John Fiske: Now and The Future

Last week, I was honored to be one of the keynote speakers at the Fiske Matters conference which was held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Fiske has been and continues to be one of the most important intellectual influences on my work. His strong defense of popular culture as offering a series of resources through which active audiences struggled over meaning was a foundation for my ongoing investigation of participatory culture and new media literacy. His work was controversial at the time he introduced it - in part because he challenged the tendency of left academics towards cultural pessimism which had motivated so much of American cultural theory in the late 20th century. Fiske struggled to get us to look closer at the lives of ordinary people and the ways that they struggled to assert aspects of their own needs and desires through their relationship with mass produced culture. For Fiske, mass culture was culture produced by commercial industries, while popular culture was culture at the moment it became a resource for ordinary people through the process of consumption. Fiske retired more than a decade ago, just as the digital revolution was helping to make the agency of grassroots cultural producers and consumers much more visible than it had been before. To some degree, the shock of the culture war which surrounded Fiske's works had left many of us uncertain how to carry that tradition forward. We had lost his mentorship and intellectual leadership; we didn't know how to face down his critics; and we didn't want the backlash to cripple our own professional development.

But this conference represented a rallying of the troops, a gathering of the tribes. It felt like a homecoming party or a family reunion for a particular strand of cultural studies that had made such a difference for each of us in the room. For a good recap of the event, read this blog post by Bill Kirkpatrick who delivered an eye-opening talk about what Fiske's ideas have and could contribute to debates about media policy.

We were honored that Fiske came out of retirement to share one last lecture with his students - in this case, a talk about how shifts in social consciousness were reflected in the material culture of the 16th and 17th century, which in the end turned out to also be a provocation to think about how our own relationship with self and community were changing in the digital age. This was a talk by a man who had spent the last decade of his life running an antique shop in Vermont and who was clear he was no longer reading cultural theory still managing to share some insights to scholars very much confronting the challenges of understanding his own time. Fiske suggested that antiques were physical reminders that people had thought and live differently in the past and that they had often done so in ways which were meaningful and satisfying to him; it was a suggestion that there were always alternatives to the current configuration of culture and power and thus, if things had changed in the past, they could and would change in the future. We hung on every word, reminded of his lively wit, his provocative personality, his attention to each phrase, and his systematic development of thought.

And as the weekend continued, we learned more about how he had impacted each of us - through his teaching inside and outside the classroom, through his writing, and through his work as an editor and leader in the field. He stitched together through his travels a network of people which scanned across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the Americas. And we saw how his students had taken his ideas to Asia and Africa as well. We saw Fiske's own students and contemporaries as well as the next generation - our students can be seen as Fiske's intellectual grandchildren, those who had found his writings through our own teaching and scholarship, all of whom still saw Fiske's ideas as a living presence in our thinking. Fiske made clear that he saw his legacy not in the continued circulation of his ideas, which he had seen as contributions to contemporary debates and conversations about culture and politics, but through the minds and personalities he had influenced. I certainly know that I channel Fiske all the time in both conscious and unconscious ways. It felt liberating to be able to talk with others about the importance of this man and his work.

I was asked by Routledge to write a general introduction to Fiske's scholarship which will accompany the reissue of some of his key books later this year. I also helped to pull together roundtable discussions of his former students around each of the books, feeling that it was far better to represent his works through conversations and colloquiums rather than lectures. I wanted to give just a little taste of this material here - part of my discussion of Fiske's relationship to technology and politics:

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"The technology needed for them [The Right] to establish the total surveillance upon which to base their moral totalism is already available. Fear will increase the likelihood of that technology's use and the probability of right-wing forces being in power to use it. It is, therefore, in their interests to confine as many of us as they can to our cultural and geographic enclaves. Is this what we want?" -- John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change, 1994 (MM, 253)

The above four sentences constitute the final words in John Fiske's final book before his retirement. It is telling that Fiske ends the book on a provocation -- "Is this what we want?" No matter how dark his vision of the society had become, Fiske believed we have a choice, that we have the capacity to change our social conditions , and he called upon academics to deploy their expertise and institutional power in the service of social change.

He asks explicitly: Is this what we want?

He asks implicitly: if not, what are we going to do about it?

The question culminates in a chapter devoted to what Fiske describes as "technostruggles," one of the few places where Fiske wrote extensively about technology as an agent of cultural change. Fiske wrote about arcade games, well before his contemporaries, in Reading the Popular (1989). He discussed the ways people were using channel changers to exert greater control over television in Television Culture (1988). And he described how the widespread deployment of photocopiers were causing anxieties about copyright regulation, even as copying television programs and music was becoming more "socially acceptable" [TC 311]. In each case, his arguments were ultimately less about the technology than about its popular uses. In such passages, Fiske suggested the complex interplay between technological and cultural change, but he never developed a theory of oppositional use of technology until the final chapters of Media Matters.

Fiske's relative disinterest in technology (and often, in media ownership) drew sharp criticism from political economists, who felt that he underestimated the structuring power of entrenched capital. He explains in Understanding Popular Culture that his theoretical perspective is "essentially optimistic, for it finds in the vigor and vitality of the people evidence both of the possibility of social change and of the motivation to drive it." [UPC,21] We've heard so much over the past decade and a half about the democratic potential of new media technologies and practices that it is easy to forget that Fiske saw the Internet as simply another battleground through which ongoing struggles over meaning, pleasure, knowledge, and power would be conducted. But he also did not accept a model which saw certain media technologies as forces for cultural domination:

"Information technology is highly political, but its politics are not directed by its technological features alone. It is, for instance, a technical feature of the surveillance camera that enables it to identify a person's race more clearly than his or her class or religion, but it is a racist society that transforms that information into knowledge." [MM 219]

The affordances of new media could be deployed towards certain ends, but ultimately, how they were used reflected their cultural context.

Fiske saw the promises of a digital revolution but did not declare a premature victory over mass media:

"New technologies cannot in themselves produce social change, though they can and do facilitate it." [MM 115]

"Power is social, not just technological, and it is through institutional and economic control that technology is directed." [MM 137]

"We can make our society one that is rich in diverse knowledges, but only if people strive to produce and circulate them. Technology will always be involved and, if its potential is exploited, its proliferation may make the control over knowledge less, not more, efficient." [MM 238]

"Technology is proliferating, but not equally: its low-tech and high-tech forms still reproduce older hierarchies, and although it may extend the terrain of struggle and introduce new weapons into it, it changes neither the lineup of forces nor the imbalance in the resources they command." [MM 239]

"The multiplication of communication and information technologies extend the terrains of struggle, modifies the forms struggle may take, and makes it even more imperative that people grasp the opportunities for struggle that the multiplying of technologies offers." [MM 240]

Yes, Fiske tells us, media matters, but media change does not overcome other social, cultural, political, and economic factors.....

When I brought John Fiske to MIT shortly after Media Matters was published, I remember the disappointment and frustration some of my students felt that Fiske was "not ready" to embrace the promise of the digital, because at the epicenter of the digital revolution, we were full of hopes that the new media would lower the barriers to entry into cultural production and distribution, allowing many more voices to be heard and putting greater power (political, economic, cultural) in the hands of "the people." I was surrounded by early adopters for whom the transformative capacity of new media was an article of faith. In this context, I often had to work hard to resist technological determinist arguments and to insist, as John had taught us, that cultural and social factors shape technology far more than technology shapes culture....

Confronted with the assertion that the wide availability of new tools would enable greater public participation, Fiske wrote, "In premodern Europe,... everyone had a larynx, but few were able to speak in public and political life." [MM 238] Technological access was not sufficient in the absence of efforts to overcome those social and cultural factors which blocked full participation -- what we now would call "the participation gap."

Fiske typically followed claims about grassroots resistance with an acknowledgment of the powerful forces which were stacked against us. For example, Fiske was interested in the unequal status of high tech and low tech uses of communication technology, contrasting the "videohigh" of the broadcast industry with the "videolow" of citizen camcorder activism, a contrast which paves the way to a consideration of how broadcast and grassroots media competes with each other for attention and credibility. Fiske wrote "technostruggles" in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial. As Fiske notes, the original video showing the Los Angeles police beating suspect Rodney King, captured via a home movie camera by a passerby George Holliday, possessed high credibility because it displayed so little technological sophistication:

"George Holliday owned a camera, but not a computer enhancer; he could produce and replay an electronic image, but could not slow it, reverse it, freeze it, or write upon it, and his videolow appeared so authentic to so many precisely because he could not." [MM 223]

The LAPD's defense attorneys deployed a range of technical and rhetorical tricks to reframe the King video and change how it was understood, at least by the jury, if not by the general public. For Fiske, this struggle over the tape's meaning suggested what was to come -- an ongoing competition between those who have access to low-tech, everyday forms of cultural production and those who had access to high-tech communication systems. If new media technologies were expanding the resources available to those who have previously seemed powerless, they were also expanding the capacities of the powerful.

In Media Matters, Fiske's embrace of participatory media practices was suggested by his enthusiasm for low-bandwidth "pirate" radio stations within the African-American community. At the same time, Fiske was quick to link networked computing with institutions of government surveillance. Fiske warned that the same practices deployed by companies to construct a "consumer profile" could be applied by governments to construct a "political profile": "The magazines we subscribe to, the causes we donate to, the university courses we register for, the books we purchase and the ones we borrow from the library are all recorded, and recorded information is always potentially available." [MM 219] Fiske predicted that conservatives might intensify the power of the government in response to their "fear" as America became a minority-majority country in the coming decades. Fiske anticipated that increased controversy around racial conflict would be embodied through "media events" such as the Rodney King tape and the LA Riots, the battle between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and the murder trial and acquittal of O.J. Simpson. A decade plus later, we are more apt to ascribe the growth of surveillance culture to the "terror" produced by 9/11 and its aftermath, though Fiske would have pushed us to consider the ways the War on Terror is linked to racial profiling and may mask other kinds of conflicts.

The Future of Teenagers: My Interview in O Globo

Here is the interview I did with Bruno Porto of O Globo, a publication targeting youth, during my time in Rio. The newspaper devoted three full pages to this interview which was prominent on its cover and I heard lots of great responses to it as I traveled around the country. I suspect what will be striking to readers in the United States is how much the questions being asked there by parents, teachers, and others about new media are very much those being asked in our own country. For those who prefer to read this in Portuguese, here's the link. What´s the main difference between the teenagers that lived in 2000 and the ones that live nowadays? Do you see them as completely different beings or the prior generation already had cultural elements that are present in the next one?

First, the continuities across generations are much greater than the differences. Young people today listen to different bands and often acquire music through different platforms than teens a decade ago, yet one's taste in music is still a key indicator of one's personal and social identity for teens. Young people play different games on different game platforms yet young people acquire and display mastery through competitive play. Young people use different social networking platforms and communicate with their friends through text-messaging, yet forging a place for oneself within the social system of their schools remains a central goal of adolescence. We can go down the list and most of the new digital practices which seem alien to older people are serving purposes which, if they are being honest, they recognize from their own teen experiences. That said, there are also significant differences, which I know we will get to as this interview goes forward. What does it mean to have immediate contact with your friends as a support system as you move throughout your day, to know that you will remain connected with your friends no matter where you move in the planet, and that you can form intense, intimate social ties with people who you may never meet face to face? Or to know, but not yet fully grasp, that those pictures you shot at a party when you were 16 could resurface at a job interview when you are 25 or end up being used against you in a political campaign when you are 45 because they have persistence online and can be accessed by many unintended audiences? These are some of the questions that contemporary teens face which are different from those confronting previous generations of teens.

Do you think that the leap between the 2010 generation and the 2020 will be as significant as the leap between the 2000 and 2010 generations? Or have the main, structural changes, already happened?

We are in the midst of a profound and prolonged period of media transition which is inspiring changes on every other level -- economic, social, cultural, political, legal... and I don't see the rate of change slowing anytime soon. Youth are often the earliest adapters and adopters of those emerging technologies and cultural practices as they seek out some place they can call their own, some place where their parents and teachers are not going to be nagging at and snooping on them. Young people, thus, embody the change that media is bringing and they are thus likely to be the advanced guard for most cultural practices. (Interestingly, this is not true for Twitter which has spread from the professional classes outward and downward to reach youth rather than the other way around). As this happens, they are going to create differences in style and taste which signal their differences in identity and affiliation. So, yes, I think that youth ten years from now will be significantly different from youth today -- with my above caveat that it will still be the case that the continuities in experience and interests will far out distance the differences.

Which aspect of the DIY/collaborative philosophy, that transformed the youth (and the world), seems more intriguing and relevant for you now?

For the past three decades, I have studied fan cultures as the springboard for grassroots creativity. Fans are people who are inspired by the stories that circulate through the mass media, who take elements of those stories and deploy them as the raw materials for their own creative expression, and who bond together over their shared investments in these rich cultural materials. I don't call this "do-it-yourself" but rather "do-it-ourselves," because of the deeply collaborative nature of these forms of cultural production. They are collaborative both in the sense that they build on existing stories, including those of mass media, within our culture and because they depend on each other to create the infrastructure which supports their creativity. Fan fiction is collaborative from conception -- as fans talk through story ideas as cafe table conversations, as they give each other feedback through Beta-Reading (peer-review) processes, as they read and comment on each other's shared works, and as they build the very platforms through which they circulate their creations. The fan fiction writer exists alongside the cosplayer who creates costumes and embodies characters, the fan musician who creates, records, and circulates songs, the vidder who re-edits and remixes footage, and so forth. All of them form communities which embrace new participants, which generate new forms of creative expressions, which teach each other the skills needed to participate, and who support each other's creations. This kind of participatory culture has existed for more than a hundred years, but the web has made it accessible to a much broader array of participants. Because it can innovate outside the constraints of the market or the art world, it is endless generative and thus a source of ongoing fascination to me.

The transformations that the web caused are already present in almost all the Western world, but parents and teachers are still trying not only to understand it, but to accept it. Why do you think they´re still in denial?

Some parents are in denial; some are in a state of panic. The first sees no change occurring, the second fears the change that is coming. Few are finding the middle ground between the two which allows young people plenty of space to navigate between neglect and constraint. I just heard the story of a young man, who came from a conservative religious family, who was told by his parents that he could not watch Family Guy or other Fox shows on television. The kid watched it on the internet instead without guilt, since his parents hadn't set up any restrictions on what he did on line. As someone who is the parent of a 29 year old son, I can tell you that most of parenting is reactionary. You are uncertain about the right way forward and so you fall back on what your parents did, even if they were dealing with different times and situations. You end up saying everything you thought you would never say to your kids because the script you have in your head bears the early imprint of your parent's philosophy. And you have to make a very conscious effort to change or reverse those impulses. You may change it some of the time, through sheer act of will, but then you will find yourself reverting back on other fronts. Most parents now do not have a script in their heads for thinking about what young people are doing with their iPhones. The young people are encountering situations which seem on the surface totally different from anything they faced growing up. That's why I always stress the continuities first. They may not know what the value is of having lots of friends on Orkut, but they do know that forming friendships is a vital part of adolescent culture. As the next group of parents grows up, they will have a better mental framework for thinking about these issues but unfortunately, their kids still won't believe they have any clue what they are talking about. :-)

During years journalists, teachers and other specialists considered videogames as a media that causes much more damages than benefits. Do you think that that perception changed?

Yes, somewhat. The good news is that the group of people entering the teaching profession over the past five or so years probably grew up playing Super Mario Brothers and so they have a much more normative understanding of what games can be used for. The bad news is that research shows that of ten different professional classes, teachers are the least likely to still be playing games today. Teachers are consumate creatures of the book and if anything, they are becoming more defensive about these new media as they fear that print culture may be displaced by digital. So, you have some teachers who do get the value of games as recreational and teaching tools, that want to see better games developed which they can deploy through their teaching, that may respect and value the kinds of teamwork and leadership skills being fostered on World of Warcraft, who may understand the simulations of history and government offered by Civilization or Sim City, We are seeing libraries embracing gaming as a community building activity for their patrons. And among educational researchers, games for learning constitute a high growth area of research. On the other hand, you see schools locking out most forms of participatory culture, closing out not only games but also Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia. You are less likely to see teachers who believe that playing Grand Theft Auto is going to turn their students into school shooters, but you are more likely to see teachers who believe video games are simply distractions from real learning, rather than recognizing how at least some games can be vehicles for the learning process. I will be happy when our government officials stop telling kids to turn off their XBoxes and do their homework, and start telling them to turn on their XBoxes and do their homework, but that's going to be a long time coming.

Survivor, The Matrix and American Idol are some of the franchises you used as example in Convergence Culture. Any other relevant examples appeared recently?

Franchises still dominate our media production. If I were writing the book today, I might have chapters focusing on Lost, Heroes, Glee, Avatar, and District 9, each of which represent a somewhat different way of thinking about the media's relationship to its consumers. Indeed, each of these franchises plays a role in my next book, which I hope to be writing later this summer, on spreadable media. So, let's take Lost. On the one hand, Lost represents one of the biggest hits on contemporary commercial television. When the Lost finale airs later this week, it is going to attract a massive audience. It is event television on a global scale. People will gather in large theaters all over the United States to watch it. They were flood Twitter and the other social networking sites with their responses. On the other hand, Lost represents all of the properties we would have associated with niche television a decade ago. It is a complex and demanding program. It draws a hard core, socially active, culturally generative audience. It challenges the collective knowledge and thinking of large scale social networks of people who pool their knowledge, compare notes, and try to figure out the mysteries of the island. And as they do so, they follow Lost through podcasts, websites, wiki projects, alternate reality games, and countless other platforms. Lost is television outside the box -- television in a transmedia environment. Each of the other examples I cite represent the further move of television into a transmedia and participatory world. With Glee, we might pay attention to it as a vehicle for selling music -- in that sense very much like Rock Band and Guitar Hero -- and we might talk about it as inspiring lots of amateur performances -- check out all the amateur performances of the songs from Glee which spring up on YouTube within hours of the airing of a new episode. With Avatar, I am of course interested in 3D but also in the ways that activists around the world have embraced the identity of the Na'Vi and their struggle against the cloud people as a language through which to talk about their own local struggles to protect their environments and their way of life. With District 9, I am interested in the ways that a small scale movie gains the level of public interest this film did through strategies which rely heavily on the most engaged and socially networked segments of their audience. And the list continues.

Ten years ago, in Brazil and many other countries, kids found it hard to feel attracted by their schools. Now, with their connection with technology and the internet, it´s ten times worse. Do you think that most countries are facing this problem properly?

I teach a class at USC on the New Media Literacies. One of the assignments is to have my graduate students interview a teenage student or a teacher they know. My students come from all over the world and since they tend to interview people in their own families, I see projects on people who live in many different countries. Almost without exception, every young person they interviewed had a more intellectually rich life outside of school than inside. The things they cared about, they things that provoked their curiosity and passions, were often things which had no place in the current configurations of schooling. The ways they learned best often involved tools and platforms which were blocked in the classroom. And they felt like what was turning them on intellectually was largely unknown by the adults in their lives. The teachers also expressed frustration about how much new technology they needed to absorb or about how hard it was to change the presumptions of school administrators that such tools were distractions from the core business of learning. This is bad enough as a global problem if we think about schools shutting down the brains of our most networked young people, but we might feel that they still get extra educational opportunities and cultural experiences outside the school hours. But then consider all of those young people who only get access to these technologies at school, for whom the teacher or librarian may be the only adult they know who has any understanding of the technical, social, cultural, and ethical challenges and opportunities they represent. If we shut these practices out of our schools, we will have denied those young people the support they need to meaningfully engage as citizens, workers, learners, and expressive individuals in a world where these technologies are going to be taken for granted. Young people are not better off being told to learn about technology on the street corner the way my generation learned about sex. Our schools need to develop a coherent, informed, creative approach to technology which incorporates the best tools and practices into their pedagogical approaches.

