Why Do We Need to "Understand" Fans?: A Conversation with Mark Duffett (Part Four)

There remains a strong emphasis within fan studies on issues of gender and sexuality, not to mention generation, yet there is still relatively limited focus on issues of race. One consequence is that the “whiteness” of fandom is often taken for granted, with very few examples here of the practices associated with fans of color. How might we expand current paradigms of fan studies to deal more fully with race or be more inclusive of diverse kinds of fan tastes and interests?

In the book's conclusion I mention that there is much more work on fandom and race. There is a danger here, though, that we might essentialize “fans of color” and their practices, creating a kind of academic segregation by default. Instead, there are ways to explore fandom and race that might lead the discussion in fruitful directions.

The first is to explore fandom’s multiple implications within what we might reductively call “the colonial project.” After all, it is a type of blindness not to deal with race within its historical context of colonialism, production and labour. It would be a mistake here to see wider issues of identity and consumption as fully falling outside those concerns. Collecting has always been a means of defining identity. What therefore happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when electronic media became the context within which such practices were defined? Fans operated from within the orientalist ideologies that defined the colonial and postcolonial era. I have not seen very much work like this, but I think it would be interesting to explore the orientalism at play within fans’ collections of ‘exotic’ artefacts or ‘exoticized’ media genres.

A second approach might involve examining the implication of fandom within specific racial or ethnic cultures. Blackface, in its later incarnations, is an obvious example here. Researchers like Eric Lott have made clear that it was a mode of performance primarily organized to define whiteness. It continued in its vestigial forms into many of our own lifetimes. To identify as a fan of blackface was necessarily to implicate oneself in racial terms. Equally, we might explore dimensions of racial ownership around things like the chitlin’ circuit. How did fandom function within on-going histories of race relations, as a way to express ethic or racial identities at particular junctures?

A third way of examining race in the context of fandom is to examine moments when race made a difference within particular fan cultures. How are fans of a particular background treated when they constitute a minority with a particular fan culture? What does that say about perceptions of the object or the ethics of the fan community? Should, for example, one’s status as a ‘black Doctor Who fan’ always be a point of discussion? To what extent are people actively using fan cultures for particular objects as ways to build or deny inter-racial alliances? The recent discussion in the journal Transformative Works about racism in cosplay was instructive there.

Also, to what extent it unproductively generalizing and essentialist to explore why particular ethnic groups claim ownership over certain fan objects, some of which at first appear unconnected with their specific cultures? We can generate hypotheses at least, for example that Morrissey’s Chicano fans connect with his Anglo-Irish status as a white ‘outsider,’ but such theories hold absolutely no weight until they are subjected to thorough empirical assessment.

A final direction for the study of race and fandom might be to consider the racial implications of fandoms based around racially controversial objects. For example, how do the fans of the vulgar contemporary blackface performer Shirley Q. Liquor see the racial connotations of their object? This kind of research is a rather thorny area; using unsolicited material might give us some traction.

You suggest that academics writing about fandom often have a very static conception, not doing research on how people become fans or for that matter, how specific fandoms emerge. What do you see as some possible steps towards addressing these questions?

The answer to your query has two possible directions: one for collective communities and the other for personal fan passions.

The emergence of specific communities and fandoms is amenable to historical study. A substantial number of younger researchers still see the online world of the present as the main place to research fandom, but I expect to see more of this historicizing work as fan studies further expands as a field. In consequence, we might then be able to start developing a more elaborate understanding of the history of media fandom itself. To set the ball rolling we need a greater historicization of fandoms specifically as living cultures, communities that go through periods of expansion and decline. There has been some interesting recent work on this, including your piece for Boom about the San Diego Comic-Con.

The question of how people become fans is still something of an elephant in the room for fan studies. There may be some scope there for a project comparing ‘becoming a fan’ stories. As I explain my book, however, serious methodological obstacles await anyone who uses such material to explain the emergence of personal fandom. Longitudinal studies of individual fans - even autobiographic or auto-ethnographic ones - always have a reflexive, ex post facto element. People can keep diaries, but fandom is hard to anticipate. Serial or genre fans who predictably move from one object to the next are already fans in a sense, so their personal stories are not the same as those of new fans.

As new fans progress through the process of initiation, they change their perspective and commitment. Self-reporting afterward is not going to create the same data as might be collected ‘live’ at each stage. Asking individuals who already keep diaries to reveal their contents during phases of first initiation would move the question forward, but such individuals were not primed to talk about things that might help to address theoretical concerns. It is quite a thorny issue, but we need to start addressing it to fully understand fandom.

You write at the end of the book, “a master theory of fandom may never be found, but it remains a worthy goal to understand the phenomenon as a special bundle of processes that interact in contingent ways.” How does this push for a more general theory of fandom relate to the push, elsewhere in the book, for ever more particular accounts of specific kinds of fans and fan practices?

The concern that you raise here is in some ways like squaring a circle, because fan studies has expanded so rapidly as a field. Media technology has continually changed. More researchers have become interested. New fandoms and new ways of pursuing fandom have sprung up. Empirical work on fandom has now rather exploded. Beyond this, Understanding Fandom was deliberately rich in detail because I was disappointed by some other media textbooks: volumes that were well organized but rather low on information.

Because the value of some recent work is yet to be decided by history, the world of textbooks moves a bit slower that the field that they discuss. Although articles are referenced in Understanding Fandom and sometimes discussed quite extensively, I focused quite deliberately on the ‘classic’ texts of fan studies. My hope was to get a balance between theory and empirical detail, especially when particular examples could further illuminate theoretical concerns and point a way forward.

The challenge of creating a textbook is to be able to frame the work that has been done, and - ideally - explain a bit about what is missing or offer some fresh perspectives. One of the things that seemed missing to me from fan studies was much discussion about celebrity-following. I hope that the book begins a dialogue that will encourage us to widen our scope a little further, beyond a focus on fan practices and communities to think more carefully about on fan motivations. Of course, ‘textual’ fans follow auteurs and celebrity actors, so celebrity-following is a practice or set of practices, not a separate set of fandoms, but it is a practice that forces us to think about the “why” of fandom, not just the “how.”

The fascinating thing about media fandom, for me, remains that it affectively unites commercial culture, individual subjectivity and collective empowerment. My aim with Understanding Fandom was to explain it in an ethical way that might connect research on practices with a wider spectrum, if you like, of work on representations, identities and processes.

Mark Duffett is a Senior Lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Chester with research interests spanning fandom and popular music culture. As well as publishing Understanding Fandom (Bloomsbury, 2013), he guest edited a recent special edition of the journal Popular Music and Society, and also edited a Routledge book called Popular Music Fandom(2013) which featured chapters by Cornel Sandvoss, Joli Jensen and Matt Hills. In 2010 he organized an International Symposium on music fandom at Chester and was keynote speaker in 2012 at the MARS music conference in Finland. He is currently writing a book on Elvis Presley for the Equinox Press series, Icons of Popular Music, and co-organizing an April 2014 international conference on rock music and love in Montpellier.

Why Do We Need to "Understand"Fans?: A Conversation with Mark Duffett (Part Three)

There has been ongoing tension in recent years over researchers who are interested in understanding the personal motivations of individual fans (who may have no strong social connections with other fans) and those who are studying fandom as a specific subcultural community with its own traditions, norms, and hierarchies. How do you negotiate this conflict in writing your account?

With respect, I think that the question begins from a false polarity. It is not so much that we have personal fandom on one side and the fan community on the other. Rather, we share in a conceptual separation of the private and public sphere that was never fully sustained in an age of electronic media and is even harder to discern in the digital era. If we can start to understand that the public constitutes, invades or invalidates the private - and also that versions of the private can exist in public - then I think we can get much further in this discussion.

In relation to fandom, reconsidering the validity of the full distinction means devising and embracing concepts that conjoin or embrace both spheres. Our traditional tools have been limited there. Psychoanalysis and psychology offer quite powerful explanations of individual behavior that often, I think, start to break down when we make collective generalizations. Equally, the transformative works tradition offered a way out of previous intellectual dilemmas, but it did not come with a strong conception of why individual people become fans (except, perhaps, as a kind of communitarian, ethical act).

If we ignore commonly circulating (public) assumptions that audience members take up, in some ways I think that fandom still appears to begin as a ‘private,’ personal interest – a kind of autonomous statement of personal conviction - but it can then become the basis of public collective activity. The question for researchers is how to think in ways that reduce the distinctions between private and public to order to approximate real life.

As a label, fandom broadly began as a way to define groups of people who built their identities around media consumption. Because fandom is, socially, about our passions and declarations of subjective interest, it has become a way to personally express oneself. Unfortunately, it has also become a term of abuse for our shared fascination with the products of commercial culture.

However, I don’t think that all humans are born fans. My humanity is more essential than my fandom, but what does that mean? I’d locate my fandom as a human response to a social and economic system that hijacks, reconfigures and transforms human relationships. What that means is that there’s no need - other than image management - to (re)locate fans as creative, political, active or social; all human beings have those qualities.

Rather than thinking about how we might redeem fandom socially by seeing fans as redeeming texts, I’d rather locate fandom as a set of human, social relationships emergent in an industrialized era of electronic mediation: an era where we electronic traces of others can prompt our emotional experiences. From that perspective, fandom is a form of human chemistry pursued within a context where it inevitably gets alienated, amplified and shaped or directed.

There is a danger that in talking about ‘human chemistry’ we are liable to essentialize arbitrarily posited needs. However, I think there are some absolute basics that we can talk about, like the idea that generally we like company and want to feel socially-valued as people, or that we appreciate great creativity. These are universal needs that happen to be expressed within fandom.

I’d therefore see the genesis of fandom – sympathetically – as an ideological process. Rather than suggesting that fandom is something that begins completely in private, it is important to remember that we all carry notions of the audience as a collective entity. When we watch someone on screen, we know that others are watching them too. In the case of live studio audiences, we can see actually them, but they are always implicitly there.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t think that the Internet age has fully ended this kind of collectivization; by lowering the barriers of entry to public debate it may have allowed many of us find a low level of celebrity, but it has also created important new indices of mass popularity (YouTube hits, Twitter followers, etc). As a personally recognized, individual conviction, fandom begins within this context of our individual understanding of the wider audience. So, even if we consume and become fans in private, we are always in the matrix of something much more communal.

Indeed, when we are convinced by a performance, we are likely to know that others are convinced too. We recognize our connection with a dedicated fraction of the audience and locate ourselves as part of “the fandom” or “the fanbase.” This means, conceptually, that we don’t fully begin in private and go public. Instead, we always have assumptions about the public and our relationship to it.

Beyond thinking carefully about our prior understanding of audiencehood and concurrent notions of the fanbase, there are several other ways that I attempt to conceptualize that unified private-public fannish self in the book. One is the notion of a “knowing field,” which I’d locate as a kind of phenomenology of participation in the fanbase. This idea posits fannish conviction as a shared inner territory of emotional certainty: suggesting “knowing” almost in the carnal or mystical sense, rather than simply holding a stock of appropriate knowledge.

The “knowing field” becomes something that, as fans, we enter and/or move across, which I suppose makes it quite similar to Cornel Sandvoss’s notion of Heimat, the difference being that Sandvoss understands Heimat more through its linkage to personal safety or self-esteem. The idea of “knowing field” is more about conviction and does not posit psychological foundations, at least in the same way. You have sometimes located fandom as a kind of equivalent to sexual identity: inner, perhaps essentially felt, based on desire. I’d also see it, perhaps, as a bit like patriotism: a recognition of emotional commitment to something that we also know is shared with others.

A second bridging idea is to think about Durkheim’s notion of totemism: although not all fandom is the same or a secular substitute for religion, I do think that Durkheim’s notion of totemism can explain quite a lot about fannish motivations in relation to the the power associated with celebrities. Totems are foci of collective attention who gesturally return the energy of collective attention back to their individual followers through personal one to one transactions. The idea says quite a lot about notions of fame and human aura. It makes some sense to say that celebrity-following fandoms are an extension of totemism as a human process of attachment organized in a media age.

Another bridging concept I introduce in the book is the idea that we share “imagined memories” to describe socially prized moments of performance. Each imagined memory is based on a thing you wished you had experienced, but never did, like, say, being at Woodstock. It is not exactly a fantasy, because it really did happen to someone else. However, it is not your memory either, because it happened to someone else. By valorization in the media and more precisely in the narrative of history, it is therefore a kind of fantasy that authenticates itself as something like a memory.

The term points to the paucity of phrases like ‘cultural memory’ in describing the mediated past: for a few people these memories are real enough (although, even for them, the memories have been inflected by the subsequent story of the event). Imagined memories only matter because of what came after them and are therefore spaces of emotional investment that are necessarily contradictory. In a sense, then, they are commodity templates: they are both made to matter by stories and characterized by their own rarity value (not everyone has the ‘real’ memory). This is precisely why they become starting points for further commodities (media documentaries, heritage tourism, anniversaries, re-enactments, etc).

Each of those concepts – the “knowing field,” totemism, imagined memories – is deliberately partial and open enough to account for variety; each has its share of flaws, but does attempt to get beyond an artificially separated public and private sphere and to chart a course between personal and collective fandom. They attempt to talk about power, affect and communality without recourse to the usual generalizations.

Throughout, there’s an emphasis on exploring fandom as a “performed” identity rather than as a natural or essential one. What do we gain by this focus? What are some of the ways and contexts through which fan identity gets performed?

I do question essentialism in the book, but I’m not sure that I entirely replace it with performance. Personal fandom is, in my view, something that is neither essential nor, exactly, performed: it is not at the root of one’s very being, but it does begin as something internal.

When I talk about fannish subjectivity, I tend to locate its origin in a form of self-recognition (a kind of "I realized I was a fan..."): an inner recognition of connection and subjective fit rather than an outer attempt to persuade anyone else. However, I know that performative elements come into play once we start to look at social communications. I am therefore partly reporting on what existing writers like Matt Hills have said - performance, after all, is something that shows fans are active.

Beyond that explanation, I also think that we could do with more bridging concepts. The term “performers” is used quite a lot in the book to allow me to keep the register open and not narrow down to specifically speak about fan objects as “actors” or “singers.” Performance is, nevertheless, a powerful perspective precisely because it has the potential to easily make connections between our existing repertoire of ideas.

If used it with understanding, it allows us to begin mediating between issues of textuality, spectacle, identity, communication, empirical situatedness, temporality and history, creativity, agency, style and affect – all of which are relevant, I think, to discussing fandom. How can one discuss cosplay, for instance, without talking about performance?

One of the issues here, though, is that performance studies research has been seen as a separate scholarly tradition emerging from theatre studies and slowly integrating itself with cultural studies approaches. Scholars like Phil Auslander are beginning to integrate that tradition with the study of media cultures.

 Mark Duffett is a Senior Lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Chester with research interests spanning fandom and popular music culture. As well as publishing Understanding Fandom (Bloomsbury, 2013), he guest edited a recent special edition of the journal Popular Music and Society, and also edited a Routledge book called Popular Music Fandom(2013) which featured chapters by Cornel Sandvoss, Joli Jensen and Matt Hills. In 2010 he organized an International Symposium on music fandom at Chester and was keynote speaker in 2012 at the MARS music conference in Finland. He is currently writing a book on Elvis Presley for the Equinox Press series, Icons of Popular Music, and co-organizing an April 2014 international conference on rock music and love in Montpellier.

Why Do We Need to "Understand" Fans?: A Conversation with Mark Duffett (Part Two)

You argue here that anti-fandom is not necessarily always a totally outsider or oppositional perspective, that under some circumstances, the industry or individual performers actively “invite” the anti-fan response. At first glance, this may seem counter-intuitive since the industry clearly hopes to attract the largest number of consumers. So, what are some of the reasons why producers might court or encourage anti-fan responses?

The idea that the industry hopes to attract the largest number of consumers assumes a monolithic entity (the media industry) with one market place and one audience, ignoring notions of consumer targeting or niche marketing.

This is one of the areas where popular music studies might productively contribute. I cite Bob Dylan as a clear example of invited anti-fandom in the book. Courting controversy has been both a catalyst for publicity and a form of audience segmentation, particularly in rock. Controversies have expressed social change at certain points in time and have also been a familiar part of the production process. From around 1956 to 1976, some of the most commercially successful music was based on the idea of a generation gap that articulated, at its mildest, a kind of autonomy and permissiveness, and at its extreme represented a push towards obscenity. Allusions to sexual debauchery became a genre convention in rock and the knowing evocation of moral opposition was characteristic of whole subgenres – notably punk. Individual artists, from Jim Morrison and GG Allin to the Dayglo Abortions, continually at pushed the boundaries, sometimes without any other recognizable cultural project.

In his foreword to Understanding Fandom, Matt Hills seems to suggest that the process might be unique to popular music, but I am not so sure. Certain forms of exploitation or art cinema purposely push at boundaries and violate concerns, like Christianity, that groups in society hold dear. It’s clear that Srdjan Spasojevic’s movie A Serbian Film (2010), for instance, was designed to shock and provoke offence.

Perhaps what we need to think about the relationship between invited anti-fandom and different industrial regimes. One point here is that products that seem to deliberately evoke anti-fandom regularly go on to become ‘cult’ phenomena. Another is that parent corporations can treat them at arm’s length, signing independent producers to distribution-only deals so that they can skim profit but avoid the risk.

I don’t, therefore, fully see anti-fans as a kind of free-floating audience; perhaps they too can be ‘courted’ by the industry as a marketing strategy. Perhaps we can even talk about ‘anti-fanagement.’

You argue, at places here, that academics miss some of the picture when they define fans in relation to political ideologies or corporate interests, suggesting that fans are never simply compliant or oppositional, but rather fans are "relatively indifferent" to the industry. Explain.

Fans use economic mechanisms for cultural purposes, while media industries use culture for economic ends. Both parties interact and are, to some extent, merged. They each, however, have distinct priorities. Fans are inspired by media products, but their concerns and practices cannot - as the Fiskean tradition demonstrated - be reduced to industrial planning.

