The Multiplicity and Diversity of Fandom: An Interview with Fansplaining's Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel (Part Three)

You have argued against assuming that all forms of fan culture are transgressive or resistance, a position with which I strongly agree. The status of slash as a political expression has shifted as GLBT representations have become more mainstream and commonplace. Why do you think this transgressive reading of fandom has been so persistent? What do you see as the investments within fandom in seeing themselves in these terms?

Elizabeth: I have a lot of thoughts about this—I’ve written about it and we’ve had entire episodes on the topic. One thing I’d say from the outset is while I don’t believe that male/male slash is even remotely the act of transgression it once was, it’s undeniable that amongst the types of media that transformative fandom tends to gravitate towards, canonical queerness and queer relationships are still a rarity. Fans are queering texts in genres that still fail to deliver significant queer representation; that makes this conversation even more complicated. And from my vantage watching the way the media, dominated by straight men, talks about and engages with fans, there is certainly still an element of bafflement and even derision about slash. “Why slash?” A question that will not die!

That being said, in 2017, I think the way you characterize our stance on slash as political or transgressive is correct. I was chatting about this with Anne Jamison oh, maybe 18 months ago—some of our conversation made it into this article—and she had a theory that really resonated with me. Acafans talk about affect all the time, but fans rarely do, even using simpler language; how often do you see people arguing on behalf of their favorite show or character or ship by saying, “It just brings me a lot of pleasure.” If the act of shipping and romantic desires around a text is largely coded as female, there might be some subconscious internalized misogyny at work here; I ship these guys because it is Serious and Important and Vital for Gay Rights, not because it brings me pleasure, because my (female) pleasure is frivolous and foolish.

Flourish: I think you’re absolutely right, and I also think that the idea that your pleasure might be also serious and important is heady stuff to lots of people! It marches well with sex-positive feminism, for example. I think that it’s easy to think of it as—wow, I can have my cake and eat it too!

And you can have your cake and eat it too; it’s not wrong to say that slash can be important, serious expression as well as romantic, sexy, and/or fun reading. But that can become an armor against critique, against gay men saying “this seems like you’re fetishizing gay dudes,” against people pointing out that slash sometimes writes women out of stories entirely, et cetera. I think that that armor, that method of defending yourself against critique, is very important to some people. Humans find it hard to hold two or three ideas in their head at once: Slash is important in creating queer representation; it’s fun and pleasurable for many people and that’s important too; but slash can sometimes be regressive, sexist, or fetishizing.

Elizabeth: And I think that the limits of the “progressiveness” of slash shipping patterns also belies how flimsy the “it’s politically important” argument is to both of us. Rukmini Pande, a scholar who’s been on the podcast twice now, is the person who really clarified this for me: she talked about how slash so often means only specific sorts of bodies: white, first and foremost, but also cisgender, able-bodied, etc. Sometimes fandom seems to go out of its way to seek out white men to slash, stepping around canonical characters of color and thrusting background white dudes, especially ones who look and act certain ways, to the forefront of fanworks. It’s systemic, and it’s pervasive. And I think it’s impossible to have a conversation about queer fanworks without talking about it.

You have consistently brought in historical perspectives about fandom into the program. Why should fans care about the history of fandom? What have been the most interesting insights you've discovered along the way?

Flourish: To me, the history of fandom is most interesting where it helps us think about our fandom today. I’m interested in the way that supporters of the Blues in Byzantine chariot racing rioted, but the reason I’m interested is mostly that football fans riot today. And that’s not to say that there’s any sort of coherent lineage between chariot racing and Manchester United. It’s to say that humans are humans, and have always been humans. By seeing the patterns people fall into, we can learn something about ourselves, and about our fandoms.

At times, I’ve thought of fandom history as a way to establish a lineage or a hierarchy of authority. This is a pretty common way that people think about fandom history—go on Tumblr and search for “fandom grandma” or “foremothers of fandom” or something like that and you’ll see an infinite number of people over the age of 40 holding forth on how Kids Today Just Don’t Remember How Hard It Was When We Had To Mimeo Our Zines And Pay For Shipping Both Ways, And Mimeo Fades, Dagnabbit. There’s an implicit plea for attention, often: “this stuff is important, so lend me your ears (and don’t listen to those newbies, they don’t know shit from shinola).” Sometimes it seems like people are upset that fandom has moved on from their favorite sites, zines, or fannish practices, so they’ve turned to cataloging what it was like “in their day” and insisting that that’s really important. And sometimes I’ve fallen into this trap and claimed authority just because I’ve been in fandom longer than others. (Whoops.)

Yet I do think that fandom history can be really important for fans today, especially fans who feel like fandom is shameful. Lots of fans still feel that way, and feel very isolated, believing fannish behaviors to be some kind of weird, avant-garde thing that’s only come to be with the advent of Tumblr or the internet. They don’t need to feel that way, because people have been behaving like fans forever, long before we had the word “fan.” These behaviors are part of human nature! I hope that anyone who doesn’t know that has the opportunity to study enough fan history to be aware that they’re part of a glorious tapestry of people freaking out about how much they love things.
 

You often move beyond our stereotypical understanding of fandom in terms of the community of women who write fanfiction to include fans of sports, popular music, and gaming.  Again, academic writers have struggled to bridge between these different forms of fandom. What do you find they have in common? What are main points of difference? Does this help us to refine our definitions of fans and fandom?

Flourish: I think it’s easy to see the ways that these different forms of fandom connect. Is there really that much difference between a person waiting in line to see Harry Styles and a person waiting in line to see the Harry Potter presentation in Hall H of SDCC? Of course there are differences, but the lines in both cases are long; people camp out; people wear costumes; some bring fanfiction to read; everyone is thrilled if a celebrity comes by and visits the line.

Part of the issue here is really internet-enabled fandom. I believe that fandom has become more “same-ish” across different properties and different media types because the internet has enabled people to see more, to search for more, to find more types of people. The person who loves Harry Styles may write fanfiction because they read fanfiction about Harry Potter when they were a kid (or vice versa) (hey, it’s me!). But fifty or sixty years ago, the person who turned up for the Beatles was less likely to be the person who went to a Star Trek convention, not because people who like the Beatles don’t like Star Trek, but just because it was so unlikely that you’d ever find out about either a gathering of Beatles fans or a Star Trek convention. How? The newspaper? Rumors from your friends? Not so easy as just Googling or finding a trending hashtag on Twitter.

As far as points of difference, I think that the main point of difference is the way the wider culture treats these different types of fandom. Since time immemorial people have pointed out that if you come in to your Boston office on a Red Sox game day wearing your Red Sox gear, it’s normal and even team-building, but if you come in dressed as Captain Kirk on the day a new Star Trek movie comes out, it’s absurd and career-damaging. One of the reasons it’s easier to see the similarities, though, is how those differences are a little less stark than they used to be. People watch Game of Thrones like it was the World Series. Dressing up as Daenerys is still a big statement, but it’s not quite the brand of eternal nerd shame that it once might have been.

I wonder if this cultural difference isn’t the reason that academic writers have struggled to bridge between different types of fannishness. People don’t publish very much about sports in the Transformative Works and Cultures, even though (as we learned in our interview with Cecilia Tan) baseball fans cosplay, they re-enact historical games, they write what seems an awful lot like real person fanfic (but not called that, of course.) People who write about sports fandoms do it in their own journals, and they’re often (in my admittedly limited experience) more focused on marketing: those fandoms have been culturally recognized as socially OK and as a source of profit for longer, and in our capitalist system that’s one of the reasons they have more cachet, I think.

Flourish Klink is half of Fansplaining. She is Chief Research Officer and a partner in Chaotic Good Studios, where she develops entertainment franchises and helps companies and brands understand fan culture. She was formerly a partner in The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. and led fan strategy for the award-winning Hulu Original show East Los High. As a teenager, Flourish helped organize the first ever Harry Potter fan convention and was a co-founder of FictionAlley.org. She holds an MS from MIT and a BA from Reed College.

Elizabeth Minkel is the other half of Fansplaining. She's written about fan culture for the New Statesman, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Millions, and more. She's the audience development editor at Storythings, where she helps both foster and study communities of
readers. She's also the co-curator of The Rec Center, a weekly fandom newsletter she writes with fellow fan culture journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. She studied English at Amherst College and has an MA in the digital humanities from University College London.

An Interview with Fansplaining's Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel (Part Two)

You recently surveyed your listeners to get a clearer sense of how they defined fanfiction. What were some of the more interesting insights to emerge from this discussion?

Flourish: The survey was pretty provisional and unscientific! But for me, the most interesting takeaway was that the newer people were to fanfic and fandom, the less of a line they drew between fanfic and original fiction. Nearly everyone we surveyed agreed that it was really important that fanfic was based on a source text—that is, most people shared a formalist definition. But people who used a cluster of terms that we called “fanfiction is nonprofessional” (making statements like “fanfiction is unauthorized,” that it is “not written by the original creator,” that it is “not for profit,” that it is “distributed for free,” or that it is “amateur,” “unprofessional,” “noncommercial” or “nonliterary”) were more likely to have entered fandom earlier, often in the 1990s.

My unsubstantiated theory is that fandom was much more discrete in the 1990s, because the entertainment industry was more litigious. Today, companies like Wattpad have closed that gap. So people who have gotten involved with fanfiction more recently don’t believe that there is as much of a difference between fanfic and what older fans might call “profic.”

What I personally realized, more than any insights the survey gave, was how much I would love to do a properly representative study of the entire United States and learn about the wider public’s fannish behavior patterns and perceptions of fandom. The study we did, and nearly every study I’ve seen (with the exception of one completed by the agency Troika last year), involved only people who were tangentially aware of fandom or knew to call their own behaviors “fannish.” I’d love to see a study that was carefully designed to measure fannish types of behavior separate from the “fandom” label, and given to people who aren’t necessarily already part of fan culture.

I know when I was writing Textual Poachers there were certain topics which were basically taboo to discuss outside the fan community—at the time, real person slash was perhaps the biggest one of these. Are there still taboos within fandom? If so, are there any topics that you have discussed in the podcast that have drawn fire from people in the fan community?

Elizabeth: There are certainly topics that provoke a great deal of debate in transformative media fandom spaces these days—I’m not sure I’d describe them as taboo, since they are widely practiced and have strong defenders and detractors, but conversations about, say, whether people should be allowed to create explicit fanworks involving underage characters, or whether people should be allowed to depict rape in fanworks, are mainstays on my Tumblr dash these days. These are murky conversations, and we haven’t necessarily avoided these topics, but we haven’t devoted full episodes to them, just touched on them in passing.

Often complex intra-fandom discussions that we’ve devoted full episodes to include topics like racism in fandom and the intersections between queer shipping, queer representation, and queerphobia. I don’t want to call any of these topics taboo—at all. But they certainly are conversations that tend to be strongly critical of fans and fandom at large—the same critiques we have for the media and content creators extend to fandom’s consumption and creation as well.

For the racism conversations in particular we’ve worked to center as many fans of color, especially black fans, as we can; we’re extraordinarily aware of the limitations of two white women talking about race and fan culture. I definitely see a sort of defensive pushback from fans with these conversations about fandom and marginalized identities—the old “I’m just here to have fun” line—but the response to our fandom-critical episodes has been pretty positive. I mean, we’re not actively googling ourselves here, there could be plenty of hate out there for any of what we do, but we’re not getting angry messages in our inbox.

One topic we circle that I think tends to touch a nerve is the monetization of fanworks, specifically fanfiction—whenever we bring it up we get a good amount of pushback (often against things we aren’t even advocating—a fair bit of it feels like a knee-jerk response to another set of ideas). A few people have even included our podcast (and the work we do with fandom professionally) in their criticism: they disapprove of anyone “profiting off of fandom” in any capacity.

Perhaps tangentially related: we get a bit of pushback when we talk about the evolution of the culture of critique in a lot of fanfiction spaces, how it’s taboo (there we go!) in a lot of spheres to give critical or negative feedback on fanworks. Flourish and I are coming from tricky positions here: most of the work we put out in the world is in a professional context, but it’s also heavily scrutinized and critiqued. (I can tell you from editing Flourish that she actually expects—even welcomes!—her work being torn apart.)   

Flourish: I agree with what Elizabeth has said, and want to note that I think the reason why some of those taboos have broken down is because of the way that fan culture has come more fully into contact with capitalism. (Only slightly kidding.) Take, for example, Wattpad. Fanfic archives didn’t prioritize mobile reading and writing, because they were run by people primarily seeking to serve the needs of their existing community, not to imagine the needs of a possible larger community and innovate to draw them in. So people who prefer to consume and create stories on phones found Wattpad and began creating fanfic there. Wattpad took notice and, to their credit, began learning about fandom and trying to appeal to a segment of fanfic authors. But in so doing they discovered real person fanfiction and began to publicize it. In other cases fanfic authors were doing this themselves, as 50 Shades of Grey began to break down the idea that if you file the serial numbers off your fanfic you should have the courtesy to hide it.

In other words, money is what has made these taboos weaken, and I don’t hide the fact that I think this is an inexorable force that ends in the commodification of all parts of fan culture. My main hope is that fans can leverage this change to protect their rights, be taken more seriously by the culture at large, and preserve spaces in which fans can create transformative works for love and not money. But, of course, not everybody shares this view.

Francesca Coppa recently published an anthology of fanfiction for use in the classroom. What criteria would you use to determine which stories to include in such a book?  Do you have any general insights in terms of how fans assess the quality of fan works?

Elizabeth: I’m not 100% sure I would be publishing such a book! :-) But the question of how fans assess fanworks fascinates both of us—we devoted a whole episode to it, talking with my newsletter partner, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, another fandom journalist. Gav and I have been collaborating on The Rec Center for nearly 100 issues at this point: it’s a weekly newsletter where we share fandom-related articles, our favorite Tumblr and Twitter posts, fanart (with permission!), and a dedicated fanfic section, 5-10 recs written by one of us, a guest poster, or culled from our one-off submissions form that readers submit to every week.

Early on we sent out a survey to readers asking for feedback and trying to get a sense of preferences—were people fandom-monogamous when they read? Did they prefer certain types of fic over others? It was a relatively small sample—only a few hundred readers—but I was really surprised to see how many people said they would read fic without knowing the source material it was based on. I cannot do this; I actually have a hard time reading fic from fandoms I’ve been in but have drifted away from, even though I remember those stories as being technically good as well as emotionally meaningful. For me, fic is wrapped up in my feelings about the source material at the time, so much so that I wonder sometimes if it affects my critical judgement of a work.

So to put together an anthology would be to strip out all that context—which I know is not an issue for a lot of fanfic readers! But it certainly is for some: fanfiction separated from that active fannish feeling about the source material—a friend recently described this, for her, as a lightswitch that gets flipped on and off—can be, for some people, missing some integral part of the work. For others, fanfic divorced from the communal is similarly incomplete, whether this means actual dialogue with fic writers and other readers or simply a fic’s contextual position within fanon or a body of fanfiction.

Flourish: Like Elizabeth, I don’t particularly love the idea of reading fanfiction without the context of the original work. So while I really like Francesca’s book, and think it’s a good idea, I would prefer to assign students fanfiction based on something I can assign them to read or watch in the context of the class. It’s not enough to assign a class an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then give them Buffy fanfic to read, in my opinion. I’d rather give them an Inception story to read, after assigning them the movie to watch. In my experience, the new Star Trek movies have been a boon: students with Trek familiarity get a lot out of reading Trek fanfic, but even a student who’s never seen Star Trek can watch the 2009 movie and know enough to at least begin approaching fic.

I think emotional engagement with the source material is a significant part of fan reading and writing, but for me it’s only one of two pleasures I get from fanfic, and I don’t need every story to fulfill both pleasures. The other pleasure is the pleasure of seeing a clever argument made about the source material. This is the Wide Sargasso Sea model of fanfic and I think it’s much easier to teach. You can’t induce someone to feel a particular way about canon and so understand from the inside the feeling of reading a fic that is just perfectly about your OTP. But you can show someone a story that’s making a fabulously convincing and clear argument about a source text and they can understand that argument whether or not they have that affective response.

If I were picking stories to teach, I would certainly lead with that type of “argument story,” but I would try to include stories that are primarily valuable for emotional engagement reasons as well—tropey stories, stories that exist solely for shipping purposes, stories that are short and plotless and just drop you into a character like a warm bath. I think that these stories, which many people might dismiss as “bad” from an outsider’s perspective, actually get at the heart of a lot of what people love from fanfic, and so even if there’s not a hope in the world of getting that across, I’d like to talk about it. (Of course, this runs the risk of suggesting to students that fanfic stories are either great arguments or emotionally engaging, which is very far from the truth, but nothing’s perfect.)

Elizabeth: So to add on that, it’s my understanding that Anne Jamison, who teaches fic in the classroom, tries to choose works from very well-known source material—most of her students will have some knowledge of, say, Sherlock Holmes, or Harry Potter. So that gets to your understanding of the source text worry. But like I said, there are lots of fic readers out there who don’t care about the source text—maybe it’s a self-selecting pool of people who are really into fanfiction at large, but the fact that so many of The Rec Center’s readers don’t need source material knowledge was really telling to me—as is the popularity of things like high school and college AUs, soulmate AUs, Hogwarts AUs, some modern AUs for non-modern source material, and other intra-fandom tropes that often talk more to each other, across fandoms, than they do to the source material from which they’re derived.

And I know Flourish tried to backtrack a bit from creating a binary between “great arguments” and “emotionally engaging”—for me, a fic really needs to have both, so that blows the binary right there—but I also want to push back against the idea that “emotionally engaging” means things like “tropey stories, stories that exist solely for shipping purposes, stories that are short and plotless and just drop you into a character like a warm bath.” For me, a lot of the time that great argument is directly tied up in my emotional engagement with the source material.

But I think what Flourish writes here is directly tied up in how tricky it is to explain fic to non-fic people, and how difficult it is to talk about affect without resorting to “some stories make serious arguments and other ones are id-pleasing warm baths.”  A lot of my journey as a ~fandom professional has been, I don’t know, maturing out of my desire to prove that some fanfiction was very Serious Literature, and today a lot of my work is getting people to take the practice seriously, rather than trying to lift up the “serious stories.” But that’s easier to teach in the context of fan studies, where you’re looking at fans and their practices, than it is to teach in an English class, when you’re primarily looking at texts rather than readers and writers. Luckily neither of us are compiling these anthologies or teaching these classes, so I guess we’re safe for now!

Flourish: And now all your readers understand what it’s like when we record our podcast and get into arguments in which we basically agree with each other! (We can’t help it.)

 A central media narrative in recent years has centered around "toxic fandom", and in particular, white male fan backlash against diversity casting. Yet, we also know that many fans have been strong advocates of diversity and inclusion in popular media franchises. How would you characterize the current state of the debate within fandom around these issues?

