Feeding the Civic Imagination: Call for Papers

The Civic Paths research group invites you to contribute to a special issue of the cultural studies journal, Lateral. Details are below.

Forum: Feeding the Civic Imagination!

Abstract proposals of 200 words due July 30, 2021 (form)
Completed submissions of 2,000 words due January 15, 2022

You stroll by a bakery. The door opens, spilling the smell of fresh bread onto the street. You cannot resist. Soon you hold a warm loaf in your hands. Your fingers scrape the flaky golden-brown crust. Will you taste it or wait to share it? Will you be motivated to learn more about where this food came from? Will you be inspired to embark on your own baking adventure? Or, perhaps you stumble onto a cooking video on YouTube. Mesmerized, you watch spices sizzle before other ingredients are added to create a Punjabi-style cauliflower sabji. Before you know it, you are transported to another time and place, immersed in a memory of a meal shared many years ago. In an instant, the past collides with the present, inviting you to weave together the sprawling connections that are revealed.

Food can nourish and inspire us. Food can be used to shame us. Food can connect us to each other. Food can divide us. Food can remind us of the past. It can also inspire us to think about the future, to imagine culinary possibilities, even as we encounter real world constraints, tensions, and challenges. With a mindfulness towards how food has historically often been used in framing racist, gendered, ableist, fatphobic, heteropatriarchal, colonialist, and ethnonationalist imaginings of civic participation, we aim to channel our collective energies and shared emotions in relation to food to pave the way for tangible social change. It’s not about choosing one food item over another. It’s about reaffirming and challenging our beliefs in the power of food to protect our rights and fight for justice. It’s about charting paths through the creative, ambivalent, or painful ways that food shows up in our lives. How can we imagine more just and inclusive ways to involve food in civic imagining?

Help us explore these connections! This is a call to practitioners, artists, community leaders, scholars, and others who want to share their lived and observed experiences with baking, cooking, and eating as a shared, emotional, critical, challenging, creative, civic, even nostalgic experience. We invite you to contribute to a Lateral Forum focused on food and civic imagination, curated by the Civic Paths Group at the University of Southern California. The Civic Paths Group explores continuities between online participatory culture and civic engagement through outreach, creative work, popular culture, storytelling, research, and academic inquiry. 

We define civic imagination as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic Imagination is the foundation of a greater process in which members of a society come together to share their memories and future change they want to see in their world. We think of imagination as a force with power, and collective imaginations as civic arenas where serious issues can be explored, critiqued, and aspirational futures can be crafted through, among other things, eating, cooking, and baking. Whether it is cooking a recipe passed down over generations, fighting food injustice, valuing the fleeting experience of a shared meal, relearning how we relate to what we eat, exploring a flavor combination learned over YouTube, or deepening the connections we make by sharing our bakes on social media in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, food has the power to connect, challenge, and inspire us.

For this Lateral Forum, we welcome contributions focusing on different dimensions of the relationships (emergent and long standing) between appreciating and questioning food, cooking, baking, imagination, and memory. Some questions of special interest include:

• How does food inspire or stifle an inclusive imagination? How can we encourage ways to involve food in civic imagination and debates on justice?

• How can we inspire our shared imagination as we prepare meals, serve dishes and eat what we made? How does food connect with our memories and aspirations?

• How can the media and popular culture support food and civic imagination? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? How to reckon with the history and heritage of the food we fuse?

• How do we connect imagination, cooking, and political meaning?

• How can we confront the structural barriers and limitations around food justice, that go beyond a poor food system onto the legacies of settler colonialism?

• How can we resist and imagine alternatives to (racist, sexist, ableist) power structures that dictate who and which bodies are “allowed” to interact with foods?

• What has the pandemic taught us about food and framing the imagination? What examples and approaches need to be documented at this moment in time?

• How can we cook with civic imagination? What are the “recipes” that could guide us?

• How do we want cooking practices to look like in the future?

We aim to create a space for these conversations around food and the civic imagination. We are open to experiences, case studies, annotated recipes, or critical short pieces that provoke thought and reflection. Written submissions should adhere to the 2,000 word limit. Media-rich and interactive pieces that make use of Lateral as an open-access, web-based platform will be scoped on a case-by-case basis.

"I Don't Want to Be Flesh": Feminist Transhumanism in Years and Years (Part Two)

“I Don’t Want to Be Flesh”: Feminist Transhumanism in Years and Years (Part Two)

by Daisy Reid

This brings me to the second half of this study, which explores the ways in which Bethany’s representation in Years and Years frustrates both the hyper-masculine tropes commonly attached to transhumanist doctrine, and popular feminist technoscientific understandings of cyborgian human-technology configurations, in order to open up an undertheorized category of what we might term feminist transhumanism.

Feminist interventions such as Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto have long considered the philosophical and political implications of our multitudinous bodily entanglements with technology: “We are all chimeras,” Haraway famously writes, “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (7). Emphasising boundary porosity as a site of socialist-feminist potential, Haraway’s cyborg is ultimately a celebration of multiplicity, insisting that such distinctions as human/machine, human/animal, and natural/artificial are ultimately untenable in a world where everyone can be partly someone else.

In attempting to anchor Davies’ representation of Bethany Lyons within a theoretical framework, Haraway’s cyborg is certainly a seductive, if not the default, figure to explore. When Bethany’s body is fully integrated with technological interfaces, with transmitters embedded in her fingers and cameras fitted into her eyes, she becomes a hybrid being imbued with a radical new potential to enact political disruption – and this, it should be noted, she eventually does, by using her tech to expose government-sponsored death camps throughout the UK. As such, she seems the epitome of the “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (14) that lie at the heart of Haraway’s feminist cyborg myth. 

However, posthuman[1]thinkers such as Katherine Hayles have suggested that the Harawayian cyborg is in fact “no longer the most compelling metaphor through which to understand out contemporary situation” (165). Hayles suggests that, as a figure defined by its boundary-crossing potential, Haraway’s cyborg remains somewhat paradoxically invested in the very existence of the binaries and split it purports to refute.

To put it another way, if Bethany’s implants are what make her a cyborg, then the label “cyborg” becomes locked to certain bodies – thereby suggesting an essentialised difference between such tech-assisted bodies as Bethany’s, and “pure,” or “natural” bodies belonging to other, non-transhumanist bodies.

In a critique of Haraway levied from a disability studies perspective, crip scholar Alison Kafer contends that the common practice of looking to biotechnologies such as cochlear implants or prosthetic limbs as exemplary of the cyborg condition suggests that “there is an original purity that, thanks to assistive technology, has only now been mixed, hybridized, blurred” (108).

In such a hasty framing, we can identify an oblique investment in the maintenance of essentialising categories, rather than their dissolution via an emphasis on the dynamic and co-evolving flows of an interconnected system – this latter framework being one that, according to the likes of Hayles, is more productive for theorising the present posthuman moment.

Nor, indeed, would Haraway herself be at all content if Bethany’s transhumanism were framed as cyborgian in her own use of the term. Transhumanism in its present, post-Extropian form is deeply anthropocentric in scope, and as such is far too invested in developing something like a human-exceptionalist Nietzschean Übermensch, than one could reasonably hope to reconcile with Haraway’s own dedication to “sympoiesis,” or a philosophical mode that aims to de-centre the human by demonstrating the transversal relationality between human and other-than-human beings. In fact, Haraway has oft expressed her frustration with the manner in which A Cyborg Manifesto has been co-opted for transhumanist theorising, denouncing such initiatives as “a kind of techno-masculinism of a self-caricaturing kind” (Gane & Haraway 146). 

This, indeed, is a facet that renders Bethany’s narrative in Years and Years particularly interesting. Transhumanism has been well documented as being predominantly the interest of men; TheGuardian’s 2017 exposé on the subject was unselfconsciously entitled “When man meets metal: rise of the transhumans” (Adams, emphasis mine), and of the movement’s key figures, from Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson to Kevin Warwick, there is a notable dearth of female names.

Indeed, one might go so far as contend that the very project of enhancing the human body using technology and cybernetics echoes the masculinist principles of Enlightenment thinking; Fuller and Lipinska even describe it as “ultra-Enlightenment” (25), giving primacy to the white male symbolic domain of rationality and logic over and above the more feminine-allied notions of affect, emotionality, and matter.

Francesca Ferrando additionally notes that the transhumanist aim of uploading the mind as “software” and leaving the bodily “hardware” behind, “genealogically stands as a cyber twist to the dualism which has been structural to the hegemonic Western tradition of thought: the symbolic flesh (a.k.a. body/material/female/black/nature/object, etc.) shall be overcome by symbolic data (a.k.a. mind/virtual/male/white/culture/subject etc.)” (3).

What, then, is at stake for the transhumanist narrative in Years and Years in the fact that Davies makes Bethany a female character – or, more specifically, that she is Black and female?

One perspective might be that this question is presaged by the scene to which we have periodically returned throughout this paper, in which Bethany’s parents assume she is transgender, rather than transhuman. That Bethany aspires to be, “Not male. Or female. But better” (Years and Years E1) again recalls Haraway, in her provocative statement that, “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world.”

However, retrospective interviews have revealed that Haraway was dissatisfied with the way this comment had been construed; she did not, she claims, intend to suggest that, “Ah, that means it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman anymore” (Gane and Haraway 137).

Instead, she retroactively likens her use of the term “post-gender” to the way in which women-of-colour theorists employ the term “intersectional,” identifying the ways in which race, gender, and class “torque” one another to form a cyborgian, non-totalising subjectivity. As Cox glosses, “Women of colour readily demonstrate the queer torqueing of identity categories, since they are a priori excluded from full integration into any one social grouping…They stand at the margins of these identity labels and destabilize or queer them from this outside position” (324).

From this perspective, as a Black biracial woman, Bethany always already occupies a cyborgian post-gender subjectivity by virtue of her very non-adherence to unitary hegemonic identity categories. Her desire to become transhuman, however, is motivated by an entirely different impetus: rather than queering normative identarian classifications with recourse to the outsider position afforded by her cyborgian status as a woman of colour, Bethany appears to wish to exist in a techno-utopian world in which masculinity and femininity do not exist at all; in other words, the “post-gender world” that Haraway insists is a misinterpretation of her original writerly intention.

Bethany thus suggests that she wants to take on an unmarked identity, a neutral space of rationality and liberty that surpasses the split of sexually dimorphic biologies and the arbitrary power structures we attach to them. We might deduce, then, that what she wishes to inhabit is a form of subjectivity that has, historically, been the domain of white masculinity: that of being the default, the objective, the free and unimpeded. As such, Bethany’s desire to transcend her feminine corporeal frame in order to become immaterial, rational “data” might indeed be approximated to a desire to become, in a vastly expanded sense, transgender; that is, to take on an alternative mode of embodied performativity that has, historically, been frequently attributed to maleness. 

By way of contextualising this, we might briefly look to the show’s transgender character of Lincoln Lyons, Bethany’s younger cousin. Lincoln’s transition throughout the series is so unanimously accepted by her family as to almost fly under the radar in terms of plot; one or two older characters comment vaguely upon her new habits of wearing skirts and ribbons, gently acknowledging that a change is taking place in her gender presentation, but the need for a spectacularised coming-out narrative is completely evinced.

Nor, indeed, is Lincoln depicted as encountering the tired prejudices of so-called “TERFs” (or “Gender Criticals”), and their violent indictment of transwomen as threatening or aberrant, that are so rife in the United Kingdom at the present moment. In Years and Years, Lincoln simply starts presenting as female around 2027, and that is that; no need for further discussion or debate.

In a similar manner, Daniel Lyons – Bethany’s uncle – is unquestionably accepted as a gay man, without this facet of his identity ever being either flattened or ignored, nor made out to be a point of contention. Given that Russell T Davies has been demonstrably committed to chronicling authentic LGBTQ+ stories for much of his career, most famously through the 1999 TV series Queer as Folk, this decision to depict an unquestioning acceptance of gender and sexuality as fluid and non-totalising signals Davies’ broader investment in tracking the historical progression and speculated futures of queer and trans* subjectivities across a cross-section of British culture.

Beyond this, the myriad parallels that are drawn throughout the series between transhumanism and transgenderism, from Bethany’s “coming-out” narrative to the nurse’s offhand comment about surgery regulation, plant the seed in the viewer’s mind that the perceived ontological split between human and technology will, in the future, be universally considered as much of an arbitrary social construct as gender norms will grow to become.

Further, to return to the nurse’s comparison between face lifts, gender reassignment, and transhuman surgery, we might note a subtle insinuation that, like its surgical predecessors, biohacking will soon become a properly regulated process absorbed into the medical industrial complex – a nod, of course, not only to Bethany’s later public-funded surgeries, but also to the potentially radical medical futures to which transhumanism might give rise in our own lives.

With all these overlapping perspectives in mind, we might now briefly revisit Bethany’s “coming out” episode. Given that transhumanism is still a relatively obscure, borderline eccentric philosophy in today’s society, as viewers of this scene we are implicitly aligned with Celeste: requiring an explanation as to what “transhuman” entails, and cultivating a deep scepticism about what we hear in response.

This scene is represented as happening in 2024, by which time it is fair to predict that the dangers and more extreme cases of biohacking may have started to filter into the mainstream media, most likely framed as a subversive countercultural threat that targets vulnerable young people (again, a familiar narrative to many LGBTQ+ folks). Celeste’s enraged rejection of Bethany’s “coming out” is thus conversant with the trope of the queer and/or trans* teen coming out to a prejudiced family, in addition tothe way in which one might anticipate a parent to respond to their daughter wanting to engage in potentially dangerous biohacking activity – a more extreme iteration, perhaps, of a mother being unable to stomach the idea of her daughter getting an illicit tattoo or piercing.

The incident with Lizzie’s eye only seems to corroborate Celeste’s (and, implicitly, our) perspective: transhumanism is a threat, both bodily on an individual scale, and existential on a societal, moral scale. However, the show’s unique format in spanning such an extended timeframe permits for such perceptions to shift, organically and believably, within its characters – and, therefore, for we as viewers to imagine our own worldviews shifting with them.

By the end, Davies depicts transhumanist biohacking as gradually becoming the new normal, incrementally shifting from its cultural perception as a “wacky cyborg plan” to a sort of natural “evolution” (Renstrom) in professional and medical development. As such, it becomes as seamlessly integrated into the quotidian social and economic life of the Lyons family as their much-used, Alexa-like virtual assistant, “Señor” (incidentally, a superb example of what Bruce Sterling terms “design fiction,” or a believable diegetic prototype of a fictional object – and another example of a technology to which the older Lyons were originally resistant, and yet which is transformed into an object of necessity, even affection, by the end.

Transhuman biohacks, we surmise, are a similarly conceived design fiction that will follow an analogous trajectory). Tracking the progression of biohacking from a transgressive and threatening subcultural activity in early episodes of Years and Years, to a government-sponsored and meticulously regulated process at a later point in the narrative, thus encourages viewers, via the shifting perception of Celeste, to question the ways in which our contemporary scepticisms, disbeliefs, or even prejudices against transhumanist philosophy or biohacking activity might evolve towards something like wide acceptance in coming decades.

In his particular depiction of LGBTQ+ subjectivities, Davies seems to suggest that such an evolution echoes the ways in which mainstream antipathy and moral panic directed towards the queer and trans* community in the UK might continue to progress into something like widespread inclusiveness, and acceptance to the point of being unremarkable – yet without straying into erasure.

That said, to stake a claim that Bethany’s desire to become transhuman is ultimately a desire to discard her own femininity in favour of a body that performs as maleis to overlook the myriad embodied pleasures and textured impressions to which her transhuman and biohacked, yet unquestionably feminine, body gives her access.

In Episode Five’s scene that shows her sitting in a hospital gown, glowing with happiness at the result of the “upgrade” that has rendered her body a fully integrated human-machine interface, Bethany attempts to explain the novel sensations she is experiencing to her parents. She sits with her hands spread open over an electronic tablet, almost resembling a seer in her posture (fig. 1). Slow piano music begins to build as she interacts with the screen using only small twitches of her bionically altered fingers. At no point does she need to touch the device itself; it dances in perfect harmony with her thoughts.

As Bethany’s thoughts speed up, her musings becoming more layered and complex, new windows build above the screen in a clean visual reflection of her cognitive processes. Stacks of images extend beyond the edges of the device and appear to float just above it, forming a quivering, almost magical material-immaterial interface between the tablet and Bethany’s innermost thoughts. Settled in this visionary-like position, tablet in hand, she speaks dreamily to her parents as the camera slowly zooms in on her face:

I’m trying to explain it in ways you can understand. But the connection is so much more. While we were talking, at exactly the same time, I wondered about the Eighty Days of Rain. Where it came from. Why it was. What comes next. And I keyed into satellites, just 30 seconds ago, so I can see the course of El Niño. And I can tap into pressure sensors along the Atlantic coast. And barometric readings from ships at sea. If I put all that together…I am there. I’m inside it. The tide. The depth of the sea. And the curl of the waves. Within me…It’s joy. In my head. It is absolute joy. (Years and Years E5)

Fig 2. Bethany (Lydia West)’s technological “integration.” Russell T Davies, Years and Years Episode 5, HBO & BBC, 2019, 31:08. Screen capture from HBO Max. 

Bethany’s transhuman experience ultimately speaks less to a dissolving of her embodiment, as to its radical extension and recalibration. The profoundly spiritual affect imbuing the scene, assembled through a combination of Bethany’s prophet-like posture, blissful intonation, and the meditative soundtrack, implements a strict break with the techno-hyper-masculinist affect one might associate with the transhumanist cyborg transformations depicted in, for example, Robocopor Iron Man– although it is worth pointing out that Bethany’s characterisation also resists pigeonholing into the trope of the sexualised female cyborg, as is epitomised by characters such as Ava in Ex Machina.

Instead, Bethany’s feminine transhumanist experience is one of embodied joy, of emotion, and – notably – of calm oneness with the tides, a domain maintaining cultural associations to femininity, organicism, and nature. Nor is her experience strictly anthropocentric; she pursues avenues of relationality with other-than-human entities, exerting neither mastery nor violence over what she finds, but rather dwelling within them and responding with what we might see as a feminist ethics of care.

The “data” to which Bethany aspires cannot, therefore, be reduced to a brute overcoming of fleshly femininity in order to achieve Robocop-esque characteristics of masculine rationality, progress, and technoculture – the Extropian-inflected “techno-masculinist” transhumanism lambasted by Donna Haraway. Instead, it is posited as something organic and affective, sensual and deep, allowing her to inhabit several non-isomorphic and intersectional categories simultaneously yet without losing either her identity or her embodied materiality in the process.

This framing of a feminine-allied transhumanist transformation is reiterated in the closing scene of the final episode, in which the character of Edith Lyons is becoming one of the first subjects to upload their brain to the cloud. In the year 2034, she is living out the dream that Bethany was so admonished for coveting as a teenager. Edith muses upon the process slowly, ecstatically, as she lays in an airy laboratory:

“I’m not a piece of code. I’m not information. All these memories, they’re not just facts, they’re so much more than that. They’re my family. And my lover. They’re my mum, and my brother who died years ago. They’re love. That’s what I’m becoming now. Love. I am…love” (Years and Years E6).

Even as she participates in the extreme, fringe limits of transhumanism – that of relinquishing the body altogether and downloading the brain as code – Edith, too, rejects the overly masculinist undergirding of transhuman transformation as one grounded in logic, in violence, in sovereignty, in mastery, and in individualism.

As another figure of what we might term feminist transhumanism, she too emphasises relationality and symbiosis in her transformation, expressing a sprawling sense of interconnectedness, affect, care, and a profoundly feminine positionality that rejects reduction of memories into hard code and an attendant disavowal of the (feminine, subjective, natural) flesh.

Just as Russell T Davies prompts viewers to imagine slow changes in the ways we will culturally perceive biohacking and technological modifications in the future, so too do such scenes as this lead us to imagine a gradually developing future of transhumanist philosophy that is uncoupled from the cult of Elon Musk and Extropianism, transforming from “techno-masculinism of a self-caricaturing kind” to a relational philosophy embedded in a feminist ethics of care, radical political potential, and an intersectional formation of gendered subjectivity.

And yet even Bethany’s “fully integrated” feminist transhuman futurity, transplanted straight from science fiction as the image seems to be, may not be far off as one might expect. Today, when biohacking attempts are successful, they are often described in a language of expanded embodiment, of (extra)sensory pleasures, and of blissful interconnectedness that strongly recall Bethany’s own description of being transported “inside” a wave, a tide, or an electronic connection.

In a 2019 study, scholar London Brickley describes his encounter with Matt Henna, a lifelong science fiction fan and biohacker who had embedded neodymium (N52) magnets under the flesh of his fingers five years before. Brickley writes,

As the fingers healed and the nerves grew back around the magnetic strips embedded within, his sensitivity to the metal’s vibrating pull was becoming ever more acute. This new sense allowed him to communicate with the world around him in a whole new way, and he was learning to interpret its whispers. He can now sense when he is around power structures by how his nerves begin to hum. He can run his hand over his electronics and feel the boundaries of their presence, is even able to diagnose his laptop’s dying battery whenever the pulse of its heart starts to slow and skip a beat. He can sense the kind of electricity that is in the air. (10)

For Matt, as for Bethany, to be a biohacker – a transhuman, a cyborg, a human-machine hybrid – is not so much to uncouple mind from body, as to radically reimagine the entanglement between the two. Corporeal sensation and affect still reign supreme; for Matt as for Bethany, one can hardly say that the body is disposed of altogether. Instead, it becomes embroiled in a whole cacophony of more-than-human forces, structures, and networks to which our sensory capacities in their present form do not permit us access.

The body is not disavowed; it becomes something new. Brickley sharply articulates the nature of the shift, as he notes that the integration of mechanical parts into the organic body:

transforms the hacker into someone/something that no longer simply communicates with other human users through technology but communicates with other technology through the body. The classical digital paradigm of bodies communicating a message through a digital medium or screen…becomes inverted, as the communication now takes place between the pieces of electronic tech using the organic flesh as the medium of transport. (22)

The experience of Matt and other biohackers might therefore be approximated to a proto-iteration of the sort of feminist transhumanist transformation embodied by Bethany Lyons – a state in which transhumanist subjects will not yet have attained the status of pure data like Edith Lyons, but will still inhabit an embodiment far different to ours as we currently understand it. One will be able to live digitally through technological embodiment; to experience the rich textures and diffuse pleasures of a transversally interconnected more-than-human world, all the while without doing away with the sensations, consciousness, and phenomenology of the organic flesh, nor discarding its intersectional torques and gendered subjectivities.

Extrapolating from the underground practices of present-day transhumanist subcultures, to the queer techno-dystopian/techno-utopian future imagined by Russell T Davies, an examination of Bethany’s storyline in Years and Years thus permits one to reflect creatively and critically upon the future of biohacking, cyborg identities, and a speculative transhumanism that might be queer, feminist, and intersectional in scope rather than violently masculine; a feminist transhumanist turn that, indeed, might be upon us sooner than we expect.

Works Cited

Adams, Tim. “When man meets metal: rise of the transhumans.”Guardian, 29 Oct 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/transhuman-bodyhacking-transspecies-cyborg. Accessed 21 Feb 2021.

Banbury, Tamara. “Where’s My Jet Pack? Online Communication Practices and Media Frames of the Emergent Voluntary Cyborg Subculture.” Unpublished MA Thesis, Carleton University, 2019. https://curve.carleton.ca/system/files/etd/387fa17a-003c-4dd9-a1bd-7fc3b8e27cc3/etd_pdf/12c315671b2bc4dbcbaec32c0c7f4aa0/banbury-wheresmyjetpackonlinecommunicationpractices.pdf. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Brickley, London. “Bodies Without Borders: The Sinews and Circuitry of ‘folklore’+.” Western Folklore, vol. 78, no. 1, 2019, pp. 5-19.

Cox, Lara. “Decolonial Queer Feminism in Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985).” Paragraph, vol. 41, no. 3, 2018, pp. 317-332.

Davies, Russell T, creator. Years and Years. BBC and HBO, 2019.

Davies, Russell T. Screenplay of Years and Years, Episode 1. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/Years-and-Years-Ep1.pdf. Accessed 24 February 2021.

Delaney, Brigid. “Years and Years is riveting dystopian TV – and the worst show to watch right now.” The Guardian, 7 Apr 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/07/years-and-years-is-riveting-dystopian-tv-and-the-worst-show-to-watch-right-now. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Ferrando, Francesca. “Is the post-human a post-woman? Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence and the futures of gender: a case study.” European Journal of Futures Research, vol. 2, no. 43, 2014, pp. 1-17.

Fuller, Steve, and Veronika Lipinska. “Transhumanism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, vol. 3, no. 11, 2014, pp. 25-29.

Gane, Nicholas, and Donna Haraway. “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is To Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006, pp. 135-158.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Harawayby Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 5-90.

Hayles, Katherine N. “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 7-8, 2006, pp. 159-166.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Oremus, Will. “Choose Your Own Sixth Sense: DIY superpowers for the cyborg on a budget.” Slate, 14 Mar 2013, https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/cyborgs-grinders-and-body-hackers-diy-tools-for-adding-sensory-perceptions.html. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Regis, Ed. “Meet the Extropians.” Wired, 1 Oct 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/10/extropians/. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Renstrom, Joelle. “What Would It Mean for Humans to Become Data?” Slate, 30 Jul 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/years-and-years-finale-bethany-transhumanist.html#:~:text=Years%20and%20Years'%20transhumanist%20character%20demonstrates%20the%20conundrum,by%20merging%20human%20and%20machine.&text=In%20the%20premiere%20of%20the,scheduled%20a%20talk%20with%20them. Accessed 22 Feb 2021.

Rogers, Adam. “HBO’s Years and Years Unlocks Sci-Fi’s Ultimate Potential.” Wired, 11 Jul 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/review-years-and-years-hbo/. Accessed 26 Feb 2021.

Rothblatt, Martine. “Mind is Deeper Than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form.” The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More. Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2013, pp. 317-326.

Subba, Nikhil. “Elon Musk’s new co could allow uploading, downloading thoughts: Wall Street Journal.” Reuters, 27 Mar 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-musk-neuralink/elon-musks-new-co-could-allow-uploading-downloading-thoughts-wall-street-journal-idUSKBN16Y2GC. Accessed 21 Feb 2021.

“Years and Years: Series 1 (2019.)” Rotten Tomatoes, 2019,https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/years_and_years/s01. Accessed 26 Feb 2021. 

[1]The terms “transhuman” and “posthuman” are often confused. While transhumanism refers to ideologies of human enhancement through science and technology, posthumanism is a philosophical praxis that critiques the Western intellectual traditions of humanism and anthropocentrism. Both transhumanism and posthumanism share a common interest in the ontological dimension of technology, but transhumanism is centred upon augmenting the human condition – while posthumanism is broadly invested in dismantling human exceptionalist discourse by drawing attention to humankind’s embroilment in an extensive network of relations with more-than-human entities, processes, and interlocutors. 

Daisy Reid is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include speculative and science fictions, critical plant studies, posthumanism, (feminist) materialisms, and the Environmental Humanities. Her current work focuses on SF depictions of plant life and fungi in their manifold imbrications with issues of gender, sexuality, erotics, and desire.

"I Don't Want to Be Flesh": Feminist Transhuman Futures in Years and Years (Part One)

If you have not watched Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years, currently playing in the United States on HBO Max, you have missed something … memorable. Imagine This Is Us set in a near future UK when the world continues to collapse around us in plausible yet forward looking ways. We refract this dystopian world through the eyes of various members of one extended family whose lives is touched by the turmoil that surrounds him. For me, it did not always work but it hit a lot of raw nerves and it has been hard to get it out of my head. I’ve thought about the series often across the past year since I first watched it. More than anything else I saw, it captured the structure of feeling of the world at the current moment. I was delighted when Daisy Reid, a PhD student in Comparative Literature, chose to write about the series in my Science Fiction as Media Theory seminar. I asked her if I could share what she wrote here.

“I Don’t Want to Be Flesh”: Feminist Transhuman Futures in Years and Years

by Daisy Reid

The year is 2024. Donald Trump is approaching the end of his second term as President of the United States; extreme storms, floods, and heatwaves around the world have become so common as to be barely newsworthy; Angela Merkel has just died, leaving Germany in mourning. And, in a visibly upper-middle-class home in London, a seventeen-year-old girl initiates a nerve-wracking conversation with her parents.

Shifting uncomfortably in her seat, she begins. “I think I’ve been uncomfortable for a very long time…Ever since I was born. I don’t think I belong in this body. Oh my God.” Her parents’ eyes are full of sympathy, willing her on.

In reality, they have already snooped on their daughter’s internet history and found searches for “trans helpline,” “a trans life,” and “trans for teens.” They have all the right words prepared. They strain closer. When Bethany finally works herself up to it, blurting out, “I think I’m trans,” her parents, Celeste and Stephen, practically fall over themselves in their rush to comfort her. They assure her of their unwavering love and their wholehearted support for her transition from female to male. For her parents, this explains everything – from their daughter’s withdrawn nature, to her constant hiding behind screens and tech. They are confident they can get her the help she needs.

Bethany, however, is briefly thrown by their reaction. She is not transsexual, she corrects them, but transhuman: “I said, I’m not comfortable with my body. So I want to get rid of it. This…thing. All the arms and legs and every single bit of it. I don’t want to be flesh. I’m really sorry, but I want to escape this thing. And become digital.” Pressed by her parents, she continues, “I want to live forever. As information. Because that’s what transhumans are, mum. Not male. Or female. But better. Where I’m going, there’s no life or death, there’s only data. I will be data.”

Her parents stare at her, visibly dumbstruck, before the scene jump-cuts to Bethany running up the stairs, eyes streaming with tears, and the bedroom door slamming violently in her wake. Celeste is hot on her heels, charging after her with shouts and threats, positively boiling over with rage. In many ways, this has settled neatly back into the recognisable trope from which it was only briefly derailed: that of the troubled young person sharing a theretofore concealed aspect of their identity to their family, and being subsequently banished in disgrace.

            Such runs a key scene in the first episode of Years and Years, a six-part TV drama created by Russell T Davies and jointly produced by the BBC and HBO in 2019. The show follows the multigenerational Lyons family over a period from 2019 to 2034, tracking their interlocking lives against a snowballing backdrop of global economic, political, environmental, and technological turmoil. The show is, of course, ultimately fictional in scope – Brigid Delaney of The Guardian refers to it as “dystopian TV,” Adam Rogers of Wired designates it a work of “sci-fi,” and Rotten Tomatoes simply calls it “a nihilistic projection of the future” – but, in a similar vein to such productions as Black Mirror, its core discomfort can be located in the very plausibility of the nightmarish world it constructs.

The global events we witness unfolding in Years and Years, from banking collapse, blackouts, and mass flooding, to the rise of far-right populist politics in Europe and an eerily prescient outbreak of “monkey flu,” are grimly aligned with an entirely conceivable version of the future towards which we all seem to be headed. Indeed, notes in the screenplay alert producers to the real-life events upon which the plot points are based: in a scene featuring a town of shipping containers cobbled together for an influx of refugees, for example, the script reads, “They’re being suggested now, in 2017 – search ‘shipping container homes’ or Container City” (Davies, “Episode One” 27).

