"Hope is an Active Verb": Brenda Laurel Revisits Computers as Theater (Part Three)

In Utopian Entrepreneur, you offered a powerful call for designers and industry people to bring more of their own social values and political commitments into their work, making an argument for the ways that the design of media and culture can help change the world. Amazingly, you wrote this book after some of the set-backs you suffered with Purple Moon. Throughout this revision of Computer as Theater, we get a strong sense of your own commitments and values, especially as regard gender politics and environmentalism. Are you still optimistic about the potentials of Utopian Entrepreneurship? Can you point to some recent examples of people you admire who are working to achieve these kinds of meaningful change through entrepreneurial means?

These days I’m questioning both words. ‘Utopian’ has a statist tone historically, although the common meaning, I think, is to do things that are good for people and societies in sustainable ways. ‘Entrepreneurship’ leaves out the great work done in universities and non-profits, but it does provide an explicit measure of success.

That said, I must confess that Elon Musk is at the top of my list. People sometimes scoff at his excellent work with Tesla and SpaceX because they think Pay Pal was an egregious way to make money. Such folks need to remember that the big idea of Pay Pal was not to boost consumerism but to help people make monetary transactions of many types via the internet. I count that as good, if not utopian, work. SpaceX is filling a niche that is being vacated by NASA as it loses funding, and the working methods at SpaceX are speedier and yield a better product essentially because they are entrepreneurial.

Jane McGonigal is another great example. Her game “World Without Oil” won her the South by Southwest award for activism in 2008. Her goal is to create games that improve the quality of human life. She describes her latest work, “SuperBetter”, as “a game that has helped more than 250,000 players so far tackle real-life health challenges like depression, anxiety, chronic pain and traumatic brain injury.” Her work has also made her a best-selling author and a presenter in high demand.

In the world of serious games we have great examples of successful games like “Democracy” and “Democracy 2” from Positech. Another well-received example is “Peacemaker” from ImpactGames, originally developed by a team at Carnegie-Mellon. This particular game is one of many examples of work incubated within institutions of higher education. Although ImpactGames was later formed to publish the game commercially, it’s really important to remember its roots in the university. Your own work in the Games-to-Teach project at MIT provided a huge stimulus for the serious games movement, and much of the work is still done in universities. ‘Entrepreneurship’ may or may not be involved. Universities and non-profits can be great host organisms for pro-social work.

The ‘entrepreneurship’ qualification is only important if you measure the value of the game by its success in the commercial marketplace. Entrepreneurial approaches help us to demonstrate value by noting that a particular sort of ‘utopian’ product or service has found a sustainable niche in the ecology of commerce, but success in entrepreneurship is not an accurate measure of the Good.

Across the book, you shared some of your experiences as a Dead Head and as a participant in the Renaissance Fair culture. What models do these kinds of participatory culture offer us for thinking about the designed of shared social spaces and experiences within digital media?

I’m also a Trekker, as you recall.

I take away two important things from Deadhead culture. The first is a climate of trust. At Dead concerts, I never needed to worry about leaving a backpack on the lawn while I went to look at merchandise or buy a beer. I could be sitting next to a raving libertarian or a homeless hippie; it didn’t matter. Deadheads took care of each other as an ad hoc community. It would be lovely to establish a similar ethos in a social network or a multiplayer game.

Boundaries are definitional of communities. People who behaved outside of albeit unstated norms of Dead culture were eased out of the community (or the space) by Deadheads.

The other thing that really worked was the Dead’s attitude toward intellectual property. People taped the shows and special accommodations were made them. And anybody could hack the artwork to distribute their own home-grown merch. The Dead culture understands and accommodates appropriation as a need of fans. They made (and their successor make) their revenue from concerts, not intellectual property.

In the book, I used the Renaissance Faire as an example of how the clever selection and arrangement of materials (to quote Aristotle) could predispose individuals with differing traversals through the space to have dramatically satisfying experiences. This moves the notion of the dramatic from a line to a field. Interaction designers can also think about what sorts of predispositions are set up by the arrangement and potential ordering of experiences and encounters.

The embodied joy of walking around the Faire and speaking Faire-dialect English is not marred by the fear of attack or the need to fight. This demonstrates to me that it’s possible to create excellent multiplayer games without the need for explicit conflict as part of the play pattern.

I was surprisingly moved by your final line, “Hope is an active verb.” So, what are you hoping for in terms of digital culture in the next decade?

I hope we learn to use these capabilities that we continue to extrude to love our planet, ourselves, and one another better and more actively. Like the telescope and microscope, computer technologies hold the promise of allowing each of us to see deeply into nature, wild or urban. I believe that to see in this way can lead to both love and action. And I believe that we can develop digital tools that empower us to take action.

I hope that we can model good governance and civility in the digital world that will ripple through reality to change our institutions and behaviors.

I hope that we find highly engaging alternatives to violence and combat as the central element in the play pattern of most games. I remember when I came to Atari back in 1979, I played “Star Raiders” fanatically. But my first reaction was, “where is the negotiate button?” I hope we develop actionable negotiate buttons. I hope that the cultural ecology of connection and compassion can be strengthened. If we can do that in the digital domain, we can do it in our world.

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher in the domains of human-computer interaction and games. She currently serves as an adjunct professor in Computer Science Department at U. C. Santa Cruz. She served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts from 2006 to 2012 and the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006). Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre: Second Edition (2013).

"Hope Is an Active Verb": Brenda Laurel Revisits Computers as Theatre (Part Two)

Writing about a decade after Purple Moon's demise, I argued that many of the core design principles your team developed were being deployed successfully to broaden the audience for The Sims to include many more female gamers. Now, another five years or so later, I wondered what you saw as the lasting legacy of the girls game movement?

Without question the movement showed that intentional change is possible. Most of the companies were solvent (until their investors saw easier pickin’s in the web world), and some still exist today (e.g., Her Interactive). The interest of female-identified players in backstory creation as constructive play was demonstrated clearly and has carried through as a design heurisitic for broadening audiences.

We still have big gender problems in the gaming world, as you know. Sexual harassment is pandemic in many to most online multiplayer games. Games, like theatre, turn the mirror to our natures, to paraphrase Shakespeare; in an ever more divisive culture, sexual harassment in game worlds should not surprise us. Female-identified players who would like to perform strong, aggressive characters often have only overly sexualized bad-ass female avatars or cross-dressing to choose from.

On the other hand, I hear so often from girls—now women—who played our games. Many have gone into media design. It seems that most of my female design students played the games at some point in their lives. So something changed, if not in terms of the content, then at least in terms of the authorship.

Re-reading your book brought home to me just how much the past decade -- post-Web 2.0 -- has resulted in a shift of emphasis between a focus on interactive design and the relations between humans and computers and a focus on participatory design and the social interactions between users. To what degree are the dramatic principles you discuss in the book relevant to considerations of the design of social media?

As I said in the book, social media tend to be more narrative than dramatic, and that’s fine. By ‘narrative’ I mean the telling of extensified, episodic tales with little causal connectivity or overarching dramatic shape except through the relative constancy of characters (participants) and their networks. That said, social networks do have distinguishing qualities. On Linkedin, there may be little dramas about finding work, for example; on Facebook, there is competition for attention through photography and other means, and on Twitter folks compete is the construction of the brisk critique or the juicy link. Each of these systems has a sort of prevailing ethos with its own flavors of social regulation that is often more emergent than pre-designed into the structure of affordances. In fact, one often sees emergent behavior on Facebook that is picked up and codified into the system after the fact.

You note that one of the biggest challenges is to get designers to develop for people other than themselves. You discuss at some length here how you were able to achieve this mental shift with your professional team at Purple Moon. I wondered, though, if you could share some of your experiences as an educator helping students to make this adjustment in their own work.

When I teach design research (and I have, for the last 12 years), my primary goal is to expose students to methods for understanding people who are different from themselves and to design for those folks by meeting them where they are. The main point is: they are always, always surprised at how much can be learned through human-centered design research. It becomes a cornerstone of the design methodology that these students learn to practice. You will see it in every one of their thesis projects, and I often hear from them after they have launched careers and must argue for the relevance of design research within a firm or with a client. These people change things in the world of working designers. In places where design research is not taught, I find students and faculty sometimes searching for the audience after the project is in beta because their project does not address the audience they thought they were aiming at. This is a habit of mind that can be changed through experience as well as critique and exposure to design research methods, even when the colt is out of the barn.

You had important things to say about transmedia design in Utopian Entrepreneur, coming out of your experiences with Purple Moon, and I often share some of those insights with my students. Among them, you were ahead of the crowd in thinking about how fans might be able to meaningfully participate in the development of a transmedia world and especially about the notion of foundational myths or charters that shape the relationship between participants. In part, I assumed that these ideas came out of your own experience as a fan as well as a designer. How important do you see audience engagement and participation -- the social dimensions of consumption -- to your ideas about transmedia design?

I see audience participation as an extremely powerful affordance. In part, this goes back to the insight that backstory creation is a form of constructive play: players of Purple Moon could write articles in the Whistling Pines newspaper and suggest other dramatic arcs on our website, and we paid attention. Drama typically establishes empathy in conditions where the audience is passive. As you taught me, we create passionate relationships with characters and properties through our ability to appropriate them in order to construct meanings that are personally relevant. Cosplay has this one really right; so does slash. The vibrant domain of interactive narrative (Emily Short’s work, for example) does a great job of affording and encouraging player participation.

It is time that we hear from more diverse voices in interactive narrative and game design. As you know, Queer communities are making great strides in Indie Games as well as in interactive narrative. In such games, players have a way to enter into an ethos and construction that differ greatly from those afforded by the traditional gender stereotypes that dominate mainstream gaming. Samantha Allen’s work is exemplary in this regard.

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher in the domains of human-computer interaction and games. She currently serves as an adjunct professor in Computer Science Department at U. C. Santa Cruz. She served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts from 2006 to 2012 and the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006). Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre: Second Edition (2013).

"Hope Is An Active Verb": Brenda Laurel Revisits Computers as Theatre (Part One)

Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre was one of the few truly transformative books to emerge in the heady early days of the "digital revolution," demanding that we think of the computer as posing a series of creative problems that might best be address through the lens of the dramatic arts rather than purely technical problems that remain in the domain of the computer scientists. In a new edition released this month, she revisits that classic text in light of her rich and diverse experiences as a designer, educator, and entrepreneur. The resulting work looks backwards, at how far we have come towards transforming the computer into a new expressive medium and looks forwards to the technical and cultural problems we still need to resolve if we are going to produce a diverse and sustainable digital culture in the years ahead. I have been lucky enough to have had Laurel as a friend throughout my professional career and especially to be able to watch her journey with Interval Computing and Purple Moon games, where she broke new ground in seeking to broaden who played computer games, what kinds of experiences games offered, and what this new expressive media could accomplish. Justine Cassells and I documented some of her core insights in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games and we were with her shortly after Matel acquired and pulled the plug on the whole Secret Paths franchise. But, the story is perhaps best told through Brenda's own book, Utopian Entrepreneur, which I still turn towards when I seek inspiration about the value of doing interventions into the creative industries as a vehicle for promoting one's own personal and professional agendas. Laurel's insights predicted much that has happened in the games industry since, including the success of The Sims, which in many ways followed her template, the growth of transmedia entertainment which she helped to model, and the expansion of the female market around casual games.

Brenda Laurel has been and remains an important voice -- in many ways, the conscience of the digital industries -- and so it is with enormous pride that I share with you this exchange conducted online over the summer. Here, she reflects back on where we have been in digital theory and expression and speculates on some directions forward.

Reading back through this, I was struck by curious parallels between your work in Computers as Theatre and what Sherry Turkle was writing about in The Second Self around that same period. Both of you were trying to understand something of the mental models people brought with them to computers, even as you were asking questions that operated on different levels. What relationship do you see between these two key early works of digital theory?

Neither of us could have foreseen the firestorm of FPSs, social networks, and tiny interactions on tiny screens. In a way, I think that Sherry spoke a note of caution which I am trying to make actionable by suggesting that it’s not that these things exist, but to what use they are put (and how designers think about them) that can make them good for us or not (or somewhere in between). The relationship between the books may have been that we were each looking at the coming wave of technology as something fundamentally about humans, our social and developmental and cultural contexts.

Humans extrude technology. It is part of us. We are responsible for it. Each generation of the last 10 has had a new technology to deal with, to set norms about, to learn about appropriate usage. Parents and schools can help with media literacy—this would fit well into a Civics class, if we still had those.

As the topology of social networks complexifies, so do the opportunities and risks. I remember sitting with our girls in the age of television advertising and asking them, what are they trying to sell you? How are they trying to do it? Now they ask others the same questions as casual media critiques.

As I sat down to re-read this book, I was struck by the fact that I had no problem accepting the premise that what Aristotle had to say about drama might be valuable in thinking about what we do with computers (a theme upon which I gather you had some push back at the time the book was first published) but I had more difficulty wondering whether something written so early in the history of digital media would have anything to say to contemporary designers. It did, but the fact that this question surfaced for me leads me to ponder, what does this say about the nature of media change over the two decades since you first published this book?

It’s gratifying to me that many folks have worked on ideas in that first book and have made some progress, even recently. The largest excursions in the new edition are probably those about using science more robustly to model interaction. I’ve also emphasized the combined causal factors in multiplayer games and social media. Pointing back to your first question, I think that governance and civility are still essentially unsolved problems in this new world. I included Pavel Curtis and Lambda MOO in the new edition because there was such a valiant effort to figure out governance. I suspect that the lack of civility in multiplayer spaces today (especially in terms of sexual harassment) has something to do with the general lack of civility in our national character at this moment in time. But it also has to do with the designer’s role in framing and normalizing civil relations among multiple participants. There are great opportunities in this regard that might well channel back to our national discourse.

As I fan, I appreciated your rant about J. J. Abrams, Lost, and of course, Star Trek. What do you see as the limits of his “magic box” model for thinking about how to generate interests around stories? What alternatives do you think a more drama-centered approach offers?

As far as JJ says, his Magic Box has never been opened. That’s a problem for starters. If he wants to keep a virgin souvenir, great. But thoughtful plotting does not come out of thin air (or a closed box). Pleasing dramatic structures do not arise ad hoc. To the extent that character is a material cause of plot, the damage JJ has done to Spock and Uhura is unforgivable. It’s like throwing out some of the enduring stock characters in a Commedia piece. Spock stood for pure (if tortured) intellect; overtly sexualizing him was not a good thing for the Star Trek mythos. Transforming Uhura from a kick-butt, competent female officer into a romance queen (whose phasers don’t work as well as a man’s) fundamentally changed the ethos of the character as well as the mythos. That’s like saying that Oedipus held his temper at the crossroads and lived happily ever after with Mom.

A more drama-centric approach offers the pleasures of a well-structured plot, including catharsis. For enduring characters and ‘properties’ (e.g., The Odyssey), some core of dramatic tension already exists in the potential of the myth, and it can be spun out into many stories without exhausting its potential to deepen our relationships with the characters, their actions, and their universe.

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher in the domains of human-computer interaction and games. She currently serves as an adjunct professor in Computer Science Department at U. C. Santa Cruz. She served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts from 2006 to 2012 and the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006). Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre: Second Edition (2013).

Grand Theft: Annenberg

This is another in a series of blog posts created by students in my Public Intellectuals seminar at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Grand Theft: Annenberg by Dan O'Reilly-Rowe

Before moving to Los Angeles to begin my PhD work at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, I had probably spent less than a combined two weeks in Los Angeles in my life. But of course I know this place.

Growing up in Townsville, a small city in Australia, Los Angeles was a big part of my media-world. As a kid I'd beg my mum to buy me Thrasher  magazine, and idolise these men who balanced athleticism, artistry, and anti-authoritarian swagger. Christian Hosoi was my favourite skater. I know this place. LA is Blade Runner, NWA, swimming pools and movie stars.

As I drove out of the desert and into this city, my sensible grownup station wagon full of my most important stuff, my travelling companions a road-weary 4 year old and a black cat, I was struck by another cultural reference. I have not only seen this city's representation on screen and in print, I have navigated it in a videogame. I may not have spent much time driving the streets of Los Angeles, but the streets of Los Santos, a fictional setting in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are my old stomping grounds. Coincidentally, Grand Theft Auto V, set in an expanded rendering of Los Santos, is being released within months of embarking on my PhD studies on critical approaches to videogames and their potential role in social justice struggles.

I explore my new home. I see the city through the frame of my windscreen. My eyes glance down to the frame of my phone's display for an informatically augmented bird's eye view. I am reminded of Michel de Certeau's distinction between the concepts of place (Fr: lieu) and space (Fr: espace), map and tour. The map indicates the arrangement of locations in relation to each other, and corresponds to de Certeau's place. The tour, such as I experience as I gaze out my windscreen and pass through the city's terrain, constructs a practiced space. In my wanderings through Los Angeles, I find that I am often taking my place-oriented knowledge of the city, as represented through various maps on my phone, and putting them into practice as I move through the terrain. Los Santos not only simulates the physical geography of Los Angeles, it represents a cartoonish psychosocial space built around crude stereotypes of race, gender, and class.

In the meatspace of Los Angeles it is fairly easy to separate out the spaces I pass through and the places I see on my phone's maps. The representations of Los Santos' geography I see on the screen are less distinct. GTA's visual interface presents both a tour (the third-person over-the-shoulder perspective) and the map (the HUD mini-map) simultaneously. Both are representations of algorithms that are invisible to the player, but constitute the computer's only sense of the world of Los Santos. The cognitive effect of moving back and forth across these various representations and experiences of the city is dizzying. Exiting the tunnel that empties the I-10 freeway onto Santa Monica Beach, winding through the Hollywood Hills, passing a garage on a hill in Downtown LA, 90s West Coast hip-hop coming through the radio, I am often hit with a visceral sense of déjà vu. A critical inner voice nags at me: if my perception of the physical locations in the city is affected by my experience of a distorted and grossly simplified representation in the game, how does this work in terms of social relations?

My first few weeks in Los Angeles were structured by a series of quests to secure the basic elements of life in a new city. As with the early missions in a GTA game, these covered some essential tasks that would set in place a location and trajectory for the rest of my LA story. I needed somewhere more stable for my family to live than the series of short sublets that we'd arranged as a temporary landing pad. I also needed to find a pre- school for my daughter, preferably somewhere with an easy transition into elementary school. My basic strategy to do both of these things involved moving through the city while obsessively engaging with information about the city overlaid on interactive maps. A typical day would go like this: begin with searching through Yelp <www.yelp.com> for interesting playgrounds that my daughter and I could set up as a base for the day; once there, do a local area search for apartments on Trulia, Zillow, and other real estate apps; cross-reference rental listings against GreatSchools.org <www.greatschools.com>, a site that rates schools with an enigmatic algorithm based on a series of datapoints including test scores, ethno-racial diversity, and parent feedback. Often this process would drive me to frustration – data-driven activities and interfaces rubbing up against humanistic social justice values.