Elizabeth: [long weary sigh] Fandom isn’t broken and fandom isn’t inherently toxic, but fandom is undeniably a mess right now. And the straight white male fan reactionaries are using the same channels, and often the same techniques, as the fans who are clamoring for increased diversity in pop culture media—I understand why people try to draw these parallels! But I also see “fans clamoring for more diversity” to be pretty muddled in practice: many, many fans are doing so in good faith (and the sort of pop culture texts that draw in fandom have a *particularly* bad track record on this front—has there been an explicit acknowledgement of any queer character in any of the superhero franchises onscreen? Don’t get me started on Star Wars...) but there are certainly fans who are using calls for diversity as a weapon to bludgeon other fans in ship wars, as justification for harassing creators who don’t validate their ship, etc.

Meanwhile fandom isn’t particularly good at cleaning its own house, as it were: within fandom, conversations about racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc, can be met with reactionary defensiveness.

People often suggest that when our screens become more diverse, when we actually see a broad range of queer characters, or characters of any given racial and/or ethnic background, or we finally dump the ratio of 7 dudes to 1 lady in every group teaming up to fight the bad guys, then a lot of this will die down. I’m skeptical, to put it lightly. Look at Harry, Ron, and Hermione: ship wars get ugly even when people are fighting about which white dude the woman should wind up with. (I’m feeling fairly cynical about all of this right now because my current fandom has a lot of queer rep, about half the main cast, and I still see the same fights and patterns replicated in fandoms where there are zero canonically queer characters.)

Fan/creator interaction remains one of the top things we discuss on Fansplaining, and it’s a fraught topic to explore right now—it’s easy enough to say that these are the “growing pains” of the mainstreaming of fandom and the exposure of both sides of that fan/creator divide to each other via social media, but in practice, it’s hard to see past that to a world where fans’ desires aren’t weaponized in the way they are now. Add on top of that my general sense that the “mainstreaming” only goes so far: people outside fandom only have a fraction of the whole picture, and wind up running with their assumptions.

I can see why fandom looks toxic to someone who hasn’t actually spent any time in the world. I can see why creators would be totally freaked out by the exchanges they see on Twitter. But I also see creators learning all the wrong lessons from these exchanges—and I’m not sure how we stop these cycles.

Flourish: And this goes both ways! One of the reason “toxic fans” are considered toxic, whether they are pro-diversity or not, is that they lash out directly at creators, many of whom don’t have the kind of power fans think they do. While I have more sympathy for the politics of some groups of fans that do this than others, the fact remains that whether you are sending threats to a creator for making a character queer or for not making a character queer, you are still sending threats.

But I think it’s wrongheaded to view this as “toxic fandom” alone. We see the same kind of behavior exhibited in politics and in every other arena of life. In my opinion, what we are really dealing with here is the result of the social media systems that shape our daily interactions, and these systems have the greatest impact on our behavior when we’re using them to connect with people we don’t know or rarely interact with in person. Most of the time we talk about this with regard to the increasing polarization of the public, not just in the United States but everywhere that social media exists (which is everywhere). But I think it has a great impact on fandom as well.

Unfortunately, neither fans nor anyone else seem to be talking about the structural problems that impact our behavior. It’s a lot easier to frame things in a personal responsibility narrative: “toxic fans need to not be such jerks,” “people who advocate for diversity but then use toxic tactics should be kicked out of fandom,” etc. But I don’t think that personal responsibility and good judgment alone will get us out of these cycles, which fundamentally continue (at least in part) because of the way our communities and communication methods are designed.

Flourish Klink is half of Fansplaining. She is Chief Research Officer and a partner in Chaotic Good Studios, where she develops entertainment franchises and helps companies and brands understand fan culture. She was formerly a partner in The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. and led fan strategy for the award-winning Hulu Original show East Los High. As a teenager, Flourish helped organize the first ever Harry Potter fan convention and was a co-founder of FictionAlley.org. She holds an MS from MIT and a BA from Reed College.

Elizabeth Minkel is the other half of Fansplaining. She's written about fan culture for the New Statesman, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Millions, and more. She's the audience development editor at Storythings, where she helps both foster and study communities of
readers. She's also the co-curator of The Rec Center, a weekly fandom newsletter she writes with fellow fan culture journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. She studied English at Amherst College and has an MA in the digital humanities from University College London.

The Multiplicity and Diversity of Fandom: An Interview with Fansplaining's Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel (Part One)

Throughout this year, I am showcasing work about fandom at a time when the field of fandom studies is once again reinventing itself, often in very dramatic ways.

People often ask me where I go to learn about contemporary developments in fandom and fandom studies. Much of the time, I don't have to go anywhere, because being who I am, many people come to me to seek advice on their projects in this space. I also might go to some of the academic journals, such as Transformative Works and Cultures or The Journal of Fandom Studies, or the great folks at the Fan Studies Network. But I also listen most weeks to the Fansplaining Podcast, which is one of the very best way to keep on top of new developments in this space.

Its hosts Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel get so much right with this podcast. It is, as they note in this interview, not the place you go to get fan theories about Game of Thrones, not that there's anything wrong with that. They are doing what fans call Meta, asking big questions about how fandom works, who gets included or excluded from fandom, how fans intersect with the industry or journalism, why fans do what they do -- in other words, it is about fandom culture and its practices, not about the shows fans love. They may have Orlando Jones as a guest one week and an academic studying race and fandom the next. They work hard to insure a diverse and inclusive representation of fandom, week by week, and in the process, they often help me to discover new and emerging perspectives in the field who had not crossed my radar in any other way. I do not know how they do it -- stay some far ahead on the trends and consistently call attention to new voices and new ideas. They often allow room for graduate students and junior scholars who are not yet being heard elsewhere, and in the process, they are helping to define the next generation of researchers in this space.

I've wanted for a LONG time to feature Flourish Klink (my former student) and Elizabeth Minkel on my blog and I could not be happier to finally be able to do so. 

Tell us something of your background in fandom and how it relates to your professional life. How did you come to start Fansplaining and what have been your goals for the podcast?

Flourish: I’m a long-time Harry Potter fan with a lot of involvement in the fan community—with fanfic archives, conventions, all of the things that require you to get off the internet and physically interact with lots of strangers. In my professional life, I work in audience research, basically combining the “big data” that's produced out of sales, website traffic, and social media tracking with qualitative research into individual fandoms. Another way to put it would be “explaining fandom to Hollywood,” and I got the job in fact because of fandom—Henry, you know this, but I got my start through studying fandom with you at MIT.

Elizabeth: I’ve been in fandom about as long as Flourish, but I’ve only been speaking up for the past half-decade: I was a lurker for my first decade-plus (most of which was also spent in HP fandom). I started talking in 2012: I was a book journalist—working both as a critic and writing about the industry and culture around books—and 50 Shades of Grey came out and book journalism did...a very bad job talking about its fanfiction-al origins. I had been warned against talking about fandom in my professional work, but I was too annoyed to stay silent (ha). I wrote a few explicitly fandomy pieces over the next few years, but it wasn’t until the third season of Sherlock aired and, once again, people had a lot of bad takes on the fannish reactions, that I felt compelled to speak up (there’s a pattern here). I started writing a regular column on fan culture not long after, both explaining fandom practices to a mainstream audience and standing up for fans as they clashed with both the media and content creators.

The podcast grew out of a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015. Flourish and I had never met but we wound up on the same (too-large) panel of people who straddled the intersection between creators and fans. Our go-to line is that everyone on the panel was having a different conversation—but Flourish and I were having the same one. Afterwards she approached me about starting a podcast; I laughed and said sure, why not, assuming this was the sort of throwaway suggestion you make at a party. But Flourish was not kidding: a few days after we flew back from San Diego, we were having a long and very business-like call where we were setting up the whole thing

Flourish: I suggested the idea to Elizabeth because I felt like, in my professional life, I’d seen people working and talking in a register that was somewhere triangulated between academic discourse, fannish discourse, and journalistic discourse. But I didn’t know of any forum that used that kind of tone. Most places seemed to lean one way or another, or seemed to be very focused on a particular fandom, not on the phenomenon of fannishness.

Of course, our goals have evolved over the course of 60 episodes. Today it’s especially important to us that we feature a diversity of voices in terms of race, gender, sexuality etc., and partially as a result of so doing, to include a wide range of types of fannishness. There’s always more to do in these directions.

Elizabeth: I can think of two major themes that have emerged over the course of these 60 episodes. One is striking a balance between loving and critical—the same line that many fans walk as they talk about their favorite thing. We get messages from people, they leave reviews, etc, saying how grateful they are that we’re critical of fandom and fannish practices; I always feel like there’s a little bit of surprise in there, which is interesting, because I think a lot of meta-fandom posts within fandom are pretty critical. One thing I always feel frustrated by in my work for mainstream outlets is I when I stand up for fandom in my pieces, I feel like there isn’t a ton of space to critique while I defend. The podcast lets me do both.

The other major thing is what Flourish has already touched on—we’re talking about behaviors and ideas, not about the cultural products that fandom focuses on. We actually get a ton of requests like this—“Talk to my friend in X fandom!”—from people who don’t seem to be familiar with our work: at this point, it should be pretty clear that we’re talking about fannish practices, not about objects of fandom. We often lean on specific fandoms for examples—we worry sometimes we bring up Harry Potter too much, but it’s our only real shared point of reference, and, to be fair, it’s the place where we both have spent the most time in fandom. But we’re not interested in deconstructing Harry Potter itself, even through a fannish lens. (We save this for our patrons-only episodes, of which we’ve done a handful so far.) I think the fannish podcast landscape is only growing more crowded, but the vast majority of the podcasts out there are about specific fannish objects or fannish projects (watching every episode of a show, for example). Which is awesome! But it’s just not us.

You focused some of your early podcasts on the relations between fans and the media industries, in part because of Flourish's involvement there, so let's use that as a starting point. What do you see as some of the core ways that people in the entertainment industry misunderstand or mistreat their fans? What are some of the things fans misperceive about the way the contemporary media industry operates?

Flourish: These two questions are very interrelated. In both cases, the problem is often oversimplification. Fans don’t know all the roles or understand the power plays that go into making even the simplest decisions on a TV show (for example), so they often end up advocating for outcomes they want in ways that aren't going to ever succeed. (And, by the way, why should they know all the roles? The entertainment industry is purposely opaque. It’s a club you have to fight to get into and you can't really see what's going on except from the inside.)

Similarly, not every person who works on a TV show has the mental space or the inclination to immerse themselves in complex fan cultures (and the plural is important: it’s not like there’s a single fan culture, even for one property!), so they'll form simple “good-enough” ideas about what fans are into: “Trekkies are dudes who care about the blueprints of the Enterprise,” "Fans freak out with joy when the two male characters almost kiss so let's do more of that even though the characters aren't gay." These are simple assumptions that aren't completely unsupported, but they miss important aspects of the fandoms in question!

And those assumptions are the good assumptions, the ones that get made when people are invested in and trying to understand what their fans are saying. When you get into the upper echelons of the industry, many people don’t even try, because they don’t see hardcore fans as being a significant impact on their bottom line. Those people are the ones who say, “I can make Two and a Half Men and make money hand over fist without any ‘fan culture’ to speak of. Why should I bother?” When you mix someone like that with a property with a strong fan culture, it’s never pretty. But the core of it is that people with that attitude do not believe that fans are important to their bottom line (and fans are absolutely not the only group they feel that way about—not that that’s any comfort).

You have come back to some of these issues recently with some discussions of shipping and showrunners. How has the awareness of fan response started to shape the choices showrunners make, for better or worse? Is there such a thing as too much fan service and if so, can you point to some good examples?

Flourish: I’m not entirely sure how to answer this, because it can be very hard to know what decisions are shaped by fan input, what decisions were always planned (people prevaricate about this sort of thing all the time) and even what decisions aren’t decisions at all but are shaped by the paratext that marketing provides—for example, an official social media account run by a show’s marketing team may really push a particular pairing or reading that’s never been planned as “endgame.” Marketing departments are incentivized to do this because they notice particular keywords, often ships, getting traction, and their metric of success is clicks, shares, eyeballs. They’ll usually jump on any bandwagon quickly, no matter what the showrunner’s opinion or plan is, and not worry about the long term impact that might have on the way fans read a text. As a result of this stew, I’m hesitant to call out particular examples. I don’t know enough details about what goes on behind the scenes of any particular show.

Elizabeth: If I can jump in here with a little fan perspective, or maybe more like, perspectives on fandom: I think that many fans believe they are far more influential than they actually are, even in an era of heightened visibility on both sides of the fan/creator divide. My favorite example was after episode 3.1 of Sherlock, “The Empty Hearse,” a meta-textual commentary on fannish/viewer conversations on how Sherlock survived the fall at the end of the second season. In the two-year hiatus between seasons, this was a major topic of conversation in all sorts of fannish corners and amongst millions of casual fans in Britain—British newspapers published articles speculating how he did it, that sort of thing. The actual episode offered up a bunch of theories, some jokey, some serious, and the punchline of it all was that no solution would be as satisfying as the act of speculation itself.

On Tumblr after the episode aired there was a ton of commentary along the lines of, “OMG they are totally looking at Tumblr for their ideas!” And people dredged up headcanons, fics, metas, that shared themes or concepts with what wound up in the episode. This frustrated me; this isn’t rocket science. The idea that TV writers would need to mine Tumblr for ideas seems like a fairly egocentric way for fans to position themselves? Finally someone wrote a post that expressed exactly what I was thinking: I could never find it now, but to paraphrase, it was something like, “Folks, there are thousands of us generating ideas in exponential combinations; the odds that, amongst all those combinations, we will hit on the same ideas as the writers are fairly good.”

I thought about this, too, when I saw people discussing Korrasami, the f/f ship from the Legend of Korra, becoming canon in the show’s finale. “It was because fans shipped it!” I saw flying across my dash. “They listened to us and made it happen.” A quick Google led to an interview with the creator saying he’d planned it from the start, long before there were any fans to ship these characters. I think this sort of underscores the trend of shipping fandom thinking of themselves as detectives solving a case: when a writer is planning on bringing characters together, they likely leave some subtextual clues and build-up along the way.

Again, this is not rocket science: if you pick up on subtext that then becomes text, it’s likely because the writer did a decent job? And these are exceptions—most of the time, fans want something, and are even picking up on very real subtext, but it will never become text. What can feel like secret clues to a master plan often don’t amount to anything more than that. A lot of the biggest dust-ups in fan/creator interaction in the past few years have been over ships (not) becoming canon; I do think creators are seeing fans talking about this stuff—but that doesn’t mean they’re following fans’ wishes. If anything, I can mostly think of examples where the opposite is true.

Flourish: I always tell fans to assume that the Powers That Be are half as together and aware of fandom as you think they are. That’s not an insult directed at any individual writer or showrunner; it’s just that when you get a lot of people working on a TV show together, things get lost the cracks, and collective intelligence doesn’t always function as smoothly as one would hope.

Now, let's slide this over to Elizabeth's expertise—how would you assess the current state of reporting on fans and fan related issues? Have we made progress over some of the stereotypical and dismissive representations in the past? What role have fan blogs and podcasts played, if any, in challenging dominant media narratives about fans?

Elizabeth: It’s funny—I’ve been a fan culture journalist for five years now, and I’d have given you a wildly different answer at the end of each of the past five years, from everyone’s favorite trend of talk show hosts mocking fanworks to the misunderstandings on all sides as fandom became more mainstream. But at the close of 2017, here’s what I’m observing:

A few weeks ago I gave a “fandom 101” talk at a conference largely for professional content creators. To take the temperature of the room, I asked the crowd of about 150 people a series of questions. “How many of you consider yourselves in fandom?” Only a couple of hands went up. (It was at this moment when I realized that I needed to make things far more 101 than I thought I would!) I continued: “How many of you know the term ‘transformative work?’” Roughly the same hands—just a few. But when I asked, “How many of you know what ‘fanfiction’ is?” the majority of people in the room raised their hands. “And finally, the term ‘shipping?’” The same: most people in the room said they knew it.

After the talk, multiple people came up to me and said something along the lines of, “I didn’t raise my hand when you asked who was in fandom, but after your talk I realized I totally was in fandom.” This really struck me, as did the disparity between the “who’s in fandom” question and the number of people who said they know about fic and shipping.

I think this reflects the way that fannish practices and terms have only sort of seeped into mainstream culture—lots of people have heard of shipping, or can give a rough definition for it, but they don’t actually understand it, and often fill in the gaps in their understanding with a lot of (bad) assumptions. Tons of people are out there assuming they understand these fandom terms—and maybe gatekeeping themselves out of fannish practices based on poorly-informed assumptions, like those people who didn’t raise their hands during my talk.

The other big trend I’m seeing—which overlaps a bit with the half-formed fandom assumptions—is the conflation of “geek culture” with fandom. This is partly driven by these mainstream conceptions, partly driven by the entertainment industry (take a stroll through SDCC or NYCC and you’ll see “fandom” used as a quick-and-dirty stand-in for a relatively narrow set of cultural products rather than behaviors or communities, specifically SF/F, comics, and superhero media), and partly driven by media outlets: the past few years have seen a proliferation of geeky news outlets that reference fans and fandom constantly without any real connection to or acknowledgment of fannish practices.

This is particularly tricky for me—my personal fannish interests don’t really align with the big pop culture geeky properties, and while it might seem like there’s a proliferation of fannish media out there, it so often falls within these constructs: places for fans of certain types of media to read and write about those types of media. If I had to place bets on the next few years, I’d say associations between “geek culture” and “fandom” will only grow stronger. In a way, with superhero and SF/F blockbusters, this actually helps fight some of the mainstream’s dismissive ideas about fans and fandom—Marvel, Star Wars, they’re all hugely popular, and let very casual fans get super fannish around new installments. But I worry that this doesn’t do much to disabuse mainstream assumptions about the rest of fandom—there’s not a lot of crossover understanding. I might be proven wrong, but this is the way things have been trending, in my view, in my years covering fan culture in the mainstream media.

Oh, and to address your final question: I think that fan blogs and podcasts give more people entry into fandom, but only certain types of fandom, or fannish practices. I remember when Westworld came out, there were like 9,000 fannish podcasts about it, many from mainstream media organizations. “Non-fans” on my timeline—people who don’t self-identify as “being in fandom”—were rushing to figure out which of these podcasts were the best and following along with the show and various accompanying fan theories and analysis in a way that was pretty damn fannish. I think fandom podcasts in particular give people a route into fannishness that they might not otherwise take. But that’s not going to change their knowledge or assumptions about a lot of preexisting fannish practices—I’m thinking specifically of those in female-dominated transformative media fandom. I think there are a lot of female-led pop-culture-oriented podcasts and blogs that kind of skirt up along the edges of fandom, but in my mind, there’s a difference between shared enthusiasm and shared practices. And when it comes to stuff like fic, fanart, meta, shipping conversations, and the other stuff that fills my dash, I still don’t see a ton of crossover in this realm.