Grounded as the show is within a reasoned extrapolation of contemporary reality rather than pure imaginative fiction, a “what if” scenario that inputs our current situation and pumps out a projection of where it could take us, this paper proposes that one can look to the transhuman storyline of Bethany Lyons (played by Lydia West) as taking seriously the idea that such concepts as uploading one’s brain as software, and enhancing the organic body with machinic implants, might begin a slow transition from the domains of science fiction and cyberpunk cultural production to that of tenable reality within the next few decades.

The science fictional mode is thus deployed in Years and Yearsas a metanarrative in order to not only speculate upon the future of human-technology interfacing, but also to question the very role of sci-fi in shaping it.

Bethany’s 15-year narrative arc throughout the show sees her maintaining her transhumanist impulses despite her parents’ initial explosive reaction. She soon receives public funding to have telephone technology embedded in her hand, and eventually becomes “fully integrated” with implants in every finger, digital lenses in her eyes, and the ability to interact with electronic devices using a tiny “wafer” embedded in her brain. Her transformation is, notably, facilitated by her career as a data miner; the government sponsors her surgeries, which in turn guarantee her high-earning employment in the public sector while vast sectors of industry are phased out due to automation.

This paper proposes examining the progression of Bethany’s speculative transhumanist future in Years and Yearsthrough the diffractive lens of real-life transhumanisms past and present, tracking elements of Bethany’s story back to the underground activity of fringe “biohacking” communities in existence today, in addition to exploring its links to, and tensions with, the masculine genealogies of Extropianism and Silicon Valley pro-market capitalists.

Anchoring the depiction of Bethany’s transhuman journey in dialogue with the posthuman and cyborg philosophies of Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway respectively, in addition to outlining the myriad ways in which Bethany’s transhuman subjectivity both complicates and epitomises theories of gender performativity and intersectionality, this paper goes on to propose that Bethany’s is a uniquely feminist transhuman futurity that resists dissolution into the hyper-masculine tropes typical of Extropian technical progressivism by insisting upon symbiosis, relationality, and an ethics of care – thereby positing a recalibrated form of transhumanist embodiment that permits one to live digitallywithoutdisavowing the materiality of the feminine flesh, nor the attendant forces of affect, sensuality, connection, or emotion.

The term “transhumanism” was first coined in 1951 by Julian Huxley, younger brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley. An extension of what he termed “evolutionary humanism,” Huxley’s transhumanism essentially suggested that humans should be able to take an active role in their own evolutionary advancement. As such, he proposed implementing population-wide improvements via mechanisms of social and cultural control, so as to shape a more refined stage in the development of the species as a whole. Huxley’s transhumanist thinking ultimately strayed uncomfortably into the realm of eugenics, but his core doctrine of pushing humankind into the next “phase” of its evolutionary development persisted, and was picked up again in the 1980s and 1990s by the so-called Extropian movement in Southern California.

A group of majority cis-male, white, affluent techno-progressivists, the Extropians believed in the basic premise of fighting “entropy – the natural tendency of things to run down, degenerate, and die out – with its polar opposite, ‘extropy’” (Regis). Extropian transhumanism eschewed Huxley’s eugenicist angle, but instead proposed freely taking the work of humankind’s evolution into one’s own hands with recourse to developments in the realms of technology and science.

Such thinking drew directly and self-consciously from the techno-utopian aesthetics at the heart of much sci-fi, manga, and cyberpunk, taking seriously the potential for the widespread availability of such speculative technologies as brain-computer integration, cryonics, bionics, and advanced AI that would afford humans an expanded level of cognitive, sensory, and bodily being in the world.

Fast-forward to today, and transhumanism continues to exist as a fringe movement (albeit a growing one) largely associated with libertarians and pro-market Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk; in fact, the latter is currently pumping funding into the development of so-called “neural lace” technology, hoping to one day “implant[] tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts” (Subba). The sustaining transhumanist mission in the twenty-first century, propagated by the likes of Musk alongside such institutions as Humanity+ and the U.S. Transhumanist Party, is to radically extend the capacities and possibilities of the human form through technological upgrades, with a view to eventually transcending the final limitation imposed upon the human form: overcoming death itself, by activating a cyberpunk future in which we are no longer restrained by the ageing and flawed materiality of the human body.

Much like the young Bethany Lyons, many transhumanists ultimately hope to live forever as information – and, again mirroring Bethany’s fraught “coming-out” experience, they are treated with a hearty dose of scepticism, if not outright ridicule, within both the media and intellectual circles.

            How, then, are we to understand the progression depicted in Years and Years from transhumanism being framed as a fringe ideology, a silly notion entertained by a troubled and vulnerable teenager – to its depiction in later episodes as a highly regulated and widely practiced tenet of modern Western society, with transhumanist body modifications a necessary prerequisite for stable participation in the work economy? As is characteristic of Years and Years, we can track the show’s projected future back to rumblings in the present moment.

Briefly putting to one side the hyper-visible, Musk-esque Silicon Valley superstars of transhumanism, we might instead turn to the “biohackers,” an underground community that has been steadily expanding since the early 2000s, as a key point of reference for understanding the show. Otherwise known as “grinders,” biohackers are known to actively insert microchips, implants, and magnets into their flesh in an attempt to speed up the transition to a transhuman future akin to that depicted towards the end of Years and Years. At present, these implants are relatively undeveloped; cybernetics professor Dr Kevin Warwick, for example, has a radio frequency transmitter inserted into his arm that automatically unlocks the doors of his university lab as he enters (perhaps, incidentally, the inspiration for one of Bethany’s own implants, which unlocks the doors of her workplace without the need for a key-card). Will Oremus of Slate suggests that we call these biohackers “practical transhumanists”: “people who would rather become cyborgs right now than pontificate about the hypothetical far-off future,” while Carleton University’s Tamara Banbury, a PhD candidate and biohacker herself, employs the designation, “voluntary cyborgs.”

Being medically unnecessary, such body modification procedures cannot currently be legally performed by health professionals – so biohackers regularly resort to self-surgery in order to attain their transhumanist goals, which has led to abundant images of gore and infection circulating among online community spaces for grinders, such as biohack.me. As a result of the risky lengths to which biohackers will willingly and very visibly go for transhumanist body modifications, journalistic exposés frequently frame them as an extreme subculture, teetering discomfortingly between pseudo-intellectualism, idiocy, and an outright threat, both to the bodily health of its individual members and the moral economy of society writ large. 

The lack of regulation, countercultural leanings, and dangerous reputation that encircle the biohacking movement in its minor percolations in the present moment can be understood as an important precursor to a particularly visceral scene in Episode Three of Years and Years. Depicted as the year 2026, the episode sees Bethany and her friend Lizzie sneaking out to get digital implants inserted into their eyes without their parents’ knowledge. Unqualified foreign practitioners carry out the surgery on a boat off the British coast, working under the radar so as to avoid detection – but they end up botching the operation, and Lizzie’s new eye jerks about crazily, her vision transplanted into a laptop nearby rather than “integrated” into her head (fig 1). 

Fig 1. Lizzie (Shannon Heyes)’s digital eye. Russell T Davies, Years and Years Episode 5, HBO & BBC, 2019, 50:42. Screen capture from HBO Max. 

Extrapolating a few years from the bungled self-surgeries that are routinely posted on biohack.me, this scenario seems like a perfectly feasible successor to the underground activities of grinders happening in the present moment. As such, we might see such pursuits, in both Years and Yearsand its real-life subcultural referents, as the darker, lower-budget underside of the glossy transhuman future imagined by the likes of Elon Musk.

Pursuant to the surgery, as the characters of Lizzie, Bethany, and Celeste seek proper medical help in an NHS hospital, a nurse observes, “It’s been going on for decades. Cruise ships arrive at the docks, specially adapted as hospitals….And people go on board for cheap operations. It was facelifts in the 90s. Gender reassignments in the 2000s. Now they’ve discovered transhumans” (Years and Years E3). In other words, Lizzie’s is not a unique case; in Davies’ imagined future, unregulated individual biohacking is exceeding its obscure status to become a more popular pursuit, exposing a growing influx of young grinders to its many health risks.

It is worth dwelling here, however, upon the fact that the nurse frames transhuman surgery as something of a logical follow-on to gender reassignment surgery in terms of its cultural positioning – again, recalling the lexical mix-up depicted in Bethany’s “trans” coming-out scene.

This comparison between transhumanism/biohacking and transgenderism is one that persists on a number of levels throughout the show, and it is a crucial one to investigate in terms of parsing out Russell T Davies’ speculations upon how transhumanism might be incrementally absorbed into something like social normativity. Trans* thinkers such as Martina Rothblatt have long posited a continuity between transgenderism and transhumanism, predicting that, “First comes the realization that we are not limited by our sexual anatomy. Then comes the awakening that we are not limited by our anatomy at all” (318).

While it certainly merits clarifying that gender reassignment is a medical treatment and, as such, can hardly be approximated to a biohacking “enhancement” of the body, Rothblatt’s suggestion that both transgenderism and transhumanism pertain to a sense of morphological freedom over the way the body is shaped and performs in society is one that does seem to hold considerable weight in Davies’ speculative future.

By way of contextualising this, we might briefly look to the show’s transgender character of Lincoln Lyons, Bethany’s younger cousin. Lincoln’s transition throughout the series is so unanimously accepted by her family as to almost fly under the radar in terms of plot; one or two older characters comment vaguely upon her new habits of wearing skirts and ribbons, gently acknowledging that a change is taking place in her gender presentation, but the need for a spectacularised coming-out narrative is completely evinced. Nor, indeed, is Lincoln depicted as encountering the tired prejudices of so-called “TERFs” (or “Gender Criticals”), and their violent indictment of transwomen as threatening or aberrant, that are so rife in the United Kingdom at the present moment. In Years and Years, Lincoln simply starts presenting as female around 2027, and that is that; no need for further discussion or debate. In a similar manner, Daniel Lyons – Bethany’s uncle – is unquestionably accepted as a gay man, without this facet of his identity ever being either flattened or ignored, nor made out to be a point of contention. Given that Russell T Davies has been demonstrably committed to chronicling authentic LGBTQ+ stories for much of his career, most famously through the 1999 TV series Queer as Folk, this decision to depict an unquestioning acceptance of gender and sexuality as fluid and non-totalising signals Davies’ broader investment in tracking the historical progression and speculated futures of queer and trans* subjectivities across a cross-section of British culture. Beyond this, the myriad parallels that are drawn throughout the series between transhumanism and transgenderism, from Bethany’s “coming-out” narrative to the nurse’s offhand comment about surgery regulation, plant the seed in the viewer’s mind that the perceived ontological split between human and technology will, in the future, be universally considered as much of an arbitrary social construct as gender norms will grow to become. Further, to return to the nurse’s comparison between face lifts, gender reassignment, and transhuman surgery, we might note a subtle insinuation that, like its surgical predecessors, biohacking will soon become a properly regulated process absorbed into the medical industrial complex – a nod, of course, not only to Bethany’s later public-funded surgeries, but also to the potentially radical medical futures to which transhumanism might give rise in our own lives.

With all these overlapping perspectives in mind, we might now briefly revisit Bethany’s “coming out” episode. Given that transhumanism is still a relatively obscure, borderline eccentric philosophy in today’s society, as viewers of this scene we are implicitly aligned with Celeste: requiring an explanation as to what “transhuman” entails, and cultivating a deep scepticism about what we hear in response. This scene is represented as happening in 2024, by which time it is fair to predict that the dangers and more extreme cases of biohacking may have started to filter into the mainstream media, most likely framed as a subversive countercultural threat that targets vulnerable young people (again, a familiar narrative to many LGBTQ+ folks).

Celeste’s enraged rejection of Bethany’s “coming out” is thus conversant with the trope of the queer and/or trans* teen coming out to a prejudiced family, in addition tothe way in which one might anticipate a parent to respond to their daughter wanting to engage in potentially dangerous biohacking activity – a more extreme iteration, perhaps, of a mother being unable to stomach the idea of her daughter getting an illicit tattoo or piercing.

The incident with Lizzie’s eye only seems to corroborate Celeste’s (and, implicitly, our) perspective: transhumanism is a threat, both bodily on an individual scale, and existential on a societal, moral scale. However, the show’s unique format in spanning such an extended timeframe permits for such perceptions to shift, organically and believably, within its characters – and, therefore, for we as viewers to imagine our own worldviews shifting with them.

By the end, Davies depicts transhumanist biohacking as gradually becoming the new normal, incrementally shifting from its cultural perception as a “wacky cyborg plan” to a sort of natural “evolution” (Renstrom) in professional and medical development. As such, it becomes as seamlessly integrated into the quotidian social and economic life of the Lyons family as their much-used, Alexa-like virtual assistant, “Señor” (incidentally, a superb example of what Bruce Sterling terms “design fiction,” or a believable diegetic prototype of a fictional object – and another example of a technology to which the older Lyons were originally resistant, and yet which is transformed into an object of necessity, even affection, by the end.

Transhuman biohacks, we surmise, are a similarly conceived design fiction that will follow an analogous trajectory). Tracking the progression of biohacking from a transgressive and threatening subcultural activity in early episodes of Years and Years, to a government-sponsored and meticulously regulated process at a later point in the narrative, thus encourages viewers, via the shifting perception of Celeste, to question the ways in which our contemporary scepticisms, disbeliefs, or even prejudices against transhumanist philosophy or biohacking activity might evolve towards something like wide acceptance in coming decades.

In his particular depiction of LGBTQ+ subjectivities, Davies seems to suggest that such an evolution echoes the ways in which mainstream antipathy and moral panic directed towards the queer and trans* community in the UK might continue to progress into something like widespread inclusiveness, and acceptance to the point of being unremarkable – yet without straying into erasure.

MORE TO CoME

Daisy Reid is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include speculative and science fictions, critical plant studies, posthumanism, (feminist) materialisms, and the Environmental Humanities. Her current work focuses on SF depictions of plant life and fungi in their manifold imbrications with issues of gender, sexuality, erotics, and desire.

Science Fiction Representations of Cyborgs in Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine”

Seoyeon Lee, a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, is a student this semester in my seminar, Science Fiction As Media Theory. For her first assignment, she wrote about Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine”, a work little known outside of South Korea. I thought there would be broader interest out there on this topic. For those who would like to know more about Korean science fiction, check out this episode of How Do You Like It So Far?, the podcast that I co-host with Colin Maclay.

Science Fiction Representation of Cyborgs in Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine”

by Seoyeon Lee

Introduction

As a techno-dystopian locale for human trafficking and prostitution, Asia has been depicted against a dark, rainy background full of neon signs in Blade Runner (1982), Ghost in the Shell(1995), and Blade Runner 2049(2017). The Western fear of and fascination with technologized Asia recently shifted from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Seoul, for example, in the cyberpunk film Cloud Atlas(2012), which presents the SF trope of a female cyborg as the very image of a futuristic East Asia. In this film, South Korea in 2144 is depicted as a dystopia governed by transnational corporations that divide the world into the upper-level and the underworld, where the genetically transformed human clones are treated as slave labor.Cyborgs or humanoids in an Asian female figure are no longer unfamiliar in science fiction (hereafter SF) literature, film, and animations. 

At this point, a clear SF pattern is drawn from the Western imagination of the Asianized future: Otherizing the Orient by either over-simplifying or over-fantasizing it in order to alienate it from the Western criteria of humanity and humanism. Facing the West’s projection of its technological fear and fantasies of Asia, how does Asia respond? Are Asian SF writers, especially women writers, able to reappropriate the pattern of yellow peril anxieties of technologized Asia in the age of globalization? Considering that SF cultural products are often associated with various factors, such as transnational capitalism, state censorship, and global technological innovations, how do Korean SF women writers conform to or deviate from the status quo? This paper examines the SF literary representation of female cyborgs in Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s“My Space Heroine” (2019) from a feminist viewpoint.

Kim Ch’o-yŏp (김초엽1993~) isa South Korean SF woman writer who is interested in the theme of marginalized identity. Kim majored in chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology, and she won the Grand Prize at the 2ndKorea SF Awards with her novella “Book Missing Inside Library” during her graduate year in 2017. Kim’s SF short story, “My Space Heroine” (“Na ŭi uju yŏngung e kwanhayŏ” 나의우주영웅에관하여), which I will discuss in this paper, is included in her first SF collection bookIf We Cannot Move at the Speed of Light, which has been a sensation since its publication in 2019. Given that only a small number of studies on Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s selective SF works have been published and no English translations of her works exist, this paper as the first case study aims to explore the trope of cyborgs in Kim’s short story. In the plot, thefemale protagonist Ka Yun and her idol, aunt Jaegyeong become cyborgs through the SF concept of “Pantropy” to explore a new time-space in the universe. Through the process of becoming a cyborg, Ka Yun understands Jaegyeong’s choice of death; and meanwhile, Kim seeks the possibility to build an alternative world that reflects reality and imagines a future. In other words, Kim’s world-building provides an avenue to understand the characters and the world away from a familiar perspective while questioning the criteria of normality. In this respect, I argue that the SF concept of the female cyborg not only reflects on Otherness to challenge the binary demarcation of the center and the periphery, but also blurs the boundary of the nation-state, race and gender while imagining an alternate future.

Science Fiction Concept of Cyborgs: “My Space Heroine”

As Darko Suvin has argued in “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” “SF is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 118). According to Suvin, SF is a literature of cognitive estrangement. It is neither metaphysical nor entirely naturalistic, but a meta-empirical genre that emphasizes a strong relationship with the real world(s). SF, thus, does not simply play the role of the prophet that imagines the near or real future of our society in a pessimistic or optimistic way, but rather aims to unfold the present as history in the form of “some future worlds’ remote past” (Jameson 217). 

When it comes to the literary aesthetics of cognitive estrangement, Kim Ch’o-yŏp deploys the SF trope of a cyborg in her short story. If the definition of a cyborg is “a hybrid of machine and organism” (Haraway 291) that is not afraid of “their joint kinship with animals and machines” (295), then Kim’s “My Space Heroine” is a great example to delve into. This short story depicts a female cyborg who changes bodily fluids and organs to complete the global mission of exploring an unknown space in the universe. Kim herself has become a “cyborg” since she was medically diagnosed as having a hearing impairment and wore a hearing aid from her early teens. When asked how it felt as a cyborg to live with a disability, Kim responded that “We are all in symbiosis with technology and we are hybrids of machines and organisms. … We already acknowledge the potential impact of becoming a cyborg which dismantles various dichotomies between machine and organism, human and non-human, and so on. If we cannot stop obsessing about the concept of normality, however, cyborg technology would merely become a means to fulfill the practice of normality. What kind of cyborg shall/should we eventually become?”[1]This response highlights Kim’s main idea of (becoming) a cyborg that is often combined with a transformed body and extended mind to question the criteria for being human.

In Kim’s SF short story, the second-generation female astronaut, Ka Yun, tried to understand the mysterious death of her heroine, aunt Jaegyeong, the first astronaut to participate in the Aeronautics and Space Administration Project. In order to pass through a black hole like a tunnel and arrive at a new time-space in the universe, the selected astronauts were trained to rebuild their bodies through “Pantropy,” a so-called “cyborg grinding project.” During the multilevel training, the original human body is supplemented with artificial organs, skins, and blood vessels to endure the acceleration of gravity and pressure inside the tunnel. After their body fluids were replaced, both Jaegyeong and Ka Yun became cyborgs, hybrids of metal machines and nanobots. Although the first attempt of the project failed due to an unexpected explosion, Ka Yun, inspired by her long-time heroine Jaegyeong, was selected as the final member of the project to accomplish the incomplete mission. Through the process of becoming a cyborg, Ka Yun realized the reality of Jaegyeong’s death and gradually changed her feelings about Jaegyeong from a sense of admiration to betrayal to sympathy. Ka Yun understood why Jaegyeong was not in the spacecraft the day before launch but dived into the deep sea, where her marginalized identity as a disabled Asian single mother was finally liberated from the oppression of normality through the practice of becoming a cyborg.

            Throughout the story that addresses Jaegyeong’s mysterious death from Ka Yun’s perspective, Kim employs the SF trope of a cyborg both to reflect the hierarchical dualism of reality and to imagine an alternate future free from the various social regulations and norms. In particular, when Jaegyeong was selected as the first woman tunnel astronaut, she was embroiled in controversy due to her background: 

[Jaegyeong] was at the center of controversy over the selection of qualified astronauts, when the press released the fact that her skinny, small body had less muscle mass and a lower bone density, which were below the standard of the normal human body. She even had chronic vestibular disorders and was an Asian woman who once experienced pregnancy and childbirth. People were curious about how such an inappropriate agent, Jaegyeong, was chosen to be the representative of human beings. It was not emphasized that Jaegyeong was one of the three final selectees, and the other two astronauts were white men from the Aeronautics and Space Administration headquarters.[2]

While Jaegyeong was criticized for beingan imperfect candidate who did not fit into the standardized image of a white male astronaut, she was simultaneously admired as a heroine who was the representative of gender and racial minority groups. Jaegyeong met Yu Jin, Ka Yun’s mother, in an online community, where a single mom raising her non-marital child communicated with others. Jaegyeong and Yu Jin took turns taking care of their daughters and later built an alternative family relationship to live together. This alternate concept of family is considered a big threat to the normative social structure and challenges the heteronormative perspective of family kinship. Jaegyeong acknowledged that a double-edged sword was facing her as if she was the very person to be underrepresented or overrepresented, but she was not able to escape this double burden. In this light, Kim successfully illustrates the tension between fear of losing normative power as hegemony and a fascination for embracing differences in reality through the SF representation of a female cyborg Jaegyeong.

In addition to Kim’s reflection of reality through Jaegyeong’s fragile and disabled body, Jaegyeong’s ironic choice of becoming a cyborg mermaid highlights the subversive version of imagining the alternative future where human normativity is challenged. On the night before the spacecraft was launched, Jaegyeong decided to explore the deep sea rather than achieving the glorious title of being the first Asian woman astronaut. The next day, the media concluded that Jaegyeong committed suicide due to stress, and the public condemned her impulsive choice while proposing a new model of an ideal human that was the opposite image of Jaegyeong. Ka Yun, however, underwent the cyborg grinding process as Jaegyeong did and thought about Jaegyeong’s purpose of jumping into the deep sea as a cyborg body. During the actual diving training that checked whether the transformed cyborg body could withstand pressure, Ka Yun felt an unexplainable sense of freedom under the sea. At this moment, she realized that “what Jaegyeong wanted indeed was not the way of entering the space tunnel but becoming a new human. That is to say, cyborg grinding itself was what she had wanted from the very beginning” (Kim 306). Ka Yun envisioned the alternative space where Jaegyeong already became a cyborg mermaid and breathed freely with her newly implanted gills in the deep sea. This possibility of living in a new world resonated with what Jaegyeong mentioned before: “I want to become a human beyond human” (281). Jaegyeong’s words do not simply mean that she prefers sea to space in order to seek her freedom with her cyborg body. Rather, Jaegyeong’s pursuit of liberation is closely connected with the question of why humans explore new space. For Jaegyeong, regardless of whether the destination is deep space or a dark sea, becoming a cyborg itself provides the opportunity to imagine an alternative future in which a new human, i.e., posthuman decenters the dominant discourse of Western humanity.

 It was not a surprise that the collection of Kim’s SF short stories became a sensational best-seller in South Korea, given that her posthuman narrative not merely reflected global technological innovations in contemporary Korean society but challenged the status quo from the perspective of race, gender, and disability. Although Kim’s vivid embodiment of cyborgs differs from cinematic visualization of cyborgs, her world-building as a communicative form in a written text reveals the power of literary imagination. It refuses to imitate the collective imagery of cyborgs driven by mass communication of audio-visual media; rather, it pushes the boundaries of reality to envision an alternative future making invisible visible.

Conclusion

This paper analyzed Kim Ch’o-yŏp’s “My Space Heroine” to examine the role of the SF trope of cyborgs. Kim provided a creative avenue to empower the act of storytelling through the SF effect of cognitive estrangement. By telling the story about another future, Kim imagined a world that reflects reality impacted by technological innovations and questions current norms to explore the uncertainties. The writer’s scientific imaginations played a significant role in avoiding the reproduction of the Other and blurring the boundary between the center and the periphery. In particular, Kim represented the image of a female cyborg, who was largely marginalized in history, to represent oppressive society and subverted the Western dominant paradigm of normality. Both Jaegyeong and Ka Yun as Asian women astronauts became cyborgs to complete the space mission, but their destinations were different. While thinking about Jaegyeong’s mysterious choice of diving into the deep sea, Ka Yun later realized that Jaegyeong was overrepresented as a part of minority groups and underrepresented as an unqualified agent. Becoming a new human, i.e., a cyborg, was the only way for Jaegyeong to escape the double burden and contest the Western ideal of humanity. Rather than entering the space tunnel to become the first Asian woman astronaut, Jaegyeong chose to belong to nowhere but herself while exploring how to become a cyborg. 

By analyzing Kim’s SF work, I argue that SF as a literary genre is neither a means to propagate science technology nor a mere entertainment to amuse the public; rather it crosses the boundary of science and fiction and its in-betweenness ultimately makes SF writing reflect the present and imagine an alternative future. In this context, SF writers, as well as the audience, should consider the concept of a cyborg that represents the Other within or beyond reality.

Bibliography

Haraway, Donna Jeanne."A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In The Cybercultures Reader, 291-324. Edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000.

Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, 211-24. Edited by Rob Latham. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Kim, Ch’o-yŏp. “Na ŭi uju yŏngung e kwanhayŏ.” In Uri ka pit ŭi sokto ro kal su ŏptamyŏn, 273-319.Seoul: Hŏbŭl, 2019.

Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, 116-27. Edited by Rob Latham. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

[1]The Korean essay appears in Ch’o-yŏp Kim, “Shinch'ewa kamgagi pyŏnhyŏngdoen uridŭrŭi chilmun,” Sisa-In169, Sisa-In co., Itd. https://www.sisain.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=35180

[2]This is my translation from Korean. The original text is found in Ch’o-yŏp Kim, “Na ŭi uju yŏngung e kwanhayŏ,” in Uri ka pit ŭi sokto ro kal su ŏptamyŏn(Seoul: Hŏbŭl, 2019), 279-80.

SEOYEON LEE is a second-year Ph.D. student majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. She graduated from Ewha Womans University with a bachelor's and a master's degree in Chinese Language and Literature. Her current research centers on science fiction literature in Korea and China. In particular, she is interested in the intersection of contemporary Korean and Chinese science fiction writers’ works while exploring possibilities of imagining an alternative world beyond the boundaries of gender and race. 

CBS's Clarice: In the Shadows of Lamb and Hannibal

Kyle Moody and Nicholas Yanes are the editors of a recent anthology, Hannibal for Dinner: Essays on America’s Finest Cannibal on Television. I was curious to see what they thought of Clarice, the new series also based on characters from Silence of the Lamb and other books by Thomas Harris. Their book was covered by USA Today. Below is what they shared with mel

CBS's Clarice

In the Shadows of Lambs and Hannibals

by

Kyle Moody, Ph.D. and Nicholas Yanes, Ph.D.

We have spent the last several years with Bryan Fuller’s and NBC’s Hannibal(now streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime). With our book, Hannibal for Dinner: Essays on America’s Favorite Cannibal on Television– now published through McFarland Press – it is time for us to look at the future of the characters created by Thomas Harris. As of now, this future is CBS’s Clarice, currently airing Thursday nights on the broadcast network and streaming the next day on Paramount+. (Clarice’s homepage can be found here.)

It is somewhat odd to talk about this show because of the differences between Clarice and Hannibal. The productions are obviously separated by  multiple years (Hannibal ended its broadcast run in 2015, while Claricebegan airing this year). However, the impact Hannibal had on the broadcast and TV environment cannot be overstated, and it is clear that Clarice had to find its own identity by navigating in the shadow of what came before. 

After all, Hannibal was one of the rare shows to inspire a passionate fandom - a feat which remains unusual for modern scripted network programs (we see you out there, #Fannibals!); it also launched its titular Dr. Lecter – Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen – into superstardom with him appearing in Marvel’s Doctor Strange, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and set to star as Gellert Grindelwald in future Fantastic Beasts films.And as we are in the midst of the Streaming Wars, Hannibal became a streaming sensation when it finally landed on Netflix during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing others to catch up on the show during the Peak TV era.

The visual language Hannibal deployed is a major reason for its continued longevity; as a matter of fact, our book uses academic examinations to tackle those tableaus that generated excitement and produced multiple meanings. The recurring black stag, the sensual crosscutting between violence and banal activities, the layout of bodies in ghastly yet beautiful displays, the presentation of meals in a manner that entices and disgusts – all of this was produced weekly during Hannibal’s initial run. Fuller’s production was aesthetically pleasing and cinematic, subverting the cinematic and violent boundaries of network television. But Hannibal was so much more than a visual tableau. 

In many ways, Hannibal retained such a loyal fanbase because it made the audience an accessory to Dr. Lecter’s crimes. Viewers knew that Hannibal was a monster, but the artistry of his work caused us to see him as an artist. So, for some fans, Hannibal is less a show about a serial killer and more a show about a culinary artist whose preferred materials are human parts.

Legal Issues and a Missing Doctor 

Due to complicated rights agreements between Hannibal and Thomas Harris’s estate, Clarice can not legally show or mention Dr. Hannibal Lecter. This sets up a massive obstacle for the CBS series because the star of this franchise is not Starling or Graham, it is Lecter. Our over educated and culturally refined cannibal is more than the primary antagonist; he is the center of gravity that these stories will always orbit around. 

Remember, some of the most riveting moments of Hannibal and Silence of the Lambs are when Dr. Lecter is facing off against FBI agent turned patient Will Graham in Lecter’s office for psychiatric sessions or when he is verbally manipulating Starling. Hannibal did this to such a great extent by using the visuals of “mind palaces” and by focusing on subtext; creative decisions derived from Hannibal’s presence which showed the ways that Lecter was a master manipulator and polite interloper. (Contributors further explored this perspective by examining the ways Lecter used psychology and Gothic imagery, along with elements of mythology, to create mental palaces that helped guide Will Graham, Jack Crawford, and later Lecter himself to decode the scenes of the crime.)

With that said, it was surprising to see Clarice start in a psychologist’s office with a combative meeting between Agent Starling and her FBI therapist. This opening scene is clearly crafted to echo Hannibal the character and Hannibal the show without being able to discuss them. Furthermore, allusions to an “inmate” with whom Clarice became “intimate” are all that remain in this framing device. Moreover, while the sessions between Graham and Lecter in Hannibal and the encounters between Starling and Lecter in Silence of the Lambs were layered with subtext and pushed the characters to evolve, Clarice’s session seems to simply function as an exposition drop to help bridge Silence of the Lambs o this show.