How do you think that the new generation is absorving so much information? Do you think they absorb less - after all, the information is at reach all the time - or less?

First, I think there is a shift away from an emphasis on learning information towards learning how to find information. The emerging generation tends to offload much of what they know into technological devices which they use to enhance their thinking. Take away my laptop and you chop off a chunk of my brain. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the information is changing at such a rapid pace. Yet, it only works if we don't fill our heads with misinformation, if we develop skills at evaluating information and recognizing what kinds of information we need to solve particular kinds of problems. Second, they are learning to depend on each other for information they may lack. This is what we call collective intelligence -- a world where nobody knows everything, everybody knows something, and what an individual knows can be shared with the group as needed. Young people are learning to recognize the expertise of their friends and others in their networks and learning to work together to solve complex problems which they would not be able to tackle on their own. So, there are two ways of processing the massive amount of information which the web makes available to us -- deploy tools which sort and filter the information or tapping into collaborative communities which appraise the information together from many different perspectives. The later, for example, describes how I use Twitter. I subscribe to the feeds of the smartest people I know in many different fields and trust them to insure that I at least get exposed to the key developments in those fields each day. Young people are tapping this in a more informal way, which is why young people often know a lot about current events without ever seeming to read a newspaper or watch the news. A lot falls through the cracks this way, which is why we need to foster these skills more, but it is still a pretty shrewd approach to dealing with what previous generations have described as information overload.

As schools, many companies that hire young people are not prepared for all the changes that are happening. How does that affect young people? They will try to adapt or look for new kinds of jobs?

Our young people have much more to give the world than they are being allowed to contribute. No question about it. When we read reports of fans developing online reference works for Lost, say, there's often a dismissive response that says they had too much time on their hands. I don't want to undercut the value of this grassroots production of knowledge and culture on its own terms, but I also want to ask - whose fault is that? Such activity emerges in a world which undervalues the creativity and knowledge, the skills and intelligence, of every day people -- undervalues it in school, undervalues it in the work place. As a result, young people create alternative spaces where they can learn and share what they learn with each other. It can be enormously frustrating to watch the company where you work make bad decisions because it is ill-informed about alternative possibilities, even as you sit there, knowing about new ways forward, and not being solicited to contribute, or sitting there going through mind-numbing repetitive activities while you know a high tech way which would be more effective and efficient. Just as schools need to change to embrace new ways of learning, companies need to change to embrace new ways of working. The most forward thinking companies have relatively flat organizations which allow new ideas to emerge bottom up from any corner of their staffs. They reconfigure teams so that everyone has a chance to lead and people can contribute based on their skill and expertise. As we think about who might be best at working in such an organization, it may well be someone who grew up playing massively multiplayers games, swaping roles, trying new identities, tackling new challenges. Hell, don't just hire an individual gamer. Hire an entire squad or guild, since this team of people already knows how to work together to achieve its goals, already knows what each member can contribute, and already trusts each person to carry their own weight. It isn't just that companies need to embrace new technologies; they also need to recognize and value new cultural processes which come out of young people's experience of growing up in a networked society.

Last week Rio received his first TEDx (a version of the original TED) and the main attraction was a 13 years old boy that knows how to program apps for iPhone and iPod Touch. Many scientists are trying to understand the brains of people like that boy, that could be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Do you think that makes sense, that they´re treated that way? Or in some years there will be thousands of kids like that one everywhere?

Our focus should not be on prodigies. There have always been child prodigies. There will always be child prodigies. That tells us little about the state of our culture. What we need to pay attention to are the remarkable achievements of perfectly normal girls and boys who are doing things that would have been inconceivable for earlier generations. Their ability to tap into social networks, to deploy new tools and technologies, to process complex information, is astonishing, yet often dismissed by their parents and teachers because it doesn't fit within the grids through which we evaluate their educational performance. It may well be the case that what this young man is doing will become much more widespread in another generation's time, especially as the processes for designing aps are better understood and toolkits more user friendly. In any case, I would want to understand not just how the boy's brain works but also the social support system around the child. What kinds of help has he received from parents, teachers, other adults along his path to this level of accomplishment, since no kid gets to this point alone. In general, we need to understand such developments not as singular cognitive accomplishments but as windows into the kinds of learning ecology which is needed to make it possible for every young person to achieve their full potential.

My Big Brazillian Adventure

Of the foreign language editions of Convergence Culture, probably the best selling one was the version published in Portuguese and distributed primarily in Brazil. Thanks to the support of Mauricio Mota and the Alchemists, a transmedia company which works in Rio and Los Angeles, my book has stimulated enormous interest in that country, with companies such as Globo and Petrobras buying hundreds of copies to give to their employees and clients as Brazil seeks to better understand the digital age at a moment of deep cultural and technological transition.

Why Brazil? Two primary reasons: First, Brazil is at the center of the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), countries which economists believe are going to be dominant economic (and I suspect, cultural) powers in the 21st century. These are countries on the rise, countries which have embraced new media and are surfing it to gain greater influence over the planet. Much as China has gained greater visibility in recent years through the Olympics and the current Shanghai Expo, Brazil is positioned to gain wider attention by hosting the Olympics and the World Cup in the next few years. It is a country with a strong digital infrastructure and thriving creative industries.

Second, unlike the United States, Brazil has held onto strong folk and participatory traditions, despite the rise of modern mass media. Seymour Papert famously used the Samba Schools as his illustration of how informal and community based learning works and that example has stuck in my head from my early days at MIT:

If you dropped in at a Samba School on a typical Saturday night you would take it for a dance hall. The dominant activity is dancing, with the expected accompaniment of drinking, talking and observing the scene. From time to time the dancing stops and someone sings a lyric or makes a short speech over a very loud P.A. system. You would soon begin to realize that there is more continuity, social cohesion and long term common purpose than amongst transient or even regular dancers in a typical American dance hall. The point is that the Samba School has another purpose then the fun of the particular evening. This purpose is related to the famous Carnival which will dominate Rio at Mardi Gras and at which each Samba School will take on a segment of the more than twenty-four hour long procession of street dancing. This segment will be an elaborately prepared, decorated and choreographed presentation of a story, typically a folk tale rewritten with lyrics, music and dance newly composed during the previous year. So we see the complex functions of the Samba School. While people have come to dance, they are simultaneously participating in the choice, and elaboration of the theme of the next carnival; the lyrics sung between the dances are proposals for inclusion; the dancing is also the audition, at once competitive and supportive, for the leading roles, the rehearsal and the training school for dancers at all levels of ability.

From this point of view a very remarkable aspect of the Samba School is the presence in one place of people engaged in a common activity - dancing - at all levels of competence from beginning children who seem scarcely yet able to talk, to superstars who would not be put to shame by the soloists of dance companies anywhere in the world. The fact of being together would in itself be "educational" for the beginners; but what is more deeply so is the degree of interaction between dancers of different levels of competence. From time to time a dancer will gather a group of others to work together on some technical aspect; the life of the group might be ten minutes or half an hour, its average age five or twenty five, its mode of operation might be highly didactic or more simply a chance to interact with a more advanced dancer. The details are not important: what counts is the weaving of education into the larger, richer cultural-social experience of the Samba School.

My Student Ana Domb Krauskopf recently wrote a fascinating white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium on Techno Brega, a form of popular music in regional Brazil, which operates under a radically different model of production and distribution which is being studied by many in the Free Culture movement.

If you accept my premise that digital participatory culture is what happens when we apply folk culture logic to the content of mass culture in an era where we have expanded capacities for circulation, then it makes sense that digital culture is going to take a very different shape in Brazil than in the United States. Given this history, my work seems especially resonant with Brazilian readers and I am feeling a strong tug to spend more time in that country.

I spent the last week and a half of May in Brazil, speaking with several key players there in the efforts to make the country a key digital player, including Petrobras, the leading oil company, and Globo, a key media producer and distributor. While I was there, I was interviewed by half a dozen or so of the leading print and television journalists.

The key event during my stay in Rio was a talk to creative workers inside Globo's Project, their primary production facility on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of a truly spectacular cluster of mountains and on the edge of the rain forest. I was consistently impressed in Rio by the ways that the natural world was fully integrated into the life of the city.

I was able to go to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain and look down on the city. Scattered throughout Rio are massive outcroppings of exposed rock -- to call them mountains, though they are mountain sized, does not really capture the oddness of these protrusions. They are much closer to Stone Mountain in my native Atlanta (of course without the carvings of Confederate generals!) than anything else I had ever seen. The city is wrapped in and around these mountains. In some cases, the Favela run up the sides of mountains. The more desirable land is at their foot. They are contained by the beaches and oceans that surround much of the city. And threaded through these pockets of development remain large forests. The effect is close to the technological utopian conception of the city as an integrated environment where nature and technology can co-exist. It is hard to go far in Rio without confronting the natural world and the companies where I spoke were very overt about their commitments to Green policies.

The event at Globo was simply spectacular. The production people had turned a soundstage into what can only be described as a set. Not only had they taken a key motif from the cover of my book and blown it up to the size of a wall, adding in massive television screens on either side, but they had taken other elements from the book's design and decorated the entire hall. It was packed with hundreds of people who wanted to learn more about convergence and transmedia. And the event was being webcast and live-blogged so the words were being transmitted to many who could not be physically present. I presented an opening talk on transmedia which drew upon my recent He-Man essay and my 7 Principles of Transmedia Storytelling paper, both of which have already been shared on my blog, and ended with some thoughts about future challenges confronting transmedia producers which I hope to share with my readers soon.

Afterwords, I was joined on stage by Mark Warshaw, who had developed transmedia for Heroes and Smallville and now is a key partner in The Alchemists, and Florish Klink, a recently minted graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program who is becoming the group's Chief Participation Officer (their expert on fan relations). And we were hit with all kinds of thoughtful questions from the audience, questions which showed just how carefully they had listened and absorbed the insights from my work and how much they were thinking through the future of media in their country. In some ways, they are a step behind developments in North America -- for example, the DVR has not yet come to Rio -- but they are learning the lessons of the early adapter countries and will be ready as they reinvent their media system for the 21st century.

Afterwards, we went on a tour of the production facilities. In many ways, they resemble the classic film studios of the Golden Era of Hollywood, except that they are managed by digital dasebases. So, there are large backlots and vast sound stages. We were shown, for example, a scale reconstruction of a Sao Paolo shopping mall which was used as the setting for a youth-oriented telanovela.

And we were driven through a lovingly recreated neighborhood from the south of Italy which is the setting of another of their popular series. I am posing here with Mauricio Mota and Flourish Klink from The Alchemists.

We toured a vast warehouse holding props which were in storage from previous productions and could be called up from the database when needed for new series and another warehouse where costumes were stored, organized by the decade where the stories were set. Alongside the storehouses, there was a factory of workers sewing new costumes to be used, often in just a few hours, on one or another of the projects they were filming and there were construction crews that could build and breakdown sets on a daily basis.

We walked through the soundstages and saw Passione, a telanovela, being shot. We met briefly the young and very attractive stars Mariana Ximenes and Reynaldo Gianechinni, who have been called the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt of Brazil. And we were able to watch them shoot a scene from an upcoming episode, standing in the booth with the director as they swapped between five cameras which were filming the scene. It was one of fifteen scenes for the series that were scheduled to be shot that day amongst ten or so settings in the studio devoted to Passione's production. The scenes were shot out of sequence 4 or 5 episodes at a time to allow them to complete their needs of a setting, break it down, and make way for the next setting, all in the course of a 1-2 day period of time. The folks with us who worked in Hollywood were astonished at both the attention to detail in the production design but also the efficiency of the operation over all.

(Next Time: Down Argentina Way)

Call for Papers: Transformative Works and Fan Activism

My team at USC is partnering with the fine folks at Transformative Works and Culture to put together a special issue dealing with our current research focus -- how we can forge a bridge between participatory culture and civic engagement. Here are the particulars. I am hoping some of you out there are either doing work on this topic or have graduate students who are and might be looking for a common space to publish your work. I am going to be speaking more around these topics at the Fiske Matters Conference and the Games Learning and Society conference this coming week, both in Madison, Wisconsin. Looking forward to seeing some of you there. If you read the blog, be sure to introduce yourself to me. I like meeting people who read -- especially at academic conferences. :-) Transformative Works and Fan Activism

March 2012

Edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California

How might research on fandom and participatory culture inform our understanding of citizenship and activism? Cultural theorists have long speculated about how our fantasy lives and cultural engagements might inspire broader forms of public participation. In his book Understanding Popular Culture, for example, John Fiske describes one potential route which might lead a young woman from fannish interest in Madonna towards the resources, skills, and identities she needs to contribute to social change. Fan studies have long located localized resistances within the cultural productions and practices associated with fandom, looking at how fan fiction, say, might lead to new understandings of gender, sexuality, and race. Yet there has been less work that examines how these imaginative practices, at times facilitated by digital media, might lead to an enhanced sense of agency or a new vision of social change, or how the skills developed through fandom might be mobilized for getting people out to vote, protesting public policies, or encouraging contributions and volunteerism around emergency situations.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins describes how popular culture, and more broadly participatory culture, can function as a civic playground, where lower stakes allow for a greater diversity of opinions than tolerated in political arenas. Jenkins argues, "One way that popular culture can enable a more engaged citizenry is by allowing people to play with power on a microlevel...Popular culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture." Building on these observations, we begin with the premise that participatory culture, like popular culture, encourages active participation, lively discussion, and even mobilization around particular topics and issues, leading to civic engagement. Clearly, a fan group online is apt to be far more diverse in its perspectives than a group defined around, say, a political candidate or a social issue. This is not to suggest that fan communities do not form firm consensus perspectives that block some other ideas from being heard, but they form them around different axes, such as desired sets of romantic partnerships between characters, which may or may not reflect ideological schisms. Our understanding of these synergies between participatory culture and civic participation creates many possible intersections with grassroots activism.

We seek contributions premised on a dynamic understanding of citizenship that will help us understand how participatory culture interactions encourage people to create, discuss, and organize as a way of engaging with specific civic issues and events, and whether (or how) these interactions may lead to new forms of social organizing and action. Researchers have long noted that people who participate in after-school programs or who contribute to the arts are more likely to become involved in other civic activities; we are just starting to understand whether or not interest-driven activities, such as fandom, which typically occur outside of formal educational settings, may have a similar impact on individual trajectories toward public participation. A growing number of groups, such as the Harry Potter Alliance, and specific campaigns, such as Racebending, are seeking to mobilize fans as potential political agents. In the process, these groups may support the development of long-term civic identities as well as the applied skills of fan activism, such as letter-writing campaigns to keep programs on the air. Both are likely to be useful for future civic and movement mobilization.

This special issue emerges from work being done by the Participatory Culture and Civic Engagement Project at the University of Southern California (Henry Jenkins, Principal Investigator).

We seek articles and other work that explores the continuities between online participatory culture and civic engagement, including, but not limited to:

• Case studies of U.S.-based and international fan communities who have moved toward civic engagement (including efforts to protect or promote the fandom, charity efforts, and direct forms of political activism).
• Examples of how practices from fandom and participatory culture are informing more traditional activist organizations and political debates.
• Examinations of how fan discussions flow into more overtly political conversations, with constructive or destructive consequences.
• Interdisciplinary explorations of ways in which participatory cultures may encourage some forms of civic engagement, as well as the possible limitations of such engagement.
• Considerations of how work in fan studies might contribute to ongoing discussions in cultural studies about the relationship between audiences and publics, consumers, and citizens.
• Theoretical discussion relevant to the trajectories that exist between participatory culture and civic engagement.
• Reflections on how a focus on "cultural citizenship" might challenge more traditional definitions of civic engagement.
• Analyses of digital media participatory practices in the context of civic engagement.
• Methodological discussions of how we might study the shifting relationship between participatory culture and public engagement.
• Investigations of how participatory modes of civic engagement intersect with questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.
• Mappings of the dynamics of the local and mediated in communities that form around participatory culture in the context of new media technologies.
• Discussions of how fiction and fantasy can captivate us on an emotional level, providing a narrative structure that can motivate us to seek change in the real world.

Writing from fans, independent researchers, community leaders, and practitioners is actively encouraged. We are especially interested in case studies that deal with these fan practices outside of the United States.

Submission guidelines

TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. Contributors are encouraged to include embedded links, images, and videos in their articles or to propose submissions in alternative formats that might comprise interviews, collaborations, or video/multimedia works. We are also seeking reviews of relevant books, events, courses, platforms, or projects.

Theory: Often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offer expansive interventions in the field. Peer review. Length: 5,000-8,000 words plus a 100-250-word abstract.

Praxis: Analyses of particular cases that may apply a specific theory or framework to an artifact; explicate fan practice or formations; or perform a detailed reading of a text. Peer review. Length: 4,000-7,000 words plus a 100-250-word abstract.

Symposium: Short pieces that provide insight into current developments and debates. Editorial review. Length: 1,500-2,500 words.

Submissions are accepted online only. Please visit TWC's Web site for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail the TWC Editor (editor AT transformativeworks.org).

Contact

You are encouraged to contact the guest editors with advance inquiries or proposals:

Henry Jenkins, hjenkins AT usc.edu

Sangita Shresthova, sangita.shresthova AT usc.edu

Due dates

Contributions for blind peer review (Theory and Praxis essays) are due by April 1, 2011. Contributions that undergo editorial review (Symposium, Interview, Review) are due by May 1, 2011.

Why Participatory Culture Is Not Web 2.0: Some Basic Distinctions

The following is excerpted from the Afterword I wrote for the recently published book, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel's DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. Next time, I will begin an extended interview with the book's editors about their views about DIY Media, Informal Learning, New Media Literacies, and Otaku Culture. Do It Yourself rarely means Do It Alone. For example, much of what youth learn through game playing emerges from "meta-gaming," the conversations about the game play. Trading advice often forces participants to spell out their core assumptions as more experienced players pass along what they've learned to newcomers. This "meta-gaming" has many of the dimensions of peer-to-peer teaching or "Social Learning." As John Seeley Brown and Richard P. Adler (2008) explain, "social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions."To call this "learning by doing" is too simple, since we will not learn as much if we separate what we are doing -- making a podcast, modding a game, mastering a level -- from the social context in which we are doing it.