Flourish Klink is half of Fansplaining. She is Chief Research Officer and a partner in Chaotic Good Studios, where she develops entertainment franchises and helps companies and brands understand fan culture. She was formerly a partner in The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. and led fan strategy for the award-winning Hulu Original show East Los High. As a teenager, Flourish helped organize the first ever Harry Potter fan convention and was a co-founder of FictionAlley.org. She holds an MS from MIT and a BA from Reed College.

Elizabeth Minkel is the other half of Fansplaining. She's written about fan culture for the New Statesman, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Millions, and more. She's the audience development editor at Storythings, where she helps both foster and study communities of
readers. She's also the co-curator of The Rec Center, a weekly fandom newsletter she writes with fellow fan culture journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. She studied English at Amherst College and has an MA in the digital humanities from University College London.

Comics and Popular Science: An Interview with Clifford V. Johnson (Part Three)

We might expect a book called The Dialogues to be fairly text-heavy and we certainly have much conversation here, but some of the more surprising moments come on pages which have little or no dialogue. What role does silence play in your exchanges?

Oh, I love silence in comics! I love the whole business of leaving the reader alone with their thoughts, just providing fragments of a narrative through images that they can embellish in their way. I really wanted this book to breathe, with lots of space for the reader to reflect, or perhaps to prepare for the next set of ideas after finishing the last. I designed every element to facilitate this. This includes pauses in the conversation. Sometimes you need to stop talking and think about the points being made, or just back off from an approach and try another. I wanted to show that aspect of a conversation, for sure. Generally, my publisher (MIT Press) was very generous in allowing me control of every aspect of the design, right down to the cover, even though they were doubtful about one choice. Once a chapter/conversation ends, there’s the notes, and then there’s a double page spread separating chapters that’s a blank page on the left, and then just a simple number (with a window to the next chapter) on the right. A number of editors questioned that blankness, and suggested either skipping it or putting a splash of colour on it. But I resisted. I wanted this as a palette cleanser. A bit of silence before diving into the next chapter. And then in some cases, even after you start the chapter there’s a lot of visuals before you get to the conversation, so you ease in gently, perhaps wondering what concept you’re going to be thinking about next. Actually, since a lot of those opening visuals involve drawing what felt like thousands of windowpanes in skyscrapers, I did find myself cursing my love of architectural detail, telling myself that people are just going to flip through those pages until they find speech bubbles anyway. I briefly considered having a narrator help move the reader through some of it, and maybe act as a connector between stories too, but I did not want to break the silence, and then the narrator risks being seen as me, and there’s the whole voice of authority coming back in. Everyone is so rushed these days but I do hope some people take the time to linger through the silences, and glance at some of the details. I actually went out there into the world and measured the heights of those parking meters! And in some cases completely (after lots of research) constructed the interiors of certain spaces so that I could use them as settings.

I was amused by your opening segment which depicts a conversation between a man and a woman both dressed as superheroes. This seems to be a wink and a nod towards the expectations many have about the kinds of content appropriate for comics. Yet you soon shift towards other comics genres and keep changing ground across the book. In what ways did you play here with audience expectations about comics as a medium?

Yes! You saw that, great! That was exactly the joke. I find myself frustrated, still, that in 2017 people are still mixing up comics with genre. So you see it all through the culture. It is something that affects this very book, since it really belongs with non-fiction science books, but I'm going to have to fight for it to be on those shelves. Instead it's just going to be lumped with comics and graphic novels. It'll be alongside (if if I'm lucky enough to get shelf space at all!) wonderful comics about history or graphic memoirs, etc., and that’s great, but those books should be in the history and memoir sections of the bookstore. But anyway, I could rant about this a lot more. In any case, I thought I would at least amuse myself (if nobody else) by having the book open with everyone in superhero costumes (since that’s what most people are expecting form a comic)… but then you look closer and see that the costumes fit badly, and it becomes clear that it's just regular people in costume at a party. And they are at a museum, and they start talking about science because of the superhero context. I started that story a long time ago in the process, before the ubiquity in people's consciousness of cosplay at conventions and so forth. If I were starting to write it now, I consider just setting it as a conversation in a line at some ComicCon, with costumed people everywhere.  Or maybe I wouldn't, since I've learned from bitter experience to try to avoid crowd scenes, along with lots of skyscrapers and their endless rows of windows.

This was not your first experience working with superheroes, since you provided technical advice to Agent Carter’s producers. How did you become a technical advisor for this superhero series and what motivated you to participate in this process?

Oh, yes. I worked on Agent Carter, season two. Actually, I've worked on a lot of other superhero things you might recognise, like Agents of Shield, The upcoming Avengers movies and Thor: Ragnarok which is coming out around now. I think I started getting involved in Science advising for movies and TV well over a decade ago because I’d talk about science and film on my blog, and word got around. Also, I got a reputation as a good explainer from my work as a guest expert on various TV documentaries like PBS’s Nova, The History Channel’s The Universe and so forth. People from the industry started getting in touch. Motivation? I really think that it would be a massive mistake to not use the most powerful and pervasive storytelling tools ever invented - TV/Film - in getting people interested in, or at least familiar with, science and scientist characters. And it shouldn’t just be in documentary. Science is (or should be) part of our general culture, so you should see it everywhere. But anyway, the connection to Marvel in particular really began in earnest because a few years ago the Science and Entertainment Exchange (a nonprofit set up by the National Academy of Sciences to help connect scientists to entertainment people) started to suggest my name to some of Marvel’s producers as someone who can help with big physics stuff like space, time, energy, and so forth. Just what gets played with a lot in the Marvel Universe. The collaboration with the Agent Carter people was particularly successful because they called me in very early, before they wrote much. This is unfortunately still unusual - science advisors are wrongly mostly thought of as fact-checkers to be brought in near the end. I was able to help give them a lot of physics ideas (or fanciful ideas inspired by real physics) underpinning for a lot of the universe they were trying to create, and from that comes not just good visuals and buzzwords, but entire story ideas, character ideas, and so forth, that have the science embedded in them. It was a true collaboration that made that season really strong, in my opinion, because you might recall that her agency was the Strategic Science Initiative, so it made sense that the science needed to be up front. 

Clifford V. Johnson is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Southern California. Here's how he describes his research on his home page: "My research (as a member of the Theory Group) focuses on the development of theoretical tools for the description of the basic fabric of Nature. The tools and ideas often have applications in other areas of physics (and mathematics) too - unexpected connections are part of the fun of research! Ultimately I (and the international community of which I am a part) am trying to understand and describe the origin, past, present and future of the Universe. This involves trying to describe its fundamental constituents (and their interactions), as well as the Universe as a dynamical object in its own right. I mainly work on (super)string theory, gravity, gauge theory and M-theory right now, which lead me to think about things like space-time, quantum mechanics, black holes, the big bang, extra dimensions, quarks, gluons, and so forth. See the research page for more, or look on my blog under the "research" category (here). I spend a lot of time talking about science with members of the public in various venues, from public talks and appearances, various intersections with the arts and media (you might catch me on TV and web shows like The Universe, Big History, or Fail Lab), to just chatting with someone on the subway. I love helping artists, filmmakers, writers, and other shapers of our culture include science in their work in some way. Check out my blog for more about those things, and occasional upcoming events. Get in touch if you are interested in having me appear at an event, or if I can help you with the science in your artistic endeavour."

Comics and Popular Science: An Interview with Clifford V. Johnson (Part Two)

In your Preface, “Space and time and the relationships between things are at the heart of how comics work: Images (sometimes contained in panels, but not necessarily) arranged in sequence encourage the reader to infer a narrative that involves the sense of time passing, of movement, and so forth. In this sense, fundamentally, comics are physics! Put this way, upon reflection it is stunning that this graphic form has not been used more to talk about physics, and to communicate what’s going on in the fascinating world of physics research.”  What are some of the ways you are taping this insight in your visual storytelling across the book?

I use it in some fairly obvious ways in some places, like just having characters moving from frame to frame while actually discussing the whole business of movement. In other cases, I get to do much more subtle things with the form. For example, at one point in a conversation two people are discussing ideas from contemporary research about what might happen to space and time inside a black hole. Without going into detail with me just say that space and time can get rather jumbled up inside – maybe even lose their meaning entirely. So one of the ways I show this is by messing with the order in which you conventionally read the comic frames as you are watching the discussion delve into the black hole. I'm deliberately playing there, deliberately inviting confusion in the interior of the black hole in a way intrinsic to the comic form itself.

In other places I have characters talk about the breakdown of space and time entirely, as might happen at the birth of the universe. There, as they talk about this, I completely dissolve the panels containing the characters and the backgrounds. Frankly, I wish that I had realised this connection between subject and form earlier in writing the book. I would have played with it a lot more than I actually do in this book. I almost want to immediately start work on a second volume of dialogues and cast many more contemporary ideas from physics in this form. If I don't do it, I hope others may try.

One of the real strengths of this work is your focus on particularized locations for the exchanges. Many dialogic texts in the past have been abstracted from any specific physical space, but your drawings are rich in architectural and geographic information. Why? What do these locations, such as Los Angeles’ Angels Flight, contribute to our experience of your work?

Thank you for noticing this! Yes. This is all about being able to show - because I chose this graphic form - that science takes place out there in the world. Everywhere there are people present, science, and conversations about science can take place. It's not just with the experts and it's not just to be left in labs and research centres. From pragmatic perspective, I also have the feeling that readers can get drawn into the book by wondering who and where these people are. I hope they might have fun recognising details of places that may be familiar. The richness you so kindly pointed out is also my weakness by the way. I obsess over details in my drawing. Is one of the reasons why it took me seven years to finish this thing. One of the other reasons is that I was teaching myself more or less from scratch how to draw at the required standard, and how to draw for this medium. It will take a lot more time than I had to also learn the kind of distillation and economy that a true master has. Perhaps I will one day.

Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe has been widely cited as an example of what it might mean to do science through comics.  You adopt a very different approach. Can you say more about the pedagogical choices you made in how to present this material?

I have a confession to make. I've never read that book, although I know of its existence, and of course I have a lot of respect for it. I’ve glanced at some pages from it online and so I know enough about it to put in that class of wonderful books out there about science which are essentially illustrated lectures. I did not want to write an illustrated lecture about physics. Obviously, by being a physics professor writing/drawing about physics,  I am still trying to illustrate physics ideas, but I want to get away from the tone (which is not to everyone’s taste) of an expert coming out of the ivory tower and giving the public the benefit of their wisdom. I felt that having the reader eavesdrop on dialogues about science gets the ideas across any different way. And that’s even if some of the people in the dialogues are scientist themselves, as is the case. They're not talking directly at you, and I think that makes a difference. I don't know why. That's probably for my colleagues in the psychology department to tell you.

Often, documentary or instructional comics -- Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics comes to mind -- are monologues in which the author represents themselves on the page lecturing us, albeit in a playful way, about the content. Why did you chose to communicate more through character interactions with accompanying notes?

McCloud’s book is wonderful. I spoken a bit about the choice to avoid lecturing and use character interactions already, but let me say a bit more about the notes. The great thing about conversations is that they are imperfect. I know that sounds a bit odd, but I like that imperfection. In representing conversations on the page then, I get to visit lots of topics, because conversations seldom stay exactly on track. And that ends up allowing me to show the connectedness of science ideas. You can go off in one direction or another. Inevitably there for that means that, unlike a carefully prepared lecture, a conversation won't stay on topic and is less likely to go very deeply into one particular topic. Instead there are notes at the end of each chapter where I list books for further reading on some of the topics that popped up on the conversation. So the dialogues end up being an invitation to, or maybe a tasting menu of, various ideas. And then the reader can dive in more deeply by getting some of the many wonderful books that other writers and scientists have written.

Nick Sousanis, creator of Unflattening, has suggested that thinking through comics about his subject matter fundamentally changed his understanding of his topic. Is the same true for you? What did you learn doing physics through comics?

That book is fascinating, by the way. I finally got to reading it this Fall, and I can see that we’d have a lot of ideas to discuss if we met. I hope to meet Nick one day. (I feel bad that I did not cite his work in my book, but it appeared too late, and in any case my notes are mostly pointers to physics texts. I stumbled on it in a bookstore when I was just at the end of finishing the writing and layout of the dialogues, and about to embark on final art. I had to stay away from it, like I did all books at that time so that I could just focus on the coming year of finding time to frantically complete over 200 hundred pages of final art.)

But to your question. I would love to give some spicy story in answer to this question where at the end I point to some scientific paper I published that owes its insights to my investigations of comics. Maybe I will one day. But I cannot right now because it did not happen. Nevertheless, I am quite sure that my research is helped, overall, by my work on this book. Many scientists will tell you that the process of finding good ways to explain even the most basic concepts feeds positively into their research. It encourages clarity of thought. Also, sometimes, tackling a research problem is a dialogue with yourself or with your collaborators. You are reviewing what you've already done, sometimes explaining it back to yourself to glimpse a pattern or a theme. So, trying to explain concepts about relativity or the nature of time to non-experts (as I do in the book) can be useful. Also trying to explain a character’s principled  position on some controversial scientific issue, as I do in the book, helps me clarify my own position. I hope that goes some way to answering your question.

Comics and Popular Science: An Interview with Clifford V. Johnson (Part One)

Clifford V. Johnson is the first theoretical physicist who I have ever interviewed for my blog. Given the sharp divide that our society constructs between the sciences and the humanities, he may well be the last, but he would be the first to see this gap as tragic, a consequence of the current configuration of disciplines. Johnson, as I have discovered, is deeply committed to helping us recognize the role that science plays in everyday life, a project he pursues actively through his involvement as one of the leaders of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities (of which I am also a member), as a consultant on various film and television projects, and now, as the author of a graphic novel, The Dialogues, which is being released this week. We were both on a panel about contemporary graphic storytelling Tara McPherson organized for the USC Sydney Harmon Institute for Polymathic Study and we've continued to bat around ideas about the pedagogical potential of comics ever since.

Here's what I wrote when I was asked to provide a blurb for his new book:

"Two superheroes walk into a natural history museum -- what happens after that will have you thinking and talking for a long time to come. Clifford V. Johnson's The Dialogues joins a select few examples of recent texts, such as Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe, Nick Sousanis's Unflattening, Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland, or Joe Sacco's Palestine, which use the affordances of graphic storytelling as pedagogical tools for changing the ways we think about the world around us. Johnson displays a solid grasp of the craft of comics, demonstrating how this medium can be used to represent different understandings of the relationship between time and space, questions central to his native field of physics. He takes advantage of the observational qualities of contemporary graphic novels to explore the place of scientific thinking in our everyday lives." 

To my many readers who care about sequential art, this is a book which should be added to your collection -- Johnson makes good comics, smart comics, beautiful comics, and comics which are doing important work, all at the same time. What more do you want!

In the interviews that follows, we explore more fully what motivated this particular comics and how approaching comics as a theoretical physicist has helped him to discover some interesting formal aspects of this medium.

The Dialogues seeks to call attention to everyday conversations about science. Why? What are the stakes for you as a scientist in calling attention to the ways everyday people think about and talk about science?

It goes back a long time, actually. Many people have liked the way I explain scientific concepts to non-experts, and several kept asking me when I was going to write that non-expert level book that people who do a lot of public science explaining usually end up writing. I was stumped for a good answer. I did not feel that the world urgently needed another of those books…not from me anyway. There’s nothing wrong with those books, they are wonderful resources - it just did not feel urgent, and so I carried on with my other work, doing research, and connecting to the public through various other media. Then 18  years ago (!) I had an idea. What was missing from the literature are science books that focus on the reader being able to see themselves as part of the conversation. As part of the joyful, delightful dance that science can be. So the core idea was to make the entire book a series of conversations.  Conversations of a type that any reader may have had, or can be a part of - any time they choose. This takes away some of the tone of the expert telling you what you’re supposed to think, and emphasises participation more. The engagement with science should not be left to the experts - its open to all kinds of people.

What do you want your readers to learn about science over the course of these exchanges? I am struck by the ways you seek to demystify aspects of the scientific process, including the role of theory, equations, and experimentation.

That participatory aspect is core, for sure. Conversations about science by random people out there in the world really do happen - I hear them a lot on the subway, or in cafes, and so I wanted to highlight those and celebrate them. So the book becomes a bit of an invitation to everyone to join in. But then I can show so many other things that typically just get left out of books about science: The ordinariness of the settings in which such conversations can take place, the variety of types of people involved, and indeed the main tools, like equations and technical diagrams, that editors usually tell you to leave out for fear of scaring away the audience. I also get to emphasise (sometimes in microcosm) the dialogue between theoretical work and the experimental work needed to connect it with reality. In one story, two kids theorize about a cooking process and devise an experiment to test their ideas. The experiment is designed well enough to sharply distinguish between two perfectly good theories.  This might not seem to be connected to fancy ideas about multiverses and quantum entanglement and other buzz-words people come to contemporary science books for… but that process is core to science.

Why did comics emerge as the best way to share these conversations with your readers? What has been your relationship with comics as a medium?

I said earlier that I had the idea to do dialogues about 18 years ago, but the idea for it to be a comic came years later. There was a visual component in the original idea, yes, but it was mostly to show at the end of each story a bit of what might have got scribbled during the conversation. As though you’d eavesdropped in a cafe, they’d left, and you picked up a scrap of paper they’d written on. Well, years went by and I’d occasionally take the idea off the shelf, tinker with it, and then put it back. But I still did not start on the book. Then around 2006 or so I realised that every time I tinkered the visual component grew. I wanted to show more of the things they’d scribbled… Maybe the order in which the scribbling happened. Then I wanted to show who was having the conversations. Maybe that would engage the reader - we’re social animals, so we tend to be pulled into things that way. Then I thought it would be nice to show that these are happening in everyday circumstances. Cafés, sure, but also trains, buses, museums, on the street, in the home. And then it hit me - the visuals had entirely eaten the prose aspect of the book. What I was working on was a non-fiction graphic novel about science. I realised that there was really nothing out there like it, and then I just had to make it and get it out there into the world. It marked a return to the medium for me. I’d read superhero comics a lot as a kid, and into my early college years, and I was always interested in the art, but not at the level I would become later, for this project. In the early 90s I’d almost fully put them aside for various reasons. I’d dip in from time to time, but did not really become a regular reader again. But around the time the book ideas properly crystallized into a graphic book, I returned to reading the form, discovering that a lot of wonderful expansions into storytelling in a wide range of subjects had happened, and I began to consume many examples. By 2010 I took a sabbatical semester and devoted it to (secretly) studying the form in earnest to learn if I could do it, teaching myself art and other production techniques and so forth from books and lots of trial and error.