Soon after discussions of her personality and PTSD, she is shuttled to a crime scene that is shot much like a Hannibal crime scene, but without the shot composition and strong writing that characterized Fuller’s show. In other words, it tries to echo the ghoulishly artistic style of Hannibal, but comes off as a generic procedural show with a different filter.

 The lack of Dr. Lecter in Clarice not only deprives another actor of the opportunity to bring this character to life, it means that the show suffers from the lack of a memorable villain. Leaving Clarice with no mirror to highlight her weaknesses and strengths as Lecter did.

Gender Uncomplicated

In addition to the lack of Lecter leaving Clarice devoid of a main villain to push the heroine forward, it is one of the many elements that erases the issues of gender complexity from this franchise. After all, with Hannibal not being legally allowed to appear in this show, Clarice becomes a world that communicates the misogyny of the Silence of the Lambs without understanding it. Jonathan Demme’s masterful adaptation of Harris’s second novel emphasized the demure size of Jodie Foster’s Clarice in a largely male world of violence and bureaucracy, but found time to ensure that Clarice was a force of her own, driven by a clarity of purpose.

Clarice, on the other hand, is focused on building a world where Clarice can show up week after week, solve a crime, slowly integrate with her FBI team of doubters, and move away from her “inmate.” Moving away from Hannibal proves to be a more difficult task when the show borrows liberally from the visual elements of its predecessor without totally understanding how the visual vocabulary and cinematic language was applied in the first place.

That may not be a bad thing for our heroine on the surface. After all, Clarice is finding her voice and strength throughout the first two episodes, illustrating how her intellect and background in behavioral sciences is essential for unraveling the mysteries of the murdered women in the pilot. While Starling gains one male ally in her new team, her main allies are the women in her life. One bright spot in the world is Clarice’s fellow agent and friend Ardelia Mapp, played with scene-stealing verve by Devyn A. Tyler. She generates questions and frustrations for Starling all while letting her stay in her Washington D.C. loft, even keeping a book of names titled “People I’m Sending to Hell.” Clarice and Ardelia present a hopeful vision of the world and a strong shared chemistry; their scenes together are easily the highlights of the pilot. 

Whether the dynamic between Clarice and Ardelia remains platonic or becomes romantic, it is important to remember that one of the many reasons Hannibal developed such a loyal fanbase was because the world Bryan Fuller crafted was unapologetically queer. It became a show that clearly communicated that people of any sexual/gender orientation were welcomed. In contrast, while Clarice is in no way homophobic, it is clearly falling back on sterotypical and common gender norms within popular crime dramas, especially those present on “America’s most watched network.” Now, part of this can stem from how our culture’s views of people who aren’t cisgendered heterosexuals has evolved. After all, most people were not offended by Buffalo Bill’s depiction as someone with gender dysmorphia in the 1980s and 1990s, but this has changed. 

Just Another Procedural

Clarice is trying to differentiate itself from other criminal procedurals by focusing on some key issues: our culture’s renewed interests in everyday people becoming celebrities, mental health, and women in toxic workplaces. As a result, Claricepresents three main questions. Will Starling be able to overcome her trauma from Silence of the Lambs? Will Starling be able to accept her fame and use it to benefit her work? And will Starling be able to earn the respect of all the men on her team?

The answer to all these questions is yes.

Anyone who watches criminal procedurals – especially criminal procedurals on CBS – already knows the narrative formulas this show will deploy. Clarice is exactly what we feared Hannibal would be when it first aired, a procedural that warps Harris’s characters into a mold that doesn’t fit them. Hannibal took this saleable premise (different killer each week, solved by Will Graham and the FBI) and forced the show to be imagined through Dr. Lecter’s pristine tastes. 

In our book, co-editor Nicholas Yanes was able to interview Nick Antosca. Antosca was not only one of the writers on Hannibalbut he also co-wrote the series finale. When asked why he felt Hannibal was never a ratings hit, Antosca simply responded, “It was too weird. It’s not for everyone.” And he is right. Hannibal was a unique show that demanded a high level of engagement from viewers if they wanted to fully appreciate its various flavors. 

In contrast, Clarice is a solid, watchable CBS show at this time. It’s the Abel Gideon of Thomas Harris televisual adaptations; it knows how to grab our attention, but it doesn’t do anything noteworthy with it just yet. Clariceis ultimately a warm and friendly weekly crime procedural wearing Harris’s license and the visual storytelling of Hannibal like Buffalo Bill wore a skin suit, but has the potential and the lineage to evolve into something so much more.

More about Kyle Moodyand Nicholas Yanes can be found by following them on Twitter.

Kyle Moody (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is an Associate Professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University, where he teaches courses on social media, message design, new and emerging media, and media history. His research interests include the production of culture through new media practices, online community formation, information creation and dissemination, and examining how cultural practices are impacted by a changing media landscape. His recent work has been published by McFarland Press and Springer, along with Iowa Journal of Communication. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts with his wife and two children. 

Nicholas Yanes (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is a freelance writer and vagabond. His first book, The Iconic Obama examined the 2008 presidential election and its relationship to popular culture. Outside of academia, he is a freelance writer who has contributed to CNBCPrime, MGM, ScifiPulse, Sequart, the Casual Games Association, Shudder’s blog The Bite, and several other publications. His academic and professional interests center on researching and analyzing entertainment industries

Jack Benny and American Radio Comedy (Part 4)

One of my Black students recently told the class that he assumed any media product to come up before the 1960s (and in some cases, well after) was problematic in terms of the racial dynamics between white and Black characters. What might surprise him about the relationship between Jack Benny and Rochester?

 Let me first say that I, as a white cis woman in 2021 can’t presume to speak for anyone else, present or past, for how they might interpret such things as interracial relationships on an old radio comedy program, then or now, given that the commercial network radio system 1930s-50s was so completely dominated by white corporate power.

Back in the day, there was a range of interpretive positions that listeners of color might take (that could provide some interesting context for listeners today). Many African-Americans in the 1930s refused to listen to network radio, as almost no programs included black artists. (White actors routine spoke in ‘verbal blackface’ to voice small roles). When Eddie Anderson won the new, continuing role on the Jack Benny Jell-O comedy program in 1938 (one of the highest rated/most listened to shows on the air,) there was great interest in him and the show from the black community. The Chicago Defender and other African-American newspapers started carrying radio schedule listings, and they called the show the Rochester program with Jack Benny.

Rochester was wildly popular with both white and black listeners, for different reasons. African American listeners could enjoy the character’s sharp wit and puncturing of his boss’s ego (Rochester called his employer “Boss” more often than “Mr. Benny”, which was a small victory towards parity in the workplace). White listeners could feel that Rochester was “safe” as a servant eternally tied to housework. In my book I describe how Benny’s writers saddled the Rochester character in the first several years with belittling stereotypes (gambling, drinking, calling attention to his skin color, etc.).

But by World War II, Anderson’s character solidified a major continuing role and gained more autonomy to criticize the “boss.” Scripts allowed him to further develop his personality. Anderson simultaneously starred in several of the big-budget black cast musicals released from the Hollywood studios (such as Cabin in the Sky) as well as virtually co-starred in three very profitable Paramount films with Jack Benny. 

After World War II, the younger generation of African-Americans grew increasingly impatient with the lack of progression in black representation on network radio and television. They expressed great frustration with roles limited to valets and maids and waiters, and that spilled over to anger at the older black performers who enacted these roles. Eddie Anderson got caught in the middle of this cultural change. His Rochester character in the latter radio years and throughout Jack Benny’s 15 years in television shared a remarkably intimate and convivial relationship with “the boss,” and their repartee is truly hilarious.  Some have described their relationship as like the “Odd Couple” of later TV fame, two older men sharing the house and Rochester being like a domestic partner as well as Jack’s sharpest critic.  Eddie Anderson, because he did few other performances apart from the Benny programs on his own in the 1950s and 1960s (ill health curtailed his career), has not been recognized sufficiently as a superb comic performer who brought a unique voice and sense of timing to amplify his continuing role in Benny’s narrative world. 

 I’d like to mention several other authors who have done marvelous work exploring the historical constraints and cultural contexts in which African-American performers at mid-century worked –

Petty, Miriam J. Stealing the show: African American performers and audiences in 1930s Hollywood. 

Savage, Barbara Dianne. Broadcasting freedom: Radio, war, and the politics of race, 1938-1948. 

Watts, Jill. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. 

I especially point readers and scholars interested in the African-American actors’ experience in radio to this fabulous unpublished study ----  Edmerson, Estelle. "A descriptive study of the American Negro in United States professional radio, 1922-1953." MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1954. Edmerson undertook extensive interviews with black performers, and this report is a treasure. It is difficult to access, however, being available only on microfilm through interlibrary loan, but I have made a digital version that I can share with those who contact me. 

  Benny, like many of the comedians of that period, was Jewish, yet this is played down on the program. Can you speak about the ways that ethnic humor operated on the program? Was Mel Blanc (or Mr. Kitzel) there to deflect attention away from Benny’s own ethnicity. I just heard an episode where the Benny cast imitated the folks on Allen’s Alley to great effect and it really called attention to the more subtle ways that ethnicity was dealt with on the Benny show.

I am indebted to Holly A Pearse’s essay “As Goyish as Lime Jell-O?: Jack Benny and the American Construction of Jewishness,” which has helped me better understand Benny’s approach to ethnic representation in his own performance. Unlike many Jewish comedians who were raised in the densely-populated immigrant ethnic enclaves of New York City and the East Coast, Benjamin Kubelsky grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish barkeep and haberdasher in a relatively small industrial town an hour north of Chicago which had multiple ethnic groupings but only a small Jewish population. Renaming himself Jack Benny, as a performer, sought to emphasize a Midwestern white identity. He almost never incorporated Yiddish words or phrases into his vaudeville or radio performances. 

 There were long traditions of ethnic performance in vaudeville, of course, in which performers either exaggerated their own identities or took on ethnic costumes and language as part of their act. Historians have described how what Robert Snyder called these “voices of the city” brought constructed stereotypes (always a mix of benign and harmful) of Irish, Scotch, German, Italian, Greek, Scandinavian, Russian and other white immigrant ethnicities (as well as Black, Latino and Asian) to audiences in cities and towns across America. Humor involving these ethnic characters both reinforced stereotypes for audiences as well as sometimes made them seem part of a rich, vibrant American “melting pot.”

 Radio inherited these approaches to representation of ethnicity from vaudeville. It seems that radio broadcast creation, with cost limitations on production on the one hand, and freedom to imagine characters (from the audience point of view) on the other, used ethnic voices quite frequently.  In a storytelling world constrained by lack of visual cues, voice accent, tone and inflection carried a great deal of weight. Without other ways of distinguishing between different characters at the microphone, ethnic accents added an all-too-easy differentiation. I believe that in the case of Jack Benny’s early radio broadcast years, his writer Harry Conn often turned to ethnic voices among the supporting cast members to yield a quick laugh at the difference they represented from Jack’s midwestern voice. Conn used German, Yiddish, Greek or Scottish voices for bit players in Jack Benny’s skits.  After Conn left the program in 1936, these ethnic voices were not used very often by the new writers (Morrow and Beloin) who chose to use the regular cast members more intensively. 

 It seems that Jack Benny and his writers offloaded Jewish identity onto a pair of part-time cast members over the course of his radio career. In the 1933-1936 era Jack Benny used comedian Sam Hearn to voice the character of Shlepperman. Shlepperman was a Jewish immigrant with city smarts and a heavy Yiddish accent. In the skits in which he appeared, he usually poped in towards the end for a surprise twist, in places where he was unexpected.  Hearn did not want to relocate to California when Jack moved the radio show to Hollywood, so the character faded out.   

Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

The Mr. Kitzel character was added to the Benny radio program in 1946, a time when interracial and inter-religious tolerance was being promoted by progressive groups. Kitzel was first encountered on the Benny program selling hot dogs in the stands at the Rose Bowl football game. His call of “pickle in the middle and the mustard on top” gained notice in popular culture. Kitzel was the opposite type of character than Shlepperman – a naïve and gentle greenhorn, a barely assimilated Jewish immigrant who constantly misunderstood Anglo American culture and who transposed Anglo names into Yiddish idiom.  Jack Benny encounters him in brief interchanges – Kitzel does not become a fully integrated cast member.

Kitzel’s character is similar in ways to Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum, the Jewish housewife character Fred Allen incorporated into his “Allen’s Alley” radio skits from the early 1940s until his radio show ended. Both transpose Anglo-American words and names into Yiddish sound-alikes, in ways that emphasize their lack of American knowledge on the one hand, but I suppose make the listener laugh with kindness and perhaps pity rather than contempt for their lack of understanding. Social critics in the latter 1940s lodged complaints about the stereotypes at play in both these characters, but Allen and Benny both defended their creations, emphasizing their universal humanity and the opportunities they offered to laugh at human frailty.

 Henry, you mention Mel Blanc’s characters on the Benny radio and TV program, that’s interesting. Only some of Blanc’s vocal inventions were ethnic characters (I am thinking Polly the Parrot, Carmichael the Bear, the Maxwell’s sputtering engine, the train announcer sending people to Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga, the English race horse, etc.). Other characters, however, had strong ethnic identity. Professor Le Blanc the violin teacher shared Jack’s whiteness. However, the Mexican character Mel played, who answered only “Si, Sigh, Sew, and Sue” to Jack’s queries about his family and occupation, have garnered substantial criticism in the years since the skits were aired for their ugly stereotyping (similar to Blanc’s voicing of the Speedy Gonzales in Warner Bros. cartoons of the same era. 

 Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. 

Pearse, Holly A. “As Goyish as Lime Jell-O? Jack Benny and the American Construction of Jewishness” Jewish Cultural Studies (2008) 272-290,

Jack Benny and American Radio Comedy (Part Three)

Another striking feature is the way that Benny’s program interacts with other contemporary series -- the various spinoff series featuring Dennis Day, Fred Harris, and others, or the role that the Colemans perform on the show. What factors made these kinds of intertextual connections possible?

Well, we see plenty of spin-off programs today on network TV, cable and streaming, between a dozen versions of NCIS, or Young Sheldon or r Frazier reboots, etc.  Marketers might call it “brand extension,” a way of giving consumers plenty more of what seems to be popular at the moment.  But using existing product ideas to fill the schedule, instead of gambling on a new and untried narrative idea, has a long history. These kinds of spinoffs happened fairly frequently back in network radio programming days, as The Great Gildersleeve show, for instance was spun off from Fibber McGee and Molly, and I believe Beulah was spun off from Gildersleeve. The sponsors who provided the production money for radio programs were conservative and looked for “sure bets,” or already-familiar performers, characters and situations that could almost be guaranteed to draw a fairly large and loyal audience.  Radio critics in the 1940s complained constantly about the lack of innovation in radio. A half dozen other radio comedy programs borrowed heavily from Jack Benny’s format (such as those starring at one time or another Jack Carson and Groucho Marx and Bob Hope).

So, it was not unexpected that every major character or performer from Jack Benny’s program was tapped by bright advertising executives who pitched spin-offs to sponsors. A Day in the Life of Dennis Day turned the Dennis character into a small-town soda jerk.  The Phil Harris and Alice Faye Show turned Phil from a drunken lout into a devoted father with loutish band members. Former tenor Kenny Baker was back on the radio in Glamor Manor. There was even a Mel Blanc show, that did not have a strong premise, and did not last long.

I happen to be a fan of The Halls of Ivy,(NBC radio 1950-1952) the gentle sitcom-like program starring movie star Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Colman. Colman had been reluctant to appear on Jack Benny’s radio program in 1946, worrying that it was beneath his dignity and afraid of failing as a comic performer.

The Colmans were a marvelous counterpoint to Benny’s social faux-pas, and quite a hit on appearances on Benny’s show. They were convinced to try a show of their own.  It turned out to be a popular show and extended his career. He plays the president of a small college, and Benita carries over her character from the Benny show appearances as the level-headed spouse who solves many of their daily problems. 

 The most unfortunate attempt at Benny radio show spinoff, in my opinion, was a program for Eddie Anderson, called The Adventures of Rochester.  Franco American spaghetti was pitched a daytime, 15-minutes program in early 1950 that took the marvelous Rochester character and regretfully removed everything interesting about him; the existing pilot episodes turn Rochester into a gullible and not very bright fellow who is the constant victim of the get-rich schemes of his feckless friends. The show turns Rochester into a hapless “Amos” character from Amos n Andy.  Just as well that the sponsor ultimately turned down the opportunity.  There are reports in the radio industry trade press that Anderson had originally hoped to pitch a daily 15-minute program called The Five O’Clock Shadow that would have his character parody private eye who-done-its. It’s a shame that this project did not find a sponsor, but a forthright African-American lead character, even with a Benny-show-pedigree, was probably too progressive in terms of racial representation for conservative sponsors to be brave enough to back.  (my book pages 178-179)

The real hallmark of Benny’s interactions with other programs was his ongoing feud with Fred Allen. Here, listeners went back and forth between the two shows as the comics threw insults at each other, and Benny developed a mean impersonation of Allen’s nasal voice. What can you tell us about the circumstances around which this interplay was allowed on radio?

Jack Benny and his writers crafted many superb running gags and recurring comic situations, some of which played out over a few episodes and some which cropped up time and again over the years. One of the longest running, and a favorite with Benny fans, is his feud with fellow radio comedian Fred Allen, which lasted from late 1936 up to Allen’s death 20 years later.  The genius to its longevity and popularity was that the contexts in which it played out changed over time. Celebrity feuds are a kind of easy, gratuitous laugh-getter for comics. They tend to get boring pretty quickly if there is not ingenuity in the writing behind it. Readers today might consider the current Jimmy Kimmel-Matt Damon mock feud, or the way that Jerry Seinfeld’s TV character could say “hello, Newman,” with all the pretend-hate in the world distilled into it. The Bob Hope/Bing Crosby frenemy [friend-enemy] rivalry that made their “Road to…” movies so popular also made feuding work in the 1940s. On the other hand, in my book I talk about the insult humor popular in various cultures, particularly between groups of young men. Throwing “the dozens” back in the 1930s and 1940s is not distant from comic rap battles today, and some of the fun of the Benny-Allen feud comes from their creativity and ingenuity in creating topper insults. Allen was much better at adlibbing than Benny, who occasionally would howl wishing that he could get even “if my writers were here.”



Radio lore claims that the Benny-Allen feud started accidentally with an ad-lib. On December 30, 1936, Fred Allen’s show, which broadcast from New York, featured amateur performers, and Allen had 10-year-old violinist Stuart Canin on the show. Canin played a marvelous version of Shubert’s short composition “The Bee,” and won prize money for being on the program. Allen supposedly adlibbed that the boy played much better than Jack Benny. I believe Allen broadcast on Wednesday evenings, Benny on Sunday. It was not that next Sunday, but several weeks later, that Allen repeated the insult, Benny’s cast members did their usual work of insulting their boss by noting Allen’s quip. Benny shot an insult back east across the ether waves, and from January through early March 1937, there was a radio ratings bonanza as millions of radio listeners tuned in each show to see what new cracks would fly. 

Fred Allen crashes Jack’s stage show in NYC in 1947, terrific and only 3 minutes long

Fred Allen show, where Jack Benny crashes the show and becomes “King for a Day”, its terrific!

Benny show, how Benny and Allen met Jan 15 1950

Benny’s side of the jokes were pretty tame, he made fun of the bags under Fred Allen’s eyes. Allen, who did most of his own writing, each week would add a few new insulting jokes to his already-prepared script at the last minute. Truly, listening to the feud is not all that hilarious, there were some “hits” and plenty of “misses” in the attempts at humor. But radio performers talking about each other, (or throwing guff at each other) had been generally frowned upon by the program sponsors, who were loath to give free advertising to any other company during the airtime they paid so dearly for. Ratings for both the Benny and Allen comedy shows shot to new highs during these weeks and there was tremendous coverage of the uproar in newspaper radio columns, and lots of talk about it in popular culture.  Benny brought his radio cast east to New York for a March 14 show, and the feud came to a climax with a live broadcast from the Waldorf-Astoria. To me the denouement was a bit of a letdown, the two went into another room, and came back singing a snarky song about friendship. 

What I learned in my research, from lots of digging into the columns of radio journalists, that in 1937 it was supposed to be kept “top secret” that the feud was actually manufactured by a fast-thinking advertising agency account executive   Don Stauffer. His company, Young & Rubicam, held both the Benny and Allen radio show accounts (Jell-O and Sal Hepatica, a particularly awful tasting antacid). When Stauffer heard Allen make the Benny comment, he pitched the idea of a mock feud to the two comics, who agreed to do it. The public was supposed to think it was a product of Benny and Allen, but increasing ratings and getting lots of free publicity had a lot to do with it.

Stuart Canin is still with us at 94, and he recently gave a marvelous interview at a Jack Benny convention that I will link to. I enjoyed getting to ask him if the people in his neighborhood heard him on the air and listened to the feud’s progress and he said yes indeed. 

That should have been the end of the feud, as I mentioned it was getting a bit tiresome (as some newspaper radio reviewers noted). But here is where long public memory, and the smart comic twists and Benny and Allen and their writers (long after the Young & Rubicam agency ceased to their listened producers) gave the comedians the later laughs. 

Paramount film studio contributed to the new chapters in the feud, as the movie executives had signed Jack Benny to a film contract, and very much wanted to translate his radio stardom into film stardom. (two wonderful books Catherine Jurica’s Hollywood’s Greatest Year 1938, and Susan Ohmer’s George Gallup in Hollywood provide the background to Hollywood’s slump and looking to the rival medium for new star power). Paramount hired film director Mark Sandrich away from RKO (he had become famous making the Astaire/Rogers musicals), and gave Sandrich the assignment of making Benny a top box office star. Sandrich decided that the way to do that was to craft a film around Jack Benny’s radio personality, and his cast members, making a kind of visual version of the radio show (grafted onto some typical music and dance numbers featuring pretty chorus girls). Sandrich had brought Benny’s hugely popular cast member Eddie “Rochester” Anderson into the first one, a sleeper hit in June 1939 titled Man About Town.

Sandrich then upped the game in April 1940’s “Buck Benny Rides Again” by incorporating the comic insults of Benny by Fred Allen, Allen’s voice emanating from a radio. Another huge box office hit resulted. Sandrich made a third film co-starring Benny and Allen, using the Feud as a take-off point for a bunch of slapstick blustering.

The resulting comedy, Christmas 1940’s release “Love Thy Neighbor” is really a dreadful film, Allen is clearly miserable and the slapstick is forced, and even Rochester has little to do in it. Nevertheless, the film made oodles of money for Paramount. And Stuart Canin appeared on stage in New York at the film’s premiere and was awarded a big scholarship for his future study of music. Sandrich then pleaded to move on to something else, and he created hit films with Bing Crosby. 

During World War II, Jack Benny travelled extensively to put on episodes of his radio program at US military training camps across the US during the prime-time network season, and then Benny toured with USO troops to North Africa, Europe and the Pacific in the summers. Everywhere he went, soldiers greeted Benny with homemade signs touting the feud, making playful insults about Benny or his rival Allen. I mention this just to demonstrate that the feud remained in enlisted men’s memories and it gave them pleasure to hope for a frustrated reaction from their beloved comic Benny. (Allen appeared in the early 1940s as a guest panelist on the delightfully erudite quiz show “Information, Please” and host Clifton Fadiman always asked him questions snarky questions about Jack Benny, another way outside their own programs that the popularity of the feud continued. (Allen, however, had serious health issues that took him off the air for most of the War. He was able to return in late1944).

The most successful way (in my opinion) that the Benny-Allen feud remained evergreen was in the ways the two comics worked it into occasional show narratives in the post-World War II years. Allen appeared as a guest star on Benny’s radio program ten times between 1944 and spring 1953 (second most frequent guest after stuffy British actor Ronald Colman and his wife Benita, another excellent example of a continuing narrative gag). Along with devising his famous “Allen’s Alley group of quirky ethnic characters who responded comically to his interview questions, Fred Allen also had a running gag on his own show of a campaign to “Bring Back Vaudeville,” enlisting Jack Haley and other old variety stars in satirical sketches on the craziness of entertainment in the old days.  When Allen came west to Los Angeles to appear on Benny’s radio program, the episode’s narrative would often revolve around Benny and Allen being asked to reminisce about their early days in vaudeville – how did they form the ideas for their acts, how did the two performers meet, how did one ask the other for advice on becoming a star. Benny and Allen would tell Rashomon-like substantially different versions of the same memories. They worked in references to the oddest acts in vaudeville – Fink’s Mules, Swain’s Rats and Cats, Japanese “flash” acts in which performers (tucked into barrels) would be tossed in the air by the acrobats who were lying on their backs, using their feet. Fred Allen took great delight in the opportunity that gave him to make jokes about Benny having to look out the “bung hole” of the barrel. Benny and Allen playfully insulted each other and fashioned a great deal of funny material that mixed nostalgic with the snark.  

Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

Jack Benny and the History of Radio Comedy: An Interview with Kathy Fuller-Seeley (Part Two)

One of the shifts I observe is a change from the focus on performers to characters. Even the announcer and the members of the band become characters without losing their ability to function in their more traditional roles. The development of bandmembers as characters looks forward to late night television, for example.

 I think that you are absolutely right, Henry, that the Benny radio show (and his TV years) lend themselves to connections to late night talk-show television in the vein of Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show,” and all who have followed him. Johnny moving from his opening monologue to ritual kidding of the announcer/second banana Ed McMahon, to making jokes about the bandmembers, to interweaving interviews with guests, with occasional comedy commercials and short humorous skits involving Carson himself. Carson always spoke about his huge admiration for Jack Benny and Fred Allen as mentors for comedy writing and performance. Carson’s alma mater the University of Nebraska has even digitized Carson’s senior thesis, a 45-minute audio presentation that he made in 1949 on Benny and Allen in radio comedy, “How to Write Comedy for Radio.” It’s worth a listen. 

 How might you compare the relations of Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone to other husband-and-wife comedy teams, a tradition best remembered today in terms of Burns and Allen, but wide spread in vaudeville and radio comedy?

I think that the Jack Benny/Mary Livingstone duo offered radio listeners in the 1930s a different “twist” on the typical husband and wife pairings of radio and film (more like a serial continuing of a combative comedy relationship than devoted marital bliss).  Mary (Sadye Marks Benny) joined the Benny/Canada Dry radio program July 27 1932, after its first 13 weeks on air, as a young woman from small town New Jersey who had a crush on Jack the radio performer. In the next 3 months they flirted and even eventually professed their love for each other (as is detailed in a new volume of published scripts from these “lost broadcasts.”) But Benny and his writer Harry Conn, found they felt that they had just written the show’s narrative into a corner, so they shifted gears and retreated -- Mary remained on the show as Jack’s pseudo-secretary handling fan mail, but they did not date further. From 1933-1938 or so, Jack and Mary were among the top couples in radio broadcasting (as described in the radio fan magazines, who lavished detail on their new California home, their married relationship off-mike and adoption of their daughter Joan), However on the air Mary was limited to being known as his dimwitted heckling sidekick. When singer Kenny Baker joined the program in 1937, Benny and Conn made his character oafish, and consequentially, the Mary character became sharper in her criticisms of Jack’s foibles. When Eddie Anderson as the Rochester character joined as Benny’s valet and home companion in 1939, Mary’s character became more independent and acid-sharp in her comments. The Jack/Mary relationship (IMHO) was something like the sparring of screwball comedy films in which the female is the smart puncturer of the pretentions of the male boasting windbag. Yet the Benny show radio narrative never comes to the conclusion of coupling at the altar and taming of the woman. The Mary character becomes more distant and brittle in the 1940s (which has something to do with Mary Benny’s own increasing anxiety in front of the microphone) and faded out in the early1950s on the radio, replaced by the close relationship between housemates Jack and Rochester. She would appear only rarely on Benny’s television program, limited to a few times in the mid-1950s when the shows were filmed instead of live.

It’s worth noting that in the 1930s, there were not many radio comedy “married couples” to emulate (the idea that we get from sitcoms from the 1950s onward). While there were talkative husbands and wives in the morning breakfast programs. and in the afternoon soap operas, but there were few in the randy world of radio comedy.  In the 1930s, George Burns and Gracie Allen’s characters (who appeared as a team in vaudeville, radio and film) were NOT written as married. Gracie chased after men in a crazy desirous way, while George wryly commented on her transgressions. Radio fan magazines meanwhile presented a different narrative, providing lots of detail about their happy private married lives and the children they adopted. It was only in about 1940, with their radio ratings slipping, that George and Gracie changed their radio narrative and had them become a married couple. They felt that listeners felt they had “aged out” of accepting them in the dating age, and being a married couple refreshed their humor, for years to come. Fred Allen and Portland Hoffa were also featured in the radio fan magazines as a top radio comedy couple, but she always played the role of a 13-year-old fan visiting the show (which led Fred to make occasional wry commentary about what the censors would do with dialogue about them staying in hotels together).

Among the domestic radio comedies of the 30s and 40s,” Fibber McGee and Molly” were perhaps the most prominent married couple on radio in its “golden age”, with Fibber getting into trouble with some crazy get-rich scheme and redoubtable Molly responding with an “Oh, Dearie.” “Vic and Sade” and the “Easy Aces” were also married couples on radio traversing domestic issues.

“The Goldbergs” and “Amos n Andy” also of course joked about married life, but not in the way we think of in terms of male-female comedy teams. The “Ethel and Albert” 15-minute daily program written by Peg Lynch in the mid-1940s, was among the very first domestic narratives to be labelled as a “situation comedy” by radio critics (John Crosby and Jack Gould), along with “Life with Luigi”, “My Favorite Husband” (starring Lucille Ball in a role similar to her TV work) and the hugely popular “Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

For contemporary consumers, even for many in the advertising industry, the ways that the concept of integrated advertising is often a surprise. What are some of the ways that Benny and the others in the cast engaged with the sponsors around the program? How might we compare these approaches to more contemporary forms of product placement?

Commercial advertisements were the absolute bane of radio for listeners from the 1920s through the 1950s. (Fifties television inherited that same annoying structure). Bleating, blaring, loud and noisy commercials that listeners could only avoid by switching the set off or twisting the dial were the heavy price American audiences paid for “free” entertainment. Kathy Newman has charted the wide public outrage and campaigns mounted by consumer groups and federal agencies to try to limit the incessant ads. Cynthia Meyers examines the huge role ad agencies played in adapting print advertising to the aural medium, creating and formatting the American system of radio broadcasting, and its creation of program content as well as ads. 

Jack Benny found himself between these two forces, trying to cajole audiences to tolerate the ads and wrestling with ad agencies and sponsors for the creative freedom to have the commercials in mid-program not constitute such a jarring disruption. I think this is a particularly “fun” media industries research topic, as Jack Benny quickly became known in ad agency circles as the “best salesman” in network radio. His first three sponsors, on the other hand, were appalled at Benny and writer Harry Conn’s attempts to combine humor and advertising, and each sought to fire him. I am currently publishing the scripts from Benny’s first 2 years on radio (which do not exist in recorded form), and even reading the Canada Dry commercials that Benny and Conn wrote is slightly shocking and hilarious. The upper-crusty “champagne of ginger ales” was connected with cannibalism, torture, and illegal liquor consumption. The company was horrified and wanted to fire Benny immediately, but their ad agency N.W. Ayer&Sons noted all the positive mail they were receiving, with delighted listeners complimenting the humorous ads. 