Ultimately we did find a place to live, a supercute bungalow in Highland Park, a neighborhood synonymous with many Angeleno's narratives of gang violence and recent gentrification. On moving day I pulled a box truck and trailer down the narrow dead end street and before long had a crew of neighbors I'd never met voluntarily lugging heavy furniture and boxes into the house. “You'll like it here. It's a great block. We all watch out for each other.” Lifestyle status levelled up from itinerant subletter to lease holder and good neighbor. w00t.

Now I sit in my car while the kiddo naps in the back seat, using my phone to learn more about my new home. Maps abound. I glance out the window and see one of the many billboards for GTA V that have been placed around LA to push the game's launch. The LA Times Crime Map indicates that Grand Theft Auto really is a fairly commonly reported crime around here. The LAPD Gang Injunction Map shows that the entire neighborhood is under an order that grants special powers to police when dealing with suspected gang members. As grassroots community organizations opposed to gang injunctions such as Youth Justice Coalition  and Homies Unidos  argue, the connections between racial profiling and the gentrification of neighbourhoods that have historically been populated by low income people of colour (often migrants), are not difficult to see in this situation. I find it hard to imagine the police detaining my pale skinned self to inspect my tattoos, the logos on my baseball cap, or the fit of my clothes as a basis  for attention that might lead to arrest. The gang injunction map breaks the city into color coded blocks, but at the micro level, the color coding of my skin pigmentation exempts me from its reach.

Sure, the GTA map is huge. But as in Borges' story fragment, the proximity of the map's scale to the size of the territory does not lead to a greater realism. The map ceases to serve as a representation of the world, and instead shapes the way we organize our understanding of the world. The sense of freedom to move through the city at will is at the core of GTA's sandbox gameplay, but it is an illusory freedom, tightly contained within the rule system that generates the world of Los Santos. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, similar strategies of power are at play as the people's physical and psychosocial spaces are shaped and constrained by algorithmic processes.

Dan O'Reilly-Rowe's research focuses on the intersections of new media, critical pedagogy, and social movements. His professional background includes work as a youth media educator, documentary filmmaker, and video artist. He has served as a lecturer at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and the Ringling College of Arts and Design (Florida), teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Subjects taught covered a range of media and communications topics, including online and mobile media, videogame studies, comics and graphic narratives, journalism, and public relations. Dan holds a Master's of Digital Communications and Culture from the University of Sydney (Australia), and Bachelor of Arts in the Humanities from Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia).

October 27, 2013/ Henry Jenkins/

games culture, University of Southern...

Henry Jenkins

Three Things that Western Media Fail to Tell You About Chinese Internet Censorship

This is another in a series of blog posts written by the students in my PhD seminar on Public Intellectuals, being taught this semester at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Strategic Censorship, Ambivalent Resistance, and Loyal Dissident: Three Things that Western Media Fail to Tell You About Chinese Internet Censorship

by Yue Yang

When talking about the Chinese Internet, what would first come to your mind?

The largest online gaming population in the world? A highly creative ICT (information and communication technology) community? An enormous e-commerce market? “Tu hao(土豪)”, “Watch and Observe (围观)”, “Er Huo (二货)”，”Jiong (囧)” ?

I don’t know about your answer, but I am sure most American media would say with alacrity “No, it is CENSORSHIP!” Indeed, “censorship” seems to have become their knee-jerk word to annotate the Chinese Internet. If you search “New York Times Chinese Internet” through Google, on the first page of search results, you would 9 out of 12 news stories related to censorship; for “CNN”, it is 9 out of 9 (with 3 urls linking to non-CNN websites), and for “Fox news”, it was 8 out 10.

Since American media is so interested in censorship on Chinese Internet, do they come up with good, objective censorship stories? As a native Chinese and a doctoral researcher studying the Chinese Internet in the US, I would say “yea” for “good storytelling” and “nah” for “objectivity”. Try to click on one of the top urls and you will see what I mean: this is an exotic digital world: on one hand, the iron-wristed Chinese government launches another round of censorship campaign. It cleanses criticism, cracks down dissident sites, and even puts political foes into jails. On the other hand, facing ruthless and stifling censorship, courageous and canny Chinese “netizens” (Internet citizens) use their ingenuity in various ways, to flit machine censorship and to mock the impotence of government. Be it a gloomy “Big Brother” story or an empowering “Tom-and-Jerry” story, a censorship story never lacks tension or a easy-to-follow storyline. However, these stories grounded only on partial facts are not qualified for universal validity they imply, and they are often too interested in drama to capture the plain truth. In short, current censorship stories in mainstream media are often too simplistic to inform western readers of the complex politics on the Chinese Internet. In the following part, I will talk about three things that western media do not tell their readers about Chinese Internet censorship.

(1) Strategic Censorship: yes, Chinese people criticize the government on the Internet!

The first thing that western media do not tell you about Chinese online censorship, is that average Chinese Internet users can and do express a lot of criticism about the party-government. In fact, such criticism attracts little interest from the government censorship.

It is a widely recognized observation by people who personally attend to political discussions on Chinese cyberspace, that online space of speech is expanding and people can criticize their government without seeing their unfavorable comments censored over time. This observation is contrary to what most media censorship stories are telling people, but recently it has been confirmed by a large-scale, big-data research report from a Harvard research team. By collecting, analyzing, and comparing the substantive content of millions of posts from nearly 1,400 social media services over all China, and distinguishing what gets censored from what remains online over time in discussions around 85 topics, the researchers have upended some popular stereotypes, and found that “negative, even vitriolic criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content”. Rather than remove any criticism against it, the Chinese government conducts strategic censorship, which “is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future”.

(2) What Chinese People Think about Censorship: infringement of rights or Moral Guidance?

The second thing that western media do not tell you about Chinese online censorship, is that Chinese people’s attitudes towards censorship are actually divided and ambivalent.

In 2009, the Chinese government made various censorship efforts to make it virtually prepared for an extremely sensitive time period: not long ago, the famous dissident and later-Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo released the “highly subversive” 08 Charter; starting from March, the government was to anticipate several major political anniversaries: the 50 anniversary for Tibetan uprising, the 20 anniversary for Tiananmen Event, and the 60 anniversary for the foundation of People’s Republic of China. Although nothing except the 60-year national anniversary was to be publicly celebrated, the government was highly vigilant against any online-and-off commemoration or mobilization of other political anniversaries.

In such context, there was little surprise that the Chinese government demanded pre-installed censorship software called “Green Dam Youth Escort(Lvba Huaji Huhang绿坝花季护航)” on each new PC to be sold in the market, including those imported from abroad. The purpose, of course, was to protect the psychological health of the young from pollution through pornography and violence. But Chinese Internet users soon found that the software expanded censorship to political information. Worse still, the software had so many technical defects that it would severely hurt overall online experience and security.

Shortly after the installation plan was announced, a large-scale online protest occurred among Chinese Internet users, particularly among the younger generation. Young people soon launched an online carnivalist play-protest, characterized by a manga-style personification of the software called the “Green Dam Girl” (Lvbaliang 绿坝娘). At the same time, “2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens” (“The Declaration”), a western-style manifesto against censorship appeared online.

Seeing such resistance, Chinese government canceled the installation plan, and the “Green Dam incident” became a typical case to illustrate Chinese emerging civil power countering the government’s blunt censorship decisions. However, when examining the online comments on “The Declaration”, researchers discovered wide expressions disagreeing with the anti-censorship declaration. In fact, there was considerable endorsement of the government’s filtering attempt during the incident.

Why was there public support for censorship? After looking closely at these for-censorship comments, doing interviews with their authors, and analyzing the collected data with reference to Chinese culture, the researchers made some very interesting analysis: unlike western people who conceive government as a “necessary evil” and censorship serious infringement of freedom of speech, the majority of Chinese people uphold Confucian state-society ideal, represented by the notion “custodian government(父母官 fuwu guan)”, which accordingly frame people’s understanding of censorship.

So what does “custodian government” mean and imply? Basically, it is a Confucian notion that proposes a state-society model in which the government maintains its authority through displaying exemplary virtue and parental care for people, and in return, people respect and obey the government like they respect and obey their own parents. When both government and people perform their roles properly, social harmony and ideal that would yield the best for the most can be materialized. Note that traditional Chinese culture does not challenge hierarchy or centralization, nor does it often raise government legitimacy questions as long as the administration is established in accordance with Confucian ethics.

In the case of “Green Dam”, a large number of people supported government censorship, because they expected a morally exemplary and custodian government to establish social norms and protect as well as regulate minors. In other words, to many Chinese, censorship does not necessarily mean violation of human rights or encroachment of individual interests, rather, it means moral measurements that are expected and accredited.

Such understanding was more popular among middle-aged Internet users, but it was not rare among the young either. In fact, researchers have found that quite an impressive percentage of Chinese Internet users are either unaware of or do not care much about the online censorship, stating that they are generally happy with the current cyberspace they have. In short, the general attitudes towards censorship are not as definite as most western media state.

(3) Subversive Dissident or Loyal Dissident?

The third thing that western media do not tell you about Chinese online censorship, is that Chinese Internet users are more of “loyal dissident” than subversive resisters, even if they were expressing criticism. It was again in 2009, an Internet meme called the “Grass Mud Horse” (Caonima 草泥马) gained viral popularity in Chinese cyberspace. “Grass Mud Horse” sounds almost exactly like an abusive phrase, and it was originally invented by young Chinese gamers to dodge Internet censorship on obscene expressions. Soon the word play adopted the visual form of an alpaca, and put into different extension forms such as stories, animations, music videos, and T-shirts and dolls. Even a virtual Chinese character was later invented for it.

The phenomenal popularity of Grass Mud Horse attracted a lot of western media attention in its peak time. CNN, BBC, and the Guardian, for example, produce extensive report on it. Citing academics, these reports claim that Grass Mud Horse is not only a grassroots symbol of resistance against censorship, but also a “weapon of the weak” to challenge (the legitimacy of) the authoritarian government.

The statement that “Grass Mud Horse” is a play turned into politics, making creative resistance against censorship and authoritarianism is indeed interesting. However, when analyzing how Chinese Internet users actually engaged in the “Grass Mud Horse” carnival, how people actually used the words, pictures and related stories to expressed what intentions, research has found that Chinese Internet users tended to use “Grass Mud Horse” to vent personal frustration, criticize local corruption and bureaucracy, rather than make accusations against censorship or challenge the government’s legitimacy.

In a similar vein, through looking at the most popular and uncensored microblog tweets on Weibo that discussed political scandals during the Spring of 2012, some Swedish researchers have found that Chinese Internet users are more interested in criticizing certain activities of the Party than challenging its hold of power.

In fact, more and more scholars start to realize that consensus against the current regime in China is yet to be produced. More interestingly, despite pervasively expressed criticism of the government, in two highly respected surveys conducted by non-Chinese scholars (World Value Survey and Asian Barometer Survey), the rate of loyalty and recognition declared by the Chinese public to their government is much higher than those from western democratic societies. Instead of implying another uprising in China, these studies suggest that Chinese Internet users may become more critical and expressive, but they are not ready to demand fundamental democratization.

When creating Chinese Internet censorship stories, western media often fail with four things. First, it fails to look more closely at what is happening; second, it fails to avoid wishful speculations; third, it fails to account for complexity that disrupts clear storytelling; fourth, it fails to put incidents into the broad Chinese social and cultural context. With such failure, western media reduce the extremely interesting and complicated Chinese Internet to a monolith and create stereotypes.

I hope I have well explained some important aspects that go beyond the oversimplification of Chinese Internet censorship in western media, so that you, my dear readers, will not only have reservations next time you hear something about the Chinese Internet, but also suspend belief whenever you receive messages about a different society from the media. Bolstering critical thinking and avoiding stereotyping, that’s what media literacy is working at, and that is also what I am trying to do with this blog post.

Yue Yang is a PhD student at Annenberg School for Communication, USC. Being a native Chinese, she is constantly confused and therefore deeply fascinated by the complexity of her country's culture and society, online and off. Her current interests range from Chinese people's imagination of the West, to the tensional dance between the Chinese government, the grassroots and the intellectuals on the cyber arena (and she always hopes that one day she could write as fast as she eats and publish as much as she speaks.).

Chivalry is Dead: SUBA51's Killer Is Dead, Gigolos, and The Status of (Virtual) Women

This is another in a series of blog posts written by students from my Public Intellectuals seminar in USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Chivalry is Dead: SUBA51's Killer Is Dead, Gigolos, and The Status of (Virtual) Women

by James B. Milner

I usually don’t purchase video games without doing my homework. This could take a number of forms. I tend to stick to companies which have produced the games I have loved the most in the past. I closely read reviews from sites like IGN and GameSpot, even though I often take the reviews with a grain of salt. In the buildup to the release of a new title, I will watch any number of video clips to get a sense of whether I will enjoy playing the game, and whether or not it would be worth $60 to get it when it comes out. All of this, and also I keep in touch with the associates at my favorite game store, who let me know what people with tastes similar to mine are reserving.

Ignoring most of my usual tricks, I bought Killer is Dead brand new knowing very little about it. I was informed that it was an indirect sequel to Killer 7 (which I had not played, but had heard good things about) and was by the same Japanese developer (SUBA51) who was behind the No More Heroes franchise. I had played No More Heroes and enjoyed it: I thought it a bit simplistic, and a touch repetitive, but stylish and fun and even a little challenging at times, and overall weird and unique, these last being right up my alley game-wise. And it was a limited edition, which again appealed to me as a collector (I haven’t recreated the shrine since I moved to California, but in Michigan I had all of my boxed sets, art books, stuffies, and other assorted paraphernalia on display on a series of bookcases). So I plunked down my $60 and took it home with me.

And then I read the GameSpot and IGN reviews. Mind you, this post is not a review, nor is it even about the game’s reviews, strictly speaking. It concerns, in large part, a debate about sexism in the game that takes place in the comments on the reviews. It is, however, important for the sake of the discussion to spend a little time on the reviews themselves. And the reviews were—mixed. And consistent. The major knock on the bulk of the action in the game, the fighting, boiled down to this: all you have to do to succeed is alternate between A) simply mashing on the buttons and then B) pressing the dodge button when an enemy attacks. And then I watched gameplay footage, to see if, reviews notwithstanding, I might still enjoy the game, and this criticism seemed to be borne out. Take a look and you’ll see what I mean:

And the only other piece to the puzzle for this game, the only other thing to do in it that doesn’t involve this circuit, are the unfortunate Gigolo Missions.

I say unfortunate—I of course haven’t played the game, which is why this isn’t at all a review, and although from here on out I will be referring to the GameSpot and IGN reviews of the game, it’s really not about those reviews either. But what I found there was enough to make me question whether I could in good conscience play the game and get any enjoyment out of it. Both Marty Sliva of IGN and Mark Walton at Gamespot reported an uneasy relationship (to say the least) with the Gigolo Missions. But what are the Gigolo Missions?

Basically, the goal is to have sex with a virtual woman. How is this accomplished? First, you sit down at a bar next to a woman and order a drink. Then, you ogle her, looking at the appropriate places on her body (you’ll know what you should be looking at, because the area under your gaze will light up if, say, you should be staring at her chest, legs, or crotch). Stare at her enough (without saying anything, mind you), and she’ll ask you for a gift. Gifts are found or bought elsewhere in the game, and, if you bought the limited edition of the game or downloaded some extra content, you got special Gigolo Glasses which will give you a hint as to what she wants (and, of course, give you X-ray vision). Give her the right gift, and you’ll get to sleep with her. And then you’ll be rewarded with a special item. Mission accomplished.

Lest you think I’m making this up, here’s a clip:

The Gigolo Missions are optional, but not strictly so: sometimes the reward item can only be obtained through a Gigolo Mission, and playing the game without these items makes the game more difficult or less interesting in terms of the action. So that you can skip them and still complete the game, but you may make it much harder on yourself if you do. And I had to ask myself whether I could suffer through this aspect of the game to keep it interesting in the action sequences, or if I could skip them as I would have liked to have been able to do without suffering through even more repetitive fights. My answer was a resounding “no” on both counts, so I returned the game unopened and unplayed. The discomfort expressed by the reviewers over the Gigolo Missions, combined with my own disdain for game content which turns virtual women into hollow sexual shells, made it impossible for me to consider keeping it.

Where this really gets interesting is not in the two (male) reviewers’ accounts of their discomfiture as playing the Gigolo Missions, who describe these missions with phrases like “digital creeper” and “filth” and expressed how these missions “felt weird” to play. What is really interesting for me is the discussion that springs up in the comments, and how some participants in this discussion took an antifeminist stance based on a few lines of criticism of the Gigolo Missions in the reviews.

The reviews pointed out misgivings about the misogyny and objectification of women in the Gigolo missions, but in larger part they pointed out technical flaws that contributed to the low scores of the game. This didn’t stop a subset of commenters from focusing on the former criticisms. Some of these comments were what is (unfortunately) pretty standard anti-feminist fare in gamer circles:

GasFeelGood: “People are tired of seeing Internet Feminists forcing opinions as facts and pushing the politicizing of what is imaginary entertainment. This has turned into a cult and this crap operates like organized religion now.

“We want to play games and discuss games, not pseudo-intellectual philosophizing political and social crap that has no significance whatsoever.

“There is no place for subjective political opinion in professional reviews.” To which KillaShinobi replied “They are like Nazis except not intelligent enough to get everyone in on their cause but surely misguided.” (GameSpot)

Atalalama: “It's gotten to the point anymore that ANY time a "professional game reviewer" (ie: Panders to what's Socially Fashionable of The Hour, Blathers Gender-Fascism, and/or Comes with a Creamy Undercoating of Purityranical Tropes) slams a game for "degrading women" in some imaginary way, I go out and buy it.” (GameSpot)

IceVagabond: “Here we go again with the neo-feminist nonsense... can we go back to having reviews that critique the actual game more than promote a spiteful (and moreover completely irrelevant) ideology?” (GameSpot)

In these comments, one gets an equation of feminism with Nazism and fascism, as if feminism were concerned with a dogmatic imposition of a coherent and simplified ideology, rather than the breaking down of an entrenched dominant ideology of male privilege. Feminism is multiple, with a variety of aims and a variety of means to achieve these aims, and while there is general agreement that the degradation of women is something to be fought against (rather than a selling point for entertainment media) and that women should be treated equitably, just what this means and how this plays out is so multifaceted that one should hesitate to call it an ideology. But if even if it is granted that it is an ideology, it is not a “completely irrelevant” one that has “no significance whatsoever”: if pointing out that the act of scoping out a virtual woman’s body for sexual favors makes one a “digital creeper” leads to charges of Nazism then clearly the movement has a lot of work to do. And if a culture of virtual objectification doesn’t seem relevant enough, one can get a sense of the broad context of gamer misogyny and anti-feminism by looking at sites like Not in the Kitchen Anymore, Fat, Ugly or Slutty, Kotaku, or The Mary Sue to find an alarming number of disturbing stories of harassment and threats, including threats of rape and other sexual violence, made by male gamers against female gamers, both generally speaking (almost, apparently, as sport) and particularly when speaking up about these very threats or sexism in gaming generally.