The words I use quite a lot to talk about fans and their concerns in relation to the media industries are “tangential” and “collusive.” By this I mean that fans can be relatively indifferent, co-operative or oppositional, depending on which fan culture we decide to examine and when we decide to examine it.

While I have no doubt that fans can act collectively as ethical communities, I also think that is a danger that we tend to forget the “business as usual” aspect of fandom - that television fans were, for instance, generally more interested in watching the final episode of Breaking Bad than contesting High Bridge / Sony Pictures. This does not mean that they were pawns in someone else’s game who bought into hype. It means they felt that the show spoke to them, they enjoyed it, and they were engaged by its narrative. They became fascinated and dedicated.

As I think you noted in Textual Poachers, such fans may well “rescue” a series after the network stops broadcasting it – although, of course, networks themselves now often help to facilitate that. So maybe there is a kind of goal towards which fans are heading that can be further facilitated, either by agents in the industry or those outside it.

I think, though, that because our academic traditions work to ignore or reject a focus on the enjoyment of commercial culture, we are in danger of forgetting that win-win situations are part of this spectrum of relationships. Rather than searching for the dramatic moments where fans contest media producers, to understand fandom it seemed a greater challenge to me to start providing non-generalizing, non-reductionist frameworks within which we might explain why fans are sometimes complicit in doing what they do.

I should add, however, that “business as usual” is not static and also includes fans organizing into communities, creating different factions, and acting collectively. I do not necessarily see it as a term that excludes group ethics or politics, but rather one that encompasses ordinary activities and motivations.

Mark Duffett is a Senior Lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Chester with research interests spanning fandom and popular music culture. As well as publishing Understanding Fandom (Bloomsbury, 2013), he guest edited a recent special edition of the journal Popular Music and Society, and also edited a Routledge book called Popular Music Fandom(2013) which featured chapters by Cornel Sandvoss, Joli Jensen and Matt Hills. In 2010 he organized an International Symposium on music fandom at Chester and was keynote speaker in 2012 at the MARS music conference in Finland. He is currently writing a book on Elvis Presley for the Equinox Press series, Icons of Popular Music, and co-organizing an April 2014 international conference on rock music and love in Montpellier.

Why Do We Need to "Understand" Fans?: A Conversation with Mark Duffett (Part One)

When I visited England two years ago, as part of my grand European tour, I was struck that there was a new generation of British cultural and media scholars, often the offspring of old friends such as Roberta Pearson, Will Brooker, Matt Hills, Nickianne Moody, Mark Jancovich,  Peter Kramer, and others, who were turning their attention to the study of fans and media audiences. Most of them are not yet well known on this side of the Atlantic, but they are posed to leave their marks, and they are voices we are going to be hearing more from in the years to come. Mark Duffett was one of the many young scholars I met on this trip, and he's recently published a significant new book, Understanding Fandom, which is intended as a textbook for fan studies classes. I am using it as one of the core texts for my own graduate seminar this term on fandom, participatory culture, and web 2.0. Duffett sets out to provide a critical overview of some of the core texts which have helped to define the study of fandom; as one of the writers he discusses at some length, I felt that he was asking hard questions about how this work has withstood the tests of time and the challenges of next generation scholarship but he approached them with fairness, nuance, and much greater attention to detail than most other writers bring to this subject. I did not always agree with what he had to say about some of the key issues in the field, but I was glad he was pushing the discussion to the next level, and I am eager to see how others in the field react to his formulations.

Beyond summing up what has already been done, though, he points us in some new directions -- as Matt Hills suggests in his introduction to the book -- and that's where I've chosen to focus my attention in this interview. I learned a lot from reading his account, especially because he is not necessarily beholding to some of the false distinctions which have held our work hostage for so long. He offers a great illustration, for example, of how ideas drawn from the study of music and celebrity fans might be brought into active conversation with works that deal with cult television and transformative works, and I think what he has to say here about the divide between Fan Studies and Fandom Studies (which has often been both gendered and geographically and disciplinarily rooted) may offer some interesting directions forward for the field.

Mark's publisher has been nice enough to offer us a free preview of the book.

There are sure to be debates sparked around some of the book's findings, but this is a book that we all need to engage with as we think through the current state and future direction of fan studies. I know we will be hearing more from Mark and from his contemporaries amongst British fan scholars.

You spend a good chunk of time across the book nuancing and negating some of the negative stereotypes about fans that have concerned fan scholars from the beginnings of this field - among them, the idea of fandom as a religion or the fan as stalker. What justifies the continued emphasis on these negative constructions of fandom, given how much progress has been made within academia in constructing alternative understandings of some of these same phenomenon?

The short answer to that is that entry level students (as opposed to fan studies course graduates) still have to unlearn the stereotypes. Understanding Fandom was commissioned as a textbook, but I hope it’s also a critical discussion of the history of the field. I wanted it to be something that I could pass across to a competent student and say, “Here is what I know about the study of media fandom.” In my fandom seminar class every year I used to ask students to do some initial word association on the term “fan” just to see what was already in their heads. The same words and phrases repeatedly came up - things like “geek,” “cult,” “stalking” and “hysteria.”

Unfortunately, society has not fully given up on depressingly familiar ideas that equate fandom with obsession, extremity and emotional excess. In its six year life span, for instance, Chris Croker’s ‘Leave Britney Alone’ video has had 47 million hits on YouTube. Although the contemporary film and television producers tend to court avid fans as a market place, approaches to marginalized fandoms in the tabloid press have not changed a great deal. Even in the Internet era, they still influence popular understanding.

Judging by Facebook hate pages and other indications, modes of stereotyping that have traditionally been articulated against media fandom as a whole are now being used by specific fan cultures to marginalize those in other fandoms. Unfortunately, too, some of the less nuanced discussion of the academic material is also falling into a trap. Introducing the recent Radio 4 documentary Fan Power in November 2013, for instance, one presenter explained:"This program is about fans or fandoms, and whether being a fan is different now from how it used to be, and whether fandoms can be mobilized for political or social change. It’s not so much about Beliebers and Directioners and their crazy rivalries, but about what happens when fandoms turn their attention away from their idol to the real outside world."

The introduction recalls the history of debate on media fandom by using a set of binaries: old (implicitly naive or consumerist) and new (savvy and activist) fan cultures, ‘crazy’ pop fanaticism and serious, mobilized fandom, distracted idol worship and the “real outside world.” The documentary’s introduction mirrors a tendency in fan studies, I think, to separate ‘worthy’ aspects (film and TV cult fandom, cultural productivity, text-based and literary interests, real world political activism) from unworthy ones: celebrity following, pop music, distraction, obsession, consumption… The logical extension here is that “outside world” politics matters and fandom is interesting only as its tool.

In the book I distinguished media fandom research – in its broadest sense – from fan studies. Research about fandom exists well beyond cultural studies and not all scholars are sympathetic with the Fiskean conception of fandom. Psychologists like Lynn McCutcheon have hypothesized connections between media fandom, “celebrity worship” and intellectual under-achievement. A student wishing to explore “extreme” fandom might come upon some of this less sympathetic material. I wanted to think about its ideological work from a cultural studies perspective.

I often go back to your discussion at the start of Textual Poachers to expose the stereotypes, but I think that addressing the stereotyping of fandom is something that is too important to only do once. We need to keep addressing the stereotypes, because if we don’t, in unexpected ways they will come back to bite us. To those students unfamiliar with 1990s cultural studies scholarship, the relative lack of recent work on fan stereotypes might seem to imply a critical silence. Perhaps we should consider addressing such estimations of fandom as a continual process.

You use the phrase, “media fandom,” in the book’s title. For you, this term includes fans of performers and celebrities, as well as fans of fictional texts. Indeed, some of the best contributions here come when you juxtapose work that has been done on what are often seen as radically different kinds of fans and find points of commonality between them. What do you think academics writing about fans of popular music, say, and academics writing about fans of “telefantasy” have to learn from each other? Why do you think these topics have been seen as separate for so long?

I will address your second question first, because it is a little easier to answer…

Perhaps we have also been concerned that different kinds of fan have been associated with each media form. I am reminded here of my colleague Phil Tagg’s claim that colleagues can be charged with ‘driving a disciplinary vehicle without a license’ if they dabble in a different field. Ironically, media studies and cultural studies have long offered a number of bridging concepts – consumption, genre, style, textuality, performance, affect – but these often seemed to contextualize fandom rather than fully explain it.

The separation of topics has partly been a matter of disciplinary specialisation. Television studies was relatively dominant in the cultural studies discussion about fandom. Many scholars in that area saw no need to look outside their own field. Popular music studies, on the other hand, rarely ventured to explore dedicated music audiences at all (specifically as fans), and either tended to focus either on texts (musicology) or sociological contexts (subcultural studies, scenes). It was not until the late 1990s that scholars like Dan Cavicchi started to explore music fandom. Fan studies did not have such a wide interdisciplinary reputation back then.

The way that fan studies focused on its object has gradually extended its reputation beyond television studies. In light of this there has been more ‘cross town traffic’: pop studies writers like myself picking up or working within the fan studies paradigm, and fan studies scholars – like Matt Hills and Cornel Sandvoss – refusing to draw narrow lines around the type of media fandom that they will investigate. I don’t actually think that the latest generation of researchers is as aware of those older distinctions, because fan studies has now begun to form its own vibrant and rapidly expanding research field.

To address the question of what researchers of different fan objects have to learn from each other…

Telefantasy research developed fan studies as a means to pay attention to fan activity, in the transformative works sense, and could therefore disrupt notions of “the pop fan” as one atom of a seduced mass. The problem for popular music research before the Internet was that in the public sphere fans were most visible in spaces associated with consumption and the mass audience: record shops, live concerts. Rock fans were respected, but the idea of pop traditionally linked music fandom to a feminized mainstream. Attention to your work has encouraged music researchers to think carefully about ethical dimensions when studying fandom and has offered us a framework within which to examine fan practices.

There is a textual focus in much of the television studies work. So I hope what some of the research on popular music fandom can offer telefantasy scholars in return is a focus on certain kinds of fandom as cultural fields organized around celebrity and affect. Popular music research always had to contend, in some ways, I think, with a disappearing object: relatively ephemeral, immaterial nature of emotionally engaging music. That was true at the level of the text itself – music’s meanings not being quite amenable to the usual modes of linguistic or representational analysis.

Yes, some music fans have textual objects (the song, the album, the genre), but there are many others who have become fascinated with a particular individual or group (the star, the band); in some senses the distinction itself is debatable because musical texts and their makers have inevitably become confused, raising questions of authorship and authenticity.

Celebrity-following is not unique to popular music, but rather popular music has often become associated with celebrity-following in the public sphere. Consequently, things that have sometimes been marginalized in the discussion of textual fandom, are right on the surface in popular music and require attention.

Take Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen’s (2012) recent book on Supernatural fandom, for example. Precisely because they are exploring the interests of sections of the Supernatural fan community, Zubernis and Larsen focus as much or more on the consequences of female fans’ lustful identifications with the show’s lead actors as they do on show itself.

Their work reminds me of Susan Fast’s (2001) discussion of the way in which female fans perceived the lead singer of Led Zeppelin as an erotic object, or more recent work on boy band audiences. The commodification of romantic allure and sex appeal is a common theme across very different media forms. An interchange between different fields of fan research might help us better understand similar places that, in many ways, form common empirical ground.

In a wider sense, I think that we may be able to productively destabilize assumptions that come from our respective ‘home’ disciplines. This friendly destabilization could take the form of recognizing commonalities in fandom itself as a shared object. On one level, diverse fandoms operate within common social contexts and are have sometimes been marginalized in similar ways. Very different fandoms have been associated with, for example, the public performance of emotion and conviction.

On another level, different fandoms share common discourses and practices. Fans of very different objects can behave in surprisingly similar ways. Traditionally the similarities included things like collecting, canonization, displaying commitment and creating fanzines.

The realm of digital media offered a new context of convergence within which previously unrelated fandoms have shared common platforms and approaches: forums, fanfic writing, spoiling, video uploading, mash-ups, activism, nostalgia / archiving / heritage. Perhaps we should not be thinking in terms of media forms (say, TV serial or pop fandom) but in terms of different clusters of cultural capital: people liking similar cultural fields like, say, horror cinema and heavy metal.

Matt Hill’s notion of ‘inter-fandom’ is interesting in that respect. His concept is not about one kind of fandom, or even recognizing something common to different types, but instead about asking how – as media fans - we move between associated cultural fields to our efforts to display particular forms of cultural capital.

 Mark Duffett is a Senior Lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Chester with research interests spanning fandom and popular music culture. As well as publishing Understanding Fandom (Bloomsbury, 2013), he guest edited a recent special edition of the journal Popular Music and Society, and also edited a Routledge book called Popular Music Fandom(2013) which featured chapters by Cornel Sandvoss, Joli Jensen and Matt Hills. In 2010 he organized an International Symposium on music fandom at Chester and was keynote speaker in 2012 at the MARS music conference in Finland. He is currently writing a book on Elvis Presley for the Equinox Press series, Icons of Popular Music, and co-organizing an April 2014 international conference on rock music and love in Montpellier.

Deciphering Black Masculinity: An Interview with Mark Anthony Neal (Part Three)

You describe Stringer Bell in The Wire as the “thinking man’s gangster,” seeing him as a powerful illustration of the “cosmopolitan” qualities you ascribe to this acclaimed series. What is it that The Wire was able to achieve in terms of breaking with black masculinity? Some have similarly celebrated Orange is the New Black as a series which offers a broader range of alternative constructions of femininity (including black and Latino characters) than we typically see on television. Would you agree with that assessment? Why or why not?

Think that for David Simon and Ed Burns, these men were real to them—composites of folk they had interacted with in some way.  In that way, their experiences covering Black Baltimore in the 1980s made them aware of the diversity of Black men that existed.  Give HBO some credit for allowing them to fully explore that diversity throughout the five-year run of the series.  Beside opening up for  range of expressions of Black masculinity and Black femininity, The Wire and Orange is a the New Black has also cultivated a space for the performance of “Female Masculinity,” to draw on Jack Halberstam’s work.  It is in those moments that one can see the fluidity of Black identity, in ways, rarely, if ever, explored in mainstream entertainment.

Idris Elba has continued to gather public interest as he was widely promoted as a potential for casting as the new Doctor on Doctor Who (amid debates about whether or not the Doctor could be black). How have these more recent developments altered or confirmed your analysis of the performer in the book?  How might we imagine a black Doctor introducing themes of Afro-Futurism into this long-standing British series?

This is clearly the moment of the Black-Brit-Afropolitan actor.  If the question is,  is there an Afro-futurism for male Afropolitans actors, well yes, particularly if your name is Idris Elba or Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Not sure that a more “traditional” African-American or Afro-Caribbean actor, save Don Cheadle, would have those same opportunities.  Elba is really having the career that Calvin Lockhart and Delroy Lindo should have had.  Find it interesting that Ejiofor and Elba have been able to traffic in both more global and traditional African-American roles. I don’t think that is simply about their skill-set.

Entertainment Weekly had speculated that we might have had as many as four black actors in contention for the Best Actor Oscar this year -- Idris Elba for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Forrest Whitaker for Lee Daniel’s The Butler, Michael B. Jordan for Fruitville Station, and Chiwetel Ejiofor for Twelve Years a Slave. How might we fit these black performers (and the characters they portray) in the trajectory of acclaimed black performances you traced between Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington? (This question was framed before the Oscar nominations came out)

I am happy for Ejiofor’s nomination—expected Elba to earn a nomination, especially after Mandela’s death.  Most disappointed that Michael B. Jordan didn’t get a nod, though I suspect that had much to do with his youth and the stark, un-sensational reality of Oscar Grant III life and death.  Washington had to break through the archetype that Poitier represented throughout his career.  I think this current generation, though Whitaker is a little older, has benefitted from Washington’s willingness to break ranks with roles in films like Training Day (most famously), but also He Got Game and American Gangster.

You end the book with a discussion of Barack Obama and Reverend Wright, suggesting the ways that the candidate has had to negotiate around assumptions about black masculinity identity. To what degree do you think Obama has been willing to explore the boundaries between Harvard and the Hood as he has responded to the politics around the Treyvon Martin Case?

Barack Obama is more of an enigma to me now, than he was at anytime during the 2008 campaign, when he was largely illegible to so many of us.  It’s not simply about how he has chosen to govern—from the Center, in reaction to the Right, largely dismissing legitimate critiques from his base of the Left—but his real silence on the ‘Hood, except as a lecturer of family values.  His calculated initial comments about Martin’s shooting—after checking for the winds of popular opinion—is the most obvious example.  I never forgot that the President took more than a week to comment on Michael Jackson’s death.  I always understood that the value of a Black President in the contemporary US was largely symbolic—albeit a powerful symbol—but what value is a Black President if he can’t even acknowledge the artistic legacy of a figure like Amiri Baraka.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books, including New Black Man and Looking for Leroy.  He is the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.

Deciphering Black Masculinities: An Interview with Mark Anthony Neal (Part Two)

You argue that Avery Brooks, as a performer, was, despite often being cast in stereotypical roles, able to “draw on the full range of black expressive culture, often in opposition to the intent of the show’s writers and producers.” This claim has strong implications at a time when black men exert much greater influence on our culture as performers than they do as “writers and producers.” Can you say more about the forms of agency that surface in this analysis?

 As I mention in the book, Brooks was granted agency around the character, because the writers and producers really didn’t have a sense of who and what the character (created by the late Robert Parker) was.  I think what Brooks’ did with the character spoke a great deal about both his classical training and his investment in Black arts—he was of a generation that was a direct product of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, he was deeply involved in the National Black Theater Festival, for example.  I think that in the last generation, Black performers have had more access to mainstream success and thus have had less need for the kinds of Black organizations that Brooks’ generation cultivated.  Whereas Brooks may have always been clear that his work was in conversation with a Robeson, Belafonte, or a Diana Sands and Rosalind Cash—to name just a few—contemporary artists don’t have the same relationship with previous generations of Black performers—and thus I think it limits their ability to really drawn fully and freely from “the culture” (whatever that means).  The irony is that in the era of Youtube, they actually have much more access to those earlier performers, than any other generation.  One of the things I appreciate about Beyonce’s art is that she has spent serious time in the “archive,” if you will, though she’s often criticized for not being original.  I see it as a real tribute to those folk, some of them obscure,  that come before her.