In Fall 1934, Benny’s liberal sprinkling of jesting Jell-O references into his new show took a declining old grocery product and turned it into one of the largest-selling packaged foods in America, launching a pop culture phenomenon. Ironically, General Foods wished to move him out of Jell-O to sell the much more mundane Grape Nuts cereal in 1941, but Benny was having such fun with gelatin jokes that he refused to go. Only sugar rationing at the start of World War II and lack of product on the shelves forced Benny to switch products, and he soon parted ways with the corporate sponsor. 

Benny and his writers tackled a huge challenge with the program’s new sponsor in 1943, Lucky Strike cigarettes. Lucky Strike commercials were infamous as the most obnoxious of all American radio ads, the very essence of “irritant advertising.” Company president George Washington Hill insisted on the horrific, shouted prattle, claiming that even if listeners hated the commercials, they definitely remembered the name of the product.   In my opinion, Jack Benny and his writers worked a miracle – they devised a new addition to the comedy program in 1946, a comedy singing quartet supposedly managed by announcer Don Wilson, whose job it was to sing a popular tune with lyrics adapted to tout the praises of Luckies. The Sportsmen Quartet were brilliantly insane -- manically energetic and always losing control in a chain-reaction musical crash of whoops and hollering, causing Jack to lose his temper and scream at them to stop. The pandemonium was one of the first new comic inventions network radio had seen in several years, and critics and audiences adored it. What I appreciate about the Sportsmen’s commercials is that their song lyrics take the same obnoxious advertising slogans heard at the start and end of each Benny show (LSMFT!) and turn them into gibberish. Apparently, GW Hill thought the comedy commercials were fine, as he was pleased to see his ad slogans repeated (Hill died soon afterwards, but his minions allowed the Sportsmen to continue.) Perhaps audiences found the songs and performances to be a kind of delicious nonsense that took some of the sting out of the obligatory “irritant” ads. 

All throughout Jack Benny’s radio career, he and his writers took the sponsor’s product and turned it into joking by-play that was thoroughly enmeshed in the show’s narrative; the products became comic elements of the show through repetition and playing up the enjoyable part of drinking soda pop or eating fruity gelatin desserts (or even smoking). Ad executives at various times tried these same tactics with other products and other performers, but failed again and again. There was some kind of alchemy between Benny’s mode of comedy and the products he was asked to promote.  I am not sure, that as hard as any advertiser might try, that a similar convivial integration could ever happen today in media – perhaps we consumers are far too cynical now to put up with it. But I do have a CD in my car with Sportsmen’s comedy commercials clipped from Benny’s shows, that I listen to when I want to sing along and laugh.

Meyers, Cynthia B. A word from our sponsor: Admen, advertising, and the golden age of radio. 

Newman, Kathleen M. Radio active: Advertising and consumer activism, 1935-1947. 

 Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

Jack Benny and American Radio Comedy: An Interview with Kathy Fuller-Seeley (Part One)

 When I was in middle school, there was for a brief time an amazing radio station in Atlanta that was totally programmed with classic radio comedy and drama, which sent me down a rabbit hole trying to learn everything I could about old time radio. Ever since, I have been a fan. Witness my earlier post celebrating the wonders of the Columbia Radio Workshop and my discovery of the OTRCAT website where you could find full runs of vintage series at 5 bucks a disc, This past year, I have fallen down that rabbit hole again because of the number of shows that can be found on podcasts. Somehow vintage Dragnet, Lux Theater, Damon Runyon Theater, and Jack Benny show, among others, have put me to sleep during the pandemic, My interest in Jack Benny goes back to middle school but has taken on renewed interest since I moved to the Eastern Columbia Building in Downtown LA, just a few doors down from the May Company where Jack met his future wife, Mary Livingstone, and the home of a department store which many fans believe is where Jack went Christmas Shopping in a famous episode of the series.

For Christmas this year, among other things, my wife gave me a copy of Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley’s Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, a wonderful book which provides the historical context I needed to listen to the great Jack Benny and Fred Allen episodes with a new level of appreciation. She offers so many different frames for understanding the historical importance of the program in terms of its place in the evolution of radio comedy, in historical representations of race and gender, in terms of cross-overs between radio shows and in terms of the comedian’s relationship with his sponsors, all important insights into American cultural history and in terms of what they teach us about the evolution of American radio. Because of my great love of this book, I reached out to its author, who is an old friend, and asked if she would agree to be interviewed. She has shared some rich tidbits from the book here, but if the is of interest, you will want to read the whole book.

Classic radio comedy and drama has been a neglected topic in media studies for a long time but we are starting to see more scholarship in this space, including your book. What factors are contributing to greater scholarly interest in these vintage radio programs?

That’s a great question, Henry, and I have a shorter answer, or a longer one that could become a 30-page lit review, haha. My views might be quite idiosyncratic, as I was trained in a history PhD program in the late 1980s, versus a media studies program, and of course I have opinions that might differ from others!

My work stands, of course, on the shoulders of giants. Within media studies, the formative books in the US radio history field have come from Michele Hilmes and Susan Douglas, (the former first investigating the ways Hollywood interacted with radio, the latter coming from a technological history background to chart the formation of early radio broadcasting).  Erik Barnouw published his epic trilogy on broadcasting history in 1966-70. 

The only claim I might make is that my book is the first academic book to take a sustained look at Jack Benny’s radio career. I learned so much about him from Hilmes, Douglas and Barnouw. Because of their examples and their mentorship, there is now a vibrant field of radio history and radio/audio-media studies. Increasing interest in historical and contemporary comedy and humor studies, in media studies and American Studies, is also encouraging scholars to study outstanding performers of the past.

Why nobody had tackled the topic of Jack Benny before was a mystery to me, but perhaps it was due to commercial network radio being even more of a “bad object” to US media scholars than television. (The British could at least be proud of the BBC). Jack Benny was US radio’s most iconic performer, so perhaps he shouldered that burden of not being worthy of discussion. Radio’s ephemeral nature, existing only as audio, and broadcast live by the networks back in its “golden age,” meant that many media scholars, drawn to the visuality of film, overlooked radio.

US radio seemed (to most critics) completely compromised by corporate control. The dominance of two networks, the “sameness” of top-rated radio programs (dominated by a small handful of comedians and singers from 1932-1955), the overwhelming prevalence of commercial concerns through advertising and the control of programming by advertising agencies and sponsors, all kept scholars away. The paucity of substantial critical radio criticism until after 1946 (when John Crosby, Jack Gould and others) did not help.  And the lack of extensive official collections of recordings and contextual documents (apart from the amazing NBC collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society) make studying US radio history a huge challenge. 

However, there has long been a parallel stream of US radio history research that comes from US history, American Studies and history of technology, areas that have studied radio broadcasting as a major mid-20thcentury cultural and political force. (topics include FDR’s fireside chats, the propaganda of Father Coughlin and Huey Long, ethnic radio in Chicago, Amos ‘n Andy, Fred Allen, radio’s role in World War II,etc.) Historians are often immersed in paper archives, so a lack of actual broadcast recordings did not totally deter them, as they delved into scripts, corporate, government or personal archives and technical documents. 

Fans and collectors of what became known as “Old Time Radio” also played a significant role in enabling the study of radio history. As Nora Patterson’s research shows, it was the work of fans from the 1930s to the 1970s (continuing today with the wonderful International Jack Benny Club and other organizations and individuals) diving into dumpsters to retrieve transcription discs, creating and sharing taped versions of old shows, that created program archives. Old radio shows, broadcast live, were almost never “re-run,” and recordings of programs were not officially kept by the networks or sponsors, or often even the performers. Fans over the years assembled checklists of programs, located rare recordings of rehearsals and repeat performances for the West Coast, and through their passion for the old shows, made a substantial chunk of old radio accessible to listeners today (and now programs are increasingly available in digital format). I was fortunate when studying Jack Benny’s radio program (encompassing over 900 episodes across 23 years) that about 700 recordings have been assembled by fans. My other contribution to Jack Benny research has been to labor to make the other approximately 240 episodes for which there are no recordings (Benny’s early formative years 1932-1935) available published in script form, dug up from the Benny papers at UCLA. The scripts are fascinating to read.  See Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (by Jack Benny and Harry Conn, edited and with introduction by Kathy Fuller-Seeley) Bear Manor, 2020.

If you want a brief bibliography of some of my favorite classic US radio history books, it would include, these, plus others I have mentioned in subsequent responses….

Hilmes, Michele. Radio voices: American broadcasting, 1922-1952.

Hilmes, Michele.  Hollywood and Broadcasting

Douglas, Susan. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination   

Douglas, Susan, Inventing American Broadcasting

Barnouw, Erik. A History of Broadcasting in the United States: 1. A Tower of Babel: to 1933. Vol. 1. 

Barnouw, Erik. A history of broadcasting in the United States: Volume 2: The golden web: 1933 to 1953.

Barnouw, Erik. The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Volume III--from 1953. 

 Havig, Alan. Fred Allen's radio comedy. 

 Ely, Melvin.  The Adventures of Amos n Andy

 Cohen, Lizabeth,. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago

 Wertheim, Arthur Frank. Radio comedy. 

 Horten, Gerd. Radio goes to war: The cultural politics of propaganda during World War II. 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression. 

Lenthall, Bruce. Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture.  

I am of course very interested in the transition which Jack Benny makes from vaudeville to radio. What are some aspects of vaudeville that stay with him and what needs to be shed as he makes those adjustments?

 In the book I talk about Jack’s earliest episodes of his radio program in May 1932, and it seemed to me that, at that moment,  he had not really thought through how radio was going to be different from vaudeville. Jack had been on the vaudeville stage since age 16, as he moved around the small time Midwestern circuits being a violinist who interjected a bit of musical humorous byplay into his performances (first with a partner, but after World War I as a single). He learned how to perform comedy lines during his time in the Navy, participating in a variety show for charity. By 1920, he played the violin less and began talking more. In the mid-1920s he rose from regional circuits to top national vaudeville houses. Benny began to model his routines on those of the newer “suave” comics like Frank Fay, who wore fine evening dress and spoke directly and informally to the audience, telling tales and stand-up jokes (and in Fay’s case, slaying any hecklers in the audience).

Frank Faye

Jack Benny followed Fay’s career path to become a prominent (albeit much better-liked) “master of ceremonies” at the legendary Palace in New York and in top vaudeville theaters across the US.  Benny now was a genial “Broadway Romeo,” a middle-class white Midwesterner with almost no references to ethnicity in his jokes or tone of voice, well-dressed, mild-mannered, but still the fellow for whom things always go wrong. As “MC” Benny interacted with the other acts he introduced, and he told his stories standing at the front of the stage. 

That was the character Jack Benny brought to radio. What he had NOT counted upon was how much new material radio demanded at each performance. No longer would one well-crafted 17-minute monologue last an entire year as Benny traversed the country from week to week across the vaudeville circuit. His material was eaten up in a single performance, broadcast to a national audience.   For the Canada Dry radio show, Benny needed to provide about 15 minutes of comic patter between the songs played by George Olsen’s band and sung by former Ziegfeld Follies chanteuse Ethel Shutta (Olsen’s wife).   I write in my book that Benny, panicking after his fourth bi-weekly radio appearances, had run through all his best material. Benny had always been dependent in vaudeville on comedy writers to help provide him material that he would then personalize and hone. Now he hired a full-time writer, former vaudevillian Harry Conn, and the two of them started crafting a kind of comedy that moved away from Benny simply performing monologues, and brought in the best of his Palace Theater-like exchanges with the other program members. As the band and singer remained the same each week, Benny and Conn crafted radio personas for them too, and Jack interacted with them in increasing amounts of dialogue. Then Benny and Conn began to interweave skits and film parodies and visiting guests, and began to turn the show into what was something like a workplace situation comedy.  Only the upheaval of changing to new sponsors and casts four different times kept that format from becoming more ingrained into the program until 1934.

Henry’s question had been about Jack Benny’s vaudeville routine. If we were only to look at Benny’s radio career, we would think that he left his vaudeville format behind in 1932. However, all throughout this period Jack continued to appear as MC and performer at vaudeville-like stage shows at the biggest picture palaces across the land, and at state fairs or other major events.

During World War II he took his stage shows to military camps in the US and overseas with the USO.  When Benny finally capitulated in October 1950 to travel to New York to perform a live television program, he reverted back to appearing before a small studio audience, standing on stage before a curtain. In a way, Benny returned to his vaudeville MC roots for television, mixing talk in front of a seated audience with staged skits involving guest stars and his radio regulars.  As Benny’s television program in the 1950s and 1960s became more structured like a situation comedy, he took his vaudeville format to Las Vegas and successfully performed there into the 1970s. Vaudeville monologues never really ended for Jack Benny, they just moved to other places. 

Jack Benny’s program lasted for several decades on radio and then on television. What are some of the ways that they were able to keep this program fresh for audiences over a duration that would be unheard of in contemporary television (with perhaps the exceptions of Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons).

The reasons for Jack Benny’s longevity in show business are many. One is character – Benny’s own comedy persona, a likeable everyman, and a person listeners and viewers could both relate to and feel superior to  – he’s the eternal loser, a classic schlemiel in Yiddish comedy. The other comic characters he surrounded himself with were memorable, a group of quirky friends, each with flaws, but an ability to get along with the rest. 

 Another is the large collection of staple comedy bits -- Benny’s writers created a large number of comic routines, scenes and interactions that could be endlessly recycled (comfortable familiarity) but also slightly twisted or tweaked each time to make it seem new or refreshed. Benny and his writers were wise to never lean too hard on any one character or routine, so that the audience might tire of them from repetition. A character could not have a major role for weeks, and then when the character returned, it was like they had never left. Superb writing and terrific comic performances played a role. 

 The pseudo-situation comedy format that Benny and his writers devised on radio also was especially flexible, and so perhaps listeners did not tire of it as quickly as a more limited program structure. Benny always said he wanted to do many different kinds of shows to provide variety, and a radio episode could be the running of the radio program, another might take place right after the show ended or beforehand during rehearsal. The gang could go off on an adventure together (like a multi-episode trip to Yosemite). The whole episode could take place at Jack’s house involving Rochester and domestic issues. Or a guest star would interact with Jack. Or the cast would perform a parody of a current film. Radio’s ability to take the performers to any location made this much easier (there were not costs to build sets or create costumes). Benny’s television programs by the mid-1950s would often be more limited to his home place, or the TV studio stage from which he gave his opening monologues. 

 It’s worth mentioning that one reason for Benny’s longevity was that radio sponsors and networks in the 1930s, 40s and 50s were far more willing to continue an existing show that earned adequate ratings/listenership. There was less competition for audiences between rival shows broadcast at the same time, and conservative sponsors were convinced to deepen connections between their star performer and the products they wished to promote. Starting in the 1960s on network television, production became so expensive, and the race to get high ratings was so heated, that programs did not have the luxury of developing over several seasons, and shows were cancelled if they did not immediately become hits.  

Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).

Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Permissive Childrearing and Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (Part Two)

Last time, I shared the first part of my reading of Mary Poppins from my book in progress about children’s culture from 1948-1968. As I hoped, I have already gotten some great responses. 

Alex Halavais posted “Kid’s Carnival” on his blog, which is well worth reading.  He writes about “the inversion of power: kids being kids without the pesky interference of grown-ups” in children’s media, an important theme which he especially explores through the example of Pippy Longstockings. He concludes about the absent parents in children’s fictions, “we don’t know how to write good parents. It isn’t easy to do. “  

But one of the striking things about the period I am studying is that there was often an effort to depict good parents in part because these stories were aimed as much at adults as at children and because they written in response to an explosion of new advice literature for Baby Boom era parents that could not avoid the challenge of discussing what good parents did. John Watson gets picked on a lot because he was so stuffy about the relations of parents and children. But there wer many more books after the war addressing these questions and most of them sought to imagine new kinds of relations between adults and children, an issue which was understood in part through the lens of anti-fascism. I will trace in this book how attitudes emerged through the Child Study movement of the Poogressive Era that would become much more widespread by the 1950s and 1960s, popularized by Benjamin Spock, but actually shaped by the thinking and advocacy of many female writers of the period. Early on, I define this discourse, which I label with many qualifications, as permissive.

Permissiveness:

• uses empathetic reflection to “take stock” and attempt to understand children’s motivations and drivers 

• values children’s sensuality, curiosity, push for independence, passion, playfulness as part of how they process the world 

• seeks to protect the rights of children to find their own voices, to pursue just solutions, to engage democratically with others in their own community

• Offers opportunities for children to achieve catharsis by working through emotional conflicts via expressive means, such as drawing pictures, writing stories, acting them out using dolls or other household materials.

• Seeks to minimize conflict by decreasing the use of authoritative statements in favor of discussions and explanations 

• seeks indirect rather than direct means to shape children’s characters 

• Is known for what it permits and accommodates rather than what it disciplines, constraints, limits and thwarts 

• gives children security and freedom to work through their own problems, watches from distance, provides resources when needed 

• embraces play as a mode of learning and as a means of communication, especially between parents and children

There are some permissive era works -- Peanuts for example -- which depend on the absence of adults, but there are many more which explore, as Mary Poppins does, the reformed relations between parents and children. And as this definition suggests, permissiveness involves more than just a shift in the authority structure of the American family.

On Facebook, Patrick Herron notes: “Reminds me of Lakoff's description in "Don't Think of an Elephant" of “strict father morality” (conservative) and “nurturant parent morality” (progressive) political frames.” This is a good point and one could argue that these distinctive ideological formulations, both of which model the American public on the structure of the family, came from the debates I am mapping here. The backlash against permissiveness has been a hallmark of conservative thought, which stresses a more discipline-centered family and dismisses engagement with children’s emotional development as producing “sniwflakes.” Both the left and the right map their aspirations for the nation onto their ideas about family life, which is the reverse side of what Lakoff is discussing.

Thanks to both for provoking further reflection through thoughtful critical engagement with the work. I welcome further such comments, since it’s going to be a while before I can send out this work for peer review and since I am not yet getting invites to give public talks on this project.

Now, back to Mary Poppins…

Poppins’ approach is perhaps best summed up by the lyrics of “A Spoonful of Sugar,” which she sings as she is encouraging the Banks children to put away their toys. A disorderly nursery was one of Watson’s  pet peeves:

“Children with toys all over the floor do not have time at the end of the day to clear them all up carefully -- handle them gently and stack them away in order. You buy a toy box but the toys are dumped in by the armful and thrown about the room at random the next day until the child comes upon the one he wants.” (142)

. Watson encourages parents to take out only one toy at a time and replace it before offering another.

Mary Poppins, however, approaches the problem in her own distinctive way:

In ev'ry job that must be done

There is an element of fun

You find the fun and SNAP!

The job's a game

and ev'ry task you undertake

Becomes a piece of cake

A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see, that a...

Spoonful full of sugar helps the medicine go down

The medicine go down

The medicine go down

Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down

In a most delightful way 

Mary Poppins issues no commands but rather she offers an invitation. She redirects their attention, using pleasure (the sugar) to inspire them to embrace the desired task and by the end of the song, the children do not want to stop, even to go on an outing. She has, in true permissive fashion, made cleaning the room into a game rather than a chore. Sugar (Mintz, 1985) was indeed a magic substance in the post-war period, added to breakfast cereals to insure that children ate them, used as a reward for good behavior in the form of suckers or candy canes at the dentist or the barbers, and resulting ultimately in a generation which was highly susceptible to childhood onset diabetes and cavities. Later in the film, Mary Poppins will get the children to take their medicine by customizing its flavor to their individual tastes: strawberry for Michael, Lime Cordial for Jane, and Rum Punch for herself. 

Mary Poppins’ mastery over child psychology is also suggested by another number where she gets the children to go to sleep by suggesting the exact opposite:

Stay awake, don't rest your head

Don't lie down upon your bed

While the moon drifts in the skies

Stay awake, don't close your eyes

Though the world is fast asleep

Though your pillow's soft and deep

You're not sleepy as you seem

Stay awake, don't nod and dream

Here, again, she does not need to issue orders, she doesn’t turn bedtime into a struggle and she does not demand that they sleep on a schedule,  but simply waits patiently for what Dreikurs describes as “logical consequences” to unfold. As Jean Webb (2002) notes in regard to the novel, Mary Poppins, as an “educator,” refuses to answer children’s questions and rarely offers direct morals, letting children make discoveries on their own as a consequence of the remarkable experiences she offers them. She exposes the Banks children  to other worlds rich in laughter, imagination, and creativity, teaching them to listen to other voices (whether those of Chimney Sweeps and Bird Ladies or a neighboring dog). When she does deliver messages, they are messages that Mr. Banks might respect, but they are often presented by Julie Andrews  in a teasing fashion. 

The book has no real equivalent to the “Spoonful of Sugar” or “Stay Awake” scenes, one of the many ways that the story was reconceptualized for a 1964 audience. There is an interesting sequence in the book, though, where Michael does naughty things all day, more or less, without any conscious motivation: 

“Michael woke up one morning with a curious feeling inside him. He knew, the moment he opened his eyes, that something was wrong but he was not quite sure what it was…. Throughout the rest of the day nothing went right with him. The hot, heavy feeling inside him made him do the most awful things, and as soon as he’d done them, he felt extraordinarily pleased and glad and thought out some more at once.” (Travers, 1934, 81, 83). 

Mary Poppins seeks to redirect his behavIor through one of her outings -- in this case, a trip around the world where he encounters stereotypical representations of various races (no doubt the reason the scene is not in the film -- another example of where racist representations are excluded but alternative ones are not provided).  In the end, she needs to settle his bad feelings with a glass of milk and a few moments of her affectionate attention:

“She stood there without saying a word, watching the milk slowly disappear. He could smell the crackling, white apron and the faint flavor of toast that hung about her so deliciously...And he thought how warm he was and how happy he felt and how lucky he was to be alive.” (Travers, 102)

There is no suggestion that this “naughty” boy needs to be disciplined. Rather, whatever bad feelings within him must be displaced by the good feelings that can only be generated through loving care. And, even if these ideas will be more fully elaborated through the film’s musical numbers, this structure of feeling points towards the permissive paradigm as it will be more fully articulated by postwar writers like Dreikurs.

Disney’s Mary Poppins is, in the end, structured around the project of “saving Mr. Banks,” helping the father to develop a more constructive relationship with his children. No such plot exists in Travers’ original novel, where, as Webb (2002)  suggests, the focus is on helping the children, “Travers is implying that the demands and stresses of capitalism separate the middle-class Banks family from the enjoyment and wonder of childhood, despite their desires.” (116)  Mr. Banks, whose name defines him through his job, must make a similar discovery in the film when he brings his children with him to his workplace. Despite his efforts to teach them the virtues of capitalist empire building, Michael refuses to give over his tuppence as a deposit, wanting instead to make a compassionate gift to the Bird Woman outside the Cathedral. When the children’s disruptions result in a run on the bank, the father faces the threat of being fired by the institution he cherishes so much. By this point, he has also found his home in a state of anarchy, overrun by soot-covered Chimney Sweeps, and in the aftermath, he has a conversation with Bert about the importance of spending more time with his children. Again, using reverse psychology, Bert tells him:

 When your little tykes are crying, you haven’t time to dry their tears and see those grateful little faces smiling up at you…. You’ve got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone though childhood slips like sand through a sieve. And all too soon, they’ve up and grown, and then, they’ve flown and it’s too late for you to give. 

Dick Van Dyke plays Bert as an adult who has remained in touch with his inner child, who remains imaginative, playful, and jocular, who finds creative expression through his work, who understands the emotional life of children, and who still maintains the ability to speak to the adult world. In this scene, he becomes a translator between Mr. Banks and his children, helping him to take the “bitter pill” of adult life with “a spoonful of sugar.” Mr. Banks retains his dignity and maturity throughout the scene but at the bank, the father seems to internalize the other man’s anarchic spirit:  laughing, telling jokes, rejecting the dignity and decorum expected of him. The moment is rendered all the more ironic by the fact that Banks -- reverting to a boyish state -- confronts Van Dyke as  another character: the ancient bank president, who embodies the fossilization of the capitalist patriarchy.

Everyone is convinced that he might try to kill himself without the job that has defined his life, but instead, they discover he has been working in the basement, repairing the children’s kite, and he takes the children and their mother in tow to the local park, where everyone decides to fly a kite:

When you send it flying up there

All at once you're lighter than air

You can dance on the breeze

Over houses and trees

With your fist holding tight

To the string of your kite

Only then, when the children care more about their father than they do about their nanny, does Mary Poppins make her departure, flying off into the sunset, like the gunman at the end of a classic western film, having set things right within the Bank’s household. Julie Andrews play a remarkably similar plot function the following year in The Sound of Music, where as the nanny, Maria, she transforms the Van Trapp household, which was run with military precision and discipline, into one full of song and rich in emotion, as the father learns to play and in this case, perform with his children.

The persistence of such narratives suggests how deeply grounded these conflicting patterns of child-rearing were in the culture of the 1960s. It was as if the whole culture was rediscovering the pleasures of childhood play -- of turning bread and water into tea and cakes, as Bert describes it -- and the importance of fathers spending more time with their families.

Perhaps they were.

Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Permissive Childrearing and Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (Part One)

I have described my current book project as “my second childhood book,” since it is the second book I have produced about children (following The Children’s Culture Reader) and since it involves a return to core texts which helped to define my own childhood growing up in America in the 1960s. I started this book more than twenty years ago but life got in the way and in any case, I am much better situated to write this book now than I could have then.

I am roughly half-way through writing it, so it is still several years away, but I wanted to share a bit of a sneak peak with readers this week, hoping to solicit some feedback on the core argument I am making about a paradigm shift in how different generations understood the role of parenting.

Here, I am painting with broad strokes but my research has found the roots of permissive parenting in the progressive era and the work of the Child Study movement, led by mothers and female researchers who formed an alliance to try to reform and reimagine the American family. I hope to share some other bits of this work in progress as the writing takes shape.

This segment comes at the end of the introduction and as its title suggests, explores the ways competing ideas about parenting run through Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) which as it happens is the first film I remember seeing in a cinema.

Just a Spoonful of Suger

Across this book, my approach is to situate some of the most popular children’s fictions of the era in relation to the debates around child development and psychology that preoccupied my parent’s generation, seeing the first as implicitly and in some cases explicitly addressing the concerns of the later. What advice, for example, would Dr. Spock have given to the parents of Dennis the Menace or how might Margaret Mead made sense of the imaginary worlds depicted by Dr. Seuss? 

By children’s fictions, I mean fictions for and about the nature of childhood regardless of the medium through which they are told. I am suggesting some vital connections between these two expressions of ideal parenting and childhood. These links may or may not have been fully understood by the works’ creators. In some cases, there was direct contact between child-rearing advocates and children’s media-makers; they shared the same publications; they worked in the same organizations, and in some cases, the creators actively participated in the child study movement and shaped their works to reflect pedagogical insights. Yet, even here, keep in mind the various agents who process such works between their site of creation and their site of reception. Margaret Mead (1954b) makes a similar point in Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, where she describes an experiment -- “Modern Children’s Stories”-- which sought to create a children’s book to reflect insights from the Child Study movement: 

It became increasingly clear that, after all, five-year-old children don’t buy books and that the children’s needs or preferences had to be mediated by layers of other people -- mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, librarians, publishers, bookstore buyers, experts -- all of whom had a full quota of fears and hope and a much more substantial quota of firmly entrenched values and prejudices than the children for whom the story had been designed …. The cultural process by which artists and writers, sensitive to changing values, prefigure those values in their work and the guardians of public taste and morals accept and reject what they produce had proved to be too complex and sensitive for such self-conscious activity. (455). 

This is what Jacqueline Rose (1984) described as the “impossibility” of children’s fiction -- such works tell us far more about adults, their values, their aspirations, their emotional needs, than such stories tell us about children’s actual experiences.

Just as child-rearing advice needs to negotiate the transition from prewar and postwar paradigms, the creators of children’s fiction similarly had to negotiate around the persistence of genre conventions, the assumptions of gatekeepers, and the biases and tastes of parents and grandparents. Consequently, we can assume that there will be residual elements at play in even the most progressive children’s texts -- some nostalgic tug towards earlier versions of proper parenting and idealized childhood. At the same time, the works discussed here made it through all of those filters and into many American households, showing some “fit” with the values with which parents were raising their children. 

Childhood in Contemporary Cultures models how cultural analysis might address such problems. Mead and Wolfenstein (1954) explain, “Songs and stories, pictures, dances, and theatrical shows are among the gifts which a child may receive from his culture.” (231) These works are ways that the culture transmits its most cherished values to the next generation. These texts tell children how adults view them, how they are meant to behave, what risks and opportunities the world offers them, and how they should feel about their circumstances. These “gifts” in many cases are literal -- these materials are things adults offer to children as treats or rewards, or at best, they are options that adults tolerate. Often, also, these are media that adults consume along with their children in the case of film and television and even works that parents read to their children in the case of chapter and picture books. 

In her essay, “The Image of the Child in Contemporary Films,” Wolfenstein (1954) argues that consequently,  media representations of childhood “embody a complex mixture of fantasy and reality… memories and dreams of adults about their own lost childhood, as well as feelings about those mysterious beings, their own children.” (277) If permissive parents no longer believed they could “produce” children according to their own specifications, they did hope to “shape” childhood through the cultural materials they provided to their children.

Though she was writing several years before, Wolfenstein might easily have been describing the emotional trajectory of  Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964). P. L. Travers’ original novel was published in 1934, the film is set in 1910, but in fact, Disney’s movie, from start to finish, pits permissive ideas about child-rearing against more discipline-centered approaches, offering a model for a thoroughly modern upbringing.  If the story, as a recent film reminded us, centers around “saving Mr. Banks,” what he must be saved from are out-dated concepts about child development (which are extensions of his ideas about work that leave him cut off from his own family).

John Watson would certainly recognize the problems the characters confront at the opening of the story, where Mr. Banks advertises in the London Times in order to replace yet another Nanny. Writing in 1928, Watson acknowledges: 

Nurses are the weakest link in infant culture today. They are untrained, green and poorly mannered. They are either bullies or sentimentalists. It is no unusual thing for a home to have a succession of five nurses per year -- nor for a child to have had from 25-40 nurses and governesses from birth to 12 years of age. (147)

The Disney film establishes two very different sets of criteria by which a Nanny might be selected, the first “requirements” coming from Mr. Banks and the other, a contract of sorts by which the Banks’ children describe what they need and how they might curve their misconduct if they receive fair and just treatment.  No such scene exists in the original novel. There, we only learn:

 Mr. Banks went off with his black bag, and Mrs. Banks went into the drawing-room and sat there all day long writing letters to the papers and begging them to send some Nannies to her at once as she was waiting; and upstairs in the Nursery, Jane and Michael watched at the window and wondered who would come. They were glad Katie Nanna had gone, for they had never liked her. She was old and fat and smelt of Barley-water. (4-5)

To understand the contrast between the two approaches as represented in the Disney film,  it might be helpful to consider a chart the child psychologist, Rudolf Dreikurs offered in his book, Children: The Challenge, published in 1964, the same year Disney’s Mary Poppins was released. Here, he maps the difference between two competing paradigms.