Then there are those who downplay the significance of this type of depiction of women:

Christoffer112: “blablabla femenism bla bla bla, who cares.. it''s a game.” (GameSpot)

rnswlf: “ I'm sorry that you are seemingly too intimidated by the female form to appreciate a little light hearted fun.” (GameSpot)

1983gamer: “Also am I the only one who is tired of all the politics and Hippocratic bull crap that is going on in the gaming community? Really reviewer are complaining about bi-gist sexism in games? Really have we forgotten that video games are a art form? Gamers and reviewer alike. First dragon crown now this?? Its really sicking. The Hippocrates that condemn these games are the worse. No one complains when james bond has sex with a random woman..or halie berry having sex. So if you are one of these people male or female, stop using double standards and review or play the game based on how good the game is. Oh and maybe grow up and not watch sexiest movies or play sexist video games.” [33 votes up, 3 votes down] (IGN)

Kratier: “next time you see an attractive male portrayed in a video game you should call it sleazy as well. unless you know, you're a hypocrite “ (GameSpot)

AugustAPC: “I mean it's not like I'm going to pretend these are real women or anything. Seriously, why should anyone give a f*ck if women are portrayed as hypersexual whores in a game that doesn't take itself seriously? It's in all kinds of media. Shut your brain off and enjoy it or don't play it. There are plenty of male tropes that are just as negative in video games. Why can a man-slut blindly f*ck any chick he wants in gaming, but girls can't do the same? Double standards.” [18 votes up, 0 down] To which Ultimatenut replied: “Because in this particular game, the sex missions are just plain weird. You stare a girl in the eyes and when she's not looking, you stare at her tits and legs. Then you use your X-ray glasses to look under her clothes. And, apparently, as a result of doing this, she goes home with you.” [3 votes up, 0 down] (IGN)

The charge of “double standards” when there is outcry over the objectification of women in games but not the same outcry when men are objectified is a classic argument (both Kratier and AugustAPC go to this well), but of course ignores the power differential between men and women. Men never lose their fundamentally dominant position in society even when they are objectified, while women are consistently subordinate, objectification being a constant aggravation of this. During the making of Animal House, Karen Allen expressed misgivings about showing her bare behind on screen, so John Landis added a similarly gratuitous shot of Donald Sutherland’s rear end, as if this balanced it out. Allen was apparently put at ease, but maybe she shouldn’t have been: as a young, particularly female actor, her half-nude shot risked her being pigeonholed into “beautiful ingénue who does nude scenes”, while Sutherland’s shot risked nothing. His shot was safe both because he was a well-established actor at the time but also because, as a man, he had little fear of not being taken seriously when he needed to be. In other words, for Sutherland, it was “a little light hearted fun”, but for Allen it was a risky career move. The double standard is not in the criticism of objectification, but in society as a whole. For AugustAPC, the fact that the women are virtual “hypersexual whores” removes them from the sphere of reality, where such things would matter, to the sphere of representation, where they (supposedly) don’t, and that the fact that Karen Allen is a real woman negates my analogy since we are discussing the virtual. But the double standard remains even in a virtual space. A “man-slut” is hardly ever referred to pejoratively, but is more often called a “stud” or, tellingly, “the man,” while negatives like “whore” or “slut” are the weapons of choice for referring to women who “get around.” This means that virtual “hypersexual whores” are a problem in a way that “man-sluts” are not because this trope perpetuates in a virtual space the very real inequality that separates the positive connotations of a sexually active man from the negative connotations of a sexually active woman. Representations draw their content from reality, and as such they have the power to perpetuate this type of inequality or to seek to transform it. Killer is Dead sticks closely to the former. The idea that sexism is innocuous when found in something that is “just a game” ignores the fact that such representations reinforce the reality of sexism pervasive in the broader culture, and in doing so help make it seem natural and inevitable.

Two comments in particular are worthy of note, one from each site, since I think they get at the heart of the problem. The first commenter, pseudospike, seems to be attempting to dismiss the charge that the Gigolo missions would be off-putting or offensive to female gamers by posting the following video of professional gamer Jessica Negri playing the missions:

His comment is: “What's this then, double reverse backwards misogyny!?” (GameSpot) He seems to be trying to play up Negri’s apparent enjoyment of the mission she plays in the video and suggesting that women (as a varied set of individuals) shouldn’t be offended by them because this one woman (Negri) was not, and in fact seemed to have fun while playing. Of course, one can’t decide finally on the basis of the video whether Negri really enjoyed playing the Gigolo Missions or if she was forcing it because she was getting paid to do so. Offering Negri as a representative for women enjoying playing the Gigolo Missions is therefore problematic at best. The idea that one woman’s view negates a flood on the other side is short-sighted and fallacious, and ultimately damaging to the discussion, since it dismisses out of hand the very real concerns of those women (and men) opposed to this type of depiction of women and sexuality. And it is similarly fallacious to point to a woman who is being paid to enjoy what she is doing. Thus, without the irony, this video, or at least its use in the comment thread, may indeed be “double reverse backwards misogyny.”

And then there is DrakeNathan: “It is way too fashionable for game reviewers in the California area to be offended by sexual depictions of women. Honestly, it's so nauseating listening to these guys try to get a piece by showing how sensitive they are. I know, I shouldn't assume motives, and I do apologize for doing it, but it's certainly trendy in game reviewer circles for dudes to be offended by things most girls aren't offended by. […] There's a reason I don't watch certain shows or play certain games, and that's because they aren't made for me. I shouldn't review them.” [19 votes up, 5 down] (IGN, my emphasis)

The point that DrakeNathan misses is that he is basically telling female gamers not to play games at all, because, as numerous gamers and theorists have pointed out, games, especially those for consoles, are almost exclusively made for men. Female gamers must choose from among the games that exist, and since the video game industry has been extremely reluctant to produce gender-neutral or female-oriented games, this means dealing with misogyny, hypersexualization, and objectification to do something they love to do. When a game goes beyond the pale, and introduces gratuitous fantasy sequences such as the Gigolo Missions where women literally ask to be compartmentalized into their most sexually charged body parts, where they want to be gazed at without being spoken to, and where an expensive gift is all that is required for sex, of the one-night stand variety no less, one has to wonder if video game companies are making any progress at all.

The ultimate irony is that while a lot of the comments on the reviews defended SUDA51’s artistic vision in the released version of Killer is Dead, he himself did not:

Kiaininja: “Suda never intended to make KID into a Weaboo eroticism. KID originally was supposed to have a clean deep story of Mondo being a family man surviving to protect them but Suda's boss ordered him to sexualize and add gigolo to the game and as a result fucked up the story and the game's original vision.” (GameSpot)

Here is the interview the user cites:

So why did I feel the need to reject Killer is Dead? Couldn’t I just get past the parts I found offensive and play it for the lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek game that it is? Isn’t it “just a game”? Or can it be read as a sign of a tendency of the video game industry to pander to a subset of the audience that likes its virtual women shallow and easy? Can one see it as an indication that the representation of women in video games remains highly problematic? And, in that light, can’t one understand that the defensiveness of those comments I have singled out here against any call for change to this trend of problematic representations is itself a big part of the problem?  In the end, even the game’s developer thought that the Gigolo Missions were unnecessary and detracted from the game, but commercial interests won out over artistic vision. As it turned out, maybe SUDA51’s company was right—the controversy over the missions probably sold more copies of the game out of sheer curiosity (or, as in some of the comments, spite) than it lost sales due to disgust or outrage. Sex sells, and so, apparently, does sexism. But to allow sexism to remain an inevitable part of the industry is not acceptable, for at least two reasons. First, for some of the reasons I outlined above, representations in media have real consequences, and reactionary representations that reinforce an unacceptable status quo have a naturalizing effect which stifles progress. And second, because I suspect that those who desire sexism in their games are far outnumbered by those who tolerate it or suffer it, so that in the end it is unnecessary to sell games. The broader issue remains—sexual and gender equality is a far off ideal, and in many ways it seems farther than usual when looking at the games industry and gamer culture. But Killer is Dead is just one game, and the comments I selected are representative of one side of the argument over sexism in games, a vocal and fairly coherent side but still not the only game in town. It would seem to me that the way forward would be for all sides of the argument, everyone with a stake in the discussion, to voice their concerns in open forums where they can be heard. The real problem with this rather rosy solution is that, as one gets a taste of in a few of the comments I have quoted, there is a real sense in which civil discussion is not everyone’s goal—and this not only on the side of the argument I’m trying to counter here (dismissive terms like “troglodyte,” “ogre,” “moron,” and “idiot” crop up in responses on the other side). But civility is an attainable ideal, at least on a personal level, and I have tried to treat the commenters I’ve quoted here with respect even as I disagreed with them. Hopefully I have succeeded, at least in a small way, in pushing forward a civil discussion.

James Milner is a Ph.D. student at USC Annenberg whose research lies at the intersection of video games, philosophy, and education. He is also interested in issues of gender and race within video games themselves and in the broader gamer culture. He is an avid gamer, but never seems to be able to find the time anymore to play anything except FarmVille 2.

The Regulation of the Chinese Blogosphere

This is another in a series of blog posts produced by the PhD students in my Public Intellectuals seminar being taught through USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

The Regulation of the Chinese Blogosphere

by Yang Chen

On September 9, the highest court and prosecution office claims that non-factual posts on social media that have been viewed more than 5,000 times, or forwarded more than 500 times, could be regarded as serious defamation and result in up to three years in prison.

This new law reflects the tense relationship between the government and the emerging and yet proliferating online public sphere. As one of the 500 million registered users on Weibo (the most popular tweet-like microblog in China), I feel a hint of nervousness. Normally my posts would be read around 500 times - which is far less than the 5000 quota – but Weibo is an open space where anyone can view and comment on any posts. Thus I have to be much more cautious about what I post in order to keep myself out of trouble.

I hope you won’t ridicule my timidity. Everybody has to be cautious, because the first account user who got arrested for violating this new law was an ordinary 16-year-old schoolboy, whose posts questioned the police’s negative act in a case and a conflict of interest in the court (Further information, go to China detains teenager over web post amid social media crackdown). But other than this poor boy from Junior School, there are a group of people who are much more nervous towards this law – the Big Vs.

Who are the Big Vs? Big Vs are the opinion leaders who actively engage in the discussion of political, economic, and social issues online. These prominent figures are followed by more than a hundred thousand netizens on Weibo. Unlike other grassroots users’ hidden identities, these users are verified by the website with their real names and occupations, and there is a gold “V” mark beside their account names that stands for “verified.”

Because these Big Vs are followed by a considerate number of Weibo accounts, their posts or reposts can reach a much larger audience than that of grassroots user accounts. As a matter of fact, though verified accounts only represent 0.1% of the Weibo accounts, almost half of the hot posts (posts being commented more than 1,000 times) were written by them. Thus instead of a We-media platform, Weibo is more like a "speaker's corner" for the Big Vs; their posts easily get reposted and commented more than ten thousand times. Although everyone has the same rights of free speech on Weibo, some people like the Big Vs speak much louder than the others.

Of course, with real identities and huge popularity online, they are also much easier target for this new law. Let’s take a brief look of what happened to some of the big Vs recently.

Most Big Vs are Chinese venture capitalists and investors; they would put their properties at risk if they go against the government. Thus not surprisingly, there has been an inclination that the Big Vs chose to cooperate with the government.

After an account is verified and branded with a “V,” the website fits the account into categories such as education, entertainment, business, and media. The verified account enters the “House of Fame” under that certain category, and be recommended to general accounts which are relevant to that category. This move leads to closer connections among the people under the particular category and would simultaneously distance people in the other categories.

Earlier this year, the website has asked all users to fill in their education backgrounds and the newcomers to register with their phone number. This move would also allow the website to identity users’ background information and recommend them to people who have similar backgrounds. As a result, highly educated individuals are communicating with other highly educated individuals; individuals with lower education, with lower educated individuals.

Due to this classification, a user who follows a verified Weibo account will recommend the verified account to members within their groups, so people end up following the same verified accounts. This system creates information barriers. For instance, the likelihood that a high-educated member will recommend a verified account with lots of helpful and accurate information to a lower educated member who is in another group is slim. The lower educated member may never be given the chance to increase his or her access to information, although both are using the same networking service.

Users are also separated by geographical location. Individuals from northern regions are speaking to individuals also from northern regions; individuals from southern regions, to individuals from southern regions. Each user is matched into groups based on the user’s characteristics and is subject to an environment where the user can only meet other users similar to the user. From this process, these groups are drifting further and further apart from one another.

Not surprisingly, I have found out that users from outside the country also are segregated from domestic users as well. When I first come to US, I have registered a Weibo account using my U.S. mobile phone number. I found out my posts have been deleted very often secretly without any explanation from the website. It is even more ridiculous that on my personal page, everything looks fine, but on my followers’ page, these posts secretly disappeared. If my friend had not told me, I would never have known.

A screenshot from My follower’s page

The Screen Shot from My Page

As I have shown, the post in the red circle was shown on my personal page, but deleted in my follower’s page. I found the similarity of my “deleted” posts: all of them having the common word “activity,” since I were spreading the information about USC’s upcoming events – some of these events are not even related to China or Chinese regime. Because some of these posts were deleted the second after I posted them, I guessed that a strong automatic filter system was applied to my account - maybe because my U.S. mobile put me into a more sensitive position. I was right! After I changed my mobile number into a Chinese domestic number, I never encountered another deletion. The segregation is really simple, yet effective; there’s no doubt that the censor system creates more information barriers.

The big Vs constitute the verified accounts that each followed by millions of people, that make them serve as the “links” among different groups. Controlling these links means further isolating the different groups and getting a tight grip on the information flow on Weibo.

The purpose of the policy maker is to develop a regulated and peaceful internet public sphere. However, we should bear in mind that the word “peace” doesn’t equal  “quietness” or “weakening voices.” There are obviously problems to be solved, voices to be heard. If tears were burried deep in one’s heart, it doesn’t mean the wound is not there anymore. I will end this blog with an old saying in China, “防民之口，甚于防川:” it means if you trap water in a stream, there would be a disastrous flood; if you shut up voices from the public, a worse disaster would be waiting ahead.The old saying is from thousands of years ago, but the words transcend time and still apply today; the Chinese regime should still take lessons from the wit of our ancestors.

Information Darwinism

This blog post was produced by one of the students in my PhD seminar on Public Intellectuals, currently being taught at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Information Darwinism by David Jeong

The brain craves information. Individuals demonstrate high preference for novel, highly interpretable visual information (Biederman & Vessel, 2006). This preference stems from an evolutionary advantage that an information-rich stimuli/image/environment would provide over a barren environment. Neuroscientists have even provided evidence we have a bias for irregular, non-singular shapes/curved cylinders over regular, singular shapes/cylinders (Amir, Biederman, & Hayworth, 2011). Simply, human beings are not carnivores or omnivores-- rather, we are info-vores. And oh boy, do we have a lot of information-- we can presently access more information than ever before in our evolutionary history (I hope I can make this claim?).

Since our brains evolved to solve the problems of our ancestral environments (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992), we may be experiencing a capacity load crisis in the amount of information we can remember, understand, or care about. Whether intentionally or not, we are constantly sifting through information in our environment-- we always have, not just in present day. My main argument is that when we have as much information at our disposal as we have today, there must be casualties.

One type of information that does seem to thrive is novel information-- we are constantly sharing and re-distributing "original content". It is no coincidence that we receive pleasure from new information. Competitive Learning Theory, otherwise known as "Neural Darwinism", occurs when strongly-activated neurons among a network of activated neurons inhibit the future activity of moderately-activated neurons upon recurring presentations of an image (Grossberg, 1987). The strongest-activated neurons dominate these future perceptions of a particular image, resulting in a net reduction of neural activity. This means that neurons prefer novel stimuli because they have yet to undergo Neural Darwinism.

The information in the current media sphere seems to also be undergoing its own version of what I will refer to as "Information Darwinism":

* Given two forms of information, the novel information will dominate over the replicated. * Given two forms of information, the simple information will dominate over the complex. * Given two forms of information, the visually appealing will dominate over the neutral. * Given two forms of information, the humorous (which also implies novelty) will dominate over the banal. You get the picture.

//*Note* Of course, novel information does not always reign supreme. Nostalgia and familiarity are counter-examples of this pattern. That said, nostalgia would not be nostalgia if it was pushed to our attention daily. Nostalgic content can only become effective through intervals of inattention.//

We have a bias for the fantastic, the amazing, the horrible, and disastrous. Most of the time, we are not interested in what occurs most of the time. We disregard the status quo.

What I mean by Informational Darwinism is that amidst the massive amount of information being pushed into our brains, we are witnessing an information-based natural selection where novel, simple, and visually appealing information dominates.

Not only are shorter, simplified forms of information (memes, Twitter updates, Facebook statuses) winning out, these forms of information champion novelty (original content, humor), and visual appeal. These "predators" are feasting on information that maintains a degree of persistence, permanence, and god forbid-- patience. Public discussion of climate change, ongoing conflicts overseas, inner-city poverty, and our tremendously dysfunctional health care industry are simply being driven to "extinction".

Tversky's and Kahneman's (1982) availability heuristic suggest we attribute greater probability and frequency to information that is more readily available in our minds. Perhaps the more troubling issue is the potential for a naturalistic fallacy to take place: that the survival of the fittest indeed yields the "fittest". Ultimately, "fitness" should refer to physical survival -- and indeed, accurate and proper communication of health and political issues do indeed have implications for life/death-- but I feel it also encapsulates physical and mental health, financial stability, and any domain of social life that represents a form of success. As such, "fitness" here refers to the positive impact on the most number of people-- regardless of race, gender, nationality, religion, and the like. In other words, we may be fooling ourselves to think that the information that our mind's eye is attending to is indeed the information most worthy of our attention.

The information that survives is information that garners our collective attention, that captivates the collective consciousness. This information may be biased, inaccurate, or may simply be fictional content intended for entertainment-- which is not to say that such information is meaningless as it represents the social reasons for sharing information in "spreadable media" (Jenkins et al., 2012).

So, not only are we wired to prefer this attention-grabbing information, this attention-grabbing information is concurrently being reproduced and shared at the expense and demise of information that is less attention-grabbing.

Problem: We have already been primed with much of the important information in the world. Another Problem A: Less attention-grabbing information tends to be information we already know, information that is complex. Another Problem B: Important information tends to be information we already know, which tends to be less attention grabbing. We know diet coke is bad, we know much of the Middle East is under various sorts of turmoil and conflict, we know, we know. We just can't bring ourselves to care about this information more than the next episode of Breaking Bad, or the top post on the front page of Reddit.

This is not to say that Breaking Bad offers less desirable information or a less desirable mode of delivery. In fact, its writers demonstrated an example of a truly complex form of narrative that goes against the traditional and familiar TV narrative. It is precisely its creativity and originality that makes it a champion of TV ratings and our collective consciousness.