Clifford V. Johnson is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Southern California. Here's how he describes his research on his home page: "My research (as a member of the Theory Group) focuses on the development of theoretical tools for the description of the basic fabric of Nature. The tools and ideas often have applications in other areas of physics (and mathematics) too - unexpected connections are part of the fun of research! Ultimately I (and the international community of which I am a part) am trying to understand and describe the origin, past, present and future of the Universe. This involves trying to describe its fundamental constituents (and their interactions), as well as the Universe as a dynamical object in its own right. I mainly work on (super)string theory, gravity, gauge theory and M-theory right now, which lead me to think about things like space-time, quantum mechanics, black holes, the big bang, extra dimensions, quarks, gluons, and so forth. See the research page for more, or look on my blog under the "research" category (here). I spend a lot of time talking about science with members of the public in various venues, from public talks and appearances, various intersections with the arts and media (you might catch me on TV and web shows like The Universe, Big History, or Fail Lab), to just chatting with someone on the subway. I love helping artists, filmmakers, writers, and other shapers of our culture include science in their work in some way. Check out my blog for more about those things, and occasional upcoming events. Get in touch if you are interested in having me appear at an event, or if I can help you with the science in your artistic endeavour."

Revisiting the Concept of "Sharing": An Interview with Nicholas John (Part Three)

How might we think about the social mandate to share in today’s culture in relation to ongoing concerns about the loss of or disrespect for notions of privacy? What relationship do you see between sharing and privacy?

Online sharing would certainly seem to present quite a challenge to privacy: the more we share, the more Facebook et al. know about us. So on the face of it, sharing and privacy stand in opposition to one another. However, there are interesting parallels between them which lead me to see them not necessarily as subsisting in a zero-sum game but rather as giving different expression to a kind of self that took shape during the 20th century.

If I may oversimplify somewhat, the modern right to privacy, as formulated by Warren and Brandeis at the end of the 19th century, emerged in response to modern technologies of representation and reproduction, specifically, the use of photographs in newspapers. The right to privacy has as its object the discrete individual. On one account, privacy is necessary so that the individual may make authentic decisions (for whom to vote, or what to purchase).

Paradoxically, the contemporary injunction to share (as a type of communication) also addresses the discrete individual who expresses her authentic individuality by making it public. In their work on reality TV, Andrejevic and others have shown how self-exposure and its subsequent scrutiny are taken as a guarantor of truth, and I see sharing on social media as an extension of this. Of course, I’m aware that many social media users feel that others are not being authentic in their self-representation, but the rhetoric of sharing on these platforms, and especially Facebook, is all about connecting with others and being your most authentic self. (It has been interesting in this regard to follow Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about apps for anonymous communication, which also claim to offer users the opportunity to be their most authentic self.) Moreover, there are sanctions against not sharing. For instance, refusal to use Facebook can be perceived as deviant; and if we think about interpersonal relationships outside of social media, it seem obvious to me that you will not be able to sustain a romantic relationship without talking about your emotions.

Perhaps the term that points to failure in managing these seemingly competing demands – to share and for privacy – is “oversharing”. This is when we are given too much information, when the boundary between the public and the private – which is always shifting and negotiable – leaves too much in the public sphere. When we accuse someone of oversharing, we are not only saying that we did not want to know that, but that they should not have wanted to tell us in the first place, that they should have had a better sense of their own privacy.
 

Which term has more moral and emotional weight in our culture -- sharing or piracy?

I haven’t studied the metaphor of piracy per se, though it clearly is a meaningful cultural resource for those more deeply involved in the community (that is, it may not be a term that resonates with everyone downloading the Game of Thrones finale, but it is important to the people who contribute to the file sharing forums I analyzed). The metaphor of piracy is, I think, seen as more subversive among the file-sharers I studied. It’s more edgy than sharing, though one does come across “sharing is caring” slogans and images in members-only file-sharing sites too.

In terms of our broader culture, I think I’ve nailed my colors to the mast pretty strongly here: after all, the book is called The Age of Sharing. I think that the term, sharing, is an extremely powerful term today, both morally and emotionally. Part of the evidence for this is actually provided by people who strenuously oppose its application to practices that they say are “not really sharing”. Sharing, for them, needs to be protected from appropriation by commercial entities (among others).
 

Your conclusion stresses the unfulfilled promises of the concept of “sharing” in contemporary culture, which is often used to mystify far more traditional kinds of economic relationships. But we could turn this around and say the persistence of the concept of “sharing” across the various contexts you discuss suggests an ongoing desire, amid large chunks of the western world, for an alternative set of economic and social arrangements that does not look like capitalism. Can we deconstruct the abuse of the concept of sharing while keeping alive the radical potential of these shared social values? As you ask, “if the promise is extinguished, what are we to do?” (155)

What are we to do? I wish I had an answer.

Were I asked to present a blueprint for the Good Society, I have no doubt that it would include sharing: my good citizens would share resources; relationships would be built on openness and honesty. But in fact this blueprint says a great deal about my cultural circumstances; perhaps more than the desirability or attainability of this Good Society. There certainly is an ongoing desire in large chunks of the western world for an alternative to capitalism – an important wing of the so-called sharing economy is trying to present such an alternative – but our ability to imagine this alternative is defined, or at least shaped, by our present-day culture. I certainly think this is the case when we imagine a past in which people shared and drew inspiration from that past, and I think this is what Benjamin was intimating with his notion of an ur-past, a mythological past of harmony. With the help of anthropologists, in the book I argue that our conceptualizations of hunter-gatherer societies as grounded in sharing are anachronistic and misplaced. We imagine a better past (and future) from our place in the present. How could we do otherwise?

It is from this perspective that I refrain from talking about the abuse of the concept of sharing. Culturally speaking, the concept and its “abuse” have common roots. I suppose this is another way of saying that we cannot get outside the system. This isn’t to say we should critique the system (whatever we perceive that as being), but it is to suggest that arguing about whether this or that is “really” sharing isn’t going to get us very far. If there is a problem with certain parts of the “sharing economy” it isn’t that it is called “sharing”, it is that people’s labor is being exploited.

Nicholas John is a Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include technology and society, the internet, social media, sharing, and unfriending. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Age of Sharing. This book offers an innovative approach to sharing in social media, specifically by linking it to sharing in other social spheres, namely, consumption and intimate interpersonal relations. The book won the Best Book award from the Israel Communication Association, and the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers. Nicholas is also interested in disconnectivity, which he sees as a neglected aspect of digital culture. In particular, he is fascinated by Facebook unfriending, particularly when it is politically motivated. He sees unfriending as a new political and social gesture that we know very little about. His teaching looks at the complex interrelations between technology and society.

Revisiting the Concept of "Sharing": An Interview with Nicholas John (Part Two)

To what degree was sharing part of the early hacker and counter-culture ethos which shaped our understanding of cyberspace? To what degree might it have emerged from the science and technology culture of research institutions such as MIT and Caltech which also placed a value on the open exchange of information?

It was absolutely part of the early hacker culture, and indeed of early computing culture. However, I find claims that the internet, or cyberspace, has always been about sharing to suffer from the same anachronism as claims that prehistorical hunter-gatherer societies were about sharing. This is because I’m interested in the use of the word, and the word did not come to represent the internet until the mid-2000s. The key text on the counter-culture’s role in the cultural signification of the internet is Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. What I find worthy of note is that nowhere in the book does he talk about sharing as value of the internet; nor, incidentally, does Howard Rheingold in The Virtual Community. Today we understand cyberspace in terms of sharing, but we did not thus understand it even as recently as the early 2000s.

The second part of this question is, in my reading, an empirical question, which one would answer by looking through the archives of those institutions. Did they talk about sharing? Is that how the open exchange of information was discussed? I don’t know, but it could be interesting to look into that.

Why has sharing become the prefered language for talking about what we do when we participate on social media? What other potential frames might we consider for thinking about these activities?

There are three main reasons for this. The first sees “sharing” as emerging organically from the field of computing, where it has long been a term in use (as I mentioned earlier in relation to time sharing).

The second is that the term, sharing, covers so much. It refers to both the distributive and communicative aspects of sharing, and it incorporates a wide range of other terms that might be used in describing social media activities, such as “express yourself”, “post”, “connect”, “socialize”.

The third reason is that “sharing” has such positive connotations, encapsulated in the phrase, “sharing is caring”.

Taken together, these reasons point to a term that is both an organic part of the world of computing, and that has been leveraged by social network sites’ PR people. If you look at the front pages of the major SNSs over the first decade of the century (something I have done so that you don’t have to), you can see the word “sharing” becoming more widespread over that time, but particularly between 2005-2007. Facebook played an important role in this. They adopted the concept of “sharing” in 2006, which seems to have pushed other companies to present themselves in that terminology too.

This suggests that the term, sharing, came relatively late to digital culture, which begs the question, what other frames were used prior to that point?

One significant frame was that of “gifting”, but I see “gifting” and “sharing” as quite different. First, I would note that “gifting” and “sharing” are different in that the former was a theoretical concept used by scholars to describe activities they were witnessing (making music files available to others on Napster; creating websites), while sharing became the term used by social network sites to describe participation on them. So actually “gifting” wasn’t the term used by participants, but rather by observers.

Be that as it may, gifting refers to the distribution of goods, even if they are immaterial goods. Sharing refers both to the distribution of goods and to a form of interpersonal communication. Because sharing as a type of communication implies honestly, openness, authenticity, and more, it is far wider than the notion of “gifting”. To say that someone is sharing is to suggest that they are giving something of themselves. More than gifting does, it implies caring, perhaps even altruism.

The phrase, “the sharing economy,” has been applied to everything from Uber to Wikipedia. How can we make meaningful distinctions between the different forms of “sharing” involved here and the ways what gets shared does or does not become part of a larger “economy”?

There have been plenty of attempts to make this distinction. Lessig talks about me-regarding and thee-regarding economies, and about thin and thick sharing economies; Belk talks about sharing in and sharing out, and also about sharing versus pseudo-sharing; in a slightly different context Haythornwaite talks about crowds and communities. There have also been other efforts to shift the terminology, perhaps most notably Hillary Clinton’s promotion of the term “gig economy”.

I think, though, that the horse has bolted, and that the term “sharing economy” is here to stay. More than that, I think that the very word “sharing” may get another layer added to it. When attending a sharing economy meet up in Manhattan, one of the panelists spoke of different models – sharing for free, and sharing for money. None of those in attendance objected to this (perhaps they were being polite), which raises the possibility that “sharing” will also come to mean something like “using an app to rent out possessions”. If this happens, does that mean that there will be no more sharing (the “good” kind) in the world? I don’t think so, but I’ll save my thoughts on this for the final question.
 

You discuss sharing in the context of a therapeutic discourse, which links it to notions of individual wellness and social health. Yet, could we also see the concept at work in political movements, like the feminist consciousness raising sessions of the 1960s or the giving of testimony in a range of social movements across the 20th century? This political notion of sharing involved recognizing commonalities in social experiences as the basis for framing larger critiques of the current order.

I don’t feel particularly qualified to comment on the feminist movement of the 1960s or the giving of testimony in other contexts. What I can say is that in these contexts it seems that the authentic individual experience is given voice. By hearing others’ voices, one may feel empowered – it’s not just me! – and by giving voice one may also feel empowered – this is who I truly am! These instances, then, seem to belong as much to the therapeutic discourse, which extends far beyond the therapist’s clinic.

I would add here that my investigations into the origins of the therapeutic sense of “sharing” lead back to an evangelical group that was active in the US in the 1920s and ‘30s. Called the Oxford Group (no relation to the university), its key practice was as follows: members would sit together in someone’s parlor or drawing room and take it in turns to publically confess their sins. This practice was called “sharing”. Two alcoholic members of the Oxford Group adapted this practice to allow other alcoholics to talk about their experiences in a non-judgmental setting. This became Alcoholics Anonymous (where participants are famously thanked for sharing), which, to the best of my knowledge, is where the ideas of sharing adopted by countless other groups and organizations – some of them more psychologically oriented, and some of them more political – were institutionalized.
 

Nicholas John is a Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include technology and society, the internet, social media, sharing, and unfriending. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Age of Sharing. This book offers an innovative approach to sharing in social media, specifically by linking it to sharing in other social spheres, namely, consumption and intimate interpersonal relations. The book won the Best Book award from the Israel Communication Association, and the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers. Nicholas is also interested in disconnectivity, which he sees as a neglected aspect of digital culture. In particular, he is fascinated by Facebook unfriending, particularly when it is politically motivated. He sees unfriending as a new political and social gesture that we know very little about. His teaching looks at the complex interrelations between technology and society.

Revisiting the Concept of "Sharing": An Interview with Nicholas John (Part One)

Today, I want to share with my readers an interview with the author of a smart new book, The Age of Sharing -- well, I wanted to share it with you, but Nicholas John does such a great job in this book of drilling into and complicating my understanding of the very concept of sharing that I am now not certain that's what I want to do after all. I will post it. You may recirculate it. But should we call this sharing?

The central project here is to understand how the meaning of sharing has shifted over time, the ways the term has been dematerialized (no longer about material relations) and made to stand in for all kinds of social interactions, the ways the term has become central to our understanding of the digital age and yet it continues to mean somewhat different things to producers and consumers in an era of social media. I learned a lot in this book about the history of sharing as a concept and a set of practices, and it sets us on a path to a more nuanced deployment of the term as we talk about what it is we are doing with each other in an era of spreadable media content. 

I hope this interview captures your interest so that you will pick up a copy of the book for yourself.

You write, “When we -- English-speakers in western societies -- hear talk about sharing today, we understand the concept differently from both our grandparents and their grandparents.” (20) How so? Can you characterize what the term, sharing, meant in each of these periods?

Obviously the answer may depend somewhat on how old the reader is, but what I’m getting at here is that new layers of meaning have been added to the word, sharing, giving it its current set of connotations and meanings. (Of course, today’s constellation of meanings is just as unstable as any set of meanings in the past.) Today, obviously, sharing refers to digital participation. I have called sharing the constitutive activity of social media to highlight how it has become the key word for describing our online participation. It covers the whole range of digital activities: updating statuses, uploading videos, sending messages, posting pictures – all these are called sharing. More than this, though, a crucial aspect of the meaning of sharing today is its sense of fairness and caring, which are tightly linked to sharing as a specific type of talk about our emotions. This association of sharing with rainbow colors and intimacy is new – when my 92-year-old grandmother was a young woman, this sense of sharing would not have been accessible to her. In the 1940s and ‘50s, she would not have come across the idea that “sharing is caring”. Needless to say, none of the digital implications of sharing would have been available to her either.

She would, though, have understood sharing as a kind of talk about emotions. This had been emerging particularly since the 1930s as part of the secularization of romantic relations, especially those between husband and wife.

My grandmother’s grandmother, living around the turn of the previous century, would not have understood sharing to be a type of talk at all. The metaphor of sharing one’s troubles would have been accessible, and obviously one shared one’s troubles by talking about them, but the talk itself was not called sharing. We can understand this best by going further back in time, to the 16th century, when sharing meant dividing – this is the pre-metaphorical sense of sharing. Consider the similarity between the words “sharing” and “shearing”: this is no coincidence; “to share” used to mean (and sometimes still means) “to divide”. In fact, the old English word from which “sharing” evolved, namely, scearu, had two meanings. One referred to the groin, that part of the body where the trunk of the body divides into two legs; the other referred to a monk’s tonsure, where his hair had been sheared off. Sharing one’s troubles, then, meant dividing them in two, and giving a portion to your collocutor, thereby reducing your burden. The metaphor here is still physical. It wasn’t until the 1900s that the word sharing started being used to refer to the talk itself, taking another step away from the rather material, pre-metaphorical sense of the word.

Looking back over how the concept of sharing has changed over the last 100 years or so, I would say that it has added layers of meaning that take it further away from its material sense of sharing as dividing. This has included the institutionalization of sharing as a type of talk, and also the notion of sharing as morally desirable, exemplified, for instance, in the way parents (especially American parents) teach their children to share nicely.

As I read you, part of what has taken place has been the dematerialization of the concept of sharing -- from an early emphasis on cutting into parts or cutting off -- to the contemporary sense where the exchange of information also often involves the exchange of feelings and may play an active role in shaping the social ties between parties. How do you explain these shifts over time?

Yes, the concept of sharing has been dematerialized. This is a useful way of thinking about it. But we should remember that the development of many metaphors is about dematerialization, or perhaps even more specifically, decorporealization, as so many metaphors – including sharing – have their origins in the body.

I think that there are two broad paths to the current meanings of sharing. One is related to shifting conceptualizations of the self throughout the 20th century. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that it is related to the emergence of the specific idea of the self that we have today. This is a self with a coherent core, that is accessible to us through talk, and conveyable to others through talk. This is the Freudian, therapeutic self. The emergence of this sense of self is concurrent with secularization and urbanization, and what T.J. Jackson Lears calls a thinning of life and a consequent “quest for self-realization”. This is the path by which sharing, as a type of communication, becomes related to authenticity, self-understanding, and the basis for the conduct of intimate relationships.

The other path remains closer to the pre-metaphorical sense of sharing as dividing, and can be traced through the brief history of computing. When time-sharing was invented, and named, it was a technology that divided up a computer’s computational capacities among multiple users; the computer’s time was being dividing up and allocated to different users. Later, disc sharing was developed. Here, the “sharing” part of the term referred to the fact that the disc was shared by more than one user; it was held in common. Likewise the idea of file sharing, at least in its first instantiation: file sharing meant making a file accessible to others (not duplicating and distributing it, as most people understand it today).

The conjunction of these two paths came surprisingly recently, not much earlier than 2005, in fact. This is when social network sites recruited the concept of sharing to describe and promote what we do there. Some of this was no doubt opportunistic, harnessing their businesses to the pro-social implications of sharing; some of this was organic, as for computer scientists the idea of sharing files, images, and so on, was already common currency, though lacking in a normative dimension. 

Your references here to the Care Bears is a good reminder that those of us coming of age in western society are taught to share our toys, our feelings, at an early age. When we use sharing in relation to other practices -- for example, in the phrase, “the sharing economy” -- we tap something very primal. Some authors you reference go so far as to assert that sharing is a fundamental aspect of human nature -- hardwired into our very being -- but we are often required to unlearn those sharing impulses to operate within competitive capitalism and its struggle over resources. How might this reliance on a concept so bound up with childhood development render us blind to hidden agendas at play within the “sharing economy”?

The terminology around the sharing economy has been under scrutiny for a while, and my position on this is not a simple one to lay out. To be sure, there are companies within what is called the “sharing economy” that want potential customers to associate certain values with them (the values of sharing) while operating according to the logic of capitalism. To be sure, there are exploitative practices afoot within the “sharing economy”, and they must be criticized and rooted out. Also, it cannot be denied that the word, sharing, is an important weapon in the marketers’ arsenal. Accordingly, one could, if one wanted, compile a list of practices that are compatible with sharing, and a list of practices that are not. Then, one could confidently say whether a certain service is “really” about sharing or not. For instance, one might want to argue that if money changes hands, there is no sharing going on.

This, though, is not my approach. Partly this is because language is dynamic and I do not find it useful to say that this or that practice is “really” sharing, which is to reify words (in other words, my approach is a pragmatic one). For instance, I have not read a critique of sharecropping (where the tenant pays the landowner by giving him a share of the crop) that says it is not really sharing.