I have always felt uncomfortable with the phrase, "Do It Yourself," to label the practices described in this book. "Do It Yourself" is too easy to assimilate back into some vague and comfortable notion of "personal expression" or "individual voice" that Americans can assimilate into long-standing beliefs in "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance." Yet, what may be radical about the DIY ethos is that learning relies on these mutual support networks, creativity is understood as a trait of communities, and expression occurs through collaboration. Given these circumstances, phrases like "Do It Ourselves" or "Do It Together" better capture collective enterprises within networked publics. This is why I am drawn towards concepts such as "participatory culture," (Jenkins et a, 2009l) "Affinity Spaces," (Gee, 2007) "Genres of Participation," (Ito et al, 2009) "networked publics," (Varnelis, 2008) "Collective Intelligence," (Levy, 1999) or "Communities of Practice," (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

While each reflects somewhat different pedalogical models, each captures the sense of a shared space or collective enterprise which shapes the experience of individual participants/learners. Each offers us a model of peer-to-peer education: we learn from each other in the process of working together to achieve shared goals. Many of these models emphasize the diverse roles played by various participants in this process. It is not that all participants know the same things (as has been the expectation in school); success rests on multiple forms of expertise the group can deploy "just in time" responding to shifting circumstances and emerging problems. It is not that all participants do the same things; rather, these practices depend on the ad hoc coordination of diverse skills and actions towards shared interests.

We need to understand the specific practices discussed here as informed by norms and values that emerge from their community of participants. We see different things if we focus on the practices or on the communities that deploy them, and in my remarks here, I hope to shift the lens onto the communities. Focusing on practices first, the editors write in this book's introduction, "Podcasting, for example, involves using particular kinds of tools, techniques and technologies to achieve the goals and purposes that podcasters aim to achieve, and to use them in the ways that people known as podcasters recognize as appropriate to their endeavor in terms of their goals and values." While saying something important about the nature of these practices, this description assumes that the operative identity here is that of the podcaster and that podcasters enjoy a shared identity as parts of a community of practice regardless of the content and functions of their podcasts. And this may be true for some, especially at the moment they are first learning how to podcast or are passing those skills and practices along to others, but for many, podcasting is a means to an end.

OTAKU, FANS, HIP HOPPERS AND GAMERS

On the ground, these practices get embedded in a range of different interest-driven networks and what motivates these activities may be less a desire to make a podcast than an urge to create a shared space where, for example, fans can discuss their mutual interests in Severius Snape or where church members can hold prayer circles or where comic book buffs can interview writers and artists or... The Digital Youth Project (Ito et al) drew a useful distinction between "messing around," tinkering with new tools and techniques to see what they can do, and "geeking out," going deep into a particular interest that may in turn lead you to engage with a range of social networks and production practices. There is some risk that as educators organize class projects around the production of podcasts, they risk divorcing these practices from the larger cultural contexts in which they operate.

We might think about different interest-driven networks as mobilizing somewhat different clusters of interlocking and mutually reinforcing practices. Consider, for example, Mimi Ito's (2005) description of the literacy skills within Otaku culture, the fan community around anime and manga:

"Anime otaku are media connoisseurs, activist prosumers who seek out esoteric content from a far away land and organize their social lives around viewing, interpreting, and remixing these media works. Otaku translate and subtitle all major anime works, they create web sites with hundreds and thousands of members, stay in touch 24/7 on hundreds of IRC channels, and create fan fiction, fan art, and anime music videos that rework the original works into sometimes brilliantly creative and often subversive alternative frames of reference.... To support their media obsessions otaku acquire challenging language skills and media production crafts of scripting, editing, animating, drawing, and writing. And they mobilize socially to create their own communities of interest and working groups to engage in collaborative media production and distribution. Otaku use visual media as their source material for crafting their own identities, and as the coin of the realm for their social networks. Engaging with and reinterpreting professionally produced media is one stepping stone towards critical media analysis and alternative media production."

Certainly, within Otaku culture, one can gain an identity as a fan-subber, a vidder, a fan fiction author, a community organizer, or an illustrator, but these practice-based identities do not supersede one's larger identity as an Otaku.

What Ito observes about Otaku culture is consistent with what researchers have observed in a range of other subcultures. Consider this description from my field work on female-centered science fiction fandom in the early 1990s (Jenkins, 1992):

"Four Quantum Leap fans gather every few weeks in a Madison, Wisconsin apartment to write. The women spread out across the living room, each with their own typewriter or laptop, each working diligently on their own stories about Al and Sam. Two sit at the dining room table, a third sprawls on the floor, a fourth balances her computer on the coffee table. The clatter of the keyboards and the sounds of a filktape are interrupted periodically by conversation. Linda wants to insure that nothing in the program contradicts her speculations about Sam's past. Mary has introduced a southern character and consults Georgia-born Signe for advice about her background. Kate reviews her notes on Riptide, having spent the week rewatching favorite scenes so she can create a 'crossover' story which speculates that Sam may have known Murray during his years at MIT. Mary scrutinizes her collection of 'telepics' (photographs shot from the television image), trying to find the right words to capture the suggestion of a smile that flits across his face....Kate passes around a letter she has received commenting on her recently published fanzine....Each of the group members offers supportive comments on a scene Linda has just finished, all independently expressing glee over a particularly telling line. As the day wears on, writing gives way to conversation, dinner, and the viewing of fan videos (including the one that Mary made a few weeks before)....For the fan observer, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about this encounter. I have spent similar afternoons with other groups of fans, collating and binding zines, telling stories, and debating the backgrounds of favorite characters....For the 'mundane' observer, what is perhaps most striking about this scene is the ease and fluidity with which these fans move from watching a television program to engaging in alternative forms of cultural production: the women are all writing their own stories; Kate edits and publishes her own zines she prints on a photocopy machine she keeps in a spare bedroom and the group helps to assemble them for distribution. Linda and Kate are also fan artists who exhibit and sell their work at conventions; Mary is venturing into fan video making and gives other fans tips on how to shoot better telepics. Almost as striking is how writing becomes a social activity for these fans, functioning simultaneously as a form of personal expression and as a source of collective identity (part of what it means to be a fan). Each of them has something potentially interesting to contribute; the group encourages them to develop their talents fully, taking pride in their accomplishments, be they long-time fan writers and editors like Kate or relative novices like Signe."

At the time, I was interested in what this scene told us about how fans read television and how they deployed its contents as raw materials for their own expressive activities. Rereading the passage today, I am struck by how fully the description captures the strengths of a DIY culture as a site for informal learning. Sometimes the women are working on individual, self-defined projects and sometimes they are working together on mutual projects but always they are drawing moral support from their membership in an interest-driven network. Each plays multiple roles: sometimes the author, sometimes the reader; sometimes the teacher, sometimes the student; sometimes the editor, sometimes the researcher, sometimes the illustrator. They move fluidly from role to role as needed, interupting their own creative activity to lend skills and knowledge to someone else. Their creative interests straddle multiple media practices: they write stories, they take telepics, they edit videos, they publish zines, each of which constitutes a complex cultural practice combining technical skills and cultural expertise. Leadership, as Gee tells us, is "porous": the space is Signe's apartment; Kate is editing the zine to which they are each contributing; and Mary has the expertise in fan video production which she shares with her circle in hopes of getting more of them vidding. And we see here a conception of culture as a series of "processes" rather than a set of "products." Fan work is always open to revision, expansion, and elaboration, rather than locked down and closed off from other's contributions. As a more recent account of fan cultural practices (Busse and Helleckson, 2006) explains:

"Work in progress is a term used in the fan fiction world to describe a piece of fiction still in the process of being written but not yet completed....The appeal of works in progress lies in part in the ways... it invites responses, permits shared authorship, and enjoins a sense of community.....In most cases, the resulting story is part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced...When the story is finally complete and published, likely online but perhaps in print, the work in progress among the creators shifts to the work in progress among the readers."

Similarly, Kevin Driscoll (2009) has discussed how Hip Hop's diverse practices around music, dance, the graphic arts, video production, and entrepreneurship associated with Hip Hop encourage participants to master a range of cultural and technological skills. He describes, for example, the different participatory practices that got mobilized around the circulation of a single song:

"

As the figurehead of 2007's "Crank Dat" phenomenon, Atlanta teenager Soulja Boy exploited social-networking and media-sharing websites to encourage a widespread dance craze that afforded him a level of visibility typically only available to artists working within the pop industry. "Crank Dat" ... began as a single commodity but grew into a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon.... Within just a few months of the first "Crank Dat" music video, fans had posted countless custom revisions of "Crank Dat" to media-sharing sites like YouTube, SoundClick, imeem, and MySpace. In each case, the participants altered the original video in a different manner. They changed the dance steps, altered the lyrics, created new instrumental beats, wore costumes, and performed in groups. Some created remix videos that borrowed footage from popular TV programs and movies...."Crank Dat" welcomed diverse modes of participation but every production required considerable technical expertise. Even a cursory exploration of the various "Crank Dat" iterations available on YouTube provides evidence of many different media production tools and techniques. The most basic homemade dance videos required operation of a video camera, post-production preparation of compressed digital video, and a successful upload to YouTube. For some of the participants in "Crank Dat", the dance craze provided an impetus for their first media projects. This lively media culture is representative of a spirit of innovation that traverses hip-hop history."

As a former classroom teacher who worked with inner city and minority youth, Driscoll directs attention towards the technical proficency of these Hip Hop fans, to challenge assumptions that often position African-American males on the wrong side of the digital divide, assuming that they have limited capacity and interest for entering STEM subjects. Rather, he argues that educators need to better understand the ways that their cultural attachments to Hip Hop often motivate them to embrace new technologies and adopt new cultural practices, many of which could provide gateways into technical expertise.

Or consider what James Paul Gee (2007) tells us about the "affinity spaces" around on-line gaming:

" A portal like AoM [Age of Mythologies] Heaven, and the AoM space as a whole, allows people to achieve status, if they want it (and they may not), in many different ways. Different people can be good at different things or gain repute in a number of different ways. Of course, playing the game well can gain one status, but so can organizing forum parties, putting out guides, working to stop hackers from cheating in the multi-player game, posting to any of a number of different forums, or a great many other things."

Indeed, for Gee, the idea of multiple forms of participation and status are part of what makes these affinity spaces such rich environments for informal learning. Unlike schools, where everyone is expected to do (and be good at) the same things, these participatory cultures allow each person to set their own goals, learn at their own pace, come and go as they please, and yet they are also motivated by the responses of others, often spending more time engaged with the activities because of a sense of responsibility to their guild or fandom. They enable a ballance between self-expression and collaborative learning which may be the sweet spot for DIY learning.

These examples represent four very different communities, each with their own governing assumptions about what it means to participate and about what kinds of cultural practices and identities are meaningful. Yet, all of them embody the pedagogical principles I have identified within participatory culture:

"A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another." (Jenkins et al, 2006)

CHALLENGING THE "LEARNING 2.0" FORMULATION

There has been a growing tendency to describe the application of these participatory culture principles to the classroom as "education 2.0" and as we do so, to take the highly visible corporate "web 2.0" portals not simply as our ideal model, but also as the source for these new participatory practices. Look at the way Brown and Adler's (2008) influential formulation of "Learning 2.0" ascribes agency to corporate platforms and technologies rather than to communities of participants:

"The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources-- such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities-- have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multple modes of learning."

The DIY ethos, which emerged as a critique of consumer culture and a celebration of making things ourselves, is being transformed into a new form of consumer culture, a product or service that is sold to us by media companies rather than something that emerged from grassroots practices.

For this reason, I want to hold onto a distinction between participatory cultures, which may or may not engaged with commercial portals, and Web 2.0, which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices that seek to capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users. "Web 2.0" is not a theory of pedagogy; it's a business model. Unlike projects like Wikipedia that have emerged from nonprofit organizations, the Open Courseware movement from educational institutions, and the Free Software movement from voluntary and unpaid affiliations, the Web 2.0 companies follow a commercial imperative, however much they may also wish to facilitate the needs and interests of their consumer base. The more time we spend interacting with Facebook, YouTube, or Live Journal, the clearer it becomes that there are real gaps between the interests of management and consumers. Academic theorists (Terranova,2004; Green and Jenkins, 2009) have offered cogent critiques of what they describe as the "free labor" provided by those who chose to contribute their time and effort to creating content which can be shared through such sites, while consumers and fans have offered their own blistering responses to shifts in the terms of service which devalue their contributions or claim ownership over the content they produced. Many Web 2.0 sites provide far less scaffolding and mentorship than offered by more grassroots forms of participatory culture. Despite a rhetoric of collaboration and community, they often still conceive of their users as autonomous individuals whose primary relationship is to the company that provides them services and not to each other. There is a real danger in mapping the Web 2.0 business model onto educational practices, thus seeing students as "consumers" rather than "participants" within the educational process.

He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia

The other day I flew back to Cambridge at the request of Scot Osterweill, the research director for The Education Arcade, in order to participate in the Sandbox Summit, a fascinating gathering of game designers, toy makers, television producers, children's book authors, and educators drawn together through their shared interests in "how media is changing our play and how play is changing our media." I had been asked to give a keynote address which would share some of my thoughts about transmedia entertainment in a way that might be relevant to people who were shaping children's culture. As I was pulling my thoughts together for the talk, I stumbled onto an article in I09, one of my favorite blogs about geek culture, which listed the "ten most unfortunate Masters of the Universe Toys." I shared the blog post with my son, now 29, who had grown up as part of the "He-Man" generation and we both took great pleasure in realizing that he had at one time had almost all of their examples in his collection and that we both remembered all of these toys. There was, for example, Moss-Man, an action figure covered in green fuzz; Stinkor, an action figure that smelled and looked like a skunk; and Mosquitor, an action figure which contained a red blood-like fluid.

And I began to ponder why these toys had been such a memorable part of his childhood and what it meant that the generation of young men and women who were, in many cases, controlling the production of transmedia entertainment had come of age playing with this particular media franchise. In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.

Peggy Charren, who formed Action for Children's Television and lobbied the Federal Communication Commission to regulate childrens programming, would have had an explanation. At the time, she argued that Heman and similar programs were simply "half hour commercials" which had no redeeming value, because they "blur the distinction between program content and commercial speech. Children are attracted to the concepts of the shows and don't fully understand the selling intent behind them... [This has become] a gold mine to station managers and toy manufacturers, but a commercial nightmare to most parents." She and her allies argued that the stories and characters, she feared, were being sacrificed in order to turn the cartoons into advertisements for tie-in toys and as a consequence, these toys were going to stifle youngsters' imaginations. Charren's critique of these toys has taken deep roots among the professional classes, as was reflected by the many different ways these concerns got evoked by speakers at the Sandbox Summit. I do not mean to make light of these concerns, though I have also always found myself resistant to the language used to critique these toys, which often assumes that the play around these fictional narratives necessarily reproduces the terms of the original stories without creating a space for the child's own imaginative contributions.

There is no denying that Mattel had a clear commercial interest in producing the program and extending our experience of watching the show into a line of associated toys. And the same can be said of contemporary transmedia entertainment content which is often funded by the branding and promotional budget for the media property. Minimally, transmedia extensions are selling the "mother ship." Often, they are creating alternative sources of income - they are products in their own right just as the He-Man dolls are.

Yet, I don't think we can reduce the experience which young people had playing to He-Man to simply the selling and buying of commercial commodities, however distasteful such toys seem to many academic parents. After all, all of us have bought many commodities in our lifetime, most of which we forgot as soon as we had consumed them, yet these particular toys have become part of the shared memories of my son's generation in part because they were tokens of stories and entertainment experiences which were deeply meaningful to them. More than that, though, these toys became resources for their own imaginations, tokens which they used to claim a space for themselves within the stories.

Whether they fully recognized it or not, when media producers sold these toys to our children, they also told them things about the nature of the story - the story you saw on the screen was not complete and self contained; these characters had a life beyond the stories we've been sold and told, and what happens next is literally and figuratively in the hands of the consumer. These toys were in effect an authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.

Children have long played with the core narratives of their culture, as might be suggested by the fact that Tom Sawyer played Robin Hood, Anne of Green Gables King Arthur, and Meg of Little Women Pilgrim's Progress, each central stories of their own time. In the 20th century, mass media displaced many traditional stories, but it does not follow from this that children's play with narrative was none the less meaningful to them as a way of trying on adult roles and asserting their own ability to build on and revise core stories that matter to them.

As a father during that period, I have vivid memory of the intense pain of stepping barefoot on some molded piece of plastic when I was called into my son's bedroom at night to comfort him about a bad dream. I'd pick up the plastic shield, sword, or pick ax, and grumble, "grrrmble snarl Teela" and my son, a stickler for details, would correct me, "No, Dad, that belongs to Sorceress." These details mattered. I often reflected at such moments (or at least I did when the pain of my punctured flesh subsided!) on the ways that this attachment to distinctive shields, say, mirrored the detailed descriptions of the shields and weapons of the different Greek heroes found in Homer, suggesting that heraldry in some forms remains an active element in stories across history.

The accessories were extensions of the characters, reflections of their personalities, artifacts of their stories, and signs of their capacities for action. Each character was connected to every other character through complex sets of antagonisms and alliances and each character bore their own mythology which could become the point of entry for a new as yet unrealized story. He-Man was teaching his generation to think not just about individual stories but about the process of world-building and part of the pleasure of collecting these toys was to demonstrate their mastery over the lore of these worlds.

In some cases, the characters would be deeply embedded in the aired episodes and in other cases, they would exist only in the background or only in one episode and often these were the characters most vividly remembered because they became the child's own possession, their backstory fleshed out from their own imagination, their personality constructed from their own playful performances. Each of the characters had different personalities (and thus demanded different voices) and over time, you would learn their verbal ticks, the quirks of their personality, and the sound of their voice, even though no two children would necessarily perform these characters in the same way. We might think of these characters as in effect avatars, an extension of the child into a virtual or imagined world, and see these constant shifts between personalities as a predecessor of what we would describe as identity play in adolescence.

Of course, the performance doesn't end there. The child themselves might become He-Man or some of the other characters through Halloween dress-ups and the web is full of yellowing family photographs of children of my son's generation physically embodying the heroes of their programs. Their mothers (or in my son's case, their grandmothers) might be coaxed into decorating birthday cakes with images copied from He-Man coloring books. And those lacking coloring books (or possessing artistic temperaments) would draw their own pictures of these characters which gave another tangible form to their fantasy lives. My son wrote countless stories which he dictated to his mother and I about He-Man and in the process, he moved from playing with physical objects to playing with words and with the basic building blocks of narratives.

In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmnation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figures, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books, each of which gave us a chance to learn a little something more about Eternia, Castle Grayskull, and the other places where these stories took place.

And of course, He-Man was only one of the many media franchises which were producing action figures. My son collected figures from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and the World Wrestling Federation, not to mention a smathering of Transformers, Thundercats, Silverhawks, and many other toy lines. Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories, which might involve meet-ups and cross-overs unlikely to occur in commercial media (though there was at least one DC comic where Superman and He-Man combined forces) but almost inevitable once kids got their hands on the toys.

Sometimes an action figure would stand in for another character not yet acquired much as an actor plays a fictional role and in other cases the pleasure was in experimenting with the boundaries between texts and genres, with the mixing of characters forcing them to rethink the scripts. The cross-over points to the generative dimensions of this action figure play - the ways that kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.

I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son's imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite - a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture. The fact that these stories were shared through mass media with other kids and that they were some vividly embodied in the action figures meant that it was easy for children to have intersubjective fantasies, to share their play stories with each other, and to pool knowledge about the particulars of this fictional realm.