That said, annual re-runs of Breaking Bad-- while remaining strong in popularity, will inevitably decline in ratings and our collective consciousness over time. Aren't "ongoing issues" basically "re-runs"?

//*Aside* The Irony: "Fittest" information = information that provides a positive impact to the most people. "Fittest" information represents the essence of morality and altruism. Ironically, the information that is becoming "extinct" is the information that is most crucial for our collective success, survival (Perhaps collective survival goes against the central tenets of natural selection?!). //

Complex concepts in science are often misunderstood because they are simplified and thought in terms of "linear causality" with a singular cause and effect, when in fact science often involves a complex system of causality that may be iterative, cyclical, and take place over time and space (Grotzer, 2012). According to Grotzer, we simplify causality due to our preference to attribute agency to conceptual understandings, our tendency to make cognitive heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1982), and our limitations of our attention (Mack & Rock, 1998). Our visual perception is subject to natural tendencies of not only our attention, but also differences in the perception of visual images in our central vs. peripheral visual fields.

With a world of images, memes, and 350-character messages, we cannot help but be deterred from complex understandings of crucial political and scientific issues-- let alone an accurate and complete understanding of those issues. The non-immediacy of these issues means that they do not alert our attention or perceptual systems as would an elephant charging towards us. Rather, inattention and conscious ignorance of non-immediate, non-perceivable issues (radiation-contamination, global warming, GMOs, etc) all involve gains that are immediate and gratifying (fresh sashimi, convenience and laziness, cheap food, etc) and harms that are tacit. Even more troubling is the exploitation of our cognitive limitations and tendencies for harmful consequences. Sensory formats (visual/auditory advertisements, and even tastes) are now engineered to target sensory vulnerabilities while we overlook non-sensory information (global warming, obesity, risky decisions, any decision with a positive short term and negative long term outcome.

This is not necessarily a value judgment against the Breaking Bads, the Twitters and the Reddits of the information world. Rather, there is much to learn from these thriving models of information. There is a wealth of "fit" information intertwined with entertainment on these newer modes of information dissemination. If anything, perhaps we have to move past the "iron curtain" of network news, academic fluff, and the like. We are facing a communication gap, a failure of learning, and a reality that is increasingly at odds with traditional communication environments. If there is indeed an Information Darwinism underway, we cannot continue to beat the dead horse with "what used to work". It is our moral obligation to engage in our own pedagogical arms race against the changing information landscape in order to maximize information that yields the most physical, mental, social "fitness" for as many people as possible.

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References

Amir, O., Biederman, I., & Hayworth, K. J. (2011). The neural basis for shape preferences. Vision research, 51(20), 2198-2206.

Biederman, I., & Vessel, E. (2006). Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain A novel theory explains why the brain craves information and seeks it through the senses. American Scientist, 3(94), 247-253.

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange.The adapted mind, 163-228.

Grossberg, S. (1987). Competitive learning: From interactive activation to adaptive resonance. Cognitive science, 11(1), 23-63.

Grotzer, T.A. (2012). Learning causality in a complex world. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education.

Jenkins, H., Ford, S., Green, J., & Green, J. B. (2012). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. NYU Press.

Made by Hand, Designed by Apple

This is yet another in a series of blog posts authored by the students in my PhD seminar on Public Intellectuals, being taught this term in USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Made by Hand, Designed by Apple

by Andrew James Myers

Apple’s recent release of two new iPhone models — the iPhone 5s and 5c — was heralded with a pair of videos celebrating the aesthetics of each of the devices’ design and physical materials. The first, a 30-second spot entitled Plastic Perfected played at the 5c’s unveiling and aired on national TV, shows abstract swirls of liquid colors against a white background, gradually molding itself into the form of the iPhone 5c’s plastic shell. Other components, like the camera and the small screws, emerge spontaneously from within the molten plastic, until the idea of the iPhone is fully materialized, having literally created itself.

The other video, a companion piece also shown at the company’s iPhone presentation, depicts a mass of molten gold against a black background, swirling elegantly and weightlessly to sculpt itself into the iPhone 5s. Hovering components gradually descend into place, and the phone spins to present its finished form.

Over this past year, in my research of Apple’s marketing, I have watched hundreds of Apple’s ads and promotional videos extending back to the 1980s. For me, these most recent iPhone promotional videos were a surprising addition to this research, as they embody the purest and most potent distillation yet of a longstanding trend in Apple’s marketing. Apple’s marketing texts have long been preoccupied with constructing a certain aesthetic myth for the creation of Apple products. This mythical origin story at its essence taps into notions of vision, creativity, and genius while obscuring the devices’ real-world material origins as the product of concrete human labor.

Apple frequently releases “behind-the-scenes” promotional trailers for each of its major product launches. In Apple’s (widely-accepted) view of product creation, the valuable labor occurs in the realms of engineering, design, executive leadership, and software engineering. This is reflected in two significant patterns in the visual rhetoric of its behind-the-scenes videos: exclusive focus on automated robotic assembly processes, and animated visualizations of components spontaneously self-assembling against blank backgrounds. In the narrative framing constructed by these three rhetorical patterns, human labor at assembly factories like Foxconn is completely erased, written out of Apple’s corporate self-identity.

For example, consider the above making-of video for the iPhone 5c. The first visual pattern, exclusively showing automated labor rather than human labor, is always accompanied by a verbal discussion of manufacturing innovation. As we watch Macs and iPads being built, we almost never see a pair of human hands; in fact, I have been completely unable to find a single instance where worker hands — much less a full body or face — are shown in an Apple video made after 2008. Hands as a visual symbol and touching as a ritual are instead reserved for the consumer (“The fanatical care for how the iPhone 5c feels in your hand”), with frequent close-ups of disembodied hands touching, gripping, manipulating the product’s glossy material glory.

Second, Apple’s particular imagination of creation is manifest through its animated visualizations of how components fit together inherently and effortlessly. In one major type of these animations, components float in layers in the air, slowly and gracefully layering themselves into a snug assemblage. The molten-plastic and molten-metal ads discussed at the beginning of this post are merely the most recent (and visually extravagant) iteration of this aesthetic. Designing how components will fit together into ever-shrinking cases is essential to Apple’s hardware aesthetic obsession over making products as thin and small as possible. The designers’ work of putting the jigsaw puzzle together conceptually is seen as the real feat; actually putting it together, on the other hand, is trivial.

The visual rhetoric embedded in Apple’s videos clashes intensely with how Apple’s production process has recently been covered by journalists. Beginning in 2006 and climaxing in early 2012, the popular media has actively worked to raise awareness of the labor conditions of the individuals who work in the overseas factories producing Apple’s popular iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs (along with, secondarily, the electronics of almost every other major brand). This sensational story gained wide exposure by juxtaposing the brand mystique of Apple — perhaps the most meticulously and successfully branded company in the world — with a dystopian behind-the-scenes narrative completely at odds with Apple’s image. In response to this narrative in the Media, Apple has responded with a number of public relations initiatives, including a few  laudable measures that have genuinely improved supplier transparency and labor conditions. Yet, as labor violations in Apple’s supply chain continue to surface, and as Apple’s publicity materials continue to gloss over the human labor involved in product assembly, it is clear that much more needs to be done to address these issues.

A few weeks following two high-profile reports in the New York Times and NPR in early 2012, Apple responded to the negative publicity with a press release announcing that it would for the first time bring in a third-party organization, the Fair Labor Association, to independently audit its suppliers.^[1] Apple also exclusively invited ABC news to visit the audit, yielding a 17-minute story broadcast on ABC’s television newsmagazine Nightline.

The Nightline piece offered the first journalistic footage from inside Foxconn’s assembly facility, and the pictures produced were astonishing. Reporter Bill Weir expresses surprise at the magnitude of manual labor he sees, repeatedly suggesting that simply seeing the factory process at work will cause viewers to “think different” about their Apple products. “I was expecting more automated assembly, more robots, but the sleek machines that dazzle and inspire... are mostly made by hand. After hand. After hand.” On Apple’s historical secrecy about its product manufacturing, Weir offers one interpretation. “If the world sees this line,” comments Weir over footage of a long, crowded assembly line, “it might change the way they think about this line.” Cut to a shot of a huge crowd of American consumers lined up to get inside a New York City Apple Store at a product launch.

What the Nightline piece lacks in the kinds of sensational details of other reports on Foxconn, it makes up for with the sheer visual impact of the startling images. We see exhausted workers collapsed asleep at their stations during meal breaks, the infamous suicide nets, the cramped 8-to-a-room dorms, and the apprehensive demeanor in the faces of prospective employees lining up outside the gates. The report even stages a moment in which the reporters visit a town and show an iPad to poor parents of Foxconn workers, none of whom have ever seen one.

After ABC’s first exclusive look inside Foxconn, other reporters were granted access to the factory, leading to a significant rise in video footage being broadcast and circulated online. More and more people were being exposed to the reality that iPads and iPhones are made by hand, by real humans struggling in almost dystopian conditions.

As I have researched and grappled with these issues, I have collected every relevant video I could find onto to my hard drive, which has over time become quite an exhaustive archive of Apple’s promotional material. At the same time, as I attempt to write about my research, I am frustrated at my incapability of fully conveying so many of the visual qualities of the videos I was analyzing in written form. My initial interest in the topic had sprung from an intangible, emotionally-entangled reaction I had to the aesthetic contrasts between Apple’s promotional videos and journalists’ Foxconn coverage — and I wondered whether it would be possible to make more impactful points through a visual essay rather than a written paper.

At first, I had in mind little more than a rather conventional expository documentary — nothing more than an illustrated lecture. But after taking Michael Renov’s fantastic seminar on documentary, I decided to try something a little more avant-garde. Inspired by documentary essayists such as Emile de Antonio, Jay Rosenblatt, Alan Berliner, Hollis Frampton, and Elida Shogt, I was interested in testing out these filmmakers’ innovative editing techniques for constructing original arguments by re-appropriating archival footage. I realized it might make a difficult and enlightening challenge to create a compilation documentary purely with archival footage — without voiceover, interviews, or text. I finished a 12-minute first cut of video essay this summer, and the result is below.

In contrast to the affordances of the written essay, one strength of the video medium that surfaced during editing was an ability to engage more directly with the kinetic and haptic experience of the body. In her essay “Political Mimesis,” Jane Gaines describes revolutionary documentary’s ability to work on the bodies of spectators, to move viewers to action. “I am thinking of scenes of rioting, images of bodies clashing, of bodies moving as a mass,” writes Gaines, suggesting that “images of sensual struggle” are a key element of a number of political documentaries. Gaines argues that certain depictions of on-screen bodies can produce in the audience similar bodily sensations or emotions, which inspired me to focus in my video essay on the concrete bodily attributes of sweatshop labor.

Gaines’s article brought me to formulate the central recurring visual motif of the film: a montage of close-up hand movements. I wanted to illustrate the corporeal vocabulary through which American consumers define their interaction with technology (moving and clicking the mouse, gesturing on a trackpad, tapping and swiping on a tablet), and offer in contrast the bodily relationship factory line-workers have to those same devices: repetitive, slight, monotonous movements.

As mentioned previously, the human bodies of workers — even their hands — are conspicuously absent from the footage Apple uses in their promotional videos about the making of their products. I tried to draw attention to this gaping corporeal absence with an extended montage segment of these fully-automated factory processes played simultaneously over an audio track explicitly addressing the harsh conditions for the factory workers we’re not seeing. I hoped that by explicitly cultivating a sense of mimetic identification throughout the rest of the film, the sequences of hands-free assembly would stand out as somewhat ghastly and unnerving.

Whether this film is successful in communicating its analysis is for others to decide; for me, I both enjoyed the novel experience of making it and feel like the video editing process forced me to think about the material I was working with in new ways. Focusing on making an argument through juxtaposition pushed me to look new contrasts and valences between bits of material I had not noticed before, to consider formal elements like timing and word choice with a new level of scrutiny, and to see my potential output as a researcher and advocate as perhaps not limited strictly to writing books and articles.

Andrew James Myers is a Ph.D. student in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, and holds an M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA. He is post-processing editor for the Media History Digital Library, and assisted in the creation of Lantern, an online search tool for archival media history. A former co-editor-in-chief of Mediascape, his research interests include media industries and production culture, archival film and television history, new media, and documentary.

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^[1] Apple Computer, Inc., "Press Release: Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of Foxconn," (2012), http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/02/13Fair-Labor-Association-Begins-Inspections-of-Foxconn.html.

Mules, Trojan Horses, Dragons, Princesses, and Flies

The following is a post written by one of the students in my PhD seminar on Public Intellectuals being taught this semester at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Mules, Trojan Horses, Dragons, Princesses, and Flies

by Addison Shockley 

Shortly after I arrived at the University of Southern California, to begin working on my doctorate in communication, there was a banquet to welcome the new group of communication and journalism graduate students. There were round tables, and people sat where they liked. At one point, the Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism came up to the table I was sitting at and asked us about our table and what kind of students we were, whether we were journalism students or communication students or a mixture of the two. I spoke up for our table and said, “We all happen to be communication students,” and then added, “It was natural that we all sat together.” He replied, “Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good.” Then he had to walk away because he was being called to give the opening speech, and I sat there and felt a little bit foolish.

He was right, though. Natural is not necessarily good. It’s natural for dragons to take princesses captive in their lairs, but it’s not good for princesses to lose their freedom. It’s natural for flies to be drawn to the light, but it’s not good for flies themselves to be electrocuted when the light’s a bug-zapper. Dean Ernest Wilson believed this principle of distinguishing between what’s natural and what’s good—that sometimes they’re the same and sometimes they’re not—and I believe it too.

This story is a small part of a larger story, the story of my journey of becoming who I am today. When I began my undergraduate education in 2005, I would never have been able to predict that I would be doing a Ph.D. today and examining ideas like rhetoric and the tragedies caused by misunderstanding. When I graduate in a few years, I hope to teach rhetoric in a university and share insights about communication and (mis)understanding with my students, as well as the general public.

It is a commonplace to assert that we are living through a communication revolution, and of course people are studying the ways in which our lives and communication practices are being revolutionized by new technology and new media. This is important work, but I prefer to focus on what I call the “foundational” issues in communication, questions related to what human beings are, and why they should communicate with others in the first place; questions about communicating what we know, and how we know it; questions about values, and how we communicate in line with them, about them; and questions about what it means to communicate purposefully and wisely. These are the questions I believe need to be addressed today alongside the more timely questions about technology, new media, and the ways our world is being transformed by them.

None of our experiences are wasted, or so my mother tells me (and I think she’s right—at least, they don’t have to be wasted). In this post, I share some of my personal history to discuss how it relates to who I have become, and how it has shaped my perspective on a set of real world problems that I’ll share with you.

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Like many college students, I changed my major multiple times, uncertain what I wanted to do with my life. I began in the fall of 2005, studying film as a freshman at Azusa Pacific University, which only lasted a year. I decided to return home to Kansas City, Missouri, having realized the film industry was harder to break into than I thought it was, as well as less appealing than I had imagined it to be in my mind, and I began considering what to do next. I took a year off, so to speak, talking with friends, exploring options, and finally made the decision to transfer to the University of Central Missouri—forty minutes east of my hometown of Lee’s Summit, Missouri—to begin classes in the fall of 2007 as a mule (the school’s odd choice of a mascot), majoring in—get this—Construction Management.

My dad had been a construction manager at one point, and he really liked it, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I began taking classes like “Mechanical Systems of Buildings,” talking about beams and pneumatic nail guns, and wondering why anyone would want their mascot to be a mule. (Okay, secretly, I kind of liked it. Mules are humble, but confident). Three semesters later, with an internship under my belt—shadowing construction managers who built mostly fast-food restaurants and office buildings—I realized this kind of work didn’t appeal to me anymore, at least not enough to make it my bread and butter.

Studying construction had taught me some important things, but I knew it was time for me to move on. I didn’t feel like I was getting the hang of it from the classes, and it seemed I wasn’t a natural at it—not even close. Evidence of that includes my “internship boss” yelling at me the last week of my internship and telling me I had been a failure. He was having a bad day. There was some truth to it, though. I lacked the devotion, preparation, guidance and giftedness to do a good job, simply put. Rather than wanting to read blueprints, I wanted to read novels; rather than daydreaming about building, I wanted to use words to make a difference in society. I had taken enough classes to get a minor in Construction Management, and it taught me how to think about the world concretely, though I was not built for it.

Soon after I lost interest—for good—in construction as a career, I discovered “rhetoric.” The fact of the matter is, I took my first course in rhetoric during my senior year of college, but almost immediately, I knew this was “it.” For the sake of clarifying what I would want you to imagine when I say “rhetoric,” replace whatever comes to mind with this definition of rhetoric from a famous twentieth century scholar of rhetoric, I.A. Richards (from his book The Philosophy of Rhetoric), who defined rhetoric as “the study of misunderstanding and its remedies.” To have a “rhetorical” sort of imagination is to be someone capable of pinpointing instances of misunderstanding and then to know how to work on them in order to undo them.

In rhetoric, as a rather marginalized academic subject these days, I found something I cared about. I liked it so much that I decided I would do two more years of Master’s level coursework mostly in theories of rhetoric at the same school—remaining a humble, yet confident mule. I enjoyed this experience very much and began to see myself studying rhetoric at the doctorate level.

I applied to doctorate programs during the fall of my second year into the Master’s level coursework, and I got accepted at USC in the spring. My wife and I moved to Los Angeles in the following fall to begin the next phase of our lives. I left the mule and started riding a Trojan horse, so to speak.

A few years prior I had left a career in bricks-and-mortar construction—well, a potential career in construction by abandoning my major in Construction Management. I was going to pursue a career in “words-and-ideas” construction—not physical construction, but cultural or, as it is sometimes called, “social construction.”

It should be clear from events like the historic Hyatt-Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City, Missouri, or from the recent five-story building collapse in Mumbai that construction is risky.

Misconstruction can be fatal, whether we are dealing with a physical structure that is literally misconstructed, or figuratively with a faulty idea or mistaken assumption that is used as the basis for further thinking. And it may be an obvious side note, but miscommunication can cause misconstruction, as in when blueprints (poorly designed) are used to communicate building procedures that result in faulty structures.

Today, I tell people that I study misunderstanding and how it messes things up, royally. I am convinced it happens all the time, all around us, sadly without the notice of enough people. Let me explain this phenomenon of “social misconstruction,” and then give some examples of it.

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Rhetoricians care about misunderstanding, which results in the social misconstruction of reality. Wait, social what?

When I say the “social construction of reality,” I’m using a phrase that most academics within the humanities and social sciences have heard of—which can refer to the idea, essentially, that reality isn’t really real, truth isn’t truly true, right isn’t actually righteous, et cetera. Countless interactions among persons in societies result in commonly held assumptions about what exists and how we should respond to it, and these commonly held assumptions create the illusion that there is a single reality because most people seem to agree that, well, this is just the way it is: so it must be so.