Autocratic Society **********************************Democratic Society

Authority Figure  *******************************Knowledgeable Leader

Power                  ********************************* Influence

Pressure             ********************************* Stimulation

Demanding         *********************************  Winning Cooperation

Punishment        *********************************  Logical consequences

Reward              *********************************    Encouragement

Imposition          ****************************   Permit -- Self-determination

Domination        *********************************    Guidance

Children Seen, Not Heard *********************  Listen! Respect the child

Because I Said To   *************************** Because it is Necessary                                                

Now, consider the ways Mr. Banks describes his ideal candidate.

Required. Nanny. Firm, Respectable, No nonsense. 

A British nanny must be a gen'ral!

The future empire lies within her hands

And so the person that we need to mold the breed

Is a nanny who can give commands!

A british bank is run with precision;

a british home requires nothing less!

Tradition,discipline, and rules must be the tools,

Without them,disorder,chaos,moral disintegration;

In short you have a ghastly mess!

Here, and throughout the rest of the song, the key words and concepts -- “precision”, “firmness,” “discipline,” “rules” on the one hand and disorder and moral disintegration on the other -- come directly from the discipline-centered child-rearing advice of the early 20th century.  Ada Hart Arlitt’s The Child From One to Six (1930) warned that the child “will not know that there are laws that govern the universe unless he knows that there are laws that govern the home.” The home was to be regulated not by “mother love” but by the “kitchen time-piece.”  Here, we speak to a core concern of the behaviorist model: the idea that children should be fed and put to bed on a fixed schedule rather than giving over to their demands or desires.

Elsewhere, in the film, Mr. Banks sings, “It's 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion Are scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed.” The central metaphors running through the prewar discourse emphasize industrial (Or in Bank’s case, commercial) processes. For John Watson, the home was to be run like a taylorized factory. Mr. Banks sums up his desire to prepare children for the competitive environment of British capitalism: “The children must be molded,shaped and taught/ That life's a looming battle to be faced and fought.” 

As in the pre-war models, the best methods for achieving these goals required the father to be the head of the household and for those under his “command” to maintain authority over the young. Like Watson, going hand in hand with this emphasis on patriarchal power within the home is a distrust of maternal sentimentality or what Banks refers to as “the slipshod, sugery, female thinking they get around here all day long.” Banks is portrayed as seeking a polite distance from his children: “I'll pat them on the head And send them off to bed.” Here, Banks follows Watson’s advice on such matters:

“There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults… Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task. Try it out. In a week’s time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kindly. You will  be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.” (82)

The children’s advertisement represents a profoundly different model of the relations between children and adults:

If you want this choice position

Have a cheery disposition

Rosy cheeks, no warts!

Play games, all sorts

You must be kind, you must be witty

Very sweet and fairly pretty

Take us on outings, give us treats

Sing songs, bring sweets

Never be cross or cruel

Never give us castor oil or gruel

Love us as a son and daughter

And never smell of barley water

The conversation between parents and children models something closer to the family council Dreikurs (1964) describes: “Each member has the right to bring up a problem. Each has the right to be heard. Together, all seek for a solution to the problem and the majority opinion is upheld.” (301) The children assume that they have the right to contribute to solving the problem and that their insights will be helpful to the adults.The children’s attempt to assert their voice in the process is only heard because their mother insists that the parents should listen to what they have to say.

The children’s criteria emphasize an affectionate relationship, the opposite of the anti-sentimentalist approach advocated by Watson and Mr. Banks. If Banks wants a nanny who can give commands, they want one with a “cheery disposition.” She is defined by the ways that she engages with them through jokes, songs, outings, and games, and not through the expectations she places upon them. She is to win their cooperation through what she permits and the guidance she offers. And as if to dramatize this process of winning cooperation, the next verse functions as a negotiation in which the children agree not to misbehave if the nanny agrees to better respond to their needs.

If you won't scold and dominate us

We will never give you a cause to hate us

We won't hide your spectacles

So you can't see

Put toads in your bed

Or pepper in your tea

Here, they hint at some of the pranks that led Katie Nana to flee in horror, describing the Banks children as “little beasts” who need a “ruddy zookeeper.” Instead, they suggest that the nanny’s discipline-centered approach provoked them to act out, a perspective shared by many permissive child-rearing experts. Mr. Banks rejects such values outright, tearing up the children’s advertisement and tossing the bits in the chimney. But when Mary Poppins arrives, she is holding the children’s advert, taped together, much to Mr. Bank’s bafflement and confusion. Her arrival represents an experiment in how a more permissive household might operate.  

"Wish You Were Here": Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards (Part Two)

 “Wish you were here”: Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards 

by Sui Wang

Disembodied intimacy: a paper encounter 

Epistolary communication has always been concerned with performance and interpretation. The former is expressed through disembodiment from the physical bodies and the latter often resorts to semiotic imagining. “Within a discourse of disembodiment, there is a complex relation between the imagined body of epistolary discourse and the real ‘flesh and blood’ corporeality of the epistolary actors (Milne 7).” The conscious references to the embodiments, combined with the materiality of the epistolary medium, make up for the absence of physical bodies and convey a sense of intimacy, immediacy and presence. There is an old Chinese saying that goes “I could visualize you by seeing your handwriting (见字如面).” It is a common greeting at the beginning of, often times, a hand-written letter, meaning that this letter contains the writer’s spirits. Writing as physical labor requires a presence of body thus gives handwriting the corporeality that enables the readers to conjure the image of people. As a proxy of the sender, the postcard turns into an embodiment, a sign of physicality, and a performed identity with visual and textual cues. 

In the graphic novel Griffin and Sabine, London-based postcard designer Griffin enters into an epistolary romance with stamp illustrator Sabine, who lives on one of the South Pacific islands. Their relationship begins when Sabine sends him a greeting postcard expressing her affection for his artwork. They exchange their thoughts on family, school and art. They also exchange their work -- every card they send to each other is designed or handmade by themselves, so the mass-produced feature of postcard does not apply in their case. Sabine writes in one card with an eye and window: 

“I share your sight. When you draw and paint, I see what you’re doing while you do it. I know your work almost as well as I know my own.” 

Sabine convinces Griffin of the telepathic co-presence through their correspondences, in which she writes about how she knows about his work. Suffering from a lonely soul and a miserable past, Griffin develops an intimacy with this stranger. He replies, 

“I want to hear everything. Write in detail. Tell me all about yourself. I demand to know—please. ” 

Their next correspondence takes the form of a letter, which allows them longer lengths to expound on their life stories. In the letter, Griffin recalls how his parents died and he moved to his mother’s stepsister’s Vereker house. After working under her for three years, he went to art school. When he was about to graduate, he heard of Vereker’s death, which traumatizes him to this day. He adds that Sabine’s correspondence fills the void left by Vereker’s death. It is worth noting that Griffin sees Sabine’s postcard/letter as comfort, company, and an embodiment of her to “fill the void.” Similarly, Sabine develops a yearning for his cards. The postcard exchange facilitates a disembodied intimacy between them, which opens the door for a spiritual communion instead of the face-to-face physical connection. “I have always craved a closeness that I could not find here. Now I feel it with you. My kinsmen are responsive to me—but there is no one to reach my heart, and you who are so far away, have been closer to me than any man on the islands.” 

In this card, Sabine fantasizes bodily proximity with Griffin, while their disembodied encounter makes the proximity ambivalent. After Sabine denies his request for selfie, Griffin comes to a poignant epiphany: Sabine doesn’t exist -- it’s all his imagination. He thus abandons all hope and decides that “I mustn’t write again.” While the previous correspondences confirm their mutual affection, the disembodied nature of epistolary communication eventually endangers their romance and pushes Sabine to make the move. For ages, the fragility and illusiveness of disembodied intimacy have haunted the epistolary romance. In 84 Charing Cross Road, the protagonist, Hanff, had not got to visit the bookstore in person during their twenty-year long correspondence. When she finally visited the place after the owner Doel died, the bookstore was already closed. The same anxiety over authenticity troubles epistolary relationships of today, for instance, email romance and cyber dating. In contemporary cases, there seems to be a lck of any tangible artifact. No postcard, no paper, no handwriting. The material condition has fundamentally changed, hence the reworking of intimacy: people have invented new ways to build intimacy in digital world, which in turn is being tested and performed in a hybrid online-and-offline environment. 

Collectibles in the cabinet 

The postcard has a long shelf life and even longer after-shelf-life. The oldest ones can circulate for decades. Their possible last stop is the collector’s room. Postcard collection completes the cycle of private-public, moving it from the private domain to (quasi-)public exhibit. The life of a postcard as collectible is not completely separated from its life as gift, souvenir or epistolary vehicle. Many tourists send the postcard to themselves or friends for the sake of keeping their collection. A postcard from Chicago in 1908 reads: 

“Dear Elizabeth, 

I owed you a card of Mrs. Palmer’s house knowing you have a collection. It is brownstone however and not this red. We are all well. I suppose father will go to Lake Forest first and after to [Meutor?]. I have enjoyed being at home this winter very much. There is no news. Hope you are all well. 

Yours Nellie.” 

Nellie sent this card to Elizabeth not only for greeting but as a gift for her collection. When a postcard enters into a collection, its textual information and expressivity will be weakened, which shows a process of de-contextualization and de-privatization. As Naomi Schor writes on her postcard collection of Paris: 

“Postcards are organized in series, and their very seriality negates their individual mnemonic properties; what matters in the case of my postcard collection is not the contiguity between an individual card and the environment from which it was detached; rather it is the contiguity I restore between a single card and its immediate predecessor and follower in a series I am attempting to reconstitute, or the contiguity I create between cards linked by some common theme.” (255) 

The fragmentariness of the postcard takes on another layer of meaning. Instead of being an “in media res” of personal narratives, it is put back to a numbered published series. In this case, the “context collapse” does not seem to matter any longer. To be precise, the context is re-invented, or, returns to its barest starting point. In the postcard collection, the visual on the verso often takes the leading role, while the handwritten texts (if there is any) on the recto become the ornamentation. The sides flip again. The postcard regains its commodity value on the collecting market; this time, it is not only a cheap picture carrier, promo card, or a random souvenir that collects dust on the shelf, but a real collectible. Just as the collections of other kinds, the rarity denotes the value of collectibles and the trend keeps changing, responding to the zeitgeist. In this sense, the postcard collection reiterates the previous point on how the postcard serves as “a sign of time”. 

Nowadays, the collecting culture of the postcard is intricately linked with the pen pal community. On the forum of the international postcard association “Postcrossing”, many initiatives of postcard exchanges are for the purpose of collection. By collecting postcards of different places around the globe, the collectors meet new friends, exchange cultural traditions, and curate their typologies of places. “Postcrossing” even has a special section for trading, requests and offers where postcard fiends can specify their needs for cards (written/unwritten, stamped/unstamped, of specific places or themes) and complete their collection. Instead of adhering to the original published order, they can be very creative about their collections in terms of how the cards are picked and arranged. In the postcrossing community, postcard exchanges can fulfill the tasks of greeting, correspondence and trading in a one-time, single move. At the turn of the 20th century, the picture postcard offered a convenient and cheap means for long-distance communication; it brought together families, friends, lovers and strangers, albeit asynchronously. The distance and travelling time have romanticized the sender’s journey, as well as the receiver’s waiting. Its physical weight is light, while cultural weight is heavy. It functions as an epistolary vehicle, aesthetic object, souvenir and collectible. The enmeshed roles render it a cornucopia of meanings and enable it to travel between the private and public domains. Today’s email, mobile message and social media remediate different functions of the postcard, but none of them provides the imaginative mobilities, disembodied but materialized intimacy and curatorial serendipity that the postcard evokes. 

Works Cited 

Baldwin, Brooke. “On the Verso: Postcard Messages as a Key to Popular Prejudices.” 1988. The Journal of Popular Culture. 22: 15-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1988.2203_15.x 

Bantock, Nick. Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. , 1991. Print. 

Baranowska, Mafgorzata. “The mass‐produced postcard and the photography of emotions.” 1995. Visual Anthropology, 7:3, 171-189, DOI: 10.1080/08949468.1995.9966647 

Belk, Russ W. “Been There, Done That, Bought the Souvenirs: Of Journeys and Boundary Crossing.” 1997. Consumer Research: Postcards From the Edge. Edited by Stephen Brown and Darach Turley. London and New York: Routledge: 22–45. 

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. United States: Prism Key Press, 2010. Print. 

Cure, Monica. Picturing the Postcard. University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition. 

Dotterrer, Steven, and Galen Cranz. “The Picture Postcard: Its Development and Role in American Urbanization.” The Journal of American Culture 5.1 (1982): 44–50. Web. 

Farfan, Peny. “The Picture Postcard is a sign of the times’: Theatre Postcards and Modernism.” Theatre History Studies, vol. 32, 2012, p. 93-119. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ths.2012.0018. 

Ferguson, Sandra. “A Murmur of Small Voices: On the Picture Postcard in Academic Research”. Archivaria, Vol. 60, Sept. 2006, pp. 167-84. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12520. 

Heinrich von Stephan, from an address to the 1865 Austro German Postal Conference, re-printed in Staff, Picture Postcard 44. 

Hoskins, Janet. “Postcards from the Edge of Empire: Images and Messages from French Indochina.” 2007. IIAS Newsletter: 44. 16 – 17. 

Jenkins, Henry. Comics and Stuff. NYU Press. 2020. 

Kelly, Ryan, and Daniel Gooch. “Understanding Participation and Opportunities for Design from an Online Postcard Sending Community.” Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS '12 (2012): n. pag. Web. 

Klinghammer, Waldemar. “Eine Reise nach Norwegen und Spitzbergen auf der ‘Auguste Victoria’.” Humoristische Schilderung aus der Kleinstâderperspektive. Rudolstadt: Verlag der Fürstlich priv. Hochdrückerei. 1903. 

Andriotis, Konstantinos, and Mišela Mavrič. “POSTCARD MOBILITY: going beyond image and text.” Annals of Tourism Research 40 (2013): 18–39. Web. 

Laverrenz, Viktor. In das Land der Fjorde: Reisebriefe aus Norwegen. Berlin: N.p. 1901. 

Lash, Scott, and Celia Lury. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Print 

Marsh, Allison. “Greetings from the Factory Floor: Industrial Tourism and the Picture Postcard.” 2008. Curator: The Museum Journal. 51. 377-391. 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2008.tb00324.x. 

Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies) Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. 

McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Inc. (Originally published 1964) 

Östman, Jan-ola. " The postcard as media". Text & Talk 24.3. 2004. pp.423-442. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2004.017 Web. 

Prosser, Rosslyn. “The Postcard: The Fragment.” Life Writing. 2011. 8:2, 219-225, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2011.559737 

Rogan, Bjarne. “An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication.” 2005. Cultural Analysis. 4. 

Schor, Naomi. “Collecting Paris.” The Cultures of Collecting. 1994. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 252-74. 

Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 38, no. 2, Feb. 2006, pp. 207–226, doi:10.1068/a37268. 

Trained as a media scholar and a journalist, Sui Wang’s work explore the media history of modern China and Japan with focuses on visual culture and sonic media. She is a second-year master student in East Asian studies at University of Southern California. Currently, she is working on her master thesis, which investigates how the listenership of overseas Chinese radio stations makes their diasporic identities. In her leisure time, she loves rewatching Chris Marker and writing short stories in Amazon reviews. You can read more of her other work at www.suiwang.org

"Wish You Were Here": Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards (Part One)

The following paper was written by Sui Wang, who was a student in my PhD seminar on Media Theory and History last fall. I was impressed by the lyrical quality of her writing and the multiple perspectives she brought to bear on the postcard, a medium that has rarely received critical attention.

 “Wish you were here”: Imaginative Mobilities and Disembodied Intimacy in Postcards 

by Sui Wang

Abstract 

The postcard is a rich medium inscribed with entangled relationships. As a commodity, it circulates between publishers, buyers and collectors. As an emerging communication technology, the advent of the postcard caused many to reconsider previously held understandings of concepts such as intimacy and privacy at the turn of the 20th century. It mediates the distance with romantic intentions and facilitates virtual, asynchronous encounters. The handwritten messages on the recto grant glimpses into, despite its brevity, the relationship between the senders and receivers. On the verso, they have photographs or color fine prints that depict historical places. It is imperative that we understand the boom of picture postcards within the context of both the technological advancements of the era such as photography and color lithographs and the growth of the postal service. It is also important to contextualize and historicize it in the genealogy of epistolary communication, for instance, how it remediates some elements of letters and how it is remediated by the message apps of today. A re-examination of this technological history bespeaks a disappearance of tangible artifacts, by which correspondents conceive the virtual presence. This essay adopts a bifurcated method combining close readings of textual and visual messages on postcards, on the one hand, and investigations of its representational nature and materiality vis-à-vis the technological infrastructure, on the other hand. Drawing on postcards from the early 20th century and literary examples, I argue that picture postcards depict a central tenet of epistolary communication, namely, the process that the immaterial bodies of senders and receivers, as well as of places, are imagined through reading and writing. 

Introduction 

“I am a visual image and made on paper. I embody the intention of the sender and the pleasure of the receiver. I tell small stories of travel; the joy, the hardship, the movement, the ticketing, the comfort, the discomfort, the lost luggage, the lost time and the stories of cities with their own peculiar rhythm. I register the spectacle and the viewer, held in place by the click and aim of cameras, destinations with their promise of something other than the known and events that may take you out of your comfort zone, even speaking of love. I carry words: ‘I’ve been in Greece for only a few days (fell in love with it)’. My action is embodied in acts of communication, I reveal fragments of stories that are personal representations of places and people, and I accumulate in a range of storage containers and in displays. I become a collection, which resembles elements of narrative. I constitute a memory archive and can prevent forgetting. I can be read in different ways by the interested and the disinterested (219).

— “The Postcard: The Fragment,” Rosslyn Prosser 

Postal historians date the genesis of postcards to the late 19th century, while its precursor had appeared in various forms of card-with-messages: visiting card, pictorial notecard, decorated envelop and the carte-de-visite. Despite the slightly different social protocols developed around them, they share a similar format (pair of text and visual) and were invented to facilitate the epistolary communication. In the 1860s, Postal Director Heinrich von Stephan pioneered the postcard in Germany for the sake of efficacy and convenience, arguing that the present form of the letter did not show sufficient simplicity for “a large class of communications” hence needed to be updated. “It is not simple enough, because note-paper has to be selected and folded, envelopes obtained and closed, and stamps affixed. It is not brief enough, because, if a letter be written, convention necessitates something more than the bare communication.” The early backlash primarily centered around the loss of epistolary privacy and possible censorship. The public nature of it, which was counter to our assumption of epistolary communication, fostered people’s hesitance to embrace this new medium. When it was eventually implemented later, it was used mostly in realms of military correspondence and business communication, very rarely intended for love and family letters. Even so, The 1869 Post Office Regulation still stipulates that “the Post Department will not be responsible for the contents of the message… Nevertheless the post offices are instructed .… to exclude postcards likewise from transportation and delivery, if obscenities, libellous remarks or other punishable acts are found on the cards.” The field postcards during the Franco-Prussian War period were undecorated and designed with fixed forms that only conveyed basic information, such as name, place, and sign of life. 

In the late 19th century, postcards and the postal systems were introduced to most of Europe, the United States and Australia. The design of the postcard also went through different stages as it gradually transitioned into picture postcards of today. In the undivided-back phase, people could only write addresses on one side, and brief messages on the margin of the picture side. Some pictures were printed in a way to accommodate the messages. The contemporary postcard resumes “divided-back” format, where the torso of postcard is divided into two spaces, for correspondence and address respectively. The craze for postcards swept Europe and the United States at the turn of century, concurrent with the booming of mass tourism and international postal service. It is estimated that around 200 - 300 billion postcards were produced and sold during this time (Rogan 1). Postcard mania did not discriminate nationality, class, age or gender. The postcard as a visual medium was also conceived as a popular art. The postcard introduces a new paradigm of epistolary writing, which upholds the economy of words and democratic colloquialism. As Milne aptly puts it, “perhaps for the first time the postcard made visible the discursive practices of the general public. The texts of ‘the everyday’, the products of ‘ordinary’ writers, were now being circulated and read in a manner and on a scale that had not previously been possible (117).” Postcard senders squeeze their travel stories, homesickness and fleeting feelings of sceneries into several sentences within the limited space on the verso, expecting the addressees can at least capture some of it when they receive that stamped paper with smeared postmarks and scribbled handwritings. 

A postcard travels. It not only travels from place to place, but travels between private and public spheres as well. The postcard is originally addressed to a specific receiver as a personal correspondence, while it ends up circulating semi-publicly from the hands of publishers and postmen to receivers and collectors. It is the semi-public circulation of postcards that makes us reconfigure privacy and intimacy in the changing contexts and differing socio-technical relations. “Aesthetics and communication, ritual and symbol, technology and business, play and action, imagination and remembrance, desire and materiality, commodity as well as subjective experience (Rogan 3),” the postcard seems to integrate all these aspects into a snippet. 

Art historians tend to attach unbalanced emphasis to the pictorial side of postcards. Viewing it as “a sign of time”, scholars ascertain the history through the visual representations of places on postcards. The picture postcard acquires the documentary role of photography hence replicates its controversies. Photography eventually denies the wishful positivistic thinking of the transparency of this medium. The archive of picture postcards embodies visual coloniality, with the cards exhibiting the exotic and creating stereotypical topography. Earlier as an attempt to examine the “scientific” history, the interpretation of pictures/photographs gradually turns into revisionist revisits. While the picture side seems to provide a fascinating arena for studying visual history, this should not eclipse the other side, in which the public image is annotated with private information. In order to understand the entangled nature of postcards, I propose to read both sides in relation and examine the private-public negotiation at the nexus. This essay will adopt the Lury and Lash’s method of “following the object”, and tracing the cultural biographies of postcards to further investigate the multi-modalities and discursive practices it engenders. 

Imaginative mobilities: “wish you were here” 

Inextricably tied with tourism, picture postcards have always been a medium for travelers. At the beginning of the 20th century, urban tourism rose in popularity in the United States. City tours and factory tours became a trend among the leisure class. The developments of transportation networks, the travel industry and lodging facilities later lowered the cost of travel and promoted travel as a lifestyle for people of a wider range of classes. Industrial towns and factories embraced tourism as a means of advertising and published picture postcards for the branding effect. Marketed as souvenir cards, picture postcards were ubiquitous in tourist attractions. Writing postcards was equivalent to the present day ritual of taking pictures and the postcard a possible precursor to Instagram post. Travel accounts of the early 20th century demonstrate the fad of writing postcards among travelers: 

Figure 1. Easton's Point, Newport, Rhode Island, circa 1901-1907. Postmark date: May 18, 1907. From National Trust Library Historic Postcards Collection. 

“When I entered the hall with all the interesting Nordic wooden carvings, I found the room filled with people, who without exception sat writing. And what did they write? Picture postcards!! Oh, scourge of all scourges in this century. Like a pest you have fallen over us, and you pursue us into the most desolate valley. No one is safe from you. You are capable of spoiling the most beautiful voyage, the most picturesque landscape, the most serene fjord, the highest lookout point. . . . And what does the tourist do, when your call wakes him up from his silent contemplation of nature? . . . He digs deep into his pocket, brings out his purse and buys, more or less grudgingly, 2, 4, 6, 10, or 20 postcards, according to the number of friends and family. Instead of enjoying the marvelous view of the landscape . . . the tourist sits down and with an unusable pencil scribbles some unreadable lines (Laverrenz 60-61).” 

Rather than “silently contemplating the nature”, travelers turned their eyes away from the “marvelous view” and buried their heads in writing the postcards, whose pictures, though highly idealized, became the tangible substitutes for the real views hence the authentication of travel. The former benefits the receiver, while the latter matters more to the sender. Postcards create the need to share the views during travel and, probably in a remote sense, mitigates the solitude of travel. Like other forms of entertainment, tourism celebrates togetherness. Despite the fact that the materiality of postcards often authenticate travel, the overabundance (instead of flourishing) of postcards can jeopardize that authenticity. Scholars like Cure brought awareness to this issue, arguing that “…despite the inherent role of media in performing travel, over-mediation threatened to obscure the immediate experience (689).” Invented as a cheaper substitute (than photography), pictures on the postcards soon, took over the landscape itself. A Britain cruise tourist concluded that “tourists no longer needed to remember the views and places visited—it was sufficient to bring home the postcards (Rogan 10; Klinghammer 1903).” Compared to the physical evidence, the real experience of travel appears fleeting thus tenuous. Similar stories are happening in the era of social media. Our travels are increasingly mediated by Instagram posts and organized by the Instagrammable spots. The postcard cultivates the virtual travel culture, which by extension foresees the simulacrum and art reproductions. It also offers a productive site for “contesting valorizations of authenticity and imitation” and analyzing the duality of “immediacy” versus “hypermediacy” in Bolter and Grusin’s terms (Cure 1050). 

Further investigations into the authenticity in relation to postcards would require a close scrutiny of its modalities. When Walter Benjamin lamented on the loss of aura in his monograph, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he argues that the reproduction of art work dissolves the “aura” of original work in removing its distance from viewers. In the case of postcards, the “distance” is maintained through the travel of postcards and the lengthy time it would take. It also preserves the “aura”, or the sense of being here/there and now/then, via the personalized textual messages attached to the images. 

Based on my research on postcards from the National Trust Library Historic Postcards Collection (circa 1900-1920), most of the texts are about their travel stories with regard to the place, lodging and weather. They also include messages like “thinking of you”, “wonder what you are doing”, “will be home soon” and the like. For instance, this postcard from Rhode Island in 1916 reads: “Dear Mal, 

Figure 2. Taku Glacier, Alaska, circa 1907-1914. Postmark date: July 17, 1919. From National Trust Library Historic Postcards Collection 

We arrived hear [sic] tonight but I couldn't get ashore until half past seven and I didn't moor [sic] as you would be at home but will be in again soon. 

From H [?] Northport, yacht Robin Maine.” 

This Mr/Ms H shared his travel anecdote and communicated a sign of his safety in roughly two sentences, plus, he also expressed the expectation of “being again soon”. Some postcards are even more concise. A postcard from Santa Catalina Island in 1906 reads: “This is where I spent Labor Day. Elmer.” The pithiness makes it hard to read much more into it. There is little for readers to infer from. Östman contends that “postcards have a particular rhetorical structure.” Besides the recurring elements like name, address and greeting, the rhetorical elements and the order of them vary from culture to culture. The elements may include “reference to the picture, weather and circumstances, foreign language, reference to the workplace, greeting and leave-taking (431).” A closer look into the texts on postcards reveals more semiotic and linguistic patterns. The texts on postcards are often of conversational language and exhibit dialogism markers, such as questions, responses, pragmatic particles and emotional markers (433). Figure 1 is a fine-print postcard with blue ocean waves picture. Rob was sharing this nice surf view with Agnes when visiting Rhode Island. The language is succinct, simple, even somewhat poetic. His greeting conveyed a sense of lightheartedness and intimacy, which naturally evoked speculations on his relationship with Agnes -- are they lovers? What does he mean by “Your moonlight view was a ‘beaut’”? This kind of inside joke is very typical of postcard writing. The messages are often coded in a language between the senders and the receivers, which effectively hinders the voyeuristic reading from the unintended readers like postmen or family members who happen to pick up the postcards. It could be also considered as a linguistic strategy to counter the loss of privacy, or to deal with the unavoidable semi-publicness of postcard. What makes sense to the receiver may not make sense to another person at all. This phenomenon echoes the “context collapse” on contemporary social media - the interpretations of information are highly hinged on the different social contexts people are making sense of under. “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning (McLuhan and Lapham 6).” The context that confines the meaning-making indeed carries the performances of social identities. On the contrary, the postcard is inherently fragmentary and anti-context. 

Dear Agnes: Have you any nice surf views. I should like very much to have some. Your moonlight view was a "beaut” Rob. my boat 

“This is the most wonderful sight. The picture gives one no idea of the size of the glacier. It is the most lovely blue. The crevasses are a deep blue and shades out to a very light blue. The boat ran very close to it and we were able to get some wonderful views. It was quite interesting. Could hear it cracking and saw some pieces fall off. Simply cannot write about all the lovely things, will tell you about it later.” 

In Figure 2, the sender wrote what they saw in eidetic details, for instance, “deep blue and shades out to a very light blue”; his words are brimming with excitement and sublime feelings towards nature, but simultaneously emphasizing the disparity between the represented view and the real view: “the picture gives one no idea of the size and the actual color of the glacier.” They went on to add sonic information that the image simply cannot include, i.e. the cracking sounds of ice. Lastly, the sender, again, questioned the expressive capacity of the postcard and concluded with “will tell you about it later.” This postcard perfectly demonstrates the trope of “wish you were here” that encourages the receiver to imagine a shared presence through reading the visual-textual messages it contains. However, it also indicates that the shared presence should only be imagined in a mediated fashion. The way to bridge the gap between the image and the glacier, as the sender stated, is physically being together and “tell you all about it.” A postcard like this thus retains the aura and romanticizes the distance between them. For the receiver, it kindles the hope for their next meeting and makes the time before it bittersweet. According to Milne, the “absence” here is creative; “it opens a discursive space in which desires and subjectivities that might not otherwise be articulated can be explored. (5)” 

Andriotis and Mavric examined the postcard under the Urry’s “the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP in short)”, namely “corporeal, imaginative, communicative, virtual and the mobility of objects, and systems supporting them, which in turn produce and sustain social lives.” In light of the communicative and visual properties, they view postcards as “representing virtual mobility of the time (19).” I argue that the postcard produces “imaginative mobilities” for the viewers. According to NMP, “imaginative mobility is triggered by images (and texts) circulating through print and visual media.” Through reading the postcards, the addressees not only imagine a shared presence, but go on imaginative travels to afar places. For many of them, the postcard is likely the only way to encounter faraway places. The aura, embodied in the distance between senders and receivers, between real views and represented views, enhances the imaginative mobilities provided for virtual travelers. What is more important are the personal touches to the imaginative mobilities embedded in the postcard messages. The strange places are brought by familiar people. The personal/impersonal duality keeps paralleling the private/public binary among the discussions of postcards. 

MORE TO COME

Trained as a media scholar and a journalist, Sui Wang’s work explore the media history of modern China and Japan with focuses on visual culture and sonic media. She is a second-year master student in East Asian studies at University of Southern California. Currently, she is working on her master thesis, which investigates how the listenership of overseas Chinese radio stations makes their diasporic identities. In her leisure time, she loves rewatching Chris Marker and writing short stories in Amazon reviews. You can read more of her other work at www.suiwang.org

Bridging Media Psychology and History: An Interview with Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (Part Three)

You distinguish here between broadcast and cable television. Are they distinctive media? How do their effects differ? 