So, is it any surprise that as this generation has grown older, they have continued to use these stories, characters, even the toys themselves as resources for their own creative expression? The web is full of amazing fan art in which artists lovingly recreate the assemblage of action figures and accessories they enjoyed as a child, much as earlier generations of artists sketched or wrote stories about the stuffed toys of their childhood imagination. (Think Winnie the Pooh or Raggedy Ann and Andy for earlier kinds of toy focused stories.)

There is a whole genre on YouTube of action figure movies, movies which may lovingly recreate the specific images the filmmakers remembered from the source material but may also playfully evoking the mixing and matching of characters that were part of toyroom play.

This same aesthetic of action-figure cinema gave rise to Adult Swim's successful Robot Chicken series, which also mixes and matches characters or recasts them to achieve desired effects. Here's one of their spoofs of the He-Man characters.

And I am particular fan of the web-based Skeltor Show, which remixes and remasters footage from the original He-Man cartoons for irreverent comedy.

All of this suggests that these toys left a lasting imprint on the imaginations of the generation that grew up playing with them.

When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm. From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.

In that sense, the action figure is very much the harbinger of the transmedia movement.

Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part Two)

Often, the teaching of the new media literacies is understood as either the domain of a specific digital specialist or as the work of language arts or arts instructors. Yet you offer many examples of how and why this approach should impact other disciplinary domains. Why should these skills and knowledge be integrated across the curriculum?

Erin:

If you look at these three words, New + Media + Literacies ...there are different ways to interpret them. You could read it as "New Media" Literacies or "New" Media Literacies. Either way, there is no wrong answer.

"New" Media Literacies does build upon the media literacy movement where we move from being empowered by media to critically analyze the media we consume through asking important reflective questions to now being producers of media ourselves. And in this new role as producer, there are new questions to ask and new ways to think and act on how to be an integral part of shaping and contributing my perception of the world.

But also, "New Media" Literacies is a new form of literacy and helps teachers understand that our students are reading and writing in new ways. Reading and writing was once relegated to reading books and writing papers, but now we write into meaning through new media such as video, audio or even construction of physical objects.

A possible hypothesis is that the educational system has not caught up with the shifting landscape of participatory culture where there are new ways to read, write, and compute numbers.

PAST PRESENT

Reading a Book Reading a Transmedia Story

Writing Alone Networked Writing

Memorizing Formulas Gaming as Problem Solving

This shift changes the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement where creativity and active participation are the hallmark. And it makes it increasingly important to understand and be competent in the skills of citizenship, art, and expression of social connectivity. These are the skills identified in our white paper as the New Media Literacies and ones we need to foster as we think about education.

We are in a paradigm shift in the classroom where educators need to work in the gap between life and school. You only have to observe your students outside of the classroom for a few hours to see that they are immersed in this digital culture. This is not a "special treat if they're good" sort of immersion but a complete shift. It's their way of life. Incorporating participatory practices into the classroom -- such as remixing, Wikipedia, SNS, or even mobile -- allows for a blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning and harnesses the power of digital technologies for students to reflect on the participatory culture that they live in.

This provides teachers an opportunity to offer learning objectives in their classrooms in a new way, while at the same time offering students opportunities to read and write their cultural practices that are central to their own everyday experience.

You point to a kind of generation gap around Wikipedia where students love it and teachers are wary. What do you see as meaningful steps forward in addressing these different perceptions of the value of Wikipedia? Are there examples of teachers who are effectively integrating Wikipedia into their teaching?

Jessica:

A first step is for our educational community to view Wikipedia as a collaborative learning environment. At first glance Wikipedia is perceived as simply an online encyclopedia--it's a product. Our community should look beyond the surface and focus on Wikipedia as a venue for contributing, editing and the sharing of one's expertise. For me, educators can learn a lot by creating low-risk environments in which making mistakes and struggling to come to an answer are the norm. Although someone can delete my additions to a Wikipedia entry, I can engage in a conversation around why this happened. I am part of a larger discussion around the creation and sharing of knowledge rather than being told I am incorrect and here is the right answer. Engaging a student can depend on whether or not she believes her input matters. Yet an engaged student must also be open to negotiation, revision, and change as these are inherent to the learning process. I learn from my mistakes just as I learn from my accomplishments.

I also think that Wikipedia should not be banned in schools (although there are issues of determining the appropriateness of content). I think it is an excellent starting point for research--as long as both teachers and students understand its strengths and weaknesses. And this means that all teachers need to teach what it means to research something in their disciplines. The act of researching is an act of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and assessing information as well as its source. These skills are vital to our digital media age and get at the heart of bias, perspective, objectivity/subjectivity.

Erin:

The first meaningful step to recommend is for school administrators and teachers to better understand Wikipedia's practice and the importance of the new media literacies that are gained in its practice.

Wikipedia was a predominant activity we encouraged in NML's pilot studies last year. However, this activity had numerous road-blocks. We had one teacher comment, "When I've looked at pages in Wikipedia, I've found that some are not very accurate or complete. I'll use it in my classroom, when they go in and fix it." This shows that we need to help teachers understand that "they" is the community of users and that community could include the teacher and her students. We also found that Wikipedia was often blocked at the schools we piloted our resources in, and had to go to measures to get it unblocked in order to use it for the class period.

One of the most valuable segments of Wikipedia's use was observing Global Kids' Media Masters program create the Prospect Heights Campus Wikipedia Project, which spanned five weeks. The Wikipedia page about the Prospect Heights Campus was a place for students to document information about the campus, its schools, history, and whatever else the students decided was important to include in an entry - and a place for them to do so publicly and neutrally. There are many examples of a structured learning environment of wikis or wiki pages being created; however, Global Kids chose to use Wikipedia and not develop a pbwiki or something similar for just their group of students to view.

Trying to replicate Wikipedia through pbwiki, or some other wiki software, certainly has its benefits. It is what might be termed a "walled garden" approach, allowing students to tinker with wiki software and yet not be exposed to the potentially disruptive larger Internet. However, choosing a walled garden approach also has many costs. Students who already use the internet know very well what is actually "out there," and the walled garden runs the risk of losing their interest - because, after all, a walled garden isn't the "real world." Even if students are unfamiliar with the Internet, using a walled garden approach precludes the possibility of emergent learning.

If a teacher develops a project in a walled garden, that is where it stays. It cannot become part of the information ecology of the web, and students cannot thereby learn about community participation. Nor can they be convinced that their work has any greater significance than "something I had to do to get a grade." They know very well that their work will never receive any attention from people who are not in their class.

In Global Kids' Media Masters class, however, the students were energized by the knowledge that 1) they were filling a real need on Wikipedia, and 2) their work was going to become part of the great online knowledge base. The students prepared their page, but when it came time to copy and paste it into Wikipedia, they were nervous, excited, and thrilled. The act of pushing the "submit" button - that is, the act of submitting their classwork to their teacher - was suddenly pregnant with significance. They weren't just turning in homework. They were putting themselves out there and helping shape the way the public would see their high school - would see them.

You make a strong case for the value of remix practices for learning, yet many teachers are stuck back at square one, expressing concerns about plagerism and wondering whether remix really does foster creativity. How can you speak to this long-standing concern of educators? Are they wrong to worry about issues of ownership and authorship in the new digital age or are there important differences between remix and plagerism?

Erin:

Right now, technology, new social norms and economics are all going through radical change and history has shown that at this point of convergence, moral structures break down and need to be re-built (E. P. Thompson).

It's a known fact that probably every teacher reading this has seen in the classroom a form of plagiarism facilitated by digital media. Existing laws on copyright may not match social norms and this crossroads is predicated even more with the rise of remix culture and the ability to meaningfully sample content and create new pieces of work. Shephard Fairey's Hope poster of Barack Obama is a perfect example of one of the most powerful images ever created that captured the moment of political change being foreground now with the legal battle of messiness where people are taking sides as to where they stand on Fair Use. Even artists are at a crossroads.

Through all of this though - teens are still remixing. You only have to go to YouTube to see the latest remix posted. Should we leave our students alone to wade through this muckiness themselves or is it our responsibility to mentor them in their process?

Encouraging remix in the classroom provides new venues of learning and interacting with our students. Teachers can guide youth to better reflect on these new forms of creation and know the difference between plagiarism and appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. We can help students to support their argument for their creative expression and identify other works that inspired them during their process. We can provide opportunities to explore how we author new creations with regards to point of view, character, themes, etc. and give practice to understanding copyright protection and a broader sense of authorial responsibility.

So yes, there is concern for this but the question to ask yourself is, "Are you going to blame new media as the problem or are you going to look to it as a possible solution?" Perhaps this moment in history gives us pause to rethink what are the projects we ask of our students to do? Is an essay the only way your learning objective can be met? Are their other creative practices that provide new forms of reflection and learning?

Your book's contributors involve both academic researchers and practicing educators. What do you see as the most important points or contact or divergence between the ways these two contributors approached the concerns the book raises?

Jessica:

Classroom teachers are often voicing their concerns about a lack of opportunity to sit down with their colleagues and discuss important issues; time is not allocated for them to be part of a learning community. I have had similar experiences as a professor in academia. In both realms, there is a tendency to work extremely hard in isolation. My hope is that this book can serve as a conduit for academic researchers and practicing educators to talk about their findings, their experiences, and their hopes for new and different teaching and learning environments. We must remember that there is always something to learn about our disciplines by looking outside of them.

What I find wonderful about the contributors to the book is that researchers like danah boyd would welcome an opportunity to sit down with classroom teachers and talk about the ethics of social networks and what it means to be part of a network, just as English teacher Amy Crawford would jump at a chance to talk to researchers about her students as textual borrowers--as remixers and media makers in her classroom. There are many points of interest here and, to be frank, we must be open to these kinds of trans-academic connections and discussions because we need each other as allies to move forward in rethinking learning, literacy, and technology integration.

Much of the book tries to help teachers overcome their anxieties about working with new media technologies and practices. So, let me ask, which concerns do you think are valid? Where should teachers and schools go slowly in embracing these new media?

Maryanne:

With regard to embracing technology, I think that teachers need think through the consequences of implementing any innovation. For example if a teacher hosts a blog where students post satiric pieces about the school, the administration might feel that some of the postings conflict with the image of the school they wish to project to the community. In any social network there are going to be "in-house" jokes that might puzzle or even offend outsiders. Teachers need to take a clear look at new media practices and consider how they will change when they are employed in school settings. With the ability to broadcast thoughts, ideas and products, also comes the responsibility for considering who the audience will be and how they might respond.

Any time a teacher is asking students to perform activities in a virtual environment, be it posting on a website, or interacting in an immersive setting, she must consider her duties to guide, protect and mentor her students. Teacher need to think the way they do when they take students on field trips and make clear guidelines regarding their expectations. It is not foolish to be cautious; it would only be foolish to miss out on incredible opportunities for learning simply because teachers were not willing to plan and prepare for the excursion.

Jessica:

Technology can be a scary proposition for some teachers. For both novice and veteran technology users, integrating this element into their curriculum and feeling the need to be knowledgeable can be intimidating and anxiety inducing. Additionally, teachers rarely have time to pursue their own professional development (e.g. PD that isn't mandated by the school/district), which would allow them to bring something new to their curriculum. The anxiety comes from feeling like there is too much technology to learn, too little time to learn it, and not enough of the right support from employers to really grapple with it. One option is to utilize the knowledge of the classroom: no one knows everything about technology so who knows how to do what? Is there an opportunity for students, parents, or community members to step up in a technological role? Even though this shift in thinking may challenge our notions of authority and expertise within a classroom, it opens up the possibility to create a community of learners made up of both teachers and students working toward a common goal.

Since we know that time and anxiety are key issues for teachers, then let's change the culture of professional development: let's view PD not as a one-day affair with an "expert" but as an ongoing project with a group of educators dedicated to learning, creating, discussing, experimenting, and reflecting on their philosophy of technology and its integration.

You have created this book to spark conversations with teachers. What steps have you taken to continue this dialogue once the book is published?

Jessica:

It seemed illogical to invite classroom teachers to join a discussion without offering an online space to help promote and nurture such a discussion. I created this social network (http://teachingtechsavvykids.com) in the hopes that both researchers and practicing educators could connect and discuss issues important to them as well as the issues the book addresses. I view the site as a way to collaborate, share stories of hope, frustration, and change, and tackle some of the tough questions of this profound moment. Ann Lauriks, a middle school counselor who contributed to the book, has already promised to write another piece to share with the new online community. In addition, some of the researchers who contributed to the book along with other colleagues have expressed interest in sharing their ideas and personal experiences within this space. I am excited to see the enthusiasm and ongoing commitment to continue this discussion and collaboration and I hope all educators will feel inclined to participate.

Maryanne Berry enjoys a high school teaching career that has spanned a

quarter of a century. The longer she teaches, the more fascinated she

becomes with the ways young people learn. She is currently a doctoral

candidate in the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley

Phil Halpern is the lead teacher of Communication Arts and Sciences, a

small school within Berkeley High School, where he teaches a variety of

English and communications classes. He traces his interest in media

education to the weekly television news program he helped produce while in

high school back in the earliest days of videotape.

Erin B. Reilly is the research director for Project New Media Literacies

first at MIT and now at USC. She is a recognized expert in the design and

development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered

by virtual learning and new media applications, known best for her work

with women and girls in Zoey's Room.

Jessica K. Parker is currently an assistant professor at Sonoma State

University, and she studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia

literacy into academic literacy learning. She has taught middle school,

high school, and college students for over a decade and has also created

and taught professional development courses for teachers.

Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part One)

Jessica K. Parker's new book, Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12 manages to be visionary and pragmatic in equal measures. Drawing heavily on the work done by researchers affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiatives, especially the Digital Youth Project, the book offers educators, especially classroom teachers, new ways of understanding young people's online lives and how the resources of new media and participatory culture can be effectively integrated into their pedagogical practices. The book brings together smart people -- researchers, classroom teachers alike -- to talk through the implications of our present moment of media changes on the kinds of learning which are taking place in school. The authors move deftly from considering the big picture to explaining specific activities which might be deployed in the classroom. I was proud to see some discussion of the work we've been doing through Project New Media Literacies sprinkled throughout the book and not simply because our Research Director, Erin Reilly, has contributed an essay on learning through remixing. I am using the release of the book this week as an excuse to bring together several key contributors to the volume, including Reilly and the book's editor Parker, for a conversation about the ways that this new research is challenging some of the assumptions that govern how teachers and administrators often respond to the potentials of new media and learning. And while you are at it, check out this rich website developed to provide teachers with resources around the book.

Can you give me a sense of your goals for this book? In some ways, it is translating or popularizing insights from the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning research for an audience of teachers. What do you see as the value of this research for impacting the decisions which teachers make everyday in the classroom, given, as you note, the primary focus of this research was on informal learning outside the classroom?

Jessica:

With this book, I wanted to invite educators, specifically classroom teachers, into this larger discussion of digital media and learning (DML). I felt that if I wrote a book for teachers my invitation needed to connote, "I trust you. Here is something that I want to share with you. I value your opinion and your insights." In the DML community, there is a sense that this current moment is a defining one. It is a profound moment. And I don't think my collective academic community has reached out enough to classroom teachers to say, "Join us in this moment." Join us--even though we may exist as researchers, educators, and mentors in different learning environments--join us as we analyze these important educational concepts and discuss how learning, literacy and knowledge creation and sharing are changing. Changing the culture of learning within schools starts with teachers.

I wanted to share this research with classroom teachers and listen to their responses. And yet, I realize that the book that I created with 28 collaborators will force educators to shift their perspective of learning by going beyond a normative understanding of formal education. I don't think this discussion will be an easy one: in fact, this book might take readers out of their comfort zones. And that is why it was important for me to "invite" teachers into this discussion. We desperately need this kind of philosophical discussion. In order to do this, I followed in the footsteps of the MacArthur Foundation and wrote a book that focuses on "learning" rather than "education" or "schooling." We must take a different angle on learning in order to see beyond the constraints of our own educational system.

I also wanted to avoid framing the book as a teacher's guide with a focus on one single subject with cut-and-paste activities for the classroom. This kind of thinking seems to promote an educational system devoid of curricular connections and deep participatory learning, and lacks application to everyday life. I framed the book as a philosophical discussion regarding learning in the 21st century in the hopes that we could take a step back from the everyday realities of the classroom and reflect on what it means to be an educator in these changing times. I know too well the teacher-mode of the treadmill, where from August to June I would run from unit to unit and chapter to chapter and miss making connections between topics, across disciplines or even daily lessons. We need to stop running on our treadmills and start asking serious questions about what it means to learn, to be literate, and to know something in a mediated culture.

In terms of the value of the research from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative, it is an excellent opportunity for teachers to explore pioneering research in this emerging field. Additionally, I don't buy into the notion that informal learning and formal learning are completely separate entities that have no bearing on another. I realize that they usually exist in separate settings and have different properties, but as a teacher and a learner, I have always viewed them as fluid. I don't want to draw a line in the sand and promote one over the other or frame our discussions as an either/or issue; in fact, I advocate that we should learn, reflect on, and analyze both settings. This can only make us better teachers and--most importantly--better learners.

You frame the book around issues of what learning, literacy, and knowledge mean in the 21st century. While it is clear you want educators to continue to ponder these issues, you also clearly have some thoughts that guide this book towards certain answers. What do you know about these concepts at the end of the process of writing this book that you did not know before?

Jessica:

In my current work with pre-service and in-service teachers in Northern California, when I introduce the topic of reassessing learning, literacy and knowledge, it takes more than just reading research to unpack these issues. It takes more than just having a class discussion; it takes more than just testing out an idea in their own classroom. Analyzing and re-visioning these core educational concepts takes a lot of effort and it is really a combination of factors that allow teachers to really grapple with these topics: reading, discussing, experimenting and testing out ideas in their classrooms, and then coming back to our graduate class and reflecting and getting feedback from peers. This is a process that needs to be woven into the daily life of teachers--and it's hard to create time and space to accomplish this. We have to know ourselves as teachers and be willing to analyze our own philosophies of education. It's not an easy road to take but it is required if we are to rethink school-based learning.

Many teachers fear that new media practices -- such as texting - leave students less literate. Yet, your book challenges this presumption. How do you see new media practices changing the range of expressive opportunities available to students?

Maryanne:

With regard to new media practices making youth less literate, it's a version of an old argument that surfaces every time there's a new wave of practice. Each new wave of media practices encounters resistance. Literary scholar, Nina Baym (2006), chronicles magazine and journal articles from the early 1800's in which editors asserted the need for reviewers to exercise surveillance and provide direction to the newly literate masses who had taken up the habit of reading fiction. Novels were dangerous! There was a similar kind of backlash in response to comic books. If anyone had taken that criticism seriously we would never have the incredible array of graphic novels we enjoy today.