There are other versions of this idea of social constructionism, some of which allow that an objective reality exists—and those versions are more convincing to me. But according to this radical version of social constructionism, people “construct” reality through interactions with other members of their culture or society (or world), and in this sense, they “make it up” using language. Rather than discovering reality, and disclosing it with language, they do the reverse, creating reality with language. I agree that ideas of reality are rooted in communities. But I don’t believe that all communities are in touch with reality. I believe that people can’t contain absolute reality in a box or in a system of ideas, but I believe that it exists, despite our limitations in apprehending it fully.

This is obviously a deep subject, one we could read libraries full of books about. I hold the minority perspective—the realist view that, on the one hand, there is reality, and on the other there is unreality. There’s true, and there’s false. Another term that is often used alongside the phrase “the social construction of reality” is the phrase “intersubjective agreement,” which refers to agreements made about what’s what in life, what things mean and don’t mean, what reality is. This term suggests that reality is nothing more than what we agree upon that it is.

But there’s a problem with this idea. Persons under arrest are either guilty or innocent of their alleged offense. I believe in the valuable work of socially constructing one true reality, and in the wasted time spent constructing unrealities. We don’t create reality; we bump into it. Even if we aren’t sure what we’re bumping into, it’s got a personality, and we better learn it. It’s got rules. And it’s got rewards. As one of my friends said, if you break the rules of the universe, they will break you. Denying reality is a slippery slope to some bad back pain.

Most rhetoricians these days don’t believe in “real reality.” They probably wouldn’t tell people they’re interested in misunderstanding, as I do; they’d probably say they’re interested in multiple understandings, and they would probably be uncomfortable with any claims about misunderstanding (after all, can someone be said to misunderstand a world that isn’t real?).

I believe in the metaphysical parallel to physical blindness: the eyes of minds can be distorted in vision, and effectively blind to what is actually happening. Rhetoricians like me care about social misconstruction and misunderstanding, but also about the related issues of miseducation, miscommunication, misassociation, misinformation, disinformation and deceit.

Richard Weaver, another famous rhetorician, taught that “ideas have consequences”—and Kenneth Burke—perhaps the most famous modern writer on rhetoric—taught that words imply attitudes, which suggest actions. For example, naming someone as an “enemy” implies an attitude toward them that encourages certain actions and discourages others, whereas calling them a “friend” would suggest a different attitude, and thus, different actions.

Just to give a few examples of social misconstruction, we can think for a moment about misassociation. We need to cultivate discernment among our citizens so that they can disassociate what has been misassociated, because misassociating things can disserve and harm people in serious ways.

I was eating dinner with some friends the other night, and they shared some disturbing facts with me. One of them works in Uganda, and she told me that social misconstructions of class have led to the malnourishment of children in Uganda because their society has constructed an association of eating vegetables with being poor. Their parents don’t want to feed their children what might be thought of as “poor people’s food.” My other friend from India, who was dining with us, chimed in and added that in India, white rice is associated with a higher-class diet than brown rice (even though brown rice is healthier). These examples, although limited to food, show how any society can contain “misconstructed” meanings and associations, which contribute to the “breaking down” of lives.

To give another example, this time from the United States, we can briefly consider the work of communication scholar George Gerbner to help us see how in the United States, where the average person watches more than four hours of television per day (see footnote for reference), the cumulative effect over time is that representations in television begin to cultivate misperceptions in Americans of social realitFor instance, persons who watch crime shows like Law & Order, or CSI, or Criminal Minds, may perceive that social reality closely matches the depictions in the shows themselves. To give an example of how social misconstructions can emerge from long-term exposure to such shows, consider how CSI, for example, consistently uses unrealistic depictions of the technology available to death investigators.  Or consider how Law & Order messed with popular perceptions of what constituted an adequate quantity of evidence to convict someone of an alleged offense, resulting in U.S. jury trials in which jury members required overwhelming amounts of evidence to be comfortable deciding that a defendant was guilty.

These minor examples address the ways in which, taken together, instances of media content consumed over a long period of time can influence people’s perceptions such that they misassociate, again, say, guiltiness only with overwhelmingly unusual amounts of evidence—more than is typically needed to establish a high enough probability of guilt to declare a person guilty.

Misassociation can take many other forms than this, of course, and much is lost due to mistakes of association. It is the job of the rhetorician to spot them, and zap them with his rhe-gun. We don’t want anyone to keep misassociating what is natural with what is good. (And for further examples of social misconstructions, see the work of Richard Hamilton, who tries to show the mistakenness of a few widely held views in academia: http://www.amazon.com/The-Social-Misconstruction-Reality-Verification/dp/0300063458).

Addison Shockley is a doctoral student studying rhetoric, media, and ethics at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. One of his guiding assumptions is that miscommunication, rooted in deception and/or misunderstanding, causes devastating results, and he is motivated in all of his researching, writing, and teaching by the idea of straightening out socially misconstructed realities. He's recently started blogging at www.wordscuff.com.  

Revisiting Neo-Soul

The following is another in an ongoing series of blog posts from the remarkable students in my Public Intellectuals class. We would welcome any comments or suggestions you might have. Revisiting Neo-Soul

by Marcus Shepard

Popular music blog Singersroom recently asked an interesting question “Will Alternative R&B fade away...like Neo-Soul & Hip-Hop Soul?” What’s interesting about this question for me is that neo-soul and some would argue hip-hop soul, never truly found a definition or a sonic boundary to differentiate them from other genres of music during their rise in the 1990s. Different posts could and should be written on hip-hop-soul and even the validity of the term alternative R&B as it appears to be a term used to describe white R&B artists who make music similar to the likes of the Black R&B artists such as the late Aaliyah, Brandy and Monica. I want to focus though on exploring the genre neo-soul for a moment. It’s important to engage with neo-soul because a lot of people believe that this musical discourse has either faded away or was a flash pan marketing nomer that lost steam as we rolled into the new millennium, which is not the case.

While fans of the music labeled neo-soul can often identify those songs, albums and/or artists that falls under the genre label, due to the lack of a potential concrete definition, the once burgeoning genre has become harder to define. As different sonic discourses continue to mix and create unique sounds, defining and creating boundaries for what is “neo-soul” and what is not might become increasingly more difficult. Though the label neo-soul has come under scrutiny from artists, musicians, fans, critics, and academics about its validity as a term/genre, others have gravitated towards the usage of the term. The confusion of what neo-soul is adds to the debate surrounding this genre. Defining neo-soul is not to exclude artists who are on the periphery or crossover into the genre, but to give space to those singers and musicians who are entrenched within the discourse of the music.

With the introductory track “Let It Be,” Jill Scott also expresses her frustrations with being labeled and defined as a neo-soul artist. Though Scott does not openly state her anguish with her categorization in the genre, she states an all too familiar cry of artists who simply want to make music devoid of classification.

What do I do If its Hip Hop if its bebop reggaeton of the metronome In your car in your dorm nice and warm whatever form If Classical Country Mood Rhythm & Blues Gospel Whatever it is, Let It Be Let It Be Whatever it is Whatever it is Let It If it's deeper soul If It's Rock & Roll Spiritual Factual Beautiful Political Somethin to Roll To Let It Be, Whatever it is, Whatever it is Let It Be Let It Be Whatever it is Let It Be Let It Be, Let It Why do do do I,I,I,I Feel trapped inside a box when just don't fit into it

Through her sorrow of being defined and “trapped inside a box,” Scott has also excavated what neo-soul is. Though she and other artists often have fraught relationships with the term, understanding it as a convergence of sonic discourses within the soul and rap musical traditions opens up a variety of sonic avenues that Scott, her peers, and predecessors have pursued. Scott, who often transcends the boundaries of different genres, is able to rise above these very boundaries due to the essence of neo-soul. This genre allows her to waft into the vocal atmosphere with operatic vibrato during the closing number (“He Loves Me (Lyzel In E Flat)”) of her concert, just as it allows for her and Doug E. Fresh to beatbox during their collaborative “All Cried Out Redux”.

He Loves Me (Lyzel In E Flat) (VH1 Storytellers) - Music Videos - Live Performances

Being situated on the periphery of two musical legacies, soul and hip-hop, allows for artists within this convergence to coif a variety of sonic discourses that draw on the technical, sonic, and lyrical innovations of both genres. The jazz, gospel, and blues influences of soul, which in their own right offer rich musical and lyrical histories, further add to the wide-range of sonic possibilities that artists within neo-soul can tap. Include the plentiful sonic and lyrical options that hip-hop has to offer and the neo-soul genre seems to have boundless opportunity to grow and coalesce.

So what does neo-soul sound like? Neo-soul is a genre that is an amalgamation of rap and soul music, which relies on the technological advances made during the genesis of rap, but at the same time readily uses live instrumentation of the soul era. Neo-soul builds upon sampling through its own reinterpretations of soul records such as D’Angelo’s take on Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin',” or Lauryn Hill’s Frankie Valli cover of “Can't Take My Eyes Off You”. Though these two are traditional covers, Hill and D’Angelo infect a hip-hop backbeat that is heavily pronounced throughout most neo-soul records. Hill’s cover of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” in particular opens up with beatboxing, which then leads into the sonic composition of the song and melds into a traditional rap backbeat. Though covers are not unique to this genre, when they occur within the confines of neo-soul, the musical composition of the song is often tweaked/reworked to reflect the sonic collaborations that define the genre.

Though possibilities seem endless for neo-soul, there is a distinct sonic quality that exists within the genre. Neo-soul is deeply rooted in live instrumentation and referencing the liner notes of the majority of neo-soul releases showcases the inclusion of studio musicians. Though synthesizing and sampling is present within neo-soul, it is building a legacy that is rooted in both the live instrumentation of soul music and the technological manufactured sounds of hip-hop.

Striking this sonic balance is one of the challenges the genre faces and artists who opt for a more live sound or a more synthesized sound find themselves closer to the periphery of the genres that represent this sound. As Erykah Badu famously proclaims, she “is an analog girl in a digital world” and striking the balance between these two worlds is what artists who are steeped in the musical traditions of neo-soul are all about.

In addition to the sonic quality and components of neo-soul, the genre is also one that is carried by the lyrical compositions of its artists. While hip-hop soul is a famous fusion of music that is sometimes conflated with neo-soul, artists within the confines of this music often set themselves apart from neo-soul artists due to the paucity of songwriting credits on their résumé as well as the abundance of synthesized beats. This is not to say that one genre is “better” than the other, but that they each exist in different spheres and planes of similar musical discourse.

Neo-soul artists, as Jill Scott so eloquently pointed out, speak to the realities of life within their self- or co-written compositions including, but not limited to, issues that touch upon the very essence of human experience. While rap music still speaks to lived experiences, the overarching narrative seems to have shifted to a paradigm that speaks largely to male street credibility and the highly commercialized and commoditized male hustler protagonist.

Neo-soul can be seen, lyrically, as a remix of hip-hop – still speaking to the lived experiences of its listeners as hip-hop and soul did and still do – with a slanted female perspective, as the majority of releases within the confines of neo-soul reflect the female voice.

While men and women release music within the confines of the neo-soul and rap genres respectively, it appears that each genre has the disproportionate voice of one sex. Whereas rap music has always been rooted in the male perspective, with relatively few female centered perspectives, neo-soul operates as the contrasting version with the female perspective taking center stage, while the male perspective is given voice with relatively few releases.

Responding to the obvious exclusion of female voices within hip-hop, neo-soul artists find themselves oftentimes engaging with messages perpetuated within hip-hop and mass media in an attempt to recreate and reclaim those representations of Black womanhood.

Another interesting observation of the discography released within neo-soul finds that Black artists have released the majority, if not all, of the releases considered neo-soul. Though white British soul artists such as Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, Adele, and Duffy have all released albums and/or songs that would aptly be described as neo-soul, due to their sonic and lyrical arrangements, these women are placed under the banner of pop or British soul instead of neo-soul. Jaguar Wright for one has pointed out in her observation of the musical genre the racialized space that has been built around this marketing genre.

Through the racialization of neo-soul, these artists are able to engage in visual and musical critiques of issues impacting Black communities, such as Jill Scott’s powerful analysis of the state of Black communities in her song “My Petition,” which is lifted from her 2004 album Beautifully Human: Words and Sounds Vol. 2.

Ultimately, neo-soul is a genre that is still alive and well though the glare of mainstream press and platinum selling singles and album sales has wavered. Before one engages with the theorizing of “alternative R&B,” it is important to revisit and reengage with the visual and musical discourse that is the genre neo-soul.

Marcus C. Shepard is a Ph.D. student at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His work explores Black musical performance and its intersections and transformative capabilities of race, class, gender and sexuality. Specifically, he focuses on the musical genre neo-soul and its sonic, visual and political implications in the United States within communities of color. Shepard has also worked at the world famous Apollo Theater in Harlem as an archivist and maintains his ties to this artistic community.

Solidarity Might be for White Women, but it isn't for Feminists

Solidarity Might be for White Women, but it isn’t for Feminists

                                              By Nikita Hamilton

In early August, the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen sparked an internet-wide conversation about feminism, intersectionality and inclusion after Mikki Kendal coined the term in her response to tweets that were to and from Hugo Schwyzer, a professor at Pasadena City College. Schwyzer had just gone on an hour-long Twitter rant in which he admitted to leaving women of color out of feminism, and later apologized for it. He then received sympathetic Twitter responses that moved Kendal to tweet “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen when the mental heath & future prospects for @hugoschwyzer are more important than the damage he did.” She felt that women of color were, and are, continuously left out of feminism and that Schwyzer was another example of that exclusion.

Though this is a necessary discussion, what is most interesting about it is that it’s a conversation that started decades ago and has just never come to a resolution. The inclusion of women of color has been an issue from the very beginnings of first-wave feminism and we are simply at another iteration of the same discussion. When white middle-class women wanted to fight for the right to go out into a workforce that Black, Asian, and Hispanic women had already been a part of for decades, if not hundreds of years, they all realized that there would be a continued disconnect. How could there not be when some of these women came from generations of working and slaving women or generations of woman that had been working side by side with the men of their race?

In a recent NPR Code Switch article, Linsay Yoo asked about which women were included in the term “women of color,” and advocated for the inclusion of Asian and Hispanic women. Her inquiries and points made sense since Asian and Hispanic women are also marginalized and often left out of feminism. However, in addition to noticing the continued omission of Arab women from the term “women of color” by each other these commentators, I was left with the question, “what do people mean when they say that they want solidarity?” Furthermore, what would this solidarity look like and what are its desired consequences? I believe that this is the question that feminists are really failing to answer.

Mikki Kendall wrote, “Solidarity is a small word for a broad concept; sharing one aspect of our identity with someone else doesn't mean we'll have the same goals, or even the same ideas of community.” Kendall’s definition sends feminists in the direction that they need to go undoubtedly, but the word “solidarity” itself is the problem. Solidarity implies equality and that is not present in the feminist movement or society at large. We live in world that stratifies people by their gender, race, sexuality and class. It is quite possible that expectation of equality that comes from a word such as “solidarity” that is the snowball, which then turns into an avalanche of problems and disagreements. Therefore, it is time to find another label and it is time to have a very honest conversation among all feminists, both those who feel included and excluded from the movement, about how structural inequalities based upon on color, sexuality and socioeconomic status have to be taken into consideration along with gendered issues.

Of course there are some key issues that are affecting all women because they are biologically female. The attack on women’s bodies by the government, women’s healthcare, violence and sexual assault are all topics that feminists can agree need to be at the forefront of the women’s movement. However, depending on the race, for example, the order of those topics importance shifts. For example, the 2000 US Department of Justice survey on intimate partner violence uncovered that inter-partner violence was particularly salient for Hispanic women because they “were significantly more likely than non-Hispanic women to report that they were raped by a current or former intimate partner at some time in their lifetime.” For black women, sexual assault is a leading issue.  According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), the lifetime rate of rape and attempted rape for all women is 17.6% while it is 18.8% for black women specifically. There can be consensus on what the issues are, but there also needs to be acceptance of differences, inequalities and the desire for differing prioritizations. Why can’t feminism be a movement of consensus on the overarching issues that affect women that also houses Third World and black feminists’ respective prioritized concerns? Why can’t each group be a wall under the roof of feminism that provides support, but consists of different activities in each room of the house?

The Women’s Movement is still needed, but as history has exemplified over and over again solidarity is not what can, or needs to be, achieved presently. Solidarity is defined as a “community of feelings, purposes, etc.,” and the idea of “community” connotes an equality that is not yet present among all of the women of the feminism. A better word may be “consensus,” which means “majority of opinion” or “general agreement” because feminists can all agree that there are some overarching feminist issues. Either way, the point is that we set ourselves up for failure every time we sit at the table and come to realize that once the initial layer of women’s issues is peeled back there are too many differences left bare and unacknowledged in the name of a non-existent “solidarity.” Solidarity IS for white women, and for black women, and for Asian women, and for Hispanic women and for Arab women. Consensus is for feminists. Let’s finally move forward.

Nikita Hamilton is a doctoral student at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research interests include gender, race, stereotypes, feminism, film and popular culture.

The Other Media Revolution

This is another in the series of posts from students in my PhD level seminar on the Public Intellectual, which I am teaching this term through the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.   

The Other Media Revolution

by Mark Hannah

I’ve long blogged about the so-called “digital media revolution.”  Yet, deploying digital media to praise digital media has always struck me as a bit self-congratulatory.  Socrates, in the Gorgias dialogues, accuses orators of flattering their audiences in order to persuade them.  This may be the effect, even if it’s not the intention, of blogging enthusiastically about blogging.

To be sure, a meaningful and consequential revolution of our media universe is underway.  This revolution’s technological front has been well chronicled and analyzed (and is represented) by this blog and others like it.  The revolution’s economic front – specifically, the global transformation of media systems from statist to capitalist models – has, I think, been critically underappreciated.

What Sprung the Arab Spring?

How attributable is the Arab Spring to Twitter and Facebook, really?  After a wave of news commentary and academic research that have back-patted western social media companies, some observers now question how much credit digital media truly deserve for engendering social movements.  It’s undeniable that the Internet does, in fact, provide a relatively autonomous space for interaction and mobilization, and that revolutionary ideas have a new vehicle for diffusing throughout a population.  But the salience of these revolutionary ideas may have its origin in other media that are more prevalent in the daily life of ordinary Arab citizens.

With limited Internet access but high satellite TV penetration throughout much of the Arab world, the proliferation of privately owned television networks may, in fact, have been more responsible for creating the kind of cosmopolitan attitudes and democratic mindset that were foundational for popular uprisings in that region.

Authoritarian regimes are sensitive to this phenomenon and, as my colleague Philip Seib points out, Hosni Mubarak responded to protests early on in the Egyptian revolution by pulling the plug on private broadcasters like ON-TV and Dream-TV, preventing them from airing their regular broadcasts.  Of the more than 500 satellite TV channels in the region (more than two-thirds of which are now privately owned!), Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya are two news networks that have redefined Middle Eastern journalim and enjoy broad, pan-Arab influence.

