and supportive lawyers, whose work has helped to change the environment for artists. It is altogether true that large media corporations have all too easily enlisted artists into the company’s private-interest battles using Romantic notions of artistry and alarmism.

Another recent controversy concerned the role of parody in our current understanding of intellectual property law as playwright David Adjmi received a cease-and-desist notice for his play, 3C, which appropriated and responded to the classic sitcom Three’s Company. More and more of our current creative practices involve acts of sampling and remixing, some of which meet legal standards of parody and others do not. How effective and appropriate do you see current law at policing the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate forms of remix?

Ellen: David Adjmi’s 3C is an interesting example because this case involved a clear example of fair use under the satire or parody ”safe harbor.” It also sheds light on the differences between theatrical and television understandings and professional practice of copyright. The play is set in the 70s and centers on roommates in an apartment in Santa Monica. It deliberately evoked the popular 70s sitcom where two women and a man are roommates, and the man has to pretend he is gay to satisfy the uptight landlord that no co-habitation is going on-- and for half the show’s gags. Three’s Company” ran on ABC from 1977-1984-- and is notorious for Suzanne Sommers as a classic dumb blonde type. Adjmi’s version is a black comedy in which the male roommate really is gay and the satire and pathos revolve around him “playing” gay When the cease and desist letter came out, Adjimi, even though he is a published playwright, did not have the funds for a legal defense. Reviewers of the production, which ran for five weeks off-Broadway, called 3C a black comedy-- Adjmi said he tried to imagine what Chekhov would do with “Three’s Company.” The production went on as planned, and the show closed. What I would want to point out about the case, though, is that Adjmi, as a member of the Dramatist’s Guild, was able to rely on some important friends-- Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner were among the signatories on a letter in support of Adjmi, and Jon Robin Baitz (“Other Desert Cities”, and the TV series Brothers and Sisters”) rallied the theatre community and offered to pay his legal fees. This is a case where a community of professional artists in one of the last bastions of unionism-- NY theatre---- may have kept the lawyers at bay. Adjmi did not respond to the letter, which said it could not be performed again or published. It’s worth noting, however, that nothing can invite the wrath of studio lawyers quicker than tampering with a television show that has syndication earnings.

Pat: I appreciate this background. I haven’t seen the play, and so can’t have an opinion on its employment of fair use (in which parody is an instance), since context is everything in fair use, so I have no opinion on the case. David Adjimi appeared, according to the New York Times, to be stalled out at first no because he hadn’t sought out legal counsel and didn’t want to incur any costs.

I’m glad he has influential friends. But I also think that if he does have a fair use argument, he also has friendly organizations to turn to. I believe there is substantial pro bono legal counsel on viable fair use cases. If I were him, I would turn to the ACLU or to the Stanford Fair Use Project, or to the IP legal clinics at University of Southern California, University of California at Berkeley, or Fordham University. They all, along with Electronic Frontier Foundation, have lawyers who litigate pro bono on fair use issues. (EFF typically deals with digital issues.) I hear from lawyers from all of them, calling me looking for promising cases.

Adjimi’s fair use argument does not have to be that he has a parody. He merely has to have a transformative purpose, and use the appropriate amount to meet that purpose. He has to not be using the elements of the sitcom in order to give the same kind of pleasure to the audience in the same way that the original does. I gather from the scanty description of the play that I can access online and from Ellen’s description that the play depends on the audience’s familiarity with “Three’s Company” to make a statement about the cultural values invoked and expressed by the sitcom. Well, that’s a transformative purpose. I probably would have to see the play to decide for myself if the amount taken was appropriate. But certainly if you’re going to invoke “Three’s Company” you want to have a certain amount of the package of the elements to play with.

How effective is the law at policing the boundaries? Well, that depends on what you mean, I guess. The law isn’t an abstract element. We carry our sense of the law with us. David Adjimi appears to have a fairly shaky idea of his rights under fair use, and his advisors do too. He doesn’t have a great way to do a risk analysis, since his community of practice, playwrights, haven’t acted as a community to decide what they need from the law and asserted it within a code of best practices in fair use. He hasn’t chosen to find out how related communities of practice think about it, by consulting their codes of best practices in fair use. Or at least he hadn’t as of the reports I read.

