Showcasing the Civic Media Project (2): Binders Full of Election Memes

This is the second in a series of three entires, cross-posted from the Civic Media Project website. Check out the site for many more examples of the ways groups around the world are using digital media to help foster civic change. The site was created by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, the leaders of Emerson College's Engagement Lab, in anticipation of their forthcoming book for MIT Press, Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice.   

BINDERS FULL OF ELECTION MEMES:

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE INVADES THE 2012 U.S. ELECTION

Erhardt Graeff

Participatory culture handed the 2012 U.S. presidential election season a bumper crop of political memes.  These “election memes,” largely in the form of image macros, took sound bites from the candidates’ debates and speeches and turned them into “digital content units” of political satire “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” to paraphrase Limor Schifman’s definition of “internet meme” (2013, 177).

Image macros like the lolcat, feature bold text on top of an image, often a “stock character,” and like all Internet memes are “multi-participant creative expressions through which cultural and political identities are communicated and negotiated” (Ibid.). This case study focuses on three popular image macro-based election memes that came out of the 2012 US presidential election cycle: "Fired Big Bird," "Binders Full of Women," and "You Didn't Build That," and argues that sharing such memes is a valid form of political participation in the style of what Tommie Shelby calls “impure dissent” (forthcoming).

Case 1: Fired Big Bird

During the televised debate on October 3, 2012, Mitt Romney discussed ways he would reduce the deficit. One of which was the government subsidy to the non-profit public broadcaster PBS. He mentions the beloved character of Big Bird in course.

"I'm sorry Jim, I'm gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. [...] I like PBS, I love Big Bird, I actually like you too, but I am not gonna keep spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for."

What emerges immediately is the proliferation of image macro memes, new Twitter parody accounts, and a significant amount of media attention.

This case sees political discourse play out as both Anti-Romney and Anti-Obama, with competing narratives when the meme hits some threshold of attention. And mainstream media plays a key role in amplifying the memes.

Using the media analysis tool Media Cloud, I found “pbs” among the most mentioned words in relation to "Romney" in stories from the top 25 most trafficked online mainstream media sources during the week of October 1, 2012.

Then, I used Media Cloud to browse the specific sentences mentioning PBS in those “Romney” articles.

A CNET article from the night of the debate discussed the social media discourse around the debate and Big Bird in particular. They even drop in one of the image macros shared on Twitter, with the caption "Credit: SadBirdBird/Twitter," actually giving credit to one of the parody Twitter accounts. The NYT's Lede blog, which covers the media, also included the memes and talked about how the Big Bird debate confused international election watchers.

The headlines and content of these articles addressed the meme directly, and journalists used the discussion of the shared image macros and parody Twitter accounts as part of their coverage of debate performance and public opinion. And while it is impossible to say that there wouldn't have been a significant media event around PBS and Big Bird without the intervention of hundreds of memes and thousands of tweets, these indicators help make the case for memes as legitimate political discourse.

Furthermore, the Democratic Party and Obama Campaign immediately capitalized on the attention paid by the Internet and mainstream media to the Fired Big Bird election meme. The day after the debate the Campaign’s Tumblr account passed on two screenshots, one of a Fired Big Bird meme from The Democratic Party’s Twitter account and another meme from the Harris County Democratic Party’s Facebook page. Obama was also at a rally in Denver the day after the debate where he joked, "We didn't know Big Bird was driving the federal deficit!" And six days after the debate, the Obama Campaign released a polished campaign ad about Big Bird.

Case 2: Binders Full of Women

During the second presidential debate on October 16, Mitt Romney responds to a question about pay equity, mentioning that when he was Governor of Massachusetts he was given "binders full of women" as candidates for positions.

"And I said, 'Well, gosh, can't we—can't we find some—some women that are also qualified?' I went to a number of women's groups and said, 'Can you help us find folks?' and they brought us whole binders full of women."

23-year-old experienced social media manager Veronica de Souza was watching. And while parody accounts were springing up on Twitter, she went to Tumblr, registered bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com, and started making memes and inviting others to contribute.

This case was strongly centered around the specific Tumblr blog created by de Souza the night of the debate. She made it open to contributions and curated them. Tumblr is designed for sharing content through its “submit” and “re-blog” features that in one click allow content to be shared on a Tumblr blog.

Mashable then interviewed de Souza after the fact. She talked about creating the Tumblr blog and a few starter memes: "It's so easy to create a new Tumblr that is attached to your own. Creating a new Twitter account means you have to create a new email address...it's more complicated. Also, with how fast Twitter was moving, it would be hard to break through" (Haberman 2012). She admits that she wanted to share and be noticed for her project.

De Souza also reflected on the political aspect of her meme curation: "People keep asking me politically charged questions. Will it swing voters? Maybe the original statement, but not the meme" (Ibid.). She continues, "I didn't mean it as a political statement—I just thought it was funny and I knew it would be a thing" (Ibid.).

Even if de Souza didn’t believe the election meme would swing voters, the attention it drew to related issues was a potent opportunity for the Obama Campaign. Starting the night of the debate and lasting for the next three days they posted images andquotes to Tumblr highlighting the Obama’s stances on women’s equality and right to choose.

Case 3: You Didn't Build That

President Obama gave a speech on July 13, 2012 at a fire station in Roanoke, Virginia. He was trying to make a point about the role of government and taking aim at the business credentials of the self-made Romney.

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. [...] Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own...."

Republican and conservative Internet users started generating memes, eventually pulling in the Republican Party, Romney’s Campaign, and mainstream media.

And then the GOP itself created a set of slick branded image macros.

After a few days of individual Internet users and independent conservative activist organizations creating memes, on July 17, the Republican National Committee’s opposition research team caught on and generated five GOP.com branded memes, sharing them on their Tumblr blog. That same day, Romney’s Campaign Facebook page offered a shareable image retorting “The Government Doesn’t Build Businesses… Hard Working Americans Do.” The next day, the lead story in the RNC’s research memo was “You Didn’t Build That.” The media coverage of this election meme was strong enough that the Romney Campaign held on to the message over the next two months with slogans like, “I built my business, Mr. President,” “Built by Us,” “We Did Build It!” and then theming the GOP Convention on August 28, “We Built It.”

The Power of Sharing

From the start, the popularity of these image macro memes derives in part from the relative ease of generating and sharing them. Image macro meme generator websites, like quickmeme.com, memegenerator.net, and imgflip.com, make it even easier by managing the process of uploading your own image and overlaying the classic bold white font with your own words added through a text box. They also host galleries of all of the memes created using the same image, which may facilitate their sharing. I argue the real power of this form of political participation is the ease of sharing.

Sharing or circulating a simple image macro via personal social networks, what Jenkins, Ford, and Green call “spreadable media” (2013), represents a political speech act itself. In the networked public sphere (Benkler 2006), barriers to entry have been lowered but so to have the barriers to sharing, with ready audiences on Twitter coalescing into publics around hashtags, on Tumblr through tagging and curation, and on Facebook through shared identity construction.

Shifman, Coleman, and Ward (2007) identified the growing importance of user-generated political humor during the 2005 UK general election as a form of online political participation, but the overwhelmingly cynical quality of the humor left the authors unclear on its utility to promote further participation. But looking at new social movement models like the Arab Spring, Occupy, and the Spanish indignados, Bennett and Segerberg (2012) identified the power of meme sharing, calling it the “linchpin of connective action.” They argue that sharing political memes can power “connective action networks” through personal expression shared over social networks rather than top-down forms of collective action. In some cases these networks can be organizationally-enabled through technological support and moderation to produce loosely coordinated, yet effective movements.

In the case of the 2012 U.S. presidential election memes, the organizations involved in the connective action are the campaigns. In past elections, they developed the capacity to curate attention toward and shape the framing around popular user-generated political content—most notably 2008’s “Yes We Can” video (Wallsten 2010). They now leverage networks of digital activists coordinating with celebrities who have large followings like those involved in the “Yes We Can” video, and backchanneling with savvy political operatives with prior campaign experience like Matt Ortega, the progenitor of several other 2012 election memes (Seitz-Wald 2012).

Although this corroborates the value of connective action and the argument that election memes represent legitimate political speech acts, it also calls into question the quality of personalized expression and grassroots mobilization involved. But “authentic” and even cynical political participation through memes can coexist with their adoption and exploitation by professional political organizations.

Election Memes as Impure Dissent

In a forthcoming paper, Tommie Shelby discusses hip hop as political speech act, and stresses that this form of dissent should not be understood on the model of civil disobedience: it is not meant to garner the notice of the state or other citizens to make a moral point, nor is it meant to demonstrate any moral purity or be respectable. Hip hop flaunts morally or politically objectionable content, which can lead to its dismissal by others: not unlike election memes which debase things or place them out of context to create humor.

Shelby cites Albert Hirschman's classic text Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, in which dissent comes in two forms: exit and voice, which can be used in tandem as effective political action (1970). But in cases like resignation to the current political system, or an unwillingness to emigrate, voice is the only option. And voice is meant in most cases to influence power, to alter the status quo. But Shelby argues that we should expand voice to mean symbolic expression, which can still be highly political but not concerned with ultimate impact on those in power. This is how the creation and sharing of cynical election memes make for valid political participation.

The propagation of these politicized cultural artifacts may seem trivial and guilty of the slur of "slacktivism" online, but the sharing does real political work in terms of creating a moment and a networked public with power greater than the sum of its parts. Friends or followers are exposed to the sharer’s otherwise unspoken political opinions and given the opportunity to participate by forwarding the same meme they did.

Meme sharing indicates there is something worth paying attention to in that moment. Maybe it is just funny. Maybe it is a little too true, which underlies the humor and implores us to pass it on. A lot of memes act as shibboleths—they indicate that you are part of the in-crowd, you get the joke, you were there when it happened. This is the power of the meme speech act. It quickly creates a networked public from its in-group. That feeling of inclusion can inspire further and future discourse.

Shelby argues that the value of dissent may not be social or political but in how well it reaches its intended audience without having to incite them to activism. And dissent is a public act that creates a public among those it reaches. The messages of dissent call out to be agreed with, rebutted and sometimes acted upon, says Shelby, which is how memes are a form of impure dissent like hip hop, empowered by the act of sharing.

There is the fear that commercialization in hip hop or professionalization in internet memes undermines this power. Shelby argues that impure dissent is a personal act of expression and will always be judged by the audience, critiquing the attitude and justification of the source. Commercial rappers simply have less political credibility. While Stromer-Galley argues that cooption of participatory culture practices by contemporary campaigns have nothing to do with democratic practice and are just about winning (2014), there are real moments of political discourse that emerge through meme sharing—these are moments of personal identity construction and negotiation to return to Shifman’s definition of internet memes. There is room and a need for sharing election memes as impure dissent and as cynical political participation, which might be amplified by campaigns but cannot be replaced by them.

References

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. 2012. “The Logic of Connective Action.” Information, Communication & Society 15 (5): 739–68.

Haberman, Stephanie. 2012. “Talking Internet Gold With Creator of 'Binders Full of Women' Tumblr.” Mashable, October 17. Accessed June 7, 2014. http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/binders-full-of-women-tumblr/.

Hirschman, Albert. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press.

Seitz-Wald, Alex. 2012. “Matt Ortega: The Man behind Mitt Romney Memes.” Salon, March 23. Accessed June 7, 2014. http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/matt_ortega_the_man_behind_mitt_romney_memes/.

Shelby, Tommie. forthcoming. “Impure Dissent: Hip Hop and the Political Ethics of Marginalized Black Urban Youth.” In From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, edited by Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light.

Shifman, Limor. 2013. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shifman, Limor, Stephen Coleman, and Stephen Ward. 2007. “Only Joking? Online Humour in the 2005 UK General Election.” Information, Communication & Society 10 (4): 465–87.

Stromer-Galley, Jennifer. 2014. Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Zuckerman, Ethan. 2013. ‘Beyond “The Crisis in Civics.”’ Paper presented at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, Chicago, Illinois, March 14–16. Accessed June 7, 2014. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2013/03/26/beyond-the-crisis-in-civics-notes-from-my-2013-dml-talk/.

Erhardt Graeff is a PhD researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media and MIT Media Lab. His latest projects involve building civic technologies that empower people to be greater agents of change, performing quantified analysis of media ecosystems, and documenting new forms of civic participation enabled by digital media. Beyond academia, Erhardt is a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation, which gives small grants to awesome projects. Erhardt holds master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge and two bachelor’s degrees from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Connected Learning, Participatory Politics, and Civic Education: An Interview with Ben Kirshner and Ellen Middaugh (Part Two)

As I was pulling together these questions, I stumbled on a Politico news-story about the ways that the candidates and campaigns are actively courting teens who will be old enough to vote in the next presidential election for the first time. I am sure we will be seeing more such coverage of the youth vote in the months ahead. Based on your books’ insights on participatory politics and civic learning, what do you see as missing from this conversation? EM: One thing that seems to be missing from the Politico article is a view of young people as constituents to be represented rather than voters to be turned out and persuaded. Participatory politics is about understanding the conditions in which young people can take advantage of the tools, practices and networks associated with digital media in order to introduce their issues and ideas into the public discourse. So many party-based and youth mobilization efforts treat voting as the beginning and end of civic participation.

With that view, targeting young voters through social media does bring a lot of risks. However, if we think as civic educators and not just political strategists, we know that voting is just one small piece of what it means to be an engaged citizen. Young people need opportunities to learn how to evaluate and analyze information that comes in all kinds of forms. If contacting youth through media is going to expose them to attack ads and propaganda, the answer is not to simply avoid exposure, but to educate them to interpret these media and ask critical questions.

Educators have for many years addressed the questions of propaganda. Even the National Assessment of Educational Progress has questions about interpretation of political cartoons. We simply need to make sure that we update the genres and continue to engage young people in critical analysis of media. For example, a teacher associated with the EDDA project had their students analyze and create their own "rant" videos in the style of Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olberman as a way of helping them think critically about current genres of news.

I personally like the idea of reaching out to potential voters. Being invited into the process is important, and given the diversification of communications, doing it through a wide range of networks seems important. Not all young people are on twitter nor do they all check email regularly. I would just hope that those who are mining data to reach out to future voters are interested in catering to the issues represented in those tweets and posts to learn about what youth care about and to represent them, and not just to their potential for showing up to vote.

On the other side of the problem, I think there is great need to not just teach youth to critically consume informaton targeted at them, but to produce information that can be targeted for public attention. This means not only learning how to share information and ideas through presentations or posters, but to share them in spreadable (a concept you’ve really helped elaborate, Henry) ways so that they are paid attention to and have a chance of influencing others.

A key theme in the book is what participatory politics can mean for those who have traditionally been excluded or marginalized from the political process. Doing so often requires meaningful scaffolding to help young people develop their civic voice and political agency. What approaches -- in or outside the classroom -- have you identified that seem successful in increasing political participation?

BK: On one hand, young people who experience exclusion or marginalization from politics respond to all sorts of opportunities, which can range from very conventional leadership program such as Jr. ROTC to less common spaces that privilege their voice and perspective, such as student voice initiatives and community-based youth organizing. In a book that is coming out in June I write about a distinction between procedural and issue-based opportunities for civic voice and political agency [Youth Activism in an Era of Education Inequality, NYU Press]. Whereas procedural justifies itself because it creates spaces for “voice” and “deliberation”, issue-based approaches galvanize people around a specific problem that affects their well-being, such as immigration policy or the school-to-jail track.

Both are necessary, but the two appeal to different sets of experiences for young people. The former can be more unpredictable and appeal to youth whose primary grievance is age-based discrimination. The latter, while also undetermined, have a more explicit political agenda and appeal to youth whose primary grievance is tied to their experience as student of color or undocumented, for example.

Throughout the book, you draw on examples from established educational organizations, including Facing History and Ourselves, Global Kids, and Youth Radio. To what degree are you taking the “new” models of civic education you discuss from their established practices? To what degree are they rethinking their approaches in response to the new research that has been developed in recent years?

What I like about the chapters in this volume is that this truly isn't an either or question, but that the practices are emerging in conversation. The programs we profile are both informed by and are informing research. For example, the Global Kids program grew out of Global Kids staff participation in a working group that I hosted on Service and Activism in the Digital Age where we brought together researchers and practitioners to identify some core principles of practice for civic education. Global Kids already brought a great deal of expertise for online leadership to the table and then built a new program that drew on some of the insights they gained from discussion with civic education and engagement researchers and developed the Race to the White House program.

Similarly Youth Radio and Facing History and Ourselves maintain close partnerships with the research community. These partnerships support an evolution of civic education that builds on what we have learned about effective civic education and adapts to meet the needs of the current society, rather than simply introducing "new" models to replace the "old."

Ben Kirshner is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at CU Boulder and Faculty Director for CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research. Through his work with CU Engage Ben seeks to develop and sustain university-community partnerships that leverage the resources of the university to address persistent public challenges. Ben’s research examines youth organizing, participatory action research, and new forms of digital media as contexts for learning, development, and social change. He is a Network Advisor for the MacArthur Foundation's Connected Learning Research Network.

Ellen Middaugh is an Assistant Professor of Child and Adolescent Development at San Jose State University and Senior Researcher with the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group. Her research focuses on how new media is changing the social context of adolescent development and the implications for educational practice. Current projects include studies of youth experiences with online conflict and of emerging classroom practices to support information literacy for civic underestanding and engagement.

Connected Learning, Participatory Politics, and Civic Education: An Interview with Ben Kirshner and Ellen Middaugh (Part One)

Over the past five years, the MacArthur Foundation has funded two large-scale, multi-disciplinary networks bringing top researchers together to focus on issues impacting the lives of youth. The first out of the gate was the Youth and Participatory Politics network, headed by Joe Kahne. (I have been lucky to be able to participate here). And the second, our sibling network, headed by Mimi Ito, focuses on Connected Learning. During the first phases of this work, the Networks have released a series of white papers, some of which I have featured on my blog. See, for example, this post exploring the release of the original Connected Learning white paper or this one about some of the initial findings on participatory politics. We are now starting to see book-length studies and anthologies emerge from this research as the teams have started to consolidate their findings and sharing them with the world. New York University Press has launched a Connected Learning book series, which will among other projects, publish the book my research team has developed -- By Any Media Necessary -- which we expect to come out in early 2016. But there are many other books at very states of development and I am committed to featuring as many of them as I can via interviews on my blog.

Today, I am showcasing one of the first of those publications, #youthaction: Becoming Political in the Digital Age, edited by Ben Kirshner and Ellen Middaugh. This anthology brings together thinkers from both networks, as well as a range of other experts and practioners who are focusing on how we might re-imagine civic education for an age of networked politics and learning. This book offers a great introduction to core insights that have emerged around connected learning and participatory politics and what they mean for folks who are on the ground, working in classrooms and after-school programs.  The essays are highly readable introductions to some core projects and could not be more timely in their implications as we are about to enter into a new election cycle, where the youth vote is apt to be hotly contested, but also are in the midst of a range of protest movements, especially concerning race and gender, where young activists have taken strong leadership roles. Across the book, there are important questions asked about how the political lives of American youth are changing and the ways that school-based civic education needs to shift to be able to meaningfully contribute to the process by which they find their voice and learn to take action as political agents. We can think of this collection as an example of what happens when you "cross the streams," that is, when these two networks, already diverse in their membership, work together towards a common goal: Middaugh has been involved with the Youth and Participatory Politics Network and Kirshner with the Connected Learning network.