The Internet, which represents technological progress and individual interaction, may have emerged as a powerful symbol of democratic protests in the Arab world even while “old media,” with their new (relative) independence from government coercion may be more responsible for planting the seeds of those protests.

America Online? Cultural Exchange On and Off the Web

Is YouTube really exporting American culture abroad?  The prevailing wisdom, fueled by a mix of empirical research and a culture of enthusiasm for digital media, is that the global nature of the Web has opened up creative content for sharing with new international audiences.  Yet, in light of restrictive censorship laws and media consumers’ homophilic tendencies, we may be overstating the broad multicultural exchange that has resulted.

What has signficantly increased the influence of American cultural products, however, is the liberalization of entertainment markets internationally.  As international trade barriers loosen, Hollywood films are pouring into foreign countries.  Just last year, China relaxed its restrictions on imported films, now allowing twenty imported films per year (most of which come from the United States).  This freer trade model, combined with the dramatic expansion of the movie theater market in China (American film studios can expect to generate $20 - $40 million per film these days, as opposed to $1 million per film ten years ago) is a boon for America’s cross-cultural influence in China.

It’s true that rampant piracy, enabled by digital technologies, further increases the reach and influence of American movies and music.  To the extent that the demand for pirated cultural products may be driven by the promotional activity of film studios or record labels, this practice may be seen more as an (illegal) extension of new international trade activity than as a natural extension of any multicultural exchange occuring online.

The cultural influence of trade doesn’t just move in one direction though.  As Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, insisted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, economic globalization is as much responsible for bringing other cultures to Hollywood as it is for bringing Hollywood to other cultures.

Put otherwise, media systems are both the cause and the effect of culture.

The Cycle of Cultural Production & Consumption

To use a concept from sociology, media are performative. They enable new social solidarities, create new constituencies and, in some cases, even redefine political participation.  Nothing sows the idea of political dissent like the spectacle of an opposition leader publicly criticizing the a country’s leader on an independent television channel.  And, on some level, nothing creates a sense of individual economic agency like widespread television advertisements for Adidas and Nike sneakers, competing for the viewer’s preference.

Sociologists also discuss the “embeddedness” of markets within social and political contexts. From this angle, the proliferation of commercial broadcasters and media liberalization are enabled by the kind of social and political progress that they, in turn, spur.

Despite the above examples of how the media universe’s new economic models are transforming public opinion and cultural identity, we remain transfixed on the new technological models, the digital media revolution.  It’s perhaps understandable that reports of deregulation and trade agreements often take a back seat to the more trendy tales of the Internet’s global impact. The Internet is, after all, a uniform and universal medium and the causes and consequences of its introduction to different parts of the world are easily imagined.

In contrast, the increased privatization of media, while a global phenomenon, is constituted differently in different national contexts.  The private ownership of newspapers in the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe looks different than the multinational conglomerates that own television channels in Latin America.  Like globalization itself, this global phenomenon is being expressed in variegated and culturally situated ways.

Finally, the story of this “other” media revolution is also a bit counterintuitive to an American audience, which readily identifies the Internet as an empowering and democratizing medium, but has a different experience domestically with the commercialization of news journalism.  We haven’t confronted an autocratic state-run media environment and our commercial media don’t always live up to the high ideals of American journalism.  To a country like ours, which has grown accustomed to an independent press, it’s not always easy to see, as our founders once did, the potential of a free market of ideas (and creative content) as a foundation for independent thought, democratic participation, and cultural identity.

Mark Hannah is a doctoral student at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, where he studies the political and cultural consequences of the transformation of media systems internationally. A former political correspondent for PBS's MediaShift blog, Mark has been a staffer on two presidential campaigns and a digital media strategist at Edelman PR.

Non-Conforming Americans: Genre, Race, and Creativity in Popular Music

This is another in a series of posts by the PhD students in the Public Intellectuals seminar I am teaching through the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.  

Non-conforming Americans: Genre, Race, and Creativity in Popular Music by Rebecca Johnson

Papa bear and mama bear. One was Black, and one was white, and from day one, they filled our lower eastside Manhattan apartment with sound. Beautiful sounds, organized and arranged, and from song to song they would change in shape, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, voice, instrument and narrative. Sometimes those sounds would come from my father’s guitar playing in the living room, and sometimes, even simultaneously, from my bedroom, where I could often be found recording a newly penned song. But most of the time, those sounds came from speakers.

Sometimes my father would put on this:

And the next day he’d play this:

Sometimes my mother would put on this:

And the next day she would play this:

And sometimes, they would both put on this:

The wide array of sounds that I heard was not just limited to the inner walls of my downtown apartment though. They echoed as I left home every morning to take the train to my upper eastside magnet school, and as I entered that school every day and saw diverse colors in the faces of my classmates, and when I visited my father’s parents in Brooklyn, and then my mother’s parents on Long Island. The sounds I heard became interwoven in my identity, song by song, strand by strand, they became my musical DNA. As I got older, I learned how those sounds came together, replicated, and mutated in the history of a world much bigger than myself. I discovered how those sounds had changed over time, often through deletions and erasures, but also how they had evolved because of the insertion of something new, something extra.

The sounds I grew up with were all part of the history of popular music in America. Crucial to the trajectory of that history has been the interactions between African Americans and white Americans. The complicated relationship between these two collectivities has informed much of the way we as a society understand how music helps to shape and influence our identities, and how we understand and perceive different styles, or genres, of music themselves. This post aims to explore how these understandings were formed over time, and how they can be reimagined, and challenged, in the digital age.

Popular music in America from its start was not just about sound, but racialized sound. From the moment African sounds were forcibly brought to America in the hands and mouths and hearts and minds of Black slaves, they were marked as different and in opposition to the European sounds that were already at work in forming the new nation. And yet through music slaves found a positive means of expression, identification and resistance where otherwise they were denied. While they would eventually be freed, the mark of slavery never left the African American sound and would be used to label Black music as different and not quite equal. As Karl Hagstrom Miller writes in Segregating Sound, in the 1880s music began to move from something we enjoyed as culture to something we also packaged, marketed, and sold as a business. It was then that “a color line,” or “audio-racial imagination” as music scholar Josh Kun calls it, would become deeply ingrained in much of our understanding of sound and identity (of course, that line had long existed, but it was intensified and became part of the backbone the industry was built on).

The color line that still runs through music today was in part cemented through the establishment of genres. The function of genre is to categorize and define music, creating boundaries for what different styles of music should and should not sound like, as well as dictating who should be playing and listening to certain types of music and who should not (for example, based on race, gender, class). The essential word here is “should.”

The racial segregation at the time the music business was taking baby steps played a large role in genre segregation. The separate selling of white and Black “race” records by music companies in the early 1900s assumed a link between taste and (racial) identity. Recorded music meant that listeners could not always tell if the artist they were hearing was white or Black, and thus it became the job of the music and its marketing to do so. Genres of music are living and constantly evolving organisms that feed off of input from musicians, listeners, scholars and key industry players such as music publishers and record labels. The contemporary use of them is a result of this early segmentation.

A selective, condensed timeline of genre segregation goes something like this. In the early twentieth century many white and Black musicians in the South played the same hillbilly music (including together), which combined the styles of “blues, jazz, old-time fiddle music, and Tin Pan Alley pop.” During this period the best way for musicians to make money was often to be able to perform music that could appeal to both Black and white listeners. Yet hillbilly grew into Country music, a genre first and foremost defined by its whiteness and the way that it helps to construct the idea of what being “white” means. Jump to the age of rock ‘n’ roll, and you find the contributions of Black musicians being appropriated (borrowed, or stolen) and overshadowed by white musicians. If we fast-forward once again to the 1980’s, Black DJs in Chicago and Detroit were creating and playing styles such as house and techno, while white DJs in the U.S. and across the pond in the United Kingdom were simultaneously contributing to the development of electronic music. Yet today, the overarching genre of electronic music, and its numerous subgenres, is commonly known to be a style of music created and played by white DJs.

The whiteness that came to define many genres meant to a degree erasing the blackness that also existed in them. Styles such as country and hip-hop have become important markers of social identity and cultural practices far beyond mere sound. At the same time, the rules that have come to define many genres have erased the hybrid origins of much of American popular music. They erase the fact that Blacks and whites, for better or worse, have lived, created and shared music side by side. And, they have created identities side by side, in response and through interactions with one another.

But, what if your identity as a listener or musician doesn’t fit into any of categories provided? What if the music you like, and the identity you’re constantly in the process of forming, goes something like this:

Unlocking The Truth - Malcolm Brickhouse & Jarad Dawkins from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.

What if you are not as confident as Malcolm and Jarad, and you are faced with a world telling you that your interests lay in the wrong place, because you are the wrong race? What if you’re like me, with skin and an identity created by the bonding of two different worlds, but you are bombarded with messages that tell you life is either about picking one, or figuring out how to navigate between the two?

Popular music is a space in which identities are imagined, formed, represented and contested. Racialized genre categories that function within the commercial market have not only restricted the ability of musicians to freely and creatively make (and sell) music, but have also impacted the ability of listeners to freely consume.

Take this encounter, for example:

While humorous, it is also realistic. In the privacy of homes (or cars), in the safe space of like-minded individuals, and through the headphones attached to portable music players, consumption has always crossed racial lines. In the public arena though, Black listeners, just like Black musicians, have not had the same affordances as white listeners and white musicians to express and participate in non-conformity. This does not erase the fact that these non-conforming consumers exist, or that they have power. The boundaries of genre and the identities they reflect and produce are imposed from the top down and developed from the bottom up. The old institutions will try to exercise and maintain control in the digital age where they can (just as in the physical world), but our current media environment is more consumer driven than ever. Consumers now want to pull or seek out music, rather than having it solely pushed on them.

We are in a period of transformation. The Internet and new digital technologies have forever altered the landscape of the music industry. The traditional gatekeepers might not be interested in taking risks as they determine how to survive in the digital age, but they no longer hold all of the power. Digital distribution creates new opportunities to have music widely heard outside of established structures. Once revered music critics, many of whom contribute(d) to and reinforce(d) racialized genre boundaries, are now faced with competition from music recommendation websites, music blogs, amateur reviewers and more. In the past radio might have been the medium that enabled artists to spread their music, but the Internet is quickly coming for that title. In an attempt to more properly reflect consumption by listeners, the music charts in Billboard magazine have now begun including YouTube plays and Internet streaming into its calculations. Potentially, anyone can make it to the top.

The current moment is providing the opportunity to complicate our understanding of racialized sound. The dominant conceptions of what it means to be Black, what it means to be white, and what it means to create music through those identities are being challenged.

Like this:

Splitting from genre tradition does not have to erase social identities and histories; it can allow music to expand and breathe. The remix and mashup practices of both hip-hop and electronic music have demonstrated how boundaries and identities can be reimagined in a way that recognizes points of similarity, but also celebrates difference.

Doing so is how we get songs such as this:

And artists who make music like this:

Holes are increasingly punched into the lines drawn to bound music and culture. The racial and ethnic makeup of America is changing. From musicians challenging stereotypes in the studio and on the stage, to series such as NPR’s “When our kids own America,” people are taking notice. The mutations in popular music that led to its evolution have always been about looking back, looking left, and looking right in order to look forward. The digital revolution is about providing the tools to make this happen.

Rebecca Johnson is a songwriter and Ph.D. student studying the commodification of American popular music in the digital age at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her work explores how music is produced, marketed, distributed and consumed in a constantly changing, technologically driven, and globally connected world.

Work/Life Balance as Women's Labor

This is another in a series of blog posts produced by students in my Public Intellectuals seminar. Worklife Balance as Women's Labor by Tisha Dejmanee

When Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All" came out, I have to admit I was crushed. Knowing that I want both a career and family in my future, Slaughter's advice was demoralising. However, what upset me more was her scapegoating of the feminist movement as a way of rationalising her own disappointment. This led me to explore the continuing unsatisfactory support faced by parents in the workplace, as well as the injustices inherent in the public framing of worklife balance.

Worklife balance is a catchphrase endemic to contemporary life. Despite its ambiguous nomenclature and holistic connotations, worklife balance is a problem created for and directed towards professional, middle-class women with children. Exploring the way this concept has captured the social imaginary reveals that the myth of equality and meritocracy persists in spite of evidence that structural inequalities continue to perpetuate social injustices by gender, race, class and sexuality. It also exposes the continuing demise of second wave feminism in favour of narratives of retreatism, the trend for women to leave the workforce and return home to embrace conservative gender roles.

The circulation of worklife balance as a women’s issue is only logical in an environment where the private and public spheres remain sharply divided. While gendered subjects may traverse between the two spheres, they maintain primary, gendered obligations to one sphere. Traditionally, men have occupied the public sphere while women occupied the private sphere. The work-life strain that we currently see is a remnant from the battle middle-class women fought in the 60s and 70s, as part of the agenda of liberal feminism, to gain equal access to the ‘masculine’ public sphere. This access has been framed as a privilege for women who, through the 80s – with the enduring icon of the high-paced ‘superwoman’ who managed both family and career – until the present have been required to posture as masculine to be taken seriously in the public sphere, while maintaining their naturalised, primary responsibilities within the private sphere.

The unsustainability of such a system is inevitable: Women must work harder to show their commitment to the workplace, in order to fight off the assumption that their place is still in the home. The gravitational pull of domesticity and its chores remain applicable only to women, whose success as gendered subjects is still predicated on their ability to keep their house and family in order. Men have little incentive to take on more of the burden of private sphere work, as it is devalued and works to destabilise their inherent male privilege (hence the popular representation of domestic men in ads, as comically incompetent, or worthy of laudatory praise for the smallest domestic contribution). Accordingly, women feel the strain of the opposing forces of private and public labour, which relentlessly threaten to collide yet are required to be kept strictly separated.

Moreover, worklife balance is regarded as an issue that specifically pertains to mothers, because while self-care, relationships with friends and romantic relationships might be desirable, all of these things can ultimately be sacrificed for work. Motherhood remains sacred in our society, and due to the biological mechanisms of pregnancy, is naturalised both in the concept of woman and in the successful gendered performance of femininity. This explains the stubborn social refusal to acknowledge child-free women as anything but deviant, and the delighted novelty with which stay-at-home dads are regarded which has been popularised in cultural texts, for example by the NBC sitcom “Guys with Kids” or the A&E reality television show "Modern Dad" that follows the lives of four stay-at-home dads living in Austin, Texas.

Motherhood heightens worklife balance in two particular ways: Firstly, it exacerbates the difficulties of attaining success in work and at home, because the demands set for mothers in contemporary life are becoming increasingly, irreverently, high. Fear has always been used to motivate mothers, who are blamed for everything from physical defects that occur in-utero to the social problems which may affect children in later life, as can be seen from the furore that ensued when a mother posted this photo of herself doing a crossfit workout while 8 months pregnant with her third child. However, motherhood has become a site that demands constant attention, a trend that Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels call ‘new-momism’ ‘the new ideal of a mom as a transcendent and ideal woman who must “devote … her entire physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children” (The Mommy Myth 2004, p. 4).

Secondly, motherhood physically and symbolically hinders the motility of women across the boundary from private to public as it reinforces the materiality of female embodiment. Women’s bodies are marked by the fertility clock, imagined in popular rhetoric as a timebomb that threatens to explode at approximately the same time as educated women are experiencing major promotions in their careers, and provides a physical, ‘biological’ barrier to accompany the limit of the glass ceiling. If infants are miraculously born of the barren, middle-aged professional woman’s body, they are imagined in abject terms – hanging off the breasts of their mothers while their own small, chaotic bodies threaten disruption and chaos to the strictly scheduled, sanitized bureaucratic space of the office. This is the infiltration of home life that is epitomised when Sarah Jessica Parker, playing an investment banker with two small children, comes to work with pancake batter (which could just have easily been substituted with baby vomit or various other infant bodily fluids) in the 2011 film I Don’t Know How She Does It.

Public attention to this issue has recently been elevated by the publication of writings from high-profile women, including Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sheryl Sandberg and Harvard professor Radhika Nagpal; speculation about high-profile women such as Marissa Mayer and Tina Fey; and through fictional representations of women such as the film (originally book) I Don’t Know How She Does It, Miranda Hobbes in television show Sex and the City; and Alicia Florrick in television drama The Good Wife.

Returning now to Slaughter’s article, she details her experience by frankly discussing the tensions that arose from managing her high-profile job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department. Specifically, the problem was her troubled teenage son who she saw only when she travelled home on weekends. Ultimately, Slaughter decided to return to her tenured position at Princeton after two years: “When people asked why I had left government I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules … but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

While Slaughter remains Professor Emeritus at an ivy league university (and her insinuation in the article that academia is the “soft option” is certainly offensive to others in the academy), she speaks of her experience as a failure of sorts, which is affirmed by the response of other women who seem to dismiss her choice to put family over career. Slaughter sees this as the culture of feminist expectation set for contemporary, educated young women, what Anita Harris would call ‘can-do’ girls: “I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).” In making this claim, Slaughter becomes a pantsuit wearing, professional spokesperson for retreatism.

Diane Negra discusses retreatism in her 2009 book, What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. Negra describes retreatism as ‘the pleasure and comfort of (re)claiming an identity uncomplicated by gender politics, postmodernism, or institutional critique’ (2010, p. 2). She describes a common narrative trope wherein ‘the postfeminist subject is represented as having lost herself but then [(re)achieves] stability through romance, de-aging, a makeover, by giving up paid work, or by ‘coming home’ (2010, p. 5). Retreatism takes cultural form through shepherding working women back into the home using the rhetoric of choice, wherein the second wave slogan of choice is subverted to justify the adoption of conservative gender positions. Retreatism is also reinforced through the glamorisation of hegemonically feminine rituals such as wedding culture, domestic activities such as baking and crafting, motherhood and girlie culture.

In keeping with the retreatist narrative, the personal crisis Slaughter faces is the problematic behaviour of her son, and ultimately she decides that she would rather move home to be with her family full-time rather than continue her prestigious State job. While this personal decision is one that should be accepted with compassion and respect, Slaughter uses this narrative to implicate the feminist movement as the source of blame: “Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating ‘you can have it all’ is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.”

This backlash against feminism is not nearly as novel nor fair as Slaughter suggests, but it does uncover (as I suggested earlier) the continuing scapegoating of the feminist movement as the source of women’s stress and unhappiness, in preference to addressing the rigid structural and organisational inequalities that require women to stretch themselves thin. Slaughter does not acknowledge the personal benefits she has received from the feminist movement and women who helped pave the way for her success, and in doing so contributes to the postfeminist belief that second wave feminism is ‘done’ and irrelevant – even harmful – in the current era.

Slaughter suggests that women loathe to admit that they like being at home, which more than anything reveals the very limited social circle that she inhabits and addresses. Retreatism glorifies the home environment, and this new domesticity – as stylised as it is mythical – is the logical conclusion to Slaughter’s assertion that women cannot have it all. Moreover, men become the heroes in this framing of the problem, celebrated not so much for their support in overturning structural inequalities, but for their ‘willingness’ to pick up the slack – typically comprising an equal share of the labour – around the home.