It’s easy for the “Three’s Company” folk to issue a cease-and-desist letter. It’s routine, as Ellen notes, when you have a valuable property. It costs nothing more than the price of a lawyer’s time to dictate the letter, and under the law no matter what they say in that letter, there’s no penalty. So they can claim, bluster, threaten, as they like. David would have to know his rights or find a pro bono lawyer who does, in order to resist.

But the law is pretty good, actually, on the fair use side. And not just for David, but for remixers in many media. It’s flexible, accessible, adaptable. Judge’s interpretations have been pretty stable in stressing transformative purpose combined with appropriate amount for 25 years. But in practice it means what it means to the people who most use it. So if the cease-and-desist letter writers use it and the receivers of the letters don’t, then the cease-and-desist letter writers win.

If the law weren’t otherwise so pathologically unbalanced, we wouldn’t have to care about fair use. But since copyright is effectively eternal (at least for our creative lifetimes), default, and extending so far through derivative works, we have to care. Sigh.

Good news? The more we understand our rights, the quicker we can get on with DIY remixing and sampling.

And let me take this moment to say it’s a dang shame that musicians haven’t been able to organize themselves to decide what they need from existing music in order to make new music. The law would in theory permit a wide range of borrowing. Several cases have come close to engaging fair use and music, including the first two Bridgeport cases (discussed in the book). But people settle out of court after a first-level judgment that doesn’t address fair use, and a precedent is set. This leaves judges and music producers down the line with the general impression that in music, people always get licenses. Practice. Practice is really really a big thing. If musicians practice a clearance culture, they create precedents that lead to more clearance culture.

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.

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

Copyright was historically constructed as a “balancing act” between the interests in authors in gaining compensation for their ideas and the public in being able to meaningfully deploy those ideas towards the common benefit. Yet, copyright is now increasingly understood through a conflictual lens, where one group must benefit at the cost of the other, or as Ellen characterizes it at one point, “an arms race between content creators and content users.” Is there any way to move this back from a conflict-based frame in ways that might create a win-win scenario for all participants? Why or why not?

Ellen: This is capitalism we are dealing with, so I don’t expect there to be a happy ending. In fact, I think it would be better to look as harshly as possible about the competing interests and recognize the class war embedded in it. If anything, I think copyright can help us to understand how much labor is being devalued and how much has already been given away. So I am less interested in protecting the freedom of fans, for example, and more interested in protecting those professionals (and in this I include the below-the-line workers in the media industries) to be able to sustain a living wage and even a steady income for those who are successful. It is precisely on the battleground of Internet streaming (where so much can be captured for free and repurposed) that the WGA and SAG suffered serious losses, since the studios deemed it merely promotional and therefore not a use that bore on residuals.

Digital Content Creation shook the media industries by providing new distribution outlets for creative work and a demand for new skill sets among creative workers, something that has exacerbated the tendency to favor the young for employment and discard the older, more experienced, and more labor-savvy workers. When we look at dramatic/ fictional media creation the picture shifts considerably from the issues in documentary work. The expansion of dreams of “making it” as a director, an actor, a musician or a writer has produced a new and quite unrealistic model of training in which young people are encouraged to invest enormous resources in training, self-promotion, technology, and unpaid content creation—in the hopes of being discovered, or securing an unpaid internship. My main concern is that digital content creation has been exploited by studios, talent agencies and television networks to undermine the creative and craft guilds in Hollywood. In these historic labor struggles, talent gave away their rights through work-for-hire contracts, but the consolation prize was decent wages, benefits and residual payments to make up for the long periods of unemployment and the long periods of unremunerated preparation for these jobs. Now that Google is moving in the direction of big media, distributing expensive, professionally produced content, there is a lot of room for further exploitation, where creative talent is paid merely in ad revenues, not by salary or residuals.

Pat: I couldn’t agree more that the rhetorical positioning is now conflictual. Bill Patry, in his smart book Copyright Wars, calls this a moral panic. A moral panic is when people are arguing about the wrong problem in a highly emotional way. Or to quote Wikipedia, without employing fair use, since all the stuff on Wikipedia is made freely available under a Creative Commons license, “Moral panics are in essence controversies that involve arguments and social tension and in which disagreement is difficult because the matter at its center is taboo.”