Over the next two installments, I am going to be speaking with the book's two editors, Kirshner and Middaugh, as they discuss some of the core lessons we might take from this book about the role of education in fostering the civic education and the desire to make meaningful change in the world.

You frame the book in relation to the concept of “participatory politics” as proposed by the multidisciplinary Youth and Participatory Politics network. What do you see as the key insights that have emerged from our research as they relate to the field of civic education?

EM: I think there are three critical things for educators to grapple with. The first is that social media is playing an expanded role in how young people get and share information about social and political issues. This has been a consistent finding in the YPP Survey project, Pew Internet and American life surveys, and the Educating for Democracy in the Digital Age survey of youth in Oakland. This hasn't replaced traditional broadcast media, but seems to be an added layer of information. This means it is easier for young people to get information without having to go seek it out and to see news accompanied by public opinion, but it also means that they may be getting false information, information that is heavily colored by opinion or even inflammatory commentary.

Schools are currently very good at teaching students about good sources and where to seek out information, but we see fewer models of teaching how to sort through the information that is circulated online and make decisions about how to put that information into context. Furthermore, as many schools ban social media, teachers aren't even given the option to bring discussions of critical and responsible use into the classroom.

The second idea has to do with political discussions. Formal news is one source of information, but informal political discussions also play an important role in learning about political issues. Participatory media provides opportunities for young people to share their perspectives and to hear what others think. However, we see preliminary evidence through the YPP survey project that participatory media also exposes young people to a good deal of conflict in political discussions. The kinds of interest driven communities where young people are perhaps most likely to encounter diverse perspectives are also the communities where they are more likely to see (though not necessarily directly participate in) political conversation with outrage language and personal attacks (article under review).

While some conflict or difference of opinion is a natural outcome of discussion across political difference, it can also lead to the avoidance of political conversation, something that we see in Diana Mutz's studies of political discussion in face-to face settings. If the online conversations that young people see are conflict laden, they may hesitate to take advantage of the opportunities they have to use new media for political expression. Or, more likely, we see some who are comfortable with heated conversational style (as 40% in our study suggested they were) take advantage of the opportunity for self expression and those who are least comfortable withdrawing from such conversations altogether.

While this may seem to be simply a matter of personal preference, civic educators believe that discussion of controversial issues is a skill to be practiced so that such conversations can be both honest but also inclusive and productive. We see in the classroom there is an established tradition of teaching for discussion of controversial issues, but we know a lot less about teaching for productive discussion online, where some of the qualities of conversation may be different. Chapter 8 by Justin Reich, Anna Romer, and Dennis Barr deals most directly with this question sharing Facing History and Ourselve's design principles for using social networks to engage students in dialogue across difference. Chapter 9 by Katherine Schultz, Erica Hodgin, and Johanna Paraiso also share examples of how social network sites can be leveraged for students to engage in dialogue with outside adults and get experience with feedback from strangers.

Third, we see that digital media provides wonderful opportunities for young people to produce and circulate media to share their perspectives on social issues(as we see in MAPP'S case studies of young activists embedded in participatory subcultures), but as you have written about in your comments on the digital participation gap and is reinforced by Jenn Schradie's work on the digital production gap, we can't assume that all young people will find their way to making use of digital tools and networks in empowered ways. Some will find their way through experimentation or informal peer based networks (as the MAPP team illustrates so well).

However, the question for civic education is how educators can create engaging opportunities to foster these skills. A number of chapters in the book share emerging efforts towards this end--Chapters 4 (Gutierrez, Nixon & Hunger), 5 (Vilchis, Scott, and Besaw), and 6 (Hull, Jury, and Sahni) highlight the power of youth learning to tell their own stories and frame their own narratives of their experience of community and the issues that they grapple with. Chapters 3 (Soep), 5 and 10 (Tynes & Monterosa) also stress how important the process of design and the habit of design-thinking is to student learning. In Chapter 7, Antero Garcia and I pay attention to the question of circulation and spread and consider how educators might incorporate these concepts into educational design.

MacArthur has also funded a sister network focused around the idea of Connected Learning, and their findings also seem to be in play here, both implicitly and explicitly, across a range of essays. What does “connected learning” mean specifically in the context of civic education and how does this concept shape the book’s focus on both informal and formal educational settings?

BK: Many of the chapters discuss projects that embody key elements of Connected Learning: they tend to be “production-centered” (especially using video or digital storytelling), “openly networked” (by connecting young people with audiences in the community), and embedded in “peer culture.” And, like many Connected Learning settings, several of the chapters discuss hybrid spaces that combine school-like features with more informal emphasis on creativity and student interests. [These terms are further defined here. ].

I have been particularly drawn to the ways that the language of “interests” can shape shift when deployed in a civic education context. In typical Connected Learning settings “interests” refer to hobbies or curiosities that motivate children’s learning. This meaning of interest can also animate youths’ civic activity when focused on a geographically distant problem, such as poor health care infrastructure. But for young people confronting structural racism or poverty in their everyday lives, political “interests” take on a different cast, more resonant with the language of “self-interest.”

Although for a long time self-interest had a negative connotation in civic research (where the assumption was that the goal was to get young people to care for others or become more altruistic), in the community organizing literature self-interest is the starting point for ordinary people to build political power…and eventually gain momentum through recognition of shared experiences and collective goals.

So to wind back to your question: in the context of civic education—depending on the setting and location—connected learning can also mean attending to people’s self-interests for quality schools or clean air, which has a less carefree quality to it. Mimi Ito and colleagues wrote about the connections between politics and interests in a terrific recent article in Curriculum Inquiry, where they unpacked the meaning of “connected civics.” I recommend it!

Ben  Kirshner is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at CU Boulder and Faculty Director for CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research. Through his work with CU Engage Ben seeks to develop and sustain university-community partnerships that leverage the resources of the university to address persistent public challenges. Ben’s research examines youth organizing, participatory action research, and new forms of digital media as contexts for learning, development, and social change. He is a Network Advisor for the MacArthur Foundation's Connected Learning Research Network.

Ellen Middaugh is an Assistant Professor of Child and Adolescent Development at San Jose State University and Senior Researcher with the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group. Her research focuses on how new media is changing the social context of adolescent development and the implications for educational practice. Current projects include studies of youth experiences with online conflict and of emerging classroom practices to support information literacy for civic underestanding and engagement.

Bringing Critical Perspectives to the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Tara McPherson (Part Three)

A key debate running through the book has to do with whether digital media collapses or maintains medium specificity distinctions between older media forms. What do you see as at stake in this debate? Tara's introduction calls out the persistence of formalist theories, which pushed aside other perspectives in the early phases of this debate. Does medium specificity necessarily bring us back to formal concerns or can this concept be used to work through some of the issues of race and politics which you want to raise in the second half of the collection? I do not think that studies of form or of medium specificity necessarily push aside other perspectives nor are they inherently depoliticized. But I do think that a focus on form often has the effect of displacing long-standing insights about the dual imbrications of technology and cultural systems.

To return to the example of feminist film theory that I mentioned earlier, one of the key insights of research by scholars such as Laura Mulvey or Constance Penley was their fierce examination of the ways in which technological systems and aesthetic practices exist in tight feedback loops with cultural systems. Technological systems never exist outside of culture, yet many formal analyses of digital media in the late 1990s and early 2000s often seemed to replay the blindspots of structuralist theory.

Similarly, we see similar patterns today in certain formations of platform and code studies. There remains a persistent belief that race or gender or sexuality can be bracketed off while we attend to forms and technological systems. This belief is only possible because it tends to treat concepts like race or gender at the level of content rather than at the level of form or system. In such a paradigm, you might make a video game or an exhibit about race but would see the forms or technologies as neutral delivery systems.

I don’t believe that our technologies and aesthetic forms are neutral or innocent. If Mulvey helped us see that Hollywood cinema naturalized a male gaze, aligning technological form with cultural systems, we might also ask to what degree our computational systems both reflect and shape broader cultural systems of meaning.

In my work on the origins of the operating system UNIX, I argue that early developments in digital computing were also intertwined with shifting racial codes in the U.S. and beyond. The introduction of digital computer operating systems at mid-century installed an extreme logic of modularity and seriality that “black-boxed” knowledge in a manner quite similar to emerging logics of racial visibility and racism at that time.

There is something particular to the very forms of the digital that encourages just such a partitioning, a portioning off that also played out in new configurations of the city in the 1960s and 1970s, in the increasing specialization of academic fields, and even in the formation of many modes of identity politics. In that work, I’m interested in understanding race as an operating system of a different order, one that shaped the very development of computational systems. Race (and gender and sexuality) are not just relevant at the level of representation, i.e., as images on our screens. They also form the ground from which our technological systems emerge. I think it would be naive to imagine that our digital systems remain somehow pure and disentangled from broader cultural systems of meaning and power. Thus, I am very interested in media specificity; I just understand this specificity to always exist within and to be shaped by broader cultural and historical contexts.

[video width="480" height="269" m4v="http://henryjenkins.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Digital-Dymanics.m4v"][/video]

This belief actually structures the technological development of software in our lab. Our work on Vectors very much aimed to integrate form with content, that is, to think through how a project’s formal structure and interface design reflected its content and vice-versa. So, a project like Kim Christen’s “Digital Dynamics Across Culture” models the unique systems of belief and of shared ownership that underpin Warumungu knowledge production and reproduction, including a system of "protocols" that limit access to information or to images in accordance with Aboriginal systems of accountability. The user experiences it constructs are partial, embedded, and provisional, sometimes barring access to specific images or performances in a manner consistent with the logics or protocols of the Warumungu people. The project’s information design as well as its aesthetic design (to the extent we can even separate these) render Christen’s argument differently than a print article would. Following her fellowship at Vectors, Christen went on to lead the team that developed Mukurtu, a content-management system that allows indigenous peoples to create collections of material that respect their cultural protocols and knowledge systems, limiting access when appropriate.

Scalar Platform — Trailer from MA+P @ USC on Vimeo.

Rather than assuming that technologies are neutral systems that need only be studied formally, humanities scholars should study technologies to understand how they shape and are shaped by culture. For instance, Wendy Chun’s recent book mines the connections between the rise of digital computation and of modern genetics. And we can do more than study technology. We can also participate in the design and building of technological systems that reflect both our ideological and our theoretical allegiances.

Over the past five or six years, the work in our lab has centered on developing Scalar, a new authoring and publishing platform that was released into open beta in spring 2013. Scalar allows scholars to create with relative ease long-form, multimedia projects that incorporate a variety of digital materials while also connecting to digital archives, utilizing built-in visualizations, exploring non-linearity, supporting customization, and more.

Scalar is a direct outcome of our work on Vectors as well as with our collaborations with many other scholars. We learned from those collaborations that the rigidity and hierarchal structure of many software platforms were ill-suited to the aims of qualitative humanities scholarship. Scalar is meant to be more flexible; its very technological design reflects years of work with scholars invested in feminism, post-colonial studies, activism, critical race theory, and post-structuralism. Scalar is also part of a larger network, the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, a partnership that includes several academic presses, archives, and humanities centers. One of our goals is to help push forward the conversation around open access in scholarly publishing. We also are deeply interested, as we are with Vectors, in emerging genres for scholarship, genres that move beyond a singular focus on text to explore other ways of knowing and of communicating information.

Tara, both here and elsewhere you've stressed the ways that digital theory often displaced issues of gender, racial, sexual, and class differences in favor of a kind of universialized subject. Why do you think this displacement occurred? What are some of the strategies you and the contributors to the book have taken to reassert a politics of difference into the conversations around digital media?

My previous response gets at some of the reasons why I think these displacements occurred, coupled with the limiting language of the digital divide that got deployed in the late 1990s (something I discuss in my essay in Transmedia Frictions.) As far as strategies go, several of the Transmedia Frictions authors reject a depoliticized approach to digital media theory, particularly vis-a-vis race. Some essays explore race and the digital through examinations of identity and representation, but others investigate the relationship of race to technology along different registers and also enrich our conceptions of the political.

Patricia Zimmermann and Josh Hess turn our attention to a series of digital documentary projects that activate a transnational imaginary that remains cognizant of the specificities of location and embodiment. They deploy the concept of the fold and of the sphere, powerful ways to think the relation of form to content, technology to culture, and past to future.

In his contribution, Herman Gray urges us to see the multiple valences of technological devices, recognizing their complicity within capitalism as well as their potential to (at least in the moment) crystalize new relations. John Caldwell and Guillermo Gómez-Peña/Rafael Lozano-Hemmer celebrate the possibilities of the low tech and the hybrid for ethnic cultural production, if in quite different ways.

My frustration with the depoliticized nature of certain strands of digital media theory circa 1999 was a key reason I was so interested in collaborating with you, Anna Everett, Christiane Robbins, Erika Muhammad and others on the two Race in Digital Space events we organized at MIT in 2001 and at USC and MOCA in 2002. Those two events brought together such an incredible group of scholars, artists, activists, and policy makers. From Isaac Julien, Rubén D. Ortiz Torres, and DJ Spooky to Wendy Chun, Chela Sandoval, and Lisa Nakamura, and many, many others, those events captured the energy and momentum of Interactive Frictions but also centered their critical and creative force squarely on race.

There's a recurring interest throughout the essays, in both parts of the book, in issues of cultural memory, the archival, and the documentary. What new models have emerged over the past decade for thinking about the relationship between the digital and our collective understandings of history?

Our everyday interactions with the digital these days are so often about managing data and building collections. The enormous popularity of Flickr or of Instagram reveals an archival impulse writ large across culture, even if this impulse does not always attend to preservation or to metadata in the ways our “official” archives strive to do. We found this attention to collections to be a strong trend among our Vectors’ fellows. Our scholars often came to us with desire to animate a personal archive of some type.

They may have collected a vast array of materials as evidence for a print project, as was the case with Alice Gambrell’s “Stolen Time Archive.” She aimed to attend with care to a trove of materials she’d brought together in working on a book project. Many of these materials would not be included in the book, but Alice wanted the materials to have a life of their own. Her Vectors’ project simultaneously structures the materials, staging an implicit argument, while also allowing the user to roam the materials in relatively open ways. Her argument subtly builds as the user explores.

The radical archivist, Rick Prelinger, brought to us a collection of ephemeral film materials. He’d woven these materials into a linear film, but for Vectors he wanted to break the film apart again, giving the materials new life in an interactive interface. His project, “Panorama Ephemera,” is also a manifesto about the archive in the era of digitality. In the piece and across his career, he argues that archives are justified by their use and urges us to move beyond our conceptions of the archive as a closed and cautious place.

The feminist scholar Jennifer Terry sought to make sense of a collection of videos created by U.S. soldiers during the Iraq war, often called the first YouTube war. Her interventions in “Killer Entertainments” are both as an aggregator who brought the materials together from various sites and as an interpreter or curator who helps provide critical context for our engagement with the visual productions of wartime. Across these and other Vectors’ projects, scholars and designers explored new interactive possibilities for the archive, rejecting the archive as a neutral space and instead articulating archives with multiple points of view.

Marsha and Lev Manovich have rather famously dueled over the relationship of narrative to the database in computation. The past decade definitely reveals to us that these two terms are relational, not oppositional. The digital archive (as database) invites narrative, but it also often exceeds the contours of narrative. It can be both a collection and the stories we tell about that collection.

We are very interested in the possibilities for the digital archive as we develop Scalar. In our engagements with the archive, we both draw from our team’s work on Vectors and from a long tradition of digital archive creation in the early years of the computational humanities. Our interest takes several forms. First, Scalar actually connects to a few digital archives as one of its core functionalities. When authoring in Scalar, you can easily search in collections at the Internet Archive, Critical Commons, the Shoah Foundation, and the Hemispheric Institute, among others. We’ve built formal relationships to these archives and technical bridges to their collections.

When working with materials from these collections, the digital object stays in the archive (even as it seems to be incorporated into Scalar), but Scalar grabs the metadata about the object, preserving a set of contextual materials. So often, the things we grab from around the internet lose their provenance. Our technical design director, Craig Dietrich, implemented Scalar so that context could be respected and sustained along several levels. Scholars can also work with materials from several archives (or anywhere on the web) within a single project. In this way, Scalar facilitates aggregation across archives.

A second way that Scalar relates to the archive is that the projects designed in Scalar might themselves function like small (or large!) archives or exhibits. As with Vectors projects, some scholars we have collaborated with on Scalar are interested in allowing the users or readers of their research to engage with their primary evidence while also exploring the scholar’s own interpretation of that evidence. Scholars can collect sets of visual materials from various digitized collections into a Scalar project and then arrange the materials in multiple ways, creating interpretative slices or pathways through the collection. The project’s reader might simply browse the collection freely, but she might alternately follow the scholar’s analysis of the materials. Such a project is neither solely a book nor solely an archive, neither simply narrative nor database, but rather a hybrid space between the two that integrates scholarly analysis with a rich trove of primary materials.

Using Scalar’s built-in commenting features, the reader of the project can then add her own commentary, providing more context for the collection of primary materials or responses to the scholarly interpretations of the collection. One such project, “Performing Archive: Edward S. Curtis + ‘the vanishing race,’” brings together from several collections nearly 2500 image and sound files of the work of Edward S. Curtis, an early 20th century photographer. It presents the materials as a collection but also “slices” through the archive via several interpretative pathways authored by various contributors. Such work models a future for scholarship where our analyses might live more organically with our evidence, enriching the archival object and allowing viewers to test our interpretative claims. For humanities scholars, our archives are our datasets. The digital can afford us new ways to investigate, analyze and share these archives, alongside more traditional approaches.

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies. She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is author of the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts + the Humanities (California, 2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) She is currently completing a monograph about her lab’s work and process, Designing for Difference, for Harvard University Press. She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and is a founding editor of the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (launched by MIT Press in 2009.) She is the lead PI on the new authoring platform, Scalar, and for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Her research has been funded by the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as by the NEH.​

Bringing Critical Perspectives to the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Tara McPherson (Part Two)

Another key aspect of the original conference and to some degree this book was to broker a kind of conversation between experimental artists working with digital media and academic theorists seeking to imagine digital presents and futures. What do you see as the value of such interactions between artists and academics? I see these types of interactions as incredibly important. I draw my inspiration in this regard from feminism and its engagements with media. We can trace decades of feminists blurring the lines between theory and practice, from Maya Deren to Laura Mulvey to Alexandra Juhasz and Sharon Daniel, among many others. Their work powerfully illustrates how theory and art exist in rich feedback loops. It is hard to imagine Mulvey reaching the insights of her landmark essay distinct from her engagement with practices of production. Such exchanges between theory and practice need not only happen at the level of the individual, of course. Something quite powerful can happen when theorists and artists work together.

One of my favorite classes as a graduate student in the 1990s was a course in feminist media that was team taught by the theorist Patricia Mellencamp and the video artist Cecelia Condit. The two came together to offer the class based on a friendship that grew out of Pat writing about Cecelia’s work. The course combined students from film production and from the film studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The film production department skewed toward experimental practice, while the film studies program was then part of the theory-rich Modern Studies track within English. Students were encouraged to stretch outside of their comfort zones and to work in the medium less familiar to them, be that print or video. The experience profoundly reconfigured how I understood feminism and collaboration and gave me a hands-on engagement with making that no doubt continues to influence me today. The films I worked on that term were not very good, but they opened me up to new ways of thinking about the materiality of production practices and to different aesthetic registers. They also modeled for me the generosity and commitment that collaborations across difference require, as both Pat and Cecelia actively engaged different ways of producing knowledge than those they’d previously worked within. I had the opportunity to collaborate with students who were primarily artists, and this experience was incredibly invigorating, even as it was often challenging.