You express throughout the book some deep ambivalence towards hip hop culture which you describe in your introduction as “a cottage industry of problematic images of black masculinity” but refuse to dismiss altogether as a vehicle for exploring alternative forms of black masculinity. When and how have performers or audiences been able to escape or at least challenge the more problematic aspects of hip hop culture? What contemporary performers do you think offer the best source for alternative articulations of black masculinity?

There’s an “inside baseball” aspect to this re: “corporate sponsored” entertainment geared to American youth, and what some would deem more “authentic” (however problematic that term is) rap music and Hip-Hop culture. I will only say that the latter is far less accessible to young people and the former is far more visible. From a pedagogical standpoint, I find all of it of value, provided we can equip audiences—young folk in particular—with a critical framing that allows them to contextualize what they are consuming.  Looking for Leroy is largely about providing some of that framing and hopefully encouraging even more framing from others.  Of contemporary artists, I find the work of a Jasiri X compelling, because of his ability to humanize some of the political realities of Black life globally, but even he is challenged to not simply be seen as the “protest” rapper.  I think in a purely artistic sense, beyond his place in celebrity culture, Kanye West is pushing past some boundaries particularly in indexing trauma, mental health struggles, vulnerability and loss within Black male life.  Indeed, his willingness to find raw sonic material from beyond the typical pop music archive, speaks to his searching to find sonic examples that best represents his emotions.

You draw in the book on Manthia Diawara’s notion of “homeboy cosmopolitanism”, a phrase which seems intentionally oxymoronic, given the rootedness in a particular location or community implied by “homeboy” and what you describe as the “desires for physical, social, and economic mobility” implied by the concept of cosmopolitanism. How can we resolve these contradictions? What forms of culture best express this concept?

 Part of the genius of Hip-Hop culture is that when many of these artists began to travel globally, they brought the ‘hoods they grew up in and the “hood” that they are all perceived to be from, with them.  I don’t think any of them saw this as a contradiction, in part because many of their ‘hoods, were always/already cosmopolitan, if we consider immigration patterns from the Caribbean, West Africa and migration from the American south as challenging the concept of a monolithic “blackness” or Hip-hop, for that matter.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books, including New Black Man and Looking for Leroy.  He is the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. 

Deciphering Black Masculinities: An Interview with Mark Anthony Neal (Part One)

This is another in a series of interviews with the authors of books published as part of the Post-Millenial Pop book series which I edit with Karen Tongson for New York University Press. Mark Anthony Neal's weekly webcast, Left of Black, produced by Duke University's John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies,  is a powerful example of the roles academics can play as public intellectuals, brokering important conversations  the culture needs to be having, highlighting key scholarly and cultural works that deserve greater attention than they are apt to receive from mainstream media, and asking the most urgent questions his regular fans want answered about race as embodied by both lived experience and contemporary popular culture. Among topics recently addressed on the series include the thirty year history of the Urban Bush Women dance troupe, the story behind "We Shall Overcome" and other anthems of the civil rights era, the role of black barbers and barbershops in constructing the black public sphere, and parenting in a "post-racial" America.

Neal brings his diverse knowledge and interests to bear on various performances of black masculinity in his newest book, Looking for Leroy. Here, he argues that many constructions of black male identity in American culture are far too "legible", reproducing the same lethal stereotypes where black male bodies are rendered as criminal, needing to be subjected to police authority and containment. Yet, he's interested in the ways that some performers construct personas which are less legible, which challenge our expectations and force us to think differently about identity politics. The book ranges from Jay-Z and R. Kelly to Barack Obama, with stops along the way to talk about The Wire, Star Trek, Fame, and the Oscars. The writing throughout is direct, engaging, witty, and broadly accessible, which helps to explain why his work is attracting readers and listeners far beyond the university book store circuit. At the same time, he is the master of close reading, offering interpretations that are nuanced in their attention to detail and yet encompassing in their ability to link the specifics of individual performances into larger career trajectories and into their political contexts.

Neal is one of the busiest people in the field of cultural studies today, so I am grateful that he could spare some time to address my questions.

Let’s talk about your title, “Looking for Leroy.” Can you share with us what it was about the figure of Leroy in Fame which inspired this particular path through black masculinities? In what sense are characters like Leroy “illegible” figures  when compared to more stereotypical representations of black masculinity?

My connection to Gene Anthony Ray’s character “Leroy” from the movie and series Fame was personal.  The series debuted just as I was developing a sense of who I was as a young man (I had just turned 16 at the time) and as the primary Black male character on the show I had a natural affinity for him.  Yet it was clear, at least to me, that the character or perhaps Ray were gay—this in an era when there were only a handful of gay characters on network television.  As a 16-Black kid from the Bronx, who was regularly “queered” because of my choice of clothing and the way I spoke—which was read amongst some of my Black male peers as both too soft and also too White (this was the era of the Preppie)—something about Leroy always resonated to me.  It was fitting that he would be one of the primary inspirations for the book and my own grappling with illegibility.

Given the harsh realities confronting many black men in this country, why should we be concerned with popular representations of black masculinities? In other words, what relationship are you positing between the constraints experienced by black men and the cultural construction of black masculinity?

As someone whose academic training is in Cultural Studies, I’m always concerned about whether my work addresses (in any way) the real crises being faced by young Black men in particularly.  Whether we’re looking at sports, the criminal justice system or even national politics, it’s clear that so many perceptions of Black masculinity are framed by media depictions of Black men and boys.  Hoping my work is but one intervention, poised to acknowledge the range of Black masculinities and also deconstructing (on some level) the most visible images of Black masculinity.  I think there is real connection between the limited view of Black masculinity available in US media and the limitations placed on Black men and boys in their everyday lives.

What motivated the choice of these particular case studies? What do these performers and characters, individually and collectively, help us to see about popular representations of black masculinity?

Virtually all the choices I make in the book with regard to case studies, represent figures that I had some personal affinity to. In the case of “Leroy” or Avery Brooks, they really were figures that impacted how I viewed Black masculinity as a younger man.  It was that affinity to Brooks’ “Hawk” that made Idris Elba’s “Stringer Bell” legible to me.  In the case of Luther Vandross and Jay Z, as a fan who had consumed so much of their art, they allowed the opportunity to do the kind of close readings that I wanted to do.  And admittedly, there are any number of other figures I wanted to bring into the mix—Kanye West, Erik LaSalle’s character on ER (though that will show up in a later project), Rob Brown 16-year-old character in Finding Forrester, and a whole host of “Queer” Soul and Gospel (which will also show up in another project)—but I’d still be working on the book, LOL.  What I hope I have presented is just an opening, for more work to be done, in terms of thinking about the publicness of Black masculinity.  In that regard looking forward to new books from Jeffrey McCune and C. Riley Snorton.

 Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of five books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005) and most recently, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013).  He is the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.

A Meme Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: An Interview with Limor Shifman (Part Three)

Discussion of the internet is often polarized between those who stress the personalized or individualistic nature of net culture and those who see the network as a form of collective behavior. How might the idea of the meme clarify this discussion?

 

I think that the idea of internet memes is so powerful precisely because it bridges these two perceptions. While internet memes are all about individuals creating content, they are also all about individuals creating content with awareness of each other. Memes not only involve pervasive mimicry, they are also based on intense collaborative work and complex multi-participant choreographies. Moreover, studies conducted by Ryan Milner, Assaf Nissenbaum and Kate Miltner show that memes function as a type of cultural capital: knowledge about memes and the "right" ways to use them have become a marker of membership in some communities. In these contexts the duality of being both an individual and a part of a community is flagged on a daily basis: community members are expected to be original, but not too original, when creating memes.

Throughout, you place a strong emphasis on the visual nature of the meme as a mode of communication. What do you see as the implications of this shift towards the visual in contemporary net culture?

The implications of the visual turn are pervasive, going way beyond my somewhat narrow emphasis on memes. Within the scope of the book I discuss this issue mainly in the political context. I claim that visual display allows greater integration between politics and pop culture, as it becomes extremely easy to Photoshop the US president’s head on the body of a Jedi knight, for instance. A second implication of the visual nature of internet memes relates to their polysemic potential, that is, their tendency to be open to multiple readings. Whereas in verbal jokes the target of mockery and the scorn expressed towards it are often clear, the openness of visual images and the lack of a clear narrative may invoke contrasting interpretations.  A third implication relates to memes' global spread: Images may potentially cross international borders much more easily than words. However, such international flows still depend on local norms and conversions:  In some cases, images need to be replaced or localized to make sense in new territories. For example, in the book I describe the migration of the American "Successful Black Guy" meme to Israel, which resulted in a local take titled  "Akiva, the Humanist Ultra-Orthodox".  I am currently exploring some other implications of this, focusing on photo-based memes. It seems that meme creators subvert some of the fundamental roles traditionally associated with photography, such as the notion of photographs as "windows to reality". But I've just started thinking about these issues so I hope to have more to say in a couple of months…

Let’s talk a bit about what gets excluded in a meme culture. Are there some groups or individuals who are excluded -- either implicitly or explicitly -- from meme culture? Is it easier to use memes to support dominant frames of reference rather than to challenge existing structures of belief?

This is a crucial issue which I address only briefly in the book. It would certainly appear that many groups and individuals are excluded from meme culture.  Ryan Milner's current work on memes traces some of the racist and misogynist modes of discourse emerging in 4chan and reddit—prominent meme hubs that seem to be governed by white, privileged men.  He shows that both gender and race representations in these websites are dominated by familiar hegemonic stereotypes. The framing of these stereotypes as ironic lulz is used in many cases to whitewash exclusion. At the very same time, Milner notes that at least in relation to gender, misogynistic framings are often resisted and attacked by many participants.  It is extremely important to continue thinking about these issues and broaden our scope of investigation beyond the major meme hubs. Phenomena such as "Shit X says", which generated heated debates about sensitive issues, may constitute interesting cases for further research.

My main assertion in the book is that we should take memes seriously. And doing that also means – to a large extent – critically examining the power dynamics that constitute memes and that are constituted by them.

 Limor Shifman is a Senior Lectureer at the Department of Communication and Journalism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She is the author of Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2013) and Televised Humor and Social Cleavages in Israel (Magness Press, 2008 [in Hebrew]). Her work focuses on the intertwining of three fields: communication technologies, popular culture and the social construction of humor. Shifman's journal articles explore phenomena such as internet-based humor about gender, politics and ethnicity; jokes and user-generated globalization; and memetic YouTube videos.

A Meme Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: An Interview with Limor Shifman (Part Two)

What motivates people to participate in a memetic culture, either in terms of generating new meme content or simply passing along content that has been framed in terms of a meme?

With regards to generating new content, I believe that three main types of motivation are at play—economic, social and cultural. The economic logic behind meme creation relates to the attention economy governing contemporary societies. In short, it claims that the most valuable resource in the information era is not information but the attention people pay to it. Creating memes seems to work well in this kind of economy: an emulation of a famous video may get attention because it will appear in YouTube’s suggestions bar or pop up as a highly relevant search result when one is looking for the original video. The second, social logic of meme creation can be related to what Barry Wellman and others describe as "networked individualism." On the one hand, by uploading a self-made video or a Photoshopped image people are able to express their individuality: they signify that they are digitally literate, unique, and creative. On the other hand, the text that they upload often relates to a common, widely shared memetic video, image, or formula. Through this referencing, people simultaneously construct their individuality and their affiliation with a larger community. Finally, the cultural logic of meme creation suggests that it actually represents the continuation of norms that are rooted in the history of pop culture genres and fan cultures, as you discuss extensively in "Textual Poachers" and subsequent works.

I think that the second logic – the social one – is also extremely important when passing along content that has been framed as a "meme". Spreading a meme signifies that someone is "in the know", thus reflecting positively upon her personality and (often) perceived sense of humor. 

While there is a tendency to think of the content of memes as trivial or playful, there have also been some powerful examples where memes were used in the service of political speech -- Pepperspray Cop and Binders of Women come to mind as examples from your book. Often, the same meme may blur the lines between entertainment and critical commentary.  In my essay, "Photoshop for Democracy," I argued that such remixes might function as the people's editorial cartoons, offering vivid and memorable representations of complex issues which broaden the language through which we discuss politics. Is this a legitimate description of what you've observed in terms of looking at memes as a form of political participation? Are there risks involved in the simplification of ideas required to produce an effective meme?

Your argument about remixes as the people's editorial cartoons is absolutely pertinent to the ways memes function as forms of political participation. The main new element that has been added in recent years, with the labeling of many of these Photoshopped images as "memes", relates to our previous discussion about meme genres. The tendency to create memes in particular formats turns memes into powerful bridges between the personal and the political: people express their personal opinions while consciously joining larger pleas or patterns. A striking example of this quality is the "We are the 99 Percent" meme. Born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it featured an individual holding a handwritten text depicting his or her gloomy story, leading to the shared motto, "I am the 99 percent." This combination of repetition and variation conveyed the message that people's miseries are not just personal problems: they stem from systemic economic and political illnesses.

As to your second question about risks—I believe that simplification is indeed a problem, yet what worries me more is the depoliticization of many memes, which come into the world as pointed political commentaries yet at some point turn into fluffy balls of amusement. For instance, alongside the political versions of the Pepper Spray Cop meme (featuring, for instance, officer Pike pepper-spraying iconic American symbols such as George Washington crossing the Delaware or the Constitution itself), other versions presented him spraying figures who are perceived as annoying, such as Keyboard Cat or Rebecca Black. In such instances, the original meaning of the meme as critical of Pike would appear to be reversed.

You make a distinction between virals and memes in the book. Explain. Why do you think these terms are so often conflated in popular discourse on the internet?

 The main feature that separates memes from virals, in my view, relates to variability:

while the viral mostly comprises a single cultural unit that propagates in many copies,  an internet meme is always a collection of texts. Therefore, a video such as "Leave Britney Alone" can be depicted as a viral video that spawned user-generated engagement and thus became part of an internet meme. Even so, this example shows that the border between memes and virals is fuzzy: Indeed, many memes started out as viral photos or videos.  This fuzziness is perhaps the reason for the constant conflation between the terms and the tendency among many people to use them interchangeably.  But I still think that even if the borderline is murky this differentiation is important: the simple act of "forwarding" or "sharing" is not the same as more creative modes of engagement with content. Moreover, the motivations associated with these two forms are not the same: the factors that lead us to share content are not the same as those that lead us to recreate or remix it.  In the book I chart some of these motivational differences, but I believe that much more work should be invested in this direction.

Limor Shifman is a Senior Lectureer at the Department of Communication and Journalism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She is the author of Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2013) and Televised Humor and Social Cleavages in Israel (Magness Press, 2008 [in Hebrew]). Her work focuses on the intertwining of three fields: communication technologies, popular culture and the social construction of humor. Shifman's journal articles explore phenomena such as internet-based humor about gender, politics and ethnicity; jokes and user-generated globalization; and memetic YouTube videos.

A Meme is a Terrible Thing to Waste: An Interview with Limor Shifman (Part One)

I have to be honest that the concept of meme is one which sets my teeth on edge. Sam Ford, Joshua Green and I spent a fair chunk of time in our book, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, seeking to deconstruct the concept of "viral media" which has become such a common metaphor for thinking about how things circulate in digital culture, and along the way, we side-swipe Richard Dawkins' conception of the meme for many of the same reasons. Sorry, Mr. Dawkins, but I don't buy the concept of culture as "self-replicating": such a concepts feels far too deterministic to me, stripping aside the role of agency at a time when the public is exerting much greater control of the content which spreads across the culture than ever before. So, when I first met Limor Shifman at a conference held last summer by the London School of Economics, she knew I would be a hard sell in terms of the ideas being presented in her new MIT Press book, Memes in Digital Culture, but by the time our first conversation was over, she had largely disarmed my objections. She's done her homework, reviewing previous claims which have been made about memes, and reframing the concept to better reflect the practices that have fascinated many of us about how contemporary digital culture operates.

Her approach is direct, deceptively simple, but surprisingly subtle and nuanced: she recognizes that people are making active and critical choices about what content to pass along to others in their networks, but she also recognizes that they are making tactical decisions about how to design content in order to increase the likelyhood it will circulate beyond their immediate circles. She represents the new generation of digital scholars, who came of age with the net, and have largely absorbed (and thought through) some of the core assumptions shaping its many subcultural communities and their practices.

A part of me remains skeptical that given its historic roots, the term, meme, can be redefined as fully as Shifman wants to do -- or more accurately, as she claims has happened organically as 4 Chan and other net communities have applied it to their own cultural productions. Yet,  I found much of what she wrote in her book convincing and think that this project adds much needed clarity to the conversations around memes, viral media, spreadable media, call it what you wish. If nothing else, her book provides an essential introduction to the ways genres operate in a more participatory culture.

I welcomed the chance to talk through some of these issues with her as part of this interview for my blog.

Let’s start with something basic. :-) How are you defining meme within the context of this book? How does your use of the term differ from the original conception of meme proposed by Richard Dawkins and his followers?

Basic question, complex answer… There is clearly a gap between the meme concept as it was defined by Richard Dawkins back in the 1970s and the term meme as it is used in the context of digital culture.  My aim in this book is not to redefine the meme concept in its general sense, but to suggest a definition for the emergent phenomenon of internet memes. In other words, I limit myself to discussing memes in the digital world. I suggest defining an internet meme as (a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and transformed via the internet by multiple users. So, for instance, I would treat the numerous versions of "Harlem Shake" as manifestations of one, particularly successful, internet meme. It is important to note that this definition does not equate internet memes with jokes – While many memes are indeed humorous, some of them (such as the "It Gets Better" campaign) are deadly serious.