What bewilders me most about this account is Slaughter's need to discredit the feminist movement. Without trivialising the personal decisions made by Slaughter and many other women in the negotiation of work and childcare, at some point the glaring trend towards retreatism must be considered as more than a collection of individual women’s choices: It is a clue that systematic, institutionalised gender inequality continues to permeate the organisation of work and the family unit.

Slaughter points out the double standard in allowing men religious time off that is respected, but not having the same regard for women taking time off to care for their families; the difference in attitude towards the discipline of the marathon runner versus the discipline of the organised working mother. To me, this does not indicate a failure of feminism – it suggests that feminism has not yet gone far enough. However, yet again the productive anger that feminism bestowed upon us has been redirected to become anger channelled at feminism, taking away the opportunity to talk about systematic failures in the separation of private and personal life, and their continued gendered connotations.

Slaughter's opinion, although considered, is not the final word on this issue. There are many unanswered questions that arise from her article, including:

• How we might understand the craving for worklife balance as a gender-neutral response to the upheaval of working conditions in the current economic, technological and cultural moment
• How technology and the economy are encouraging ever more fusions between the personal and the private, and what the advantages and disadvantages of such mergers might be
• How to talk about worklife balance for the working classes, whose voices on this matter are sorely needed
• How to talk about women in a way that is not solely predicated on their roles as a caregivers to others

We need people from many different perspectives to share their experiences and contribute to this discussion, and I invite you to do so in the comments below.

Tisha Dejmanee is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research interests lie at the interface of feminist theory and digital technologies, particularly postfeminist representations in the media; conceptualising online embodiment; practices of food blogging and digital labour practices.

What Do We Expect from Environmental Risk Communicators?

This is another in a series of blog posts from the PhD students taking my class on Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.  

What do we expect from environmental risk communicators?

by Xin Wang

A recent poll conducted by New York Times showed that although many Americans are dedicated in principle to the generic “environmentalist” agenda,  we -- as individuals -- stop short of enacting real changes in our habits and in our daily lives, changes that would help undo some of the ecological devastation we claim to be concerned about. For example, the alarm of global warming or climate change has been sounded repeatedly, but the society collectively and individually still generally turn a deaf ear partly because they assume the potential risks of sea level’s rising and glacial melting as chronic, diffuse in time and space, natural, and not dreadful in their impact. Continued exposure to more alarming facts does not lead to enhanced alertness but rather to fading interest or ecofatigue, which means we pay “lip service” to many environmental concepts engaging in the behaviors necessary to turn concepts into action, or we just become increasingly apathetic. In short, we are a society of armchair environmentalists.

The burgeoning civic discourses about environmental issues must confront this apathy. Our perspectives on environmental issues are influenced by official discourses such as public hearings and mass-mediated government accounts: we learn about environmental problems by reading reports of scientific studies in national and local newspaper; by watching the Discovery Channel and listening to NPR’s Living on Earth; by attending public hearings or events. By nature, however, these official environmental discourses tend toward a monologic framework that obscures the diversity and suppresses, rather than elicits, the dialogic potential of any utterance.

So here is our question: what kind of environmental risk communicators do we really need?

One challenge to effective environmental risk communication is that the narrative of environmental apocalypse still dominates as a standard rhetorical technique in communicating environmental problems to the public. Apocalyptic prophets continue, however, to blow the whistle on existing and developing environmental problems. Films such as The Core (2003) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) suggest that our biggest threat is the earth itself. While scholars agree that such apocalyptic narratives can initiate public discourse about and intervention in impending ecological disaster, the overuse of fear discourse is highly controversial considering its euphemism, vagueness, and hyperbole, which often lead to procrastination and inaction. Those who are frightened, angry, and powerless will resist the information that the risk is modest; those who are optimistic and overconfident will resist the information that their risk is substantial.

Another challenge facing environmental communication results from difficulties in producing knowledge to support improved decision making. Undoubtedly, the society requires knowledge in engineering and natural sciences, yet this is apparently insufficient for producing a transition to more sustainable communities. To wit, in the traditional technocratic model where there is little or even no interaction between scientific experts and the public, scientists decide what to study and make information available to society by placing it on a “loading dock”, then waiting for society to pick up and use it. This process has largely failed to meet societal needs.

Environmental concern is a broad concept that refers to a wide range of phenomena – from awareness of environmental problems to support for environmental protection – that reflect attitudes, related cognitions, and behavioral intentions toward the environment. In this sense, public opinions and media coverage play a significant role in evicting questions, causing changes, resolving problems, making improvements, and reacting to decisions about the environment taken by local and national authorities.

On the other hand, under the social constructionist model which focuses on the flow of technical information and acknowledges the shared values, beliefs, and emotions between experts in science and the public, an interactive exchange of information takes place: it is an improved integration of invested parties, initiatives that stress co-learning and focus on negotiations and power sharing.

Trust or confidence in the risk communicator is another important factor to be taken into account where potential personal harm is concerned: if the communicator is viewed as having a compromised mandate or a lack of competence, credence in information provided tends to be weakened accordingly. Or if the particular risk has been mismanaged or neglected in the past, skepticism and distrust may greet attempts to communicate risks. Apparently, it is more difficult to create or earn trust than to destroy it. If people do not trust an organization, negative information associated with that organization reinforces their distrust, whereas positive information is discounted (Cvetkovich et al. 2002).

When the control of risk is not at the personal level, trust becomes a major and perhaps the most important variable in public acceptance of the risk management approach. The single biggest contributor to increasing trust and credibility is the organization’s ability to care or show empathy.

On the one hand, when experts refuse to provide information, a hungry public will fill the void, often with rumor, supposition, and less-than-scientific theories. Silence from experts and decision makers breeds fear and suspicion among those at risk and makes later risk communication much more difficult. On the other hand, information alone, no matter how carefully packaged and presented, will not communicate risk affectively if trust and credibility are not established first.

It is time to advocate a new environmental risk discourse as well as to develop a practical wisdom grounded in situated practice on the part of communicators. Risks and problems are socially constructed. While grave threats may  exist in the environment, the perception of such danger, rather than the reality itself, is what moves us to take actions.

Culture, social networks, and communication practices are nuanced, specific, locally based, and often highly resilient. Our objective of effective and productive environmental communication should be in democratizing the way control affects how people define risk and how they approach information about risk, and in “formulating the meaningfulness of conversational interaction to participants in terms they find resonant, important to them, and thereby opening portals into their communal standards for such action” (Carbaugh, 2005, p. Xiii).

Xin Wang, Ph.D.student at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. M.A. in Mass Communication and B.A. in Russian language at Peking University, China. She has eight years of working experience in professional journalism, media marketing and management at the People's Daily, a co-founder of a weekly newspaper China Energy News. Her current research interests concentrate on risk and environmental communication, nation branding, public diplomacy, and civic engagement.

"To JK Rowling, From Cho Chang": Responding to Asian Stereotyping in Popular Culture

This is the second in a series of blog posts produced by the students in my Public Intellectuals seminar at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. We appreciate any feedback or response you'd like to share.  "To JK Rowling, From Cho Chang": Responding to Asian Stereotyping in Popular Culture

by Diana Lee

Awhile back, my friend and fellow graduate student sent me a simple email with the subject line, “Calling out the representation of Asian women in Harry Potter books,” and a short one-line message:

“Saw this and thought of you – the videos are really interesting!!”

I was immediately intrigued by her email because she is, as I mentioned, a respected friend and colleague, and I know she is thoughtful about her communication, but also because before clicking on the link, I wasn’t certain what she was referring to. Had she thought of me because of my love of the magical world of Harry Potter? My academic and personal interest in representations of Asians, Asian Americans, and gender in U.S. media and popular culture? Was it because of my deep appreciation of people who create counter-narratives that challenge stereotypes and forefront voices that are not frequently heard in “mainstream” dialogue? Or perhaps it was a show of support for my hopeful but yet-to-be-solidified desire to combine my enthusiasm for all of these things in academic life? The answer? Yes. Turns out she was pointing me towards something that exemplified all of these things, and much more.

In April 2013, the Youtube video of college student spoken word artist Rachel Rostad’s “To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang” went viral. In the video, she is shown performing a poem which challenges the representations of Asian women and other marginalized groups in the Harry Potter series and other popular stories (such as Ms. Saigon, Madame Butterfly, and Memoirs of a Geisha). Written and delivered in the style of many spoken word performances, Rachel uses a powerful, clear, strong voice, and the poem is filled with provocative examples artfully expressed to maximize emotional impact.

You can hear her frustration with the fact that Asians and Asian women in the U.S. are constantly misrepresented in shallow and/or stereotypical roles in books, movies, and television shows. You follow along as she exposes the subtle but sadly pervasive ways these caricatures are presented – with “Asian” accented English, with “foreign” names that may or may not make sense in actual “Asian” languages, as disposable minor characters used to set up the focus on the White, leading woman who is the “real” love interest, as sexually “exotic” Asian women who are submissive and/or hypersexualized, and only to be used and then discarded or left behind. And finally, at the end of the poem, through a story that comes across as her own, she draws a connection between why we should pay attention to these limited representations and speaks about an example of how they can influence our everyday interactions.

She makes the case that when we don’t see other representations of characters with depth and breadth that look and sound and think and love like real people, then the limited portrayals can impact not only the possibilities we can imagine for ourselves, but also what others see as possible for or with us. Rachel Rostad used this poem as a creative and powerful challenge to pervasive, potentially damaging, familiar portrayals, urging us to think critically about the stories, images, and identities we participate in consuming and perpetuating.

But that wasn’t all. She also did something else that we should highlight and celebrate.

The video of her spoken word performance went viral, generating a flurry of criticism and commentary. Instead of ignoring or dismissing these responses or getting pulled into destructively defensive or combative flame wars, she used the opportunity to reflect, learn, teach, and engage in a (public) conversation. She did this in a number of ways and across multiple platforms (e.g., YouTube, tumblr, blog posts, Facebook), but the most visible one is the follow-up video she created a few days after the first video was posted, which was called, “Response To Critiques of ‘To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang.’”

In the response video, Rachel speaks directly to the camera, beginning with “hey there, Internet!,” and point by point, articulately, sincerely, and calmly addresses the five main critiques that came pouring in to her through the various mediated forms she was involved with.

One point addressed the possibility that “Cho Chang” could be a legitimate name, despite what she articulated in her poem about “Cho” and “Chang” being two last names. Rachel admitted ignorance in Chinese and other naming practices, acknowledged that the line in the poem about Cho’s name was problematic, apologized for marginalizing and misrepresenting parts of a community she was trying to empower, and urged viewers to also focus on the other themes she draws on in the rest of the poem.

Following that, Rachel’s next series of comments emphasized that she does not speak for all Asian women, and is not claiming to through her work. She apologized again for unintended mischaracterizations, especially to those who reached out to her saying they felt misrepresented by her poem. Rachel then used these interactions to encourage reflection about and reemphasize the importance of a wider range of media and pop cultural portrayals for Asians and Asian women, which was one of the main points of her spoken word piece, saying, “I’m very sorry I misrepresented you. But I don’t think either of us is to blame for this. I would ask you, what conditions are in place that make it so that you are so defensive that I, someone with a completely different experience of oppression, am not representing your voice? It’s sad that we live in a society where my voice is so easily mistaken for yours - where our differing identities are viewed as interchangeable.”

Continuing on the theme of advocating for a wider range of media representations and prompting us to think critically about the representations we do see, Rachel’s third point was about the realistic portrayal of a grieving character versus in-depth character development of Asian and White female lead characters. Yes, Cho was sad about boyfriend Cedric Diggory’s death and confused about her developing feelings for Harry so she was crying, pensive, and sad most of the time, but JK Rowling intentionally set up Cho as weak to make Ginny, Harry’s eventual love interest and a White woman, look stronger. This may not have been intentionally racially charged, but it is important to think about because discrimination and prejudice are oftentimes not only about intentionality. This is a theme that recurs in mainstream films and stories – women of color appear as minor, brief, undeveloped characters to set up the “real” relationship for the main White characters later in the narrative, and the more we see it repeated with no alternative portrayals, the more it has the potential to seem “natural.”

Similarly, her fourth point is also about different ways that problematic representations take form, describing why she talked about Dumbledore’s sexuality, which some argued seemed tangential to the main themes of the poem. Thinking about representation and whose stories are privileged is not only about who is invisible from the story, or the limited roles people are allowed to play, but it is also about considering that even when in prominent positions within stories, aspects of character’s identities aren’t developed in a way that illustrates the depth and complexity of our lived realities.

Rachel’s fifth point in her response video is about how she does not hate Harry Potter or JK Rowling (or Ravenclaw, I’m assuming!), but rather is a fan who grew up on the books and went to all the midnight showings, and importantly, is also able to think critically about and critique a world that she also enjoys.

And finally, she closes the response video with this message:

That's it for now. I understand if you still disagree with me, but I hope you now disagree with me for the arguments I'm actually making, and it's been humbling and amazing to watch people respond to this video. I think that the presence of so much passionate dialogue means that this is an issue that needs to be talked about. And yes, I made mistakes, and just as I think JK Rowling did with some of her characterizations. But what I hope people realize is that dialogue about social justice is not about blaming people for making mistakes, whether it's me or JK Rowling. It's about calling attention to mistakes, which I'll be the first to admit, is painful, and using those mistakes as an opportunity to grow.

I personally have learned so much from the mistakes I've made in this process, and I want to thank the community for calling me out on that. Social justice is about holding each other accountable. And I hope as a devoted fan base and as an amazing community we can continue to use my piece as a jumping off point for further dialogue, growth, and reflection.

Thank you.

We should celebrate this as an exemplary instance of reflexivity, of praxis  – of the liberating power of reflection, awareness, and action. Of an intelligent, passionate young person invested in learning from and contributing to her community. Of the engaging, participatory possibilities available through working with popular culture and using technology, media, and newer forms of mediated communication as tools for transformative education. This is also a great opportunity for educators and families to unpack the pedagogical implications of what happens when you find something young people are excited about and engage in this kind of expression and communication with a larger community. And this is also an example of what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls participatory culture, specifically, in relation to new media literacies and civic engagement.

These words – reflexivity, praxis, pedagogy, new media, media literacy, civic engagement – get thrown around in academic institutions and circles all the time. And we should continue to teach them and explore their philosophies and apply their meanings, but we cannot forget the importance of grounding them in concrete examples, not just for academics or practitioners, but also for people who may not use these same terms, but still find the practices empowering. Rachel Rostad’s two videos, along with her other critical engagement with this discourse, is a great, accessible example of what we hope that people of all ages are doing when they are participating in mediated communication, engaging with popular culture, and otherwise interacting out in the world. We hope that people are actively engaged with their media and popular cultural stories and artifacts, and with each other. We hope that people are thinking about ideas, sharing them, playing with and acting on them, challenging each other and working out responses, incorporating new information, helping each other to learn and grow, and then repeating that process again and again.

By following Rachel’s videos and active online engagement with a larger community, we can literally see and hear this messy, discursive, interactive transformative learning and teaching process unfolding. One of the key messages Rachel communicates is that she has learned a lot through the process of writing this poem, performing it, posting it online, receiving and engaging with all of the responses to it, and creating the follow-up video. She used these interactions in several ways. She apologized for areas where she made mistakes, where she misrepresented or silenced populations she was trying to empower. She clarified her perspective or points that either were not clear through the delivery of the poem, or could not be expanded on given the format of spoken word poetry. She used the experience as a way to take in and address critiques about areas she could have presented differently. And finally, she also spoke about the complexity of representation and tokenization both within the poem itself, which spoke about popular cultural representation via Cho Chang, but also in terms of her speaking about these topics from her positionality as a woman of color, who is considered “Asian” in the United States. She shared with us her processing and grappling with these issues, thanked all those that responded or commented, and kept the door open for future dialogue over these issues. She did all this, and publicly. What a courageous thing to do.

In one instance, for example, a blogger at Angry Asian Girls United (AAGU) posted a response to the original poem, calling Rachel out for her glaring misrepresentation of South Asians and for ignoring Pan-Asian solidarity and identity. The blogger also critiqued her for taking up the term “Brown” as an East Asian, and for conflating the varying meanings of the “Asian” label when you consider U.S. versus U.K. contexts (where Harry Potter’s world is set; because then “Asian” would refer to Indians or other South Asians, e.g., Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and people who look like Cho Chang would be referred to as “Chinese,” “Korean,” or another label associated with the East Asian country they hailed from). In the poem, Rachel speaks of “Asians” as if it equates to East Asian, and does not count Indian characters Padma and Parvati Patil when she speaks of “Asians,” a common issue when people have not fully unpacked the deeply ingrained, volatile, problematic U.S. (and global) race categorizations. In the poem, Rachel does include the Patil twins, as well as herself, as “Brown” and “minority.” I believe she used the term “Brown” as an attempt to empower and connect with discourses of identity politics that are possibly specific to U.S. cultural context, but whether (East, South, Central, Middle Eastern) Asians are included in that term, or whether she should or can use it can be saved for a separate conversation. The point is, the AAGU blog post called her out on her conflation, misrepresentation, and the silencing nature of Rachel’s use of these terms, and she heard them, learned from and engaged with the criticism.

This one relatively small but important part of this larger example shows how many people were actively engaged, challenging both their own and each other’s thinking processes through this topic, and in a public way, which allowed others (like me and you) to witness and/or participate in the discussion, even months later. Additionally, Rachel and the people commenting on her videos were engaged through the combination and use of multiple, networked avenues. In the example above, the video was first posted on YouTube, which acquired comments. Rachel was looking for a way to succinctly learn about and respond to the YouTube comments about the misrepresentation of South Asians, which she found through the Angry Asian Girls United blog post. Rachel then linked to this blog post and responded to it on her tumblr site, and also apologized for misrepresenting Asian women in her response video, which was posted on YouTube. And to begin with, both Rachel and the AAGU blog poster were familiar with Harry Potter, whether through the books or movies (or some other form, e.g., video games, news, conversations), and the conversation and rapid spread of the discussion were supported because of an already existing Harry Potter fan base. Through their dialogue, both Rachel and the AAGU blogger were pushing ideas of the fluid markers and conceptions of identity and how it impacts and is impacted by visibility, representation, and socio-historic context.

When thinking about social justice or civic engagement, we often look for big things – movements, large groups mobilizing many people – but sometimes we should shift our perspective a bit and focus in on the incredible things small groups of individuals are doing. They can also have a big impact. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.

In the end, it all comes full circle. Rachel shared her performance and reflection with communities in person and on the internet, my friend shared the videos with me, and now I’m sharing my thoughts with you. I will join both Rachel Rostad and my friend and echo their sentiments. Hi. I saw this, and thought of you. The videos are really interesting! I hope we can continue to use these conversations as a jumping off point for further dialogue, growth, and reflection. Thank you!