I’ve talked about the photographers. They’re emblematic of one side of the debate, where all unauthorized use is immoral. I recently saw the other side in action, when I attended Wikimania 2012. I went to the debate on whether fair use should always or never be used in Wikipedia. This is quite a hot discussion topic, actually, on the Talk pages of Wikipedia. It was interesting to see the heated emotion displayed, primarily by users (the pro-fair use side was staffed by lawyers, who tended not to get passionate), on the side of the argument that said it should never be used. There are some practical difficulties (will downstream users really understand that they can’t remix that stuff without doing an assessment of their own? will laws in other countries match up with U.S. fair use?) but the biggest obstacle, it seemed, was a profound disgust with copyright as an unfree regime. Even though copyright permits unlicensed use, that right was not seen as a right so much as a begrudging permission by an ungenerous uncle. They saw it as besmirching a beautiful product, beautiful because it was free.

The problem is, though, that the mission of Wikipedia is to be a free encyclopedia of human knowledge, not--as Brandon Butler on the panel put it--an encyclopedia of free human knowledge. He argued that including copyrighted material when it was necessary to make mission was sensible, even if it had to be employed under fair use. Respondents argued that leaving blank spaces clearly labelled to show unavailability because of copyright reasons was consistent with the mission to be free and also a lesson in the costs of having copyright.

Is there a way to get out of this mess? One way is to recognize the truths that Ellen is pointing to--that the business model issue is separate from the copyright issue. The business model issue is very real. Traditional media business models are eroding, which affects vast swaths of middle managers. At the same time, the industry’s business model crisis interacts with a trend that has been accumulating particular strength since 1980 and the conservative resurgence, to disempower workers. The business model crisis creates an incentive to further exploit working people in media, especially the newest entrants. It is heartening, however, to note that even as incumbent businesses flounder, the total revenues for entertainment fields are growing, according to the impressive and extensively documented report, “The Sky Is Rising” (http://www.techdirt.com/skyisrising/).

Those who are frustrated by copyright sometimes turn to a copyleft alternative model. I don’t think constructing some alternate world, for instance, getting everybody to agree to give their stuff away with Creative Commons licenses, will work.. I think too much stuff will never go into the commons; you’ll never persuade the photographers, much less HBO, to give it away. Too much significant work in our culture--including the stuff that makes up some of the most memorable remixes and fan fiction--is made on commercial terms. Moreover, many, many people are actually really invested in having their copyright monopoly rights. I also agree with Ellen that it’s important to think about how to reward the actual makers of work. I use Creative Commons licensed work in my own, and I have Creative Commons licenses on some of my work, but I see it as a limited, if important, tool in the kit of resources to rebalance copyright.

I do see a big change in the communities of practice that have created codes of best practices in fair use. I’ve seen a big change in how creators think about what they want to do. I’ve seen changes in industry practice, e.g. how insurers for errors and omissions now treat fair use claims. Perhaps most exciting to me has been to see people who reclaim their own fair use rights come to see those rights as rights worthy of political defense. I’ve seen people who in previous years didn’t even know they had fair use rights go to the Copyright Office, ask for an exemption for their group of people (professors, documentary filmmakers, vidders) from the DMCA’s criminal penalties for breaking encryption for fair use, and.....win! Admittedly that’s not a game changer for the copyright regime, but an accommodation within a terrible law. But it is evident that people can see themselves as part of a political constituency.

We wrote the book precisely to contribute to reframing the discussion, away from an emotionally laden moral discussion toward a discussion of how we can get to the job of creating more culture better. I think when people move from a “permissions culture” to a position of agency, that is a political move, and it enables them to think about these and other issues from a more collective viewpoint, which should also encourage association and union participation.

I have seen that when you show people the consequences of their actions, they understand much better what risks they are taking. Suddenly the risk of not creating culture, not getting to create, to express, to use their freedom of speech, becomes significant and real to them. The risk of getting sued for copyright infringement becomes a risk you can calculate instead of, as one filmmaker called it, “the monster in the closet.” They can see the risks the same way they see risks in other employment of their First Amendment rights. After all, libel, treason, obscenity laws all have ugly penalties, and they all are triggered by inappropriate First Amendment acts. That doesn’t stop people from criticizing fat cats or crooked cops or using terms for female body parts while discussing reproductive health. And when people see copyright within that First Amendment lens, the discussion is very different.