 Similar to magnetic tape, we often don't think about network and cable as different, but this evolution of the technology was essential to our relationship with television content. When the difference between network and cable television is discussed in media studies, it is largely about differences in industry and policy – targeting different groups, bypassing fin-syn laws, pay content, and so on – but they are absolutely different technologies. When I refer to network television, we are talking about audiovisual content delivered through radio waves. Alternatively, cable television is a hardwired cable into your home, eliminating the problems of radio waves, including the need for an antenna, the potential for signal disruption because of weather or other obstructions. So suddenly we had guaranteedaudiovisual content. The increased spectrum also allowed service providers greater control to limit access to paying customers, as well as more channels for targeted programming. These changes are made possible by sending messages over a literal wired cable. 

 To tie back to magnetic tape, I don't think that magnetic tape receives the same attention as other technologies because magnetic tape didn't necessarily beget its own content and its own unique messaging; instead, it was a new way for users to engage with pre-existing messages. There is some work on direct-to-video content and exercise tapes because that is the new content that magnetic tape made possible, but this lack of attention demonstrates our obsession with content over the technology. In the case of over-the-air broadcast – what I call network television for lack of a better term – we think of cable as simply a new way to access media content with which we were already familiar, so we don’t think of it as a new technology. If the technology does not manifest new content, even if it gives us an opportunity to engage differently with old content or pre-existing content, then it doesn't get the same level of attention.

 By setting the boundaries of your account within the 20th century, you largely dodge the challenges of writing about social media, focusing your account of digital technology around computer games and Dialup ISP.  How would Twitter or Facebook fit within the framework you offer here?

 The choice to end the book before our current manifestation of social media serves several purposes. Most importantly it focuses the book on technologies to which no longer pay research attention. We stopped researching the psychological effects of radio when television came along, and research into the effects of television became passe with the rise of video games and social media. Considering this, one of my major arguments is that our relationships with 20th century media inform our relationships with 21st century media, including social media. So instead of talking about social media like Facebook and Twitter as its own chapter, I talk about our relationship with these platforms as the outcome of our relationships with prior platforms. The things that we attribute to the affordances of social media – the expectation of finding something that is personally relevant regardless of your personal preferences, the expectation of one’s voice being heard, the ability to connect with communities independent of space and time – I argue were somewhat available with earlier technology and therefore those uses were seeded before social media came along. 

 However, if we think about social media as its own unique technology, not as simply the accelerated opportunity to satisfy psychosocial needs that were triggered by earlier media, the specific affordances of social media must be clear. Three communication opportunities that are very unique to social media are…

1.    Mass distribution of user-generated content:In my opinion, this is the ultimate affordance of social media. Whereas other media like magnetic tape and eventually CDs allowed people to create content and distribute it, this content had to be copied and distributed through real space, limiting its reach. With social media, anyone can create anything, post it, and make it widely available. This affordance triggered a rise in influencer culture, where people can become popular overnight for just being themselves. A student once said that the new dream is to have your content “blow up;” the right person sees it, shares it, and suddenly you can make a living doing you. 

2.    Talking back to power and the invisible gatekeeper: Social media as a technology allows anyone to post anything on content by anyone else – barring changes in settings obviously. By eliminating the gatekeeper, we see how users will push back on institutions and individuals in power. I adore reading the replies on posts from people like Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, or Pope Francis just to see how random people use this space to stan, shade, and troll. It feels like every letter to the editor is published, but we also know that the algorithm is the new gatekeeper, and we are more likely to see the comments that the platform thinks will keep us engaged.  

3.    Infinite scrolling:In the end, infinite scrolling isn’t even an inherent part of social media, but it is a seemingly inseparable feature. What social media have offered from a technological perspective is literally endless content. TV shows and movies eventually run credits. Songs end. Mario saves the Princess. Content via dialup ISPs was close to infinite, but they weren’t designed to push you into more content, barring web rings. But Facebook and Twitter are designed to never end, to create a space where the next satisfying piece of content is just on the next page. This is the ultimate manifestation of the negative promise of channel surfing. But now, we don’t even have to change the channel, we just keep scrolling and the next channel is pushed to us.

 I started a private Instagram page for my son where I share one picture of him a day with friends and family. The experience of starting a new profile has been enlightening; I do not consider what I should and should not post with respect to my preexisting online persona, and instead simply share joyous pictures of a toddler. In addition, because he only follows about 100 people, we regularly get to the end of the feed. Instagram notifies you when you have gotten to the end of your new posts and proceeds to provide suggested posts, which is usually animal posts and zoo profiles in his case, so that’s cool. 

 As we think about what we expect from social media, its potential, promise, and practice. The potential is to engage with people around the world, the promise has been one of increased human connections, but the practice has been of never turning it off and literally feeding you posts that continue to draw you in. So, to come to the end of the internet, so to speak, is an epiphany. It shows you what the limits of the technology are when you're actively told that you shouldn't see the limits as well.

You describe yourself as a “fierce advocate for media literacy.” How are you defining “media literacy” here? As a mother, what kinds of educational experiences do you hope your children will receive to help guide their relationship to media?

When I talk about media literacy, in this case, as it relates to technology, is literally to look at the process by which messages get to us. 

 In 2017 for NAMLE’s Media Literacy Week, I conducted a series of interviewswith my colleagues at Newhouse to ask them how they define media literacy and how that operates in their classroom. And then created a series of images. I still use my own quote from that series for my definition of media literacy. Media literacy is the ability to see things that you are actively encouraged not to see.

This is the driving force of my teaching philosophy, to help students see what they're not supposed to see. And with respect to communication technologies, we are not supposed to see the medium itself. With any good media content, the medium should fall away – we get lost in books, we forget that we are in the theater, we return to memories through music – in short, the suspension of disbelief is to be able to ignore the medium and focus on the message. This is the sense of presence. 

 From a technological perspective, media industry does not make money by encouraging people to think deeply about the technology; money comes from making the technology invisible. When we talk about media literacy as it relates to technology, we're talking about being able to see howwe engage with something, and distinguish the potential of the technology (i.e., what canthe technology do) from the promises (i.e., how are we encouraged to use the technology by designers and stakeholders) and the practice (i.e., how do we actually come to use the technology). It is essential to understand that how we use a technology does not depend only on the technology’s capabilities; that there are a lot of people with a lot of interests – economic and social – in how technology is used and seeing this distinction is a form of media literacy. 

 When we talk about media literacy, we often talk about media industry and content framing. I think we really need to ask ourselves about the technology and this is where this whole book emerged from as it pertains to the class that I was teaching, both at USC and at Syracuse, the psychology of interactive media, where I ask students to think differently about the technology that they're accustomed to. We start with the printed word. Why do you read? How do you read? What is your relationship with the written word? What is your relationship with a book? How is an audiobook different from the tangible book? Why do you read magazines? Newspapers? Even though these are the same format – printed words and images – they are different technologies, and we expect different things and engage with them differently. But why? And to what effect?

 I think that this is particularly relevant to another question you asked: Over the past year, few of us have had a chance to watch theatrical films in public exhibition. This allows us to think through what is gained or lost from our encounters with the big screen. Did we learn anything important about cinema as a medium as a consequence of this social experiment?

 We know why we go to the movies – it is literally promised to us every year during awards season through the Oscars host opening monologue or some other industry self-aggrandizing montage. But the experience of theatrical filmis different from that of simply watching feature-length films (i.e., a story that begins and ends in 90-240m). I talk about theatrical film as a unique medium because we willingly give over our consciousness to the filmmaker…

 The venue distinguishes theatrical film from other audiovisual media, because the audience’s attention, experiences, and subsequently emotions are controlled by the medium. Users can certainly engage with moving pictures on television, backyard projections, and cell phones, but these venues do not control the total corporeal experience, and differences in display (e.g., screen size, audio quality) results in different experiences. Theatrical venues, including ornate palace-styled theaters and multiplexes, amplify the sensory experience of film by situating the user in a darkened theater that insulates them from outside noise and other distractions, resulting in consistent experiences across users regardless of time, geographical location, or user differences. (p. 22)

Now that we are watching film in our homes on our televisions, laptops, and even mobile devices, there is no consistency of corporeal experience. The film is consistent, but the venue is infinitely different between users. Films at home are more like books – the content is the same, albeit richer due to audio and visual information, but the experience of the film differs based on the user’s setup. Unfortunately, with a toddler, I haven’t had the chance to watch many movies even in quarantine, so I haven’t been able to really test this theory by talking to others about films that are being released on streaming platforms[1]. But I would assume that the interpretation of the film and one’s overall assessment of its quality may come from a combination of the film itself, the emotions that the user brings to the film, and the format in which the user watches it, the latter of which has generally not been a significant consideration pre-COVID. I hope the Academy offers a new award: Best Small Screen Film… 

As for how my child changes how I think about all of these things. It is unbelievably fascinating to know all of these things in theory, to have done this research for decades, to have written this book, and then to watch him live and experience the things. Sometimes its research in action, sometimes it’s something that has never crossed my mind. For example, he generally does not like video. Admittedly, we kept him away from screens for the first 2 years as per the recommendations of the American Psychological Association, but now he is disinterested in non-interactive video. He plays Khan Academy Kids and other educational video games, but he really doesn’t like anything that he can’t control. Interestingly, he loves books and magazines because he can control the progression of the story and he can move backward and forward at his discretion, which is largely counter to what I would have suspected given that those formats are less rich, less immersive, but he doesn’t seem interested in being immersed, especially if he is not in control. 

 We've been trying to introduce videos into his media diet, but it’s tough and it's really interesting to watch like my other friends with similar aged babies take to videos so easily because they've been watching for so long. Or they have older siblings who watch, and you can't really keep away your younger one when the older sibling is watching content. It’s just really remarkable to see how he's evolving with different media differently. He has a wonderful control over Alexa, getting the speaker to play his favorite songs on repeat. He even improved his pronunciation to better get what he wants. 

 I am technically an expert on media and psychology, and very knowledgeable about trends in development with respect to both of these disciplines, but every child is different, and I appreciate more every day how every one of us is an outlier. And I think that's probably where I would leave this. 

 The goal of a media psychography is to think about one's own biography through the media technologies, through the communication environment in which we have been immersed. So, to understand our own psychology, it is essential for each of us to understand the way in which we communicate be that language or culture or technology. I would hope that to foster media literacy in all of my readers, my students, your readers, your students, is to ask them to think differently about the communication environmentin which they live. 

[1]Although I have big plans to watch The Matrix 4and Bill and Ted 3later this semester for supplemental episodes of my podcast on Keanu Reeves with Bob Thompson. Shameless Pitch: criticalandcurious.com/s2

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA degree from the School of Cinematic Arts and a PhD in Social Psychology from University of Southern California. Charisse's work focuses on how media affects the way we think about others and our perceptions of ourselves. At Newhouse, she teaches courses on media theory, media psychology, and diversity. In her most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche, she investigates changes to the communication environment over the past 150 years and how these rapid yet pervasive shifts have affected our psychology. A committed teacher, L’Pree has spent the past 20 years encouraging others to think differently about their relationship with all forms of media and across disciplines. You can read more of her work at charisselpree.me or follow her @charisselpree.

Bridging Media Psychology and History: An Interview with Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (Part Two)

How did Americans’ relationship to mass media first take shape? What changed from the previous ways people received and processed information?

This is a really interesting question and I'm not certain that I have the answer, even though the book is entitled 20th Century Media and the American Psyche. I begin my analyses by unpacking how communication technologies affect the way humans think about themselves and others, and throughout my analysis I acknowledge that I’m writing from an American perspective: I focus on the technologies that were popular in the United States, acknowledge that the policies and practices of mass media technology in the United States are different from other countries, and draw on the individualism that is valorized in American culture – although it is not explicitly mentioned (shame on me!). 

In general, I think that the human relationship to mass media is as old as human communication itself. We generally don’t communicate to mass audiences with drum signals (i.e., broadcast without storage) anymore, but we feel something when we see them deployed in a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), just like we feel a relationship to hieroglyphs because we are aware of the source’s intention to communicate. So, I think that our relationship with mass media, American or otherwise, comes from the fundamental psychosocial need to connect with others. Therefore, the American relationship with mass media existed long before this thing we call America existed, including pre-Columbian North America and post-colonist United States.

 However, I think that Jared Diamond offers an interesting perspective on the history of the American relationship with communication technologies – and subsequently mass media – in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). The written communications of the European colonists allowed for more detailed and effective strategies across space and time, putting Indigenous Americans at a marked disadvantage. Although not unique to the United States, the use of communications as a soft weapon continued long after the colonies were established: for the better part of mediated human history, only a handful of people have had access to creating and distributing messages, often white (acknowledging the evolution of whiteness as afforded to different ethnic groups over time), male, and wealthy; enslaved Africans and African Americans were not allowed to read, and therefore not given the opportunity to participate in many components of this thing we call America; and every few years, some elected official proposes legislation to make English the official language of the United States, effectively eliminating any requirement to translate documents and systematically disadvantaging non-English speakers. 

Considering this history – and I'm theorizing in real time here – I think that the American relationship with mass media took shape at colonization and has been one wherein the masses have been hustling for media access, including the ability to create, distribute, consume, and ultimately control mass messages. The American Dream, or getting one’s own piece of the pie, includes mediated representation, which has been systematically withheld from most people for centuries. When applied to the claims that I make in the book, this perspective fleshes the overall theory that the evolving American relationship with mass media replicates interpersonal relationships: coming from a default of solitude (i.e., non-representation and singlehood) we are seeking emotional satisfaction via media and IRL. 

I don’t know if that answers your question, but that was a fun detour. Thank you!! 

Your introduction suggests that the “relational” approach you propose here grows out of your own experiences growing up in a highly mediated culture. What kinds of epiphanies did you have as you navigated the place of media in your life?

I have so much to say on this one, but just in the interest of connecting this question to the last question, here is a paragraph from the conclusion that I think also serves as a nice bridge regarding relational experiences vs. technological determinism. 

Much like interpersonal relationships, each past relationship informs (or should inform) what we want and need from future relationships. This is not the same as technological determinism; the technology has not determined our culture or our psyche. Rather, our psyches have determined the practices of technology, which then became normalized into our culture. We share selfies online for the same reasons our ancestors made cave paintings—to affirm our existence. We also reflexively check our social media for the same reason we feel a sense of awe when they looked at these cave paintings—connecting with humans is inherently and viscerally satisfying. (p. 180)

Back to your question and again, thank you so much for asking it because I feel like the book was an exercise in unpacking epiphanies and I hope that those reading the book also have the joy of similar epiphanies as they begin to think about their media uses differently. 

The whole book begins with probably the most impactful epiphany that has since led me down this path of scholarship in media psychology…

In 2000, I had an epiphany while watching late-night infomercials: With enough money, anyone can reach into your home at any hour and convince you to buy or believe something that you had never considered before. In that moment, through this revelation, my life was forever changed. (p. 1)

 This intersectional moment of media technology, content, and industry and how these three branches of media come together to impact how I think and what I do was mind boggling to me at the time. 

 Media technologies are so pervasive, it's like being a fish in water. And we all have those moments when we suddenly realize, “Oh my goodness! I'm in water!” Most importantly, it was the recognition that through the technology, I invited these messages into my home. I willingly and eagerly sat in front of this screen engage with the messages for hours on end, without recognizing that media technology was a choice. People buy televisions as a default, again detaching themselves from their own agency. That’s amazing.

In the end, I think that we generally fail to see how we are in a relationship with the media technology and that in itself is an epiphany. Habitual media use, taking pictures to make memories, the default expectation that our media will be able to deliver what we want when we want. Each of these behaviors parallels the interactions with have with partners, and that in itself was an epiphany. That my cameras – from point-and-shootsto my iPhone – have made more memories than some people in my life; that I depend on film, music, radio, and television to make me feel better when I’m sad, to make me laugh, to make me see the world differently more so than some of my professors or partners. This in itself is an epiphany. 

Everybody has a favorite media. Everyone has said at some point or another… “I love X…” I love television. I love video games. I love music. I love movies. I love the internet. We say this but we do not closely analyze whywe love these technologies. What do they allow us to do? And I think that opportunity for a close investigation of one's own relationship with media technologies invites epiphanies. 

One of the more surprising media included in the book is magnetic tape, which has rarely been discussed in works on mass media. Why did you decide to include it here? Why is it important to consider as you map the relationship between 20th century media and the American psyche?

I think magnetic tape is beyond important. And frankly, the fact that it has not been included in our common media history discourse is a major gap in the evolution of our relationship with media. There is work on magnetic tape and how it affords like avant-garde content, music videos, journalism, hip hop via pause tape production, and all of those things. But I haven't seen a real psychological analysis of our ability to control the ether. And as we talk about on-demand media today, magnetic tape[1]is our first instance of on-demand media as we know it. I can capture what I want when I want, especially from content that originally demanded synchronized behaviors as described in the second section related to radio and television. 

Magnetic tape allowed us to control and own broadcast content, to manipulate the ether. I remember the feeling of unchecked power that came from being able to set my VCR, or even just hit record when something was happening, to make it mine instantly. It offered a sense of agency that we have now come to take for granted in a digital space. But the opportunity to go to the video rental store and pick whatever movie you wanted, or record your favorite show if you weren't going to be home, or edit a mix tape like a radio producer to share with your friends. All of these opportunities have become normalized with on-demand media, but this behavior and expectation was launched with magnetic tape. 

And magnetic tape was so durable. Unlike records, or CDs and DVDs, or even digital files that can be deleted in an instant, VHS tapes and cassette seemed indestructible – as long as you didn’t leave them in a closed car in the summer – you could throw them around your car, in a box if you were moving, or just straight into your backpack without the proper case. I love this image from Jason Kohlbrenner featured in the chapter on magnetic tape. 

FIGURE 7.1 Tapes Haiku (2009)

Cassette Tapes are widely assumed to be one of the lowest quality storage devices of the 20th century, but they offered durability and portability, something that vinyl, CDs, and even MP3s couldn’t match. Literal piles of tapes, both in cases and naked, were common and inevitably held a treasure trove of content. (p. 130) 

I also think that the durability of magnetic tape gave us a false sense of security with respect to ownership in the digital environment. We like to think we own things, especially if we have paid for them, but the minute it has been uploaded to the cloud, it is made available to be deleted by some larger corporation. I recall having the Michael Jackson 20th Anniversary Edition of Bad that I uploaded to my iTunes. I then lost the CD. iTunes then decided that my file was not a legitimate copy and deleted it. Now I don’t have that album anymore. When you upload something to YouTube and YouTube decides that you don’t have the rights to it, your video can be deleted, and the thing that you thought you owned is gone, demonstrating that we don’t really have ownership over our media content, but since the ear of magnetic tape, we feel like we do…

 I think that records are probably the first instance of on-demand media. I could pull out a song and listen to it on a whim and play it as often as I liked. I could even start and stop wherever I liked by simply inspecting the grooves.

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA degree from the School of Cinematic Arts and a PhD in Social Psychology from University of Southern California. Charisse's work focuses on how media affects the way we think about others and our perceptions of ourselves. At Newhouse, she teaches courses on media theory, media psychology, and diversity. In her most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche, she investigates changes to the communication environment over the past 150 years and how these rapid yet pervasive shifts have affected our psychology. A committed teacher, L’Pree has spent the past 20 years encouraging others to think differently about their relationship with all forms of media and across disciplines. You can read more of her work at charisselpree.me or follow her @charisselpree.

Bridging Media Psychology and History: An Interview with Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay (Part One)

This week, I am showcasing a new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love, a magisterial work by a first-time author, Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay, which explores the intersection between American media history and media psychology.

Charisse has been talking about writing such book going back to when I knew her as an undergraduate student living in Senior Haus, the MIT dorm where my wide and I were housemasters for thirteen years. (The stories I could tell!) I was lucky to be able to connect with her again when I came to USC and served on her dissertation committee. And I was one of the people who got to read this book in manuscript form and give it my public endorsement:

“20th Century Media and the American Psyche is an ideal textbook for educators who want to help their students engage with the impact of more than a century of changing media on the ways we think, remember the past, interact with others, and construct our identities. The perspectives here are both productive and generative, pushing aside old assumptions and pushing us to ask new questions. And the writing is engaging, personal, and witty, all of the things most textbooks are not. The interdisciplinary fusion of media psychology and media history is especially welcomed as a way to get students thinking critically about what has changed and what has remained as a consequence of earlier media ‘revolutions.’"

I am proud as Hell for her and what she has accomplished with this ambitious project.

Across this interview, I ask her about some of the core principles which organize this project, allow her to address the issue of technological determinism, and explore her long-standing commitment to media literacy education.

You organized your book around media that enable “sharing experiences,” “synchronizing experiences,” and “affecting experiences.” Explain this distinction.

I cluster the technologies of the long 20th century (i.e., about 1860-2000) according to the capabilities that they afforded that were not available with earlier media in order to assess how the communication environment changed during this time. 

Prior to the 20th century, the primary means of exchanging messages across space and time was the written word. The written word is powerful and can deeply impact mass audiences but the mass audience being able to experience consistent and realistic (moving) images and sound – thereby sharing detailed sensory experiences – is a massive shift, an unprecedented one compared to the centuries of human communication that came before it. This fosters a sense of intimacy, or feelings of closeness between individuals in a way that was unavailable prior to the advent of photographic film and recorded sound

Similarly, being able to share visceral sensory experiences at the same time with the advent of radio and television – that is synchronizing experiences – is a blink in human communication history (i.e., widely available for less than 100 years) and yet it has become the default for mass communication experiences since. This regularity, or the quality of being stable and predictable through habitual interaction, allowed us to develop shared schedules as a nation and engage in synchronized activities across space that had previously only been salient to those in the same community, resulting in a national sense of community that is fostered through shared behaviors in shared time, not just shared messages or content.

 Finally, the opportunity to affect or manipulate mass media messages was not widely available prior magnetic tape, video gaming, and dialup service provider, but now we regularly ask ourselves, could we survive without the internet? The question seems absurd when you consider that human society survived without real time active information access for literally millennia. Reciprocity—as an aspect of any successful relationship—means that both parties acknowledge and engage with each other. Reciprocal media are communication technologies that reciprocate, or respond to, the actions of users with corresponding actions (vs. interactive media).  In 25 years, the internet has become a psychological necessity on par with food, water, and shelter. That’s beyond amazing and worthy of consideration. 

 The purpose of the book to address how our communication environment has changed with the rapid evolution of 20th century media and how this change in the communication environment has subsequently affected our expectations of ourselves, others, and future media. Each of these clusters represents a massive shift in how we communicate, affording things that were not possible previously. By clustering them, my hope is for readers to see how rapidly our communication environment has changed and even more shockingly, how we take these affordances for granted even though they have happened in less than a century. 

Your book brings together two approaches -- one psychological, the other historical. What do you see as the relationship between the two? 

I regularly identify as an interdisciplinary scholar because the term indicates that my work exists at the intersection of two different disciplines, but to be honest, I have never felt that I was bridging disciplines, I was just trying to use the best tools available to answer the questions that I was interested in. However, academia is so siloed that the idea that connecting theories across disciplines is an anomaly instead of resourceful.

Silos are often false constructions that allow us to operate and label ourselves within a given space, but also prevent us from seeing how our work connects. In this case, over time, I think psychology is deeply rooted in history, even though psychologists like to think of themselves as independent of time, that these are constructs that humans will have exhibited arguably forever. But the psychological arguments are missing the question: how does the communication environment change? 

For example, many psychological studies rely on manipulating text; changing a name, changing the words use in framing an argument, changing what information is presented to the subject at different points in the text. However, this research never addresses how these psychological processes operated before the written word and widespread literacy. 

 That’s what's so essential to the historiography of psychology; we need to understand that our psychology is dependent on the world in which we were raised, and our world has evolved more rapidly over the past 150 years than say the 150 years before that (1700-1850) or as is commonly referred to in our discipline, since the advent of the printing press in the west in the 15th century (China had moveable type printing 400 years prior). 

 Much of this is rooted in my experiences moving between cultures as a child. I spent summers in Guyana, moving annually between the suburbs of New York City to a farm in what was commonly referred to as the third world… Clearly that’s a problematic term, but so is developing, or banana republic, or any of the other terms that we use to refer formerly colonized countries that have spent years trying to attain some sense of agency and self-determination on the other side of colonization. 

 I talk about the experience of having cable and video games with my grandfather in Guyana and not having those experiences in my American home, but at the same time, I also experienced what it meant to have rolling blackouts, no air condition, no indoor plumbing, and shoddy television when I stayed with other family and friends. This marked disparity in technology impacted how I think about and how I engage with the world. It affected my psychology. But the trends in psychology, specifically that much of the fundamental research is conducted on WEIRD participants (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) is a painful blind spot that many psychologists are only beginning to address.

 As a post doc, I worked under Cheryl Grills, who focuses on Afro centric psychological phenomena. She spends a big chunk of the year on the continent, researching the cognitive processes of traditional African healing using psychological methodologies and approaches, but here in the west, we talk about that body of work using terms like African philosophy, spirituality, religion. We don’t think about it as a form of psychology and we don’t think psychology as part of their unique communication environment. 

 So back to your question about what the connection between history and psychology is. History is the story we tell ourselves about the past. But when we start to tell that story of the past, we see how we as humans have evolved over time. And by failing to correlate how we, our culture, our society, and again, our communication environment has evolved over time, then we fail to see how our psychology would arguably evolve over time as well. 

 As you are describing widespread consequences of introducing new media into the culture, how do you avoid the problem of technological determinism?

 Thank you for asking this question because this is a common assumption of my work. Long story short, I'm basically arguing the exact opposite of technological determinism. Technological determinism is the idea that technology determines society and is one of the first arguments that is debunked in the study of media; instead, I’m arguing that psychology determines technology use and our habitual use then in turn affects our psychology. We need to have an interdependent understanding of media because we have an interdependent relationship with the communication environment. Our psychology determines the communication environment and in turn the communication environment determines our psychology.

FIGURE 0.4 Psychology and the Communication Environment

How we communicate affects our psychology, and our psychology affects how we communicate. Communication technologies, including everything from language and music to smoke signals and radio, enable novel strategies for communication. As these technologies become normal, so do their associated strategies, thus impacting culture, society, and individual expectations for communicating. These expectations then impact the development and adoption of new technologies. (p. 9)

The phenomenon of early memories is particularly relevant here. The research in development psych reveals that infants actually form memories earlier than we are able to vocalize them. In the 1960s, Rovee-Collier revealed that 2-3 month-old infants “remembered” which leg would activate a mobile hanging over their crib. 

You can experience this when you have a visceral reaction to a smell, but you cannot recall where or when you first experienced it. Instead, psychologists argue that being able to communicate and encoding the memory into language is what allows us to then recall it later in life, and language largely doesn’t emerge until around 12 months. Coming back to your last question, the ability to communicate and how we communicate is essential to our psychology. Communication technologies have drastically expanded our opportunities for communication; therefore, they have drastically expanded our psychological abilities.

 Technology is affording new changes in the communication environment which then allow us to evolve. The criticism of technological determinism, or the idea that technology determines society, often ignores this major third variable: that technology changes the communication environment. We hear – and have heard for the past 25 years – that the internet and social media are going to change the world. And they have. But these technologies are social catalysts. Drawing from the definition in chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a [social] reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change; the internet and social media have afforded a communication environment that allows social changes to occur at a faster rate, much like the printing press, the written word, smoke signals, and even language itself.

 I will also take this opportunity to argue that the rhetorical use of the technological determinism is a shorthand critique that is used in spaces where technology develops quickly. I have not heard the term technological determinism applied to the advent of the written language or the printing press. However, we can all argue that the advent of the written language dramatically changed our society. 

I also think that our knee-jerk response to any whiff of technological determinism is an outcome of the popular discourse regarding media – we constantly hear arguments about the effects of media on society; the minute you tell someone what you do, their first question is “What do you think is the effect of MTV, rap music, video games, Facebook, [insert newest media here]?” Because the argument is so lazy and pervasive, we – as media scholars – have to push back on it every single time. I had a very unpleasant interaction at a history conference in 2017 when I was presenting some of my arguments on cable television and magnetic tape to discuss the environment of the 1990s. The respondent for my panel said, “I guess psychologists don’t have a problem with technological determinism,” then refused to allow me to respond. It was so sarcastic, dismissive, and righteous that it really set me down the path of having to defend my work against this particular criticism. 

I think that we need to address the connections between technology and society. And it is clearly not as simple as technology-determines-society. But technology changes the environment which we live. And that changes our society and our psychology.

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA degree from the School of Cinematic Arts and a PhD in Social Psychology from University of Southern California. Charisse's work focuses on how media affects the way we think about others and our perceptions of ourselves. At Newhouse, she teaches courses on media theory, media psychology, and diversity. In her most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche, she investigates changes to the communication environment over the past 150 years and how these rapid yet pervasive shifts have affected our psychology. A committed teacher, L’Pree has spent the past 20 years encouraging others to think differently about their relationship with all forms of media and across disciplines. You can read more of her work at charisselpree.me or follow her @charisselpree.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part Four)

In this final installment of our series, Henry Jenkins and Tessa Jolls offer some final reflections on Confronting the Challenge of a Participatory Culturein the current context.

 Tessa Jolls: How did you react when you re-read the report?

Henry Jenkins: There are certain things I wrote that when I reread I don't remember hardly anything. This whitepaper, I reread and remembered almost every word of it. There were things that surprised me, but the conversations of that era were still so vivid in my memory. I can remember the thinking that went behind this paragraph and that paragraph, as we went to that writing process. 

Tessa Jolls: Where do you see things going in terms of participatory culture? Certainly, we're at a moment right now, and you had mentioned earlier that some of the things that you had predicted, are all happening right now. It's interesting that it's taken that long to catch up, but nevertheless, it's happening. How do you see that? How do you see the moment today and where it’s going to?

Henry Jenkins: In the wake of COVID-19, we’ve seen the widespread embrace of networked technologies and particularly Zoom in response to the social isolation we're all feeling. Ironically, we were attacked as advocates of digital media for a long time because digital media was isolating us from going out into the world and engaging with the people around us.  Now, we're trapped in our apartments, have no way of going out or engaging with the world, we're isolated from the people around us. I haven't seen the guy in the apartment next to mine since this thing began but we're communicating via Zoom and email on an ongoing basis. Schools have had to revert overnight to online teaching. I'm teaching online exclusively right now. We're hearing stories of kindergarteners being asked to spend three or four hours blocks online, engaging with their teachers. This conversion was done without the support that the white paper was calling for.  The professional development never took place. The development of new content and techniques never took place.  People do traditional teaching on Zoom and largely receive technical advice rather than pedagogical advice. So the white paper still offers tools to rethink what's going on. Of course, there are innovative teachers across America doing that thinking now. We've heard from some of them through the Civic Imagination Project.  We're working regularly with some great teachers in the LA area and we do work with the National Writing Project. But teachers still need more guidance. 