As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, the critical change in the latest of the new literacies is that of convergence. The problem with "either/or" thinking with regard to traditional and digital literacy is that it fails to capture the experiences of youth. The child who is reading a novel from a traditional text, or listening to it on her ipod, downloading it onto her e-book, and visiting a website where she can play a game as a character from the book, participate in a forum discussion, and answer challenge questions, is transforming the practices of reading and writing. The sad fact is that she is not allowed to bring her e-book to school, even though some of her classmates wear outfits that cost more than her Kindle. She only sees a computer when her teacher beats out the thirty other teachers attempting to sign-up for the school's only computer lab on Wednesday, after lunch. Though at home she rarely writes with a pen, during the school day it is the only tool she is allowed to use in most of her classes. Even her cell phone must be kept in her locker or it will be confiscated.

Phil:

Students express themselves through a variety of media. Kids are writing independently more now than they have since I started teaching in1992. What is new is the range of digital communication modalities that kids are adopting with zeal and creativity. That they are doing so using communication tools that are new to all of us and somewhat foreign to many teachers is immaterial. They are practicing the skills we teachers value on a daily basis. When teachers build on students' passion, they are capitalizing on an opportunity to help kids deepen both their use of communication tools and their understanding of (hopefully) relevant course content.

You note that teachers often want to be told how they can use specific technologies in their classes. But you argue that this is not an adequate approach to the potentials and challenges of new media. Explain.

Erin:

When technology was first being used in the classroom, everyone involved in the process (from the developers to the school administrators, to the teachers working with the students) tried to replicate one to one what was already happening in the classroom. But we learned that this is the wrong approach. Integrating technology into the classroom provides new practices and scenarios that don't exist when technology is not there.

On top of that, technology moves at such a rapid pace that to introduce teachers to specific technologies to use in the classroom would be doing them an injustice in better understanding how to incorporate new practices in the classroom. If teachers only learned how to use specific types of tools, they would not be prepared to adapt and negotiate new spaces and new innovations that continuously happen in this rich media landscape.

No one technology is the savior for the classroom. It's not about asking ourselves what technology should I be using but instead we should be asking ourselves, "What practices enable my learning objectives?" This shift in question will encourage teachers to not be betrothed to a tool but instead encourage acquiring the new ways of thinking and doing through participating in new forms of practices.

New Media Literacies (NML) is working with the state of New Hampshire on a project called the Early Adopters' Network. This is a group of teachers from schools across New Hampshire who we collaborate with through NML's Community to better understand our pedagogical approach and try new methods and tools to increase collaboration among educators. One of the participating New Hampshire educators recently wrote us a reflection on her experience, "No longer am I looking to transfer some tech skill for use of an application but facilitating thoughts and skills through them. It's funny, because I always thought I did this, but the reality was my model basically encouraged to seek support from a classmate. The activities and lessons themselves were not thought-provoking or designed to encourage collaboration."

Though I don't endorse teaching teachers specific technologies, I think its important to provide ample time during each week to play. Play is one of the new media literacies, and we define it as the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving. What about setting up a digital tool playground for your school as part of your teachers' professional development and as a way for students to share their expertise with the adults in their lives? This would provide a new space for teachers and students to come together wearing different hats than what we see in the classroom. In an unstructured format, this digital playground would allow teachers and students to collaborate in new ways and make visible the value of the different expertise available right in their own school.

This is messiness at its best where teachers and students struggle together to better understand the social and cultural competencies and in a place where one isn't judged on outcome but on participation, teachers and students would have time to practice and reflect on what it means to be part of this networked world.

Jessica:

To reinforce what Erin said it isn't as easy as insert technology, out comes student learning. The excitement, sleekness, and allure of contemporary technology should not suggest that educators only have to incorporate laptops and webcams into their classrooms for students to magically acquire technical skills and understand academic concepts. We need an educational mindset that views technology as more than a mere tool--using technology in a classroom is in fact an application of a philosophy of learning. It is possible to incorporate digital media in a way that simply reproduces a particular kind of knowledge, a static notion of student identity, and a rigid understanding of teacher-student relationships. Viewing technology as both a philosophical issue and pedagogical practice offers teachers a way to avoid an overly deterministic approach to integrating technology.

Maryanne:

As a classroom teacher myself, I do not think that teachers want "canned" products that they can only employ in a particular way. Rather, they want tools and environments that can be used to extend and support the worlds they are creating in their classrooms. Excellent teaching involves a degree of risk and sadly today there are many constraints on teachers that keep them from trying anything new. Being too cautious can cause a teacher to miss the wave of enthusiasm that can generate real engagement in learning. I think that teachers need to look at how students use particular tools, how they participate in particular practices, how they act in particular virtual environments and then ask themselves, 'how can I use this to forward the subject I teach?'

I saw how much my students enjoyed instant messaging when it first became available to them and so I devised a project through which students used IM to discuss literature. The point is to try and play with the forms, bend the rules to serve learning in school. I made strict guidelines about IM-ing. I didn't want the conversations to be superficial. Students had to support their ideas with quotes from the text. There is a way of balancing the excitement of a new practice with the rigor demanded by a particular discipline.

With regard to specific uses of technology in classrooms we should be wary of practices that standardize student investigation and expression of knowledge. What the five-paragraph essay has done for writing, the powerpoint has done for presentations. Standardization of practices kills innovation as well as what we used to call "voice" in writing. While we want to introduce practices that help students organize their thinking, we also want to ensure that students will have opportunities to exercise agency in their own educations. I worry about this with regard to virtual worlds. Quests and adventures could be very exciting narratives through which students might learn all kinds of subjects, but there also needs to be studios and stages, places where young people can determine how to use the environments.

After an initial surge of interest, many schools have started to dismiss virtual worlds such as Second Life as potential distractions from the learning process. What was missed in this first wave of experimentation with virtual worlds for education? How valuable are such immersive experiences for learning? Which educational groups have been most effective at deploying virtual worlds?

Maryanne:

Of the reading I've done, the most interesting work has been in the field of medicine, not only with technical training but through experiments with virtual patients. Studies indicate that pre-service health care professionals respond to virtual patients as they would to actual ones--they have physical responses of anxiety and empathy when interacting with virtual patients.

With regard to virtual worlds, I think we will learn important lessons from Second Life. Before the recession there were 50+ virtual worlds emerging. I'm hopeful that we'll see lots of innovation in the development of immersive environments. What I envision happening is that schools and perhaps individual teachers will have access to virtual environments that they will be able to customize for their own uses. In the meantime, teachers should investigate virtual environments of all kinds, but especially immersive ones in order to experience how their literacy practices change when one dons an avatar. In Second Life, a teacher could join the very large and active education group and participate in virtual conferences and programs, in order to familiarize themselves with the possibilities. Teachers can visit http://simteach.com to get started.

Maryanne Berry enjoys a high school teaching career that has spanned a

quarter of a century. The longer she teaches, the more fascinated she

becomes with the ways young people learn. She is currently a doctoral

candidate in the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley

Phil Halpern is the lead teacher of Communication Arts and Sciences, a

small school within Berkeley High School, where he teaches a variety of

English and communications classes. He traces his interest in media

education to the weekly television news program he helped produce while in

high school back in the earliest days of videotape.

Erin B. Reilly is the research director for Project New Media Literacies

first at MIT and now at USC. She is a recognized expert in the design and

development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered

by virtual learning and new media applications, known best for her work

with women and girls in Zoey's Room.

Jessica K. Parker is currently an assistant professor at Sonoma State

University, and she studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia

literacy into academic literacy learning. She has taught middle school,

high school, and college students for over a decade and has also created

and taught professional development courses for teachers.

Thinkers Welcome: New Resources on Participatory Culture and Learning

Today, I want to flag for you some exciting online resources which emerged from two conferences on new media and education which I attended and participated in earlier this semester. The first is the TEDxNYED conference, which brought together some of the top thinkers about new technology, learning, and civic media, for an intensive one day session. Speakers included Amy Bruckman, Andy Carvin, Jeff Jarvis, Neeru Khosla, Lawrence Lessig, Jay Rosen, George Siemens, Mike Wesch, David Wiley, and others. There was something about speaking as part of an "A-Team" of speakers -- you bring your best work to the game -- and so each talk was surprising, engaging, informative, and mind-blowing. The TED podcasts are all gems and you can see this set of talks here. They just went up over the weekend. Since this is my blog, I am claiming the right to post my own video here. This talk emerged from some of the work I've launched since coming to USC on participatory culture and the public sphere. I've assembled a team of wickedly smart PhD candidates from Annenberg and the Cinema School who meet with me every week to try to identify and interprete case studies where our involvements as fans and gamers spill over into forms of public advocacy and activism. I've already showcased some of this work on the blog in the past and you will be seeing more in the months ahead.

As for the other podcasts, I wanted to flag two in particular which were of special interest to me because they represent the voices of classroom teachers who are trying to translate the abstract insights about new media and learning into day to day interactions with students on the ground. Chris Lehmann is the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia and Dan Meyer teaches high school math outside of Santa Cruz, California. Whenever academics gather to talk about education, there's some tendency to knock teachers. Or at least teachers become "collateral damage" in our critiques of educational institutions and practices, as if they were simply agents of the structures in which they serve. Yet, in fact, there are many greater teachers, librarians, and other educators out there who "get it," who have a grasp of the significance of the cultural and technological changes we are describing, and why they matter to young people. It was great to see their voices represented at the TEDx conference and I am happy to share those talks here.

I was honored to be asked to be the Conference Chair for the first MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Conference and to be able to propose "Diversifying Participation" as the main theme for the event. Diversifying Participation brought together several hundred educators, scholars, activists, community leaders, and journalists to share their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of young people. Our goal was in part to push the entire DML community to grapple more directly with the importance of enabling and promoting diversity within participatory culture. The plenary sessions of the conference have also recently been posted on line and may give you some sense of the event if you were unable to attend.

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Introduction and Opening Keynote from Shane Depner on Vimeo.

Introduction: David Theo Goldberg, Connie Yowell and Henry Jenkins (Conference Chair)

Opening Keynote: "Living on the Digital Margins: How Black and Latino Youth are Remaking the Participation Gap" S. Craig Watkins

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Plenary Panel from Shane Depner on Vimeo.

Digital Media and Learning: The State of the Field

Session Chair: Heather A Horst

Presenters: Amanda Lenhart, Brigid Barron, Eszter Hargittai, Joe Kahne, Kevin Leander and Lynn Schofield Clark

Discussion Moderator: Mimi Ito

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Closing Keynote and Closing Remarks from Shane Depner on Vimeo.

Closing Keynote: "Youthful Participation - what have we learned, what shall we ask next?" Sonia Livingstone

Closing Remarks: Henry Jenkins

By the way, I've gotten some questions about my discussion of 19th century zine publishing. My key source is: Paula Petrik. "The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870-1886," in Elliot West and Paula Petrik (eds.) Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. (Kansas City: U of Kansas P, 1992)

Finally, for those of you who heard about the great webinar which Project New Media Literacies ran last week on Collective Intelligence and Education, you can listen to a recording here. We will be running monthly events through the summer centered on the different skills identified in my MacArthur white paper. You should join us for some of the future sessions. It's a great way for us to engage with educators -- both classroom teachers and teachers in training -- who want to integrate the new media literacies into their pedagogical practice.

Is New Media Incompatible with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part Two)

In this second installment of my interview with Rich Halverson, we explore some of the trends impacting contemporary schooling, including the significance of home schooling, his vision for transforming schools, his research on fantasy baseball leagues as a literacy practice, and his thoughts on how and why schools should foster failure. As always, Halverson remains a provocative and yet substantive thinker about technology and learning.
Your book writes extensively about home schooling as an alternative to the current educational system. What advantages do home schoolers have in dealing with technological change? What are the limits of home schooling?

Home schooling is an interesting phenomena on several levels. First, it represents an effort to sever the traditional ties of institutional schooling and learning, individualizing instruction while keeping many of the curricular goals and sequences in place. Second, it cuts across cultural boundaries - many families on the left home-school for academic reasons, while families on the right home often homeschool for predominately cultural and religious reasons. Finally, the integration of technology with homeschooling may well signal a new path toward individualizing instruction in traditional schools. The predominant instructional model in the K-12 world aims toward moving students toward common learning goals, playing down individual difference in the interests of standardized outcomes. Home schooling has clear limitations - it is clearly too expensive (in terms of time, materials and money) to be conducted at scale, and the virtual curriculum used by many homeschoolers is typically based on very conventional page-turning pedagogies. But homeschool communities use technological resources to provide instructional coherence while maintaining individualized attention in ways that is would be smart for traditional school designers to watch.

You describe in the book some aspects of what an emerging educational system might look like. Can you share some of that vision with my readers?

The current state of education looks like an unlikely federation of uneasy partners - some for profit, others non-profit; some non-denominational, others ideological - who provide services to students without apparent coordination. NCLB legislation alone has sparked a vast expansion of third-party tutoring, assessment and coaching services that threaten schools and can be seen as competitors for future school funding. Digital media production, social networking, mobile computing, gaming and blogging operate entirely outside the control or influence of schooling. This motley collection of education services appears more like a consumer-driven market that could not cohere into a an educational system.

However, there are several key steps that might be taken to link these services together into an emergent system. We'd like to highlight two possible steps: 1) when administrative information technologies come to integrate user-driven networking practices, and 2) when some classroom subject-matter areas move to embrace digital learning tools. Schools are developing sophisticated tools for tracking student learning and teacher quality - but these systems are largely constructed about, but not for or by students and teachers. Social networks would provide a personalized complement to such systems that could link technologies designed to measure learning with tools to facilitate the activities of learners. It is not hard to imagine profile software that students and teachers could use to link educational activities, calendars, support services, interest groups, etc. The emergence of these personalized information tools may help usher in an integration of where schools are to where they might be.

In the classroom, one key indicator may be the degree to which non-tested subjects in schools embrace new approaches. Most K12 systems are experimenting with new kinds of media-based extracurricular activities and clubs. A threshold will be crossed when core instructional efforts in vocational education, arts, physical education and language programs follow the extra-curricular example toward greater integration of learning technologies. These subject areas are currently on the fence between embracing the standards-and-accountability practices of literacy and math or moving in another direction. Significant changes in these vital disciplines could serve as an example for how digital media technologies may transform teaching and learning.

In your historical account of the evolution of American education, one key difference between the apprentice and public school systems was how they dealt with the possibilities of failure. You suggest that in the apprentice system, it was taken as given that most students would learn, eventually, what they needed to know, while the public school system starts from the premise that only a small portion of the population can fully master its expectations. Many argue that we learn through failure -- through making mistakes and correcting them -- but that for this to work, we have to lower the costs of failure. How can we do this?

The idea that the apprenticeship model was successful for individual learning is by and large true. Because the master could work closely with the learner in apprenticeship, most learning failures could be mitigated or averted. In contrast, the American public school system provided little guidance for individuals to learn from local learning errors. Public schools were expected to provide opportunities for interested students to learn, and students who took advantage of these opportunities were able to progress. Public schools structures have typically lacked scaffolded support for individual learners to learn from mistakes - particularly across grades and classes. At the system level, comprehensive public high schools, community colleges and undergraduate programs addressed the learning failure issue in part by providing abundant course and program options for learners who failed in their initial efforts. But the long-term individualized attention to learning-from-failure that came with apprenticeship learning was not a part of traditional public schooling.

The issue of learning from failure in public schooling became more complicated by the civil rights movement. In the early years of public schooling, students (and families) bore the responsibility of taking advantage of educational opportunities. However, beginning in the 1950s, public education priorities in the US began to shift. The 1954 Brown decision demonstrated that providing access to educational opportunities was no longer sufficient. The War on Poverty of the 1960s and the IDEA act and reauthorizations of the 1970s-90s shifted the national discourse from the opportunities to the outcomes of learning. It was no longer appropriate for states to provide schools where students could choose to learn (or not); instead states increasingly saw their role as creating schools that guaranteed learning outcomes. The 2001 NCLB Act make these new expectations into law by holding public schools accountable for improving the learning of all students. Thus the premise of the early public school model was turned on its head - instead of a system that created opportunities for all students to succeed now expected schools reach all students successfully. Public schools as institutions were expected to take responsibility for educational outcomes, while at the same time absolving students and families from responsibility for learning.

We can either learn from failure, or try to avoid it. Connecting high stakes consequences to institutional failure has led many public schools to pursue a risk-avoidance approach to instruction. This intolerance for failure at the system level has been translated into a similar intolerance to experiment at the classroom level. Contemporary public school policies insist that all students show learning progress, which has led to dominant models of instruction that emphasize efficiency, smooth learning trajectories and predictable outcomes. Schools are often reluctant to experiment with high-yield, high-risk, instructional practices. Innovation is risky - most innovations fail, and even the ones that succeed are usually fundamentally transformed before achieving wide dissemination. The federal educational research policies that emphasize "what works" seem to take for granted that we already know what we need to know to improve learning for all students, and that what is mainly needed is thorough vetting and rigorous implementation of tried-and-true instructional practices. Still, high school dropout rates have held steady, the achievement gap has not closed significantly, and the love of learning continues to drain out of schools that emphasize "what works" over genuine inquiry. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the tree of learning must be refreshed from time to time by the failures of policy makers, teachers and students. The wild market swings in digital media - in hardware, software and virtual worlds - continue to demonstrate the power of failure to spark new innovation. It seems that schools feel that walling themselves off from the digital media/learning circus will insulate a path toward eventual elimination of learning problems. A more likely scenario is that by cutting off opportunities for interesting failure, schools will continue to apply the same time-tested practices that resulted in contemporary institutional inequalities in the first-place.

Richard, apart from this project, you've been looking at fantasy baseball leagues as a site for learning and participatory culture, seeing them as a fusion of fan and gaming culture. What insights do you think educators can gain by looking at these kinds of alternative knowledge communities?

Participatory cultures, such as fantasy sports, highlight three critically important aspects of learning missing from many school learning activities: motivation, production and legitimate audience. Fantasy sports team owners are motivated to play because they are fans, and this (typically) far-reaching set of beliefs, passions and knowledge spark owner interest in competition. The development and maintenance of a team requires owners to produce a competitive roster and to iteratively adjust their production in terms of competitive feedback within the league. Other team owners present a legitimate audience for game play - owners are praised, ridiculed, emulated or resented based on moves against other players. Because typical fantasy leagues persist for months, owners get reputations for game play within the league. Owners acquire status as players, particularly in anonymous leagues, because of their demonstrated abilities within the game.

Many school settings have features of participatory cultures as well, but the participatory culture of schooling is often unrelated to the topics learned. Students are often motivated (or not) to succeed in academic contexts for non-academic reasons; production is typically valued (if at all) as a means toward other forms of reward (grades, etc.), and academic prowess often fares miserably as a path toward peer culture acceptance. Fantasy sports communities provide existence proofs of how learning activities can intrinsically connect motivation, production and audience in assessment rich contexts. It is not a trivial task to select the kinds of tasks around which school-based fantasy leagues can be organized, although activities such as stock-market games or Model UN can bring some common structures to bear in traditional schools. The question is not really how to make a direct translation of fantasy leagues to school settings, but for this and the next generation of educators to understand how the underlying principles of these kinds of learning environments work, then to think about how to design local environments around similar principles.

Allan Collins is Professor Emeritus of education and social policy at Northwestern University and formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education.

Richard Halverson is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.