I wish I had stronger faith in legislative or judicial options at the moment, but without having a mobilized and sizeable constituency, I’m afraid I don’t. At the moment. I am impressed at what a difference practice makes, and I think practice can shape the building of constituency. I think we saw what a difference the blacking out of Wikipedia made to SOPA/PIPA. There had been a lot of crucial inside-the-Beltway work done on those shockingly poorly crafted bills before that moment, so I don’t want to act like Wikipedia brought them down. But Wikipedia and other blacked-out sites did make a difference. And the action taught a lot of people in that ambit the power of numbers of outraged citizens. Wikipedia’s leaders are mildly alarmed by the precedent set, though. SOPA/PIPA would directly and negatively have affected Internet culture, and so it was squarely within Wikipedia’s wheelhouse. Wikipedia’s leaders (both Jimmy Wales and the head counsel of Wikipedia spoke about this) are worried that Wikimedians may decide to use this tactic on issues that are not specifically a life threat to Wikipedia itself, which would jeopardize the foundation’s tax status, could weaken the organization by creating factions, and be ineffective to boot. So I don’t think that one act has a natural next one within Wikipedia. But it clearly educated a lot of Wikimedians and Wikipedia users about political action.

As we look at the current struggles over intellectual property, it seems that commercial producers and grassroots participants (for lack of better terms as these relationships are somewhat shifting) look at these debates through different lens. So, first, what do we see as the primary concerns, fears, anxieties, hopes of copyright holders in these struggles to define what constitutes appropriate policy?

Ellen: Copyright holders are attentive to their specific markets. Take the case of a viral sensation of the summer of 2012: The Snuggie version of Beyonce’s song "Countdown."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4aiwTkDwCY

Here is an amateur video, performed and directed by a teenager (who is a shining example of how much people can learn and achieve in DIY media) using a major pop song. But he is also a member of the target market for pop divas: and this market segment is more likely than others to go ahead and purchase the music download, buy the CD and go to the concert. So there is a motivation to be lenient and even to use amateur videos to publicize the songs, both because they don’t want to alienate this market-- which has been performing pop hits in bedrooms before mirrors for decades--and because they are not at risk in the same way of losing all sales.

There are varying levels of policing and it is important to look at the cases where DIY media is welcomed (this was formerly the case with anime distribution, as Mimi Ito’s work has so effectively demonstrated) and there is a kind of tacit agreement that you do your part as a consumer.

So Beyonce posts the Snuggie video on her website and calls it brilliant and better than the original. No word from Snuggie yet, although they must be delighted.

Pat: It’s great to remember, as Ellen reminds us, that there are endless accommodations by businesses to their best interests in practice. In terms of creating new policy formally, I think that incumbent corporations with significant revenues from media have a deer-in-the-headlights approach at the moment. Copyright policy is one tool they have to resist the future. On the other hand, everybody saw what happened to the music industry, and nobody wants to be Kodak, so that may shift the vigor of their approach to shoring up their assets with even more extended copyright terms and stiffer penalties for perceived infringement and technical overrides of fair use. Maybe. But actually in DC there is strong expectation that we will see a bill introduced fairly soon extending copyright terms....again. And SOPA/PIPA haven’t really gone away.

I think makers and users of all kinds have a different set of concerns, which I’ve discussed above in part. Many people have a Romantic notion of creativity, in which originality is prized, copying is regarded as cheating, and creativity is produced at a high personal psychic cost. That infuses how they then think about copyright.

This is true both for the copyrightists and the copyleft, actually. Artists often construe themselves as fearless appropriators and then are outraged at unauthorized reuse of their work, even when it’s clearly fair use. The copyleft community is, I think, an early adopter phenomenon rather than the beginning of a dominant “commoner” culture. As more and more people create digitally, I don’t see new waves of copyleft people; rather, I see sudden interest in figuring out how to claim and exercise monopoly rights, concern about unfair commercialization of one’s work, etc. Even within the copyleft, there is great anxiety about inappropriate (e.g. commercial) use of their work.

This Romantic construction of creativity (about which my co-author Peter Jaszi has written quite a bit, and very interestingly) is often exploited by corporate actors in lobbying.