In imagining what Vectors might become, I drew from these histories – both this personal history and those of feminism itself, including Marsha’s work on Labyrinth – to create an environment that combined theory and practice. Vectors is an online interactive project lodged between a journal and an exhibition space that features work that cannot exist in print. It began from conversations at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (now morphed into our Media Arts + Practice Division). In this milieu, many of us were teaching with digital media and came to see rich possibilities for these practices in our scholarship, but there were virtually no venues in which scholarly interactive work could be reviewed and published. Dean Elizabeth Daley saw a real advantage in supporting this kind of project within the School of Cinematic Arts and provided our early funding. I worked alongside my colleague Steve Anderson to imagine the shape that Vectors might take. From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to create a space where artists and scholars worked closely together. We soon brought Reagan Kelly and Erik Loyer aboard as Co-Creative Directors, and the fun really began.

In 2003 when we began our planning, very few humanities scholars had the skillsets they would need to produce digital scholarship. So we created a fellowship model that brought together scholars with our design, programming, and editorial team. Scholars came for a weeklong summer intensive for a kind of digital boot camp and then collaborated with one designer and one editor in a distributed fashion over several months. After the first summer workshop and as we worked on the first issue, Craig Dietrich joined our team as our technical director. The goal was not to build something for the scholar but to build something with the scholar.

Vectors was developed as a space for experimentation in screen languages, open access publishing, and collaborative design and authorship. Our projects were speculative in the sense that Johanna Drucker describes, committed to the richness that emerges when art and theory collide. They were also centered on the critical and theoretical questions that motivated the scholars with whom we worked, humanities scholars interested in questions of memory, race, gender, embodiment, sexuality, perception, temporality, ideology, and power.

Vectors engaged these themes at the level of content but also integrated form and idea so that the theoretical implications of the work were manifest in the aesthetic and information design. We were interested in seeing how you might immerse yourself in an article in multiple affective and sensory registers. We wanted to see if you could play an argument like you might play a game. We asked what might happen if scholarship explored the emerging vernaculars of the digital, drawing from both artistic and popular expression. The collaborative production process that resulted was highly iterative, based on careful listening and an ongoing give and take. The works we produced are deeply marked by these exchanges.

I was struck in 1999 by your effort to also create a space where artists working in the museum and gallery space were engaging with game designers working in more commercial contexts. This dimension seems to have dropped out of the Transmedia Frictions book altogether. What does this suggest about the continued roles of cultural hierarchies in the realms of digital art and theory?

Well, as you know, I’ve got a soft spot for game designers and programmers, since my husband, Robert Knaack, worked in that industry for over fifteen years and still designs software for the entertainment industry. Having seen his work in the games industry and in the animation business, I know that there is no firm line dividing experimental artists from those working in more commercial arenas. In fact, there’s a lot of give and take between the fields and creating a false binary between the arts and commercial games or animation conceals a deep history of interaction between Hollywood and more experimental artists.

I don’t think that binary serves us all that well if we really want to understand how aesthetic paradigms get developed and naturalized. Rather we might instead focus on movement between the realms (as well as on the plusses and minuses of those movements.) We even see this reflected in the various divisions at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. For instance, our Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA) deeply values experimental practice and technique, even as many of their students will go on to work in commercial animation. It’s probably not surprising that both the Labyrinth and Vectors teams have collaborated with graduate students from DADA.

At Vectors, we worked with then-MFA student Alessandro Ceglia for a couple of years. One interesting project he designed was a recreation of a Jenny Holzer exhibit at the Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie. Working with scholars Ehren Fordyce and Gwen Allen, Alex imagined a project with multiple goals. On the one hand, the piece combined video, animations, essays, and photographs, to create a multimedia catalogue of a powerful and important exhibition. On the other hand, the project moves beyond mere documentation to structure an argument about the relationship between evidence and interface. As we noted in the piece’s editorial introduction in Vectors:

In selecting what perspectives and artifacts would be included and in deciding how to structure access to these elements, the project privileges modes of presentation in dialogue with contemporary scholarship in performance studies, art history, and cultural studies. In detailing the sustained and collaborative labor involved in the construction of Holzer's LEDs, the piece reminds us of the often-invisible work that underlies our experiences of media and of art, something much less obvious to the visitors immersed in the dreamy modernist spaces of the original installation. In that regard, it [has] a precise goal: the desire to always remember the material in our engagements with the ephemeral.

Alex brought a unique perspective to the Vectors team and enriched our collaborative work process, designing three projects over multiple issues. He now works as both a commercial and an experimental animator.

The 1999 Interactive Frictions event honored this give and take between the experimental, the academic, and the commercial. Representatives of all three realms participated in the event, and that convergence greatly enriched the weekend. Someone like Brenda Laurel has moved back and forth across her career between commercial and academic realms, and it was very important to us that kind of movement could be discussed as part of the event’s larger dialogues.

Interesting collaborations also grew out of the weekend. As Marsha noted in her interview last week, Bill Viola was part of the conference and went on to work with USC’s interactive division on subsequent projects. David and Yoni Koenig, game designers (and partners in my husband’s company at the time, Gigawatt), presented at the conference and met curator and documentary filmmaker, Trisha Ziff. While both brothers have had long careers in the entertainment industry, David also has a Masters in History from Columbia, and Yoni is an artist who works across many media. Gigawatt went on to collaborate with Trisha on a virtual re-enactment of Ireland’s Bloody Sunday for Hidden Truths, a major exhibit at the California Museum of Photography. The event included historic documentary photographs, newly-commissioned art, and the virtual recreation built using their company’s video game technology. This was in 2000, a pretty early exploration of 3-D game technology for social documentary. The inclusive nature of Interactive Frictions helped seed such collaborations, as it refused to reinforce rigid binaries between art and commerce, even while encouraging rigorous and sometimes contested conversations about each.

As I mentioned earlier, Erik Loyer also presented at Interactive Frictions and later became a core part of our development team, joining Vectors as a Creative Director in 2004 (along with Raegan Kelly) and continuing on to the present. His career also illustrates the limited nature of artificial commerce vs. art binaries. His portfolio includes early interactive work now in SF MOMA’s permanent collection, Clio-winning work for Vodaphone, and critically-appraised apps such as Strange Rain. Erik brings this flexibility and vision to his work with Vectors and Scalar. Several of the projects he has worked on for Vectors experiment with the language and mechanics of video games in order to explore the possibilities of such dynamics for scholarly argument. I’d say that most of our work at Vectors and Scalar draws from equally from experimental aesthetics, popular digital vernaculars, and academic theory.

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies. She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is author of the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts + the Humanities (California, 2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) She is currently completing a monograph about her lab’s work and process, Designing for Difference, for Harvard University Press. She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and is a founding editor of the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (launched by MIT Press in 2009.) She is the lead PI on the new authoring platform, Scalar, and for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Her research has been funded by the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as by the NEH.​

Bringing Critical Perspectives to the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Tara McPherson (Part One)

Last week, I featured an extended interview with Marsha Kinder, reflecting on her new book, Transmedia Frictions, and on her lifetime of cutting edge thinking and production in the space of the digital humanities. This week, I am following up with a second interview with her co-editor on Transmedia Frictions, Tara McPherson, who describes how the 1999 Interactive Frictions conference has helped to shape her own work in the digital humanities. Tara's interview begins with a description of the kinds of collaboration and institutional support she received through the USC Cinema School. Since Tara's presence here was a big factor in my own decision to come to USC, this passage resonated especially strongly with me. It's hard to describe almost two decades of friendship and collaboration. The two of us connected when McPherson was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and I was a young faculty member at MIT, having only recently completed my PhD at University of Wisconsin-Madison. I brought her to MIT for her first teaching job and from her time here, we joined with Jane Shattuc to edit Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, a book which was meant to identify and showcase the work of an emerging generation of cultural scholars (and has turned out to be pretty good at catching a bunch of current stars when they were on the rise.) When she left MIT to take up a permanent academic position at USC, we continued to collaborate helping to plan two conferences, one on each coast, exploring Race and Digital Spaces. And since I have come to USC, I've been able to deploy the Scaler platform which she helped to develop to build two online resources, one around Reading in a Participatory Culture, and the second around the forthcoming book, By Any Media Necessary. And of course, we've worked together on a range of dissertation and quals committees.

We have not always agreed, and our friendship is stronger for it. Her work starts from a more critical place than mine typically has, and as a consequence, she has taught me much through the years. Like any good friends, we can call each other out when we are wrong-headed, and when this is done in a constructive manner, it strengthens the friendship as well as the work that emerges from such conversations. She is one of the smartest thinkers I know about digital media, its potentials for humanistic scholarship, and especially about core issues around digital equity and diversity, which we need to keep in the forefront of our thinking. She has never been seduced by the shininess of the "new media" but has always sought ways to get underneath the hood, to know how it works, and to identify its consequences in a world already shaped by inequalities and injustices.

I am very happy today to be sharing this interview with a long-time collaborator and colleague.

Tell us about the 1999 Interactive Fictions conference. What were its aims? What do you see now, looking backwards, as its historical  importance in the development of digital art and theory? How did it inform your own subsequent works in this area?

The opening of the catalogue copy from the exhibition – “Sparks. Heat. Conflict.” -- proved prophetic in many ways. There really was an amazing spark-filled energy at the event. Much of this energy came from the border crossing that the conference undertook: the mix of artists, industry folks, and scholars from several fields led to lively and provocative conversations. The late1990s was a period of incredible ferment for “new” media. This was the era of the full-on dot.com boom, and it was sometimes hard to see past the hype of Wired magazine and the denizens of Silicon Valley (or New York’s Silicon Alley or LA’s Silicon Beach.) We wanted to create an event that historicized this obsession with all that was “new” and that productively brought together those with a rich understanding of media history with those who were beginning to theorize the new forms of media that were so capturing the public imaginary. It was important then (and it remains important now) to situate digital media within a long historical framework.

In linking past and present, we also wanted to connect the study of new media with the political agendas that had so animated film theory across the decades. Conference co-organizers Marsha Kinder, Alison Trope and I were all deeply engaged in ideological critique, examining film and media through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We didn’t want to lose this energy and sense of political commitment in the move toward digital media. We carefully selected keynote speakers, artists, and panelists whose own work took up these issues in order to foreground their importance to an emerging field. Another form of border crossing was generational. Marsha has always been a fantastic mentor to graduate students, and this undertaking was no exception. We included graduate students in the planning, in the exhibits, and in the panels in order to stage as diverse a set of conversations as possible. Now-established scholars like Mark Hansen, Wendy Chun, and Ian Bogost were all at the beginning of their careers in 1999 when they attended Interactive Frictions.

The conference had a profound effect on my own scholarly practice, as has the experience of teaching within a cinema school alongside artists and makers of many types of media. My training as a graduate student was as a theorist and writer with a strong focus on critique. My book, Reconstructing Dixie, draws from cultural studies and feminist theory to investigate the South’s role in the national imaginary and depends heavily on textual analysis. It did begin to engage new media but largely from the toolkits provided by my graduate coursework. I still value that training, but, in engaging digital media, I found that I needed to better understand its materiality. That is, in order to write about digital media, I needed to enrich my knowledge of how such media was made.

In the years leading up to the conference, I began to teach myself beginning production skills, enough to give me a basic literacy in design programs, HTML, and some computer languages. The conference sharpened my desire to extend this knowledge and also brought me into contact with several other scholars and artists who were beginning to work across the theory-practice divide. This has directly shaped the work that I have undertaken in the past fifteen years, first with the multimedia journal, Vectors, and later with the authoring platform Scalar.

It’s hard to imagine that I would have come to this work apart from the environment I’ve been in at USC, including the opportunity to work side-by-side with Marsha on the conference, where I learned from her example. Teaching in a cinema school has allowed me to observe first-hand the complexity of production. From feature and documentary films to experimental animation to video games, the site of production is multivalent and rich. I’m a better media scholar because I work in an environment where I interact each week with makers of media.

I also got to know future collaborators through the event, including Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer, both of whom I have now had the privilege of working with for over a decade. The border crossing that the conference modeled shapes my own collaborations today, collaborations that tend to extend across individuals with a diverse array of skills, talents and interests. While humanities scholars often collaborate (even as we are usually mostly rewarded for the work we do alone), we tend to work with other scholars who are similar to us, that is, with colleagues with similar methodologies and areas of study.

In the years since Interactive Frictions, I have, of course, undertaken collaborations such as these, but I suspect I have learned the most from my collaborations across difference, be they collaborations with technologists and programmers, with artists and designers, with librarians and archivists, or with community organizations. These types of collaborations require all involved to craft a shared vocabulary and to extend an intellectual generosity toward ways of knowing that might seem alien or opaque at first. But they can also be enormously generative and productive, if you learn to manage the heat and the sparks in useful ways!

From the start, the project of Interactive Frictions was to situate digital media in a more precise historical context, to connect contemporary projects back to their pre-digital precursors. To what  degree do you think this project has been taken up over the past  decade and to what degree do you see this book as still having to push us beyond a presentist focus on digital media as somehow without historical precedent in the kinds of changes it has wrought?

There is certainly an ongoing tendency to think of digital media as “new” media. This obsession with the new is built into the short shelf life of our digital devices, as the release of the latest version of the iPhone propels waves of consumerist frenzy.   The temporalities of many social media practices also skew toward a presentism, encouraging our immersion in a kind of expanded, stretched-out now. This kind of always-on, perpetually-connected present dovetails neatly with the conditions of labor in late capitalism. Our devices and web platforms encourage us to stay connected all the time. Our email and our Twitter feeds always beckon. Our work time and our leisure time blur together. We write reviews on Yelp or Amazon, and our labor is harvested. On the one hand, this constant churn makes it hard to think historically; on the other hand, it’s all the more important that we do just that.

Scholars and artists have an important role to play here, calling our attention to the various ways in which today’s digital media both is and is not like earlier media forms. Emerging forms of immaterial and affective labor are relatively new, closely tied to the ascendancy of post-Fordist forms of capital. It’s crucial that we study what’s different about today’s labor patterns so that we can understand how they help support the growing income inequality and casualized labor practices that so shape our era.

The transformations of finance in the era of databases, simulations, and algorithms are significant and important, and we need to examine the differences between these forms of capitalism and those that categorized the industrial era. I find work of several scholars to be very helpful here, including David Golumbia, Trebor Scholz, Tiziana Terranova, and Lisa Nakamura. But that doesn’t mean that these patterns of immaterial labor or networked finance have nothing to do with earlier forms. A longer historical view will bring into sharper relief what really is changing and what continues on.

Transmedia Frictions clearly plots a longer historical arc for digital media. Many of the authors in the volume take great care in mapping both continuity and change, from Kate Hayle’s examination of print vs. code to Yuri Tsivian’s turn to early cinema to Eric Gordon’s focus on cityscapes. This longer historical framework also extends to the methodologies that contributors put into practice. For instance, Holly Willis takes up issues of feminism and embodiment in the work of new media artists, but her approach draws from and develops decades of feminist media theory. She attends with great care to the historical legacies of feminism for emerging media practices. These strategies can help us to resist the rush of the new and constant present of our increasingly digital lives.

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies. She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is author of the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts + the Humanities (California, 2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) She is currently completing a monograph about her lab’s work and process, Designing for Difference, for Harvard University Press. She is the Founding Editor of Vectors,  a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and is a founding editor of the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (launched by MIT Press in 2009.) She is the lead PI on the new authoring platform, Scalar, and for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Her research has been funded by the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as by the NEH.​

Wandering Through the Labyrinth: An Interview with USC's Marsha Kinder (Part Four)

Since the conference, you and your co-editor Tara McPherson have gotten deeper into work around the digital humanities. I'd love to hear you talk about the visions underlying these projects and the somewhat different agendas for digital humanities they each embody. One of the goals shared by Labyrinth, Scaler and Vectors, is to make the digital humanities embrace visual and audio culture as equally important to the word. We all are involved in making multisensory works that are as intellectually rich, rigorous, and subtle as any traditional essay or book.

Another shared goal is to encourage and validate collaboration both among humanities scholars and with artists, scholars and scientists from other fields. Although we have different models for the scope and range of such collaborations (partly based on issues of scale, funding and who is involved), we all recognize its importance and realize that it’s always a touchy subject. While most academics and administrators are usually willing to support collaboration verbally, the problem arises when it’s time to make decisions on promotion and tenure. Suddenly issues of credit (who’s doing what) become insurmountable problems.

Labyrinth’s collaborations usually involve a small team of theorists, scholars, artists, programmers and designers who (with the help of student assistants from Cinema) make a specific database narrative that provides a new model of digital scholarship. Each work requires a different collaborative team and individual funding. Sometimes we include interns from other nations and cultures, or volunteers from other departments or schools. The team is tailored to the specific project. These goals are narrower than those of Vectors and Scaler, which, through the development of unique user-friendly software, enable humanities scholars from across the nation to produce their own individual digital projects.

In developing different signature genres (e.g., digital city symphonies, interactive memoirs, archival cultural histories, health-science education), Labyrinth engages in an on-going process of reframing. For example, although its first science education project, Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California, was an installation in the Skirball Cultural Center’s major exhibition on the famous scientist, it combined an interactive memoir (Einstein’s complex relations with six different communities) with a digital city symphony (Los Angeles in the early 1930s).

Though it told us more about the contradictions in his life than about his scientific discoveries (which were covered by other installations in the Skirball exhibition), it led the way to Labyrinth’s next signature genre—the health-science-education project.

Produced in collaboration with molecular scientist Dr. Jean Chen Shih from USC’s School of Pharmacy, A Tale of Two MAO Genes: Exploring the Biology and Culture of Aggression and Anxiety, was another translational work in science, but this time designed for use in the classroom. The project used live action video and 3-D animation to cover basic molecular biology and to explain Dr. Shih’s pioneering research on MAO A and B. The project’s strongest elements were 3-D animations (by USC animation student Debra Isaac) of protein folding and other biological processes, visualizations that were both extremely beautiful and rigorously accurate.

To fulfill its secondary goal of encouraging youngsters to become scientists, it includes a brief biography of Dr. Shih and interviews with several scientists explaining how they entered the field. The project was translated into Mandarin and is being used as a model both in China and Taiwan.

Both of these earlier science-education projects laid the groundwork for a video-based website called “Interacting with Autism,” a collaboration with documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris that drew on an impressive list of scientific consultants who are specialists in this expanding field.

Funded by grants from AHRQ (the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality), it was launched on-line in September 2013. This bilingual website (in English and Spanish) is now being translated into Mandarin so that it can be used more productively in China. It is also being tested by an evaluative group at the Rand Corporation, who seek to use it as a model for comparable websites on other health disorders. We’ve had particularly good response to the brief animated film that shows what sensory overload feels like to some individuals on the spectrum.

While working on this website, I became very interested in neurodiversity, a key issue in the cultural debates between autism activists on the spectrum and those who see it autism simply as a disorder to be cured. We were determined to include the points of view from those on the spectrum—on both sides of the camera.

While working on these science translation projects, I realized it was possible to reframe many of the issues I had dealt with in previous works within a new conceptual framework. That’s the book I’m working on now, which is titled Narrative in the Age of Neuroscience: The Discreet Charms of Serial Autobiography.