Talking TronsMedia with Steven Lisberger

A few weeks ago, I sat down for a conversation with Steven Lisberger, director of the original Tron, to discuss our shared passions for science fiction cinema and transmedia entertainment. Mike Bonifer organized the meeting, filmed the exchange, and edited the footage. He has gradually been rolling it out in short three to four minute chunks via YouTube ever since. I have to say that it was thrilling to me to meet Lisberger -- having long admired how far forward the thinking behind Tron had been about the directions games and digital culture might take. In the first few installments of this conversation, Lisberger shares with me some of his experiences in making Tron and also considers the current project to re-engage with these characters, their world, and their stories for the next generation. In case you've missed the news, a new Tron movie is going to hit the theaters later this year, and we are already seeing a fair amount of buzz build around it.

Tron took advantage of cutting edge digital graphics to imagine forms of computer gaming which were not yet technically possible at the time. Many of us struggled to even understand what was happening in the movie because it was so far out beyond our previous experiences with things digital. In many ways, subsequent generations of game designers and digital effects artists have helped to design and fully realize many aspects of that vision. So it is interesting to imagine what Tron would mean for today's generation.

This second section discusses Tron's light cycles and the challenges of communicating how they worked and what they could do to people who had yet to have an immersive digital experience. Along the way, he gives us a taste of what it was like to work with futurist designer Syd Mead.

In this next installment, he describes his meeting with one of the "old men" on the Disney animation team and what a break Tron felt with what Disney had done before.

And in this installment, he gets into the ways that the new Tron movie engages with the franchise, including the decision to make the new film in 3D.

By the fifth and sixth installments, we begin to broaden the discussion outward from Tron to the larger context of contemporary digital culture. In part five, I hold forth about the concept of participatory culture and how it is changing the way media gets produced and circulated.

And in part six, we discuss Avatar's impact on the culture, including beginning to talk about the coming wave of 3D films emerging from Hollywood in its wake. I should note here that I discuss Alice in Wonderland as a film conceived in 3D but I have since learned it was shot in 2D and thus does not fully exploit the potentials of 3D cinematography.

Part Seven includes some discussion of political activism that has originated around James Cameron's Avatar and the way popular culture can become a catalyst for social change movements and Steve talks about how Cameron brought together radically different aesthetics from previous science fiction and fantasy films.

In the next installment, we get into the construction of the alien in contemporary science fiction and how this may reflect some shifts that are occuring in American society around race and culture.

By Part Nine, we are back onto transmedia, discussing the ways advanced publicity may help frame and shape audience expectations and how different audiences bring different kinds of knowledge with them into the theater when they engage with the new Tron movie.

This is not exactly My Dinner with Andre, but I think you will find it interesting. I will run a second installment when the rest of the material is up, but you can follow them as they are posted, one a day, on Mike Bonifer's Game Changers YouTube Channel.

On Brian Eno and Barry Lyndon: An Interview With Geeta Dayal (Part Two)

Eno seems to have been interested in cybernetics from a very early age. How did this interest impact his work?

Many artists, particularly in Britain, were interested in cybernetics. A lot of this can be traced to Roy Ascott's infamous "Groundcourse" at various art schools in Britain in the 1960s. Pete Townshend of The Who underwent the "Groundcourse," and so did Eno, and so did many others who would go on to be major names in their fields. Ascott's curriculum was a systems-based approach to learning, inspired by cybernetics.

Most people associate cybernetics with Norbert Wiener, but what I found even more interesting was the British wave of cybernetics theorists that came a bit later on -- people like W. Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, and Stafford Beer. Beer's book The Brain of the Firm, especially, was a major touchstone for Eno. Beer applied cybernetics to management, and Eno applied Beer's management theories to the studio environment

.

Eno is most often associated with Ambient music. Can you share with us something of his understanding of this concept and where it came from?

Ambient music often has no discernible beats or melodies. It is music, as Eno once said, that is "as ignorable as it is interesting." Eno is the prime exponent of ambient music, but the concept has been around for a long time. The concept was established in the modern era by the composer Erik Satie, via his idea of "furniture music" -- music that would mingle with the sounds of forks and knives at dinner, as he described it.

You have a great deal to tell us about Eno's process, including how he thought of his collaborators, their tools and technologies, and even the space of the studio as "instruments" through which he created his music. What does this expansive concept of "instrument" tell us about Eno's approach as a composer?

"Expansive" is a good word to use to describe Eno in general. Eno is not a traditional composer by any standard. Nor is he a trained musician. As I write in my book, he uses the "non-musician" label to his advantage. He doesn't play by the rules and conventions of music theory, because he doesn't really know the rules. But he has incredible intuition, and a lot of natural talent for music. And, as Eno's frequent collaborator Robert Fripp told me, Eno's playfulness in the studio is key. If an air compressor makes an interesting sound, why shouldn't it be an instrument?

Think of how creative children are. When you were a small child, you didn't know that pots and pans weren't real instruments; you just played with them anyway because they make interesting noises when you hit them. Then you get older, and you learn that a piano is a real instrument and pots and pans aren't, and you stop banging on pots and pans.

Part of the idea of the Oblique Strategies cards is to put you back into a playful environment. To drop the inhibitions of rigid classifications, strict hierarchies, and what's "wrong" and what's "right."

You compare Eno's music at one point to the work of Stanley Kubrick --especially in Barry Lyndon. What makes this analogy appropriate andinformative?

I read somewhere that Barry Lyndon was one of Eno's favorite films. I wondered why. Then I watched the film closely a few times, and I started to understand. There were a few interesting coincidences between Barry Lyndon and Another Green World. One was that Barry Lyndon and Another Green World came out the same year -- they both came out in 1975. Barry Lyndon doesn't look like many other films out there. It looks very organic and natural, as if it's shot with natural light alone, but Kubrick actually used the most advanced technology available at the time. In a similar way, Another Green World is full of imagery from the natural world -- the album title alone seems to suggest lush, pastoral landscapes -- but it was made using some of the most cutting-edge studio techniques, and lots of synthesizers and other electronic gear.

For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick searched the world for the the most high-tech lenses possible -- lenses that would be capable of, say, photographing a scene in a dark castle lit with candles. No one else in the industry was using these super-fast lenses; Kubrick had to have them custom-built according to his crazy specifications. Kubrick also used custom lenses for A Clockwork Orange, but Barry Lyndon took the technology a step further. Instead of the stark visual effects you see in A Clockwork Orange -- that dystopian, futuristic feel, which seems to suggest cutting-edge technology -- Barry Lyndon is the exact opposite. It's full of sweeping views of the Irish countryside, this gorgeous natural imagery. You almost feel as if

you could step right into the film; it feels so real.

I was struck by the phrase, "music as immersion," in the book. What kinds of immersive experience did Eno try to create through his work?

There are a few ways. One of the tricks Eno uses, which I write about in my book, is long fade-ins and fade-outs, to make you feel as if the music is part of a larger continuum -- as if you're stepping into a scene that's still happening when you leave it. In the classic U2 album The Joshua Tree, which Eno produced, the first song, "Where the Streets Have No Name," fades in very slowly. The song takes a long time to start. That's

on purpose. You're stepping into a world; you become immersed in the album. It doesn't start abruptly, like most rock albums do; it lures you in. You can hear the same thing in the classic David Bowie album Low, which Eno also produced; the first song, "Speed of Life," takes a long time to fade in.

Another immersive technique Eno uses is that his ambient music often sounds like a slice taken from a larger whole -- there's no beginning/middle/end or traditional verse-chorus-verse song structure. It's an ocean of sound, omnidirectional. This is interesting to me for

several reasons. There's the feminine aspect -- it's quite the opposite of, say, the Rolling Stones, with a macho frontman shouting loud lyrics and a band bashing out the tunes.

And then there's the textural aspect -- Eno's music is about textures, layers, timbres. Eno has a flair for a good melody, but his music isn't about melody per se, nor is it necessarily about rhythm either. Some great German bands in the 1970s, like Can and Neu!, did a similar thing with their music, concentrating on texture.

Throughout, you describe Eno as an artist drawn towards both experimental and popular music. How was he able to find a balance between the two impulses and how have this merging of distinctive kinds of cultural production shape how critics and fans have responded to his work?

Eno's great talent is in being able to travel both worlds. U2 once famously said that they didn't go to art school; they went to Brian Eno. There's some truth to that. Eno's interest in experimental music started very early on, when he was a teenager. He started booking experimental musicians as a student in art school; he performed with avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. This was all before Roxy Music, and before his solo career.

But the pop mentality started early on, too. Eno grew up listening to American doo-wop records, and his first favorite band was The Who. Eno was more successful than a lot of others at merging experimental ideas with a pop aesthetic. That's why so many bands go to him when they want to do something unexpected. You don't go to Eno to get the best-sounding, best-engineered record on planet Earth. You go to get something interesting. To go somewhere you haven't gone before. And at its heart, that's what experimental music is all about -- experimenting.

Geeta Dayal is an arts journalist and critic who writes frequently on the intersections between sound, visual art, and technology. Her book Another Green World, on the musician Brian Eno, was published by Continuum in 2009. She is the recent recipient of major funding from Creative Capital / The Andy Warhol Foundation, in the Arts Writers Grant Program. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Print, and Wired. She maintains a blog at www.theoriginalsoundtrack.com.

On Brian Eno and Barry Lyndon: An Interview With Geeta Dayal (Part One)

I don't write much on this blog about popular music. I have always said music and sports were my real blind spots when it comes to researching contemporary popular culture. So, I have the utmost respect when I find a writer who can take me inside the music and help me understand why a particular album matters for the culture. I am all the more delighted to find such a person in my own backyard. In this case, I do mean this more less literally -- in my own backyard. More acurately, I discovered that Geeta Dayal, one of the students who used to live in Senior House, the dorm where Cynthia and I were housemasters for fourteen years, has become a top notch music critic. Geeta was an undergraduate student in the Comparative Media Studies Program, she was one of the leaders in Senior House culture, and for a short while, she worked for me as we were launching the Center for Future Civic Media. But when she wasn't hanging out in our dorm, she was studying journalism at Columbia, writing for the Village Voice and a host of other publications, and working on a book about Brian Eno or more exactly a book about one of Eno's best albums, Another Green World, which shows us the many different layers on which his music works and situating it within the context of his life and his times.

I read the book with both pride in what my former student has accomplished and fascination with what she had to teach me about an artist who ranks very highly on my personal list of music preferences. I often use Eno's music as a backdrop when I am writing and I like to listen to this strangely familiar (and I do mean strange) music when I have trouble relaxing in strangely familiar hotel rooms while traveling. I knew I liked Eno, but I didn't have a language to explain why. I had to share my excitement about this book with my readers.

In this interview Dayal helps us to see the links between Eno's sounds, his early experience as a painter, his fascination with cybernetics, his collaborations with other artists, his fannish engagement with Stanley Kubrick's films, especially Barry Lyndon, and his ability to move fluidly between high and pop culture.

First, let's go through some of the choices which shaped this book. Why Brian Eno? Can you tell us something about his importance to contemporary music and about your own interest in the subject?

I find Eno to be an endlessly fascinating figure. He has so many varied interests -- creating ambient music, producing rock music, making video art, mixing up his own perfumes, gardening, cogitating about evolutionary biology and cybernetics, inventing iPhone apps -- the list goes on.

I identified personally with Eno's sprawling scope. When I was a student at MIT in the 1990s, I ran a magazine, had a radio show, organized protests, made dozens of short films, did neuroscience research, established a 24-hour video art telethon on the MIT cable channel, booked bands, taught high school students, and did about a million other things besides. It's a miracle I graduated on time, and with two degrees at that.

Over the past decade, I focused myself on being a writer, because writing was a safe space to explore my wide range of interests, from visual art to science. Writing gave me focus and discipline, and a set of practical constraints to work within, which I found useful. But writing never restrained me creatively; if anything, writing a book helped my imagination to grow. Eno is very focused, too, with an almost laser-like intensity. But he is, as he likes to call himself, a "non-musician." He uses music as a way to test out new ideas, with a sense of playfulness and an all-embracing perspective. Sometimes I joke and say I'm a "non-journalist."

And why Another Green World? What made this particular album a key focal point for structuring your examination of his work?

I thought pretty seriously about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album Eno made with David Byrne in 1981. But Another Green World told a better story. It signified a major transition in Eno's aesthetic direction. The album was a bridge to Eno's ambient works. It was composed almost entirely within the studio environment, which I thought was a very intriguing story to tell. It was made at around the same time as Discreet Music, an album that also had a great story behind it. And Another Green World was the first album to be composed with the help of the Oblique Strategies, and I found the Oblique Strategies cards to be a very interesting thing to talk about, as well.

The Oblique Strategies cards become a central motif running through this book and also played an interesting role in your writing process. What can you tell us about them? What do they show about Eno's particular flavor of creativity? And how did they guide your own journey as a writer?

I find the Oblique Strategies cards to be extraordinarily useful; I've been using them for years. I keep a deck on my desk at all times. When I get stuck while writing -- which is often -- I pick a card. "Are there sections? Consider transitions," a card might advise. "Use a different color." Sometimes this advice is not useful at all, but it always makes me laugh, rearranges my perspective, and helps to shakes me out of my rut. Each

chapter in my book is named after an Oblique Strategy -- "Honor thy error as a hidden intention," for example. "The tape is now the music." It seemed natural to use the Oblique Strategies cards to write the book; I was often stuck while writing this book. My book is a short one, but it was an extremely ambitious project. I was trying to distill a lot of research, and a lot of ideas from the last forty years, into a very short

space. Some of these ideas were very challenging ones, and I really tried hard to explain them in as clear terms as possible.

I think the Oblique Strategies cards tell you a lot about Eno's quirky sense of humor, and also about his approach to making music -- both in his sense of play, and his faith in the artistic process. But the Oblique Strategies didn't emerge out of a vacuum. In my book, I write about many other creative techniques that were similar to the Oblique Strategies -- from John Cage's use of the I Ching, to the Fluxus movement's inventive use of cards, to Marshall McLuhan's "Distant Early Warning" cards. The late artist Peter Schmidt developed the Oblique Strategies cards with Eno; Schmidt was making paintings based on hexagrams from the I Ching in the late

1960s. There was a lot of interest in chance at around that time, and in systems. The Oblique Strategies cards, in their own way, were a systems-based approach to creativity.

How much access did you have to Eno and his collaborators in developing this book?

One way to write this book would have been to do an extended interview with Eno, and base the book solely around his observations. But Another Green World was made quite a long time ago, now -- 35 years ago! -- and Eno is a bit exhausted with talking about his work in the 1970s, and doesn't remember much about the ins and outs of the making of Another Green World, anyway. I don't blame him. And Eno always surrounds himself with interesting people, and works with so many people. So it made sense to talk to them.

Part of what made the book interesting, I think, was that I didn't base the book around a big interview with Eno. Instead, I did a lot of archival research; I read thousands of pages of interviews and reviews. I read dozens of books, from topics ranging from the history of cybernetics to gardening to visual art to British experimental music. I spoke to a lot of Eno's friends and collaborators, past and present, who were very open in talking with me. I wanted to meet everyone, not just his collaborators onAnother Green World. I wanted to talk to people along the entire spectrum of Eno's life. I was interested in collaborators, assistant engineers, ex-girlfriends, friends. In that way, you create an outline of the person that might be more nuanced and surprising than just going straight to the source.

I had experience with doing a lot of digging. When I was starting out as an arts journalist, almost ten years ago, I spent a year working as the research assistant to Simon Reynolds for his book Rip it Up and Start Again, a major history of post-punk music. An incredible amount of research went into that book: around 125 new interviews, plus hundreds of archival interviews, cut out from old press clippings, and rare zines and so on. Simon taught me how to research and write a non-fiction book, based on original research. It's a painstaking and sometimes painful process,

but I think the results are worth it.

I was interested to learn that Eno started out hoping to be a painter and only later turned his attention to music. What led to the change? Is there a way in which we can describe Eno's music as "painterly"?

I think that painting and music are interrelated. Kandinsky, for instance, had huge ties to the music of his time; he was very inspired by composers like Schoenberg, and expressed this in his work. And many musicians were into painting; composers like Scriabin were deeply synaesthetic, and described their music in terms of colors and so on. Messiaen, the famed composer, once walked out on a performance of Beethoven because he felt that the purple colors on the stage clashed horribly with G major!

Eno's first favorite painter was Mondrian; he had a small book of Mondrian prints as a child, and became fascinated with it. For Eno, the shift to music happened in art school -- and as I write in my book, art school in Britain in the 1960s was an incubator, of sorts, for many of the leading rock musicians of the time, from The Who to Roxy Music. It was a safe environment to test out new ideas. Painting seemed to be stagnating a bit, compared to the huge explosion of ideas in painting in the first half of the 20th century. But here was rock music, in the late 1960s in Britain; of course a young, creative person would want a piece of that. Even Andy Warhol, the coolest painter in New York, was aligning himself with rock and roll, and hanging out with the Velvet Underground.

Geeta Dayal is an arts journalist and critic who writes frequently on the intersections between sound, visual art, and technology. Her book Another Green World, on the musician Brian Eno, was published by Continuum in 2009. She is the recent recipient of major funding from Creative Capital / The Andy Warhol Foundation, in the Arts Writers Grant Program. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Print, and Wired. She maintains a blog at www.theoriginalsoundtrack.com.

Vidding Kung Fu Panda in China

From time to time, I use this space to showcase the global dimensions of the kinds of participatory culture which so often concern us here. When I first started to write about fan culture, for example, the circuit along which fan produced works traveled did not extend much beyond the borders of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and perhaps Australia. American fans knew little about fan culture in other parts of the world and indeed, there was often speculation about why fandom was such a distinctly American phenomenon. Now, fans online connect with others all over the world, often responding in real time to the same texts, conspiring to spread compelling media content from one culture to the other, and we are seeing a corresponding globalization of fan studies. Yet, some countries remain largely outside of field of view, because of language barriers, cultural differences, political policies, and alternative tech platforms.

Consequently, most of us know very little about how fan production practices have spread to China -- which is too often described in terms of its piracy of American content and too little discussed in terms of its creative repurposing of that content to reflect their own cultural interests. So, I am really excited over these next two installments to share some glimpses into fan culture in China -- specifically focusing on the vidding community there (but also discussing other forms of fan participation.)

These two posts were created by Lifang He, an Annenberg student who took my transmedia entertainment class in the fall and who is doing an independent study with me this term to expand her understanding of the concept of participatory culture. Here, she talks about how Kung Fu Panda got read in relation to the economic crisis in China, and next time, she will tackle the array of different fan responses to Avatar.

Kung Fu Panda vidding and Chinese fan culture

Lifang He

In this paper, I'm going to write about a Chinese vid based on a movie Kung Fu Panda as it is a great example of fan made extensions in China. I'll introduce the background of the movie, discuss the relationship between the vid and the original movie, and also I'll talk about fan's role in the vidding and Chinese fan culture.

Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 animated comedy movie directed by John Stevenson and produced by DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. It tells a story of a clumsy panda bear Po, who unenthusiastically works as a waiter for his father's noodle restaurant and eventually achieves his dream and becomes a master of martial arts.

According to Sina Entertainment (2008), this movie achieved significant monetary success after it was released on July 20, 2008 in China, which had hit approximately 14 million USD box office sales in the first ten days.