At the same time, people are definitely enjoying, in greater and greater numbers, the kind of remixing (machinima, video remixes, all kinds of photographic memes) that used to be much harder to do. This group of people is now much much bigger than the geeky early adopters. So they’re getting a greater stake in accessing the copyrighted world around them. I can see corporate efforts to meet that appetite with new forms of licensing and apps, but these efforts aren’t moving quickly enough. Copyright law really makes more streamlined licensing rather difficult. But I do wonder if the perceived needs of many people who are not ideologically motivated when they remix and do DIY culture will be met with some kind of inferior (to me, certainly) licensed service. That certainly is true now with a lot of machinima, which is often done within the terms the game company set.

So I think this is an exciting moment in which people might be able to move beyond their (often new-found) frustration with their access to copyrighted culture, productively, if they understand the basis of copyright better. And they would become part of a political constituency for a more balanced copyright, not just for easier access to licensed databases provided on company terms.

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.

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

Mitt Romney’s campaign recently faced a takedown notice from BMG on YouTube for incorporating a news clip of Obama singing a song owned by BMG. What does this case say about the current state of the debate? As these struggles reach those in power, will they develop a better understanding of what’s at stake for ordinary people in their dealings with major media companies?

Ellen: Important to note that all kinds of “legal” issues are tightly linked to the politics of race and class. Was BMG taking Obama’s side? Was YouTube? Meanwhile the Romney campaign just went to Vimeo and re-posted it, but without a link to their campaign website.

Now the counterpoint to this political ad, Romney’s rather weak vocal performance of “America the Beautiful” reminds us of a tried and true techniques for young media makers: use something in the public domain. But it ALSO refers back to an era where sheet music was a big money maker and many copyright statutes focused on protecting the rights of composers, music publishers, even player piano manufacturers. The laws derive from interest groups and from technologies of distribution—those on their way up and those on their way out. America the Beautiful was first published in 1910. Good to remember that we are always dealing with media industries under assault by new technologies -- for the sheet music business that meant player pianos, records, and later xeroxing.

Interesting to compare to the Jackson Browne controversy during the last campaign, where Jackson Brown won damages for McCain using his song “Running on Empty.” Again it is a legal case inextricable from social and political contexts. But I also think that Jackson Browne still has the right to protect his intellectual property rights and control their use.

Pat:This kerfuffle demonstrates a number of things about the current state of fair use. First, it caused a huge media uproar; so copyright issues definitely are in the public eye, and they are generating conversations about how we can both circulate and grow culture.

Second, it shows how people come to exaggerate the issues. YouTube is required by law (the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to take down any video that a content holder flags as infringing. As Ellen noted earlier, many copyright holders do issue takedown notices, typically the result of automatic programs matching content, which means a lot of fair uses get swept up into the net.

Then it’s up to the person who uploaded it to challenge the take down by employing their fair use rights, and explaining to YouTube why they believe it’s fair use. (Under law, you don’t have to be exactly precisely on-the-nose right with your fair use choices; you have to demonstrate reasonable judgment, and the law permits some squish.) Then if YouTube finds that credible, the video goes back up, and if the content holder wants to pursue legal action directly with the uploader, they can. In this case, it’s very likely that BMG issued the takedown request as a result of bot detection, not person detection. Romney’s campaign people explained it was fair use, and YouTube put it back up. No more has been heard from BMG and I’ll be shocked if there is.

Ellen: According to Politico it was at the request of BMG-- but I guess that could have been bot-generated. Here’s some more discussion of it all.

Pat: So, my point on this one is that the system, such as it is, worked. Now, you could definitely say, and we definitely have, that pre-emptive takedowns are a hindrance to the employment of fair use, and disrespectful of that important First Amendment right. I haven’t noticed any policymakers listening to me or Public Knowledge or Electronic Frontier Foundation or any of the other geeky media policy folk more than they’re listening to Hollywood, music companies, and software companies; but it would be great to see a more organized constituency pushing on the DMCA. I wonder personally if the arrival in Washington, D.C. of Google and Facebook (aren’t you surprised it took them this long to set up DC offices??) will change the discussion. Ellen’s concern about Google’s media-ization are widely shared; but at the same time, Google and Facebook were opposed to media interests on SOPA/PIPA. Right now, though, copyright policy reform (e.g. DMCA reform) has a third-rail quality.