Marsha Kinder began her career in the 1960s as a scholar of eighteenth century English Literature before moving to the study of transmedial relations among narrative forms. In 1980 she joined USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she continued to be an academic nomad, with narrative as her through-line. Having published over one hundred essays and ten books (both monographs and anthologies), she is best known for her work on Spanish film, specifically Blood Cinema (1993); children’s media, especially Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1991); and digital culture (including her new anthology Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts and the Humanities (2014), co-edited with Tara McPherson. She was founding editor of innovative journals, such as Dreamworks (1980-87), winner of a Pushcart Award, USC’s Spectator (1982-present) and since 1977 served on the editorial board of Film Quarterly. In 1995 she received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship, and in 2001 was named a University Professor for her innovative transdisciplinary research.

In 1997 she founded The Labyrinth Project, a USC research initiative on database narrative, producing award-winning database documentaries and new models of digital scholarship. In collaboration with media artists Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang and Scott Mahoy, and with filmmakers, scientists and cultural institutions, Labyrinth produced 12 multimedia projects (DVD-ROMs, websites, installations and on-line courseware) that were featured at museums, film and new media festivals, and conferences worldwide. Kinder’s latest work, Interacting with Autism, is a video-based website produced in collaboration with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris and Scott Mahoy. Since retiring from teaching in Summer 2013, Kinder is now writing a new book titled Narrative in the Era of Neuroscience: The Discreet Charms of Serial Autobiography.

Wandering Through the Labyrinth: An Interview with USC's Marsha Kinder (Part Three)

I was struck in 1999 by your effort to also create a space where artists working in the museum and gallery space were engaging with game designers working in more commercial contexts. This dimension seems to have dropped out of the Transmedia Frictions book altogether. What does this suggest about the continued roles of cultural hierarchies in the realms of digital art and theory? When we planned the Interactive Frictions conference, we wanted to be as broad and inclusive as possible, which meant including games. I had hoped someday to finish the Runaways game as a Labyrinth project, once we had sufficient grant support and more sophisticated programmers. It was not that we looked down on games as unworthy of critical and cultural attention, but rather that we simply didn’t have the resources to do a first rate job.

We made a stab at it in our on-line courseware project, Russian Modernism and Its International Dimensions, an archival cultural history which unfortunately we never finished—even though we had the assistance of Jenova Chen, the most successful student to emerge from USC’s Interactive Media Division; a grant from NEH; and first-rate Slavic Studies scholars (Yuri Tsivian on film, from University of Chicago; Olga Matich on literature, from UC Berkeley; and John Bowlt on visual culture, from USC). Set at the 1896 Russian Expo in Nizhni Novgorod (where cinema was first screened for the Russian public and where the Tsar and his court were in attendance), this project provided students with three ways of engaging with these historical materials.

They could explore a virtual 3-D model of the Expo and its pavilions, where they could play a game called Montage: A Russian History Game of the Masses.

The game enabled them to engage with experimental art, subversive politics, or new technology—the three forces that made modernism so distinctive in the Russian context.

Or, they could visit GUM, (Glavnyi Universalnji Magazin), the “main universal store” in Moscow’s red square from the 1920s, whose innovative glass-roof design was also featured at the 1898 Expo. Like consumerist flaneurs strolling through a modernist arcade, here students could stop at several shops, each presenting an illustrated interactive lecture on a range of topics (e.g., nothingness, velocity, the bomb, the expo, St. Petersburg: the novel and the city, etc.) by leading scholars both from the U.S. and Russia.

Or, they could visit the archive in GUM’s basement, an extensive database of artworks that students could use in their own projects. Since the courseware was not finished, students were invited to help build the rest of it, as if they were constructionists, learning by doing. The project was designed to show how aesthetic concepts from Russian modernism (such as, dialectic montage, constructionism, and synaesthesia) are still useful in developing our own era of digital multimedia. The basic conception is still sound and challenging, but we don’t have the resources to produce it.

By the time we published Transmedia Frictions, the academic world of game studies had already developed its own trajectories. Of course, there were exceptions like Bill Viola (who attended the original Interactive Frictions conference and had an installation in our IF exhibition). Later, in collaboration with specialists in our Interactive Media Division, he developed a game about a journey of Buddhist enlightenment. Although he originally proposed a collaboration with Labyrinth, we didn’t have the resources to develop it at the time. We were moving in the opposite direction toward museum installations, particularly because we had had such a difficult experience with the Montage game at the heart of Russian Modernism.

There's a recurring interest throughout the essays, in both parts of the book, in issues of cultural memory, the archival, and the documentary. What new models have emerged over the past decade for thinking about the relationship between the digital and our collective understandings of history?

One of the new models that has emerged over the past decade is the genealogical search for family and cultural roots. We can find it in the growing popularity of a website like ancestry.com and in the television shows hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., African American Lives (2006) and Finding Your Roots (2012), where he helps celebrities discover the truth about their roots. We can also see it in the current fascination with Selfies and with the impulse to upload your own home movie fragments on YouTube. And one can also find it in new works on home movies—in a marvelloous book like Patricia Zimmerman’s Mining the Home Movie, and in the extraordinary films of Hungarian media artist Péter Forgács.

In 2000, Labyrinth embarked on a collaboration with Forgacs to turn his sixty-minute, single-channel film, The Danube Exodus, into a large scale, multiscreen, immersive installation, which opened at the Getty Center in 2002 and continued to travel worldwide until 2012. It was one of our three projects in the “Future Cinema” show, and is discussed by Stephen Mamber in the anthology. Largely as a result of this exhibition, Forgács received the prestigious Erasmus Award, for an artist in any medium who has made an exceptional contribution to culture in Europe and beyond.

Having been aired on European television in 1997, Forgács’s film provided intriguing narrative material: a network of compelling stories, a mysterious river captain whose movies remain unknown, a Central European setting full of rich historical associations, and a hypnotic musical score that created a mesmerizing tone. Now that we had 40 hours of footage to draw on, there was an intense struggle for narrative space: between the European Jews who were fleeing the Third Reich in 1939, attempting to get a ship in the Black Sea to take them to Palestine; and the German farmers who were returning home to Germany in 1940 after the Soviets had confiscated their lands in Bessarabia; and the Hungarian river captain who ferried both groups into history by documenting their journies on film.

As in Forgács’s other films, the home movies enriched or contradicted what we thought we already knew about history. Sometimes the home movie footage was juxtaposed with excerpts from official newsreels, but it always introduced an alternative vision. To see the fragile home movie footage displayed on television is one thing, but to see it projected in a museum on five large screens (each 6ft x 8 ft) is something else. This is the way superheroes or villains (like Napoleon or Hitler) are usually displayed, not domestic home movies with their humble characters and banal events.

This collaboration was the first time Labyrinth had actually designed an installation from the get-go—as opposed to making a DVD-ROM that was later included in a museum exhibition. Of course, there were several DVD-ROMs included in the show, plus a related website (produced by a group in Europe), and a related exhibition of maps and artifacts from the Getty Collection. We began to think of this work as a “transmedia network,” one that linked several spaces and many collaborators together.

Intrigued by the use of vintage home movies and the richness of what could be gleaned from their visuals and physical gestures, we were inspired to do another transmedia network for our next project. Titled “Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage,” it consisted of a museum installation which premiered at USC in October 2011 as a Vision and Voices event

and then ran for several months in 2012 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured three large screens, even larger than those we used in The Danube Exodus, on which we projected home movies of Jews living in Los Angeles.

There was also a bank of computers with the website, which enabled users to upload their own family stories and photos and to hear histories of others. The home movies displayed on the large screens and the website all addressed the subthemes of immigration, identity, and intermarriage, which were also emphasized in quotations that were posted on the walls. Mainly derived from 8mm and Super 8 footage, the home movies were collected in a series of “home movie collection days,” which enabled us to form productive collaborative relations with those contributing the footage.

After interviewing members of the family, we edited the footage and added sound. In the exhibition space we also screened a series of short documentaries about Jews in Los Angeles, a display that evoked a comparison between these two forms of non-fiction.

Both of these installations made me think of Patricia Zimmerman’s inspiring statement, which was prominently displayed on the walls of the exhibition: “Amateur films urge us all—scholars, filmmakers, archivists, curators—to re-imagine the archive and film historiography. They suggest the impossibility of separating the visual from the historical and the amateur from the professional.... We need to imagine the archive as an engine of difference and plurality, always expanding, always open.”

Marsha Kinder began her career in the 1960s as a scholar of eighteenth century English Literature before moving to the study of transmedial relations among narrative forms. In 1980 she joined USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she continued to be an academic nomad, with narrative as her through-line. Having published over one hundred essays and ten books (both monographs and anthologies), she is best known for her work on Spanish film, specifically Blood Cinema (1993); children’s media, especially Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1991); and digital culture (including her new anthology Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts and the Humanities (2014), co-edited with Tara McPherson. She was founding editor of innovative journals, such as Dreamworks (1980-87), winner of a Pushcart Award, USC’s Spectator (1982-present) and since 1977 served on the editorial board of Film Quarterly. In 1995 she received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship, and in 2001 was named a University Professor for her innovative transdisciplinary research.

In 1997 she founded The Labyrinth Project, a USC research initiative on database narrative, producing award-winning database documentaries and new models of digital scholarship. In collaboration with media artists Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang and Scott Mahoy, and with filmmakers, scientists and cultural institutions, Labyrinth produced 12 multimedia projects (DVD-ROMs, websites, installations and on-line courseware) that were featured at museums, film and new media festivals, and conferences worldwide. Kinder’s latest work, Interacting with Autism, is a video-based website produced in collaboration with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris and Scott Mahoy. Since retiring from teaching in Summer 2013, Kinder is now writing a new book titled Narrative in the Era of Neuroscience: The Discreet Charms of Serial Autobiography.

Wandering Through the Labyrinth: An Interview with USC's Marsha Kinder (Part Two)

Marsha, you coined the term "transmedia" in your 1991 book, Playing with Power, where you used it to describe an emerging entertainment supersystem. Your phrase has been widely picked up and applied to everything from transmedia storytelling to transmedia learning to transmedia branding to transmedia mobilization. You have chosen to use it as part of the title of this book. To what degree is this an effort to reclaim and redefine the term? Why did you find this an appropriate framework for thinking about the debates in this collection? Yes, in choosing to use “Transmedia” in the title of our anthology, I was reclaiming the term I had coined in 1991 in Playing with Power. But, in no way do I object to the way the meanings of transmedia have expanded—that’s the way language functions. In fact, Tara and I were also redefining the term "transmedia," for it creates an opening for those new media that our anthology didn’t cover in depth—including smart phones—and those that haven’t yet been invented.

We were also using it as a substitute for the term “interactive,” whose definition and connotations are no longer hotly contested. Transmedia, on the other hand, evokes the issue of medium specificity (still very much in contention), without supporting one side or the other. Yet, as some of the essays in our anthology suggest, it also evokes the historic transformation we are now experiencing, in which all movies, videos, TV programs, and music are being redefined as software or data, a conversion with seismic financial and cultural consequences.

In Playing with Power, instead of using the popular buzz-word convergence, I coined the term transmedia because I saw it as a deliberate, dynamic move across media. This definition partly arose from my own transmedia experience—of having completed a doctoral degree in 18th century English literature in 1967 and then publishing my first article two months later, not on Henry Fielding but on Antonioni’s Blow-up. This move from literature to film led one of my literary colleagues to accuse me of having “betrayed the 18th century.” Though flattered by the charge, I realized this move was not always freely chosen.

In Playing with Power, I linked this term "transmedia" to a new kind of postmodernist subjectivity that could be historicized. Priding itself on mobility rather than stability, this new protean subjectivity was embodied in those popular transformer toys and in the myth of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,

where all four words in their name emphasize this kind of movement—whether it was natural growth from childhood to adulthood; or a de-novo mutation caused by urban pollution; or a fluid transnational identity linked to Japanese ninjas, California surfers, and Italian Renaissance artists; or an evolutionary move by amphibians from sea to land. Given this hyper-plasticity, the only fixed aspect of their identity was their masculine gender that depended on having the right toys and gear, which meant kids could buy into the system.

The turtles acquired their own cultural capital by becoming (what I called) a “transmedia supersystem,” whose fluid movement across many different media (from comic books, to games, to television, to movies, and to a slew of licensed products, all with substantial financial rewards) made them even more worthy of imitation. In fact, you could find this transformative subjectivity not only in children but also in transnational CEOs of the time—like Akio Morita, the founding chairman of Sony, who said shortly after his company’s 1989 purchase of Columbia Pictures:

Interestingly, Morita’s statement identified transmedia movement not only with transnational moves but also with play, which led me to explore its connection with a particular kind of developmental psychology. Specifically, I relied on L.S. Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” an area of accelerated learning created through play where a child always behaves beyond his average age and beyond Piaget ‘s fixed developmental model. According to Vygotsky, when play is guided by an adult or more capable peers, the interaction could function as an accelerant. I argued that interaction with popular media (like television, films and computer games) could also fulfill this function, which is a basic premise of Sesame Street. Thus instead of echoing the dire warnings of many psychologists about the harmful effects on youngsters of watching television, I claimed TV could serve as a developmental accelerant that taught youngsters a form of transmedia literacy, which enabled them to bridge the gap between domestic and public space. For, ever since television became pervasive in the American home [a position now challenged by computers, ipads, smart phones and other digital devices], this medium had accelerated children’s acquisition of a fluid postmodernist subjectivity marked by constant change—a subjectivity that helped explain the popularity of transformer toys and transmedia heroes like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Another key aspect of the original conference and to some degree this book was to broker a kind of conversation between experimental artists working with digital media and academic theorists seeking to imagine digital presents and futures. What do you see as the value of such interactions between artists and academics?

I have always been convinced that there’s an important interplay between artistic experimentation and theoretical breakthroughs. This is true in older art forms—such as literature, as much as in film and digital media. For example, in the 18th century although Dr. Samuel Johnson realized that Shakespeare’s mixture of comedy and tragedy violated Aristotle’s rules, he concluded there must be something wrong with the rules, and he attributed his own theoretical insight to Shakespeare’s artistic experimentation. We can find this same kind of interplay in those artists (such as, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, Duras, Marker, and Akerman) whose experimentation is so radical that it transforms any theory applied to it or inspires the creation of a new one—the way Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu inspired Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, or Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Peter Greenaway’s avant-garde films helped shape Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media. And we find a similar interplay in those figures who combine theory and artistic practice in their own work—such as, Eisenstein, Vertov, Pasolini, Deren, and Godard.

In the early days of The Labyrinth Project, I purposely sought out collaborators who were already experimenting with non-linear, open-ended narrative and associative structures—artists who (I thought) could bring a new level of sophistication to this new medium. Since we had no track record, I had to begin with artists I already knew and with whom there was mutual trust. Thus I chose my friend John Rechy, the gay, Chicano novelist whose City of Night mapped the gay cruising zones of the nation, whose Numbers focused on compulsive repetition in Griffith Park, and whose Sexual Outlaw was an edgy, non-linear fictional documentary.

I also chose independent filmmaker Pat O’Neill, whose brilliant multi-layered films I had been writing about since the 1970s.

Our first signature genre was the digital city symphony, an update of the modernist city symphony with its avant-garde associations. Focusing on contested urban space through layers of time, it deliberately eroded the line between documentary and fiction. In Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill, the exploratory space was the Ambassador Hotel on the Miracle Mile in midtown Los Angeles, where the downtown power-brokers and Hollywood moguls first mingled. It was also the site where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 and where other historical traumas, both personal and cultural, took place.

In Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986, an adaptation of Norman Klein’s cultural history, The History of Forgetting: The Cultural Erasure of Los Angeles, documentary and fiction vied for control over this multi-tiered narrative. The contested space was a three mile radius in downtown Los Angeles, a neighborhood known for both its real-life ethnic diversity and fictional on-screen violence.

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2002) from Rosemary Comella on Vimeo.

Another of our early signature genres was the interactive memoir, which preserves the unique web of memories and associations that an individual builds over a lifetime and that inevitably unravels with old age and death. These works encouraged users to interweave this personal material into a broader tapestry of historical narrative. Thus we chose vintage subjects who had complex relations with several different communities. As we’ve seen, Mysteries and Desires: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy features a gay Chicano novelist whose works purposely blur the line between autobiography and fiction.

The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing was the interactive version of a print memoir by Carroll Parrott Blue, an African American photographer from an independent black community in Houston.

And we also did one on Albert Einstein, called Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California...

Presented as DVD-ROMs, websites, and installations, these database narratives from Labyrinth were featured at museums, film and new media festivals, and conferences worldwide. Three of our early works were included in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, a major exhibition co-curated by Jeffrey Show and Peter Weibel, which ran from 16 November 2002 – 30 March 2003 at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, and subsequently travelled to Helsinki and Tokyo.

Despite many exhibitions (both on-line and in museums) of such works and those by others over the past twenty years, there are still very few critics, historians, or theorists who are writing about them—partly because the production process is opaque. I remember when Kevin Thomas, who was then Film Critic for the Los Angeles Times, came to our Labyrinth studio and was interested in writing about Mysteries and Desires. He said he was surprised that John Rechy could draw so well and was so good as a visual artist. When I started explaining who did what, he lost interest in writing about the project. Another time we were delighted to find that Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles was positively reviewed by David Ulm in the L.A. Times Weekly Book Review Section. Yet we were horrified that he wrongly assumed Klein’s brief fictional pamphlet that accompanied the DVD-ROM was the primary source of our interactive project, which was merely a visual adaptation. Though several of the essays in our anthology address such experimental works, the history of projects like these still needs to be written. The pace of technological innovation and obsolescence is so rapid that it’s difficult for academics and cultural historians to keep up—both with the specific works being produced and the digital futures they project. But we included some attempts in Transmedia Frictions.

Marsha Kinder began her career in the 1960s as a scholar of eighteenth century English Literature before moving to the study of transmedial relations among narrative forms. In 1980 she joined USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she continued to be an academic nomad, with narrative as her through-line. Having published over one hundred essays and ten books (both monographs and anthologies), she is best known for her work on Spanish film, specifically Blood Cinema (1993); children’s media, especially Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1991); and digital culture (including her new anthology Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts and the Humanities (2014), co-edited with Tara McPherson. She was founding editor of innovative journals, such as Dreamworks (1980-87), winner of a Pushcart Award, USC’s Spectator (1982-present) and since 1977 served on the editorial board of Film Quarterly. In 1995 she received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship, and in 2001 was named a University Professor for her innovative transdisciplinary research.

In 1997 she founded The Labyrinth Project, a USC research initiative on database narrative, producing award-winning database documentaries and new models of digital scholarship. In collaboration with media artists Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang and Scott Mahoy, and with filmmakers, scientists and cultural institutions, Labyrinth produced 12 multimedia projects (DVD-ROMs, websites, installations and on-line courseware) that were featured at museums, film and new media festivals, and conferences worldwide. Kinder’s latest work, Interacting with Autism, is a video-based website produced in collaboration with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris and Scott Mahoy. Since retiring from teaching in Summer 2013, Kinder is now writing a new book titled Narrative in the Era of Neuroscience: The Discreet Charms of Serial Autobiography.