As for participatory culture, we now see it in its best and in its worse, right.  We are seeing some of the challenges of networking and navigation and the verification of reliable information in a world of disinformation, misinformation, and sheer confusion. We've seen the breakdown of civility and the nastiness of cultural divides in the online world but also groups rallying to take social action in incredible ways. We've seen commercialization leaving young people particularly vulnerable to various mechanisms of data collection. Sonia Livingstone often talks about risks and benefits of children and families online and the challenge is to keep both in focus at once.

I still would remain  firm in the idea that literacy in a network era is a social skill and a cultural competency; that young people need to think through together, with mentorship from adults, how to respond to the social challenges they face in this online world and that the way out of our current crisis is to foster a generation that thinks more deeply than previous generations about the human beings they're interacting with and their accountability for the information they put in the circulation.  I would still like to see us raise a generation with a mouse in one hand and a book in the other.

Tessa Jolls: My take on it was that it represents the dawn of the social media era. It came out right at the beginning of Facebook. There was a reference to Myspace in it, Friendster. We've seen a lot of change in that particular environment and yet it was right on the cusp of this enormous explosion of social media. What's your take on that, Henry? 

Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture -- which I wrote just before writing this report -- makes almost no reference to social media. That's always striking to me when I look back that it's still about discussion boards and not about social media. Convergence Culturealso does not reference Web 2.0 and Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culturepicks up on both of those. So it's somewhere in that transitional period when social media is first becoming visible to us and where the concept of Web 2.0 is starting to become popular. Certainly, I was well situated to know about social media as it was coming into being: dana boyd has been an early researcher on social media, a very important figure in that space. I remembered email correspondence with her where she started describing the work she was doing on Friendster and some of the earlier social media spaces. Some of the younger graduate students on the committee were more deeply immersed in social media at that point than I would have been.

I'm proud to have an early Facebook account because of the connections between MIT and Harvard, where Facebook was first created but we weren’t using it very heavily during that period of time. When I read the stuff about Web 2.0, I cringe a little because it's still written in this moment of celebration about what a transformation in business model and orientation Web 2.0 would represent.  It's not yet reflective of some of the critiques of Web 2.0 that would start to emerge in the years following that. I've become more and more clear trying to draw a distinction between participatory culture and Web 2.0 and the work we've done then.

The idealism of some of the Silicon Valley companies that I was interacting with during that period is very tangible.  When I spoke to them they weren't quite in the grasp of the venture capitalists. This is something danad boyd and Mimi Ito and I talked about in our book on Participatory Culture in a Networked Era,that shifts in the way we thought about Web 2.0. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes. That's why the word prescient is called for here, because the content of the report anticipated so many of the cultural aspects that would emerge with the increased use of Web 2.0 and social media.  Was that your impression as well? 

Henry Jenkins:Yes. I feel good about how it reads today. There's very little in it that I would change if I rewrote it now.  With any of the skills we identified,  you could drill as deeply as you wanted to. Many of these skills have been taken up by other specialists. Some of those skills reflect conversations that were taking place in the educational world at the time, like distributive cognition, which was something that the more education-trained members of our team brought to my attention. So, we were synthesizing what was in the air at the time. It is not that we invented collective intelligence; instead, we were consolidating it, and researchers that continue to do important work in each of those areas.

After it came out, we did some work to add one additional skill. visualization, because when we talked to science teachers and math teachers and so forth, it became abundantly clear that visualization is quite distinct from simulation. If we looked at it more closely, we might identify a couple of more skills that would need to be on that agenda. I don't think any of the skills that we identified seem wrong or out of date. They're all things that we need more urgently today than ever before. I think the balancing act we did in terms of acknowledging traditional research, traditional literacy, media literacy in relation to the new media literacy seems more as important, if not more so than ever before. This is an era of misinformation and disinformation. We need to have all of those skills to sort through what's going on day by day and the flow of information right now. 

Tessa Jolls:I thought the skills you cited are all relevant and more important than ever, as you said. If anything, it is disappointing to me that we haven't made more progress, from the standpoint of institutionalizing new media literacies. You called for a systemic approach to education regarding the new media literacies. In some ways, I think we're still stuck right where we were. What do you think? 

Henry Jenkins:The MacArthur Initiative, in general, identified large numbers of people who shared a common vision of what needed to be done and recruited a lot of individual teachers who were willing to take risks and experiment and do things in their classroom. At the end of the MacArthur-funded Digital Media and Learning Initiative, there is a much more, much stronger body of evidence in support of some of the hypotheses we put forth in that report. There were some nuances on how it needs to be taught and what it means to bring it into the classroom which are really significant. 

 What we didn't see was the institutionalization of it, the scalability of it. It's been hard to get even individual school districts on board. There's been good luck coming out of the Youth and Participatory Politics Initiative. Their Civic Tool Kit has been picked up in citywide or district-wide standards, but not on state or national standards so far. So in some ways, this experience taught me a lot about how hard it is to make institutional change in education. 

Change still comes on the backs of individual teachers who are willing to do the hard work, to bring new resources and approaches into their school and to fight their department chairs and their principals in order to do something that still seems risky. It shouldn't be risky, this many years later. I think getting wide adoption is really, really hard and MacArthur pushed against that, and still didn't inspire much momentum. We're still seeing the Connected Learning Network trying to fight that battle and again, they are running up against a lot of stone wall. 

Tessa Jolls:  In the report, you also called for the informal learning environment to be involved. Do you feel that there's been progress in that arena or do you feel like it's pretty much the same story as formal learning, in terms of scaling?

 Henry Jenkins: There have been some large scale initiatives, for example, the YouMedia project out of the Chicago Public Library. The MacArthur promoted this program and it led to many, many other libraries adopting that model. It may be the biggest success story coming out of Digital Media and Learning. The librarians have taken up the calling.  I spent time after the report was released talking to library organizations and I found them much more receptive than teacher organizations. If anything the role of the librarian as an information coach has now been firmly established in the way they conceptualize themselves. Many of them have been really open to the new media literacies in one way or another. So definitely we had much more freedom outside of school than inside school through libraries and even through school librarians. You have more freedom than the sort of standardized educational test-driven curriculum, but there is so much more that should be done to fully integrate those skills into the afterschool space.

Tessa Jolls: Regarding institutional barriers, and you mentioned in the report that there's the participation gap the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge. 

Henry Jenkins: Credibility issues seem more acute after 2016 and the misinformation campaigns and the debates about fake news and so forth. That's a huge problem that we're confronting today and we're realizing that our concerns are not just casual use of information but active massive misinformation campaigns that are undermining the idea of standards of truth. 

Similarly, we need to address the intractability of the participation gap. This is what led me some years after the report to shift talking about living in a more participatory culture because that phrase means every time I say it, I have to call attention to who's left out, what groups are not allowed to fully participate, and what the barriers the participation look like. 

Those barriers seem ever more real in the age of COVID. We wired the classrooms and promised people access to computers through libraries. Now we're hearing that as many as a quarter of students in LA don't have access to public education during the quarantine because they don't have home access. They can't go on Zoom calls with their teachers and participate with their classmates. They're locked-out.  Regarding the most basic level of technological access, we are as bad as we've ever been in serving the needs of the lowest-income students. We're hearing stories of students writing papers on their mobile phones because they don't have access to computers at home. We're also seeing young people who lack mentorship. They need to fully understand the world they're traveling through and to have someone who's watching their back and giving them insight about some of the choices they're making along the way. 

The ethics challenge increasingly came to focus on questions of mentorship because in the report we talked about some of the work that had been done on high school journalism as a space for mentoring future journalists.  We called out the degree to which at least some young people had greater access to the communication capacity than ever before, and less mentorship than ever before. The research I've seen more recently shows that this is still the case, that most young people don't have access to mentors who can help them confront the challenges they encounter as they move through the world online. 

Looking back, I don't think we understood the full complexities of the picture. I think the fact that since this systemic racism, for example, doesn't surface anywhere in the report.  We understood the participation gap almost entirely in terms of economic barriers to access. Today, it's clear that it's not just access to technology, it's access to knowledge and skills, but it's also access to certain kinds of privilege. It's access to people who are willing to listen and respond to what you have to say. If the message given is that what you say is unimportant because of the color of your skin, then that outweighs almost anything else we do in the space of new media literacy. That problem is more and more visible to us today than it was when we were writing that report, and I feel we were almost naive when I reread the report.  

Tessa Jolls:Interesting. Yes. We need to give hope to everyone and yet it has to be a real hope in terms of our culture, in our leadership, in our mentors, and being open to listening and exchanging ideas. 

Henry Jenkins: It doesn't do anything to ensure a voice for everyone if people aren’t making ethical commitments to listen to each other. Without that commitment, what I say about participatory culture as a learning environment is at best a set of ideals and not a description of reality. Students can develop a document to send government officials or a newspaper and even their own parents, but if they don’t get a response back, then is anyone listening?  That's a big problem for us as a society. So to have a participatory culture there has to be a reciprocity of communication. This is something that Nico Carpentier and I have been talking about a lot in recent years. How do you build that willingness to listen and willingness to hear? Otherwise, you've just got noise and to some degree, the divisiveness of Twitter grows out of that sense of growing frustration with lots of people talking and no one's hearing what it is they have to say. 

At the same time I'm seeing the updated numbers on young people producing media. I had a chance to observe it in an interesting way. When I traveled to India three years ago, an anthropologist took my wife and me into the center of one of the biggest slums in India, where they filmed Slumdog Millionaire.  We went into homes of people and talked to young people about their use of technology. Even under those conditions most of the young people we talked to had made some media. There was a really powerful story of a young man, who told me his best friend had died of tuberculosis. A friend of his had access to an office and smuggled the man at night so they could use the office computers to produce a video tribute to their friends from footage shot using cell phone cameras and put it out on YouTube. So that was a really powerful story to me of the young people fighting against every circumstance to create and share something with the world, but you see so many other young voices being unheard, despite all of that.

Tessa Jolls: In the report, there was a statement that we should look at the new media literacies as a social skill. In a sense, I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. There are social skills that are involved in speaking and listening and being respectful and having dialogue and using all kinds of different ways of communicating, whether it's transmedia or whether it's a particular form of media. So could you comment on that a bit? 

Henry Jenkins: If we look at traditional print-based literacy, it could be understood as an individual skill. I think that grew out of the fact that most people lack the capacity to communicate beyond an immediate circle of friends and family. So reading was understood as reading things that had been produced by someone else. Writing was understood as writing letters or maybe at most writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. There was almost an assumption that literacy didn't have large-scale social and cultural effects. In a networked society, we need to think of literacy as a collective experience, not just an individual experience.  So we look at a world where all the research shows young people get their news not by sitting down and reading the newspaper in the morning by grazing information throughout the day through social media. So, what they see of the world is what their friends pass along to them. A sense of social accountability/responsibility needs to go hand in hand with this expanded communication capacity. 

When we live in a world where hate speech has such an enormous, divisive effect on the culture then understanding the consequences of our own speech is really important. That has to be understood in the social context and not just an individual context. The problem is people see it as, "Oh, that is just my personal opinion or I was just expressing myself." They are not necessarily thinking of themselves is part of a larger information echo system that has a ripple effect across the world. 

Tessa Jolls: That too, is a very important point for today's society and the way that we use technology. It also builds on an idea that you introduced in the report, which was that we should be expanding literacies, not pushing aside literacies. So, in other words, with the new media literacies, we should be looking at enhancing people's ability to critically engage, to be able to understand that social context.  You put your finger on the pulse! Henry, where do you see the field going at this point? Having taken this look back, when you look forward, what do you see it? Do you feel that the report is a guide to that future?

Henry Jenkins: My own current work for the last how-many years has been in the area of civics, which picks up on a number of the themes from the report. When I re-read the report, I see my current thinking about the civic imagination as in some ways growing out of the discussion of play and out of the discussion of performance, but also, the act of imagining is something that is not in that report. I wasn't sure what skills I would add, but I find myself pondering whether something like imagination or world-building is not a skill that is more visible to us today than it was when we wrote that report. That skill set is one that in fact, I am spending much of my time working on, not just helping students or young people think about it. We certainly are still doing work with schools and libraries and after-school programs. We are also working with adult communities. We have done workshops with churches and mosques. We have done activities with governmental officials. We have done activities with labor unions. We have done projects all over the world on thinking about the civic imagination.

In some ways, this new work is an extension of the toolkit that we identify in that report. It is designed to specifically enhance the sense of possibility within the culture at large, and particularly the sense of civic connection. In that way, the sense of civics I am talking about in our new work probably connects with the social skills and cultural competency we are describing here. We are trying to figure out what the skills are that we need to live with each other, rather than continually grinding down at the core of our democracy with each election cycle and every battle in between, to the point that we are no longer speaking to each other. To me, that is the most urgent thing. In some ways, that is about extending our notion of new media literacy, to talk to adults as well as young people.  All of us in our society need networking skills, negotiation skills, judgment skills, as we process this new world we are living in. Now, we need to figure out how to inhabit a global society, and within the United States, to live in a much more diverse society than many of us grew up in.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Some Fifteen Years Later) (Part Three)

In part three in our series about the production and impact of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, we spend a little more time with Connie Yowell, who commissioned the report on behalf of the MacArthur Foundation; Alice Robison, who was one of the co-authors of the report; Mimi Ito, who was another key leader of the Digital Media and Learning Movement; and of course, Henry. We also check in with John Palfrey, who is now President of the MacArthur Foundation and was running an important center at Harvard focused around how “digital natives” learn at the time Jenkins was up the road at MIT.  Each of them addressed Tessa Jolls’ questions about the lasting legacy of the white paper and of the Digital Media and Learning Project more generally.

Connie Yowell: I thought the reaction was two fold. In general, it was like breathing fresh, new life into education and how people think about literacy and how they think about learning. There was a hunger, amongst teachers in particular, to really understand the report and understand what to do with it. Once they saw it, and read it, and understood it, they were really eager to figure out what to do with it. One of the core challenges for teachers is engaging students and finding ways to connect learning to the things that young people care about. Henry’s brilliance was sitting at the intersection of culture, media, literacy and education. It was a new intersection for educators and one that had the potential to pave the way to paradigmatic changes in how we think about learning, technology and learner empowerment. It’s where learner interest, engagement and action intersect. 

Later on, Henry’s work on the Harry Potter Alliance as an illustrative case of how these things come together was equally significant and enabled educators and learners to break out of their traditional learning as transmission of information box, giving us a whole new imagination on where learning can happen, how it can happen and how its supported and embedded in affinity groups.  That was the first step in creating a whole pathway into thinking about a different way of teaching literacy. 

 There was a broad uptake. There were fringes of people who were way more conservative, who really struggled with it, but we saw a massive uptake and interest.

if we had actually had even more uptake and more engagement, we would have had a way of helping our young people understand this shift in online tools that became more ad-based and more focused on capturing their attention rather than engaging them in participation. 

Henry was writing about the first wave of tools that came out, which were all around participation, and making and creating a more extraordinary youth culture--whether it was LiveJournal or some of the other tools he was looking at. Even MySpace was more maker and creator focused than Facebook.  But we took a serious turn with Twitter and Facebook and their use of media to capture and sell attention as opposed to creating onramps to participation and production.  The new media literacy took an invaluable approach to enabling youth to both be critical of and participatory in media. We needed more time to scale the approach, but its not too late.  Its time for another wave of the work.  

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

John Palfrey:   It's great to be able to reflect on a previous time in a set of ideas and how they've then tracked through. It's kind of a cool intellectual history journey, which is fun to go on. I would say, clearly, your white paper was a catalytic piece in the context of the digital media and learning work that MacArthur committed many, many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to. You can take great pride in having set up a philosophical framework for a lot of that investment. Then, as Connie Yowell went on to take the LRNG spinoff out of the DML work, trying to focus on the new media literacies of young people outside of schools and in places from Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama, to New Hampshire, she's really taken the same set of ideas and implemented them in a variety of contexts. So it absolutely was one of several, very important blueprints from MacArthur's work and a huge amount of investment.

In some ways, it may be even unusual to say that scholars would have had such a huge impact on what such a program ended up doing. That's actually a hallmark of the Digital Media and Learning project. It took so many cues from the field and from leaders in the field, obviously, but it wasn't so much the brainchild necessarily just of one or two program officers. MacArthur was leaning into what the field thought was required for the next series of directions and then invested behind it. 

Henry Jenkins:  Well, thanks for that. So you were at Harvard at the time we were doing this and you were doing your work on digital natives?

John Palfrey:   We had a great interest in how kids were learning and engaging with information in different ways, and obviously, very focused on what are the ways that we could understand that and support it and then understand some of the ramifications of it. As you know, it was a fun time with danah boyd and, of course, your work and many others in the field kicking around Cambridge and to have interlocutors and people who are kind of writing in public together, both informally and formally. It was actually a pretty generative time, at least from my perspective in terms of thinking through how kids were learning, how that was changing, what was important about it, what was enduring. It kicked off a lot of work that followed.

Henry Jenkins:  The joke has always been that Harvard and MIT are two stops down the Red line and opposite ends of the planet at the same time. But, in those days, we were finding ourselves on somewhat similar trajectories and involved in some productive conversations.

John Palfrey:   I think it's a good example of not necessarily being in the same institution, but being focused on some similar questions and then being able to have a semi-public dialogue that actually could be quite constructive. I certainly am personally grateful for that.

Henry Jenkins:  Me too.   What do you think were the biggest insights that came out of that moment in time in terms in terms of understanding young people's relation to new media technologies?

John Palfrey:  The insights around agency are always ones I keep coming back to -- the things that kids can do relative to media.  It's not simply a passive experience. You and I both have had a great interest in the ways that young people can be involved in shaping, not just communities, but democracy itself. Those insights you included in the paper are important and enduring. The other piece of it, I would say, which is more of this moment, but it may well be enduring too, is that so many kids are learning outside of the classroom and outside of the formal structure of learning. An insight that came through your work, but then was amplified through the DML work broadly is how much learning is happening across a variety of things, whether it's cognitive or social-emotional.  It's harder to describe the kinds of learning kids do when they engage with media outside of school, independent of adult control, and removed from formal education. Right now, that's so important for all reasons - some fatigue; kids not having access to the technology, not being able to participate in the formal learning. It’s important to see that broader set of new media literacies come into play and understand why they matter. Where we can make that available for kids, there’s a huge benefit from an equity perspective. The work that one teacher is doing in that 30 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever it is on Zoom with kids who are not able to be physically proximate to each other actually isn't the end of the story. That may feel like it's sort of a pandemic answer to your question, but I think it could be an enduring answer too.

Henry Jenkins:  The pandemic obviously keeps cropping up in all of these conversations because suddenly, everyone's focused on schools, online education and what that looks like at the current moment. Notions like screen time just has blown up because everything is screen time and we need to be asking what kids are doing on those screens and not just whether there are screens involved.

John Palfrey:  What are you supposed to say? The data have not borne out the idea that screen time in aggregate is a bad thing for most kids. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to say that a bunch of screen time can be quite good for most kids. 

Henry Jenkins:   So, any further thoughts?

John Palfrey:   Just gratitude. I'm grateful for the ideas and the enduring connection and the fact that I get to talk with you for a few minutes across this divide. 

John Palfrey is the President of the MacArthur Foundation.

 Mimi Ito: Our report was empirical and descriptive unlike Henry's work, which was actually suggesting stuff that educators might do. We reissued the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out book. We've issued a tenth anniversary version where we have a new foreword that looks back on the ten years and what we missed, or not necessarily what we missed, but how the ecosystem changed or what we were surprised about. I think the speed at which the grown-up world gobbled the internet was surprising, or maybe not surprising, but just how quickly it became this arena where grown-ups were doing their grown-up things and they got colonized by politics and commerce. 

When we were doing our research, it was much more of a youth and academic-centered space. It was very different. It was perceived as the space of freedom for young people. Now, it's not at all. Kids are retreating to private spaces and the open internet is not a happy place anymore.

It was a pleasant surprise how many educators embraced our work. I often take a critical view of educational institutions, and I’m not a big fan of teaching myself. I do research and mentor students but I don’t do classroom instruction. I actually enjoyed school myself, but I don’t look to the classroom as a place that is spearheading digital innovation. I wasn’t holding my breath about educator response to our work, but I was pleasantly surprised. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate and collaborate with more educational institutions instead of just engaging with youth outside of school. It’s a good thing.

One of the big outcomes was the establishment of the YouMedia Learning Lab at the Chicago Public Library and the network of youth media labs that were based off of our research, at least in part. MacArthur incentivized those, but they also brought in a Federal funder, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That was pretty exciting just to see actual programs being launched. It wasn't like it was an application of the research. It was because we were all in conversation with one another. Then a lot of our subsequent work around connected learning was really knitted around bringing insights from the empirical research, which my study was part of the design and agenda studying stuff, like Henry's report and then people who were actually building and rolling out tests and innovations and practice. Those things all fed together into the two research networks that Henry (Youth and Participatory Politics) and I (Connected Learning) were a part of to build frameworks that were evidenced-driven but were also setting the agenda for innovations and results. Because of MacArthur's funding of all of the subsequent work, there's this ongoing influence that this work has had and because they used the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out framework for the youth media learning labs and they shortened it to an acronym, HOMAGO. Now, even the library spaces, they're routinely described as HOMAGO spaces.      

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

 
Tessa Jolls:  When you think back on it, do you feel like you were surprised by anything? Were there surprises that you just didn’t expect as a result of the reporting being published?

Alice Robinson:  I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised that some media literacy educators were resentful that the report got so much attention. That was unfortunate; however, I don’t necessarily think they were wrong. We didn’t do enough to acknowledge the deep history of media literacy to begin with. However, I don’t think any of us wrote the paper with the intent of reaching an audience beyond media study folks. None of us was an expert in any way on media literacy and we should have brought in media literacy folks. We were a group of literacy scholars and media scholars, and it got taken up by the media literacy audience, but it was not written for the media literacy audience. We should have anticipated that, and we didn’t, and that was I think unfortunate. However, it was incredibly well received by literacy, especially digital literacy, scholars and educators, and that made me really happy because I really wanted them to look at literacy in different ways as not just sort of an acquisition problem and so I thought that that was really great. I was really thrilled that media folks found themselves thinking more about learning and literacy.

Tessa Jolls: Agreed. Media people, in general, were just in shock at that point in time and they were really scrambling to understand this new world that they were having [0:52:36 inaudible]and I think the report was just so awakening for a lot of them or they knew they needed to know something, and it gave them something to go to, and be able to understand the framework for it, and that articulation that you talked about was very important and [0:53:03 inaudible]for lots of people, so that… yeah, that’s a wonderful point to make.

AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

Mimi Ito:  I certainly don't think that our reports would have had the influence they did if there wasn't for the additional support MacArthur was giving to other organizations that were taking up the work. I'm guessing the same for Henry's report as well, but I don't have as much insight into that.   

Tessa Jolls: Yes, understandable. Do you think we're in one of those innovative moments now with COVID and all the homeschooling going on? I mean it's hard to tell, but at the same time it seems like things are really shaking up right now. That can be an opportunity, as well as certainly disruptive. 

Mimi Ito:  I think it's hard to know. I mean it's definitely going to change things. Whether it's an opportunity for the things we care about to survive --  that I think is less certain. It does feel to me similar to that moment in history that we were talking about earlier. COVID has really accelerated the next wave of mainstreaming of online learning. Before COVID, when people said online learning, they actually didn't think of the things that I study, like kids geeking out on videogames and things like that. They wouldn't have considered  the more expansive version of literacy that Henry talks about.  A lot of people would not associate that with digital learning because they think of online teaching as the delivery of standardized formal education for the most part. I think that has changed because people understand the importance of digital and social connection because of COVID. 

COVID has accelerated the recognition that kids can't learn academic subjects unless they feel connected and safe and/or well-fed. It seemed obvious but it's a big deal that is officially being recognized. Before COVID, homeschooling was growing slowly, but it was still a fringe set of groups that consider themselves homeschoolers and schools repeatedly ignored the home context and saw their mission as residing within the four walls of the school. 

We had been seeing a lot of growth in online learning in the Higher Ed because you have a lot of non-traditional learners there, but it had been really slow in the K12 sector.  Suddenly all doctors are doing telemedicine. It's like, "Okay. Now, we actually have to think about not only what  it means for kids to be able to access the school content from home, but also how do you design an online learning environment, which has never been a mainstream concern within education. 

The fact that Zoom has come to dominate online learning is unfortunate. Why aren’t virtual worlds where learners can interact socially and create things being used? I am running a nonprofit, Connected Camps, that is trying to do this more social and project-based kind of online learning, together with Katie Salen, also from the MacArthur network. Our focus has been offering live, social, online learning experiences in platforms like Minecraft and Roblox. These are some of the only learning platforms that some educators use, that allows for kids to engage in a social, hands-on way. Compare that to Zoom, which often translates to a second-rate version of lectures or classroom discussion. Minecraft is a digital environment that gives you new and different powers that you don’t have in the physical environment.

There were never resources or thoughts from educational community of putting imagination as a priority.  Imagine if we had invested in a metaverse that was actually good for kids where they could build things together and where a teacher could circulate among groups of kids instead of having this metaphor of face-to-face and breakout rooms, which is not how educators work.  If you want to do project-based stuff, You can't. It's very difficult to do anything that's inquiry-based in Zoom. Since March, we expanded our team from a group of 25 to 125 and we're still not able to meet the demand of summer. 

Tessa Jolls:   Wow! That's really something, Mimi. Congratulations. You kept into it, yet a good time and needed, so needed. 

Mimi Ito:  Yes, it almost killed us. We're still trying to keep things afloat, but there wasn't much out there. Families were just desperate for a step that was social and engaging and meaningful for their kids. 

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, I believe it. It's been so helpful to explore this with you because I think the timing is good with all of this change going on and yet I think it's also important to recognize how some of the work that was done early on has really blossomed. I think that the work that MacArthur undertook has really made a contribution and, in a way, we're probably going to see more from that contribution now even then we did in the past, especially when we look at the education space. Do you have any other thoughts you'd like to share on MacArthur and the impacts that it had? 

Mimi Ito: For a lot of people who are touched by it, it created a set of relationships in a community that has been very resilient.  Some of what I have tried to inherit and steward even after the official DML initiative ended a couple of years ago, I recruited eight faculty who were involved in the DML initiative to our campus at UC Irvine and started a new research institute, the Connected Learning Lab as a steward of some of the community and the resources that came out of that work.  We have a website, the Connected Learning Alliance, where we continue to blog and publish reports. My team at UC Irvine has been running the annual DML conference. Henry was our very first chair for the very first DML. We merged with Games, Learning, and Society and the Sandbox Summit, into a new event called the Connected Learning Summit, which we had to cancel this year.   This year would have been the third year in this new format. Yes, the community is still very robust. I have no idea if we're going to be able to continue it in the world post-COVID, but at least for the first two years, even after MacArthur ended its funding, it was sustainable as a community supported event. I think that the people like to see each other. They like to stay connected with each other. I think that's also a really nice outcome of that work. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

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Henry Jenkins: We wanted to make the report as concrete for teachers as we could. That was part of the writing process. So when the report came out, the first stories we were hearing were that groups of teachers were sitting down at the faculty lounge in schools across the country, reading the report, discussing it, trying to identify what they were already doing, trying to identify what next steps they wanted to take. I heard from so many teachers through the years, that they had department-wide or school-wide discussions over the report when it came out. That was really a surprise to me.

Then we started getting requests to translate it into foreign languages. We soon lost track of the number of different languages it got translated into. We are hearing reports, particularly in Scandinavia, was one pocket that really embraced it and was discussing it very far and wide. I was invited to Latin America after the report came out, to a Buenos Aires conference with delegates of all the school superintendents and educational policy-makers of the Latin American countries. So, we know it had an impact. We don't know how big an impact it was or where the impact was best felt because it was  beyond our control.  MacArthur put the report out in the public domain and people were translating themselves and studying it themselves. So, there is no way to estimate the scale of where it traveled.

The media literacy movement embraced the report  in a very serious and thoughtful way. There was some unfortunate divide. Some people didn't understand why we were not sticking with the traditional framework media literacy had developed through the years. We challenged them in some ways that we thought were productive. We saw the existing media literacy work as  part of a larger framework we were describing, and didn't feel the need to reinvent the wheel or to reproduce what was already out there, but instead, to  direct people to read that existing material. Some connected learning people probably did not appreciate fully the work that has already gone on in terms of the media literacy movement: the recruitment of teachers, the building up of the vocabulary, and so forth. I tried in my own work to bridge that divide and to be someone who had a toe in both of those camps and saw the potential of us working together to achieve a more literate culture in all senses of the word.

Tessa Jolls: You have really lived with those words, Henry. I know from my perspective, you cited the Center for Media Literacy’s framework called the attention to the fact that it was geared toward more of a passive kind of questioning in terms of media being developed by someone else. I think that your report had a huge impact. I know it did on our organization because we subsequently used your research and then developed a process of inquiry for producers of media so that it can be taken a questioning approach from an active standpoint. So, I think the research was very timely and very informative. 

Henry Jenkins: Yes, you  did an excellent job of revisiting that and responding to that critique in a very constructive and generative way. I appreciate it, that the critique got taken in the spirit in which it was meant. 

 The work that we did for the white paper led directly to the work we did with Ricardo Pitts Wiley, Wyn Kelly, Katie Clinton and others on the Moby-Dick project, which became the book, Reading in a Participatory Culture.  Erin Reilly took over the leadership of Project New Media Literacies from Margaret Weigel as we moved towards a fuller application of the ideas in the white paper, and we ended up, among other things, developing a professional development program for teachers associated with the Los Angeles Unified School District, helping them apply participatory learning practices into their classrooms. The conversations I was having with danah boyd and Mimi Ito were commemorated in the book, Participatory Culture in a Network Era, which is a book-long conversation about our intersecting research through the Digital Media and Learning initiative.

I continued to work with the MacArthur Foundation, moving gradually from work on new media literacies (with Erin Reilly) to work (with Sangita Shresthova) on civic media, civic engagement, the political lives of young people, first through the Youth in Participatory Politics Research Network.  Our work in that phase culminated with By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists. More recently, our Civic Imagination Project is part of the civic media grant making that MacArthur is doing. So participatory culture has continued to drive a lot of the research that I've done.  It doesn't shape everything that I do. I've done work on comics and some other things that are largely unrelated to that strand, although you can always see the connections. But that strand on participatory culture runs from Textual Poachers atthe beginning of my career down to our current projects on Popular Culture and the Civic imagination and onward into the future. 

In the final section, Tessa Jolls and Henry Jenkins reflect back on the report today and what we know now that we did not know when the report was first written.

Confronting the Challenges of A Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part Two)

In part two of this series on the writing and publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, longtime media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls interviews two of my co-authors for the report: Alice Robison and Ravi Purushotma about their experience, what ideas from the report they think has survived the test of time, and how these ideas about education relate to their current professional and family lives. Margaret Weigel, the Research Director for the project, tragically passed away a few years ago. Katie Clinton was unable to participate.