Third, the incident shows the ubiquity of fair use in our landscape. We see it in every daily newspaper (oh look, they quoted from a think tank report!), in the television news and in those invaluable and Viacom-owned shows The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; in every student paper (that footnoted quotation), in every scholarly work. And political campaigns routinely incorporate existing material, often edited in a way to denigrate the opponent.

There’s a common use of copyrighted material in political campaigns that is much dicier--the part where campaigns use popular songs without permission to attract and energize the crowd and as intros to the candidate jogging up to the platform. It’s just not clear how that use is transformative; it’s one of the uses the market serves directly. It usually comes to light because performers don’t agree with a politician’s perspective. And the politicians always claim fair use. Often the cases are just settled, either with payment or the candidate agreeing not to use the music any more.

You both are writing about legal issues from the perspective of media scholars. What do you think media scholars bring to these debates which are missing from previous work on intellectual property law? What do you think media scholars have to learn from legal authorities working in this space?

Pat: I am profoundly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Peter Jaszi since 2004 on the various projects that inform our book. I have learned an enormous amount, not just about the law but about how people regard, use and shape the law through their conceptualization, discussion and actions. Peter Jaszi is a legal scholar whose work is informed by some reading that media scholars do as well, especially in the areas of cultural studies and post-structuralism. I have brought a perspective shaped by the perspective of John Dewey on political participation and by Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and other cultural theorists on the process of cultural production.

As a media scholar, one of the assets I also brought to the project was my networks of contacts in practitioner communities. Our work with documentary filmmakers, journalists, film scholars, communication scholars, and remixers has all been informed by earlier work on and with these communities.

Another asset I brought to the project was a long history of working on communication and media policy issues, in which access, public participation, and democratic process were major themes. Copyright policy is another realm of knowledge, but it is shaped by the same political process, economic and political stakeholders, and institutional structures that other policies are. And as with other communication policy issues, the infrastructural elements shaping expression often go unnoticed by most people, often until it’s too late to undo bad decisions.

Our work focuses on copyright policy, but copyright policy as it intersects with creative action. So we have been able to see inside people’s heads, in a way, to see not only what they think and think about but what they are avoiding thinking about. This has been absolutely fascinating. It has been a privilege.

Ellen: The work that Pat and Peter Jaszi have done for over a decade through American University’s Center for Social Media has made a tremendous contribution to the understanding of media scholars, while offering vital assistance to media practitioners, teachers and lawyers. Their work has really brought fair use to the attention of media studies scholars-- who are not always rushing into legal topics-- as well as media makers. We owe them a great deal.

I think media scholars bring an important HISTORICAL knowledge about audiences and about distribution technologies that is invaluable to these debates. All that stuff about the patent wars over film technology that you learn in film history class in college is still extremely relevant to the shifting power dynamics among those who invent and sell the technology and those who want to use it for creative purposes, as well as the middle managers in the distribution business.

My interest in this entire topic has been repeatedly revitalized by the work of two legal scholars who write the kind of painstakingly researched, thrillingly written, and deeply creative stories about our legal past that are a model of humanities work. I am thinking here of Adrien Johns and Catherine Fiske. Johns is important for his book Piracy in which he takes a very long perspective on history and how often the winners and losers can change in copyright and patent battles. Fiske is important for introducing a keenly focused attention to labor and how people control or lose the rights to their own work in her book Working Knowledge. Both scholars help us to remember that what happened in book publishing in the 18th and 19th centuries must be kept in mind as we deal with audio visual media.

How did you each become involved in work on intellectual property law? What motivates your recent books on this topic? How does it relate to your previous work?

Ellen: Way back in the 70s when I was a senior at UCLA, my family wanted me to go to law school. So I applied to film schools and law schools at the same time. I am eternally grateful to my sister Rose who advocated on my behalf that I could always go to law school later, but if I went to law school then I would never get back to film school. My co-author, Bill Seiter, is my brother and an IP attorney, so this stuff has been dinner conversation for twenty-five years. It was a fascinating part of the process of writing this book to recognize the differences in our disciplinary perspectives and which parts of the puzzle each of us were missing, given our academic training and professional experience.