Wandering through the Labyrinth: An Interview with USC's Marsha Kinder (Part One)

In 1999, the University of Southern California hosted the Interactive Frictions conference, organized by Steve Anderson, Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson, with participants including some of the leading digital theorists, artists,  and game designers of the period. Among those featured were: Edward Branigan, Justine Cassell, Anne-Marie Duguet,Katherine Hayles, Vilsoni Hereniko, Henry Jenkins (that's me!), Isaac Julien, Norman Klein, George Landow, Brenda Laurel, Erik Loyer, Peter Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich, Patricia Mellencamp, Pedro Meyer, Margaret Morse, Erika Muhammad, Janet Murray, Michael Nash, Marcos Novak, Randall Packer, Mark Pesce, Vivian Sobchack, Sandy Stone,  Yuri Tsivian and many others. I speak at many conferences each year, but this remains in my memory a defining event in terms of my own thinking about digital media and a conference where I met a whole bunch of folks who I have ended up working with over the past decade and a half.  For me, the conference brings back memories of the launch of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, which I was able to discuss in my remarks at the event, and also represents the first of a series of interactions with the USC faculty that led ultimately to my decision to move here almost six years ago. Last year, Kinder and McPherson revisited this conference with a new book, Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts, and the Humanities, which brought together many of the original participants, who shared essays that built upon, but also artfully revisited, their original contributions at the event. The result is a great opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the digital arts and humanities across the intervening years,  allowing us to test our original impressions and to reformulate them in response to so much that has happened since.

A key signal about what has changed is reflected in the title of the book -- a movement from a focus on interactivity to an emphasis on transmedial relations. Here, Marsha Kinder is reclaiming a term she introduced in her 1993 book, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Asked to write a blurb for this collection, here's what I had to say: “As someone who attended and participated in the 1999 Interactive Fictions conference, which in many ways consolidated more than a decade of theorizing about and experimenting with digital media, I was uncertain what to expect from Transmedia Frictions. What I found was a rich collection that looks both backward to reconstruct the paths not taken in digital theory and forward to imagine alternative ways of framing issues of medium specificity, digital identities, embodiment, and space/place. This collection is sure to transform how we theorize—and teach—the next phases of our profound and prolonged moment of media transition.”

Few scholars are better situated to reflect on those shifts than Marsha Kinder, who was among the first in cinema studies to embrace digital tools for presenting her scholarship and who has overseen some remarkable collaborations with leading creative artists over the past decade through the Labyrinth project.  She has been a friend and mentor across these years, someone who was always leading the charge and inspiring younger scholars to think about new ways of doing and presenting scholarship, and someone who has bridged between theory and practice in bold new ways.  Our work has been complexly entangled through the years, given our shared interests in children's culture, transmedia, games, and digital humanities.  What began as an interview about her new book has turned into an amazing retrospective on her body of work in the digital humanities, which, true to her vision, is presented here in a multimedia fashion.

I will be following up this interview with Marsha with a second interview with her co-editor Tara McPherson, who has also been a friend and collaborator of mine over the past two decades.

Tell us about the 1999 Interactive Fictions conference. What were  its aims? What do you see now, looking backwards, as its historical  importance in the development of digital art and theory? How did it inform your own subsequent works in this area?

 

In 1997, I was asked by USC’s Annenberg Center to direct a research initiative that would explore the potentially productive relationship (rather than rivalry) between cinema and the then-emerging digital multimedia. I saw this transmedia focus as an opportunity to combine the immersive and emotive power of cinema with the interactive potential and database structure of new digital forms.

Although I had already developed my concept of database narrative, I was just beginning to engage in production myself, making companion works for my two most recent books. For Blood Cinema, my book on Spanish cinema, I collaborated with my doctoral student Charles Tashiro on making the first scholarly interactive CD-ROM in English language film studies, which led to a bilingual series called Cine-Discs.

And, for Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games, I collaborated with another grad student (Walter Morton) on a video documentary showing kids interacting with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

When I asked one of the kids in the arcade why they couldn’t play as April O’Neil, he said, “That’s the way the game is made!” Of course, he was right. And that made me want to make my own feminist game on gender.

The next step was making a prototype for an experimental electronic game called Runaways...

which I co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed with documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris and which you, Henry, kindly featured at your conference on Gender and Computer Games at MIT and in your anthology, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat.

Those projects enabled me to become the founding director of The Labyrinth Project, and to decide it would function both as a research initiative generating new theory and as an art collective making works that would advance the creative potential of the new digital media.

But to do this, I needed to quickly assess what had already been done and what was still emerging both in theory and practice. I also needed to find the most productive collaborators, and to discover which issues were driving the cultural debate and generating the most “friction.”

Being an academic, I decided the best way to perform that quick assessment was to host an international conference. Calling it “Interactive Frictions,” I knew it had to be very inclusive—with filmmakers, photographers, installation artists, animators, game designers, programmers, theorists, critics, cultural historians, curators, media scholars, and entrepreneurs. And because its scope was to be so expansive, I definitely needed innovative collaborators to help run the events. So I asked my colleague Tara McPherson and our graduate student Alison Trope to be my co-hosts at the conference, Holly Willis to co-curate the exhibition, and Steve Anderson to write the program. To emphasize the creative energy emerging from these new combinations as well as from their historical precursors, the conference was intentionally structured like a three-ring circus, featuring not only keynote speeches, live performances, and scads of panels but also a group exhibition in the Fisher Gallery including work from a wide range of artists—some well-known like Bill Viola, George Legrady, Vibeke Sorensen, and Norman Yonemoto, and others--including some of our students—just getting into the game. Amidst this array, we also showed three works-in-progress from The Labyrinth Project—collaborations with gay chicano novelist John Rechy (aka The Sexual Outlaw) and independent filmmakers Nina Menkes and Pat O’Neill. Here’s how I described the exhibition in the opening paragraph of our catalogue:

 “Sparks. Heat. Conflict. This is what friction generates. Using friction as a catalyst, our exhibit features work produced at the pressure point between theory and practice. It brings together artists from different realms, at different stages of their careers, working both individually, and in collaboration in an array of different media: installations and assemblage art, independent film and video; traditional and computer animation; photography and graphic design; literature and music; computer science and interface design; websites, CD-ROMs, and other hybrid forms of multimedia. Coming from different domains, the pieces challenge and contradict each other. What unites them is the focus on interactive narrative.”

We received fabulous feedback on the conference, claiming it had energized all those who attended and broadened their conception of what digital multimedia could be. Despite this success, I decided not to make this conference a recurring event. Instead, I wanted to start producing experimental works in collaboration with others—works that could realize some of the possibilities that were discussed at the conference. So I put together a creative team of three media artists—Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang, and Scott Mahoy-- and that’s what we’ve been doing for the past seventeen years.

But, now that so much time has passed, that conference represents a valuable snapshot of what the discourse was like in the 90s. For, some of the essays in our anthology are even more revealing now than they were then—especially those that were foundational for the field (like Katherine Hayles’s “Print is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”) and those that presented historical precursors (like the pieces by narrative theorist Edward Branigan and early cinema scholar Yuri Tsivian). And it’s important that, not just the artists and editors, but most of the contributors to our volume went on to produce multimedia projects. We hope our “Interactive Frictions” helped make them do it.

Marsha Kinder began her career in the 1960s as a scholar of eighteenth century English Literature before moving to the study of transmedial relations among narrative forms. In 1980 she joined USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she continued to be an academic nomad, with narrative as her through-line. Having published over one hundred essays and ten books (both monographs and anthologies), she is best known for her work on Spanish film, specifically Blood Cinema (1993); children’s media, especially Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1991); and digital culture (including her new anthology Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts and the Humanities (2014), co-edited with Tara McPherson. She was founding editor of innovative journals, such as Dreamworks (1980-87), winner of a Pushcart Award, USC’s Spectator (1982-present) and since 1977 served on the editorial board of Film Quarterly. In 1995 she received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship, and in 2001 was named a University Professor for her innovative transdisciplinary research.

In 1997 she founded The Labyrinth Project, a USC research initiative on database narrative, producing award-winning database documentaries and new models of digital scholarship. In collaboration with media artists Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang and Scott Mahoy, and with filmmakers, scientists and cultural institutions, Labyrinth produced 12 multimedia projects (DVD-ROMs, websites, installations and on-line courseware) that were featured at museums, film and new media festivals, and conferences worldwide. Kinder’s latest work, Interacting with Autism, is a video-based website produced in collaboration with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris and Scott Mahoy. Since retiring from teaching in Summer 2013, Kinder is now writing a new book titled Narrative in the Era of Neuroscience: The Discreet Charms of Serial Autobiography.

Announcing Transforming Hollywood 6: Alternative Realities, World Building and Immersive Entertainment

UCLA School of Theater, Film and Televisionand USC Annenberg School of Communication & USC School of Cinematic Arts

present

TRANSFORMING HOLLYWOOD 6: Alternative Realities, World Building and Immersive Entertainment

Presented by The Andrew J. Kuehn, Jr. Foundation

May 8^th, 2015, James Bridges Theater, UCLA

Here's where you can go to register for the event.

New digital technologies come and go, but the public’s desire to engage with immersive storytelling worlds is here to stay. In 2014, Facebook and Google each entered the alternative realities game with a vengeance. Facebook spent $2 billion to acquire the latest virtual reality (VR) hardware company, Oculus Rift, invented by Palmer Luckey. Google countered by investing in augmented reality (AR) start-up Magic Leap, a firm that hyped its wares with a twenty-three second video clip of a lifelike elephant held aloft in a human hand. Soon after, Microsoft jumped on board with its own AR offering, HoloLens. Samsung used VR to stimulate sales of its latest Samsung Galaxy Note 4 by making its Gear VR Innovator Edition incompatible with all other smart phones and devices. Not to be outdone, Sony announced Project Morpheus, a VR system to enhance game play on its Playstation 4.

Each of these internet technology (IT) giants claims to have high-minded goals for their new platforms—as a means to enhance human capabilities in the worlds of education, science, medicine, and the fine arts. Most likely, each of these Silicon Valley industries is looking to Hollywood and Madison Avenue partners as part of a long-term monetization scheme. After all, both the content industries and the consumer brand industries are eager to whet millennial audiences’ appetites for the latest form of tech-fueled fun. At present, there’s a glut of VR and AR gadgets and not enough content. Therefore, cutting edge artists are stepping into the void, offering to experiment with these new immersive world-building tools, even if it means they must create an occasional Budweiser Margarita girl that morphs into a 4D hologram in order to pay the bills.

While dial-up modems created a generation that was addicted to email and search in the early days of the internet, once broadband internet infiltrated our homes, a generation of digital natives became addicted to making, streaming, and sharing content in the Web 2.0 era. What else does the future hold? Futurists, who spoke at the Mobile Media Summit in Barcelona in 2014, wondered out loud whether the “gigabit internet” will create a generation hooked on augmented reality, holograms, virtual reality headsets, and other “wearables” by 2025. Indeed, as pundits observed at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, brand marketers are placing bets not only on VR and AR, but also on our fascination with the “internet of things” – smart devices (including sensory-driven thermostats, data-driven sleep monitors, and self-driving cars) that communicate with us by means of our mobile phone. But what if “the internet of things” isn’t just another way to seed consumer desire for superfluous gadgets and services?

Some see these new technologies and new experiential worlds moving us closer to that highly anticipated, if dreaded, moment when artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence. Imagine, if you will, what would happen if iPhone’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, like Spike Jone’s Samantha in Her, outgrow their humans? In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash imagined a future-world in which all of us are part of a virtual shared space. Those who chose to stay connected to this Metaverse via portable goggles and other equipment were called “gargoyles” for their outlandish appearance. It looks as if Stephenson's vision is more prescient than we originally thought. Gargoyles, get ready to step out of the CAVE, strap on your Oculus Rift, HoloLens, Samsung gear, or Morpheus goggles, for the future is now.

The tendency to discuss immersive entertainment in a breathlessly futuristic language, through metaphors of science fiction, masks the larger history of these techniques and practices across the 20^th and even 19^th century. Thus, a key strand of this year’s event involves bringing together the perspectives of technologists with those of historians who work on earlier moments of media change, a vantage point which can help us to qualify sweeping claims about the impacts of these still emerging (and often precarious) technologies by looking at how earlier generations sought to expand sensory perceptions, to map and explore complex worlds, to immerse themselves into multimedia presentations, or to create intense collective experiences that remove us from the constraints of the everyday. We are not the first generation of entertainers who wanted to create a sense of awe in spectators, of journalists who wanted to convey a more vivid sense of the world, of museums who wanted to bring their visitors into a more immediate relationship to remote corners of human knowledge, or artists who have sought to teach us new ways to see, touch, smell, taste, or hear the world around us.

Schedule 

9:00-9:10 a.m. — Welcome and Opening Remarks: Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins

9:10-11:00 a.m. — PANEL ONE

Prototype the Planet: How and Why Expansive and Immersive Worlds Are Taking Over Our Collective Imagination

Moderated by Henry Jenkins, USCFrom roots in aesthetic philosophy (Nelson Goodman) and science fiction/fantasy writing (J.R.R. Tolkien), the concept of world-building has become a core concept across many design fields in the 21st century an aesthetic response to the complexities of a multidisciplinary and networked society, a means of creating content that serves the demands of transmedia entertainment. Both the brainstorming process of world-building and the worlds that emerge from that process have become sources of entertainment and education in their own right. In this opening panel, we are bringing together some key thinkers who will share with us their thoughts about: Why world-building has gained such interest at the current moment? What are some of the ways that world-building is being deployed for entertainment and education purposes at the moment? What processes best support the design and development of multimedia worlds? What they see as some of the most powerful examples of media worlds today? What’s new about today’s fascination with world-building and how it relates to older models of speculative fiction? And what connections do they see between world-building and the emergence of immersive and expansive media environments?

Michael Saler, author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, professor at UC-Davis Brenda Romero,  UC Santa Cruz MS Games & Playable Media, Program Director Ann Pendleton-Jullian, architect, professor, Ohio State University/Georgetown University Brian David Johnson, chief futurist, Intel Alex Rivera, director, Sleep Dealers

11:10 a.m.-1:00 p.m. — PANEL TWO

Brand New Vistas: VR & AR Create New Frontiers in Art and Promotion

Moderated by Denise Mann, UCLAImagine stepping into a rickety elevator, feeling a bracing, cold wind against your neck as you are whisked 700 feet straight up a steep incline. You walk along the edge, glancing down at the abyss below, only to realize that flaming arrows are whizzing past your face. Welcome to Game of Thrones’ “Ascend the Wall” Oculus Rift experience, created by Relevant, Framestore, and the HBO marketers. A new generation of cutting edge digital artists—Felix & Paul Studios, Kite & Lightning—and innovative marketing firms—Havas and Relevant—are eager to use VR and AR to immerse participants in vivid, arresting, and sometimes nausea-inducing experiential universes. But who is going to pay for these experiments? Notably, advertisers are stepping up in record numbers, eager to give consumers an exciting new way to engage with their often mundane consumer products or services. High-end automobile manufacturers, such as Mercedes Benz, Jaguar, and BMW, invite consumers to test-drive the latest in luxury design using VR gear from the comfort of their home or office. Not sure if you want to go to Melbourne? Why not use social media to order up a virtual tourist guide and enjoy the sights and sounds of Queen Victoria Market, the Art Centre, or a sunny beach? As one pundit writes, “The promise of virtual reality has always been enormous. Put on these goggles, go nowhere, and be transported anywhere. It’s the same escapism peddled by drugs, alcohol, sex, and art — throw off the shackles of the mundane through a metaphysical transportation to an altered state.” But what if the tech, content, and brand industries see these smart technologies, sophisticated algorithms, and immersive fun as yet another means to track consumer preferences from the cradle to the grave? Ian Cleary, VP Ideation & Innovation, Relevent Ikrima Elhassan, Co-founder, Kite & Lightning Jez Jowett, Global Head of Creative Technology, Havas Media Kamal Sinclair, Co-Director, New Frontier (Lab Programs) at Sundance Institute

1:00-2:00 p.m. — LUNCH BREAK: Lunch options available on campus

2:00-3:50 p.m. — PANEL THREE

Hip Deep in Knowledge: Virtual Museums, Immersive Journalism, and Scientific Vistas

Moderated by Robert Hernandez, USCOur capacity to imagine — and create — alternative worlds, often in highly immersive detail, is now being harnessed as a means of storytelling and conveying knowledge across a range of different institutions and practices. Journalists can create experiences for their readers that they could not — or perhaps would not want to — experience directly. Museums have been testing new media tools and platforms as they seek to share curated experiences with their patrons. Scientists are using wide-screen projection, among other tech, to take students into the outer limits of space, educators are using simulations to help students think about real world systems, and activists are using augmented reality approaches to get people to see their communities from different perspectives. Panelists will share cutting edge research and experimentation in immersive journalism and virtual learning, inviting us to imagine new potential uses of these technologies to expand how we understand the world around us.

Nonny De La Pena, Immersive Journalist Scott Fisher, Associate Dean of research, Professor &Founding Chair, Interactive Media Division, Director Mobile and Environmental Media Lab, USC Cinema School Alison Griffiths, Professor, Baruch College, author of Shivers Down your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View   Kate McCullum, Vice President of Creative Projects, Vortex Immersive Media BC “Heavy” Biermann, re+public labs

4:00-6:15 p.m. — PANEL FOURThere’s Art all Around Us: The Aesthetics of Immersive Experiences

Moderated by Jeff Burke, UCLAExploring immersion via the new technologies of an era has long been a part of the avant-garde in theater, film, architecture, and other art forms. The panelists will share their ideas about what contemporary innovations by artists and technologists operating at the boundaries of commercial entertainment may herald for the future of immersive storytelling.Key questions for the participants include: What are new ways to create (fictional) overlays on everyday life (e.g., Project Tango, Hololens). What do these changes mean for world-building based storytelling? What will be the ongoing evolution of the film and television screen as each moves towards a mobile, context-sensitive, and personalized media surface? What will these new screens, contexts, and surfaces mean for storytellers? What are the implications of having the authorship of story and code increasingly paired in the creation of immersive experiences? And, finally, what next directions for immersion are suggested by direct interfaces between technology and the human body?

Ana Serrano, Chief Digital Officer of the Canadian Film Centre. Sara Thacher, Creative Lead , Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development; previously experience designer for The Jejune Institute Barry Threw, Head of Software Development, Obscura Digital Fred Turner, Associate Professor, Communication, Stanford University; author of several books, including The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychodelic Sixties

More pending speakers will be announced soon.

Here's where you can go to register for the event.

WARNING! Graphic Content: An Interview with Political Cartoonist Mr. Fish (Part Three)

I was struck by your phrase, “the democratizing power of scatology.” In what sense is scatology democratizing? Are there times when scatology gets used in more authoritarian or fascistic ways? By referencing the “democratizing power of scatology” I’m partly echoing the preeminent manifesto that has done more to unify the planet with its nonpartisan secular worldview than any other book perused by human eyes – of course I’m talking about Taro Gomi’s seminal work, Everybody Poops – and I’m partly acknowledging how an interest in obscene matters, which is universal, reflects our sameness in defiance of those whose airs and megalomania insist that the opposite is true.

I’m not 100% sure what you mean about scatology being used in an authoritarian or fascistic way, unless you’re referring to circumstances when those in power assume that the use of scatology by the proletariat and lower classes is proof that they are unsophisticated vulgarians worthy of ridicule and/or marginalization and/or abuse. If it is, then, yes, you’re right, but I’d argue that that is less a description of the effect of scatology and more an example of how thuggish and delusional imperiousness often is.

You cite Boss Tweed’s discussion of cartoons as gaining their power because they spoke to people who could not read the printed articles in the paper. This idea of comics as a medium for illiterates runs across its history and there remains a sense that comics speak to people who would not understand or be interested in more “legitimate” or “legitimized” forms of expression. And this moves beyond comics to other forms of satire -- for example, the contempt I hear among some intellectuals about young people who get much of their news from memes or from the Daily Show. How do you respond to this claim that cartoons may be “dummying down” political discourse?