More than that, though, I think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What I hope the book shows is that there is much to be gained from pushing beyond the question of whether practices are “really” sharing. I try to historicize and culturally contextualize our present concept of what sharing “really” is, and I think an outcome of this is the realization that uses of the word, sharing, that are critiqued for not “really” referring to sharing, and those very critiques themselves, have common cultural origins. In other words, when I read that something is not really sharing because it involves money and is not an authentic type of communication, say, I recall that the type of authentic communication that we call sharing emerged, and was called sharing, as part of the formation of a self that was suited for modern, capitalist society. The word, sharing, today has a distinct set of meanings that quite simply was not enacted previously when the word was used. Thus, in the book I argue at some length that to apply the word “sharing” to prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies is to be anachronistic.

Nicholas John is a Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include technology and society, the internet, social media, sharing, and unfriending. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Age of Sharing. This book offers an innovative approach to sharing in social media, specifically by linking it to sharing in other social spheres, namely, consumption and intimate interpersonal relations. The book won the Best Book award from the Israel Communication Association, and the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers. Nicholas is also interested in disconnectivity, which he sees as a neglected aspect of digital culture. In particular, he is fascinated by Facebook unfriending, particularly when it is politically motivated. He sees unfriending as a new political and social gesture that we know very little about. His teaching looks at the complex interrelations between technology and society.

What Do You Mean By "Culture Jamming"?: An Interview with Moritz Fink and Marilyn DeLaure (Part Two)

The case studies in the book also help us to map some other kinds of borders, as culture jamming rhetoric and practices are absorbed by Madison Avenue on the one hand and the art world on the other. The tendency is to read such examples primarily as a form of co-optation, but are there also ways that these border-crossing help to spread countercultural messages to new publics?

Definitely so, yes. Co-optation is certainly the buzz word here. The ad world makes use of culture jamming practices because they are rhetorically powerful. At the same time, some talented designers who work on Madison Avenue moonlight for organizations like Adbusters; so, if there ever existed a firm boundary between the subcultural domain of culture jamming and the media industry, it’s not there anymore. Yet this doesn’t necessarily need to be negative. Think of the Truth campaign by professional ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Michael Serazio’s chapter in our book describes how traditional anti-smoking campaigns often failed to move their target audiences, because they only strengthened the attraction of that which is forbidden. So CP+B took an alternative route by using the rebellious feeling of culture jamming tactics in its Truth campaign—for instance, by dumping a thousand body bags outside a tobacco company’s headquarters.

Moritz, your contribution here comes out of your larger project of providing a cultural-history context for thinking about The Simpsons. What does this particular example teach us about what happens as countercultural practices enter the commercial mainstream? Can The Simpsons still be subversive if it gets produced and marketed by Fox? Or is it another example of “the conquest of cool”?

You’re pointing to the old dilemma, Henry ;-) Can a cultural phenomenon as commercially successful as The Simpsons be at once a commodity, and thus subject to the logics of capitalism, and still be considered subversive? Well, in contrast to “the conquest of cool” argument which echoes the Frankfurt School’s cultural skepticism, I would argue it can. Subversion isn’t exclusive to productions operating below the radar of mainstream culture, especially at a time when we see how mainstream culture seeks to integrate virtually everything that connotes subcultural appeal. I’d say that what counts is the effect a certain cultural artifact has. So, yes, The Simpsons is definitely another example of neoliberalism’s cashing in on the cool, but, on the other hand, within its unusually long history, the show has had so many moments where it has torpedoed the dominant capitalist culture, albeit in the form of media representations. There is one episode where the show depicts a “Sprawl Mart” store to satirize the consumer culture and labor conditions disseminated by big box stores such as WalMart; in another instance, The Simpsons has humorously critiqued the plastering of public space with Starbucks coffee shops. The show’s viewers understand this as subversion and appreciate this element of the series. My favorite example here is when The Simpsons featured the social media platform Facebook on the series in 2010—at a time when the show became quite edgeless, Simpsons fan-critic Charlie Sweatpants complained about how uncritical this representation was. He found their show lacked in subversive intensity, a quality he and many other Simpsons fans previously found to be there.

Marilyn, one of your contributions was to interview or otherwise solicit responses from some of the artists and activists currently practicing in this space. How useful did these practitioners find the theory of culture jamming for explaining what they are doing through their work?

I sought out the interviews, work and commentary by these artists and activists to help flesh out and illustrate the concept of culture jamming, rather than the other way around.  Most of the people I talked to have a long history of developing their artistic practices, and whether they explicitly conceived of themselves as “culture jammers” didn’t matter that much to me.  Some saw themselves primarily as pranksters, others as artists, political activists, or alternative community builders.  We believed that including the voices of artist-activists in our collection—in addition to those of academic theorists and critics—would offer valuable insights to our readers on the range of practices that we consider culture jamming.

Some critics have argued that culture jammers substitute a symbolic or semiotic polics for actual efforts to change the world. How valid do you think this criticism is? Are there examples where culture jamming has, in fact, led into more immediate forms of social action and political change? What might we learn from those examples?

Ascertaining the immediate effects of activism is a thorny affair.  While there may be some value to the warnings abou semiotic play (including “clicktivism”) substituting for political action, several of our authors explore ways that participatory culture jamming can form a sort of on-ramp to other forms of activism.  Furthermore, as Rebecca Solnit explains in this recent piece,  we can’t know precisely what effects any kind of protest action or intervention will have on future movement work.  Take, for instance, Occupy Wall Street, which was initially sparked by a call from Adbusters, but was then taken up by organizers in New York City and later around the world.  Some argue that OWS failed, because it didn’t issue clear demands, or change laws, or elect any candidates.  And yet, as Jack Bratich explains in his chapter, OWS was a powerful meme generator, and it left us with lasting terminology (“We are the 99%” and “Wall Street vs. Main Street”) that has informed public discourse in the US since. OWS also created or strengthened community ties that were later activated, such as the “Occupy Sandy” citizen relief efforts in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Moritz Fink is a freelance media scholar and author. He holds a doctoral degree in American Studies from the University of Munich, and has published on contemporary media culture, popular satire, and representations of the grotesque. His most recent book is the co-edited volume Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU Press, 2017).

Marilyn DeLaure is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of San Francisco. She has published essays on dance, civil rights rhetoric, and environmental activism, and is co-editor of Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU Press, 2017).

What Do You Mean By "Culture Jamming"?": An Interview with Moritz Fink and Marilyn DeLaure (Part One)

The term, Culture Jamming, has been around for several decades now, decades of dramatic change in the media environment and in the political sphere. Does the term still have use value in an era of podcasts, blogs, viral media,  memes, and social networking sites? Does the term mean what it once did now that the goal is no longer simply to block the flow of dominant media, but rather to reshape the flow, as grassroots media producers command more influence and attention than ever before?

This is the question which motivated Moritz Fink and Marilyn DeLaure as they set out to produce a new anthology, Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. What they came back with is pretty compelling -- a collection of essays by some of today's top thinkers about media politics and social change, a series of case studies and interviews with activists and artists who are reshaping the media environment with their disruptive tactics and compelling visions of alternative social orders.

Full disclosure: I contributed an essay for the book about the "Not in Harry's Name" campaign and the Harry Potter Alliance more generally.

The topic could not be better timed, it turns out, as we are all looking for new forms of resistance to oppressive and reactionary governments around the world. I have already made this book assigned reading in my seminar on Participatory Politics and the Civic Imagination this spring, and I suspect others will want to consider it as they are making plans for teaching next semester. To help you commit to such an assignment, I am going to be running a two part interview with its editors which explores many of the book's key themes and debates. Enjoy!

Mark Dery’s “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs”, which you reprint at the start of your collection, was first published in 1993 in a very different context, both in terms of the political moment and the media landscape. What led you to believe that now was a good time to reconsider and, arguably, reclaim the culture jamming concept?

The concept of culture jamming emerged in the late 1980s as a reaction against what felt at the time like an overwhelming flow of media imagery turning us into passive consumers. This notion, of course, recalls the alarmist voices of the Frankfurt School, whose thinkers stressed the manipulative power of what they called the “culture industries”—mass media as an instrument of capitalism that must be resisted. With the digital revolution, more and more people became aware how multilayered and heterogeneous the media landscape really was, which has bolstered emphasis on the democratic potential of the media, old and new. Yet, at the same time, it is a truism that we are bombarded with media messages, day by day, hour by hour, second by second, even though we increasingly find ourselves to be players (some more active, some less) in the media spheres in which we are situated.

So, to come back to your question, why now? While the term “culture jamming” may have largely fallen into disuse since the late 1990s, the practices have certainly persisted and evolved with the rise of new communication technologies and the ever-growing impact of media content. Furthermore, as several examples in our book demonstrate—the case of Shepard Fairey’s HOPE poster promoting Barack Obama, or Pussy Riot’s protest performances against Putin—culture jamming has now broadened its scope beyond parody ads and altered billboards. Culture jamming tactics are being used not only to contest consumer culture, but also to intervene in politics and social movements. As Naomi Klein argues in her recent book No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of branding merged with politics. So in that respect, we need culture jamming now more than ever.

Should we understand culture jamming as a vocabulary of tactics or as an underlying theory of media power and social change? How might we think about the relationship between the two?

We see culture jamming as a collection of tactics, as well as a critical attitude and participatory, creative form of activism. Some of these tactics are associated with practices of cultural resistance, such as textual poaching or semiotic appropriation and resignification. In addition, culture jamming provides more specific terminology suggestive of the concept’s distinct artful as well as bellicose impetus: “détournement,” a  French term which evokes the act of turning culture back upon itself, through the appropriation and creative reworking of signs; “subvertisement” which refers to the artistic subversion of advertisements; “semiotic guerilla,” “semiotic jujutsu,” and “meme warfare,” all of which underline the David-versus-Goliath mentality inherent to the concept. Another important element of culture jamming is humor: aping, mocking, parodying, satirizing … in George Orwell’s words, “every joke is a tiny revolution.” Culture jamming is protest art informed by various artistic traditions like Dada, modernist pop art, graffiti, punk rock; there is a performative dimension of culture jamming, too, apparent in forms like pranking, hoaxing, street theater, or flash mobs.

As you know, I have expressed some skepticism that the underlying assumptions of the culture jamming concept, which stresses people standing outside the operations of mass media and seeking to disrupt its operations, clog the works, block the signs, jam the channels, etc., makes sense given the greater access many have today to the means of cultural production and circulation. How might the introduction of social media force us to at minimal reassess what we mean by culture jamming?

When I (Moritz) began the project several years ago, I seemed to misunderstand culture jamming as a form of playing with culture. Interestingly enough, as I moved forward, I not only came to learn the term’s original critical meaning, but also discovered that I shared this “misunderstanding” with several other scholars. My initial understanding of culture jamming as akin to musical jamming, or “playing with”—which Mark Levine’s chapter echoes—offers a necessary supplement to the negative blocking view. In the book, we make the argument that, while culture jamming is an expression of resisting the dominant culture, it is also playful and participatory, as many jammers blur the lines of authorship, and thus invite imitation and participation.

So, yes, citizens are no longer outside the sites of cultural production—social media situates us to be producers as well as consumers of media content. On the other hand, though, social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter demand to be constantly fed. So, jamming today might not always involve clogging or blocking media channels, in the classic sense of throwing a wrench into the machine, but may instead manifest as a creative coopting and subversive remaking of media content. For example, in our book’s Introduction, we highlight an example of “brandjacking,” where an activist group launched the fake PR initiative #AskChevron to draw attention to the environmental damage the Chevron corporation has done in Ecuador. The feedback was enormous, and people (intentionally or not) participated in the jam, posting tweets like “Are you the devil?” or “Can you tell me which country I should bribe & dump my toxins in?”

What relationship do you see between "memes" as the term is currently understood as a new media practice and the concept of culture jamming? Do "memes" offer us new opportunities to "highjack signs" and increase the visibility of alternative messages? Or has meme-making become such a mundane part of our social media landscape that it no longer has a disruptive or subversive impact?

Memes themselves—as spreadable bits of mediated culture—are neither inherently subversive nor inherently mundane. We have innumerable LOLcats, but also PepperSprayCop, NotABugSplat, ICan’tBreathe, and TinyTrump.  To us, “meme” signals a certain form: an image, word, or idea that is easily altered and repurposed and spread.  Yes, memes can achieve high levels of visibility and rapid, widespread reach … but as for their potential to disrupt or subvert, that depends on the specific content and context.

Dery described culture jamming as an “elastic category,” but as with many such broad terms, the more examples we attach to this term, the harder it becomes to define. Do we have a sense of what these various examples of culture jamming have in common? Is it possible to define what isn’t culture jamming?

In our book’s Introduction, we define the modus operandi of culture jamming, in effect explaining what culture jamming is by mapping what it does. We name eight key characteristics that define culture jamming: it appropriates, operates serially, and is artful, playful, (often) anonymous, participatory, political, and transgressive.

Of course it’s possible to find things that are NOT culture jamming: objects and texts and practices that reproduce dominant power structures and fuel consumer capitalism, that discourage participation and foreclose critique. But definition is an interpretive act, and so context matters greatly in each particular instance.

One of the more impressive dimensions of your collection is the attempt to expand the concept of culture jamming into other national contexts, including, for example, the international Occupy movement or the Arab Spring movements. As we do so, these questions of context would seem to matter all the more, though, as we shift from contexts where free market capitalism reigns to situations where what is being resisted are various forms of state power. Can we use the same conceptual models to talk about both situations?

Interestingly, we have found that forms of culture jamming emerge in tandem with the expansion of communication technologies and spread of global capital. Think of the Arab Spring, which would not have unfolded the way it did without Facebook and mobile phones. Or the protest actions of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot, which reached a broad audience through YouTube. Of course, we have forms of state power here that are different from what we would define as Western democracy, but as people around the world are increasingly sharing the same media culture, concepts of media theory become applicable, at least in part, to various national or political contexts.

Moritz Fink is a freelance media scholar and author. He holds a doctoral degree in American Studies from the University of Munich, and has published on contemporary media culture, popular satire, and representations of the grotesque. His most recent book is the co-edited volume Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU Press, 2017).

Marilyn DeLaure is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of San Francisco. She has published essays on dance, civil rights rhetoric, and environmental activism, and is co-editor of Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU Press, 2017).

Teens, Teachers and Mobile Tech: An Interview with Antero Garcia (Part Three)

Many books on education stress success stories, but you are frank throughout about moments of failure or friction in your pedagogical practice. If you could relive your time in that school, what would you change?

I made a lot of mistakes throughout this study and I try to detail them in the book in as much as I think that is useful for other researchers. I detail in my next answer a bit more about the technology-driven assumptions and mistakes I made. However, I actually think the thing I’d want to change is the scope of Ask Anansi. Often, when I talk with teachers about the Black Cloud, Ask Anansi, and other game-related activities I’ve done in my classroom, I hear both bewilderment and amusement at what transpired. Talking spiders, scavenger hunts, students out of the classroom running amuck: it feels like too much to try to accomplish and looks unanchored from standards-aligned classroom instruction. I have gotten both literal and proverbial pats on the head for this work: this game is nice and all but I wouldn’t be able to do this in my classroom and--even if I could--it wouldn’t fit within my school’s pacing plans. And to that, I say balderdash.

I wish I had worked with other teachers to implement an ARG like Ask Anansi across an entire department or grade level to highlight that this work isn’t just possible but that it is fun, intellectually engaging and--in some cases--civically transformative. My recent work with teachers at a game-design school has been pushing on how to sustain powerful and gameful approaches to learning and teaching.

You situate your success using mobile technologies in a specific classroom setting with what is now seen as the systemic failure of the LA Unified School District’s billion dollar initiative to incorporate ipads into their teaching. What do we learn by comparing these two examples?

Well, the short answer is that we both screwed up. Expanding: we both screwed up in similar ways by trying to blindly reinforce adult power with tools that are inherently about democratized participation and engagement. As my colleague Thomas Philip and I wrote shortly after the LAUSD debacle, no one should have been surprised by the fact that students hacked their devices and used them in ways adults didn’t intend. (What surprised us was that it took days instead of hours.) Similarly as an eager doctoral student ready to dive head-first into my own research, I ignored the tacit knowledge I’d known as a teacher for years: students are way, way smarter than school systems tend to give them credit for. Just as teachers are good at enacting what school is supposed to look and feel like, students too, participate in the dance of doing school without necessarily gaining a whole lot of useful stuff in the process. This is a shame and my use of technology in this study was--initially-complicit in such a cyclical process.

For those that haven’t read the book, I should explain that I tried to control what apps and media students could put on the mobile devices they used in my classroom. It didn’t work. In the matter of a day, students joyfully played games and listened to their own curated music on the devices I provided them. And this is a good thing. In other research, Thomas Philip and I have seen how mobile devices that lack the social ties and meaning of students’ own phones cease to be very useful and, in one example, mainly stayed in students’ lockers to avoid getting damaged. Devices that lack the personal value we typically place on our own mobile devices become more burdensome than educationally expansive. I know this is a lesson I learned quickly and point to my mistakes throughout the work. Districts like LAUSD are still trying to find student-proof ways to track, limit, filter, and control what students do on these devices and with whom. Again, these digital walls, gates, and mandates occlude how we interact in the real world beyond schools and I can hear an implicit shame on you echoing from educational forbearers like John Dewey. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if we are going to integrate mobile devices into classroom instruction (and I hesitantly think we should), we need to do so in ways that mirror what we hope students should be able to do once the graduate from our schools.

You describe some of your students as being steadfast about not wanting to read, even though they possess core literacy skills. What might these students teach us about the need to rethink what we mean by“reading” or “literacy” in the school context?

On of the most memorable exchanges for me during the study is an exchange I write about where a student describes to his classmates how listening to an audiobook is “like reading.” This student that I call Solomon highlights how small shifts in the consumption and production in texts pushes on the expectations of students and teachers alike. In this case, students are used to listening to audio via mobile devices passively--music while talking with peers or engaged in other activities. By highlighting that audiobooks require the same kinds of active reading strategies as traditional forms of reading, Solomon helps illustrate that there’s a little of the “old” in new and digital literacies today. On the one hand, when we talk about literacies in schools and point to fancy devices like tablets, netbooks, and laptops, we need to recognize that the vast majority of the work done on these devices is often replicating traditional forms of literacies: the word document is a shinier version of a pad of paper, the internet a more expansive version of the class encyclopedia, etc. That’s not to say that things aren’t different--there are affordances to writing on an internet-enabled device that is capable of embedding GIFs and publishing for the entire world to consume. However, while I agree with the premise of this question that such advances mean helping educators, parents, and students rethink what we mean by “literacy,” I also imagine a call for thinking more innovatively about what media production and reading could look like in schools.