This definition departs from Dawkins' conception in at least one fundamental way: Instead of depicting the meme as a single cultural unit that has propagated well, I treat memes as groups of content units. My shift from a singular to a plural account of memes derives from the new ways in which they are experienced in the digital age. If in the past individuals were exposed to one meme version at a given time (for instance, heard one version of a joke in a party), nowadays it takes only a couple of mouse clicks to see hundreds of versions of any meme imaginable  (try, "Heads in Freezers", for instance J ). Thus, memes are now present in the public sphere not as sporadic entities but as enormous groups of texts and images.

If you are going to change Dawkins’ original formulation so dramatically, what is the continued use value of the concept?

The first answer to this question is that the term meme is a great meme. While widely disputed in academia, the concept has been enthusiastically picked up by internet users. It is flagged on a daily basis by numerous people, who describe what they do on the internet as creating, spreading or sharing "memes".

But there is also a deeper rationale for using this term. I think that internet users are on to something. There is a fundamental compatibility between the term "meme", as Dawkins formulated it, and the way contemporary participatory culture works. I describe this compatibility as incorporating three dimensions.

First, memes can be described as cultural information that passes along from person to person, yet gradually scales into a shared social phenomenon. This attribute is highly congruent with the workings of contemporary participatory culture. Platforms such as YouTube, Twitter or Facebook are based on content that is spread by individuals through their social networks and may scale up to mass levels within hours.  Moreover – the basic act of "sharing" information (or spreading memes) has become – as Nicholas John suggests in recent articles – a fundamental part of what participants experience as the digital sphere.

Second, memes reproduce by various means of repackaging or imitation: people become aware of memes, process them, and then “repackage” them in order to pass them along to others. While repackaging is not absolutely necessary on the internet (people can spread content as is), a quick look around reveals that people do choose to create their own versions of internet memes, and in startling volumes. People repackage either through mimicry (the recreation of a specific text by other people), or remix (technology-based manipulations of content, such as Photoshopping).

Finally, memes diffuse through competition and selection.  While processes of cultural selection are ancient, digital media allow us to trace the spread and evolution of memes in unprecedented ways. Moreover, meta-information about processes of competition and selection (for instance "like" or "view count" numbers)  is increasingly becoming a visible and influential part of the process itself: People take it into consideration before they decide to remake a video or Photoshop a political photo. In short, while the meme concept is far from perfect, it encapsulates some fundamental aspects of digital culture, and as such, I find it of great value.

In Spreadable Media, we make an argument against viral media -- and by extension, some hard versions of meme theory -- for their reliance on ideas of “self-replicating culture” which strip aside the collective and individual agency involved in generating and circulating memes. What roles does cultural agency play in your analysis of memes?

I could not agree more with the assertion underpinning your question. In my opinion, the problem is not with the meme concept itself, but with some of the ways in which it has been used, and especially those that undermine the role of agency in the process of memetic diffusion. In this regard, the argument that I develop in book largely follows the criticism that you raise in Spreadable Media. I call for researchers to jettison some of the excess baggage that the term has accumulated throughout the years, and to look at memes as cultural building blocks that are articulated and diffused by active human agents. This does not mean that people do not live in social and cultural worlds that constraint them – of course they do. Yet what drives processes of cultural diffusion is not the "mysterious" power of memes but the webs of meanings and structures people build around them. 

Part of what I really value in your account is your stress on remixing and intertextuality within meme culture. As with all remixed culture, there’s a tendency for some to dismiss the lack of originality and “creativity” involved, yet you see these cultural practices as generative. Why is it significant that these shared genres or reference points keep recurring across a range of different communities and networks?

I'm glad that you raise this issue as I find it fundamental to the way that memes work. While people are completely free to create almost any form of content, in practice most of them choose to work within the borders of existing meme genres. This ostensive rigidity may in fact have an important social function: following shared pathways for meme production is vital for creating a sense of communality in a fragmented world. Moreover, these emergent recurring patterns – or "meme genres" – often reflect contemporary social and cultural logics in unexpected and interesting ways. Let's take, for instance, the "Stock Character Macros" genre: a set of memes featuring images of characters that represent stereotypical behaviors accompanied by funny captions.  This list of characters includes, for example, “Scumbag Steve” (who always acts in unethical, irresponsible, and anti-social ways) and his antithesis, “Good Guy Greg” (who always tries to help, even if it brings him harm); “Success Kid” (a baby with a with a self-satisfied grin, accompanied by a caption that describes a situation that has worked out better than expected); and “Successful Black Man” (who comically subverts racist assumptions about him by acting like a member of the middle class bourgeoisie). While each of these memes may be of interest in its own right, it is their combination —or the emergent map of stock characters that represent exaggerated forms of behavior—that may tell us something interesting about contemporary digital culture.

Limor Shifman is a Senior Lectureer at the Department of Communication and Journalism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She is the author of Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2013) and Televised Humor and Social Cleavages in Israel (Magness Press, 2008 [in Hebrew]). Her work focuses on the intertwining of three fields: communication technologies, popular culture and the social construction of humor. Shifman's journal articles explore phenomena such as internet-based humor about gender, politics and ethnicity; jokes and user-generated globalization; and memetic YouTube videos.

Digital Cosmopolitans: An Interview with Ethan Zuckerman (Part Three)

You talk a bit in the book about some of themes we tackled in Spreadable Media -- the degree to which more and more media comes to us because it is passed along by our friends rather than through mainstream distribution. How does this impact the challenges we face in developing a more "cosmopolitan" perspective on the world? What do you see as some of the limitations of “social discovery”?

I see social discovery as a third paradigm in how we find information online. In the early commercial internet, we saw a lot of curators from an earlier generation of media taking their place in the digital world. These curators are very helpful in guiding us to unexpected discovery, pointing us to media we might not have otherwise found, but they have been challenged and unseated by an internet-age suspicion of "gatekeepers", who silence some voices and amplify others.

For much of the development of the consumer internet, search has been a dominant paradigm. In search, we look for precisely what we want, and we often find it. It's a very rewarding experience, but it's one with some complicated implications. It's possible to surround ourselves with information that confirms our existing biases and prejudices, and to filter out voices that might challenge our preconceptions. And search demands that we know what we're looking for, which is problematic, because we don't always know what we want or what we need.

Social discovery has emerged in part as a way of reintroducing serendipity into online discovery. It gives us signals about what our friends are interested in that we've not yet discovered, which allows us the experience of novelty and discovery. But what we're discovering is what our friends knew, which means our horizons are limited to those of our friends. If we're blessed with a broad and knowledgeable set of friends, this can be a very profound discovery mechanism. But for many of us, our friends have similar backgrounds and similar perspectives, and discovering the world through their shared media may reinforce our existing worldviews, not only telling us what we want and expect to hear, but persuading us that our perspectives are universal ones, because our friends share that perspective.

I think that spreadable media escapes some of these limitations in that fandoms often bring together people from very different backgrounds around a shared media experience. Sharing a fondness for sumo gives me a point of encounter with people in Japan, Mongolia, Bulgaria and Brazil (four countries well represented in sumo at present) and the possibility to discover new perspectives through the encounter. But it's possible to imagine other experiences of sharing an interest that leads you back to people you already encounter in your daily existence - I'm not sure my experience as a Red Sox fan broadens my social or global perspectives very much.

You draw heavily across the book on your experiences with Global Voices. What has this project taught you about the kinds of human resources, processes, and technologies needed to facilitate meaningful exchanges across national borders?

Global Voices has taught me two major lessons: the importance of face to face relationships, and the idea that cross-cultural communication is a skill. Global Voices is celebrated as a virtual community that somehow manages to bring 1400 people in 100 countries together to work on a common project. While that's true, the secret of the community is that we invest heavily in face to face contact. The project started at a meeting at Harvard, and most of our important decisions have been made when many of us are able to be together in the same space. It's ironic that a project about connection through digital media is so physically mediated, but I think that just reinforces how significant in person encounter remains in a digital age. I think a lesson learned from our experience is that it can be very valuable to combine short burst of face to face encounter with use of digital media to prepare for and deepen relationships. We're big fans of introducing people online, bringing them together in person for a few days, then asking them to work together virtually for years at a time.

Most of the people involved with Global Voices are bridge figures, brokering ideas and information between two or more cultures. I'm increasingly persuaded that this sort of bridging is a skillset that can be developed and cultivated. People in our community who are committed to some other form of cultural bridging aside from blogging or writing - living and working outside their home culture, working across different socioeconomic groups - tend to be our strongest and most productive community members. And people who work with us through the years, particularly people who work in different positions within the organization, develop a very strong suite of tools that allow them to mitigate conflicts and build new connections.

As for the technological piece: we're almost luddites at Global Voices. We used IRC for many years for internal conversations, and mailing lists. We're reluctant to embrace technologies until they are very widely usable. But we're starting to make some shifts. GV Faces is my favorite new project - it's a panel discussion on an issue in the news, held via Google Hangouts and recorded for broadcast on YouTube. When we started Global Voices, it was hard to imagine that we'd see technology advance to the point where we could do a global video talking heads show, but that's where we are, and I'm loving the outcome.

You also draw on your experiences as a fan of certain forms of global pop music. To what degree might music circulate across borders that it is harder for news to cross? Does this movement pose a risk that the music will be exoticized, decontextualized, and misunderstood or does it potentially spark interests and connections that can lead to thicker forms of communication down the line? Might the same thing be said for other kinds of cultural products -- Japanese Anime or Bollywood films, for example?

Music is the easiest route into a new culture for me - I've listened to and collected global pop music since my teens, and my first trip in any new city is to the record store. There are many countries where I know nothing about the politics but something about the music. For me, knowing something about a country's music opens me to learning something about the news or the politics - when I follow the rebellion and civil war in Mali, I'm thinking of the wealth of amazing songwriters in Bamako, and about the guitar playing of Tinariwen and other Tuareg musicians.

There's no doubt that music can be a space for appropriation without exploration. I examine Diplo's use of Brazilian dance music in Rewire and conclude that he's skating right up to the line, if not crossing it, in his work with MIA. But I also consider how a blatant, naked appropriation - Deep Forest's use of "Rorogwela", a Solomon Islands lullaby, which they repackage as "pygmy music" from the Congo - leads internet artist Matt Harding to seek out the creator's family in the Solomon Islands and make a deep and significant personal tie. Harding found a piece of music he loved, learned the complicated story behind it and it ultimately led him to make personal connections behind the music.

I think cultural media like music, movies and food are often a shortcut around the caring problem. I may know little about the Uighur and their ongoing struggles with the Chinese government, but I know - and dig - the music of Zulpitar Zaitov, and so I'm inclined to pay more attention to Uighur news than I otherwise would. I see no reason why this couldn't work around anime or Bollywood, and suspect it probably does.

You are now heading up the MIT Center for Civic Media. How might the projects you are developing there help to further address the challenges you've identified throughout your book?

I talk in Rewire about a set of tools that can help us monitor our individual use of media and decide whether or not we are getting the diverse picture of the world we need. We're building some of those tools at Center for Civic Media, using the Media Cloud software that I've been working on for years with colleagues at Harvard's Berkman Center. Tools like Catherine d'Iganzio's Mapping the Globe are designed to help us visualize the concentrations and biases of media coverage. Nathan Matias and Sarah Szalavits have built a tool called Follow Bias that helps show how many women, men and brands you're following on Twitter and, perhaps, make a decision to change your behavior and follow more (or fewer) women. We're also building tools that look at how ideas and culture spread globally, as with a tool like What We Watch, which maps global audiences for YouTube videos. Finally, we're starting to build tools that help you add serendipity to your media diet. Catherine is working on a Masters thesis called Terra Incognita, which helps you monitor where in the world you pay attention to and discover sources from parts of the world which are unknown to you.

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab.  He is the author of "Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection", published by W.W. Norton in June 2013. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages. Ethan's research focuses on issues of internet freedom, civic engagement through digital tools and international connections through media. He blogs athttp://ethanzuckerman.com/blog and lives in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Digital Cosmopolitans: An Interview with Ethan Zuckerman (Part Two)

The word, cosmopolitanism, is often used and often misunderstood. What does the term mean to you? What do you see as the core values or virtues of adopting a more cosmopolitan perspective?

I debated whether or not to use the world "cosmopolitanism" in the book, as it evokes a sense of globe-hopping placelessness that's not what I wanted to evoke. But I ended up using it because I found Kwame Appiah's thinking about cosmopolitanism so helpful.

Appiah, a Ghanaian-American philosopher, suggests that cosmopolitans recognize that there is more than one acceptable way to live in the world, and that we may have obligations to people who live in very different ways than we do. This, he argues, is one of the possible responses to a world where we find ourselves interacting with people from very different backgrounds. Cosmopolitanism doesn't demand that we accept all ways of living in the world as equally admirable - he works hard to draw a line between cosmopolitanism and moral relativism - but does demand that we steer away from a fundamentalist or nationalist response that sees our way as the only way and those who believe something different as inferior or unworthy of our consideration or aid.

I'm struck by how personal a response Appiah's cosmopolitanism is. He navigates two very different cultures in his life - his academic life in Princeton and his family in Ghana - and aspects of that life, notably his homosexuality, can be very controversial in one environment and uncontroversial in another. The solution he proposes, it struck me, is one of the more thoughtful approaches to life in a world where we continually encounter other ways of thinking and living. A cosmopolitan approach offers us the encouragement to discover other ways of solving a problem while accepting the idea that we may choose to continue living in ways we have in the past. What we are not free to do is to dismiss other ways of living out of hand, or to fall back on a narrow, tribal definition of obligation. It strikes me as a responsible reaction to a world that is connected in ways large and small, in ways we rarely see or understand.

 You discuss across the book the symptoms of an “incomplete globalization.” Is it incomplete in the sense that it is broken or incomplete in the sense that it is still in process? 

One of the criticisms I've received about the book is that it's insufficiently critical of contemporary global capitalism. One reason critics have brought up that objection is that I'm enthusiastically pro-globalization, though not in the ways most people use that term. I've been involved with global economic development for the past two decades, and it has persuaded me that what developing economies need is more globalization, not less. Nations that have the hardest time educating their populations and giving them economic opportunities tend to be those most detached from global trade and migration flows. This doesn't mean that I support exploitative globalization, and I think that a great deal of what happens at the WTO and other international trade fora is rigged against developing nations. But the enemy isn't globalization - it's bad, unfair globalization.

I use "incomplete globalization" as a way of describing a tension between three types of movement. Atoms are quite free to move across global borders - we've built trade systems that allow low-cost sourcing of raw materials and manufactured goods from across continents and oceans. While trade in atoms isn't barrier free, it's far less restrained than the flow of people, which has been dramatically restrained in the 20th century, to the great detriment of many in the developing world. I am deeply influenced by Lant Prichett's arguments which make the case that increased migration would be the single biggest step taken towards economic development in poor nations. My contribution to the debate is to note that globalization of bits often lags behind globalization of atoms, closely following the globalization of people. I am concerned that a world where we globalize atoms and not bits is a dangerous world - we are dependent on other parts of the world without understanding local circumstances. So I would argue for a more complete globalization of atoms, bits and people, in ways that are careful, fair and focused on human development. So "incomplete globalization" is both broken in some ways, and incomplete, though my focus is one the ways it is incomplete and imbalanced between globalization of atoms, people and bits.

 

You make a productive distinction in the book between Xenophiles and bridge figures. What are the differences between the two? What kinds of functions do they each serve in connecting people together across national differences? How do they both fit within a larger vision of a more cosmopolitan culture?

For me, bridge figures are the cultural brokers and translators who work to make cultures understandable to each other. Bridge figures have deep attachments to two or more cultures - they've usually lived and worked in different parts of the world, and they've chosen to champion those cultures, identifying the good parts in one and introducing them to the other.

If you're going to have an advocate for a culture, they need someone to advocate to. Xenophiles are people who seek inspiration and new ideas in different cultures. They don't have the background in the different cultures to build new bridges, but they can cross the ones that bridge figures build.

For the project of increasing global understanding and connection, both types of figures are critical. I probably emphasize the function of the bridge figure more thoroughly in Rewire because it's hard for me to imagine much global connection without bridging. But xenophiles - particularly xenophiles who wear their interests and passions on their sleeves, like Anthony Bourdain and his relentless search for interesting global food - are enormously important in promoting the possibility and importance of international connection. Not everyone can be a bridge figure, I argue - it's an accident of circumstances as well as a choice of perspective and temperment - but xenophilia is a choice and one I hope more people will make.

 What steps might educators take to foster a greater interest and engagement with the kinds of global communication flows that you value? Is it simply a matter of encouraging Americans to learn foreign language or beefing up geography teaching, or does it require rethinking the curriculum at a deeper level?

Languages, geography, history and travel are all powerful tools to encourage engagement, but I think we need a more fundamental change in educational systems. We need much greater awareness of interconnection so that the importance of understanding the wider world is far more apparent. We're lousy about teaching students the complex systems that hold the world together - trade, financial flows, shipping, migration - so it's not a surprise that complex stories that require us to understand interconnection are hard to develop audiences for.

Near the end of the book, you discuss "cognitive diversity" and its value in contemporary organizations. How do you define this concept? In what sense is it different from "Identity diversity"? What steps can organizations take to foster and sustain greater "cognitive diversity" in their operations?

Cognitive diversity and identity diversity have some common ground, but do not fully overlap. Cognitive diversity recognizes different ways of thinking about problems and tends to track to differences in cultural upbringing and education. Two people who have different ethnic and religious backgrounds might think very similarly if they were raised in the same geographic community and attended the same set of schools and trained in the same ways.

Near the end of Rewire, I argue that teams benefit from cognitive diversity and may need to look for it both through identity diversity and above and beyond identity diversity. This likely requires changing how we recruit talent, looking at broader pools of individuals with different paths towards qualification. It also means making a commitment towards building teams to encourage diversity and accepting some conflict over more comfortable, homophilous teams, possibly trading some degree of comfort and harmony for creative tension.