There are certainly examples of cartoonists who dumb down political discourse, just as there are examples of writers who commit the same violation, just as there are examples of other kinds of artists and public intellectuals who dumb down the entirety of our cultural acumen with the ideas that they advocate. Rather than look to the whole profession of any of those examples, it would be more instructive to look to the individual artist or thinker and the circumstances that produced the commentary being offered to access whether participation in a dialogue is additive or subtractive.

That said, it should not be overlooked that a great deal – some might argue all – of political discourse is the very deliberate “dumbing down” of humanitarian discourse. (Recognizing the need to reverse our negative impact on the environment, for example, is made perverse by the political notion that nothing can be done to save the ecosystem until a solution can be devised that doesn’t impact the business sector.)

And while I might agree that the majority of cartoonists could legitimately be accused of simplifying political conversation, I’d argue that they are not doing it for the purpose of dumbing down discourse, but rather for the purpose of introducing clarity, common sense and sympathy into the national political dialogue.

A cartoonist, when he or she succeeds, makes politics accessible and understandable and, quite frankly, usable to a large portion of the public who, because of race, education level, income inequality, or any number of schlock justifications for marginalization from elite society, would have no easy way to decode and decipher how and why the world functions and dysfunctions as it does.

As we think about the political effects of cartoons, you show us many examples where cartoonists have ridiculed those in power, but also many where those without power, those on the margins, have been depicted in stereotypical and demeaning ways. Do these two functions get achieved through the same kinds of artistic mechanisms? Is there a way to meaningfully distinguish between these two different kinds of political use of comics as a medium?

Indeed, the use of stereotyping in cartooning will always seek to ignore the humanity of both those in power and those dismissed or abused by power for the sake of either making a joke or exaggerating a virtue or a prejudice in service of expressing an opinion of criticism or contempt.

Is the artistic mechanism of ridicule the same for slandering a king as it is for slandering a peasant? Sure it is, particularly when we recognize art as a language, and one that is made up of an alphabet that is just as indifferent to the ideas that it conveys as a pen would be to the words it is writing.

Thus, there can be no consistent or meaningful way to distinguish between good or bad stereotypes any more than there is a consistent or meaningful way to distinguish between good or bad willful misrepresentations of an intrinsic fact that is open to an infinite number of interpretations. Put simply, it is the intention of the cartoonist that must be judged, not the megaphone – the medium! – through which he or she broadcasts his or her message.

I generally share your celebration of the uncensored imagination, but this raises some questions at the same time. Are there images that are so problematic, so hurtful, that they should not be reproduced and circulated? Does a refusal of censorship necessarily imply a lack of criticism? What should be the society’s response be to images that can be very difficult to embrace?

One of my favorite quotes from Lenny Bruce is, “Knowledge of syphilis is not instruction to get it.” So, no, I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful that they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in the censoring of the written word.

In fact, I have never found the parameters drawn by the dominant culture to indicate acceptable behavior or appropriate rules of artistic conduct reliable measures of anything but our most finicky and unimaginative natures.

Still, if the images that we’re talking about are truly toxic and corrupting of our better judgment, better to have them scrutinized in the light than allow them to metastasize in the dark. Knowledge of atrocious and pernicious ideas, whether expressed through text or image, tests the integrity of one’s moral center by providing something contrary with which to compare, resist and rail against.

Exposure to idiocy also serves to unmask the deranged logic of those who advertise the questionable ideas as sound so that the mathematics of the argument can be tested in an open forum and fact can be meted out from conjecture.

Additionally, when straight society misinterprets an unfamiliar wisdom and labels it as deranged logic, it is important to have mandates for free expression in place so that the positive effects of innovative thinking can flourish and not be suppressed by priggish bureaucrats blind to pioneering intellectual advancement.

Can you speak a bit about your own priorities as a political cartoonist? How do you decide which images are worth drawing? What causes require your skills?

Dwayne Booth has been a freelance writer and cartoonist for twenty-five years, publishing under both his real name and the pen name of Mr. Fish with many of the nation's most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals and newspapers. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Z Magazine, Slate.com, MSNBC.com and on Truthdig.com. In May 2008 he was presented with a first place award by the Los Angeles Press Club for editorial cartooning. In 2010 and 2011 he was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012 he was awarded the Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning with a Conscience. His most recent books are Go Fish: How to Win Contempt and Influence People, Akashic Books 2011, and WARNING! Graphic Content, Annenberg Press 2014. He is currently teaching at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

WARNING! Graphic Content: An Interview with Cartoonist Mr. Fish (Part Two)

I was intrigued by your discussion of the classic definition of cartoons as “preparatory renderings.” This is often seen as an archaic or secondary meaning of the concept of the cartoon, but you seem to see it as more closely linked to the kinds of political and culture work cartoons perform. Explain. Yes, like I said in the book, the purpose of a cartoon, both as a preparatory drawing and as a finished piece of commentary published by a newspaper or a magazine, is never to embody perfection but rather to use imperfection to communicate possibility.

Specifically, a cartoon (both iterations of the word) is the beginning of a conversation on any given subject, not the final word, because it more reflects the deliberation over an emotion or an idea than it signifies a proselytizing conviction. To understand precisely what I’m describing, simply compare a propaganda poster that is designed to vilify an enemy or oversimplify a threat to humanity with a cartoon or a piece of fine art that is designed to challenge over-simplification and add complication to an issue so that it more accurately reflects the messiness and multiplicity of real life.

While your book’s title suggests an exploration of “political cartoons” and “comix”, there is much work here which would not fit a narrow definition of these terms, including photographs, sculptures, performance art, live action and animated video, and traditional paintings. What accounts for such a surprisingly expansive selection of materials?

True, the book was initially conceived as a scholarly examination of the past, present and future of editorial cartooning but very early in the process, when I was forced to define what an editorial cartoon was prior to making any assertions about its history or purpose, I realized that the definition of the word “editorial” was the exposition of a personal opinion and that “cartooning” was merely the rendering of that opinion in a pictorial form, or at least in a form that wasn’t entirely lingual or literary, a definition that encapsulated other forms of artistic expression such as photography, sculpture, performance art, etc.

Can you say a bit about your process in creating this book, especially what you think you gained by creating such a nonlinear and multimedia text, as compared to doing a printed book? What models did you draw upon in imagining what kind of work you wanted to create? There are places here where I found myself thinking about works as diverse as McLuhan's collaboration with Bucky Fuller, Peter Berger's Ways of Seeing, or Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. But none of these have the affordances of digital media you drew upon.

It was always my intention to create a book that celebrated and examined art, not as a collection of precious historical artifacts or unique objects that require the context of chronology to have meaning or value, but as an actual living language that I would argue is the most precise and authentic form of communication yet devised by human beings.

Similarly, it was important for me to be able to present the material in such a way that reflected the diversity and expansiveness of art’s voluminous vocabulary, which meant that I needed it to move beyond the fixed confines of being just text and still images. (Reading sheet music is quite a different thing from listening to the sound of instruments being played.)

I also wanted the narrative of the book to reflect the unrestrained and scattered trajectory of every conversation I’ve ever had or overheard on the subject of both art and the meaning of life. To enter into a debate about Bauhaus design, for example, one should also be ready to talk about fascism, the Industrial Revolution, the Labor Movement, Expressionism, Haiku, the 1913 Armory Show, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Minimalism, IKEA, Marx, Upper Paleolithic stone carvings, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the very real difference between factualism and truth.

Both Marshall McLuhan and Berger’s Ways of Seeing were most definitely on my mind while writing this book, as was Wolfe’s The Painted Word, Mailer’s later collection, The Spooky Art and Donald Hall’s Life Work – so, too, was the work of Nietzsche, Fromm, Stephen Davies, Danto and others. In fact, I probably drew more on social philosophers and cultural critics than cartoonists and visual artists when trying to determine the function and significance of art.

Your book’s title, which warns about its graphic content, seems at first to be ironic but the deeper you get into this work, the clearer it is that you have set out to publish many of the most controversial images ever published -- in part as a celebration of the “uncensored artistic mind.” Were there images here which gave you pause or that presented challenges for your editors? How hard was it to produce a work that was as “uncensored” as this one seems to be?

None of the images contained in the book gave me pause, no. In fact, I just finished a unit on offensive art for a course that I’m teaching at the University of Pennsylvania where I assigned a paper that was designed to prove how the concept of obscenity is a socialized construct rather than an innate reaction to an external phenomenon. For the assignment I asked the students to search for a piece of art that was personally offensive to them and then they needed to defend its right to exist.

After the papers were turned in I asked them to tell me about the experience of searching for offensive art and they told me that the task was nearly impossible when they searched alone because nothing was truly offensive to them. Only when they looked for images with other people around did they feel shock or shame. The exercise was analogous to reading or writing or saying a dirty word while alone versus engaging with so-called obscene language while in a public space; the former inspiring no reaction whatsoever and the latter causing real and genuine discomfort, proving that obscenity, like patriotism, typically requires a herd mentality in order to be conjured.

I also explain to my students that it is in that private space, in that state of aloneness, wherein most artists conceive of their work, which is why some artwork can appear vulgar in its honesty or obscene beyond its intention when viewed in public. Bluntly put, you are more likely to pick your nose or scratch your ass without pause if you are alone than if you are in public and it is within that clarity of purpose and egoless satiation of a dilemma wherein an artist enunciates his or her undiluted utility most succinctly. (And that is why art as a language has greater potential to enlighten, because it operates with fewer restrictions and fearlessly accesses deeper troughs of knowledge with the blade of honesty than publically sanctioned methods.)

The only image from the book that presented any challenge to my editors was the photograph by Hans Bellmer of female genitalia titled I Am God. In fact, it was in danger of being removed unless I could somehow contextualize it within the narrative of my chapter about art that is difficult to look at. The solution, of course, was to add an author’s note that draw the parallel with Gustave Courbet’s famous 1866 painting of the same subject, which was titled The Origin of the World, thusly making the Bellmer piece legitimate by association.

Dwayne Booth has been a freelance writer and cartoonist for twenty-five years, publishing under both his real name and the pen name of Mr. Fish with many of the nation's most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals and newspapers. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Z Magazine, Slate.com, MSNBC.com and on Truthdig.com. In May 2008 he was presented with a first place award by the Los Angeles Press Club for editorial cartooning. In 2010 and 2011 he was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012 he was awarded the Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning with a Conscience. His most recent books are Go Fish: How to Win Contempt and Influence People, Akashic Books 2011, and WARNING! Graphic Content, Annenberg Press 2014. He is currently teaching at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

WARNING! Graphic Content: An Interview with Political Cartoonist Mr. Fish (Part One)

Amongst the many cartoons produced in response to the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, the one which has stuck most powerfully in my memory is one produced by Joe Sacco, the comics journalist whose book, Palestine, sought to tell another side of the story of the occupied territory, one less often heard in the United States. Sacco saw himself as having certain responsibilities in this incident to challenge the dominant frame, and the result was a searing mediation on the power of images.  Like others, he defended the right of cartoonists to use whatever images they wanted, but he also wanted people to reflect on the impact such images had, depicting "a black man falling out of  a tree with a banana in his hand," "a Jew counting his money," and images inspired by Abu Girab, among other controversial icons.  Sacco writes, "When we draw a line, we are often crossing one too. Because lines on paper are a weapon and satire is meant to cut to the bone. But whose bone? What exactly is the target? And why?" As I encountered Sacco's cartoon, I was reminded of Warning! Graphic Content, a rich and provocative e-book, published by USC's Annenberg Press last fall. The author, Dwayne Booth, the cartoonist who publishes his work under the name, Mr. Fish, at such publications as Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Z Magazine, Slate.com, MSNBC.com and on Truthdig.com.

Fish reflects on the art and craft of political image-making via a long, sprawling, image-rich, multimedia essay.  This book is impossible to describe ... or to forget. Every page includes images that are designed to cut to the quick, images that have been some of the most controversial ever produced, images that force us to think about what they have to say, yes, but also about their power (and a right) to say it. There is something here that is sure to disturb you, but what that is, where we draw the line, is going to differ from reader to reader, and that's the core of the book's argument.

Mr. Fish is a cartoonist who doesn't know his place, quickly abandoning a focus on editorial and political cartoons, and taking us through the full range of artistic expression, as he seeks to encourage us to think more deeply about how art can serve as a provocation or challenge to conventional ways of thinking, about how art can disrupt (or reinforce) the power of the status quo. So, here you will find ideas about propaganda, stereotypes, and a range of phobias, but also ideas about transgression and liberation.

If you want to download a copy of this multimedia experience, you can do so here.

The moment I saw this book, I reached out to Mr. Fish to see if we could do an interview for my blog.  So, in what follows, you will be able to learn more about his thinking and his work.

You begin the book with a note describing the dramatic decline of the number of editorial cartoonists working in American Journalism today, compared to the way this function thrived at the start of the 20th century. What factors do you think have contributed to this decline and what do you see as its consequences, especially given the many examples you offer across the book who distributed their art through channels other than established publication?

Broadly speaking, I think there are two major factors that have contributed to the demise of the editorial cartoonist as a viable and sought after contributor to the national debate regarding news, politics and culture over the last hundred years. The first and most obvious is the concentration of media ownership and the elimination of independent voices by the formation of publishing and broadcast oligopolies whose power and influence derive from their disdain for creative competition and dissent. Through corporate mergers and outright acquisition of media outlets by companies motivated by the procurement of profit above all else, the very mission of the free press to inform, enlighten, agitate and educate has, over time, become less about serving the public good and more about catering to the demands and expectations of multinational corporations who have an active contempt for a diversity of viewpoints, in particular those that undermine the revenue-centric values of advertisers, shareholders and, by proxy, the consumers who revere and respect the absolute power of the marketplace. As a result, the propagation of any idea deemed inappropriate by the business and political elite for which the publishing industry serves and advocates for is prohibited, hence, the power and purpose of the editorial cartoonist as an agitator and outspoken critic of partisanship and complacency is recognized as a liability rather than an asset when it comes to servicing the ways and means of the revised version of the Fourth Estate.

The second reason why cartoonists can no longer earn a living wage is, of course, due to the total collapse of the print media industry and the inability of online publishers to pay contributors for content, having not yet figured out a financial model that is self-sustaining. And while the aforementioned consequences to the profession of editorial cartooning are certainly devastating, they have no effect whatsoever on the drive and instinct of the visual artist for whom graphic radicalism and pictorial civil disobedience are his or her best weapon against systemic injustice and institutionalized dogmatism made harmless by the status quo.

As it’s always been, the best and most insightful visual art has never appeared in newspapers, nor has it been produced by cartoonists for mainstream publication if only because the very definition of the mainstream insists on pulled punches and language that has been compromised for taste and easy digestion.

Some have seen web comics as an important new space where young artists are expressing their visions without needing to go through traditional gatekeepers. Do you see the web as offering opportunities for the kinds of subversive visions you are seeking across the book?

I tend to see the internet as being roughly equivalent to the old party lines offered by the telephone company through the middle of the last century, where multiple parties had equal access to the same phone line and could speak communally or eavesdrop on conversations without reveling themselves. Of course, where there were merely dozens of voices involved with telephone party lines, there are billions involved with the Internet, although I’d argue that there is likely an identical breakdown of meaningful vs. meaningless conversation associated with both.

That said, I do believe that while there are no more subversive visionaries eager to share their genius with the online world than there were deep thinkers to blow the minds of party line listeners, I do believe that the illusion of privacy inherent with online interactions might be inspiring more contemplative listeners and viewers, which is significant.

Previous to the invention of the Internet, radical art drew very few spectators as it was necessary for the viewer to either travel to the location of the actual painting or drawing, or to be seen purchasing a facsimile of it from a store or checking it out from a library, all of which was as a very public proclamation of interest in the controversial subject matter with which the work was associated, something that was ferociously discouraged by the dominant culture and decent society.

Does having access to a larger audience than ever before allow an artist to influence either members of a society or the architects of power any more than previous artists who were known to fewer people in the past? I’ve seen no real evidence of that. If anything, in fact, I’d say that the Internet has neutered political protest and dissent by isolating and individualizing the experience of ‘revolution’ and making the likeminded community of fist-raising comrades virtual and not publically demonstrated.

The same is true for television: there are likely more well-informed critics of the federal government nowadays than there was 20 years ago, given the work of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, yet the likelihood of genuine political revolt or organized protest is no greater than it ever was because the experience of outrage aimed at buffoonish and corrupt leaders is isolated and practiced in private as mere entertainment consumption.

Dwayne Booth has been a freelance writer and cartoonist for twenty-five years, publishing under both his real name and the pen name of Mr. Fish with many of the nation's most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals and newspapers. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Z Magazine, Slate.com, MSNBC.com and on Truthdig.com. In May 2008 he was presented with a first place award by the Los Angeles Press Club for editorial cartooning. In 2010 and 2011 he was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012 he was awarded the Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning with a Conscience. His most recent books are Go Fish: How to Win Contempt and Influence People, Akashic Books 2011, and WARNING! Graphic Content, Annenberg Press 2014. He is currently teaching at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Peru's Digital Futures: An Interview with Anita Say Chan (Part Two)

  Can you talk a bit about the role which gossip and rumor plays in your book? How might we think about the social networks that get expressed through gossip in relation to the more technologically-based networks that we often think about in discussing new media?

Gossip and rumor here were local means of contesting the dominant narratives around information age reform being pushed from the state and empowered development institutions. I draw here from postcolonial theory and framings of gossip and rumor as means of being able to contend with colonial narratives by subaltern actors. Part of my leveraging of postcolonial theory to frame the workings of rumor and gossip in this particular context of information age production was to offer a distinct framings of gossip and rumor than the version which typically gets focused upon when they are taken up as topics in digital studies.

These conventional framings in digital studies take for granted gossip’s circulation within a Western, advanced consumer society context, where rumor and gossip are typically framed as false news, or commodities manufactured for consumption, or tools to drive online consumer traffic. That rumor and gossip might have other functions, including operating as imagined foils rather than aids to market flows, or that they might function as attempts to add “noise” to the over-amplified narrative and signal of the state, is easily overlooked. There’s clearly plenty to gain, though, from bringing the insights of postcolonial theory into interface with information studies and digital ethnography.

In many ways, your book deals with the comparisons in how two internationalizing discourses collide with the local in Peru -- the first has to do with neoiberalism and global markets, the second has to do with Open Software and the development of a kind of global hacker culture. Can you discuss the similarities and differences in these developments and especially in terms of the intersections between global and local concerns?

Part of what I intrigued me about the state’s approach to information society-based initiatives in Peru, was the means by which both urban free software geeks and hackers and rural artisan communities could be targeted as ideal subjects for reform, as well as ideal partners for the Peruvian state in extending and extolling the gains of its new ICT-based plans. In other words, communities that in many ways might look radically distinct from and even opposite to one another – one party representing the height of dynamic information age expertise and future development, and the other representing slow tradition and indigenous craft from the rural provinces – could be simultaneously summoned and targeted as key partners in economic development for the information age Peruvian state.

The key here seemed to turn on the means by which knowledge work and knowledge production could be framed. And while there is a large and significant literature on technology policy in the global south that emphasizes the north as the template from which technology policy and practice get copied, here we see something somewhat more nuanced unfolding within the state logic. Definitions of knowledge work and knowledge production were rather craftily and savvily understood by Peruvian government actors to encompass “traditional and indigenous” knowledge” production as well as high-tech coding and engineering work.