I spend a lot of my time perusing (or fuming at) my twitter feed. For better or worse, it is a persistent space that I look at and participate in. As a singular example, how would student writing, understanding of spatial geography, or statistical analysis shift if the premise that civic participation today means students should have a grasp of how a tool like Twitter functions? As an English teacher, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of thinking about the messiness of interaction in hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter as an emerging and participatory form of literature. Again, Henry, your work has underscored my thinking here and points to new literacy shifts. As an additional pedagogical reminder within this example, discussions of, within, and around a platform like Twitter would also have to include an acknowledgment of how such tools are implicitly guiding participation within capitalist practices; a critical media literacy stance toward new reading and writing practices would require educators to also work alongside students to unpack how tools from Twitter to classroom textbooks to the corporate devices students use in schools are tied to neoliberal aspects of power and authority.

I offer this example of Twitter to highlight how instruction could shift to imagine what teaching for participation in a contemporary society could look like. Many friends and colleagues have been exploring what new digital practices mean in terms of student and teacher identities, and I recognize that these are huge opportunities for further reimagining literacy engagement and literature today.

You are engaging with the connected learning paradigm here to think about learning ecologies. Where do you see the biggest disconnects in education today and what might we do about them?

The structures of school have been rooted in place for quite some time. As much as we see continual shifts in policies related to education, these are tweaking a system that’s been in place long before the advent of asynchronous online social networks and peer-supported and interest-driven production. Before going on, I want to be clear: the contested policies at the federal, state, and local level around assessment, evaluation, and measurement of student knowledge and teacher effectiveness are important; there are clear ideological feuds tied to capitalism, race, class, and assumptions about what American education means today. Further, the continual encroachment of charter schools within the landscape of public education (Los Angeles being a significant terrain on which such changes are taking place) are a threat to the role of public education and to teachers as a labor force. When I say that schools and their structural components need to change it is not without acknowledging that the policies and laborers within these systems are within their own, precarious space at the moment.

So, in light of the recognitions above, I think schools are due to change in form and in purpose. They haven’t exhibited much malleability lately and that’s in large part because the ingrained assumption of what a school does, what it looks like, how we organize within it, and how we measure success are part of generations of public consciousness and storytelling. When we talk about the possibilities of connected learning in public education, the focus on students often occluded the kinds of constraints that are typically shackling their enactment in schools. In Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom, my co-editors and I (in partnership with the National Writing Project), tried to highlight the innovation of teachers and what is already happening in schools. However, to make such shifts more than piecemeal efforts of pedagogical valor, I think the work of teacher educators and collaboration between LEAs, management, and labor need to transpire. I do think the recent work of “research-practice partnerships” could speak to one pathway forward but I also think that empirical work on the role of connected learning in teacher education could help bridge the needs of schools.

Antero Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University where he studies how technology and gaming shape youth learning, literacy practices, and civic identities. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. His two most recent research studies explore learning and literacies in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and how participatory culture shifts classroom relationships and instruction. Based on his research, Antero co-designed the Critical Design and Gaming School--a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Antero’s research has appeared in numerous journals including The Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Teaching and Teacher Education. His most recent book--Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School—is an ethnographic look at technology and gaming in an urban high school. Some of his other books explore critical research methodologies (Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students--with Nicole Mirra and Ernest Morrell), techniques for shifting English language arts pedagogy (Pose, Wobble, Flow: A Culturally Proactive Approach to Literacy Instruction with Cindy O'Donnell-Allen), and changes in the consumption of young adult literature (Critical Foundations in Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres). Antero received his Ph.D. in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Teachers, Teens and Mobile Tech: An Interview with Antero Garcia (Part Two)

You have much to say about the different conceptions of time shaping the way teachers and students respond to mobile technologies at school. How do they differ and what factors have led to this gap in understanding? What are the implications of this gap for the ways we think about bringing mobile technologies into pedagogical practice?

I think how we understand the purpose of “school time” is most one of the most out of sync aspects of public education in the U.S. today. Simply put, students and teachers have different assumptions about what time means and how it is used in schools, during class time, and during breaks like passing periods and lunch. The traditional adult assumption (and one that I held for too long) is that--during class time--students should be solely working on class activities. Yes, these activities may include increasingly complex digital resources. However, these are still largely about specific kinds of practices and a relationship with technology that is oriented toward entirely academic purposes. As bluntly as I can, I want to be clear: this is not how adults function in today’s workplace. Even as I respond to these questions, my phone prods me for attention. I confess that I may have taken a peek or two at my Twitter feed and at my email inbox. Social relationships are pervasive and aren’t relegated to the time I punch the proverbial work clock.

Let’s acknowledge that the few instances where adults do not regularly check-in with their phones while working are usually service-level jobs that barely provide a living wage for employees. In our practices in implementing these kinds of policies there are two things that are alarming: we are training students to adhere to working-class kinds of employment practices and we are stifling a culture that more fully reflects how other workplace environments function; school technology policies--as innocuous as they may seem--reinforce the historical, systemic inequalities that the genie in the previous question just can’t fix.

Let’s also be clear that, at the heart of this decision around mobile use policies in schools is control. The power of teachers is threatened by the disruptive practices of mobile technologies. Instead of moving toward new pedagogies, classroom orientations, and instructional practices, we have locked down how we treat classrooms and train teachers: we double-down on enforceable and punitive policies rather than move alongside of the rest of the changing world. All of this is a reminder that schools operate from an industrial, factory model. We have bells governing the end of one shift and the beginning of the next, we separate learning into discrete, disconnected units, and we structure the school physical and social space to silence voice and individuality. Technology policies only further entrench us in the Learning to Labor practices that Willis describes more than thirty years ago.

Many of the youth pushed back at the idea that they might share contact with teachers through their normal social networking tools. Where does that resistance come from and how might teachers respect those views when designing activities that deploy social media at school?

As educators and researchers, we tend to talk about it as student resistance--we get to do that from an adult perspective of these issues of power in schools. For students, though, while their actions may indeed be resisting the desires and demands of authorities, these are issues of trust. Simply put, have teachers and school structures done enough relationship building, empathy-support, and listening for students to choose to engage socially with teachers? Particularly in schools focused on high stakes test results and district wide expansion of charter schools that have the latest snake-oil-like pitch of a better path forward, the time for relationships--online or face-to-face--simply doesn’t exist often enough.

Tied to issues of trust, we should probably also think about the meaning of mobile devices in schools today. We still tend to call them “phones” even though the vast majority of what we do on them isn’t tied to this function and--as ex-Galaxie 500 member Damien Krukowski recently wrote and discussed on a podcast series--the sounds of talk and feelings of personalization has diminished in today’s digital infrastructure. I would encourage your readers to look at their own phone right now. What case is it in? What pictures are displayed on it? How do the apps on the main screen speak to your orientation in the world? These are personal devices that support personalized activities. In schools they offer a portal to one of the few spaces closed off from the power and demands of adults. Asking students to sully such sacrosanct space is a big ask if we aren’t willing to change the other structures in schools around these relationships. In your own work and that of you and your Participatory Culture in a Networked Era co-authors, you have pointed to the fact that, on one hand these are personal devices and they often are leveraged in systems of “networked privacy.” On the other hand, students use their devices to perform publicly for their peers aspects of their identity. From ringtones to cases to content loaded on screens, what is seen and heard via mobile devices reflects the identities of their uses.

As a result of the issues of trust above, I’ve lately been encouraging teachers to start thinking about devices as ways to get to trust and engagement. I have teachers play Game of Phones to highlight an easily adaptable, commercial example. The purpose isn’t to use phone for accessing new, digital spaces or producing increasingly complex multimodal artifacts. Instead, these devices are for sharing identity, embracing multiple identities.

Many express concern that bringing mobile technologies into the classroom will result in greater distraction and that it is better to keep schools a media-free zone. How do you respond to those critiques?

In thinking about kids’ attention being pulled from classes to their devices, the inner cynic in me wonders what kids are distracted from. We have come a long way from seeing schools as drab spaces of intense work. Wonder, imagination, and even fun are posed frequently in popular media as aspects of how good schools succeed. And so, when we talk about media devices distracting kids, we need to look critically at if the materiality of schools is worthy to demand the attention of a generation of students that have many, many other ways to learn, interact, and socialize.

At the same time, there are elitist private schools that do embrace the media-free schooling utopias you suggest. Here, in the Silicon Valley, many of the wealthiest tech families send their children to schools that are “unplugged” from the media saturation that chimes for their children's attention. Such models mean we have to question whose children have the luxury of attending such a model and what kinds of home and after-school structures support these in-school practices. This points to the participation gap that you and your research team have written about.

Finally, as I mentioned earlier, we need to remember that we don’t live in media-free zones. I increasingly believe that schools offer one of the places for students to actually learn authentic and real-world ways of utilizing their mobile devices in social environments. All of the multimodal composition stuff that kids do in classrooms is great, sure. However, just as valid and more often denied, the skills kids learn about how to deal with what is shared in online spaces (as explored in Carrie James’s Disconnected), how to utilize digital tools for mobile forms of activism, and how to meaningfully integrate (or not) the lives we live in online environments into our day-to-day interactions. If not in schools, where do kids learn (and get meaningful support) in how to be on and with their mobile devices? Teachers and teacher educators are not being prepared for this shift in responsibility and this has, increasingly, been a space of continuing research for me.

As a brief, related note: In work since completing Good Reception, I have been studying non-digital forms of tabletop gaming, including a two-year ethnographic study of tabletop roleplaying game communities that play games like Dungeons & Dragons in gaming stores and cafes. Though there are several factors that led me into this nerdier sub-sector of educational research, one of the key reasons is that educational research on technology and gaming too often ignores the sociocultural aspects that surround these tools and practices. At the same time that Gamergate has violently harmed women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community in videogame spaces, educational research has been boasting about the advances and possibilities of the medium. I am interested, then, in thinking about the civic lessons and responsibilities that can be found in how we support and guide student thinking with technologies in schools.

Your key case study in the book centers around the development of Ask Ansi as a classroom experience -- in effect, an alternate reality game -- which you felt dramatically increased some of your students’ engagement with learning. Why? What factors led to its success?

The story of Ask Anansi starts a decade ago with how I found my way into the DML community. Collaborating with now good friend and recent co-author, Greg Niemeyer, we created an alternate reality game (ARG) for students in my class several years before Ask Anansi. That game, The Black Cloud, proposed that the pollution in Los Angeles had grown sentience and was communicating with my first period class via Twitter (then a very new platform). Through measuring air quality around their community, students took on new identities as storytellers and citizen scientists. Though we had an abundance of resources for this game (and the technology is currently being used to measure air quality via Google Street View cars), I was interested in how to replicate the possibilities of learning and identity that emerged in this game even with less resources.

With a different premise and different intended outcomes, I designed Ask Anansi as an ARG for my 9th grade students (I share the design document and key principles in the game’s DIY design in several appendices in Good Reception). This game, like much of the ARG design I have engaged in, speaks to how ARGs can lead to radical transformation. Greg and I write about this in the conclusion to our edited collection of ARG scholarship.

One of the key factors of success to an ARG like Ask Anansi is an intentional focus on the kinds of identities and feelings that the game is expected to foster. If students are exploring issues of inequality and playing with ideas of social transformation, we push on the boundaries of what Johan Huizinga refers to as the “magic circle” that inscribes “play,” in order to consider what identities and practices are taken outside of games and into the real world.

Often, teachers assume that games-based learning means digital-games, but in this case, Ask Ansi was a game played in physical space but that led students to think more deeply about both the physical and digital worlds they inhabited. Can you say about more about the underlying assumptions about technology that shaped this project?

The point of giving devices out to students and playing an ARG was never about the technology. Instead, by looking at points in school structures that could be adjusted, this was a study in how things like technology and play can transform the meaning, value, and opportunities of schooling. As the final chapters of the book highlight, the bigger outcomes of the study weren’t simply about improving academics or doing fancy things on expensive devices. Instead, relationships were what were most transformed during the time of this study. If we stop assuming technology will fix schools, its shortcomings in doing so won’t seem so problematic. That is: just like we don’t assume giving every student in school a set of pencils and paper makes them better learners, we shouldn’t assume a Chromebook, iPad, or any other commercial product will do so either. Instead, we should recognize that pencils enable certain kinds of learning practices, as do mobile technologies. At the end of the day leveraging these practices (and transforming schools) is going to be about transforming the relationships between students, teachers, and their broader community. No technological advance is going to magically fix relationships, trust, or power in schools. Once we can take this previous sentence for granted we can probably make better collective decisions about instruction, school funding, and the structures of

Antero Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University where he studies how technology and gaming shape youth learning, literacy practices, and civic identities. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. His two most recent research studies explore learning and literacies in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and how participatory culture shifts classroom relationships and instruction. Based on his research, Antero co-designed the Critical Design and Gaming School--a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Antero’s research has appeared in numerous journals including The Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Teaching and Teacher Education. His most recent book--Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School—is an ethnographic look at technology and gaming in an urban high school. Some of his other books explore critical research methodologies (Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students--with Nicole Mirra and Ernest Morrell), techniques for shifting English language arts pedagogy (Pose, Wobble, Flow: A Culturally Proactive Approach to Literacy Instruction with Cindy O'Donnell-Allen), and changes in the consumption of young adult literature (Critical Foundations in Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres). Antero received his Ph.D. in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Tech: An Interview with Antero Garcia (Part One)

Antero Garcia's new book, Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School, drops next week, and it can't come soon enough as far as I am concerned. I have been watching Garcia emerge as an important voice on participatory culture and learning for almost a decade now. He has been a consistent participant at the Digital Media and Learning Conferences. When I first met him, he was still a classroom teacher in the trenches of the Los Angeles Unified School System, sharing some of his day to day experiences with youth, the educational establishment, and in particular, the challenges of doing meaningful experimentation and innovation in such a bureaucratic space. His new book shares those war stories -- it is a grand mix of hope about the future and bracing accounts of obstacles to achieving a more connected learning environment.

Asked to provide a blurb for the book, here is what I wrote: "A rising star in the Digital Media and Learning realm and a gifted storyteller, Antero Garcia combines an embeded perspective as a classroom teacher into the challenges and opportunities of bringing mobile media into the public schools with a theoretically sophisticated grasp of contemporary pedagogical theories (Connected Learning, the New London Group, games-based education, and Paulo Freire, among others). This book could not be more timely or more urgent as schools confront a growing disconnect between their normal practices and the ways youth are processing the world around them.”

I have known for sometime I wanted to interview him for this blog and the new book offered a perfect opportunity to do so. Over the next few installments, you will get a sense of his pedagogical philosophy, his experiments in bring ARGS into public schools, and his sense of the limits of our current thinking about technology in the classroom. Enjoy!

For me, one of the real strengths of this book is the perspective you bring as a classroom teacher who worked in South Central Los Angeles. Can you share with us how those experiences shaped the perspective you adopted in Good Reception?

Henry, first of all thank you for the kind support and intellectual leadership in the field over the years. The work described in Good Reception simply wouldn’t have been possible without the kind of guidance around the possibilities of participatory culture you’ve been describing on this blog, in your published work, and in forums like the DML conferences. Thank you.

The school at the heart of Good Reception, which I call South Central High School (SCHS), was my professional teaching home for eight years. Like many of my teaching colleagues that went through the UCLA Teacher Education Program, I was intentional about rooting myself in a specific school and its community for my career. Long before the events described in Good Reception, I’d spent countless hours working alongside students, teachers, and parents in this community. At the same time, I’d been growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of support for teachers as intellectuals, leaders, and transformative agents in the LA public schooling system. A bit dewy (Dewey?!)-eyed, I recognize. In centering educational equity in the work and friendships while at SCHS

This preamble actually gets to the heart of how I ended up in a doctoral program and conducting the dissertation research that would ultimately find its way into the pages of Good Reception. One year, the principal at the school at the time (one of eight I would work with) announced he had completed his doctorate and the shift from addressing him as “Mister” to “Doctor” was a sudden and intense one. As a teacher--particularly if I was called into his office with my union representative for various challenges--the title change was one to further elucidate who wields power in schools. In what was--in retrospect--a foolhardy decision, I ended up enrolling in a doctoral program in order to increase the social capital of teachers in my school. Of course, I didn’t realize this decision would professionalize me into a different set of interests related to research and advocacy at the higher education level.

Related to the story about, part of my push in describing my experiences at SCHS is to disrupt the traditional assumptions about what “urban” schools look like and the kinds of stereotypes associated with our students. The true challenges that persist in this school space--dropout rates, localized contexts of violence, lack of vital resources like groceries, healthcare, and jobs--are entirely systemic; the generations of willful neglect that have let spaces like SCHS languish does not mean that the students in these schools are any less brilliant or willing to engage in the transformative and democratic purposes of schooling. If anything, as I talk about later in our conversation and in my book, teachers, administrators, and school policies get in the way of the innovative learning principles and ideas of the students at these schools.

Running throughout the book is an argument about how the school environment destroys trust between adults and youth and often destroys any active sense of agency on the part of learners. If a Genie gave you three wishes to transform the school environment, what would you change and why?

I’m going to start small and go loftier. One year, as teachers were asked to sign off on a school grant proposal that we had little opportunity to provide actual input, we discussed the limitations of throwing money and resources at bigger issues.

LAUSD’s failed iPad initiative is probably one of the clearest, recent examples of this. On the afternoon that we brainstormed what money could do, one teacher--Linda--proposed an idea that stays with me today. Simply put: fix P.E. At SCHS, the P.E. classes--filled primarily with 9th and 10th graders (students most statistically least likely to finish high school)--were overcrowded and under-supervised. For security purposes, students were locked each period within an area of dilapidated basketball courts and the school’s gymnasiums, a chain link fence separating them from the rest of the school. It wasn’t uncommon for P.E. teachers to have upwards of 80-100 students in each class and for the locked-gate of the P.E. area to act as a way for students to regularly skip other classes and remain hidden in the masses of other students crowded in the area. With the same dollars that would be used for professional development interventions, purchasing SMARTboards, or other product and service-oriented acquisitions, Linda pointed out that finding funding to, say, triple the number of P.E. teachers at the school could fundamentally transform the school’s culture and outcomes. There are caveats, of course, to such dreaming. However, if ours is a Genie that could summon a handful of teachers in an area that is often overlooked, I could imagine it would make lasting cultural changes.

My second Genie wish is simple and based on work I’ve seen transform school culture. At the Schools for Community Action--a set of small public schools I co-founded and describe in the conclusion to Good Reception--a wall-to-wall support plan that implements a Restorative Justice approach to supporting student healing, classroom management, and community support is thriving. Though there are growing studies and support for Restorative Justice, its emphasis on acknowledging and healing wrongdoing is an approach that fundamentally shifts student, teacher, and administrative relationships at the school. It is hard work (and even I wonder about the capacities of a genie!), but it is work that I would love to see more fully and authentically integrated right now. (As a brief note, I am wary of widespread district implementation of any program; as Restorative Justice grows in popularity, I wouldn't be surprised to see it watered down and shift in meaning and value in different contexts.)