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab.  He is the author of "Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection", published by W.W. Norton in June 2013. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages. Ethan's research focuses on issues of internet freedom, civic engagement through digital tools and international connections through media. He blogs athttp://ethanzuckerman.com/blog and lives in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Digital Cosmpolitans: An Interview with Ethan Zuckerman (Part One)

Ethan Zuckerman is one of the big thinkers, and doers who consistently inspires me. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as "an American media scholar, blogger, and internet activist." All of this is true, but that's just part of the picture. He's also someone who consults regularly with major foundations, think tanks, NGOs, and policy-makers, as they try to understand the potentials, and risks, of networked computing. As the founder of GeekCorps and Global Voices, he's put his geeky skills to work to try to change the problems which worry him the most about our contemporary culture. He's someone who has a formed a network of other bloggers and digital activists around the world, and someone who travels often to parts of the planet that most of us could not point out on a map, in order to better understand the political, cultural, and technological conditions on the ground there. He's become one of our best thinkers about "digital age civics" and through his work as the Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, he's leading a team of graduate students as they seek to design tools which might empower activists and community leaders to be more effective at fostering social change. He does this while remaining mild-mannered, easy-going, modest, and open-minded, a model for what an engaged public intellectual might look like in the 21st century. I am lucky to be able to call him a friend.

Last year, he published an important and timely book, Rewired: Digital Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Connection, which should be required reading for all Americans. Zuckerman is asking us to think more deeply about how we learn about the world and whether our access to the WORLD Wide Web has done much to change the parochialism within our culture. Here, he draws on the full range of his experiences to bring us face to face with the blind spots in our information consumption, with the challenges in overcoming isolationist and xenophobic tendencies in our society, but also to propose alternative strategies by which some people are becoming "bridge builders" who embrace diversity and insure that we have greater access to alternative  perspectives. Zuckerman understands the complexities and contradictions of our current moment, adopting a position that is sometimes optimistic, somethings skeptical, but always feels  is in the service of building a better society.

In the interview that follows, Zuckerman spells out some of the core concepts from Rewired, including some consideration of what the book might have to say to fans, journalists, educators, and other citizens.

Much of the media discussion around the Arab Spring movements has centered on the fantasy of more person-to-person communications across borders via social media rather than through the more formal relations between nations or the mediated communications of traditional journalism. Why has this fantasy of a “Twitter Revolution” proven so compelling to people when their everyday practices often involve relatively limited communications outside of their immediate circles of friends and families?

 

Like many compelling fantasies, the Twitter Revolution myth has some roots in fact. Tunisia's revolution had a strong media component. Protests in Sidi Bouzid would likely have been invisible to the rest of Tunisia and the rest of the world had they not been documented on Facebook, edited and contextualized by Nawaat.org and amplified by Al Jazeera. And there are deep ties between activists in Tunisia and in Egypt that helped spread ideology and tactics of those revolutions via social media. But any account of the Arab Spring that doesn't focus on existing labor movements, soccer fanclubs, neighborhood organizations and other forms of offline social organizing misses the point.

 

I think Twitter revolutions are such a compelling idea because they allow us to inscribe ourselves on global events. If digital media is the key actor in a political event, and we're participating by amplifying tweets online, we are part of the revolution, an exciting and compelling prospect. And there are times when this, too, is true - if an event is visible locally and invisible globally, and we take responsibility for translating and amplifying it, leading to global coverage, we might, in fact, share some credit for changing circumstances on the ground.

 

But this ability to be a participant in a minor way in a global event tends to blind us to our more ordinary use of these media. Very few of us are Andy Carvin, using our online presence to curate digital media and connect our readers to global events. Our use of these tools tends to be about connecting with friends and interests that are far closer to home. There's nothing inherently wrong with that - it's fine for social media to be a tool that connects us locally if we have other media that informs and connects us globally. What strikes me as dangerous is the illusion of connection, the compelling idea that we are encountering global perspectives via digital media when we're mostly reinforcing local ones.

 

You write, “[New Media] tools help us to discover what we want to know, but they’re not very powerful in helping us discover what we might need to know.” This seems to be a central theme of the book, that we have opened up new channels of communication which might allow us to connect with others around the world, but that our use of those tools has been limited by a lack of motivation or understanding. We seek out information only about those topics we already care about, and a large part of the world falls outside of that zone of interests. What are some of the signs that our interest in the world is more limited than our technological reach at the present time?

 

 I think the main reminder is sense of surprise that pervades much of modern life. The Arab Spring was a surprise, but only up to a point. For those few watching Tunisian social media, it became clear pretty quickly that something deeply unusual and transformative was taking place. At Global Voices, we were able to see the protests unfolding weeks before they received attention in mainstream American media. There's a strong tendency in our contemporary media environment to pay attention to stories only when they've reached a crisis point - we're always arriving in the fourth act, and we never stay through the denoument. It's possible to imagine a form of media that's scanning the horizons and giving us a better sense of what's coming, not what's already arrived.

 

I think a second reminder is our ability to turn on global networks at moments of crisis. The global response to SARS was quite amazing - within a week of identifying a new syndrome, the WHO had global videoconferences that allowed frontline medical personnel to identify symptoms and jointly diagnose new cases. Once those networks were set up, the spread of the disease slowed dramatically. When we need international connection, we're capable of bringing it about very quickly.

 

One of the reasons the book has been challenging to describe is that this question you're asking -what are we missing when we're so tightly attached to local media - is a really hard one to answer. I tend to understand it in personal terms. I follow African media, particularly west African media, quite closely, due to my long personal ties to the region, and as a result, I see stories well in advance of their visibility in broader media. And while that sounds self-congratulatory, patting myself on the back for my global vision, the actual experience is more anxiety-producing, because it's a perpetual reminder of how much there is to know and discover. The little I know about Nigerian politics that most Americans don't is a perpetual reminder of how much else is going on in the world, and how little we encounter until it manifests as a crisis or emergency.

 

What roles does the news media play in shaping what we care about and conversely, to what degree does our lack of concern or interest impact what the news media is prepared to cover?

 

I think this relationship between caring and coverage matters much more than it did a generation ago. Newspapers include stories on a wide range of topics, local, national and international. Until recently, our sense for what readers wanted to hear about came from newsstand sales and letters to the editor, very inexact tools for understanding which stories were being read and which were being ignored. Now we have incredibly granular information, that shows interest on a story by story level, including readership and time spent per reader per article. Publishers are acutely aware of these statistics, and more editors and writers are becoming aware of these figures. It becomes harder and harder for authors to report on stories that don't already have an audience, as there's a very strong temptation to write what people want to hear, as they will reward you with their attention.

 

This becomes a circular equation, because people need help developing an interest in new topics. A fascinating story isn't immediately apparent or comprehensible to an audience. Take the mortgage crisis a few years back - most coverage focused on the moment to moment details, featuring stories that were comprehensible to financial professionals and few others. This American Life made a major investment - an hour-long story called The Giant Pool of Money - that helped audiences understand the crisis and become better consumers of future stories on the crisis. If we wanted people to pay attention to protests in Sudan (people beyond those of us who are already watching those protests), we'd need to invest time, energy and reader attention in explaining the context and importance... and we'd be gambling that we were able to create an audience for that story in the future. 

 

The net result of this cycle, I fear, is that we get an enormous amount of information on stories we "know" are important - the minutia of US federal elections and the machinations of Congress  - and very little information on parts of the world we know little about, care little about, and care little about because we hear little about.

 

I’ve often thought that there might be a need to shift from a focus on international news (news about things happening elsewhere on the planet) to global news (news that shows the connections between distant events and people in our own communities.) Would such an approach help resolve the gaps you are describing here? Why or why not?

 

I think we'd gain a great deal from journalism that helped contextualize global events in local terms. The best newspapers and broadcasters have historically tried to do this - one of the losses we experience  when local newspapers cut international bureaus is the connection between global stories and local communities. 

We need something broader, I suspect, as not every event in Myanmar has an immediate local connection. Sometimes we need heroes and heroines - think of Malala in Pakistan and the ways in which her story has been a window into gender and educational issues in that part of the world. While we can go too far and turn a story about issues into a story about a single person, we often benefit from stories that let us feel like we know and care about an individual in another country or culture.

 

I think we also need to learn how to tell stories that look at local facets of global issues. A story like climate change is critically important, but extremely difficult to report. We might benefit from an approach to reporting that showed us the implications for different people in different communities, interweaving personal stories with the science and politics of the issues.

 

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab.  He is the author of "Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection", published by W.W. Norton in June 2013. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages. Ethan's research focuses on issues of internet freedom, civic engagement through digital tools and international connections through media. He blogs athttp://ethanzuckerman.com/blog and lives in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Announcing Transforming Hollywood: The Futures Of Television

UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

and

USC School of Cinematic Arts

Announce

Transforming Hollywood: The Futures of Television, April 4, 2014, UCLA 

Co-directors:

Denise Mann, UCLA

Henry Jenkins, USC

Presented by the  Andrew J. Kuehn  Jr. Foundation

Media Sponsor: Variety

Friday April 4   2014

James Bridges Theater, UCLA

Conference overview:  This year, the fifth installment of Transmedia, Hollywood has been given a new name—Transforming Hollywood: The Future of Television—to reflect our desire to engage more fully with the radical changes taking place in the American television industry for creators, distributors, and audiences. When future generations of historians write their accounts of the evolution of the American television industry, they will almost certainly point to the 2010s as a moment of dramatic change: we've seen the entry of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube as major players shaping the production of original programming, gaining critical praise, courting industry awards, and perhaps, most dramatically, starting to compete in terms of number of subscriptions to the top cable networks. We've seen Kickstarter emerge as an alternative means for "crowdfunding" television content, allowing fans to exert a greater role in shaping the future of their favorite series. We've seen a continued growth in the number of independent producers creating and distributing their content through the web. And with these other changes, we are seeing the industry and academia struggle to develop new insights into what it means to consume television content in this connected and yet dispersed marketplace. This conference will bring together key creative and corporate decision-makers who are shaping these changes and academics who have been trying to place these shifts in their larger historical and cultural contexts. What does all of this mean for those of us who are making or watching television?

For more information, see:  http://www.liquid-bass.com/conference/

For conference Registration, see : https://transforminghollywood5.eventbrite.com

Panel one: “Virtual Entrepreneurs—Creators Who are Reinventing TV for the Digital Future." 

9-9:10 Opening Remarks

Henry Jenkins, USC and Denise Mann, UCLA

9:10-11:00AM

Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA

In the fall of 2011, Google announced plans to invest a hundred million dollars to forge talent partnerships with a number of talented YouTube creator in order to enhance the production value of their work and their value to brands. This panel gives voice to two new types of virtual entrepreneur: individual web-creators who are reinventing entertainment for the digital age, and the CEO of a new type of web-based multi-channel network (MCNs), which is forging deals with individual web-creators in exchange for providing them with infrastructural support in the form of sound stages, green screens, higher quality cameras and editing equipment, enhanced social media marketing tools, and brand alliances. Early entrepreneurs in this newly commercial, digital economy include Felicia Day and Sheri Bryant (Geek and Sundry), Freddie Wong (Video High School), and Dane Boetlinger (Annoying Orange), each of whom has catapulted his or herself into the top tier of web-celebs based on huge fan followings.  Many of these entrepreneurial web-creators have sought out deals with MCNS, such as Maker, Fullscreen, Maker, Machinima, and The Collective, in order to expand their budding entertainment enterprises. However, other creators are chafing inside these long-term contracts with the MCNs, frustrated by what they see as onerous terms—the split of advertising revenues and intellectual property rights. Today’s panel debates the viability of these new creative and business models, asking whether they represent a radical rethinking of entertainment that puts power back into the hands of creators or are they transitional systems that will eventually be absorbed by Hollywood’s big media groups.

2."The Programmers of the Future: Video Streaming on Demand." 

Moderator: Andrew Wallenstein, Editor-in-Chief, Digital, Variety

11:15AM-1PM

Overview: As consumers spend more of their free time online, viewing and sharing content on social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, Tumblir, and Vine, what does this mean for the future of television? Cord-cutters and cord-nevers represent a very real threat to the current big dogs of digital distribution—the multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), also known as the subscription cable systems (Comcast, Time-Warner, Comcast), the satellite carriers (Direct TV), the telcos (AT&T U-verse), and the wireless companies (Verizon FiOS). At the same time, the MVPDs have been waging too many public battles with the Hollywood broadcasters over their high re-transmission fees, resorting to theatrics by pulling favorite sporting events and sit-coms--behavior that alienates consumers and tests the patience of government policy-makers.  At the same time, these policy-makers are making little effort to curb the reckless deal-making taking place in the video streaming on demand (VSOD) space as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, and new players, such as Microsoft X-box, make aggressive moves to expand globally while freeing themselves from their dependency on Hollywood licensing deals. By creating their own libraries of critically-acclaimed original programming—House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Betas—the VSOD services are creating legions of new, loyal consumers, paving the way for a future that may or may not include Hollywood's premium content licensing deals going forward. Furthermore, the VSOD services are attracting A-level talent by offering greater creative autonomy than their micro-managing counterparts at the studios and networks. Do these new programming and streaming options foretell the end of an era in Hollywood or the beginning of a revised set of practices for creators and additional viewing options for binging viewers? Only time will tell?

3. "Second Screens, Connected Viewing, Crowd-funding, and Social Media: Re-imagining Television Consumption."  

2-3:45PM

Moderator: Henry Jenkins, USC

Overview:  As the television industry has been remapping the flow of media content, as new forms of producers and distributors enter the marketplace, there has also been an accompanying effort to rethink their interface with media audiences.  Over the past decade, we’ve seen a renewed emphasis on audience engagement strategies which seek to insure consumer loyalty and social buzz as a way for individual programs or networks to “break through the clutter” of the multiplying array of media options. New metrics are emerging for measuring the value of engaged viewers and the kinds of social and cultural capital they bring with them when they embrace a program. So, for example, the rise of Black Twitter has been credited with helping to rally support behind new programs with strong black protagonists, such as Scandal, Sleepy Hollow, and Being Mary Jane.  Second screen apps are becoming ubiquitous as television producers seek to hold onto the attention of a generation of viewers who are prone to multitasking impulses. The successful Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign opens up the prospect of fans helping to provide funding in support of their favorite stars, creators, or series. And the commercial success of 50 Shades of Gray, which was adapted from a piece of Twilight fan fiction, has alerted the publishing world to a hitherfore underappreciated value of women’s fan fiction writing as a recruiting ground for new talent and as a source for new creative material. Yet, for all this focus on engaged audiences, does the industry value some form of viewers and viewership more than others? Which groups are being under-represented here and why? Are the new economic arrangements between fans and producers fair to all involved?

4. Indie TV: Where Creators and Fans Pilot New Shows

Moderator: Aymar Jean Christian, Northwestern University

4-5:45PM

Overview: The Internet broke the network bottleneck. Through platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, creators release series directly to fans, who follow shows and share them with friends. Web-content creators can write stories in whatever length, style, and genre they choose, on their own schedule, and with actors of their choosing. The result is a truly open television ecosystem, where creators, talent and fans work together to realize stories they want to see. Each of the producers who appear on this panel has contributed to this new vision of television, producing series that are developed for the Internet but are also being shaped for traditional TV as well (several of these series are being developed on HBO). Issa Rae developed The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl with a small team and expanded the show using a successful crowdfunding campaign; she went on to produce a number of series with other creators,including Amy Rubin’s Little Horribles. Released by her own Barnacle Studios, Rubin’s sitcom became a hit with fans and critics at Variety, LA Weekly and Splitsider, among many others. Dennis Dortch and Numa Perrier launched the Black & Sexy TV network to showcase indie comedy, releasing their own hit series, The Couple, and many others from emerging Hollywood talent. Jay Bushman helped The Lizzie Bennet Diaries grow into a deeply engaging transmedia phenomenon, where viewers of the Jane Austen-inspired series followed characters from YouTube to Twitter and Pinterest. As these examples convey, the internet has become an incubator for talented, next-generation web-creators and web-celebs, who, in combination with their fan followers, are reinventing television for the digital age.

Speakers to be announced.

SAVE THE DATE. WATCH THIS BLOG FOR FURTHER UPDATES

Storytelling and Digital-Age Civics Webinar Series: Highlights from Sessions 3 and 4 - MAPP Situation Room Edition

Last week we wrapped up the 4-part webinar series on Storytelling and Digital-Age Civics organized by the Media, Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) team here at USC. The series was sponsored in partnership with Youth Radio, Connected Learning, and USC’s Media Arts + Practice . The webinars highlighted the practice of storytelling and how it can be used to connect the spheres of culture and politics. An amazing group of participants were convened for the series to discuss their innovative uses of storytelling for civic/political ends, and the result was a collection of fascinating and insightful conversations (see the full list of speakers for webinar 3 and webinar 4).

I recently shared a blog post with highlights from webinars 1 and 2 selected by the behind the scenes team participating in the Livestream discussion and live-tweeting from the MAPP “situation room” during each webinar.*  This post captures some of the team’s favorite moments from webinars 3 and 4. You can also check out the full recordings of those webinars below.

Webinar 3: Spreading Your Story

Watch live streaming video from connectedlearningtv at livestream.com

The third webinar examined how participants spread their stories to others and how stories get circulated among a variety of audiences.  Some highlights include:

• Rubi Fregoso, director for KCET Departures’ Youth Voices, and her student Raul describe how they turned a vacant lot into a dog park. Hear them explain at 13 minutes in how, through this experience and other civic projects, they encourage student leadership within their own community.

• From 29 minutes in, hear the panelists discuss strategies for balancing the risk and the power of sharing personal stories. Nirvan Mullick, director of the Caine’s Arcade short film, makes a powerful statement: the more personal your story is, the more universal it is.