And while this might sound like a rather progressive advancement, I unpack in the book how such heightened investment and targeting by the state brings about rather complicated and not always promising outcomes for traditional artisan communities or networked geek and free software advocacy communities alike.

As you note, out of 40 countries who invested in the One Laptop Per Child initiative, Peru was the only one which came close to meeting the 1 million units that the foundation had demanded as the minimum commitment when the project launched in 2005. This makes Peru an important test site not only for the One Laptop Per Child project but also some of the underlying assumptions about technological change that informed it. Based on your research, what would you tell the folks at MIT who advocated for this project about what did and did not work in Peru?

To take more seriously the experience and wealth of expertise of their local partners, and not to make the conventional and all too oft-repeated mistake of presuming that the knowledge of the world’s most elite engineers is sufficient to conquer any and every global problem or situation. The global spaces where new technological deployments aim to travel today are obviously complex terrains – geographically, culturally, historically and politically – where the knowledge and experience of local partners are not only complementary, but are deeply necessary to successfully sustain any new technological deployment.

These are sites too, where the presumptions of cosmopolitan designers and engineers, no matter how well trained and globally literate, just can’t always be taken for granted. I was surprised to see how lightly deployment engineers and technicians frequently took such considerations, and how little was often invested into gaining an understanding of the layered local histories and cultural complexities of distinct deployment sites.

It was rather common to find OLPC designers, including ones who considered themselves to be invested in deployment sites in Peru, who knew very little of the knowledge and cultural practices of indigenous communities where deployments could be situated; or who knew little of recent political conflicts and uprisings in opposition to contemporary policies of the state that impacted other local deployment zones.

As a simple example of how large such local knowledge gaps were, there were situations in observing the deployment of the One Laptop Per Child Project in Peru, for instance, where highly respected lead engineers on projects entered rural communities expecting to pay for purchases with a credit card, and this was literally several years after OLPC deployments in Peru had already begun.

Gaining mutual understandings around differences in technological uses and literacies, is key and requires hard work. And as important is the work necessary to gain mutual understandings and literacies in the deeply layered cultural, political, and historical contexts that deployments are bringing designers into intimate contact with.

Your analysis of the open software movement in Peru comes to hinge on the transformative potential of play. What are some of the ways that play was conceptualized in Peru and how did playing with technologies open up space for imagining change at an institutional level?

It’s no secret that there’s been quite a lot of hype around the means by which the Internet economy fosters creative work and spaces that accommodate individual freedom, play, and flexibility. The fantastic narratives that surround Google campuses as play spaces – as well as their hyper mediation in the popular press -- epitomize such framings, that arguably build towards a kind of “end of labor” narrative. And even while studies show that leading Internet companies like Google and Amazon – actually have among the highest rates of worker turnover and employment instability among all Fortune 500 companies, the notion that the digital economy somehow fosters the most ideal work conditions that can bring about an end to the problems of discontent and exploited labor, persists.

Against these popular framings, there is a growing and much needed scholarly literature on the expansion of playbour and the blurring lines between play and labor in the digital economy. This scholarship critiques, rather than celebrates, the undoing of the binary between the two supposedly polarized poles of play and labor, and has emphasized how play logics can actually operate to enable a more efficient extraction of labor from knowledge workers.

My research on play in Peruvian geek and free software networks revealed some distinct developments around “play” instead – which lead me to draw less from political economic framings of labor, and to instead draw from psychoanalytic, critical theory and anthropological framings of play. These framings emphasize play as a kind of liminal space and condition – one that enables “the real” and the “given” to be tested by actors, to imagine the “world as otherwise” -- and that thus understands a certain degree of interpretive work being done, as well as potential for social transformation, that are contained within conditions of play.

You could see the free software community members in Peru grappling with these dynamics of play in some of my chapters. Another clear contemporary example of the means by which digital publics in Peru also engage these dynamics of play are in the massive social movements and street protests that literally overwhelmed the public spaces in Peru in protest of Ley Pulpin (the formerly passed labor law I mentioned earlier).

Just as spectacular as the wave upon wave of massive street protests, were the massive waves of online traffic, social media exchanges, and multiplying hashtags that the law’ critics used to denounce the law – and here, it was primarily online satire, satirical memes, absurd jokes and political humor – that blend the popular aesthetics with the popular accessibility of digital networks to express political critique. See for example.

This was a tactic adopted by AnonOps Peru hackers and average citizens alike. And indeed, after nearly two months of massive unrest that filled the streets (and social media networks) with amplified protesting voices, the new labor law was finally overturned. The same networks are still engaged in political organizing in response to a range of other pressing national issues, ranging from labor rights to media content and censorship. It’s yet another sign, among the others the book highlights, of other technological futures being struggled for by a range of diverse publics at the so-called “periphery” and beyond.

Anita Say Chan is an Assistant Research Professor of Communications and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in Latin America, and hybrid pedagogies and collaborative research for the digital humanities. Her manuscript on the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was published with MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program.

Peru's Digital Futures: An Interview with Anita Say Chan (Part One)

The language we use to talk about the World Wide Web is often universalizing: the web is seen as exhibit one in the argument that the world is flat, thanks to the ability of messages to travel from any point to any other point. For others, the Web is an Americanizing force, one which has made English an even more pervasive language among the world's youth than ever before, one which is transforming governments and altering cultures without regard to the desires of local residents. Anita Say Chan's Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism adopts a position somewhere in between in part by starting with a straight forward but surprisingly rare move -- she shifts the attention away from the digital cultures of North America and Europe, focusing instead on what the coming of the web has meant in the context of the global south and in particular, in the context of Peru. Her focus shifts chapter by chapter, from the stories of indigenous artisans struggling over what the future of their craft is going to look like to the saga how the One Laptop per Child initiative got taken up in rural classrooms. Her approach is skeptical, but not cynical, about claims of digital advocates that all of these changes are for the best, being attentive to shifts in local autonomy and the impact on who has power within the culture.  She writes about the impact of new media on traditional and emerging forms of intellectual property with an ethnographic perspective, one which is attentive to both universalizing and localizing forces on how people live their everyday lives.  Chan shows us the power that comes from de-centering the study of new media, from understanding media change from the peripheries.

Chan was a classmate of Candis Callison, whose book on climate change I featured on my blog last week. Chan and Callison were contemporaries entering our Comparative Media Studies Masters Program at MIT -- the second cohort admitted to the program. I was lucky enough to watch them grow as media scholars and then to be able to turn them over to the faculty at MIT's PhD Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. Both of them have published their first books in recent months, and it's a great pleasure to be sharing some of Chan's thoughts via this interview.

You begin the book’s preface with this core question: “Why study digital culture and information technology (IT) in Peru?” And you take much of the book to fully address it. Can you provide us a brief overview of your response here?

Briefly, I underscore how that very question originates from a perspective on IT and the digital – one that’s changing, but still dominant – that presumes that there is a single digital future in the making that naturally extends from given centers of innovation and engineering, like Silicon Valley, MIT or Stanford. And according to this perspective, it’s this single digital future in the making that somehow, inevitably awaits the rest of the world.

This kind of imaginary, and the taken-for-grantedness of spaces like Silicon Valley as the center of the digital universe and its universalizing future, operates so powerfully that it’s easy to forget that even with Silicon Valley based companies like Twitter and Facebook, most of their user bases (and thus increasingly, revenue futures) lie well outside of the US; that the number 1 tweeting city in 2012 was nowhere near Silicon Valley, but was in fact Jakarta, Indonesia , and that statistics show that native English speakers online will soon be (and likely already are) outnumbered by Chinese native speakers. Yet despite such clear developments, there still remains a powerful presumption that sites like Silicon Valley are behind the digital future that naturally awaits us all.

In the book, I argue that the kind of thinking expresses a kind of Digital Universalism that disguises the means which elite designers and entrepreneurs of the IT world’s leading corporations work to promote and circulate it – whether in the pages of Wired magazine or across any number of TED conference stages. It also disguises the diverse imaginaries and investments around the digital that are cropping up all over the world, including in Peru, from diverse civil society actors - but that are easy to overlook when we focus our attention only on those coming out of just a handful of innovation centers.

Peru, for instance, was the among the first countries to propose national legislation for the use of free and open source software in public office in 2001. It was the first nation chosen by the United Nations to host its conference on the use of free and open source software in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2003. It became the largest national partner for the MIT-launched One Laptop Per Child educational laptop initiative in the late 2000s, when it pledged to deploy nearly 1 million XOs to classrooms across the rural provinces and cities alike. And AnonOps Peru, the Peruvian branch of the networked collective Anonymous, has been especially active helping to mobilize the massive waves of protests that just managed to overturn a new labor law, Ley Nº30288, known popularly as Ley Pulpin (that targeted youth workers, and that many interpreted to be an erosion of labor rights overall) -- after city streets all over the country were filled with protestors in week after week of sustained demonstrations.

Your book’s title includes the evocative phrase, “the myth of digital universalism.” What do you mean by this? Where does this myth come from? And in what ways does your book debunk this myth?

Simply put, there are many digital futures, constantly in the making by a diverse range of actors, including those at the “periphery” of innovation centers, but who are far from simply passive recipients of a digital destiny supposedly being made for them from elsewhere. Digital Universalism distorts our perception of how diverse (and still undetermined) those investments around the digital really are by insisting that we keep our attention focused only and exclusively on future visions being spun out from centers of digital innovation. We shouldn’t forget how powerfully such a message operates when it’s directly promoted and reinforced by some of the tech world’s most powerful and seductive corporate leaders and entrepreneurs, who today, have not only become household names worldwide – but who often take on the roles of global ambassadors or sorts, arranging one on one meetings with government leaders that seemingly overnight, can turn their own visions of the technological future into nationally deployed policy.

My own work has been to disrupt such limited but repeatedly amplified visions of a technological future, by turning a spotlight on the many diverse imaginaries and investments around the digital that we find cropping up at the so-called “periphery,” and from diverse civil society actors. In Peru, this includes some of the parties I highlight in the book: rural artisans recruited as partners for new intellectual property for development programs; urban geeks and hackers working around free software advocacy networks; and collaborations around digital education projects in the Andes that bring the expertise of indigenous language activists, rural teachers, and free software coders into novel interfacings.

You use the example of what happens to ceramics craftspeople in Chulucanas to explore the ways that the neoliberal agendas of nation-states in regard to IP and IT can have unintended consequences on the grounds for the lives of rural and indigenous populations. What can we learn from looking at this particular example? In what sense was the outcome “not brave but brutal”?

The chapter highlights the ways that radical, neoliberal policy reforms and the demands of information age economic transformation can be narrated by their promoters as indeed, heroic, brave, and necessary. What’s striking is how such policy promoters can acknowledge that the kinds of reforms they advance might be deeply disruptive (or even largely destructive) of other social resources, established traditions or institutions, but how they can at once insist that the scale of market optimizations projected – ones that are almost always narrated as promising not only reform, but economic salvation – will ultimately be worth the price of destruction.

In Chulucanas, what we actually saw were family and kinship networks -- the kinds of social support networks that artisans traditionally relied upon for ceramics production -- devastated, following the state’s initiative to push intellectual property titlings as a means to reform traditional craft production for export in the village. Distrust and pitched competition between artisans grew palpably, and traditional production practices that had been maintained as a regional knowledge practice and tradition since the literally thousand of years when the pre-Colombian Vicus and Tallan civilization settled northern Peru’s coasts, eroded in the interest of newly optimized, export-scaled production. It that sense, such contemporary reform policies were quite literally brutal.

Anita Say Chan is an Assistant Research Professor of Communications and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in Latin America, and hybrid pedagogies and collaborative research for the digital humanities. Her manuscript on the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was published with MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program.

How Diverse Publics Understand Climate Change: An Interview with Candis Callison (Part Three)

As you note, there has been a struggle throughout much of the 20th century between fundamentalist Christianity and science, particularly around the topic of evolution, but also around issues of sexuality and reproductive rights. How have some evangelical leaders been able to reconcile a concern for climate change with skepticism about what their members often see as the “ideological” nature of modern science? One of the groups I interviewed were the leaders behind Creation Care, which was a kind of sub-movement at the time of my research in the mid to late 2000s. These were the same people who had worked on “What would Jesus drive?” a highly successful campaign to turn transportation into “a moral issue” for Christian communities.

What one of these leaders told me explicitly is that who is speaking matters to a great extent in terms of establishing the credibility of climate change as a concern within evangelical communities. He called it “blessing the facts,” and told me that the right “messengers” were required in order for evangelicals to take climate change seriously as an issue of concern that required their involvement and action. Climate change for many evangelicals is caught up in politics, science, and environmentalism, and he argued that such messengers are required in order to steer through all of that and make it about “stewardship” and part of the moral and spiritual obligation of Christians.

In some cases, this means mobilizing evangelical leaders, but in other cases, it means bringing in scientists who are also Christians. For example, the head of Working Group 1 for the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports is an active and vocal evangelical and a leading scientist. The history of evangelicals with evolution debates and court cases in the U.S. still matter to many, but it isn’t a central issue in need of resolving for those working on climate change. Rather, those I spoke with sought to rearticulate concern for the environment from and within Biblical frameworks hence the term, Creation Care as an alternative to environmentalism.

This goes back to the earlier point I raised about vernaculars. Those who ‘bless the facts’ aren’t rubber-stamping the science; it’s a much different and more nuanced process based on the moral and ethical contours of climate change. The credibility of messengers, as adjudicators of truth and of what’s meaningful within a Christian context, enable them to articulate climate change as a real and science-based issue that needs to be taken seriously because of what the Bible says about taking care of the poor, caring for Creation, etc. So the scientific facts do matter, but they also come with historical and political baggage, and facts by themselves are not an exclusive route to establishing why climate change should be taken seriously.

Many discussions of the climate change debate posit corporate America primarily as villains, who promote skepticism about climate change claims as a means of protecting their own economic interests or defending their current practices. Yet you also point towards a number of corporate efforts to combat climate change. How effective have these efforts been? When and how do they move beyond what some have called “greenwashing”? How are they able to reconcile support for environmental reform with the profit motives which drive Wall Street?

In the book, I look closely at the work undertaken by Ceres, a Boston based corporate social responsibility organization. They aren’t the only group working on climate change and CSR, but they are one of the leading voices, having focused on this issue since the early 2000s.

Ceres was fascinating for me because it took me out of the world of religion, human and indigenous rights, journalism, science, and democratic obligations and into a radically different set of societal institutions where profit, risk, and investment are the key terms. What Ceres has worked to achieve is a transformation of concerns about climate change into investor concerns that may affect future profits and the stability of corporations. Climate change presents a risk to investors that must be accounted for and managed, and Ceres uses a range of mechanisms to help companies articulate these risks related to climate change as well as the actions they are taking to mitigate these risks.

This discursive shift from climate change to climate risk has produced a powerful response within financial frameworks. It’s not without some critique from those who think Ceres could require more from the range of companies they deal with – particularly those whose bottom line is predicated on contributing to carbon emissions. However, mobilizing a business vernacular in order to reframe climate change as a problem that companies must address is an innovative way of moving towards what Ceres hopes will be increasingly progressive corporate action.

There is a tendency to discuss science in terms of rationality and facts, yet throughout your book, you point to the importance of faith, ethics, morality, and other “softer” human values in shaping how and why people embrace or reject such arguments. How might we develop arguments that better bridge between science and faith, rationality and emotion, pragmatism and morality when thinking about these issues?

In considering climate change as only (or primarily) a science-based or science-laden issue, deeper ethical and moral discussions about our relationships to the natural world and to each other often get lost. This doesn’t mean that scientific findings aren’t vital to understanding climate change, but rather: for broad and diverse publics to come to care about the issue and care enough to take actions about it, climate change needs to become much more than a scientific concern.

In the book, I refer to this as the persistent "double bind" related to climate change – where in order for a rationale to act on the issue to emerge, we must maintain fidelity to scientific findings and move beyond them at the same time in order to explore moral and ethical contours related to the issue.

Recognizing the power of social affiliations and networks and accompanying moral and ethical concerns alongside evidence-based analyses and predictions does take us towards a potentially robust and even more rambunctious public discourse. We have yet to develop the kinds of digital and/or other mechanisms that would actively facilitate this discourse. We’re barely past the gate in terms of thinking beyond a broadcast model of news and information, and in terms of contending with differing epistemologies.

I do think there are glimmers of hope here and there as social movements like Occupy and Idle No More (a Canadian indigenous-led movement) demonstrate in various ways both in terms of their use of media and in bringing together varied groups. My hope is that this book contributes to broader thinking about the social and communal life of facts, and to contending with what it means to have shared goals without shared assumptions about how evidence has come to matter.

Candis Callison is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Graduate School of Journalism. She holds a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society and a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies -- both from MIT. Her research and teaching are currently focused on changes to media practices and platforms, journalism ethics, the role of social movements in public discourse, and understanding how issues related to science and technology become meaningful for diverse publics. Her new book, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) uses ethnographic methods and a comparative lens to bring together the work of professional and social groups working to engage diverse publics in an American context. Building in part on this research, Candis has recently begun new research looking at Arctic-based journalism in an era of environmental change, digital media, and global audiences. She is also midway through two research projects that investigate how social networking technologies like Facebook and Twitter are being used both by indigenous communities and by the indigenous-led social movement, Idle No More in Canada. Prior to her academic life, Candis worked as a journalist in Canada and the U.S. for television, radio, and early incarnations of the Internet (think dialup and early broadband). She is a member of the Tahltan Nation located in Northwestern British Columbia.

How Diverse Publics Understand Climate Change: An Interview with Candis Callison (Part Two)

You argue that part of the problems is that scientists and journalists have conflicting professional ideologies, which prohibit both groups from being strong advocates for the importance of climate change and the values of any particular plan of action. Explain. What initially got me interested in thinking about climate change were the debates I had encountered between scientists and journalists about whose fault it was that the public didn’t care (enough) about climate change. Yet, when I began researching this problem, I encountered a lot more common ground between scientists and journalists than might be obvious at first glance, particularly in regards to observing and negotiating with professional expectations of objectivity, distance, and independence.

Encountering the findings of climate change – whether as a scientific researcher or journalists, produces a variety of responses for many that I talked to for this book. For some, there is an absolute obligation as a citizen or as an expert to do something about the predictions related to climate change. For others, there is an obligation to speak about the findings only. Some scientists reach out directly to the public or work through social groups, or even more simply, just endeavor to return the call of reporters.

I came up with the term “near-advocacy” as a way of discussing and acknowledging the wide spectrum of responses that emerge as a result of knowing the facts related to climate change (and often as well, knowing what isn’t known and the long tale of unlikely probabilities that create some of the gravest concerns). Advocacy is a still “a third-rail” for many high level professionals who work in science and journalism. Most don’t want to be associated with or slotted into left or right politics such that their credibility as science experts or journalists is compromised. And yet, these same professionals are often the ones most able to speak about the state of climate change findings and predictions. Navigating what has become a very tricky political and politicized terrain is definitely not for those who lack conviction about the role of science in society.

You note that journalists often struggle with the need to distinguish their role in informing the public with other potential functions such as educating the public about science or advocating for particular policy changes. Why have these functions proven so challenging to work through in relation to climate change? How does the climate change debate bring into sharper profile questions about how journalism functions in the contemporary media landscape?

One of the funniest metaphors I encountered that captures the challenges journalists face was from a journalist who described reporting on climate change as akin to “parking your car under a bunch of starlings.” Whenever I quote this in a talk, I always show a car covered in bird shit and get a good laugh.