Finally and acknowledging that this would have to be a powerful genie(!), I think it is necessary to spotlight and make visible the systemic issues of inequality that plague schools like SCHS. There is no simple fix to racial, class-based, language-specific, or geographic forms inequality that are inextricably linked to the power issues that affect contemporary understanding of academic achievement in U.S. schools. There are, though, a lot of bad attempts at band-aid fixes for these issues. In just a couple of chapters of my book, for example, I point to poorly-thought-through attempts by SCHS administration to address these topics through implementing school uniforms, new hall passes, changing bell schedules, and tardy-line policies. Without addressing the root causes of how schools for historically marginalized students are designed to fail, such surface level approaches do little more than signal that well-meaning adults tried. If a genie could center these inequities in the eyes of the public and in the policy-making decisions at local and national levels, I think we could (slowly) start making sounder decisions.

Antero Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University where he studies how technology and gaming shape youth learning, literacy practices, and civic identities. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. His two most recent research studies explore learning and literacies in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and how participatory culture shifts classroom relationships and instruction. Based on his research, Antero co-designed the Critical Design and Gaming School--a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Antero’s research has appeared in numerous journals including The Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Teaching and Teacher Education. His most recent book--Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School—is an ethnographic look at technology and gaming in an urban high school. Some of his other books explore critical research methodologies (Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students--with Nicole Mirra and Ernest Morrell), techniques for shifting English language arts pedagogy (Pose, Wobble, Flow: A Culturally Proactive Approach to Literacy Instruction with Cindy O'Donnell-Allen), and changes in the consumption of young adult literature (Critical Foundations in Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres). Antero received his Ph.D. in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Remixing Gender Through Popular Media: An Interview with Jonathan McIntosh (Part Three)

You celebrate Steven Universe for offering a more positive role model for young boys. What is it doing that seems distinctive and progressive to you?

When I first saw Steven Universe on Cartoon Network, I was pleasantly surprised by its subversive themes and plotlines. A lot has been written about the show’s progressive values, and rightly so; it centers powerful women and contains relatively unambiguous positive depictions of queer relationships. Last year I produced two videos focusing on something that gets a little less attention: the downright revolutionary ways men and boys are represented.

One of those video essays explores Steven’s superpowers. This is an adventure show about a boy with superpowers derived from an interstellar gemstone, which he uses to summon a magical shield. It’s rare to see a boy hero given a largely defensive weapon instead of an offensive one. Indeed Steven’s main contributions to his superhero team are shielding, protecting and healing his teammates. Those are all traits traditionally associated for women in fantasy fiction. But beyond that I argue Steven has an additional less obvious superpower which is even more fundamental to his character and to the show’s values. And that’s Steven’s empathy, which plays a critical role in de-escalation and conflict resolution throughout the series. Again that’s something exceptionally rare to see with boy heroes in these kinds of narratives.

My other Steven Universe video essay focuses on emotional expression. In Hollywood men are typically not shown expressing vulnerable emotions, at least not outside of a very narrow set of traumatic circumstances, like when a loved one dies. Steven Universe doesn’t play by those rules, on that show men are regularly depicted as expressing a wide rage of vulnerable emotions in response to all kinds of social situations.

Whenever I talk about emotional expression in male characters, I make a point of emphasizing the “expression” part. Most male characters are, of course, written to have feelings and emotions on some level. It’s not uncommon for male heroes to harbor a deep-seated inner pain. However, that pain is usually left unspoken. We as audiences are meant to understand that male heroes experience intense feelings, but that turmoil is framed as something they must keep hidden. They’re very rarely shown openly communicating or vocalizing their vulnerable feelings. The emotions that men on the big screen are allowed to express are anger and rage. And those emotions are typically closely aligned with acts of violent revenge which are framed as a form of vigilante justice. Needless to say, this is the very definition of emotionally unhealthy.

Steven Universe is the exact opposite. As I mentioned, the show is absolutely packed with men and boys who are open and vocal about expressing their emotions. So for example, everyone in on the show cries. Men and boys are shown crying in most episodes, and more importantly, these tears are never presented as a sign of weakness. In fact, tears serve to communicate an impressively wide range of emotions, from joy to concern, from despair to pride, from frustration to love.

Steven and his father Greg are also not afraid of being physically affectionate with those around them, and not just when it comes to family or romantic partners either. Steven openly admits to being afraid, and he is never shamed for expressing that fear. Unlike many other coming-of-age stories about boy heroes, Steven’s growth does not hinge on learning to “conquer his fear.” Instead Steven learns that fear is a natural and useful emotion, something he should listen to, in order to help keep himself and those he cares about safe. All of this is exceptionally rare for television. It’s especially notable given that Steven Universe is an animated series aimed at younger audiences.

To what degree are the myths of masculinity you discuss inherited unconsciously as part of the genre formulas passed down from earlier generations of media makers? To what degree is masculinity being reimagined and reasserted today in equally destructive terms?

Certainly there are a whole bunch of regressive ideas about masculinity baked into many long-running traditions in genre fiction. Hollywood's current rush to remake and reboot franchises from decades past has meant we’ve seen images of aggressive manhood reproduced in uncritical ways. Over the past decade superhero movies have taken over the box office. That genre in particular lends itself to portrayals of manhood where physical intimidation, violence, and vengeance are framed as effective and heroic forms of conflict resolution for men. Incidentally that goes for both small interpersonal conflicts as well as larger intergalactic conflicts. We’ve also seen some entertainment that I’d categorize as being part of a conservative backlash against progressive or feminist gains. I already mentioned that some popular gaming franchises are especially guilty in this regard. Recent films by directors like Michael Bay, Zack Snyder, and Peter Berg would also fit into this category since many of their productions tend to unapologetically celebrate aggressive versions of hypermasculinity.

On the whole though, I do think a lot of Hollywood writers and media makers are much more aware of the potentially harmful conventions and clichés in their work these days. Unfortunately the relatively high level of media literacy on the production side hasn’t translated into much in the way of new or subversive storylines for male characters. What we get instead is an enormous amount of lampshading.

Lampshading is a writer's trick wherein media makers deliberately call attention to a dissonant, clichéd, or stereotypical aspect of their own production within the text itself. It’s basically a wink in the direction of the audience. Lampshading is often used as a way for media makers to acknowledge troubling or toxic gender representations in their production but then continue to uncritically indulge in those depictions. Lampshaded dialogue can make writers seem clever, self-aware, and even self-critical, while still largely sticking to Hollywood traditions. This then tends to make a piece of media seem more progressive or subversive than it really is.

My latest video essay, The Adorkable Misogyny of the Big Bang Theory, details how ironic lampshading is employed in comedies and sitcoms as a way to let nerdy “nice guys” off the hook for a wide range of creepy behaviors. But lampshading is increasingly used in dramas as well. It’s one of Joss Whedon's favorite writing techniques; he’ll often write humorous lines of dialogue to point out macho behaviors in his male characters, only to then have them keep engaging in those same behaviors. So for example there’s a scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron in which the male heroes take turns trying to lift Thor’s hammer. The witty writing acknowledges that these men are involved in what amounts to an extended “dick measuring” contest over who is the stronger superhero. There’s even a line where Black Widow makes fun of them all for it. In another Marvel movie from different directors, Captain America: Civil War, Black Widow asks point blank if the male hero really wants to “punch his way out” of a difficult situation. But again even though the problem is explicitly acknowledged in the text, nothing fundamentally changes in terms of how those male characters are depicted; they still solve the majority of their problems by punching other men in the face.

So I’d argue that while many Hollywood writers are on some level aware that toxic and violent masculinity is an issue, they either have no alternative or they don’t really believe it’s a big enough deal to take seriously-- preferring instead to acknowledge the issue and then double down on the same old formulas. The end result of all these forms of replication is the same: a market flooded with images of violent macho manhood, some done with a wink to the audience, but precious few representations that directly challenge the hypermasculine ideals of manhood.

So while the clichés of genre traditions are more readily acknowledge today, I’d argue that media makers are still trapped. However, it’s not that difficult to become unstuck. It just requires a willingness to defy audience expectations. I will say that there are a few exceptions to the rule where filmmakers do embrace atypical and empathetic versions of heroic masculinity. I recently made a video essay about the Harry Potter spin-off, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, in which I posit that the protagonist, Newt Scamander, is a welcome subversion of traditional male action-adventure heroes.

If you had the attention of people working in genre entertainment today (and I am sure you do), what would you most want them to learn from watching your videos?

First and foremost that their work isn’t just entertainment; media can have enormous impacts on people’s belief structures, worldview, attitudes, and sometimes behaviors. In various times and places around the world the role of storyteller has been a sacred and revered position because their job includes the responsibility of passing on lessons, values, and cultural identity to a younger generation. Media makers are the most influential storytellers of today and, like it or not, there is a lot of power that comes with that job.

And it’s possible to do things differently even within the confines of a major studio production. The Martian, for example, was a widely successful, thrilling, edge-of-your-seat blockbuster, and one that remarkably contains absolutely no images of men solving problems with violence. All conflicts are solved through the use of science, cooperation, and human ingenuity.

As I mentioned above, another successful movie with an unconventional male hero is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Newt performs a refreshingly atypical form of masculinity. He’s sincere, nurturing, empathetic and sensitive. And, crucially, that sensitivity is framed as a strength rather than a weakness.

It may sound cliché to say that “with great power comes great responsibility,” but it’s true, and it’s especially true when it comes to Hollywood. Media makers have a responsibility to be careful and intentional about the messages and values embedded in their stories. If producers and filmmakers are willing to take the risk of showing emotionally vulnerable, communicative, empathetic versions of leading manhood, I think they’ll find a large audience out there that is hungry for those alternative depictions of manhood.

Jonathan McIntosh is a media critic, remix artist, and video essayist. He has been remixing mass media narratives for critical and educational purposes since before the invention of YouTube. He serves on the advisory board of New Media Rights, a non-profit organization working to protect the rights of digital media makers. His current project, The Pop Culture Detective Agency, is a series of long-form video essays exploring the intersections of politics, masculinity, and entertainment. 

Remixing Gender Through Popular Culture: An Interview with Jonathan McIntosh (Part Two)

As we turn to your current project, let me ask a question that is the title of one of your videos. What is toxic masculinity and what should we as a society being doing to reign in this particular noxious set of attitudes? Why might educational videos represent one appropriate response to this problem?

Toxic masculinity is an important term but it’s often mischaracterized or at least misunderstood in conversation, especially outside of academic settings. The video you’re referring to is my attempt to clarify the meaning of the term and hopefully spark more constructive conversations.

As I said in my video on the topic, Toxic masculinity refers to a particular set of harmful actions and cultural practices. It’s marked by things like emotional detachment and hyper-competitiveness. It’s connected to the sexual objectification of women, as well as other predatory sexual behaviors, and it’s also linked very closely with aggression, intimidation, and violence.

It’s important to note that “toxic masculinity” is not a condemnation of men or manhood in general. There is nothing toxic about being a man, but some men act in toxic ways. In other words, toxic masculinity is not something that men are, but rather it’s something that some men do. Which means that, we as men, can choose not to participate in that toxic behavior and instead choose other more empathetic, cooperative, compassionate forms of manhood.

In terms of why educational videos like mine are useful, the hope is that they can help get us on the same page. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to have these difficult conversations when critical words are terms are so widely misunderstood or misrepresented.

Let me ask another blunt and straight forward question. Why should we care what kinds of representation of masculinity run through popular culture? Shouldn’t we be more concerned with actual male behavior in everyday life rather than the masculinity of wizards and stormtroopers?

I believe we should be concerned with both. The truth is that personal expressions of masculinity and media representations of manhood are not separate and distinct; they’re deeply interconnected. Media and culture have a cyclical relationship; media influences culture and, conversely, culture influences media. Obviously that doesn’t mean we’re all mindlessly mimicking what we see on television, but one thing media is very good at doing is shaping our worldview. One of my favorite feminist theorists, bell hooks, connects the dots succinctly, she says: "Popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is happening.” She’s right. Our cultural ideas about what it means to be a man are heavily influenced by entertainment. Of course schools, families, and religious and political institutions all play important roles, but for better or worse mass media has become one of the primary areas where our cultural ideals of manhood are shaped and reaffirmed. This is why I believe it’s critical for us to interrogate what those Stormtroopers and Wizards are teaching us about masculinity.

All media has embedded messages and values whether producers and filmmakers intend to include them or not. When it comes to myths about manhood, some of the most common ideas we see infused in entertainment often pass under the radar because they reflect current cultural norms. These include myths like: men are naturally aggressive and violent; men who express vulnerability are weak; manhood is earned through physical competition and conquest; men’s sexist behavior is biologically driven. These messages are limiting and harmful for a whole host of reasons, not least of which because they reinforce the false notion that toxic behaviors, practices, and attitudes are normal, natural, and even inevitable for men. The reality, of course, is that men are capable of transformation. This is why we need media that models alternative formulations of masculinity in which men are shown openly communicating their feelings and vulnerabilities, practicing de-escalation tactics, and embracing empathetic responses to conflicts and challenges.

Media changes us -- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. It has incredible power to alter our perceptions, shape our worldview, and transform our identities. Media can trap us in old ways of thinking or open up exciting new social possibilities. My long-form video essays are focused on challenging media that does the former and elevating media that does the latter.

Today, the phrase -- men’s movement -- has often been co-opted into a misogynistic backlash against “political correctness” in general and feminism in particular, making it harder to speak as a male ally of feminism. How would you characterize the perspective you bring to these videos? What works provide you with the intellectual framework you draw upon in this work?

As I mentioned above, my work is very much influenced by feminist writers like bell hooks. Back in 1984, hooks boldly advocated for a feminism that included men. Her second book “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” includes this passage which has stuck with me and provided a framework for my own work on masculinity. She notes, "Men are not exploited or oppressed by sexism, but there are ways in which they suffer as a result of it." Her point about how the social system of patriarchy both privileges men while simultaneously harming us by robbing us of our humanity is a foundational one for my Pop Culture Detective Agency project. Hooks expands on this perspective in her excellent book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. That book is, incidentally, the first thing I always recommend to guys who are just beginning their journey into what feminism means for men. I find it both critical and inspiring that hooks calls for men to be held accountable while still remaining deeply compassionate to our struggles as men.

Another important influence for me has been the work of Sociologist Allan G. Johnson who wrote a book called Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. I’ve found his insights about how social systems and individuals are interconnected (neither exists without the other) to be particularly helpful in my research and criticism. R.W. Connell’s academic writings on Masculinities is also very useful for my work. She argues that there are many types and formulations of masculinity, all of which exist within a hierarchy of “masculinities.”

As you eluded to in your question, my perspective is fundamentally different from those who call themselves “Men’s Rights Activists” or MRAs. There are now hundreds of men with shockingly popular YouTube channels and social media followings who proport to care about men’s issues. Unfortunately most of them are indeed coming from a decidedly reactionary place which oozes hatred for feminism and is steeped in a palpable resentment of women. These guys are openly advocating for a return to the hypermasculine male supremacist values of decades past. They’re upset that our culture is slowly evolving in terms of gender and they’re determined to resist this social progress. The dark irony is that many of the things MRAs point to as being problems for men in our society, (suicide rates, combat deaths, life expectancy, etc.) are not a result of feminism or “discrimination against men” but are instead a byproduct of the social system of patriarchy. Instead of working to find real solutions to these issues (which would require a measure of self-criticism and self-transformation) MRAs are hell-bent on blaming feminism in particular and women in general. In many ways my video essays are a direct response to the popularity of the poisonous MRA prospective. My hope is that by compassionately addressing the emotional harm men and boys face as a result of patriarchal pressures in our culture, I can reach some of the guys who are hurting and perhaps keep some from joining reactionary movements.

Remixing Gender Through Popular Media: An Interview with Jonathan McIntosh

I have been following the work of political remix artist Jonathan McIntosh for some years now. We discussed his Buffy vs. Edward and Right Wing Talk Radio Duck projects in By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists. We reconnected recently when he participated in a workshop of artists, activists, and educators hosted by my Civic Imagination research project, and he shared with me the really exciting work he is doing as part of the Pop Culture Detective Agency series on YouTube. I wanted to direct more attention to the ways he is using his remix skills to question the construction of gender and sexuality -- in particular, toxic forms of masculinity -- in various forms of popular culture. These videos are ideal resources for Media Literacy education and they make effective use of a range of fannish texts in the process. Over the next few installments, he is going to share the background of this project and in each post, I am going to be sharing some of his works.

“Buffy vs. Edward” helped to establish your reputation as a remix video producer. In some ways, it looks forward to the focus on pop culture and masculinity which has been central to your newest videos. So, can you share some of the thinking behind this now classic video? What motivated this video? What does it suggest about the relationship of your work to fandom and popular culture more generally? What core political commitments informed this work?

When I saw the first Twilight film back in 2008, I was struck by its unmistakably regressive messages about gender. I also notice that much of the disdain for this movie online was directed at the character of Bella rather than that of Edward. In general female characters in entertainment tend to draw more criticism than male characters do. Often this is because of a combination of sexism and the poor representation of women in a male-dominated media industry. Though in the case of Twilight, the critical focus on Bella’s romances seemed especially misguided because Edward is the one depicted engaging in unambiguous stalkerish behavior.

Domestic violence and abuse prevention organizations publish lists of “red flags” to help people identify warning signs in their romantic relationships.  Even a casual look at those lists reveals that Edward engages in many “red flag” behaviors over the course of the four Twilight books and subsequent movies in the series. These “red flags” include things like extreme jealousy, disregard for personal boundaries, threats of violence, and isolating someone from their friends or family. These controlling behaviors are part of a dangerous and toxic form of masculinity that is often celebrated in entertainment.

When I began constructing my remix video comparing Twilight’s conservative gender framing of vampire lore to the more progressive messages embedded in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show, I made a point of focusing my visual argument on critiquing Edward’s behavior. To that end, I removed Bella entirely from the remix and replaced her with footage of Buffy. All of the Buffy clips I used were deliberately chosen to make it appear she was directly responding to Edward’s abusive behavior.

My hope with that remix was to re-shape and re-focus online conversations away from Bella’s “lack of personality” or “indecisiveness” and back onto Edward’s words and actions. Once I released Buffy vs Edward on YouTube in 2009, I was excited to see that the mashup accomplished that goal. All across the internet, from the LA Times to Edward fan forums, I started seeing nuanced conversations pop up about Edward’s abusive behaviors.

All of my critical video work uses pop culture as a lens through which I can engage in sociopolitical discussions with fans and general audiences who may not be as familiar with academic theory or texts. My projects are, at their core, critical investigations of the ways entertainment creates meaning in our shared culture.

“Right Wing Talk Radio Duck” brought the political dimensions of your remix practice into much sharper focus and you found yourself responding to some fairly powerful critics within the conservative media sphere. In some ways, you were mapping the emergence of the alt right ethos that would bring Donald Trump to power. What do you see when you look back on that video and its reception today?