• Thea Aldrich, community manager of Random Hacks of Kindness, emphasizes the power of the public that activists engage.  She advises others at 37 minutes in to “be comfortable with an idea or narrative taking on a life of its own...because it’s about the community, it’s not up to us to decide where it goes. Trying to control it limits its potential.”

• Joshua Merchant of the Off/Page Project vividly demonstrates his poetry’s power to speak about his experiences as a black queer youth growing up in East Oakland. Check out his poetry performance at 49 minutes into the video.

• At 39 minutes in, moderator Derek asks the activists how they measure success. Kat Primeau, from improv comedy outreach non-profit Laughter for a Change, cautions against relying solely on view counts and hits, saying at 54 minutes in that with improv comedy “you see success in the room when you see people having fun,” but that experience may get lost online.

Webinar 4: Considering Your Story’s Afterlife

Watch live streaming video from connectedlearningtv at livestream.com

The fourth webinar focused on how participants navigate their stories’ “digital afterlife” and lasting impact.

• At 13 minutes in, hear Wajahat Ali explain how he became an ‘accidental activist’ and created Domestic Crusaders after a domestic violence murder case. He explains how something that starts locally may quickly grow into a national campaign.

• Joan Donovan shares her experience with Occupy at 20 minutes in.  She explains, "We needed a space where Occupiers could speak to each other. Email was a terrific failure." So participants created the interOcc digital platform to connect a lot of people quickly, allowing them to coordinate action, share ideas, and strategize.

• Jonathan McIntosh, pop culture hacker and remix artist, points out that the media is often lazy: mainstream news organizations will usually reprint your story in whatever form it takes in the beginning, so he advises taking the time to write and frame it how you want it from the outset. At 29 minutes in, he explains how activists can use the media to give power to their words.

• Pete Fein talks of his experiences as an internet activist, including being a former activist with Anonymous. At 35 minutes in, hear Pete explain why he never considers himself to be in control of the story.

• At 41 minutes in, Jasmeen Patheja of Blank Noise responds to a question about the role of the audience in civic stories.  She urges activists not to think of those they reach as an audience, but as a community to engage.

• Luvvi Ajayi of the Red Pump Project responds to a question about how civic storytelling on social media can encourage people to participate. At 48 minutes in, she advises activists to make sure their story is more about people than the stats so it rises above the noise and people are more likely to act on it.

• At 53 minutes in, Wajahat responds “Hello, NSA” to a question from the Livestream chat about dealing with the possibility of surveillance.  He suggests looking at surveillance as an educational opportunity that keeps you on your toes and encourages you to be smarter in your activism.

We are thrilled with the depth and breadth of the conversations generated by the webinar series and hope the stories of all the panelists inspire you just as much. We thank our fantastic panelists and facilitators, along with Derek Williams, moderator for all four webinars, and look forward to utilizing their insights in the future. You can continue the conversation about storytelling and digital-age civics on Twitter via #civicpaths and #connectedlearning.

*The support team includes: Samantha Close (@ButNoCigar), Raffi Sarkissian (@rsark), Karl Menjivar-Baumann (@newclearistbau), Liana Gamber-Thompson (@lianathomp), and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik (@Netakv).

Situating Bollywood: An Interview with Aswin Punathabekar (Part Three)

Despite your description of the range of media industries and practices which construct Bollywood today, it is clear that cinema remains the center around which all of these other media systems operate, and you also argue that cinema remains core to understanding the connections between Indian diasporic identity and media. So, what accounts for the continued centrality of cinema to the narrative you are constructing, given the other pressures towards transmedia and transnational logics you describe?

There are several reasons for the privileged position cinema occupies. The first is simply the enduring popularity of films and film music (mainly Hindi language cinema from Bombay) among South Asian families who migrated to the U.S. following changes in immigration law in 1965. From the late 1960s, when enterprising families began screening films in university halls and other venues, to the recent forays into film exhibition by Bombay-based media companies like Reliance Entertainment, Hindi-language Bollywood films continue to dominate the Desi mediascape.

These film screenings were usually held in university halls rented for a few hours during the weekend, with films screened off 16mm, and later, 35mm reels. These weekend screenings, with an intermission that lasted 30-45 minutes, were an occasion, apart from religious festivals, for people to wear traditional clothes, speak in Hindi or other regional languages, and participate in a ritual that was reminiscent of “home.”

During a period in which there were no cultural institutions in place, and little on offer in mainstream media that resonated with their emotions, nostalgic longing, and cultural values, leave alone addressing the difficulties of life in a new cultural space, these screenings were marked as an exclusively Indian space, away from mainstream society, where families could meet and participate in a ritual of sharing personal and collective memories of life in India.

A second reason that films and film music figure prominently in discussions of Desi youth culture relates to Desi youth appropriating and re-mixing film songs and dance sequences in college events, dance clubs, and so on.

Third, it is in and through cinema that diasporic writers and directors like Hanif Kureishi, Mira Nair, and Gurinder Chadha began addressing the complexities of claiming and defining South Asian identities in countries such as the U.K. and the U.S.

But you’re right that we are beginning to see some major changes in the diasporic mediascape. One question to ask is: do we even have a space for diasporic south asian films?

Mira Nair’s The Namesake does deal with diasporic themes, but it is a Bombay-based company that produced and distributed the film. Further, we are not at a point in the cultural life of the South Asian diaspora where media from the Indian subcontinent is only one part of a very diverse mix. Finally, with a range of actors of Indian-origin making their way into American and British public culture, one might argue that the diasporic sensibility that marked the work of cultural producers during the late 1980s-mid-1990s has given way to engagement with mainstream media.

 You begin your discussion of Bollywood fans by setting up the contrast between grassroots forms of media circulation that get labeled “media piracy” and various forms of industry cooperation which get labeled “crowdsourcing.” Is there a meaningful “space in between” these two paradigms? If so, what does it look like?

Part of the difficulty involved in charting the terrain of participatory culture surrounding Bollywood, especially in an era of networked audiences and publics, stems from the sheer range of sites and modes of participation one encounters. And in the Indian context, our understanding of participatory culture remains tied to a very specific history of fan associations and their links to electoral politics in south India. This narrative of fan/cine-politics has been so dominant that other modes and sites of participatory culture have not been considered, leave alone studied in systematic fashion, for no apparent reason other than their seemingly “non-political” character.

In fact, the topic of fan activity has not even been raised in relation to Bollywood. So in the book, I drew on some research I’ve done on fans of A. R. Rahman to argue that we need to move beyond narratives of political mobilization. The major Rahman fan community online includes fans who are primarily interested in film music, fans based in Malaysia for whom participation in the Rahman fan community is part of a larger process of claiming a Tamil ethnic identity, fans in India who work with Rahman, some fans who are, yes, “pirates,” and some who go so far as to police music stores (makeshift stores set up on pavements in busy shopping areas, in shopping complexes, and so on), threatening to call the police if pirated CDs of Rahman’s music are not taken off the shelf.

This is, as you put, a very complex “space in between” piracy and crowdsourcing. And we simply do not have the critical vocabulary to describe and theorize what’s going on in this space.

While my own recent work has sought to map the emerging links between fandom and activism, you argue that these links have totally dominated discourse around Bollywood film fans to the extent that they crowd out understandings of film consumption in the context of everyday life practices. American fan studies has often been accused of not being sufficiently political, of being too interested in the personal, cultural, affective, and social dimensions of popular culture. What might these two groups of scholars learn from each other?

The crucial difference we need to first acknowledge is between film studies and TV/media and communication studies in the Indian context. Film studies is the disciplinary location within which there has been at least some discussion of fandom, even if it has been studied primarily in the south Indian political context.

TV/media studies in the Indian context is yet to take the question of participatory culture seriously. I do not know of a single book-length study of participatory culture surrounding television in India. This is beginning to change in part because the past decade in India has been marked by some very interesting instances of participation surrounding reality TV, for instance, that has intersected with larger political issues.

In my own work in this emerging area, I’ve tried to be very careful to not make easy ‘political’ readings simply because I know next to nothing about the sociable dimensions of participation. And this is what I admire so much about scholars’ work on pleasure and participation in the American context.

As I see it, what we have here in the US is a wealth of historically grounded material on audiences and fans that provides a necessary foundation for examining links between participation and politics. But despite this archive that we have to work with, I feel strongly that it is only when we fully comprehend how participation and everyday life – say, in relation to our current digital and mobile context - are braided together that we can meaningfully pose questions about political impact.

 Your final paragraph includes a very provocative statement, which I was hoping you might expand upon here: “to look broadly at fan participation is to imagine transnational media worlds that are intimately tied to, but not always constrained by, statist or industrial imperatives.” Do tell.

As I've already explained, fan activity surrounding cinema in India - south India, in particular - has always had very close connections to the realm of politics. This cine-politics take on fandom has tended to dominate our understanding of participatory culture in India.

However, this cine-politics frame has given way to an extent under the influence of the incredible expansion of the mediascape since the mid-1990s. One of the key changes that the proliferation of television channels engendered was a shift in how audiences were imagined. Television channels like MTV-India, Channel [V], Star Plus, ZEE, and others invited audience participation. Of course, audience participation was tightly controlled and managed expertly - from talent shows to programs like Lift Kara De that leveraged fan labor for ostensibly humanitarian ends.

These changes made it clear that fandom was now an integral part of the corporate media apparatus. What I tried to signal with that last statement is the need to look beyond these two dominant frameworks - politics/state and market - without ignoring their structuring effects. I wanted to make a case for approaching fandom in India from a position of trust rather than suspicion (as my friend and colleague Paddy Scannell argues, media studies tends to operate with a hermeneutics of suspicion). Or to draw on your work, I want us to hop on this realm of pop, not stomp all over it.

For e.g., there is a group of fans who have painstakingly collected and subtitled numerous videos - film clips, TV appearances, interviews, advertisements, etc. - of the Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan. For anyone who might not understand the Hindi language, this website - srkpagli.net - was a wonderful resource. To approach the work that these fans have done by - a) dismissing it as apolitical or b) as simply a part of the Shahrukh Khan/corporate Bollywood system - is too reductive. I simply wanted to clear the space so we can begin to acknowledge the astonishing range of practices that constitute 'fandom' in the Indian context, and in doing so, develop richer and more nuanced accounts of participatory culture.

Aswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (2013), and co-editor of Television at Large in South Asia (2013)and Global Bollywood (2008). He is now conducting research on the politics of mediated activism in India as part of a collaborative SSRC project on "Media, Activism, and the New Political."

Situating Bollywood: An Interview with Aswin Punathambekar (Part Two)

You spend a significant amount of time in the book exploring the role that MTV India has played in shifting how films are marketed and how Bollywood understands its audiences. What factors have allowed MTV India to become a core player in this space? What has been their impact on Bollywood's media strategies?

MTV did play a crucial role in shaping Bollywood’s industrial identity and marketing strategies, but it didn’t happen overnight. A range of new television channels that entered the Indian market during the mid-1990s attracted audiences with a range of film-based programs. ZEE, Star Plus, and other channels introduced a number of innovative film music-based shows like Antakshari, Sa Re Ga Ma, and Videocon Flashback, weekly countdown shows like BPL Oye and Philips Top Ten, and shows that reviewed popular films and evaluated their box office performance.

In fact, MTV-India went off the air for a period of two years and returned in 1996 with a redesigned brand identity and, most crucially, with the recognition of the importance of Hindi film music and “localized” programming to its fortunes in the Indian market.

Suggesting that the makeover was not exactly an easy process, one MTV-India executive explained to me that the decision to start with the “look” of the channel, especially the on-air promos, turned out to be the right one and crucial in terms of reaching out to directors and producers in the Bombay film industry who were skeptical, if not dismissive, of music television. As this executive put it, their goal was to “dovetail cool with Bollywood.”

Beginning in 1997-98, with a clear mandate to forge ties with the film industry, MTV-India executives began initiating conversations with a range of producers and directors in the Hindi film industry. And it took well over two years before the film industry began responding to television executives’ overtures. Once they had their foot in the door, however, MTV-India began making the case that their particular brand identity and programming sensibility would make the difference in what was a very cluttered television landscape. And by the early 2000s, Bollywood producers began setting aside a larger percentage of the budget for marketing and promoting films.

What roles did the internet play in shifting the relations between domestic and diasporic audiences for Bollywood films? To what degree is the contemporary media industry being shaped by a desire to court and capture “NRI Eyeballs”?

The trouble with saying anything about Bollywood-internet connections is the pace at which things change! My research does not take into account the impact that social media has had on marketing, stardom, participatory culture, and so on. But I can say that dot-com companies did play a central role in establishing the “overseas territory” as a key economic and cultural site for Bollywood. Simply put, television and marketing professionals working in Mumbai were not in a position to shape Bollywood’s relationship with overseas markets.

Speaking a language of web-metrics and capitalizing on the growing interest in marketing and promotions, dot-com companies began generating knowledge about overseas audiences’ engagement with Bollywood that was hitherto unavailable to filmmakers and stars operating primarily from Bombay. More crucially, dot-com professionals were able to forge connections and establish themselves within existing social networks in Bombay’s media world. And in doing so, dot-com companies emerged as powerful knowledge brokers who shaped the imaginations and practices of film industry professionals for whom envisioning an overseas territory had come to constitute an increasingly important dimension of going global.

Exploring this terrain raised a very interesting question for me regarding the dynamic relation between the expansion of capital into new territories and the work of rendering those new territories more imaginable. What Bollywood got was, in fact a very limited “spatial fix” as dot-com companies interpreted and resolved the problem of space—of imagining the overseas territory—in terms of overseas audiences’ cultural temporality with the nation. In other words, these companies only thought about the overseas territory in terms of non-Resident Indians. It is only over the past 4-5 years that these industry professionals have begun taking into account Bollywood’s popularity beyond South Asian communities.

What do you see as the use value of the concept of “transmedia entertainment” for exploring the ways that convergence has impacted the Bollywood industry? What do you see as missing from such an approach?

I don’t think “transmedia entertainment” is particularly useful at this point. I have yet to see a media producer in Bombay truly grasp the potential for transmedia storytelling. At the moment, it is largely driven by a marketing sensibility: pushing Bollywood content across platforms. To be sure, there have been a handful of interesting marketing campaigns and there was also an ambitious attempt to draw on India’s rich mythological tradition to drive film content. But we are yet to see a major push for storytelling across media.

Writers have started to talk about “Bollystan” to describe this new configuration of diasporic cultural identity. What does this term mean and is it a good description of the changes you are discussing in your book?

The term comes from a widely circulated article titled “Bollystan: The Global India,” in which the author Parag Khanna reflected on how processes of globalization had reframed relations between India and the vast Indian diaspora. Khanna wrote: “Increasingly linked by culture and technology, they form a Global India, which I call Bollystan. ‘Bolly’ connotes culture (e.g., Bollywood), and ‘Stan’ (Farsi for “land”) represents the transcendence of borders and sovereignty.” Khanna’s neologism first appeared in the Fall 2004 issue of Another Magazine, a now defunct publication targeted at “young, upwardly mobile South Asians.” Featuring Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai on the cover, the magazine declared: “Bollystan is a state without borders, defined by a shared culture and common values.”

Using the term Bollystan to refer to a vast space of trans-national cultural production that included everything from henna tattoos and remix music to literature and films, Khanna and other writers sought to map how rapid flows of people, culture and capital across national borders have rendered difficult any easy separation between nation and diaspora. In fact, Khanna proceeded to argue that Bollystan is “cosmopolitanism’s inversion: instead of one person being at home anywhere, it is re-rooting Desis everywhere in a real and imagined shared cultural space.”

But the fact is that where commercial media ventures are concerned, Bollystan has a very specific Anglo-American cultural geography and as a consequence, re-roots only certain kinds of Desis. The network of cities that are part of diasporic entrepreneurs’ imagination of Bollywood’s global reach include cities such as London, New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto but not, for instance, Durban in South Africa. And even within these cities in the Global North, it is only a certain narrow, largely middle and upper-middle class cultural sphere of South Asians that informs the imaginations and practices of media industry professionals.

Aswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (2013), and co-editor of Television at Large in South Asia (2013)and Global Bollywood (2008). He is now conducting research on the politics of mediated activism in India as part of a collaborative SSRC project on "Media, Activism, and the New Political."

Situating Bollywood: An Interview with Aswin Punathambekar (Part One)

This is another in a series of interviews with the authors of books we have published through the PostMillenial Pop series which I co-edit with Karen Tongson for New York University Press.  I have known Aswin Punathambekar since he was part of one of the first cohorts of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, where he did an ethnography/oral history of the experience of South Asian diasporic audiences in Boston as they impacted the reception of Bollywood films. He continued his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where his dissertation focused on the online fandom around Bollywood composer A. R. Rahman. He has made some key contributions to the project of expanding the study of fandom and participatory culture beyond its origins in Western Culture, as reflected by articles published in Transformative Works and Culture and Popular Communication.

In a relatively short period of time, Punathambekar has developed a scholarly profile that is at once programmatic (in that he continually  deepens our understanding of media production and consumption in India and its global diaspora) and expansive (in that he has used his expertise on Bollywood to bring a much needed non-western perspective to work on a range of topics, including fan studies, participatory culture, media convergence, narrowcasting, mobile media, and digital citizenship, which have been central to media scholarship in the 21st century.) Punathambekar  has expanded upon his initial focus on audience studies to develop a mixed methods approach, which is at once theoretically sophisticated and historically informed.

His new book, From Bombay to Bollywood is a tour de force, one which connects Bollywood decisively to larger conversations about our current moment of media change, one which moves incorporates close readings not only of texts but also of media rituals (informed by the best work in Production Studies), to explain the larger contexts through which Bollywood operates as a global media industry, one that moves backwards from Bollywood's relationship to digital networks to explore the historic role in radio in helping to shape the circulation of Indian film music.  This expansive understanding of what once might have been treated purely through a lens of "national cinema" was anticipated by his Global Bollywood anthology, which he co-edited with Anadam P. Kavoori. Global Bollywood brought together established scholars with younger researchers, many of whom received their first publications under his leadership, to create an important and groundbreaking exchange around how Hindi Cinema reflects and drives larger developments in the global media scape.