It’s poignant on a bunch of different levels because it demonstrates the ways in which journalists enter into rambunctious, concerned, and diverse debates when they report on this issue. I argue that this not only speaks to the kind of issue climate change is, but also to the changing structures, norms, and practices facing journalists as a result of the rise of digital media.

Journalists are now not only expected to report on issues and put information out on a 24/7 basis, but they are increasingly expected to be verifiers and chief discussants. Journalistic methods and approaches as well as the facts they relay have never been more open to public scrutiny. In this sense, climate change is an exemplary issue with much at stake in terms of public engagement, policy, and the circulation of information.

Much of the concern about how climate change is reported on stems from the persistence of climate change denial and mis-information -- despite the widespread scientific consensus that climate change is a very real problem with a range of predictions and probabilities. For journalists, the spectre of denial is something they have to contend with constantly whether in response to stories or in the choice of experts. This past year at least one major science publication closed off its comment sections after stories, citing the response to climate change stories in particular.

Recent research has shown that this kind of debate does seem to affect public perception of whether there is scientific consensus, but I also think it’s vital to develop much better digital tools for dealing with these kinds of problems related to public debate and engagement. Shutting off comment sections doesn’t solve the issue, nor does it reflect the robust commitment to democratic discourse that many, including me, argue is required particularly on contentious and far-reaching issues like climate change.

You start your discussion with a consideration of the roles which indigenous peoples, especially those who live in the Arctic region, are playing in informing the climate change debate. What value do you think these forms of indigenous knowledge contribute ? In what ways have their voices been hi-jacked by other players and through what means have they learned to be more effective at speaking for their own interests?

When the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) was released in the early 2000s, it received a lot of attention because of the kinds of predictions it made about how climate change would affect polar regions. It also represented one of the first major and comprehensive attempts to combine indigenous knowledge with scientific knowledge. Indigenous knowledge about the natural world comes out of a different system, tradition, and methodology so this kind of work – bringing scientific and indigenous knowledge together is not an insignificant challenge. In the book, I look at this challenge from varied perspectives, recognizing the diverse ways in which traditional knowledge offers important insights both historically and currently.

What initially got me interested in the Arctic was the human rights claim that was brought by Inuit leaders and elders before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. The claim was intended not only to put indigenous experiences with climate change in the Arctic before a wide public, but also to confront U.S. policymakers regarding their inaction on the very real and ongoing effects related to climate change. As the ACIA had shown and as much of the testimony offered by Inuit hunters and leaders articulated very powerfully in the claim, their ways of life, their means to support their communities, and their culture were being drastically affected by changes to sea ice, permafrost, and other environmental changes.

I come from an indigenous family, and my father is a longtime hunter and outfitter in my First Nation in northern B.C. so these kinds of stories captured my attention immediately. But, when I began to speak to Inuit leaders, I also began to see that climate change, while being a huge issue, was also the latest in a long line of challenges that have required their communities to deal with scientific researchers, media, geopolitics, resource development, and multiple national interests. The book provides a glimpse into how Inuit leaders were navigating both the needs and conversations going on at the level of villages and regions as well as transnational networks and discourses in order to influence Arctic policies and decision-making.

Candis Callison is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Graduate School of Journalism. She holds a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society and a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies -- both from MIT. Her research and teaching are currently focused on changes to media practices and platforms, journalism ethics, the role of social movements in public discourse, and understanding how issues related to science and technology become meaningful for diverse publics. Her new book, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) uses ethnographic methods and a comparative lens to bring together the work of professional and social groups working to engage diverse publics in an American context. Building in part on this research, Candis has recently begun new research looking at Arctic-based journalism in an era of environmental change, digital media, and global audiences. She is also midway through two research projects that investigate how social networking technologies like Facebook and Twitter are being used both by indigenous communities and by the indigenous-led social movement, Idle No More in Canada. Prior to her academic life, Candis worked as a journalist in Canada and the U.S. for television, radio, and early incarnations of the Internet (think dialup and early broadband). She is a member of the Tahltan Nation located in Northwestern British Columbia.

How Diverse Publics Understand Climate Change: An Interview with Candis Callison (Part One)

The debate about climate change can often seem perplexing for those of us who take the foundations of modern science seriously.  We can become deeply cynical about why certain players refuse to accept "established truths" and become frustrated by the inability of governments to act decisively to curtail behaviors that are helping to create long-term "risks" for the future of humanity and the planet. Yet, we are never going to make progress in such debates, Candis Callison argues, unless we understand what she calls "the communal life of facts," unless we develop a deeper understanding of the different epistemological commitments held by diverse players in this argument. Candis Callison's recently released book, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts, is a spectacular example of how ethnographic work, especially work informed by the science, technology, and society perspective, might inform our ongoing debates around the environment.Here's what I said in a blurb for the book:

"A gifted storyteller who brings enormous empathy and nuance to each group she documents, Candis Callison depicts the current discursive struggles over climate change, as such diverse players as corporate responsibility advocates, evangelical Christians, and Inuit tribal leaders, not to mention scientists and journalists, seek to reconcile the need for dramatic change with their existing sets of professional norms and cultural values. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand how science gets refracted across an increasingly diverse media landscape and for anyone who wants to understand how they might be more effective at changing entrenched beliefs and practices."

Callison's work ultimately raises core questions around the public communication of science, sharing insights around how advocates and activists might transform this debate. Before she gets there, she seeks first to understand in subtle and complicated ways why these various players believe what they take to be true about our relationships with the natural world. As she does so, she develops a robust account of different  "vernacular" models of climate change that have to be aligned before we can make progress in dealing with these concerns. We are speaking past each other because we see the world in such fundamentally different ways and we will never convince each other unless we understand the diverse languages through which this debate is being conducted. This books makes an important intervention into what remains one of the central controversies of our time.

I read this book with much personal satisfaction. I had been lucky enough to work with Candis Callison, when she was a masters student in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program more than a decade ago, having come to us with an already established professional career as an award-winning journalist. She went on to complete her PhD in Science, Technology, and Society, also at MIT. She is now  an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Graduate School of Journalism and How Climate Change Comes to Matter is her first book, based in part on her dissertation research. Callison was already an intellectual leader in her graduate cohort  in part because of the enormous respect the faculty and other students had for her deep ethical and political commitments, including her desire to use her scholarship in the service of the indigenous community where she grew up in Canada.  I am so proud of the kind of scholar she has become.

Your introduction suggests that you are seeking to better understand a range of vernacular accounts of climate change. How are you defining vernaculars and what do you see as the relationship between scientific expertise and these more popular modes of describing environmental issues?

First of all, thanks for reading my book and for the kind words you say about it. I’m deeply grateful I got to start my graduate life at MIT in Comparative Media Studies. CMS and your Media Theory class are what started me on a path to thinking more broadly about the many and diverse roles media play in, with, and around public engagement.

I started contemplating using the term, vernacular, because of what I experienced when I talked with people who were actively working to mobilize their concerns about climate change. The ways they were talking about climate change drew to a great extent on how they experienced the world, what mattered to them, and how they conceived of a future they wanted for themselves, their social group – and often, for society as well.

The way I’m using the term vernacular borrows from linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology in order to describe these processes I saw unfolding during my fieldwork. How climate change comes to be meaningful outside of a scientific context depends on how it gets talked about and reframed/reformatted/recontextualized within what people are already concerned about. So, for example, Inuit leaders who were at the forefront of global negotiations around climate change talked about it outside of their communities as a human rights issue in order to account for the fundamental changes that have already begun in the Arctic that will affect their ways of life, their cultural and social practices, and the location of their communities.

What was really interesting to think about is how very different concerns related to climate change sound in other contexts. For corporate social responsibility advocates working with Wall Street investors and corporate leaders, climate change concerns were rearticulated as “climate risk” in order to situate the issue within existing financial frameworks that require attention to fiduciary obligations and responsibilities and an accounting for risks that would harm an investment.

In a church setting, evangelicals talked about climate change as being part of Bible-based concerns and dictates to care for the poor and to be responsible stewards of creation.

You describe this debate as much in terms of questions about why the public should care about climate change as  about who or what they should believe. What are some examples of the reasons the groups you study offer for why their members should care about climate change?

Who and what is considered expert is related to a great extent to credibility, and yet how/where are our ideals of credibility formed? In our daily lives, many will trust the word of a New York Times reporter or a MIT-trained scientist – and we’re likely to assume everyone else does too. Our ideals about who and what is credible are inherently social and cultural, based on collective and historical experiences with institutions and a trust in the methods used to arrive at conclusions, analyses, and predictions. That’s the logic behind much of the work done by many environmental activists – they appeal to wide publics to act, based on evidence most will agree is credible.

Amongst those I interviewed and researched for this book, I encountered this straightforward route, but also, a range of alternative means of establishing credibility and expertise. So, my research became about trying to understand the many ways and means by which scientific evidence comes to matter, what kind of an issue climate change is in specific contexts, and how it is articulated as an issue of concern.

I often half-joke now that I would like epistemology to become a household or ‘headline’ word because how we know what we know -- and how facts get established -- are becoming increasingly open to scrutiny. Just look at the comments after an online story and you see this play out in various ways. But, and this is equally crucial then, the facts that we come to care about and why/how we decide to care about them -- the routes by which concern becomes established -- are equally important.

Candis Callison is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Graduate School of Journalism. She holds a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society and a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies -- both from MIT. Her research and teaching are currently focused on changes to media practices and platforms, journalism ethics, the role of social movements in public discourse, and understanding how issues related to science and technology become meaningful for diverse publics. Her new book, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) uses ethnographic methods and a comparative lens to bring together the work of professional and social groups working to engage diverse publics in an American context. Building in part on this research, Candis has recently begun new research looking at Arctic-based journalism in an era of environmental change, digital media, and global audiences. She is also midway through two research projects that investigate how social networking technologies like Facebook and Twitter are being used both by indigenous communities and by the indigenous-led social movement, Idle No More in Canada. Prior to her academic life, Candis worked as a journalist in Canada and the U.S. for television, radio, and early incarnations of the Internet (think dialup and early broadband). She is a member of the Tahltan Nation located in Northwestern British Columbia.

In Defense of Moe: An Interview with Patrick W. Galbraith (Part Six)

Many of us have a strong sense that gender differences are enforced in Japanese culture. I had the experience of crossing to the wrong section of a manga shop in Akihabara and seeming to create some consternation amongst the other patrons. Yet, in many ways, moe itself involves various kinds of transgressions of gender barriers – men consuming texts created initially for a market of young girls. Can you share with us a bit more about the ways gender is reinforced or transgressed in the moe culture you are describing? What does moe masculinity look like? First of all, I don’t want to give the impression that moe is somehow limited to male fans of media featuring or originally targeting young girls. For one of my first major research projects in Japan, I spent a year with female fans of manga and anime, who referred to themselves as fujoshi, which means “rotten girls.” Why rotten? Well, because they enjoyed watching manga and anime featuring charismatic male characters, who they then would imagine sexual relationships between. They drew fanzines about these imagined romantic and sexual relationships, which they called “couplings,” and then sold these fanzines at conventions or published them online.

Their activities are not really that different from the writers of slash fiction that you wrote about in Textual Poachers, except that they typically were interested in characters from manga, anime and games rather than live-action TV shows and film. This is simply a reflection of the prevalence of manga and anime in Japan, which provides charismatic male characters. Also in line with the prevalence of manga and anime in Japan, these fujoshi tended to draw their fanzines instead of writing textual stories. But aside from growing up in manga and anime culture, fujoshi are not so different from slashers. Indeed, male-male romantic fan-fiction, which is called yaoi in Japan, got started in the late 1970s, which is around the same time that it did in North America and Europe.

The presence of these female fans in Japan in the 1970s is also interesting because they were there in the early days of “otaku culture,” when manga and anime were beginning to attract mature and intense fans. Too often we ignore the presence of these female fans, despite the fact that some of the earliest records of anime fan clubs date back to Umi no Toriton (Triton of the Sea), which was dominated by female fans, including Kotani Mari. The critic Sasakibara Gō goes so far as to say that it is women, not men, who first recognized, celebrated and shared their love of fictional characters. That is, and Sasakibara is quite clear on this, female fans responding to fictional male characters like Triton are the origin of moe culture.

It is perhaps not a surprise that women dominated early attendance of the Comic Market, a central gathering for fanzine buyers and sellers since its founding in 1975, or that women led the charge in drawing sexual parodies of manga and anime characters.

Men were always behind, late to party and responding to what women were already doing. Indeed, just as women consumed across gender/genre lines to find charismatic male characters to slash in their fan works, men then did the same, but in the other direction. The bishōjo or cute girl character, which is now so prevalent in manga and anime, is actually a hybrid of Tezuka Osamu’s manga and shōjo manga, and was developed as a result of women producing manga for boys and men and men producing their own manga in a style inspired by shōjo manga. This is why, in the late 1970s, even as women were pioneering sexual parody fanzines, adult men began to read Ribon, a manga magazine originally intended for young girls.

This gender/genre crossing goes both ways – male to female and female to male. Indeed, Weekly Shōnen Jump, a magazine ostensibly for boys, is not only read by adult men but also a significant number of women. Eventually, the lines blur to the extent that it’s hard to locate the gender/genre boundary. Take for example Sailor Moon, originally a manga for young girls written by a female artist and serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi. It is hard not to notice that Sailor Moon draws on cultural touchpoints that might be categorized as “boys’ culture,” for example a team of young people who transform into color-coded rangers to fight evil. Sailor Moon simply has young women transform into color-coded sailor soldiers to fight evil. It adds a strong dose of melodrama, but its not really so different. Once transformed, the young women wear modified school uniforms with shortened skirts. Is it any wonder that Sailor Moon attracted male fans when it was adapted into a TV anime in the 1990s?The crossing seems calculated at this point.

So, there is certainly a strong tendency to carve the manga and anime market up into target gender and age groups, but there is also a great deal of movement across the boundaries. This typically doesn’t bother anyone, expect perhaps the when adult men come into close proximity with young girls around a shared object of affection, which is to say bishōjo or cute girl characters. The presence of adult men at events surrounding the Sailor Moon anime, which is at least ostensibly for young girls, caused some commotion in the 1990s. Legend has it that when one child began to cry at such an event, one of the women who voices a character in the show defused the situation by referring to the adult males in the room as “big friends” (ōkii otomodachi). It’s a cute story, but my suspicion is that this scene probably makes many people uncomfortable.

Indeed, Mizuko Ito notes a similar discomfort when adults and children came together in the unsupervised environments that sprung up around the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game. There seems to be a general anxiety about adult men being near children, especially adult men interested in fictional girl characters. Even in Japan, when there is a violent crime involving a child, admittedly rare, it is not uncommon for commentators to point out that the perpetrator was a manga or anime fan. As if that explains anything. I have seen politicians in Japan do this, even pointing to cases where the police have not yet revealed if the media that the suspect consumed was in fact manga and anime or not. That is, these politicians have said to me, without a trace of irony, that they can assume the connection to manga and anime because the criminal in question was an adult male who harmed a girl child.

By this point, it’s a foredrawn conclusion – except that it’s tenuous at best and asinine in any case. These men, we are told, spend too much time with manga and anime and are socially isolated and sexually immature. They become warped and cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality. Their desire is suspect, as at any moment their benign perversion might transform into predatory sexuality. That is, by virtue of their interest in cute girl characters in manga and anime, these men become suspected sex criminals.

We are starting to see this all over the world, with arrests and prosecutions for the possession of pornographic (and sometimes not) manga and anime as “child abuse material” in Canada, Australia, the United States and beyond. Men with no record of ever consuming actual or even “pseudo” child pornography, let alone abusing a child, are arrested, convicted and jailed for possessing drawings of purely fictional characters. As these stories circulate in the news, Japan is set up as the perverse sexual “other” of the West, with manga and anime on the whole characterized as child abuse material and anyone who touches it suspected of harboring the darkest of desires.

With all of this negative press, conservative forces in Japan are emboldened to attack manga and anime and argue for stricter regulation. Sometimes the conservative agenda is obvious, as when a library was raked across the coals for making boys’ love manga, which is commercially published and widely available, accessible. The criticism was that young people would be sexually “confused” by this material, though this has not happened since such manga first appeared in Japan in the 1970s. The same logic seems to be at work in saying that manga and anime more generally will lead to “cognitive distortions” about children, though this has not happened in Japan, where manga and anime are widely available.

The conservative and criminalizing discourse about manga and anime is exactly why it’s important to remember the basic definition of moe as a positive response to fictional characters and representations of them. To return to the Sailor Moon scene that might have made us uncomfortable, the adult male fans in the room are not there for the children, but rather for the characters of Sailor Moon. Surrounded by children, they are there to see the drawings, hear the voices and get the merchandise. To conflate desire for the fictional characters with actual children is a gross misunderstanding of Sailor Moon fandom, which potentially makes innocent people suspected criminals. It also ignores that moe is a response in relation to fictional characters, which are kept intentionally separate from reality. Such a critique completely misses the point of the word moe.

What do you hope to achieve with this book?

I hope that the interviews will introduce people unfamiliar with manga and anime to the faces of the men and women, both real and fictional, who are so often talked about rather than talked to. This talking over and around Japan, Japanese fans and criticism in Japanese has led to a seriously biased view of otaku, especially Japanese men who are attracted to fictional girls.

There is a lot of room for more nuance. For example, Kotani Mari talks about “otaku” as those who feel alienated by hegemonic masculinity, as “strange men” who struggle for alternatives. We can certainly see that in people like Itō Kimio, though this male reader of shōjo manga is not among those identified or identifying as an “otaku.” But when it’s Honda Tōru talking about his love for fictional girls, for cute characters, this guru of moe seems like a walking otaku stereotype. We tend to point and laugh rather than listen to what he’s saying, which reveals his own deep discomfort with hegemonic masculinity. Until we actually begin to see the faces and hear the voices, it is difficult to even entertain Honda Tōru’s ideas about “moe men.”

At its worst, its most poisonous, the bias against male otaku in Japan makes it seem as if merely hearing them out and letting them speak is apologia for “perversion” and “pornography” that endangers real children. It’s a gothic narrative, and this iteration of otaku are the bad guys. If you don’t stand against the bad guys, then you stand against the good guys and are one of the bad guys.

There is no way to raise questions about moe in such an environment. It is in this impossible environment that I decided to focus my interviews on male otaku in Japan. It was a purely strategic decision meant as a response to and intervention into the most reactionary discourses that demonize and criminalize manga and anime fans.

In the future, I hope to do another book focusing on female fans, male characters and moe. Or, better yet, an expanded edition that is not segregated based on the sex/gender of fans and characters. As we can see from the fact that Itō Noizi, a female artist, is one of the most popular illustrators of these characters, bishōjo should not be reduced to “male fetishes” of “sex objects.” I tend to agree with Momoi Halko, who is incidentally also a female artist, when she describes interactions with manga and anime characters as potentially taking us beyond a bodily, binary understanding of male/female into imaginative dimensions of sex/gender.

Patrick W. Galbraith received a Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of Tokyo, and is currently pursuing a second Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan (Kodansha International, 2009), Tokyo Realtime: Akihabara(White Rabbit Press, 2010), Otaku Spaces (Chin Music Press, 2012) and The Moe Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime and Gaming (Tuttle, 2014), and the co-editor of Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture (Palgrave, 2012) and Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan: Historical Perspectives and New Horizons (Bloomsbury, 2015).

There's Ain't No Moe!