Now I actually want to go to law school. JK.

But my initial interest in these matters came from my own experiences as a filmmaker, and from teaching film and video production for twenty years.. I finished my MFA in 1978 making experimental shorts and documentaries. We used optical printers then, no computers, and it was painstaking, but we did amazing things with found footage, and we freely used all kinds of materials. Even then, however, we knew not to mess with the music, but try to commission musicians for soundtracks. It always breaks my heart when students pour hours of work into a film and haven’t thought out what they can and cannot use from the onset if they want to be able to submit to festivals, etc.

By 2005, when I made my most recent documentary, Projecting Cultures: Perceptions of Arab and American Film, at USC, I was getting quotes of 20K for one minute of a 1950s feature film that was exclusively for educational use. (You can see the video and the clips from Hollywood and Egyptian films here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmd4cUY7g-s

I had to conform to the requirements of my funding agency (The Sunnylands Trust/ Annenberg Center for Public Policy) and of USC School of Cinematic Arts. Like all big institutions they are wary of fair use and have undoubtedly made the situation much worse. Like many publishers, colleges and universities, and festivals, the bottom line is that they do not want to offend the donors, and in the case of my school that involved a big movie star who had appeared in the film and the studio that distributed it. We eventually got all three film distributors whose films we used to agree to give the clips for free, but only after we had used a lot of the budget for a rights clearance specialist, because studios don’t return calls from your average filmmaker. They want to know that everything about transferring the quality version of the dub, etc., will be done exactly as they specified. Pat has done so much important work (along with Peter Jaszi, and with extraordinary support from LA lawyer Michael Donaldson) on advocating for documentary filmmakers and their fair use rights, but to “win” still often involves a hefty price tag either in legal fees or clearance specialists.

Pat: Of all film schools, USC is the most rigid to my knowledge, and I agree with Ellen that it’s entirely related to the special relationship with major studio figures. It’s not just frustrating to USC filmmakers but to many others including staff who want to support teachers and researchers and who know the law is available to them. It’s also a reminder of the importance of practice in determining access to the law.

Peter Jaszi and I plunged into the lived experience of filmmakers’ creative struggles with copyright together. I knew Peter Jaszi from previous conferences on communication policy and copyright issues, when he invited me to a conference on copyright and culture. Like other non-lawyers there (he had made sure to get cultural actors there!), I found the concerns of scholars about “tight copyright” very compelling, but I was puzzled by why the media makers I knew weren’t complaining about it themselves.

That is still a fascinating issue for me. Many professional creators focus only on the threats in the digital landscape to traditional business models. Photographers in particular believe their profession is imperiled. Photographers never seem to worry, though, about the fact that most photographs capture copyrighted material in the picture taken. The reality that all cultural expression is in some way recombinant--that it all uses existing culture as a platform, that every one of us “stands on the shoulders of giants” (and no, Isaac Newton did not think up that phrase)--has been buried under a deluge of Romantic sensibility (the artist in the garret, creating a work of tortured genius in complete originality), bad teaching practices in K-12 (you can only use pictures from these licensed databases, and don’t copy!), and alarming FBI notices on our movies.

People confuse business models with creative process, and they moralize one part of the copyright regime. They believe they have simple property rights in stuff they’ve created, and that even if other people have a legal right to use it, that’s an immoral act. Many remixers, of course, just flip that problem around. They say it’s an immoral act to hoard your stuff, and you should give it away. Meanwhile, the law both incentivizes creative acts by granting a monopoly right that is limited, and by encouraging use of copyrighted material if you are making new culture in some way.

Anyway, I loved the idea of exploring that problem of how creative actors think about copyright in their creative process, and so did Peter Jaszi. We were lucky enough to get interest from Joan Shigekawa at the Rockefeller Foundation (she’s now doing great things at the NEA), and that one grant plunged us into an odyssey that hasn’t stopped.

Oh and by the way the answer to my question--we focused on documentary filmmakers, since I knew so many of them--was that documentary filmmakers simply were not aware of the depth of their self-censorship. When they learned how profoundly their creative process was crippled by their confusion on copyright and fair use, they created a code of best practices in fair use that changed their industry.

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.

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.