In this interview, he situates Bollywood at a series of intersections between film and other media, between local, regional, national, and transnational industries, between domestic and diasporic audiences, and between producers and fans.

You begin the book with the suggestion that Bollywood should be studied across media rather than through more traditional paradigms of national cinema. What factors have contributed to making Bollywood a particularly rich case for understanding contemporary convergence culture?

I worked out this perspective of media convergence or inter-media relations in part by revisiting a question that several scholars have tackled: how did Bombay emerge and maintain its position as the pre-eminent media capital in India? Film and media scholars have identified a number of key factors: the city’s position as a center of trade and commerce, and the influx, through the decades, of mercantile capital into film-making; its status as a vibrant cultural center, with established theater movements initially providing the film industry with a range of creative personnel; the use of Hindi which accorded the Bombay-based film industry (located in a multi-lingual city and in a state where the official language is Marathi) ‘national’ status whereas film industries in cities like Madras and Hyderabad were ascribed ‘regional’ status; and the impact of India’s partition on other centers of film production, most notably Calcutta and Lahore, and the migration of a number of producers, directors, actors and technicians to Bombay during this period.

I argue that there is another important factor: the role played by new media—radio, television, the internet and the mobile phone—in enabling the Bombay film industry to consistently imagine and mobilize a national and now, transnational audience. Moving past a film-centric approach, the case studies of television and dot-com companies’ relations with the film industry that I develop in the book invite us to consider how various ‘new media’ have, historically, reconfigured the cultural geography of Bombay cinema and Bombay’s status as a media capital.

Considering the case of Radio Ceylon, which broadcast a range of film-based programs that reached audiences across the Indian subcontinent, South Africa, and even some cities in east Africa, encourages us to ponder how other technological and institutional developments influenced the circulation of films and film music, transforming the Bombay film industry’s spatial coordinates and engendering new sites and forms of consumption. This does not necessarily mean that we think only about continuities from the 1950s to the present. Rather, my goal is to open up a space for more grounded explorations of the interwoven histories of different media technologies and institutions and, in the process, expand our understanding of the histories and patterns of media convergence.

So at a basic level, the ‘national cinema’ paradigm isn’t productive given Bombay’s position as a media capital that has always been shaped by trans-national forces and factors.  I’ll say more about the limitations of a strictly ‘national’ framework as I answer other questions here. But I should also point out that film historians like Priya Jaikumar have argued very convincingly that we need to move past the national cinema framework to understand how aesthetics, regulation, and other dimensions of the cinema in India have always been worked out in relation to various trans-national forces and factors.

You note that most work to date within the production studies tradition has focused on western and for the most part, American contexts. So, what might production studies as an emerging paradigm gain from a more thorough exploration of media production in India?

This is a crucial question not only for production culture/industry studies but media studies at large. Too often, “global media studies” serves as a mere placeholder for media studies outside Anglo-American academic settings, with “global” gesturing towards studies of “Other” media ecologies. Such studies are often understood as mere case studies that test and refine theoretical concepts developed within media studies proper. In writing this book, I have tried hard to steer clear of fitting what I observed into existing theories of production culture while at the same time avoiding celebrations of local difference.

For instance, I take into account the enduring power of long-standing social and kinship relationships in the Bombay film industry and, equally important, the creative ways in which small-scale, family-run businesses have responded to changes in the global media landscape and calls for corporatization. Examining the impact that the discourse of corporatization has had on the film industry by analyzing the construction of industrial identities suggests that the narrative of transition from one established mode of production to a new one, say Fordism to post-Fordism, does not adequately explain the industrial logics and practices that characterize Bollywood.

In fact, Madhava Prasad’s observation that the Hindi film industry adopted a “heterogeneous form of manufacture in which the whole is assembled from parts produced separately by specialists, rather than being centralized around the processing of a given material,” troubles stagist narratives of media industries in the non-Western world catching up with those in the West. After all, the dominant mode of production in the Bombay film industry could be described using terms like flexible accumulation and de-centralization that theorists like David Harvey use to describe the logics of late capitalism in the West. In other words, the particular histories of capital in Bombay cannot be easily set aside.

But this does not imply documenting a set of practices that are somehow essentially Indian. A closer look at the operations of family firms suggests that production relations defined by mercantile capital and kinship networks are neither static nor contained within national boundaries. And when we move beyond family businesses to consider a wider range of companies and professionals, it becomes clear that every domain of Bollywood including production, distribution, marketing and promotions, and exhibition involves negotiations among actors and institutions enmeshed in multiple, asymmetric, and seemingly incongruent cultures of capitalism.

You link the global extension of Bollywood to shifts in national cultural and media policy in India over the past decade, policies which involved a greater state role in the financing of media production, the regulation and “corporatization” of the media industries, and a recognition of the core cultural mission which film plays in shaping communication between the South Asian Disapora and the mother country. During this same period, though, we’ve seen a growing crisis in state funding and support for cinema, television, and other media across Europe. What might we learn by looking at developments in India and Western Europe side by side as we think about the place of state funding for media production in the 21st century?

Situating the emergence of Bollywood within the socio-historical conjuncture of the past two decades helps us understand how the state worked out its relationship with the cultural industries. Let’s not forget that even though Bombay had emerged as major center of film production during the 1930s and 40s, the Indian state did not regard filmmaking as an important industrial activity or as central to the project of defining national culture. What changed during the late 1980s and early 1990s?

This was a period that witnessed a number of socio-cultural and political transitions engendered by the Indian state’s adoption and gradual legitimization of neo-liberal economic policies including the privatization of different sectors of the economy and, broadly speaking, attempts to integrate the nation into a global economy. Among other arenas of cultural production, Hindi-language films and television shows played a crucial role in mediating these concerns. So one way to understand the state’s overtures towards the media industries is in terms of the media industries having become useful to the state. This is, of course, a global story. For instance, we see this kind of strategic alignment of state-media relations in the UK and Australia under the “creative industries” banner.

But in the Indian context, the usefulness of the media and entertainment industries was articulated in more than just this economic sense. If we consider Bollywood’s presence in settings such as the World Economic Forum (at Davos), we can see that the transformation of the Bombay film industry into Bollywood was caught up in a larger process of the state re-aligning its understanding of ‘culture as resource’ away from well-worn developmentalist paradigms towards meeting the demands of new circuits of capital. While development-oriented media production had its own shortcomings, it wasn’t beholden to commercial mandates. If anything, it is all the more difficult now to imagine carving out a space for independent and public media production.

It is also important to keep in mind that this particular re-alignment of state-media relations ended up privileging Bollywood as the global (Indian) media industry. The Tamil and Telugu language film and television industries based in Chennai and Hyderabad, for instance, are anything but “local.” The use of the term “regional” to mark these industries’ position within the Indian mediascape and the Indian state’s material and symbolic investments in Bollywood underscore the continued relevance of the “national” as a scale where the politics of media globalization play out.

Aswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (2013), and co-editor of Television at Large in South Asia (2013)and Global Bollywood (2008). He is now conducting research on the politics of mediated activism in India as part of a collaborative SSRC project on "Media, Activism, and the New Political."

What World Wrestling Entertainment Can Teach Us About the Future of Television (Part Two)

The following exchange is between my son, Henry Jenkins IV, who is a Creative Development Coordinator at the Alchemists, a transmedia company, and Sam Ford, who is  Director of Audience Engagement at Pepercom Communications, a strategic communications firm. They are both life-long wrestling fans and regular contributors to this blog. They are sharing their thoughts here about some significant new developments in the world of "sports entertainment," which constitute another of those factors this past year, which are transforming television as we know it. Tom Phillips,  Senior Research Associate contributing to research at University of East Anglia and University of Edinburgh, has written a thoughtful response to this blog post, which can be read here.  Henry:  As a writer of transmedia I want to think about the biggest, most creative ways you could use the WWE Network. But realistically there are a host of factors that limit what a producer is going to want to do. Budget is one of those factors. You can't spend the money that the WWE Network will make when so far it hasn't made a cent. It won't start selling subscriptions until late next month. Man hours are also an issue. They'e already producing six hours of TV every week, and it's going to be a massive undertaking just to get the infrastructure working and the archive available online. But here's another recent story that would play on my mind if I were them.

The WWE has a reality show, Total Divas, on the E! Network. The writers weren't finding enough time to flesh out the female wrestlers' characters on their main shows, so they created Total Divas as a way to build relationship-driven, soap operatic stories around those characters. On the surface it was a brilliant move. Two of the main characters of Total Divas, identical twin wrestlers Brie and Nikki Bella, had come across poorly for years, but became genuinely likable stars on Total Divas. Just one or two episodes completely changed the way I felt about those characters. The show did good ratings. Online fans seemed to like it. So the WWE took the obvious next step: They pushed The Bella Twins to the forefront on their wrestling shows. They got crickets. Nobody cared.  It baffled me for a second, but then I think everyone realized what the problem was. Most of their fans still weren't watching Total Divas.Only a subset of the WWE's global following had been necessary to make Total Divas a success, and the people who were interested in watching the women's wrestlers plan their weddings weren't necessarily the ones going to the fights. The show was on a different network, at a different time. The people who hadn't seen the Bellas in a likable light yet hadn't changed their opinion. They booed the Bellas. So in a way, the show had only accomplished half its goal. It had given the divas more time to develop their characters, but hadn't noticeably effected their popularity at the live events.

Total Divas was originally conceived of as a WWE Network program, and you can see the logic. The WWE has about 80 wrestlers on their active roster. They've got 24 hours of programming to fill. Better start utilizing everyone. They're using the Network as a chance to showcase NXT - the minor leagues of pro wrestling. Commercials and online videos have explicitly reminded fans that the top stars they love began their careers in NXT, and told them to watch the next stars' rise to glory from the very beginning. Another move that echoes real sports, where fans are often excited about their team's young prospects. One could imagine a reality show that focused on following tag teams. Do they get along off stage? Do they have fights right before they have to team up on camera? Or do they love each other and have lots of fun together that we never get to see? With the WWE already airing six hours of programming on cable, and now posting thousands of hours on their archive, can they count on a significant percentage of their audience seeing any one show? And if not, then is producing more programming necessarily going to deepen the audiences' understanding of the master narrative in any consistent, meaningful way? Can the narrative ever become so big it's unwieldy? I don't think the WWE has an answer for that yet, and until they do creating a lot of new programming risks spinning their wheels.

Sam Ford: Agreed, Henry, that the WWE has to be awfully careful about crafting its programming in a way that allows for various depths of viewing. They will have this always-on network of programming. They will continue to have their “big” monthly shows. They will continue to have their website that they update 24/7. And they will have their programming on other networks that will continue. No one fan can possibly watch everything they put out there…but that has always been the case with WWE. I can’t imagine there is already any one fan who has seen every tweet every wrestler has put out, every archived show available in their online and video-on-demand “WWE Classics” programming, watched every hour of first-run television they’ve created, and so on.

Instead, what WWE needs to create is a storyline that makes sense for fans who, say, only will watch Monday Night RAW and the PPVs and intermittently drop in on everything else.  But it needs to create almost two tracks of experiences with everything else:

• deeper continuity and new meaning that can be gleaned from fans who want to view additional original programming that gives more depth to certain characters, or provides historical context to something currently happening on screen, etc.
• supplemental experiences or pleasures, for fans who like WWE and don’t want to extend the narrative further but rather the experience of watching WWE. In this case, it might be more “features-like” programming that have no bearing at all on storyline, or it might be interactive programming of some sort, etc. In Spreadable Media, drawing on Alex Leavitt’s work, we look at how Glee does this to a degree—embracing and drawing on participatory programming (fans doing covers of songs from Glee, for instance) or inviting fans into the experience more deeply in a way that extends the feel of the story world rather than anything about the progression of the narrative in the story world.

It’s important to keep in mind that WWE is contemplating the launch of this new network alongside another significant change. The company has set the contracts for its various first-run programming so that it all runs out at the same time: their weekly 3-hour Monday Night RAW on USA Network; their show Main Event on ION; their show Friday Night Smackdown on SyFy; and their show on E!, Total Divas. In addition, they had let the contract run out on their children’s show, Saturday Morning Slam, on CW Network. Their plan is to go to a family of networks and sell all of that programming in as a package deal, to try and command the sorts of prices that sports leagues do for packaged programming with a media conglomerate.

It remains to be seen if that approach will help them negotiate a better deal, but WWE would be in an interesting position if they have a really deep partnership with one centralized distribution company for its weekly first-run programming and then its own WWE Network for its monthly big shows and all its supplementary content. Should WWE get that sort of arrangement in place and have success using the launch of its network in the build-up to Wrestlemania this year as a way to get subscribers (who will sign up for an initial six-month subscription), it might allow them to think about the sorts of questions you pose here—how they craft a narrative that one can follow across watching only its most central of texts but find ways to provide depth and value across various experiences.

There’s another challenge we have to think about here, though. WWE fans both love and are often frustrated by the company’s creative direction. Of course, you can never satisfy all fans, and WWE certainly has very different fan bases to satisfy. But one frustration across the board by WWE fans who have moved from a casual to a more in-depth relationship with the brand is that there is often a lack of attention paid to detail and continuity with the company’s storytelling, as the ability WWE has—through its live programming—to overhaul and shift its creative direction quickly can be a double-edged sword….leading to shows getting rewritten often and a lot of second-guessing of creative directions.

For WWE to take full advantage of garnering the sort of in-depth loyalty from its fans to make the network idea work in the long term, it has to create a product that the fans feel confident in investing in. I would guess WWE’s hope is both to draw a greater number of its casual fans into a deeper relationship with the company and also to draw lapsed fans back in, in part by creating deeper connections between WWE’s current content and its content from yesteryear. That all makes sense, but fans have to develop a level of trust with the organization to deepen or renew that commitment. Many more casual fans may have not gotten more deeply involved with the WWE because of frustration with that lack of continuity, and many lapsed fans may be wary of re-committing due to those continuity concerns.

In short, WWE has a lot of business and creative potential with this network and its related packaging of all its cable network TV programming. But the quality of it will also come through the details, so they are better served to do all they can to deliver a great narrative experience for their primary narrative, and finding connective tissue between that primary story and all this supplementary material…than they are to develop too many supplementary shows, a la Total Diva, in the formative months of the network and dilute their focus.

From a storytelling standpoint, I’d love for WWE to use their network to:

• help further build the story of their big events. More traditional “sports analysis” sorts of shows might help better tell the story of the history of certain rivalries, etc., that are leading to a match at an upcoming big event than can be accomplished on the live nature of a MondayNight RAW or a Friday Night Smackdown. History pieces about the ways two rivals have crossed paths in the past, featuring original studio interviews with them, etc., is something WWE could benefit from more of.
• connect current WWE programming to events from the past. If one of the commentators makes reference to a wrestler from yesteryear or a match from the past during a show, WWE Network could feature those matches in its on-demand programming later in the week for fans who wanted to see more. For shows like Smackdown that aren’t aired live, they could even provide pop-ups during the programming to drive people to the WWE Network to check out what was just referenced.
• provide more interest in what happens at WWE Live Events. One of the challenges WWE has is that its live arena shows that aren’t televised have little meaning around them. But the WWE Network might allow them to have something happen (an interview; a skirmish; etc.) at one of those live shows that has some impact on what happens on next week’s Monday Night RAW. The WWE Network might be the place where that can play out and that story could be told. These could be developments that don’t have deep narrative importance, in that you won’t be lost if you don’t watch it. But, for those who are more deeply immersed in the WWE narrative universe, it might provide greater interest in connecting the story.

Henry: I totally agree. My sense is that the larger the canvas, the more the WWE needs to discipline their story from the top down. Conventionally in the industry they would plan narrative arcs in advance, draw a flow chart of some sort showing how each storyline will play out across all of the different media channels, and find a fresh and interesting part of the story for each one to tell. WWE RAW and Smackdown would drive the narrative week-to-week. They would function like the weekly episodes of any other dramatic serial, furthering the storylines and ending with cliffhangers. Much as series like The Walking Dead and Doctor Who seasons are sometimes split into two half-season arcs, the WWE season would be split into 12 monthly mini arcs. The pay-per-views would be 12 mid-season finales. Can't-miss special episodes. You'd have to watch them to see the storylines resolved.

With the WWE Network's current price point they should be affordable and available to working families and young individuals. Even kids should be able to afford it with their allowance. That's important from the perspective of serving the public, but it's also important from the perspective of retaining viewers. Everyone will have more reason to emotionally invest in RAW and Smackdown if they know they'll be able to see the payoff. WWE.com would do for pro wrestling what ESPN.comdoes for traditional sports. It would post small news bulletins as often as possible, and provide expert analysis and commentary on everything that's going on.

That sounds like a complete circuit right there, but it's not. I actually think WWE Network and social media have the coolest roles to play, and they really go hand-in-hand. That's where everything takes on a third dimension - depth. At its worst, pro wrestling has cardboard cutout characters. At its best, it has real human beings that you can follow over their entire careers. At it's worst, it has paint-by-numbers stories. At its best, it's one epic story that has spanned over 50 years continuously.

WWE Network lets you watch a documentary like CM Punk: Best in the World and find out his whole life story. Twitter lets you continue following the story through Punk's day-to-day experiences in real time. WWE Network should let you see Punk's greatest matches. Twitter should let you know how he did tonight in Poughkeepsie. Although there was recently a History of WWE: 50 Years of Sports Entertainment DVD set, it's the WWE Network that's the living history.If they can manage to keep all the balls bouncing, the WWE can also use the network to go two important steps further.