My Right Wing Radio Duck remix video was meant as a critique of Glenn Beck in particular and reactionary right-wing talk radio in general. But more than that, I wanted to focus on how right-wing demagogues exploit real working class concerns by scapegoating immigrants and people of color. Many Americans were understandably angry about the bailout of corporate banks after the mortgage crisis of 2007, which left huge subsections of the working poor and middle class out in the cold. Glenn Beck and his ilk preyed on and twisted the very real frustration many Americans were feeling about that economic catastrophe.

I wanted to unequivocally condemn Glenn Beck’s racist fear-mongering, but I didn’t want to completely demonize all of his listeners. My goal was to have viewers of my remix come away with a better understanding of why some working folks might be taken in by Tea Party-like rhetoric. It’s a bit of a difficult and delicate argument to try to make in any format but it’s especially challenging with remix video because you’re so often limited by the source material. That’s why I chose Donald Duck as the lens through which to make my critique. Donald seemed especially appropriate for remixing because he was originally created by Disney to represent a frustrated down-on-their-luck Depression-era "everyman.” Donald is a hot-headed character. He’s easily duped. He’s almost always wrong, but critically he’s not entirely unsympathetic. In short, he’s not a villain. I constructed the remix carefully so we see Donald lose his job, have his house foreclosed on, and then in desperation turn to right-wing radio for answers, only to be driven into a panicked nightmare by racist fearmongering. In my remix Donald eventually figures out that he’s been hoodwinked by right-wing voices that don’t really care about him or his struggles.

In terms of the reaction to the remix, I was accused by Beck himself of being part of a union/communist plot funded by Obama to undermine the values of American capitalism. It was ludicrous but it would have been a lot funnier if it didn’t inspire his listeners to start threatening me online. During his heyday on Fox News, Glenn Beck turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. His potent mixture of “tough guy” rhetoric, racist fearmongering, faux populism and conspiracy theories was nearly identical to what we saw in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

You ended up working with Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency, where you would have seen fairly directly the #gamergate crowd at work. How did those experiences shape your current Pop Culture Detective project?

My experiences while working with Feminist Frequency were definitely a catalyst for the creation of my crowdfunded video series. As you mentioned, I worked as producer and co-writer on the first season of the Tropes vs Women in Video Games project. During my 4 years at that job, I became one of gamergate’s favorite male targets.

Gamergate, for those who are unfamiliar, was a coordinated hate and harassment campaign mostly targeting women involved in video game development and criticism. This online crusade was reactionary in nature and rooted in a particularly virulent strain of anti-feminism. I should note that since I’m a straight white guy, the type of online abuse I faced was decidedly different (and less intense) than what women endured. Abuse directed at women is often of a sexual nature and includes obsessive stalking and specific threats of intimate violence. When men are harassed online it usually follows an established pattern of attempted emasculation. Alongside a spade of threats, I was accused of “not being a real man,” of being “too sensitive”, of being controlled by women, and of course of being gay. Essentially I was seen as a traitor to my gender. All this because of my role in critiquing the demeaning and overtly sexualized ways in which female characters are often represented in video games.

The daily insults and abuse hurled at me over social media made it clear that gamergate had as much to do with cultural ideas about hyper-masculinity as it did with women in gaming. Indeed the two concepts are deeply interconnected. It very quickly became clear to me that the angry young men involved in gamergate saw themselves as protecting video games from the influence of women because they viewed their hobby as one of the “last bastions” of macho manhood.

The gamergate response is perhaps not all that surprising. At every point in history when steps toward equality are won, those gains are met with a reactionary backlash. So for example, Old West pulp stories saw a surge in popularity which coincided with the rise of movements for women’s suffrage. Men’s Adventure magazines of the 1940s to 1960s were in large part a reaction to gains made by women (and people of color) in the aftermath of WWII. These types of testosterone-infused pulp adventure stories served as a form of “equality escapism” (as I like to call it) for men angered by a changing reality. They offered men a way to retreat to a place where men could engage in regressive power fantasies rooted in white male supremacy. These were narratives where men got to be rugged individualists who dispensed justice from the barrel of a gun (and where those men were rewarded with women). These were fantasy worlds in which men’s violence and men’s chauvinism were presented as ideal formulations of masculinity.

I’d argue that this same type of macho manhood is mirrored and celebrated in many modern video games. For decades mainstream video games have leaned on macho power fantasies as a way to appeal to a young straight male demographic. Entitlement to women and women’s bodies (and other sexist conventions like the damsel in distress) played a large part in the type of male fantasies major gaming companies were selling. In the years leading up to gamergate, however, we saw some sectors of the gaming industry very slowly begin taking some steps towards creating better representations of women in their products. A large cross section of angry young men falsely believe that even modest progress towards gender equality in their favorite entertainment media is something that diminishes them, their power, and their masculinity.

Over and over again, men involved in gamergate would say they were defending their fantasy worlds from “political correctness” and “diversity.” They felt some types of video games were important to their identity as men because those games provided them a safe space where “men could be real men again.” And they feared that women’s input into video games would “feminize” gaming and therefore take away their hyper-masculine fantasy worlds.

The celebration of and idealization of macho, violent, and toxic forms of masculinity has always been closely linked to reactionary right-wing politics, and it’s an especially potent part of the ideology of hate groups. After gamergate and the rise of Trump, it seemed a important time to start a video series that critically deconstructed toxic representations of manhood in entertainment. That is what my project, The Pop Culture Detective Agency, is all about.

Jonathan McIntosh is a media critic, remix artist, and video essayist. He has been remixing mass media narratives for critical and educational purposes since before the invention of YouTube. He serves on the advisory board of New Media Rights, a non-profit organization working to protect the rights of digital media makers. His current project, The Pop Culture Detective Agency, is a series of long-form video essays exploring the intersections of politics, masculinity, and entertainment. 

Digital Media and Learning 2017: A Conversation about Politics and Youth

Last week was the 8th and final Digital Media and Learning Conference, hosted by the University of California-Irvine. Starting next year, the conference will be morphing into the Connected Learning conference, which will alternate years between MIT and Irvine, and which involves the collaboration of multiple research networks -- among them, Games, Learning and Society and the Sandbox Summit. I was proud to have been asked to help organize the very first of the Digital Media and Learning conferences shortly after I arrived at USC eight years ago. We started out with a focus on issues of diversity and learning with Craig Watkins and Sonia Livingstone as our keynote speakers. It was amazing to take time to see how much more diverse and inclusive the current conference was. DML has worked because it brought together educational researchers, teachers, librarians, after school program coordinators, youth media producers, policy makers, and many others in a space which encourages active exchanges between theory and practice.

This year's keynote events centered around youth and politics. danah boyd's opening remarks posed an appocalyptic vision of the darker side of the web, describing the ways that some of the disruptive communication and information practices associated with troll culture, have grown in strength and influence in recent years and now pose a serious threat to the state of American democracy. Her remarks were critically important to those of us who care about participatory culture, politics, and learning, forcing us to confront the negative consequences of some of our choices about the media environment. She ends with a call to action, describing many of us in the room as on the front lines of a larger struggle that will define what kind of society we will inhabit. She does not offer many answers and at times, the questions she raises can feel overwhelming. I talked to people afterwords who left this talk with their heads reeling.

My instructions as moderator for the closing plenary session was to bring back some hope. I was honored to share the podium with Esra'a Al-Shafei, a young internet activist who spoke about her experiences fighting for human rights and social justice in the Gulf. Her courage, determination, and creativity inspired everyone who heard this conversation, as she described her entry into the digital realm, spoke about being censored by her government at 16, explained the role which humor, music, games, and other cultural practices played in allowing her community to maintain their struggle. These are stories we need to hear as Americans, because there is so much we can learn from activists working in the Arab world and elsewhere about how to use these platforms and practices to change the world. 

I strongly recommend my regular readers to watch both of these programs, starting with danah boyd and ending with Esra'a Al-Shafei, so that you can have the full emotional experience we felt at DML this year.

What the Filk...?: An Interview with Sally Childs-Helton (Part Three)

Wizard Rock and Nerdcore are two different genres of fan music that sought to distinguish themselves from filk and which stressed performances rather than group sings as the primary mode of presentation. How has the filk community responded to these developments?

Some filkers, especially younger ones, are aware of and enjoy wizard rock (often called wrock, here represented by Harry and the Potters) and nerdcore and its franchise-oriented cousins (Trek rock, Dr. Who rock, Rocking Jay, etc.), while some are vaguely aware of the existence of this music but don’t actively seek it out.  Some nerdcore and franchise-oriented rock tunes do show up in the filk room as “found filk,” so filkers become aware this way.  One geek/nerd musician who is especially popular in the filk community is Jonathan Coulton, and several filk dealers carry his music, though he has no real affiliation with the community.  “Code Monkey” and “Re: Your Brains” (performed here at the PAX gaming festival) are highly popular.  Filkers have been writing about geek and nerd topics and media franchise characters for years, so it’s no surprise that when nerdcore, wrock, etc., began developing that some of the tunes would become “found filk.”

Nerdcore, wrock, etc. come out of a popular music model, most often rock, which differentiates them from filk, with its folk-based model (though rock has been in filk for a very long time).  These niche audience musics are often performed by professional and semi-professional bands or artists, and some of these musicians make most of their living playing music (which cannot be said of filkers, or professional musicians when wearing their filk hats).  Geek/Nerdcore musicians often perform on the indie band circuits and have large online followings.  Many of the franchise-oriented bands (wrock, Trek rock, etc.) perform at the larger commercial media cons and occasionally at fan-run SF/F cons.  Niche musicians may also have local and regional followings and perform in bars and clubs.  So the venues in which these geek/nerd/media musicians perform are not conducive to the filk room format so vital to filk, though geek/nerd/media and filk communities all sing along at concerts, as do fans at rock concerts.  Some filkers who are semi-professional or professional occasionally perform concerts at commercial cons, but there is no filk programming (workshops and panels) and no filk room for group sings.

One way that filk has attempted to engage younger musicians has been by inviting geek/nerd and media franchise musicians to perform at filk conventions.  In some cases, the groups have come in, performed, and left, treating it like any other gig.  In other cases, they have come, performed, and stayed to join the evening filk circles and other programming, and later become members of the community.  Some of the geek/nerd/franchise groups look at filkers as amateurs while others recognize like-minded musicians.  I had an interesting exchange with members of a Trek band at a convention where my band was a guest of honor.  We finished our concert, and were tearing down while the Trek band was setting up.  They said they really enjoyed our set and I said we were looking forward to theirs.  When I invited them to return for open filking later that night, I was told in no uncertain terms that they were not filkers, the implication being that they were “real” musicians and filkers were not.

Filkers are more aware of the geek/nerd/media franchise music community now than they were 5 or so years ago simply because filkers bring the music in as “found filk,” filk cons are inviting these musicians to perform, and their music is readily available online.  Filkers who are active in wider fandom are also attending commercial cons and hearing these groups in concert.  Concerts have been an important part of filk cons and some general SF/F cons for years, and these allow especially the more polished musicians to showcase their materials.  But the filk circle is still at the core of the filk community and culture.  The relationship between the filk and geek/nerd/franchise music communities continues to be defined, but I think it’s accurate to say that the filk community knows a lot more now about geek/nerd/franchise music than that community and its audiences know about filk.  Even though filk is considered by some as the grandmother of geek and nerd musics, the filk community exists at non-commercial, fan-run cons, and even though filk music is easily available online, filkers really don’t promote themselves beyond the community.  Filkers deeply value making music together in small groups more than they value winning large audiences and selling product.  Part of this may also be generational, which I’ll address later.    

 How has filk taken advantage of new systems of distribution, such as video-sharing on Youtube and Vimeo, musical downloads on i-Tunes, or podcasting?

Filkers, like many SF/F fans, were online from the beginning of the internet and today they inhabit every form of social media and use every contemporary form of music distribution.  Like many fen, they are early adopters and serious tech geeks.  Even though CDs are still selling well, many filkers are also releasing albums as downloads, though there is some discussion in the community about how much longer the CD platform will remain financially viable since most filkers hope to at least recoup the money they have put into an album.  Some are crowd-funding projects through KickStarter and similar platforms.  Others are offering live online concerts, and there are plenty of videos on YouTube and Vimeo, though they can be surprisingly hard to find only using “filk” as a search term.  Several filkers have professional sound studios in their homes and are releasing very high-quality albums.  Podcasts are available, and even SF/F publishers like Baen have done podcasts featuring filk and filkers.  As mentioned earlier, it seems that filkers use their command of technology to share music with the community; if other people find it, that’s wonderful, but the main motivation is to share the music rather than make a living from it.  I have heard from several Millennial filkers that they came across filk first through online performances, but again it was only by happenstance.

Some filkers have tried to reproduce the environment of the filk room using Skype and other real-time conferencing formats, but they have not been satisfactory.  The time lag is still too great to Skype someone into a house filk and be able to sing along or interact in ways expected in the filk room.  During my research several people noted how wonderful it would be if Skype-style technology could get fast enough to let filkers at a distance create a virtual filk room.  Online concerts have been more successful because people have different expectations; the performer knows he or she will hear laughter or applause a bit later than expected.  Technology exists that can let musicians at a distance perform together, but it takes computers beyond consumer-level product.  It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when this technology is supported by consumer-quality computers and other technology so that filkers will be able to hold “virtual filks” with greater success.     

Your scholarly writing documents what you describe as the generational politics of filk. What did you discover?

I think I’d call it more generational preferences and enculturation than politics.  Baby Boomers and to some extent Gen-Xers value their filk face-to-face, and are more likely to enjoy folk music, folk rock, and “classic” rock.  Millennials prefer newer genres of popular music, and are perfectly comfortable living much of their social lives online.  One Millennial child of Baby Boomer filkers said she didn’t enjoy the filk room because it was like walking into space that belonged to her parents’ generation.  The music wasn’t to her taste, many of the references in the songs--and jokes or remarks made between songs--were generationally specific, and things just moved slowly.  Her expectations as a Millennial were not being met, and she felt that she was invading space that was not generationally her own.  She didn’t feel unwelcome, but it simply wasn’t attractive and there were things she’d rather be doing with friends her own age.  When asked what music activities Millennials might enjoy most, she replied that maybe having a room set up where people could just come and jam and create together would be attractive.  My article “Folk Music in a Digital Age: The Importance of Face-to-Face Community Values in Filk Music,” published in the Journal of Fandom Studies, goes into more depth on this topic.  

Is there a risk that filk may die out as a cultural practice within fandom?

It depends on how you define “die out,” and “fandom.”  Filk is certainly evolving and changing, and it has changed dramatically from the early days of SF/F fans singing folk song revival songs at cons.  It has changed since it was documented almost 25 years ago in Textual Poachers.  It also depends on the parameters you put around fandom.  The biggest split I see is between fan-run cons and commercial cons, and how that has changed fannish music culture.  Unless commercial and franchise-based cons start making space for face-to-face fan-made music beyond concerts performed by professional and semi-professional musicians, then filk as we know it today may well disappear as Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers age out.  I say this because traditional filk circles are closely tied to fan-run cons, and these cons are starting to feel the pressure of staying viable as Baby Boomers age out of fandom and younger generations gravitate toward commercial cons.  So the “natural habitat” of the filker is becoming endangered, much like the natural habitat of some wild flora and fauna that is endangered by urban sprawl.  Then again, many species of flora and fauna have learned to live in suburban and even urban areas.  To carry this metaphor further, for a number of years now the symbol of filk has been the dandelion—it grows everywhere and keeps sprouting back up.

So I’m never going to say that filk, as it is currently practiced, may die out.  There are hints that people of all generations are starting to get tired of living so much of their lives online, and that they are finding the joys of face-to-face activities again.  There is technology on the horizon that may help filkers engage in virtual filk rooms that feel more genuinely like “the real thing.”  And filk, like all things, is going to keep evolving to meet the needs and tastes of each new generation.  It may be that as Boomers and Gen-Xers age out, the filk room will disappear and that fannish music will be identified as indie nerd and geek rock, performed at commercial cons.  Or individuals might write music that is very much like filk, and offer it up through YouTube or as live online concerts.  Or younger generations may decide that they want the experience of making and enjoying music in a face-to-face environment, where everybody contributes, and the filk room will enjoy a rebirth, though in a different incarnation.  Instead of a filk circle where everybody takes turns with other people supporting, it may be more like a musical “maker space” where people can jam and co-write lyrics and melodies and co-create arrangements.    

One thing I’d like to examine more broadly are activities (fannish or not) that people can pursue as individuals versus those that must be pursued in face-to-face groups, and how the balance between these activities is changing generationally.  Such research can be expanded to activities people can engage in through face-to-face groups versus online groups.  This will tell us a lot about how interests in various fannish creative activities is changing, and about filk as it is currently practiced and possible future directions.

What might be some steps that could be taken to revitalize filk for this next generation of fans?

We do have Millennials coming into filk, but there are many fewer of them than we would like.  The draw for them is the face-to-face community and the support they get as young creative people.  Millennials have told me that most of their peers have no idea filk exists because they go to larger commercial cons like GenCon where there is no filk.  But now that so much filk is available online, I think some Millennials are finding it and thinking it’s just more geek/nerd music, and they have no idea this music has been around for over 70 years and has an international community.  The Millennials who find filk now tend to be singer/songwriters, and already have “retro” sensibilities.  And they appreciate the support and sense of community they don’t find at the large commercial cons, where they may enjoy listening to geek/nerd groups, but there is no place for them to share their creativity.  It’s very easy for cosplayers to go to a commercial con and display their creativity by wearing a hall costume, but the lone singer/songwriter has no audience there.

We can continue to revitalize filk by making it easier for these young, lone singer/songwriters to find us online, and to encourage them to come join the community.  Some of them are going to be comfortable there, and some are going to feel like they’ve just entered a roomful of people old enough to be their parents or grandparents.  But when there are younger faces, they will be more likely to feel like they belong.  Some filk cons and general fan-run cons have been inviting younger performers to do concerts, sometimes as guests of honor, further signaling to younger generations that filk welcomes them, and is capable of change.  As more and more fans of all ages go to large commercial cons, it can’t hurt to ask for filk rooms, or even a concert room where more polished filkers can offer themed concerts (Dr. Who tunes, Star Wars songs, tunes about gaming).  Some filkers and cons are already doing this, but we need to do more to help the younger generations of fandom realize that there is a whole huge body of music out there they might enjoy.   

Sally Childs-Helton, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist, percussionist, and archivist; she holds the rank of Professor at Butler University.  Away from university duties, she is active as a musician and facilitator who conducts drumming and improvisation workshops; performs with her husband Barry, eclectic Celtic band Wild Mercy, and the Thin Air improvising quartet; and accompanies choruses, dance, and theater.  She has been active in the filk community since 1984, was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 2003, and has won several Pegasus Awards for Excellence in Filking.  Her current music research interests include musical fandoms, generational aspects of fandoms, and artistic sign language as musical expression.