Henry Jenkins:    Ravi Purushotma was one of the master’s students at the time. He came to us with a very strong commitment to thinking about new media in relation to learning and education. His particular fascination was language learning. He was doing really interesting things in his own life to try to learn languages using everything from video games to his iPod, to immerse himself into new language. He seemed absolutely the right person to do this work.

Margaret Weigel had just graduated from the program and was looking for work after her time with us.  We hired her as the research director of that project. The research directors play a really crucial role in my approach. As co-director of the program, I was pulled in so many different directions. I was on planes constantly, raising money, trying to manage a lot of different research initiatives. I would be distracted from one moment to the next, and I needed people for each project who would wake up every morning thinking about that project and would grab my attention when things needed to happen. Margaret played this role admirably through this phase of the research. 

Alice Robinson was hired as our postdoc to work on this project. She was a classmate of Katie Clinton who had just moved to Boston. Katie and Alice had been students of James Paul Gee at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I had met them during trips to visit Gee and Kurt Squire and they had made strong impressions on me. I'd liked both of them very much and felt that they would cross pollinate between the game centered research that Gee was doing and the more fan directed research that I had been doing. This was a good team, especially given MIT did not have its own education school for me to draw upon.

Tessa Jolls:It's interesting to look back on it and see what were the takeaways, and definitely, the participatory culture went worldwide. It was just incredible that it just kind of spread like wildfire.  So definitely, there was a need out there. There was a hunger out there for this new way of looking at the world. Were you expecting that kind of reaction, Henry? How did you feel at the time in terms of having done the work and released it?

Henry Jenkins:We had no idea what the response was going to be. MacArthur told me that they had very mixed reception on previous white papers that they had issued from research. So my expectations were relatively low.  We wrote it collaboratively using software that allowed us to share the text in process with each other, we were really trying to apply the technologies we were talking about. Ravi kept us state of the art in terms of the tools we were using to write the report. 

As we finished that first draft, Connie Yowell decided it made sense to bring in a developmental editor to increase the clarity and make it more widely accessible.  We worked with that editor closely. Yowell saw that there was real potential with us and our report became something that was really targeted at diverse stakeholders. 

Fairly late in the process, we realized that we needed not just to describe the skills and the research behind them, but also give concrete examples of how teachers could deploy them in their classes. That's where the postdocs particularly came into play. We had these brainstorming sessions where we brought that whole team together and just said, here's a skill, what do we know that's going on out there, where do we look for more examples. We reached out to media literacy organizations of all kinds to fill in those holes there. That's become an important part of the report, even though that may be the most dated part because it was describing prototypes, some of which took off, some of which didn't but it captures what was happening in the world as people saw this change coming. We were trying to get ready for it. 

But no, I didn't expect anywhere near the reception that that report got. I'm still floored by the number of discussions that I've heard about that took place as that report was released to the world. It's worth saying the two reports were released in parallel, meaning, Ito's report and my report were announced at this event at the Museum of Natural History and simultaneously a press event was held in Second Life. So that was MacArthur trying to use a new toolkit to release its reports to the world. 

Alice Robison:  I wanted to make sure that… Henry talked about Margaret because, as you know, she had breast cancer, and it was pretty severe, and she passed very quickly, and we all miss her. Margaret was just an incredibly, cool, Gen-X chick, and-- she was a true artist, and a radical and really representative of the Gen Xers. She played bass. She wore Doc Martens every day. She’s just a really cool chick and having her be a part of this paper, I miss her and I really think she would have loved to have talked to you about it. I I’m sure Margaret would be thrilled to know you were doing this.

In a true Margaret way, actually, she announced it on Facebook. She said, “Look guys, it’s not looking good, and I’ve got breast cancer, and I’m going to go in for one more round of treatment,” but it was very quick with her, like she did not catch it early. She said, “I’d appreciate it if you could just post something here,” and we did, and we all wrote to her and posted things, and her brother read them to her, and then it was I think a day or two later that he posted and said, “Thank you all. I read them all to her. She heard everything you said before…” and then she just died. It was, of course, shocking and awful, but at the same time, it was cool that she allowed us all to use that space to tell her how much we love her, and that she got to know that, and she used that tool in order to…

I do remember presenting the report at the National Media Literacy Conference in St. Louis, and I just remember how incredibly well received it was by a small minority of people who were excited about what we were talking about. It’s always true whenever you present radical ideas to educators. It’s always the minority who are most enthusiastic and most excited because they’re the closest to those changes that are happening. The further away you are, the more skeptical you are and that’s just true of anything. That minority of people were excited to know that they weren’t the only ones who were seeing the changes that we were seeing and they were so thrilled to get the validation that they had been seeking for a long time, and so for that, I’m still incredibly grateful.

There’s always going to be changes in platforms, right? There’s always going to be changes in applications and tools, but I think the principles that we described in the paper are still true. What we wrote in that paper is still very much true about distributed storytelling, and distributed cognition, and the ways that all of these media are specifically designed and created by teams of people in a very social way in a way that’s meant to be appreciated in social ways by people who love that content.

I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old. I was explaining to their teachers, not too long ago, that for them, YouTube stars are what rock stars were to us when we were young. My nine-year-old is begging me to have her own YouTube channel because she wants to be a media creator and create content for large groups of fans. She’s not thinking about, “Oh, this is going to appeal to a specific tailored-group.” She’s thinking, “I want everyone to love Minecraft as much as I do.” I think that was one thing that we probably could have been more articulate about.

We talked about, what was it, the transparency problem, the participation gap, and the ethics challenge.  The transparency problem is the one that most people are surprised by, meaning the persistence of the myths of the digital native will never die and I fought for years against this, and it still persists, engrained in millennial parents because a lot of these folks we were writing about then are now parents of their own children.

I’m part of an online summer camp for kids here, and we are spending hours talking about how to get all of our kids together on the same Minecraft server, and these other parents are just really resistant to think about how they might have something to offer their kids about how to be present in a collaborative online space and it’s so surprising to me that they would be so resistant to think, “Hey, maybe I should teach my kids a little bit about ‘password,’ or why you might want to think about muting yourself, or turning off your video, or think about what you say to others, or what does ‘griefing’ mean and why is it important not to grief someone, or why do we want to be careful about respecting what other people build in that space,” and they just assume  that their kids can just jump right onto this game and its online space with other people and know what to do. The transparency problem is still a huge concern of mine, and we don’t talk about it enough. 

We do talk a lot about the participation gap and the ethics challenge; but for example, rural internet is still very weak, still very limited, and it’s… we’re looking at things like how are we going to have distributed learning come August. Out here, we start school the very first week in August, some districts start at the end of July, and we still don’t have plans for how we’re going to do online learning for rural districts here in Arizona, how are we going to get them access, yeah, or what can be done on mobile devices. The Navajo Nation here in Arizona is one of the worst-hit COVID-19 population. I don’t imagine anyone that’s going to want to put those kids in classroom. What do we do if you don’t even have access to water? How are you going to have access to the internet? These things are really difficult, and I do believe that schools want the best for their students. I do strongly believe that there are limited numbers of things that can be covered in any given day, but the participation gap is still just as powerful as it was 16 years ago and the transparency issue is barely studied at all, so that’s something that frustrates me.

I don’t know if you know Katie Salen Tekinbas. She’s at UC Irvine. Katie Salen Tekinbas did the school project called “Quest to Learn” in New York City, that’s a school based on principles of gaming, Salen and Mimi Ito created something called “Connected Camps.” My  nine-year-old is participating… she’s done every single camp they’ve offered. It’s been wonderful to see how the principles that we wrote about are enacted in online digital curriculum and folks who are teaching these classes have no idea where this stuff comes from. They’re just thrilled to be teaching a class in Minecraft, but it’s fun for me to see my kid do the kinds of things that I wrote about 16 years ago.

Katie Clinton and I are very close, and we went to graduate school together, and we both went to work with Henry together. Katie’s son, same thing. It’s been so great to see and… I feel like all we did was really articulate what everyone who is immersed in digital media consumption at that time already knew. We just put it down on paper.

At the time Katie Clinton and I were finishing our dissertations and we were doing research on how video games were particularly good instantiations of what we already knew about learning science and how people learn, that’s different from saying, “Video games should be used to teach content areas,” okay? We were constantly trying to distinguish between video games as good instantiations of the research on learning versus folks who were in classroom being told to teach content with curriculum that was handed to them who wanted to use video games as a vehicle for that. Those are two different things, and so in the media literacy paper, we didn’t want to make that same mistake. We didn’t want to reduce what we were observing to a set of skills because we didn’t want that to be interpreted as, “Here’s the formula that you should be teaching in your class. Teach them how to blog, how to create YouTube channel.” Instead we were saying, “No, no, no. You need to teach them how to look at these phases in a different way. What you do with that is up to you,” but these phases are being created, and interpreted, and used in all kinds of fascinating new ways, what that ends up being translated to in the classroom is up to you because it’s your classroom, but we don’t want to reduce it down to a simple activity. 

Those little sections on what might be done, those are really tough to write. We understood the need. When we got feedback from readers, “Well, we want examples. We want examples,” and so we offered those examples, and I think they were good examples, but if you’ll notice, they’re not curriculum. Each of those sections, what might be done. Their ideas, their examples, they’re meant to be taken as such. They’re instantiations of the framework and examples of things that we had seen people do, and so we wanted to hold them up as good examples of the kinds of things we’re talking about without saying, “Here. Go teach X.”

Let’s say you’re teaching world history, that’s very, very different from teaching in a radio and TV lab. You can still use these principles in both content areas, but maybe one is going to be much more applied and the other one is going to be much more conceptual, but both can use these principles and use the framework in equally successful ways. There’s so many fantastic examples of how you could talk about distributed cognition in a whole class on the video game, Legends and use it  for example, in the Connected Camp. My daughter takes a weekly class in Minecraft, learning about ancient history of Rome, and they’re using all these principles, appropriation, distributed cognition, multitasking, all of the same things that we describe in the paper, they’re doing in that space and it’s because Katie Salen said, “Hey, Minecraft is a great place to explore what it was like to be a citizen in Ancient Rome,” but it’s not a class on ancient Roman history for a nine-year-old. …

 AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

 Ravi Purushotma: Henry was just always a brilliant mind and able to predict things quite well. It’s been a blast over the last couple decades to have had such insight into where things would be going. I mean, we really took it for granted just how aware of the direction things were changing we became by being around him.

If we were re-writing the report today, we might use some different language. There was a lot of talk about things like affinity spaces back in the time and maybe today we’d be using slightly different vocabulary. But, fundamentally, the underlying concepts of how we need to develop the skills to be able to take in information from society accurately, the skills to produce content and share information back with society in the best means possible -- that students need to find their voice. I think the underlying concepts still form the same fundamental conversation we’re having today.

Tessa Jolls:  Sure, yeah. But conceptually, you think, “Hey, yeah, we captured it,” and so that’s really gratifying to feel like it’s being used or could be used today. I think in that regard, the report really did make an impact at that time. What was your perspective about the impact that the report had?

Ravi Puralena:  I’m actually probably not super aware of the impact. I definitely got a sense it was getting good distribution. I would meet people randomly in social circles who would say, “Oh, my God. We just read your report in my grad seminar at Stanford!” So, events like that definitely gave me a sense that it seemed to have been an impactful report. But, for the most part, I had switched over to educational game design after graduating and I was a bit out of the media literacy discussion afterwards.

I guess I was trusting Henry a bit on where the report would land and where it would all go. Back at that age, I was much less attached to the process and just super excited to be a part of it all. I knew I wanted to make a difference in the Education and Media landscapes, but there was always, and there still is, a lot of uncertainty in my mind about where the best insertion point for making a change is. For change to happen, a lot of different efforts have to come together in parallel: some people need to take on arguing with the skeptics or traditionalists or policy-makers; some people need to be mentoring the open-minded but hesitant people looking to take their first steps; some people need to be trailblazing with the savvy early adopters and inventing the best possible solutions. In this field, there’s different media forms associated with each of those: the first one needs to be books and whitepapers like the one we wrote, the second might be things like YouTube guides and the latter might be things like programming mobile apps. Given my strong technical background, I always felt suited to the later. There also was simply more job opportunities being in the latter than the former. Also, I tend to get better energy being on the creative/trailblazing side of things rather than the arguing with the skeptics side. Though I’m super grateful for people like Henry who are able to do that role so well, after I graduate I somewhat left that role to them. Instead I was doing things like working with a Fortune 100 company to program an app to help kids in Latin America to create, tell and record stories.

I guess, even when starting the whole paper writing process, I didn’t fully understand what it was and where it could go. I think it’s really stunning for me to think back retrospectively about actually writing the paper. At the start, I don’t think I actually understood what the term “Media Literacy” meant or how to articulate it. I got “21st Century Skills.” But, even half-way through writing the paper, if you had told me “People think about ‘Literacy’ as the ability to read a book or write a paper. But, it’s really the skill of taking information in from society and producing information to contribute to society. You need to be able to take information in from more than just books and create more than just papers in order to really be ‘Literate’ today or have a voice.” I would have responded “Wooooah! I totally never thought of it that way!!!” But, piecing it all together while writing it -- it was a crazy journey to think about how that all came together.

I guess maybe to back up a bit. Originally, I don’t think even Henry knew that the paper was going to be such a big scope or the core focus it ended up being. I got the sense, originally, at the very beginning, that this was kind of my project personally and that maybe he would come in at the end, do a bit of fine touching and what not, but, fundamentally a simple paper I was to write about 21st Century Skills. I had written over a hundred pages of the original first draft before anybody had seen anything. Then, it started to evolve with more discussions from the Foundation and become clear that we were going to turn it into a much more involved paper. Henry was able to step in and pull together the huge gaps in my understanding of the field at the time and take my hundreds of pages, and really expand then edited it into just a much more polished and comprehensively articulated work. Originally, though, it started with a very different scope before evolving to what it became.

Looking back on it, one really unique thing about the paper for the time was the way it involved having multiple people writing it simultaneously. It's something we take for granted nowadays, having such easy access to Google Docs, but, I think the tools used for collaborating really impact the content of the writing. Perhaps one reason the paper was received so well is because of how unified the different voices of the authors felt compared to other papers at the time. And perhaps one reason for that was because it was one of the first papers of its scope to be written entirely in an online collaborative environment. At the time Google Docs didn’t exist. There was a small startup tool called “Writely” which I had identified and thought could be a good tool for this paper. It was still in beta at the time and incredibly buggy. I knew it was a big ask for all these academics to take a tool as fundamental to them as their word processor and ask them to replace it with the totally new way of doing things in the midst of a project with important deadlines. And the interface was totally unintuitive. I remember how frustrating it was for Henry: at one dinner someone made a comment about what a genius he was and he replied something like “I’m no genius, I can’t even figure out how to operate my word processor!” But, I really admired his willingness to give it a try, to show humility in always asking me for help learning to use a new technical tool and navigating through all its quirks and bugs. I think most people would have just said “Just send me a Word Docs with track changes turned on like I’ve been doing for 20 years. We’re in the middle of a big project. This isn’t the time for me to be learning this Writely thing that you’re fixated on [and is making me feel inept].” Perhaps it’s because they would have felt embarrassed to be the one to say that given the content of what we were writing about. But, for whatever reason, we persevered and I think the level of collaboration we had as a result really changed the tone and voicing of the paper for the better and was a first for its time. Writely was eventually acquired by Google and became Google Docs, so, nowadays it’s essentially the standard way of writing a collaborative paper. But, at the time of Writely Beta -- or ‘Writerly’ as Henry kept calling it -- it was unique.

After I graduated, I then moved from the media literacy side of Henry’s department to the educational video game side. I worked as a research manager in the Education Arcade lab, then for a spin-off, for many years focusing on educational video games design. I had a fellowship in Germany for almost two years teaching classes and meeting with various government officials for discussions about how technology can enhance language learning & education. Then, eventually, I moved to California and have been working largely in the tech industry here, gaining a lot more programming skills and more the technical side of media development. Some more work in educational games, but also just in general industry --  web programming, mobile app development, things like that. When I first got married, I needed to focus really on income and so I was working for an artificial intelligence company creating tools for doing financial audits. Now that my wife is further in her career, I have more flexibility to kind of go back into Educational design. I started making some content for Coursera. I’m hoping someday there’ll be more opportunities to utilize my tech background for more Media Literacy work. Perhaps once I’m a parent I’ll find a way of creating more creative activities and apps for parents and kids. But, currently Media Literacy is more just a hobby. Like, a week or two ago, I made a little video I posted on my facebook page discussing religious texts and what it means for someone from today's literate society to try and interpret something from an oral tradition 2,000 years ago and apply it to their life. I’ve been putting out little videos and things on those kinds of topics and constantly discussing it with people in my religious community, and work life. So, even though I’ve left academia, it’s still a discussion and a movement I love at heart and hope all my different backgrounds will intersect again someday.

Ravi Purushotma currently authors videos, games and apps for clients looking to use digital media to make learning & instruction more engaging.

Next time, We will consider the publication of the report and its subsequent impact on our understanding of media literacy.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part One)

The white paper, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, was published by the MacArthur Foundation sixteen years ago. This document, prepared by Henry Jenkins and a team of researchers at MIT, offered an important reframing of media literacy which reflected the shifting realities of the digital era -- new affordances, new practices, and new opportunities were leading to new forms of informal learning that were playing an important role in the lives of many American youth. Educators were often slow to recognize the value of these new spaces as a site for developing new skills or the ways literacy changed in a world where young people were creating and sharing media with each other in record numbers. 

Across this series, we are going to provide an oral history of how that report came to be written and what its impact was at the time of publication. In this opening segment, we speak to Connie Yowell, who headed the Digital Media and Learning Initiative for the MacArthur Foundation; Mimi Ito, who was a second pillar of the initial research for the Digital Media and Learning Initiative; and Henry Jenkins, who was the primary author of the Participatory Culture White Paper. Long time media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls conducted the interviews.

Connie Yowell:  In 2004, we were coming out of a $30 million initiative and district reform that was focused on teacher professional development and evidence-based approaches to teacher professional development. It was state of the art. It was a really thoughtful, forward looking set of commitments we had made revolving around the notion that the teacher was going to be the core unit of change in transforming schools and that we needed to focus on professional development. We were in three districts doing district wide reform, and within three years, we cycled through 11 superintendents and made almost no progress. 

The MacArthur Board was paying attention. They said, there’s got to be something different we can do. We had John Seely Brown on our board, the former head of Xerox. John said we should be looking over the horizon and thinking about the impact of digital media, and these new tools that are coming out, and what they mean for learning. I was like, well, I don’t do that. I’m a hardcore educator. I don’t believe in technology making a difference.  I’m out of here. 

What we decided in the meantime was to split the difference, because MacArthur didn’t want me to leave, which I appreciated, and to do three exploratory pieces of work. Henry’s piece was one of the three. Another one was Mimi Ito’s research. We asked her, with her group of 25 researchers, to do an ethnographic study of how young people were using digital media outside of school. We had Nicole Pinker in Chicago, who’s a computer scientist, and we just said, “you’re in our backyard”. It allowed us, the staff, to be able to come and spend some time with teachers and kids to see how they were doing intervention with technology.

Great. But neither of those was the conceptual piece. Neither of those pieces were really grounded. In reading Henry’s stuff, I was really coming to understand the transformation in the culture. We needed somebody who really understood the relationship between culture and media and what it means for thinking and production and creativity and all the things that Henry focuses on. Then, the third piece was for Henry to really dive deep conceptually to help us and to help the field understand what was happening both from a theoretical and a more practical perspective. He was able to understand the media in a much different way and explain a new set of literacies. We were looking for Henry and his team to really conceptually, intellectually drive that work I mean, he’s got all those literacies. His team has all those literacies. He’s deep in it, but to have him start writing about it and really make explicit what the combination of these new digital tools plus culture was going to create. 

That was the genesis of the work. We had brought Henry with Mimi and Nicole to be our consultants to help make us be smarter. It really became clear that we needed him to be our intellectual center, and his team to really push that thinking to the world of education, because this new thinking wasn’t going to come out of the world of education. 

Tessa Jolls: I think that’s a really important point and something that I don’t know how we can shift education easily. I mean, it’s a real challenge, but I always felt that this work was really important in terms of holding up this mirror for where we were and trying to help educators see that we needed to move in a different direction. 

Connie Yowell:   Yes. In order to do that, educators, we all do, need a conceptual frame. We need to know the categories and the buckets that matter in this new world and why they matter. A big piece of the work that Henry was doing and his team was doing, from my perspective, was coming up with those key conceptual categories that are grounded in pop culture.  In our vision of innovation, we needed to go deep on the adjacencies to education. We weren’t funding directly within the education space; instead, we were funding all of the adjacent places where new ideas were coming to life then figuring out what they would mean for education and for learning. Henry’s work is clearly a core adjacency that needed to become infused inside education. 

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

Henry Jenkins: This was my very first opportunity to work with the MacArthur Foundation. We've been working with them continuously for the last 15 years since the report was written.  I was midway through my time co-directing the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. We had launched the program with the goal of providing a new kind of master's program in media studies, one that was committed to preparing people to go out in the world and make a difference in industry, journalism, public policy and academia. It was a program that would have a very strong applied logic to it. We wanted students to take what they were studying in their classes and to apply that in an immediate way to pressing problems in conversation with real world stakeholders. Project New Media Literacies was one of our major research initiatives but one among others. We were also researching games-based education, games and innovation, global media policy, civic media, and the creative industries. Each of those projects allowed a mix of students to engage in an active research process based on their own career goals and commitments. 

 As we were reaching out to identify what those research opportunities were, I was in a dialogue with danah boyd, who took some classes under me when she was a master's student at the MIT Media Lab. She was advising Connie Yowell at MacArthur, about the launch of some new initiatives around digital media and learning. Through her intervention, I was invited out to San Francisco for a conference at the old Exploratorium, where we were to present some insights into the current media environment, with the idea of impressing the MacArthur leadership, and hopefully getting some grant funds out of it.   As I was doing that first presentation, something went wrong with the PowerPoint. It was basically shuffling the slides randomly throughout the entire presentation. So I had a rich deck of stuff prepared to share, but on the fly, I was having to adjust my talk to reflect the images on the screen, with no sense of what might pop up next. No one ever dared to say to me, was that a random presentation or did you plan it that way? But it must have been strong enough because that launched one of the most important relationships of my academic career.

Connie had situated me next to the President of the MacArthur Foundation on the bus trip back to the hotel, and asked me to explain to him why media literacy should be part of their initiative. I did so. I don't remember anything I said in that conversation. By the time we got off the bus, he was sold on the idea that media literacy should be part of MacArthur’s agenda. Everyone, all the staff at MacArthur seemed really thrilled that I somehow convinced him of this. I was asked to both write a white paper and to do some proof of concept demos.

I was already dabbling in media literacy. I'd written the column for Technology Reviewthat you and a number of other people had seen and responded to. I was starting to get invitations to speak at media literacy conferences in the New England area. We had begun to do a series of conferences called We’ve Wired the Classroom -- Now What? They were designed for local educators to think about the next steps towards online education -- what kinds of curricular materials and professional development were required, what new projects were emerging.

Right now, we’re suddenly relying on online education nationwide, but a lot of the work we were advocating then never took place. Many of the challenges we now confront were being discussed at these conferences decades ago. 

Many of us saw a need for advocacy for the digital realm, something like National Public Radio or National Public Television that was going to generate content, develop curricular materials, take advantage of the experiments that were going on, and bring the teachers along. As the conference title suggests, it's not enough to wire the classroom and just assume that everything else falls into place because it doesn't. The wires are the least of it. The Clinton administration at that time was pushing them to wire all the classrooms in America, saying this would close the digital divide, and we knew it wouldn't.

The main thinkers of that period were passing through MIT— like Howard Rheingold who was doing groundbreaking thinking about the virtual community, and regularly speaking at MIT. Sherry Turkle was a colleague at MIT who was raising important questions about online conversations, identity in a networked world, and the blurring of reality and the imaginary online.  We had great students like danah boyd passing through MIT. She was shaking up our thinking because she was so grounded in the youth culture and what they were doing online. 

Part of our mandate from MacArthur had been to look across the research that had been done on learning and fandom and gaming spaces. This helped us gain insight into learning in other online communities and bringing that back to schools. Throughout that report are signs of the conversations we were engaged with MIT on games-based learning. Alongside the work we were doing for MacArthur, we were doing Microsoft-funded research making the educational case for how games might serve educational purposes.  We called that initiative Games to Teach and as we expanded our funding, it became The Education Arcade.  Kurt Squire, the original Research Director for Games to Teach, left MIT and ended up at University of Wisconsin-Madison with James Paul Gee. It’s no accident that two of James Paul Gee's students are on the team that wrote the Macarthur white paper with me. So, there was a cross-pollination with one of the major centers for thinking about games-based education. I am still seeing the importance of that pioneering work even as I fear that this language of gamification has rigidified a lot of the creative experiments that were going on into the narrowest possible version of what games-based education could look like. I am very pleased to see this new book Locally Played by Benjamin Stokes who was, at the time, one of my foundation officers at MacArthur and later became my PhD student at USC. Ben’s new book stresses how games played in real world spaces can enhance community building. 

 I don't think that report could have come out of any place other than MIT. Being at MIT left us ahead of the curve in the midst of ongoing conversations about the social and cultural impact of emerging platforms and practices. I was housemaster in an MIT dormitory, and I could walk up and down the halls, and just see what students were doing online. That was part of my night job, so it wasn't even necessarily formalized research. But there were lots of insights that made their way into that report that grew out of just living in an MIT environment with those students.

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, and I think that's fascinating how all of that came together at this special time. How then was that connection made in terms of, hey, we need a report, we need this theoretical framework outlined?

Henry Jenkins:  As Connie Yowell describes in her interview, she was working with Nicole Pinker. She was working with Mimi Ito. She was working with me. There were conversations amongst us about how we were progressing. I certainly was following Mimi Ito’s research. She invited me to participate in discussions with her research groups at multiple points along the way, and vice versa. I think it was very clear that we needed a shared vocabulary to talk about learning in this environment. I also felt that we needed to make the case to educators for why the kinds of informal learning that were taking place in young people's lives outside of school were in fact pertinent to what teachers did in their classrooms. 

Mimi's work was really documenting youth digital practices out in the world. She ended up using youth vernacular to frame her theories. She talks about “hanging out, messing around, geeking out”. Those are terms that emerged organically from the young people she interviewed. My task was the opposite: to take what we knew from research on informal learning, fan communities, gaming communities, and write it up in a way that would speak to teachers, to principals, the school board members, the state policymakers, grant funders. So I was giving academic terms to practices that probably would have been described rather differently by the young people themselves. 

As we got into it, it was also clear that young people were being taught to devalue their own experiences, to devalue the ways they were learning and what they were learning in these informal spaces. I've come to recognize the importance of helping young people think about why it's important to take seriously those opportunities, as alongside helping teachers think about how to incorporate those skills and practices into the schools. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, absolutely. You really were at this confluence of all of these ideas swirling around. Fortunately, it seems, like, I know and talking with Connie and with Mimi, they saw a need to really articulate more of the theoretical foundations and then turn to you. It was just incredible timing, well, not really coincidence, but definitely you were the man of the time and that really made all the difference.

Henry Jenkins is currently Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California and is the Principal Investigator for the Civic Imagination Project (funded by MacArthur).

Mimi Ito: Henry was focused on writing a more conceptual summative piece and then around the same, we had started fieldwork on what young people were doing in the digital landscape. We were looking at kids who were on Myspace and instant messenger primarily and had not really made the leap to text messaging, which is hard to believe.  The US was very late to text messaging compared to the rest of the post-industrial world. The US was an outlier, so kids were still using a lot of instant messengers around then. This is pre-iPhone. Sometimes I get my chronology wrong ... yes, it was definitely pre-iPhone. MacArthur deciding to look at the online world as an arena for understanding learning was ahead of the time. John Seely Brown had just joined the board and it was a bold move at that time. 

Tessa Jolls: Yes, it certainly was. It was interesting, too, because the emphasis was certainly on the education, but not education in schools. It was really centered around the technology and, of course, that was rapidly developing. We didn't even have a clue about what was coming, but I guess that isn't quite fair. We did have some clues, but nevertheless, when we really didn't have, as you said, the adoption of the social media and so on, but what did you feel then was your major challenge in terms of the research you were doing? 

Mimi Ito: I was in that post-doctoral phase when all of this started. I had been studying how kids learn with video games and socializing and other things.  I was an educational researcher as well as a cultural anthropologist by training.  I wrote the first dissertation about digital culture in our anthropology department, but a lot of the perspective came from youth culture studies and so on. 

I was very familiar with Henry's work because there weren't really many people doing work in the States. Henry had written an early paper on videogames and had been one of the few senior media study scholars who would look at video games at all. At that time, I don't think Henry was that deep into learning and education.  I was delighted that he was brought into the MacArthur initiative and was writing the paper around literacy, which is obviously a great bridge to the education side. I was always the black sheep of educational research because I looked at what kids did for fun, like play videogames. I had just finished the study of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is a post-Pokémontrading card game and I described what kids learn from playing those kinds of complex games.  Early networks, multiplayer games, text-based games were really the only environment at the time that I could see kids connecting socially via digital media because none of this other stuff had taken off yet. I had done research on mobile phones and texting in Japan, but the MacArthur Initiative kicked off right at that time when those things were starting to converge.

Henry was writing his book on convergence culture and suddenly you were at the beginning of seeing rich digital media in a social environment and games turned into real-time multiplayer network for the first time. ... there was a five-year period when all of that was converging, which was also that period that this paper that Henry was working on was pulled together and our digital youth study started. 

For me, it was very much an extension of work I had already been doing theoretically and conceptually, but suddenly, it became a big thing in the world… I had just spent two years in Japan studying the birth of camera phones and the mobile Internet and these weird videogames that were very social and then suddenly the rest of the world got interested.   That was when MacArthur stepped in, yes. I was starting to write about this stuff, suddenly the whole world was interested. I had already seen how youth culture was an incubator of trends around the digital. By 2004, people were paying attention to the mobile internet. It wasn't just high school girls in Tokyo. 

I was pretty confident in the topics I was choosing that they were going to become global phenomena that transcended ages. If you were an observer of the digital environment, you knew this was going to explode. That part was not surprising. I think the question of whether educators would pay attention, that was not preordained. MacArthur had important influence supporting a counter-narrative. Henry's paper was really instrumental in that. 

Tessa Jolls: Interesting, yes. Again, the impact on the different audience, splinters, educators versus the technology people and so on is really interesting because traditionally the education segment has always lagged and not necessarily been there. It was really important to have some impact on that particular audience and I think these reports did. That was something very different. 

Mimi Ito:  MacArthur’s choices of scholars were not in the educational mainstream. Bringing people like Henry into the conversation around education was an interesting move because Henry has credibility within the media and gaming space. That helped knit those worlds together, I think, in an important way. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

Next time, we will check in with Henry’s co-authors on the project to see how they are living with those insights in their professional and personal lives today.