`1) The WWE needs to use their original programming like Total Divas and NXT to target certain demographics, but they can't count on them to change the overall audiences' perception of a character. For example, my guess would be that Bella Twins have more Twitter followers and better merchandise sales than ever, particularly among women, because fans who have seen Total Divas are identifying more personally with those characters. Even though the Bellas aren't getting huge crowd reactions at live shows, they've got more devoted fans now, and that's good enough. If the global mainstream audience starts cheering for them too because they've heard the Bellas are cool, that's the icing on the cake.

2) Original dramatic series that star the wrestlers could also give audiences a new way to enjoy the WWE's talent. The company has been trying to make movies for years, and they haven't been box office leaders. I think TV is a better medium because it demands a somewhat smaller audience, and asks them to come back week after week. That's what WWE fans are good at.

The WWE already has more or less the infrastructure I just described. They should keep sharpening their process. What's holding them back right now are the stories. Under the hood the infrastructure could be as fine-tuned as an Aston Martin. The graphics and set design can be as beautiful as that car's body too. But if the stories suck, the car is going to be running on fumes.

Last week the WWE brought back Batista. I dislike him, but RAW got the highest ratings in 10 months. I'm not excited for it, but that tells me they should be pushing him. By the same token, Daniel Bryan is getting the loudest crowd reactions of anyone on the roster, including John Cena. If he main evented Wrestlemania the WWE wouldn't have to fight an uphill battle by going against the fans' wishes. They'd be driving downhill, with the full momentum of the crowd propelling them.

On a more general level, though, if the WWE wants to be respected in the same way as other mainstream shows, their stories need to be as intricate and well-structured as those shows.  Because they're trying to do so much more than those shows it's going to be really, really hard for them to pay the same attention to the craft of each script. There are a lot of people working on all of the WWE divisions who need to be on the same page, and a lot of important production people who are understandably going to want a say. I don't envy the McMahons in having to organize that labor. But the fact remains that if the scripts aren't well-written, the entire operation is going to be spinning its wheels.I think there is fan energy behind this Sunday's Royal Rumble, but the storylines are frankly terrible. Batista is the only person who's been written in such a way they could credibly win the Rumble match. John Cena and Randy Orton have just had a TLC Match, so putting them in a standard match without a brilliant new wrinkle in the story is anticlimactic. Brock Lesnar had a five star match against CM Punk at SummerSlam in which he was victorious, and fans wanted a rematch, but instead they're getting Lesnar/Big Show. It just isn't a good story. The WWE Network is a powerful tool. Everyone is excited about it. It can transform the landscape. But if the stories don't get better, it's not going to achieve the effect it could.

Sam: I think you’re right, Henry, that—in the end—it all comes down to story quality. The WWE, when it’s at its best, tells compelling stories that gets its fan base talking, that gets people excited, and that builds a narrative over time. Sometimes, that means doing a “variation on a theme” of a classic pro wrestling storyline: the slow build toward getting the title, while overcoming all the odds; the breakup of longtime partners, which leads to a heated grudge match; the brutal attack and injury, which leads to the triumphant return of a hero after the performer gets a much-needed vacation to rest his body.

One of the problems, though, is that the WWE has struck on a model these past several years where it is driven by a few major stories, with most of the other people being “programmed” into a series of matches with the same opponent but without much story driving it. Compare this to other periods in WWE’s history, for instance in the late 1990s, where it seemed there was significant thought being put into the stories of people, even at a mid-card level. If WWE wants to see fans engage more deeply, there has to be more story to find there. It’s true that people may decide to buy a PPV only on the merits of its top couple of matches, but to sustain long-term fan interest and to take advantage of this subscription model, I think those fans are going to hope to find depth in what they get in return.

Since WWE doesn’t have to worry so much about trying to get people to buy each show as one-off, I hope that frees up their creative resources to focus on finding stories and putting thought into people throughout the roster. That doesn’t mean everyone has to get pushed equally; but it does means that fans of the Bella Twins or fans of Kofi Kingston can watch that character’s journey and part of the story in particular and find deep narrative pleasure in that.

Here’s where WWE can learn a lot from the soap opera world where soaps, when they are at their best, have characters that cycle from front-burner to back-burner status in the story over time, but who always play a crucial role and aren’t just on the screen as filler between two important TV segments.

I often argue that WWE is a property that serial narrative storytellers or people who champion “transmedia storytelling” should be taking a close look at because of the depth of its storytelling potential. But I must admit that prompt is hobbled by the lack of quality in WWE’s storytelling. The WWE waffles between taking its own stories seriously, on the one hand, while drawing great attention to its artifice, on the other. The creative team often sours on an idea part of the way through and drops it, in ways that trains fans to be hesitant to invest that deeply and to believe that tracking the nuances of a story will actually have any sort of payoff.

In short, WWE has a narrative world that could be the stuff of truly great storytelling that would put any entertainment franchise in awe. But it has to put a deep commitment to quality storytelling at the forefront to take full advantage of that opportunity. I’d love to see WWE ranking as a serious contender for creative awards and to see the TV critics and others start paying attention to what WWE is doing. The WWE has barely scratched the surface of the depth of the immersive stories they could tell. And the way they can draw the audience into that story, and take advantage of being a story told in real time and in the real world…just as they have even more they can do with the depth of live fan engagement on social media. See my Fast Company piece about how WWE has used listening via social media to correct storyline continuity errors within the course of a single episode. I’d love to see even more of this from them.

From my perspective, WWE in 2014 sets in front of a boundless storytelling potential. I don’t know if “the world is watching,” to steal a former WWE marketing phrase, but I know the wrestling fan base is. And I think anyone interested in entertainment and storytelling should be as well.

Sam Ford has been a fan of professional wrestling since his youth. His fan activities has ranged from fantasy wrestling leagues to putting on costume wrestling shows with his high school friends to even, for a time, being a licensed professional wrestling manager in the state of Kentucky and playing the role of owner of the local “Universal Championship Wrestling.” He has taught courses on pro wrestling in U.S. culture at MIT and at Western Kentucky University and has written about wrestling in publications like Fast Company, CommPRO.biz, Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, In Media Res, and in an essay in the 2012 book Bodies of Discourse. His undergraduate honors thesis at Western Kentucky University was entitled “Grappling with Scholarship on Pro Wrestling: Comparative Media Studies Inside the Ring.” Sam is Director of Audience Engagement at Peppercomm, an affiliate with MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and co-author, with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, of the 2013 book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture.

Henry Jenkins IV is a devoted fan, and critic, of professional wrestling. The son of Professor Henry Jenkins, he dressed up as The Undertaker for Halloween as a child; wrote scripts as an apprentice promoter with the Carolina Wrestling Federation after college; and will attend his eighth Wrestlemania in New Orleans this April. He previously wrote memoir accounts - first of being a child fan in the 80s in the article "Growing Up and Growing More Mature" for Nicholas Sammond's collection Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling and then of a recent trip to Wrestlemania with his dad in "Same Old Shit!": Fan Resistance at Wrestlemania 29. He is a transmedia producer and write for The Alchemists whose credits include The CW drama Cult and the Hulu original series East Los High. He has also written numerous unproduced television pilot scripts which lay the groundwork for transmedia franchises. Last year he performed a five month study on The 20 Greatest Franchises of All Time and summarized his findings in a proprietary white paper for The Alchemists. He ranked the WWE near the top.

What World Wrestling Entertainment Can Teach Us About the Future of Television (Part One)

The following exchange is between my son, Henry Jenkins IV, who is a Creative Development Coordinator at the Alchemists, a transmedia company, and Sam Ford, who is  Director of Audience Engagement at Pepercom Communications, a strategic communications firm. They are both life-long wrestling fans and regular contributors to this blog. They are sharing their thoughts here about some significant new developments in the world of "sports entertainment," which constitute another of those factors this past year, which are transforming television as we know it. Tom Phillips,  Senior Research Associate contributing to research at University of East Anglia and University of Edinburgh, has written a thoughtful response to this blog post, which can be read here. 

Henry: World Wrestling Entertainment recently announced the launch of the WWE Network – a 24 hour programming track, and an online archive, that audiences will access through their computers, smart phones, video game systems and DVRs. Many of you may not be wrestling fans, but read on, because this case study has big implications on the future of television and fandom. I’m excited not only as a lifelong fan but as a Hollywood transmedia writer who grew up as the son of Professor Henry Jenkins. I immediately reached out to my longtime friend and colleague, Sam Ford, who I consider to be the world’s foremost professional wrestling scholar, and I asked him if he wanted to write a public dialogue with me about why this is such a game changer in and outside of the wrestling world.

If you can’t quite picture what the WWE Network will be like, that’s because there’s never been anything like it before. The closest comparison would be to Netflix, which can be accessed through many digital devices, but does not show their content over the air. The WWE is likewise putting their entire archive of 100,000 hours of shows on the server for fans to play with. But unlike Netflix, they’re also going to be airing content 24/7 on a cable-style channel,  with a slate of original reality shows and sports desk shows, which you access through your iPhone, Android, Playstation, XBOX, Roku, Apple TV, etc.

This isn’t the first time that the WWE has driven a new TV format. In 1982, Vince McMahon acquired the WWF from his father. The company had been a popular regional promotion in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states since 1963, and his dad intended for it to stay grassroots. His son had visions of national fame, so in 1985 Vince essentially spent the company’s entire fortune putting on a one night show, Wrestlemania. But in a bigger gamble, he relied on audiences to use a relatively untested technology – closed circuit television – in order to watch. The technology was so new that in many cases the WWF had to buy the equipment for the theaters. The gamble paid off. Cinemas coast-to-coast sold out showings of the event; just two years later, closed-circuit theater broadcasts were overtaken by pay-per-view in homes; and now the WWE charges fans $55 a showing to watch 12 pay-per-view events a year. They built their company, but they also created a demand for a new way to watch sports.

The biggest headline for many fans now is the change in price structure. Buying 12 pay-per-views at $55 each costs $660 a year. There are also a limited number of people willing to do it. The WWE Network costs $10 a month – or just $120 a year – and expects to attract six or seven times as many viewers. Cash-strapped families and young fans who cannot spend $660 have been left out, while many adults have turned to illegal downloads. But those same people have been blown away by the possibility of spending $10 a month to get the same content. A weird analogy: The economics of it sound like Obamacare. If millions of people who are currently paying nothing now start paying $10 a month the WWE can afford to charge the average customer less.

Although many sports fans don’t know it, Major League Baseball already has a digital channel. It is not hard to believe that if the WWE Network is successful, other brands will follow suit. Just like movie studios made pay-per-view a part of their business model – releasing films there after theater runs but before DVDs and TV debuts in order to milk additional revenue – it is easy to imagine Warner Bros. putting their entire film and television catalogue on a subscription-based digital archive. Well, the WWE is now removing most of their offerings from Netflix and making them exclusive to their service. What would happen if a company like Warner Brothers did the same? Sam?

Sam: Thanks for inviting me to take part in this dialogue, Henry. Like you, I’ve been a long-time viewer of pro wresting and—while there are a long list of reasons I would hardly call the pro wrestling industry as a whole a progressive one—it certainly has been transformative in the way it deals with storytelling. For those who don’t watch WWE, let me back up for a moment and explain exactly why a 24/7 storytelling model makes particular sense for the WWE and why I think it behooves both those working in the media industries and media scholars to pay especially close attention.

First, pro wrestling has the opportunity to conduct storytelling on multiple levels simultaneously:

• The pro wrestling match is a narrative into itself—the fictional depiction of an athletic competition with a beginning, middle, and end—governed by rules that have remained fairly consistent across the history of this “sports entertainment” performance genre. So, as opposed to any other sort of fictional programming, almost any individual segment of any pro wrestling show is, in itself, a discrete chapter that could be watched on its own as a “mini-episode.”
• Then, there is a narrative that spans the course of an individual show. An episode of WWE RAW or WWE Friday Night Smackdown or a PPV event all takes place, typically, in one arena, in front of one live crowd…like an individual sporting event…and there is a script that connects all of the matches and “segments” taking place in any one night together into a discrete whole, as an episode of television.
• At the next level, there is the ongoing story arc of the WWE, which is typically built in one-month increments and which leads to a climax with the pay-per-view event. In other words, the month of programming leading up to a “big show” basically is designed to set up the rivalries, the tensions, and the background story to get people to tune into the major show that resolves all the questions that the programming has built up to. In the days before there was closed circuit and PPV, this is the same model wrestling promoters like Vince’s father used to drive people to go to Madison Square Garden or the other big arenas in his regional circuit—Boston, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc.—to see the big rivalries taking place at the moment. The TV programming plays a promotional element to drive people to the most important shows, where typically the best matches take place, where the championships are most likely to change hands, and where, traditionally, the biggest moments would take place.
• But, at the next level, of course the storylines coming out of one PPV event typically role right into the next, so WWE maintains a “TV season” that runs all year long—that means there are 6 hours of WWE TV shows on network/cable every week, along with a range of internet, DVD, and on-demand shows—with no “re-run season.” For WWE, the climax of each “season” is Wrestlemania, so the typical flow is that the new WWE season in a way begins the night after Wrestlemania, dealing with the aftermath of the biggest show of the year, and everything from that point forward slowly starts to build to the next Wrestlemania.
• Finally, since WWE’s season never really ends, there are “meta” narratives that spans the course of time. Since WWE has the advantage of both having a deep well of serialized stories that go back for decades—with at least most of the previous decades’ archives saved—as well as the fact that most of those individual units—matches, interviews, etc.—can be treated as their own discrete segment—they have a way of drawing from their archive that few can. They can tell the story of the evolution of a particular character through the course of that history…and, since they have bought the archives of many of their competitors now out of business, that story can be told by even looking at their history as they’ve jumped from one part of the “pro wrestling” narrative universe to another. They can also tell the history of particular time periods in wrestling, of particular promotions, of particular types of matches, of particular rivalries…there are a wide range of ways they can slice and dice—and move through—their history.

Second, WWE has a unique ability among entertainment franchises in terms of creating an “immersive storyworld.” Elsewhere, I’ve defined “immersive storyworlds” as narratives which include the following attributes:

1. expansive backstories which can’t be neatly summarized
2. a vast set of ensemble characters, including a few who may front burner at the moment but with a wide variety who may only show up from time to time
3. tying current storylines to the extensive history of the narrative world
4. managed by multiple creative forces, often both at any one time and also through generations of storytellers who have controlled the property at one point or another
5. a hyper-serialization
6. a sense of permanence to the narrative world

For WWE, this is conducted by mimicking the sports world. Elsewhere, I’ve called WWE “the world’s biggest alternate reality game,” because they are a fictional story that uses all of the tropes of a real sports league to basically turn our “real world” into the story world for a fictional narrative. Often, wrestlers compete under their real names or draw on a range of elements from their real lives, blurring the line between fiction and reality. The core and longest-lasting part of the pro wrestling business model is the live event, which means stories are told about these wrestlers as they travel from arena to arena—and they are telling stories about themselves through social media accounts that the performers themselves run—as they carry out in real time, in the same world the WWE’s audience lives in. And, if you purchase a ticket, you can even go and watch the next installment of the story live.

This means the potential WWE has for being the true masters of “transmedia storytelling” is unmatched. However, the issue WWE has faced until now is that they have spent much of the past two decades distancing themselves from the sports background—emphasizing the “entertainment” over the “sport.” Now, they are trying to shift that pendulum back and to think through what the unique advantages are of being a fictional property purporting to be a sports league. As they see MLB, NFL, NASCAR, and others negotiate massive TV and sponsorship deals, they realize that they could forge a path between “sports” and “entertainment” that might take advantage of both in a way no other storytelling company could.

Through that lens, I’d say that every other media/entertainment company—and sports company—should watch what WWE is doing because they could perhaps learn a lot from it. However, on the other hand, the potential WWE has here is unique to them, because no other narrative out there is better suited to move to this sort of model. No other narrative has the potential to both take advantage of its video archive in the way WWE does, nor to tell ongoing stories through this sort of model.

But these observations speak primarily to how WWE is uniquely suited to draw on its archive and to move its current way of storytelling to a unique online video distribution model…and why the rest of the entertainment world…as well as media scholars...ought to pay attention to what’s happening here. The question remains…for those of us who care about pro wrestling narratives themselves…what are the narrative potentials this new model affords? What are the narrative challenges? And what will be WWE’s mentality of making the most use of those potentials? As someone now working in the entertainment and storytelling business, Henry, I’d be curious your take on what this might mean for WWE in particular.

 MORE TO COME

Sam Ford has been a fan of professional wrestling since his youth. His fan activities has ranged from fantasy wrestling leagues to putting on costume wrestling shows with his high school friends to even, for a time, being a licensed professional wrestling manager in the state of Kentucky and playing the role of owner of the local “Universal Championship Wrestling.” He has taught courses on pro wrestling in U.S. culture at MIT and at Western Kentucky University and has written about wrestling in publications like Fast Company, CommPRO.biz, Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, In Media Res, and in an essay in the 2012 book Bodies of Discourse. His undergraduate honors thesis at Western Kentucky University was entitled “Grappling with Scholarship on Pro Wrestling: Comparative Media Studies Inside the Ring.” Sam is Director of Audience Engagement at Peppercomm, an affiliate with MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and co-author, with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, of the 2013 book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture.

Henry Jenkins IV is a devoted fan, and critic, of professional wrestling. The son of Professor Henry Jenkins, he dressed up as The Undertaker for Halloween as a child; wrote scripts as an apprentice promoter with the Carolina Wrestling Federation after college; and will attend his eighth Wrestlemania in New Orleans this April. He previously wrote memoir accounts - first of being a child fan in the 80s in the article "Growing Up and Growing More Mature" for Nicholas Sammond's collection Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling and then of a recent trip to Wrestlemania with his dad in "Same Old Shit!": Fan Resistance at Wrestlemania 29. He is a transmedia producer and write for The Alchemists whose credits include The CW drama Cult and the Hulu original series East Los High. He has also written numerous unproduced television pilot scripts which lay the groundwork for transmedia franchises. Last year he performed a five month study on The 20 Greatest Franchises of All Time and summarized his findings in a proprietary white paper for The Alchemists. He ranked the WWE near the top.