For more information on Rachel Rostad, visit her tumlbr or facebook pages. Rachel is currently a student at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In keeping with voicing diverse stories about Asian Americans, she also has a great poem, “Adoption,” which is about identity, belonging, and family, from the perspective of a Korean adoptee growing up with a non-Korean family in the U.S., and one of her latest poems is about her Names.

Diana Lee is a Ph.D. student at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her work explores representations of race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and other aspects of identity in U.S. media and popular culture. Specifically, she focuses on media portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans, implications of stereotypical and limited representation, and the educational and empowering nature of counter-narratives. Of particular interest are counter-narratives created through networked, mediated expressions, as well as participatory experiences and communities.

Who Reaps the Rewards of Live-Tweeting in the TV Attention Economy?

A few weeks ago, I shared the syllabus of a new class I am teaching this term in the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism focusing on helping my students acquire the skills and knowledge they are going to need to put a more public-facing dimension on their scholarship. This experiment in training public intellectuals has continued with great success. Over the next few weeks, I am going to be sharing here the blog posts my students produced, reflecting a range of different research interests in media and communications. These posts should allow you to hear the voices and get a sense of the commitments which drive this generation of students. I am pleased to be sharing their work with the world and I am enormously proud of what they've been able to accomplish in a very short period of time.  

Who Reaps The Rewards of Live-Tweeting In the TV Attention Economy?

by Katie Walsh

When the newest season of The Bachelorette rolled around this summer, I was excited, not just for the male antics and cattiness I unabashedly take pleasure in as a fan, but as a writer and media studies student interested in the machinations of reality TV. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the show’s 9^th season would provide a wealth of resources for my research into reality TV fans and their online productions. With the first TV spots advertising “MAN TEARS” in bold letters, I rubbed my hands together in anticipation of the humiliations Mark Burnett and co. would subject to newest bachelors, feeding the needs of the tweeting, recapping viewers who tune in for the spilled tears, and not so much the fairytale romance.

I began my research into The Bachelor/Bachelorette ABC franchise as a fan (albeit as the kind of fan who tuned for the opportunities to snark with friends). Despite, or because of, my feminism, I was compelled by the showy courtship ritual-turned-competition, and the best and worst that it brought out in its participants. As an avid reader of recaps, and a live-tweeter, I wanted to understand more about how these disparate texts worked in tandem with each other. I am of the mind that the instant feedback received by reality show producers, in the form of recaps, comments, and live-tweets has influenced the shape of their product, particularly in terms of the narrative.

Anna McCarthy describes the reality TV genre as a “theater of suffering,”[1] and part of reality TV fandom is often the voyeurism and perverse pleasure in the exposure of humiliation and pain that these love-seekers go through (exhibit A, the blog Forever Alone: Faces of Rejected Bachelorettes, which consists solely of screenshots of crying women). Women are expected to perform their gender properly in order to “win” the bachelor. When they fail, often by committing the cardinal feminine sin of being “mean,” or being too sexual (or not sexual enough—just the right amount!) they are either rejected, or humiliated, or both, by both fellow cast members and producers in the way they shape the narrative. The camera invades private moments of suffering, such as the infamous reject limo shots, which shine a spotlight on the women as they mourn their rejection. This practice has seeped into the The Bachelorette, as men descend into gossiping and accusations about those who are “not there for the right reasons.” Male contestants are emasculated onscreen for their over-the-top demonstrations of emotion, such as singing embarrassing ballads, too-soon declarations of love, and crying (hence the advertised “MAN TEARS”). Both of these practices reinforce strict, and traditional, gender stereotypes: women must be nice and not too sexual, but not frigid, and men must be stoic, masculine, and controlled.

My initial assertion was that these recaps and live-tweets demonstrate the “anti-fan” readings that many fans engage in, and that they affected the show in the editing and narrative structure. But, this summer, Team Bachelorette did me one better: they slapped those tweets, good, bad, and snarky right onto the screen. The narrative structure of a show like Bachelorette is uniquely suited to a social media enhanced viewing experience, which is often a necessary part of getting through the bloated two-hour running time.  Knowing that some viewers were engaging with a second screen platform during the show, producers brought that second screen inside the screen itself, keeping viewers’ eyes on both their tweets and on advertisements. One can’t really live tweet unless one is watching during the broadcast time, which means real time ads—no fast-forward or time shifting here. This is all the better for letting advertisers know just how many activated, interactive viewers are participating—lucrative commodities for sale in the attention economy.

Bachelorette allowed a variety of tweets onscreen, in terms of content and sentiment about the show. Not all of the tweets were straightforward fan praise, so it’s clear that Team Bachelorette is fully aware of those audience members who like to poke fun at the extravagant love contest. It’s unclear how exactly they chose the onscreen tweets, many hashtagged #TheBachelorette or tagged the official account @BacheloretteABC, but this wasn’t consistent across the board. There were several tweets featured from the Bachelor “fan” site Bachelor Burn Book (their Twitter bio reads, “How many witty and sarcastic comments can we make about The Bachelor/Bachelorette/Bachelor Pad? The limit does not exist”) often snarking on the contestants’ hair or even host Chris Harrison’s shirt choices (they hate the bright colors and prints).

Part of the appeal of competitive reality shows is the viewer’s ability to participate in the game itself through technology, whether it’s determining who goes home each week on American Idol or The Voice, or voting for a fan favorite contestant on Top Chef or RuPaul’s Drag Race, a process that Tasha Oren refers to as a ludic or game-like interaction in her article “Reiterational Texts and Global Imagination.” Live-tweeting can be a way for fans to participate with a favorite TV text in an increasingly interactive culture, but that practice isn’t just simply fan-generated fun. These interactive efforts are also extremely lucrative for networks and producers vying for viewers. Oren states, “game culture and the rise of a play aesthetic have not only emerged as an organizing experience in media culture but are central to an industry-wide reconfiguration towards interactivity and intertextual associations across media products.”[2] Viewer interaction is now an integral part of television viewing, as a result of an industry-wide effort to sustain attention in a marketplace where attention is increasingly fragmented.

This attention is what television networks and producers need to sell to advertisers, which is why viewer activation is such a priority for those networks losing viewers to Hulu, Netflix, and DVR. Live-tweeting is something that fans do to enhance the viewing experience for themselves, but they’re also providing an important service to networks, offering not only feedback but numbers of engaged audience members. They’re doing the heavy lifting of audience activation by activating themselves. Their efforts are then incorporated into the show’s text, which enhances the product for the fans, yes, but they are essentially “buying” that product with their attention, twice.

This isn’t just a boon for TV networks, as social networks scramble to be the destination for television conversation, as they expand promotions and advertising within their platforms. As Twitter gears up for its IPO, its place at the top of the online TV chatter heap enhances its value. As the New York Times reports this week, “Facebook and Twitter both see the social conversation around television as a way to increase use of their sites and win a bigger piece of advertisers’ spending.” The attention of activated viewers is now being bought and sold on both screens.

The draw to interact with the text for a viewer is often the feeling of control. Audiences that feel like they can affect the outcome feel an authorship or dominance over the text. Snarky tweets about Chris Harrison’s shirt choice allow viewers to feel like ABC isn’t getting one over on them, that they are subverting the system and its production. This phenomenon is explored in Mark Andrejevic’s piece “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans,”[3] but his results are less utopian than us anti-fans might imagine: ultimately, this labor still renders the work that we do subject to the mass-mediated text itself, and the networks have created us into an army of viewer-workers, exerting effort to make these shows interesting for us, the product of these efforts splashed onscreen as part of the attention grabbing television show itself.

This onscreen tweet campaign was not a completely harmonious union, however. As mentioned, part of the appeal of interactivity is control, and inundating the lower half of the TV screen with snarky tweets may have been efficient for viewers already used to participating in a second screen experience, but not for all. One tweet slipped through the filter, expressing not humor and snark but dissatisfaction and alienation with the format. It read, “I wish the tweets at the bottom of the screen would go away on the bachelorette. #noonecares.” Entertainment Weekly, Mediabistro, and Buzzfeed, who all reported on it, noted the irony of the dissatisfied tweet slipping through into exactly what it was complaining about in a moment of meta-textual anarchy.

While the onscreen tweet producers work on those cracks in the matrix, it seems appropriate to question the economic implications of this practice. One can argue that fans, especially technologically empowered ones, are going to produce as a part of their consumption, whether or not the networks are involved, so why should it matter if ABC decides to use the products of this practice to their own advantage? However, the exploitation of this production becomes more clear when considering just what ABC uses as a commodity to sell to advertisers: audience attention. The onscreen tweet practice is way to take advantage of that viewer attention even further. Audiences can now pay attention on two screens in order to enjoy the show, which is a value-add for the online and television presence. Are onscreen tweets simply an innocuous add-on to the text of the show itself or a way to capitalize on the increasingly rare attention commodity?

And it’s not just TV networks seeking a piece of the pie, as Twitter gears up for its impending IPO, the amount of TV viewers chattering on their social network makes their public offering even more valuable, as they add more ads and promoted content in users’ timelines. Even Nielsen is getting into the game, finally updating their ratings system with Twitter metrics this week. Though this is a case of the corporations organizing themselves and driven by the habits of consumers, it’s important to examine these practices and see where those benefits actually land in the end.

Katie Walsh is a writer, critic, academic, and blogger based in Los Angeles. She has contributed film reviews, TV recaps, and interviews to the The Playlist on indieWIRE since 2009, and has written about media and culture for The Hairpin and Movieline. She received her M.A. in Critical Studies from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2013, and is currently a first year doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, focusing on television and new media.

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[1] Anna McCarthy, “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” Social Text 93, Vol. 25, No. 4. 2007

[2] Tasha Oren “Reiterational Texts and Global Imagination: Television Strikes Back,” in Global Television Formats, ed. Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf (Routledge, 2011), 368

[3] Mark Andrejevic, “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans,” Television & New Media. 2008.

How Many People Does It Take to Redesign a Light Bulb? USC's Daren Brabham on Crowdsourcing (Part Two)

You seek to distinguish crowdsourcing from  Kickstarter, which get described from time to time in those terms. What is at stake in making these distinctions?

Crowdsourcing is conceptually distinct from crowdfunding. It is only the “crowd” in their names that lumps them together. The one thing they have in common is the existence of an online community.

Where crowdsourcing is a co-creative process where organizations incorporate the labor and creative insights of online communities into the very creation of something (the design of a product, the solving of a tough chemical formula, etc.), crowdfunding involves using the monetary donations from an online community to bring an already conceived concept to market. That is, most of the projects on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter are not asking for individuals to help shape a creative project. Rather, Kickstarter projects are asking for financial backing to bring someone else’s idea into being.

While different, both crowdsourcing and crowdfunding will be enormously important players in the future economy.

While you cite some earlier examples of collaborative production processes, you insist that crowdsourcing really only emerges in the era of networked computing. What did digital media bring to the production process that wasn’t there before?

The capabilities of the Internet – its speed, reach, temporal flexibility, and so on – completely changed the music industry, its legal terrain, and more. The ability to share digital files online quickly, relatively anonymously, all over the world, without loss of file quality – this is why we do not just say that the MP3, torrents, and peer-to-peer file sharing services are fundamentally different from what took place with cassette tape piracy and mix tape sharing. The technology elevated the concept of sharing and piracy to a new level. That is the way I view crowdsourcing and why I see crowdsourcing as really only emerging in recent years.

Many critics like to say that crowdsourcing has been going on for centuries, that any sort of large-scale problem solving or creative project over the last several hundred years counts as crowdsourcing. I think, though, that the speed, reach, temporal flexibility, and other features of the Internet allow crowdsourcing to be conceptually distinct from something like the distributed creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1800s.

You note that crowdsourcing has shown only modest success when tested in the field of journalism. What is it about journalism which makes it harder to apply these models?

There have been plenty of experiments with citizen journalism and other forms of open, participatory reporting, and some of these have even kind of succeeded. I have heard much more critique of crowdsourced journalism than praise, though, and I think I know why. There are four problem types for which crowdsourcing seems to be suitable for addressing. Two of these types address information management problems (the knowledge discovery and management type and the distributed human intelligence tasking type) and two of the types address ideation problems (the broadcast search type and the peer-vetted creative production type).

The problem with some of the crowdsourced journalism experiments that have happened so far is that the writing of entire stories is attempted by an online community. It is still much easier for a single talented writer to report a story than it is to write a narrative by committee. The future of crowdsourced journalism will need to stick closely to these four problem types, crowdsourcing portions of the reporting process while keeping the act of story writing under the control of one or a few trained journalists.

Plenty of steps in the journalistic process can be crowdsourced, though! New organizations can turn to online communities and charge them with finding and assembling scattered bits of information on a given story topic. Or online communities can be asked to comb through large data sets or pore over huge archives for journalists. Crowdsourcing may very well breathe new life into investigative journalism, a rather expensive kind of reporting that some cash-strapped news organizations have drifted away from. Online communities may turn out to be the best tools for journalists hoping to put some teeth back in the Fourth Estate.

 Daren C. Brabham is an assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the book Crowdsourcing (MIT Press, 2013) and has published widely on issues of crowdsourcing in governance and the motvations of online communities. His website is www.darenbrabham.com.

How Many People Does It Take to Redesign a Light Bulb?: USC's Daren Brabham on Crowdsourcing (Part One)

This week, I want to use my blog to welcome a new colleague to the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism here at USC. I was lucky enough to have met Daren Brabham when he was still a graduate student at the University of Utah. Brabham had quickly emerged as one of the country's leading experts about crowdsourcing as an emerging practice impacting a range of different industries. The video above shows Brabham discussing this important topic while he was an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina. But, this fall, USC was lucky enough to lure him away, and I am personally very much looking forward to working with him as he brings his innovative perspectives on strategic communications to our program.

Brabham's insights are captured in a concise, engaging, and accessible book published earlier this fall as part of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series simply titled Crowdsourcing. Brabham is attentive to the highly visible commercial applications of these practices but also the ways that these ideas are being incorporated into civic and journalistic enterprises to change how citizens interface with those institutions that most directly effect their lives. He also differentiates crowdsourcing from a range of other models which depend on collective intelligence, crowd-funding, or other mechanisms of participatory culture. And he was nice enough to explore some of these same issues through an interview for this blog.

The term, “Crowdsourcing,” has been applied so broadly that it becomes harder and harder to determine precisely what it means. How do you define it in the book and what would be some contemporary examples of crowd-sourcing at work?

There is certainly a bit of controversy about what counts as crowdsourcing. I think it is important to provide some structure to the term, because if everything is crowdsourcing, then research and theory development rests on shaky conceptual foundations. One of the principal aims of my book is to clarify what counts as crowdsourcing and offer a typology for understanding the kinds of problems crowdsourcing can solve for an organization.

I define crowdsourcing as an online, distributed problem solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities to serve an organization’s needs. Importantly, crowdsourcing is a deliberate blend of bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals. It is this meeting in the middle of online communities and organizations to create something together that distinguishes crowdsourcing from other phenomena. The locus of control resides between the community and the organization in crowdsourcing.

One of the great examples of crowdsourcing is Threadless, which falls into what I call the peer-vetted creative production (PVCP) type of crowdsourcing. At Threadless, the company has an ongoing call for t-shirt designs. The online community at Threadless, using an Illustrator or Photoshop template provided by the company, submits silk-screened t-shirt designs to the website. The designs are posted in the community gallery, where other members of the online community can comment or vote on those designs. The highest rated designs are then printed and sold back to the community through the Threadless site, with the winning designers receiving a modest cash reward. This is crowdsourcing – specifically the PVCP type of crowdsourcing – because the online community is both submitting original creative content and vetting the work of peers, offering Threadless not only an engine for creation but also fine-tuned marketing research insights on future products.

Threadless is different from, say, the DEWmocracy campaign, where Mountain Dew asked Internet users to vote on one of three new flavors. This is just simple marketing research; there is no real creative input being offered by the online community. DEWmocracy was all top-down. On the other end of the spectrum is Wikipedia and many open source software projects. In these arrangements, the organization provides a space within which users can create, but the organization is not really directing the day-to-day production of that content. It is all highly structured, but the structure comes from the grassroots; it is all bottom-up. Where organizations meet these communities in the middle, steering their creative insights in strategic directions, is where crowdsourcing happens.

Some have questioned the use of the concept of the “crowd” in “crowdsourcing,” since the word, historically, has come linked to notions of the “mob” or “the masses.” What are the implications of using “crowd” as opposed to “community” or “public” or “collaborative”?

I am not sure that crowdsourcing is really the best term for what is happening in these situations, but it is the term Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson came up with for Howe’s June 2006 article in Wired, which was where the term was coined. It is no doubt a catchy, memorable term, and it rightly invokes outsourcing (and all the baggage that goes with outsourcing). The “crowd” part may be a bit misleading, though. I have strayed away from referring to the crowd as “the crowd” and have moved more toward calling these groups “online communities,” which helps to anchor the concept in much more established literature on online communities (as opposed to literature on swarms, flash mobs, and the like).

The problem with “crowd” is that it conjures that chaotic “mob” image. These communities are not really masses. They tend to be groups of experts or hobbyists on a topic related to a given crowdsourcing application who self-select into the communities – graphic designers at Threadless, professional scientists at InnoCentive, and so on. They are not “amateurs” as they are often called in the popular press. Most of the truly active members of these online communities – no surprise – are more like invested citizens in a community than folks who were accidentally swept up in a big rush to join a crowdsourcing site.

The professional identities of these online community members raise some critical issues regarding labor. The “sourcing” part of “crowdsourcing” brings the issue of “outsourcing” to the fore, with all of outsourcing’s potential for exploitation abroad and its potential to threaten established professions. No doubt, some companies embark on crowdsourcing ventures with outsourcing in mind, bent on getting unwitting users to do high-dollar work on the cheap. These companies give crowdsourcing a bad name. Online communities are wise to this, especially the creative and artistic ones, and there are some notable movements afoot, for example, to educate young graphic designers to watch out for work “on spec” or “speculative work,” which are the kinds of exploitive arrangements many of these crowdsourcing ventures seek.

It is important to note that online communities are motivated to participate in crowdsourcing for a variety of reasons. Many crowdsourcing arrangements can generate income for participants, and there are folks who are definitely motivated by the opportunity to make some extra money. Still others participate because they are hoping through their participation to build a portfolio of work to secure future employment; Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan cleverly call this kind of thing “hope labor.” Still others participate because they enjoy solving difficult problems or they make friends with others on the website. As long as organizations understand and respect these different motivations through policies, community design, community recognition, or compensation, online communities will persist. People voluntarily participate in crowdsourcing, and they are free to leave a site if they are unhappy or feel exploited, so in spite of my Marxian training I often find it difficult to label crowdsourcing “exploitive” outright.

Daren C. Brabham is an assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the book Crowdsourcing (MIT Press, 2013) and has published widely on issues of crowdsourcing in governance and the motvations of online communities. His website is www.darenbrabham.com.