This Hollywood made Chinese movie is much better than other Chinese made Chinese movies, which proves American's leading ability to create entertainment and market Chinese culture. The movie is filled with Chinese elements. The key character Panda is China's national treasure and the other characters in the movie such as the monkey, snake, red crowned crane, tiger and mantis are the classic representatives of Chinese martial arts. Moreover, the Chinese imagery was used so well that Chinese audience felt very excited to discuss how great the movie is. As a famous Chinese film director Lu Chuan commented on his blog, " the movie brought big laugh to Chinese people. It was a big surprise. Our familiar culture is no longer a burden for the creativity, instead it becomes an active and vivid entertainment" (Lu Chuan, 2008).

In response to the success of the movie, a lot of discussion was generated online between the audience and the animation filmmaker after its first release. Fans posted reviews on their blogs and discussed their favorite characters on Bulletin Board System (BBS). Also hey used Photoshop software to make posters with different themes such as Harry Potter, Lust, Caution, Pirates of the Caribbean, which attracted a lot of buzz. They also created music videos and wrote lyrics to compliment the movie, which were posted on social networking sites. After knowing that The Kaboom of Doom, a sequel of Kung Fu Panda, has been currently in pre-production and will be released in 2011 (Wiki, 2009), fans started to make their own versions of the movie.

Among all of these fan activities, producing vids and sharing with other fans on Chinese social networking sites is one of the most popular ways for them to express their love to the movie. They wrote scripts, re-edited video clips using the original footage and did the voice over to tell a new story. Unlike American viding culture that has a relatively long history, Chinese vidding only emerged a couple of years ago owing to the video sharing websites such as Youtube.com, Tudou.com. There's no centralized grassroots community for vidding in China and Chinese vidding culture is very casual. An example to help exemplify how fans use this to publicize their opinions is a vid called Gu Piao Panda (Stock Panda), which is widely spread online and applauded by the fans.

Gu Piao Panda is a three-minute short film, which links Po to China's unsound stock market and tells a parallel story about stock panda. The story starts from a scene that Po was a legend in the stock market, but it turns out that it is just a dream. In reality, he is a rookie stock investor and his money is all tied up in stock because of the global recession. Po is so sad that he goes back home to talk to his goose father and his father persuades him to withdraw money from the stock market because of the bearish market situation. Po has a strong belief that he will become a guru in the financial world someday and the only reason he hasn't achieved that yet is because he hasn't met his teacher. His father has no choice and encourages him to attend a stock master competition at somewhere in the mountain. Po tries so hard to get into the competition and there are three competitive groups --- the happiness group with monkey in it, the fighting group with tiger in it and the desire group with red crowned crane in it. These three groups represent the three different types of stock operators. Then, Po attends the competition and finally his teacher finds him and teaches him how to become a successful fund manger. In the vid, the creator doesn't show an ending in the video, and instead he poses a question that if Po will become a stock master finally.

There are many similarities between the original movie and fan made vid. First of all, both of the film and fan vid chose Po as a main character as he is a good character to conceive the new stories and has become a prototype based on which fans have developed distinct characters in various contexts. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is an every Panda who masters some area through his persistent effort. Gu Piao Panda is a rookie stock operator and finally achieves success as a stock master. In other vids such as Real Estate Price, the key character panda is portrayed as a junior real estate developer who finally becomes a hero to save the real estate from subprime lending crisis. Moreover, the storylines of the two movies are very similar. Specifically, Gu Piao Panda creates a story that Po is a rookie stock operator who wants to become a stock master. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is a worker at his father's noodle restaurant who wants to become a kungfu fighter. Also, they both fight for an evil in the two videos. In Gu Piao Panda, he fights for the stagnant stock market. In Kung Fu Panda, he fights for Tai Lung. Furthermore, Po attends the competition to become a master in two movies either as a kung fu master or financial guru. In the original movie, he fights for a kung fu secret book. In the vid, he fights for two cars as the competition awards. When examining the video clips, it is apparent that fans use the same video clip to convey the same meaning in the different context. They just choose the video clips they like from the original movie to tell their stories. Other vids such as Real Estate Price, Kung Fu Competition, Certificates are all associated with the current social issues to tell different stories.

Real Estate Price

Kung Fu Competition

Certificates

This parody is so popular that fans keep spreading it online because there's so much fun in the video. Some popular terms and events used in this vid are funny in the context of Chinese culture. For example, they use the word "Niu Bi" (newby) to describe how successful Po is in the stock market in his dreams. They also use the word "Tao" (trapped in the market) to explain that his money is all tied up to the stock account. Real figures are also incorporated to make the audiences feel more attached to the story. For instance, Po's goose father persuades him to withdraw the money because the current stock index is above 2000 points - which is where the Chinese stock market was registering at that time when this vid was made. In addition, they use Dong Bei language, a northern Chinese dialect that often associated with Chinese cross talk to voice over the video. This brought more joy to the audiences, especially during the global depression era.

Gu Piao Panda and other vids are great examples showing that Chinese fans' role has changed from audience to active producers. They are not just passively receiving the information, but becoming publishers. The Internet has become a platform for them to distribute their works. This emerges an Internet culture called kuso, which is very popular in China. Kuso, originated from a Japanese word, is a popular subculture in China that deconstructs serious themes to entertain people (Wiki, 2009). Some interesting quotes from ESWN Culture Blog that can explain the popularity of Chinese kuso culture are, "Kuso is people deconstruct burning satire." "Kuso is an art criticism loved by people". "Kuso is people's ordinary, yet interesting, spiritual pursuit." (Soong, Roland & Qing, Huang, 2006)

The most classic case of Chinese Kuso culture is a fan-made short movie called The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bread based on a famous movie Wu Ji (The Promise) directed by Kaige Chen. A Chinese fan, Hu Ge, felt disappointed with Wu Ji and made his own spoof right after the movie was released. This fan-made movie joked about the film Wu Ji and dominant serious journalistic work, attracting huge fan following. From this fan made film, kuso has become more and more popular in China and represents a type of Chinese fan culture in the Internet.

There are two main reasons can account for the popularity of kuso culture in China. One important reason is that Chinese youth are suffering from social pressure and kuso provides a way for them to relieve themselves from the real pressure. They are a new generation who is tired of serious mainstream culture and kuso becomes a way for them to express themselves online. Moreover, kuso requires less technical skills and technology requirement and cheaper cost of movie production makes it possible for fans to make their own videos. Also the video sharing websites give the audiences a good platform to distribute and create a huge opportunity to show their own works.

Lifang He is from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in Journalism. After college, she was hired by two global advertising agencies Wieden & Kennedy and Euro RSCG Worldwide. At these agencies, she worked as a strategic planner for a variety of international brands including but not limited to Nike and Nokia and gained experience in consumer and market research and developing brand strategies. Since August of 2009, she has been pursuing her Master's degree in Communication Management at USC Annenberg School for Communication. It was while attending a USC class taught by Henry Jenkins that her academic interest turned toward transmedia planning and studying fan culture. Her specific areas of interest in these fields revolve around digital culture, brand communities, and how brands relate to and engage fans.

References:

Chuan, Lu (2008). Kung Fu Panda and Hollywood Movie. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kung Fu Panda Ticket sales(2008). Sina entertainment. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kung Fu Panda. Wikipedia. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kuso Culture. Baidu. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

Maureen Fan (2008). Kung Fu Panda Hits A Sore Spot in China: Why a Quintessentially Chinese Movie Was Made in Hollywood. Washington Post Foreign Service. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

Qi, Cai & Ying, Xie (2009). The Internet kuso culture in China. CulChina.Net. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

Qing, Huang (2006). Parody can help people ease work pressure. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Soong, Roland (n.d.). The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bun. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part Two)

In the second part of the interview, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jonathan Gray talks about his new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. Don't know what a Paratext is -- you will soon, as Gray explains how everything from "Oscar Buzz" to action figures help to shape the meanings and emotional experiences we have in relation to the films and television shows we watch. There was not an Oscar given last night for best paratext -- as long as the evening was and as outraged I was to see that Roger Corman (who happened to have trained two of last night's best director nominees -- Cameron and Bigelow -- as well as such recent winners as Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard) and Lauren Bacall (Lauren Fraking Bacall) were given their special Oscars at a separate event! Yet, it is hard to imagine Avatar making the money it did, a low budget genre film like District 9 making the list at all, or for that matter The Hurt Locker building up the critical support it did in the absence of well-crafted campaigns designed to warm us up to these particular projects. And given the huge grosses that Alice in Wonderland took in this weekend, we certainly might pause to pay respect to the creative promotion that the film has received in the months building up to its release, even though much of the press is going to ascribe the box office purely to the growing public interest in all things 3D. So, this interview seems particularly well-timed, even though, in fairness, I should note that Gray answered these questions some weeks ago and might have new things to say today precisely on these topics.

Your new book, Show Sold Separately, centers around "media paratexts." While this concept has a long history, it is apt to be unfamiliar to many of my readers. Can you define it and explain why you prefer it as a category to other ways of talking about these phenomenon?

I draw the word from a book of that title by Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist. He was interested in all those things that surround a book that aren't quite the "thing" (or "the text") itself. Things like the cover, prefaces, typeface, and afterwords, but also reviews. His subtitle to that book - "Thresholds of Interpretation" - is the intriguing part, since it suggests that meaning might be constructed and might begin at these textual outposts, not just at the site of "the thing itself." And that in turn offers a pretty radical proposition, namely that the item that we're studying, whether it be a film, television show, book, or whatever, becomes meaningful and is interpreted in many sites, some arguably even more important than the site of thing itself. The purpose of the book, quite simply, then, was to examine those sites.

I prefer the word paratext precisely because it has a pretty academic background, and from within textual studies at that, and thus isn't encumbered by a lot of the connotations that surround many of the other words that we usually use. Your readers may be more familiar with "hype," "synergy," "promos," "peripherals," "extratextuals," and so forth. But hype and synergy frame paratexts too definitively as wholly industrial entities. Certainly, paratexts are absolutely integral in terms of marketing, and in terms of grabbing an audience to watch the thing in the first place. But we've often stalled in our discussion of them by not moving beyond the banal observation that hype creates profits. What I wanted to look at is how they create meaning, how our idea of what a television show "is" and how we relate to it is often prefigured by its opening credit sequence, its posters, its ads, reviews, etc. Meanwhile, "peripherals" belittles their importance, since they're not at all peripheral, at least in potential. "Promos" is fairly innocuous, and yet I'm interested not just in how the things that surround a film or show create an image of it before we get there, but also in how reviews, DVD bonus materials, fan creations, and other after-the-fact paratexts might change our understanding later on, so that too seemed inadequate. And though I like "extratextuals" (the title of my blog!), "extra" means "outside of," whereas "para" suggests a more complicated relationship to the film or show, outside of, alongside, and intrinsically part of all at the same time. Hence my fondness for that word in particular.

You write in the introduction, "While many consumers deride the presence of hype and licensed merchandise as a nuisance, we also rely upon it, at least in part, to help us get through an evening's viewing or a trip to the multiplex." In what sense? In what ways do such materials shape our experience of films and television programs?

Let's take the trailer as an example. We've all seen thousands of them. And when you do, you often hear evaluations from the crowd around you. That's because everyone is judging the film before it's even been released. But they're not just saying "wow" or "ugh" - they're learning something about the characters and whether they can identify with them, about the genre of the film, about the kind of world that it's set in. In short, they're getting a pre-view of the film's basic components, and it's thus being constructed as a meaningful entity for them. When the film finally comes along, it doesn't begin with a fresh slate; rather, its viewers have a history with it. They've come with expectations, with engagements with certain characters, and with an idea of how to make sense of it. Indeed, in many cases, they'll already be enjoying the film, as played with in a beautiful way by an Onion News Network parodic item about Iron Man trailer fans being worried about the studio making the trailer into a feature-length film.

But all sorts of other things might happen along the way too. Perhaps the trailer confused us into thinking that the film was something different, and so we sat down to watch an action film and got a drama instead. Or perhaps the hype and paratexts annoy us, and so we decide that we don't want to see the film - we don't need to, since we already know it to be junk. Or perhaps paratexts clash - the trailer looks awful, but then you hear an interview with the director and you're fascinated. The frame of mind that we bring with us to any viewing experience is remarkably important, and paratexts often play the key role in creating those frames. Meanwhile, the story doesn't even end after watching, since other paratexts might reframe an experience. Perhaps a "making of" special or a podcast asks us to think of it in a new light, maybe a fanvid, item of fanfic, or other fan creation challenges our understanding of a character. The great Russian theorist of narrative, Mikhail Bakhtin, poetically wrote that no meaning is ever dead, and that every meaning will have its homecoming. So too with all items of media, which aren't just framed; they can be reframed.

I've spent some time in the blog over the past few months reflecting on the benches that were erected in anticipation of District 9 and the ways they contributed to narrative exposition and shaped emotional reactions to the film, well beyond their roles as pure promotion or publicity. I take it you would read these as classic examples of paratexts. How would you explain their contributions to District 9?

Those are great examples, since they put you into the world. When you're faced with a bench that tells you one kind of being isn't allowed there, it opens up a history, at least in the U.S., of segregation, and of racial intolerance. We like to pat ourselves on the back and think that it's all behind us, but such benches haunt us with the notion that it's not. If you're Black, I'd guess there's a sore wound that's opened. And if you're liberal and White, there might be some liberal White guilt over your potential complicity with the segregation: do you really want to sit on that bench now?

All that can happen before you even know there's a movie. Now when you're told there's a movie, and that these benches are part of it, they've given you an experience of that world. You've set foot in it and had an experience in it. The narrative, in other words, has begun. Your allegiances are being pulled on. Or, to point to another classic example from film history, the Jaws poster scared the crap out of me as a kid. I couldn't swim without thinking that a massive great shark was about to gobble me up, as I moved on unaware, just as with the woman in the poster. So the horror and fear began long before the film (and, damn the designer, continued long after!).

You note that paratexts can be "entryway" or "In medias res." Early discussions of transmedia storytelling focused on nonlinearity -- suggesting that the parts could be consumed in any order -- but more recently there's been a focus on notions of seriality and temporarily. What might your book contribute to that discussion?

What I'd hope readers would see is how many different media the story can be told over. It's not just the "big" media, like film, television, books, comics, and videogames - trailers can also play a part here, as can opening credit sequences, or DVD bonus materials, posters, ad campaigns, or, as we've discussed, benches. When we recognize that, we move towards realizing how audiences have always been intimately familiar with serial storytelling and with transmedia. We're all already well-trained to keep shows on hold for years, inbetween trailers and film and bonus materials, so I'm dubious when I hear complaints about audiences being unable and unwilling to deal with seriality and transmedia.

But if I talk of "us" needing to realize that, meaning "us" as analysts or fans, it's also production cultures that need to learn from it. Towards the end of the book, I draw on several interviews I conducted with transmedia producers, and they all point to an industry that isn't currently set up to facilitate discussions between the marketing department, the writers, the DVD producers, the videogame designers, and so forth. Let's imagine a future in which communication improved, and thus one in which all these paratexts and sites didn't work against each other or simply in spite of each other, but instead contributed to the serial development. Then, as audiences, we could have a much richer product, and I imagine the producers would be much richer too.

You suggest that audience-produced artifacts -- such as fan vids or spoilers -- can be paratexts that help shape the meaning of the work. Your emphasis there is not so much on how they resist official meanings but rather how they shape our interpretations of the primary text. An old school cultural studies approach might talk about this as a struggle over meanings or as competing bids for interpretations. How do you think about the relationship between commercial and amateur paratexts in the age of participatory culture?

I don't mean to foreclose the possibilities of resistive readings. But someone very smart and way more knowledgeable about fandom already wrote Textual Poachers, and if there's only one thing that many people in cultural studies know about slash fanfic it's that it's supposed to be doing interesting, resistive things with gender and sexuality (I say "supposed to" only because some don't believe that). So when I came to the chapter on fan-created and -circulated paratexts, I didn't need to make that point. Instead, I wanted to focus on how one can use paratexts to cut one's own groove through a text in a way that isn't necessarily working against the producer's version, but that is personalized nonetheless. Many relationship and character study fanvids, for example, don't necessarily repurpose a character, but they do ask us to stop and think about that character and his or her history in ways that the official text, in its breathless progression, may not have time to do. I don't mean to suggest that this is either the dominant form of fan use of paratexts, or even one that's necessarily changed in a more obviously convergent media era. But it might help cultural studies to back away from some of the desires for an orcs vs. hobbits style bad-and-good battle between The Industry and The Fans, and to focus on smaller, humbler moments of repurposing.

Critics in the 1980s talked about television series such as He-Man, Masters of the Universe as half hour commercials for toy lines, suggesting that the commercial tie-ins stripped them of any real meaning or narrative interest. Your work suggests something different -- that the toys become vehicles for extending the meanings of a series into everyday life. How have action figures impacted our interpretations of blockbuster movies like the Star Wars franchise?

Star Wars is a great example here, since what we had was a text that was seemingly put on ice (or should I say put in carbon-freezing?) for three years between each film. That's a long time in a child's life, so excellent or not the trilogy likely wouldn't have held the attention of those of us who were kids at the time if it weren't for the toys. The toys kept Star Wars alive by transferring the story and the world to the playground, and hence by keeping that galaxy from drifting far, far away.

However, precisely because the text entered the body of the toys for such a long time, we need to ask how they contributed to the popular understanding of Star Wars. On one level, for instance, I think they worked to gender the text. When all the toy boxes and ads were showing boys playing with them, when FAO Schwarz in New York required one to march through a tunnel of GI Joe figures to get to the boys' palace that was their Star Wars section, and when all the figures had guns (even when all we see them do is drink or press buttons in the films), the toys were strongly framed as for boys. The toys also helped, I'm sure, to amplify fans' nostalgic feelings towards the texts, since those of a certain age can think back to countless days spent playing in school yards or excitedly opening a Millennium Falcon for Christmas or so forth, and all of a sudden Star Wars seems such a huge part of our childhood ... courtesy of the toys as much if not way more than the films. So toys contribute to how we make sense of all these films and shows, and to the cultural meanings that surround them.

But more than that, they also teach kids to expect transmedia and participatory culture. When I talked to Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof about what got him into transmedia, he told me the tale of the Boba Fett toy. When I asked Jesse Alexander of Heroes and Day One the same thing, he too waxed eloquently about Star Wars. Licensed toys let us into fictional worlds, and I've yet to hear of a company send a cease and desist letter to kids for playing with toys, even if they're wedding Han to Luke. So if many of us grew up expecting to be able to play with texts, and move their characters into new realms, let's look to toys for where it may've all started.

We've just ended The Oscar season. To what extent is "Oscar buzz" a kind of paratext for more "serious" or "middlebrow" forms of cinema?

I'm glad you asked, since I find it amusing when people hear the topic of my book and quickly pronounce that they hate "that stuff" (hype and paratexts). They'll often list the blockbuster of the moment for illustration, so right now everyone claims to despise Avatar when they want to impress me with the height of their brow. But there is no such thing as a text without paratexts. So it's not a question of preferring a text without paratexts - it's a question of which paratexts are one's poison. Oscar buzz is great for the middlebrow audience, New York Times reviews, buzz at Cannes, or even what their film prof says works for some, and for others it's trailers and huge billboards. So there's no escaping paratexts. If we think we live in a media saturated world, the films and shows are only a fraction of that world - the paratexts are everywhere.

Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.

Don't Miss Transmedia, Hollywood Conference March 16

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place Tuesday, March 16, 2010, on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field's most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics (March 17--21, 2010) in Los Angeles.

By coinciding with SCMS, Transmedia, Hollywood hopes to reach the widest possible scholarly audience and thus create a lasting impact in the field. It will give cinema and media scholars from around the world unprecedented access to top industry professionals and insight into their thinking and practices.

Mission

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story

As audiences followed stories as diverse as Heroes, Lost, Harry Potter, and Matrix, from one format to another--from traditional television series or films into comics, the Web, alternate reality or video games, toys and other merchandise--Hollywood quickly adopted the academic term "transmedia" and began plastering it above office doors to describe this latest cultural phenomenon. This is not to say that convergent culture and transmedia storytelling are new concepts; instead, the emergence of convergence can be traced to the 19th century when a Barnum and Bailey-style mode of entertainment first took hold, maturing in the mid-1950s with Walt Disney's visionary multi-platform, cross-promotional, merchandising extravaganza known as Disneyland.

Since then, Hollywood has created countless new transmedia titles, everything from Batman to Star Wars - an evolution only accelerated by the advent of digital convergence. While transmedia, in one way, vindicates the logic of the integrated media conglomerate and activates the synergies long hoped for by the captains of industry in charge of Hollywood's six big media groups, it may also prove to be more than they bargained for. Engaged, "lean-forward" consumers--coveted by advertisers and entertainers alike--are not content simply to watch traditional media but rather, they produce their own videos, remix other people's work, seek out those who share their interests, forging concordances and wiki's, fan fiction, and various forms of interactivity that are still in their infancy and that corporate Hollywood is just beginning to explore. Copyright law, guild rules, and the conventions of audience quantification are frequently operating at cross-purposes with these new, expansive sets of cultural-industrial practices. As the demise of the music industry shows, active audiences and technological advances can create an explosive combination, powerful enough to bring down an entire industry. The entertainment industry wants to embrace this new, active consumer while ensuring its own survival by seeking to recreate familiar rules of what is considered "valuable" and "entertainment" within traditional business models.

Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.

Schedule

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

9:15--9:45 am

Registration

9:45--10:00 am

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC

10:00--11:50 AM

Panel 1: "Reconfiguring Entertainment"

This panel brings together visionaries, people who think deeply about our experiences of play, fun, and entertainment, people whose expertise is rooted in a range of media (games, comics, film, television) to think about the future of entertainment as a concept. Transmedia designers often use the term, "mythologies," to describe the kinds of information rich environment they seek to build up around media franchise and deploy the term, "Bibles," to describe the accumulated plans for the unfolding of that serial narrative. Both of these terms link contemporary entertainment back to a much older tradition. So, are we simply talking about a largely timeless practice of storytelling as it gets relayed through new channels and platforms? Or are we seeing the emergence of new modes of expression, new kinds of experiences, which are only possible within a converged media landscape? What does it mean to have "fun" in the early 21st century and will this concept mean something different a decade from now? In what ways will the desire to produce and consume such experiences reconfigure the entertainment industry or conversely, how will the consolidation of media ownership generate or constrain new forms of popular culture? What models of media production, distribution, and consumption are implied by these future visions of entertainment?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: Mimi Ito, Associate Researcher, University of California Humanities Research Institute (Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software; Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media; Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life)

Diane Nelson, President, DC Entertainment

Nils Peyron, Executive Vice President and Managing Partner, Blind Winks Productions

Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer, Naughty Dog Software (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune; Uncharted 2: Among Thieves)

Jonathan Taplin, Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; CEO, Intertainer.

John Underkoffler, Oblong, G-Speak (Technical Advisor for Iron Man, Aeon Flux, Hulk, Taken, and Minority Report)

12:00--1:50 PM

Panel 2: "ARG: This is Not a Game.... But is it Always a Promotion?"

Using a collective intelligence model disguised as play, Alternate reality games, or ARGs, give any individual with a computer a means of problem-solving anything from global warming to the true meaning of the Dharma Institute conspiracy. ARGs also give instant "geek cred" to marketers from stuffy firms like Microsoft and McDonalds tasked with selling consumer goods to the Millennials. Are these elaborate scavenger hunts, which send players down an endless series of rabbit-holes in search of clues, teaching them how to think collectively or are they simply the latest in a long series of promotional tools designed to sell products to tech-savvy consumers? Unlike regular computer games, ARGS engage a multitude of players using a multitude of new technologies and social media formats--sending clues via Web sites, email, or just as likely, by means of an old-fashioned phone booth in some dusty, small town in Texas. For ARG creators, the new entertainment format represents rich, new storytelling opportunities, according to Joe DiNunzio, CEO of 42 Entertainment (AI, Halo 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). However, for the big six media groups, the primary purpose of ARGs is promotional--a new-fangled way of selling Spielberg's AI (The Beast), WB's Dark Knight, Microsoft's Halo 2 (ilovebee's), or ABC's Lost (The Lost Experience). In other words, are ARGs simply a novel new way for the big six media groups to prompt several million avid fans to start beating the promotional drum on behalf of their favorite movie, TV series, or computer game or do they represent a new way of harnessing revolutionary thinking? In this panel, ARG creators, entertainment think-tank consultants, and media scholars will debate the social vs. commercial utilities associated with this latest form of social engagement.

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists: Ivan Askwith, Director of Strategy, Big Spaceship (clients include NBC, A&E, HBO, EPIX, Second Life, and Wrigley)

Will Brooker, Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK (Star Wars; Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture; The Bladerunner Experience; Using the Force; Batman Unmasked)

Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, Founding Partners, No Mimes Media (Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Nine Inch Nails, Pirates of the Caribbean II)

Jordan Weisman, Founder, Smith & Tinker (The Beast, I Love Bees, Year Zero)

2:00--3:00 PM

Lunch Break

3:00--4:50 PM

Panel 3: "Designing Transmedia Worlds"

Transmedia entertainment relies as much on world-building as it does on traditional storytelling. Transmedia practices use the audience's fascination with exploring its richly detailed world (and its attendant mythology) to motivate their activities as they seek out and engage with content which has been dispersed across the media landscape. Recent projects, such as Cloverfield, True Blood, and District 9, have relied on transmedia strategies to generate audience interest in previously unknown fictional universes, often combining promotional and expositional functions. Derek Johnson has argued that these fictional worlds are "over-designed," involving much greater details in their conceptual phase than can be exploited through a single film or television series. This "overdesign" emergences through new kinds of collaborations between artists working both for the "mother ship," the primary franchise, and those working on media extensions, whether games, websites, "viral" videos, even park benches. In this new system, art directors and script writers end up working together in new ways as they build up credible worlds and manage complex continuities of information. What does it mean to talk about fictional worlds? How has this altered the processes behind conceptualizing, producing, and promoting media texts? What new skills are emerging as production people learn to introduce, refine, and expand these worlds through each installment of serial media texts? And how do they manage audience expectations that they will continue to learn something more about the world in each new text they consume? What does each media platform contribute to the exploration and elaboration of such worlds?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: David Bisbin, Art Director/Production Designer (Twilight, New Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Drug Store Cowboy)

Danny Bilson, THQ (The Rocketeer, Medal of Honor, The Flash, The Sentinel)

Derek Johnson, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

R. Eric Lieb, Partner in BlackLight Media; Former Editor-in-Chief, Atomic Comics; Former Director of Development, Fox Atomic (Jennifer's Body; I Love You Beth Cooper; 28 Weeks Later)

Laeta Kalogridis, Screenwriter (Shutter Island, Night Watch, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Battle Angel); Executive Producer (Birds of Prey, Bionic Woman)

Marti Noxon, Executive Producer/Writer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Prison Break; Grey's Anatomy; Mad Men)

Louisa Stein, Head of TV/Film Critical Studies Program, San Diego State University (Limits: New Media, Genre and Fan Texts; Watching Teen TV: Text and Culture)

5:00--6:50 PM

Panel 4: "Who Let the Fans In?: 'Next-Gen Digi-Marketing'"

Most Hollywood marketing campaigns remain overly reliant on expensive broadcast television commercials to reach a large cross-section of the audience despite growing evidence that avid fans are capable of generating powerful word of mouth. In the decade since The Blair Witch Project's website became a model for engaging a core audience by creating awareness online, a new generation of marketing executives has emerged, challenging the effectiveness of top-down strategies and advocating "bottom-up," social media marketing. By fusing storytelling and marketing--ranging from ABC's low-tech, user-generated aesthetic in "Lost Untangled" to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's polished, eye-candy approach to selling Sprite in its "sublymonal advertising" campaign--this next generation of web marketers has upended previous notions about where content ends and the ad begins. Having grown up reading Watchman comics, playing Sims, and surfing the Web for like-minded members of their consumer tribe, these new media professionals come armed with the knowledge of what it means to be a fan; as a result, they are refashioning the processes and structures that inform the relationship between audience members and the culture industry--forcing today's media conglomerates to adapt to the new realities of the cultural-industrial complex while also ensuring their own survival. Gen-Y consumers' sophisticated understanding of, but less contentious relationship with brand marketing, invites today's media marketers to embrace a revolutionary mode of selling that may impact copyright law, guild agreements, professional standards, and the global labor market. What is the future of entertainment? Will the Internet be run by top-down mid-media corporate owners or bottom-up Web-bloggers or some yet to be realized combination of both?

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists: Emmanuelle Borde, Senior Vice-President, Digital Marketing, Sony Imageworks Interactive (digital campaigns for Spiderman, 2012, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon)

John Caldwell, Professor, UCLA Department of Film, TV, Digital Media (Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Film/Television Work Worlds; Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television)

Alan Friel, Partner, Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP

John Hegeman, Chief Marketing Office, New Regency Productions (marketing campaigns for Saw 1 & 2, Crash at Lionsgate; The Blair Witch Project at Artisan)

Roberta Pearson, Professor, University of Nottingham (Reading Lost; Cult Television; The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches)

Steve Wax, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Campfire (HBO's True Blood, Audi's The Art of the Heist; Discovery Channel's Shark Week marketing adventure, Frenzied Waters).

7:00 PM

Reception

Lobby, USC Cinematic Arts Complex

Location

Ray Stark Family Theatre, SCA 108, USC Cinematic Arts Complex, Los Angeles http://cinema.usc.edu/assets/047/10153.pdf

Registration

Faculty/Students:

Event is free for faculty and students of accredited institutions. Registration includes conference badge and continental breakfast. Valid university I.D. is required for admission.

General Public:

Tickets for the general public are $25. Registration includes conference badge and continental breakfast.

To register and for more information, please go to: www.tft.ucla.edu/transmedia-conference

Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About Digital Ethics (Part Two)

You found that adults and teens had different understandings of the identity play which occurs online. Where do these differences come from?

GOODPLAY: In the dialogues, we asked what the participants saw as acceptable, and what they viewed as the risks and benefits of experimenting with and exploring one's identity online. Both adults and teens cited the ability to test out an "ideal self" as one of the primary benefits of online identity play. The two groups also identified common risks associated with identity play, such as not being true to yourself or becoming disconnected from your offline self.

However, as you note, we did observe differences between adults and teens in their attitudes toward online identity play. In addition to testing out an ideal self, teens mentioned the opportunity to recreate themselves online. Adults, on the other hand, were more likely to celebrate the ability to accentuate existing aspects of their personality. To make sense of this difference, we consider the fact that adolescence is generally regarded as a critical period for identity formation. Adolescents begin for the first time to ask themselves: "Who am I?" While this question is never answered once and for all, identity tends to become more stable as people leave adolescence and enter adulthood. Therefore, it's perhaps not surprising that the adult participants focused on minor alterations of existing identity elements, whereas teens considered more dramatic self-transformations.

With respect to the perceived risks of online identity play, teens focused to a greater degree than adults on the danger of developing relationships on a false or inauthentic basis. Again, this finding isn't surprising if we consider its developmental underpinnings. Interpersonal relationships become central during adolescence; it's in the context of reciprocal, trusting relationships that adolescents explore their identities. The feedback they receive from friends plays an important role in their decisions to highlight certain personal attributes and hide others. It's likely due to the centrality of peer relationships that our teen participants were more concerned than the adults about building inauthentic friendships online.

Some have argued that the emerging generation cares much less about privacy than preceding generations. Did your research bear out this oft-cited claim?

GOODPLAY: To a certain extent, yes. We found that teens are generally more comfortable sharing their lives online than adults. Teen participants had considerably more to say than adults about the benefits of sharing personal information with others online. Teens discussed the opportunities that the Internet affords them to express themselves freely, to get things off their chests, and to learn about friends and have their friends learn about them. In contrast, adults focused to a greater degree on the privacy concerns related to such self-disclosure. That's not to say that teens didn't express any concern about their privacy online. On the contrary, they were quite clear about their desire for privacy from adults!

How so?

Well, consider this quote from one teen participant: "Let me make it clear, for me Facebook is for socialising with my friends and expanding my friend circle and when my parents add me as a friend it really pisses me off so when my dad joined Facebook and added me as a friend I rejected his request that instance because I knew he was doing that to keep a check on me. for Gods sake!!! Parents should let us have our own privacy and not meddle in between as it may hinder the relationship we share." All joking aside, what sentiments like this point to is that teens aren't unaware of privacy issues, they simply have different norms when it comes to negotiating them.

Youth are often described as "the Napster generation" and accused of having little respect for intellectual property. What did you discover about the way adults and youth thought about attribution and authorship?

COMMON SENSE MEDIA: This question is interesting because both youth and adults identified how difficult it was to know what constitutes "best practice" given that the norms of the industry are in flux and because of the varying messages that artists convey to the public about how to buy their albums and from where. For instance, there are bands who have allowed customers to download their albums for the amount the customer believes is appropriate, while other bands abhor this practice.

GLOBAL KIDS: We saw both teens and adults actually call for new business models that addressed problems with downloading and made sure that authors got their fair share, while at the same time a majority of youth indeed admitted to downloading, with some being conflicted and some not about doing so. On the other hand, teens seemed quite adamant about both wanting attribution for their own work and about the importance of giving attribution to others when relevant, likely because they're creating more online remixes/mash-ups etc. than adults.

GOODPLAY: Interestingly, while a lot of teens were adamant about wanting attribution for their own work and giving attribution to others, fewer seemed to connect this to the issue of illegal downloading. When they did talk about the negative aspects of illegal downloading, they mostly worried about the negative consequences to themselves rather than the potential negative effects for the artists.

You cite one young person as saying, "the internet is a way for people to do what they want without getting in trouble." How characteristic is this of the attitudes displayed by young people in these conversations?

GLOBAL KIDS: Well, I think it's definitely representative of a certain subset of teens, though certainly not a dominant perspective. As we watched the dialogues progress and then conducted analysis of who said what, we noticed that the youth involved stratified into certain categories of thinking with regards to ethics, some that were more advanced and others less so, as GoodPlay mentioned above. We felt it was important to highlight that this sort of "do what you want without consequence" sort of thinking is indeed there, especially for teens on the younger end of the spectrum. We didn't want to be alarmist when sharing our results, as there's been plenty of alarmist rhetoric out there about young people's participation online, but rather be realistic about the views that exist and the resulting need for adult involvement in these conversations.

What insights did you get from this research which might inform the decisions made by parents? by educators?

COMMON SENSE MEDIA: I think that the biggest takeaway was that adults and teens are truly able to participate in meaningful dialogue about some of the tougher issues that emerge about life online if there's an honest and open setting to do so. Dialogues like these could be tailored to a variety of settings and could focus on a wide array of issues that might be specific to local needs in a given community. There are a lot of easy to use online tools (out of the box social networks like Ning, free forum and Listserv services, etc.) out there that can allow educators and youth workers to run online dialogues with their school communities during the school year. Increased dialogue online between teens and adults is not only important because the two groups generally inhabit the digital world in very different ways right now, but also because adults provide important guidance in terms of the ethical development of young people. Adults have always played this role in kids' lives and the more they are educated about talking about the digital aspects of their kids' lives the better.

GLOBAL KIDS: It's also important to note that this kind of cross-generational dialogue doesn't just need to happen online. We found that there are some real advantages to an online context, like a changed power dynamic where youth might feel more confident sharing openly. However, we know that having face to face conversations about these issues is critical whether it's in the home, in classrooms, in afterschool spaces or in other sorts of youth groups.

GOODPLAY: Actually, Henry, the recent collaboration between your NML team and the GoodPlay team is a great example of a school-based initiative aimed at promoting these types of conversations between adults and youth. The curricular activities that we created together - called Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World - attempt to engage high school students in a thoughtful examination of the ethical issues that arise online. We hope that these activities will be an effective way for teachers to enter into conversations with youth and scaffold their ethical thinking.

COMMON SENSE MEDIA And by bringing parents into the conversation we can strengthen home-school partnerships to help young people navigate the ethical challenges of the digital world. With the aging down of online life, it's become imperative to begin these conversations in middle school and so we are working in collaboration with the GoodPlay Project to create a 5th-8th grade digital citizenship curriculum - Digital Literacy: Citizenship in a Connected Culture Check back at www.commonsense.org in late Spring for more information and access to these materials.

Katie Davis is a Project Specialist on several research projects led by Dr. Howard Gardner at Project Zero, including the GoodPlay Project, the Developing Minds and Digital Media Project, and the Trust and Trustworthiness Project. She is also an advanced doctoral student in Human Development and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In recent work, she conducted a study investigating how girls in late adolescence and emerging adulthood use blogging as a way to express and explore their identities. For the Focus Dialogues, Katie and Carrie James, a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, developed the framework that informed the dialogues, developed dialogue prompts, and synthesized findings.

Shira Lee Katz is the Digital Media Project Manager at Common Sense Media, where she manages the research and creation of a forthcoming Digital Citizenship curriculum for 5th-8th grade students. She is also a key point person for the Digital Media & Learning grantee network funded by The MacArthur Foundation. Shira holds a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the Focus Dialogues, Shira and Linda Burch, Common Sense Media's Chief Education and Strategy Officer, co-conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited adult participants, and produced the final report.

Rafi Santo is a Senior Program Associate in the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids, Inc. Rafi specializes in the design and implementation of educational technology projects and has done work as varied as online youth dialogues, youth advisories focused around digital media, social media civic engagement programs and youth leadership development and peer education in virtual worlds. He has collaborated on projects with many organizations and with MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grantees to strengthen their initiatives through youth voices and perspectives. Rafi has over 10 years of experience in youth development and education. For the Focus Dialogues, Rafi and Barry Joseph, Director of Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited teen participants, housed and monitored the dialogues on their website, a wrote the final report.

Camille Bacon-Smith and Henry Jenkins at Gaylaxicon 1992 (Part Two)

Transcript of a panel discussion between Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith, moderated by Shoshanna, at Gaylaxicon 92, a science fiction convention by and for gay fandom and its friends, on 18 July 1992. At that time Henry was about to publish Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992); Camille had published Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and Popular Culture (U. of Penn. Press, 1992). Shoshanna is a fan. All fans identified here are identified with the name/pseud they requested. Shoshanna: I wanted to ask you guys to bring this back to media fandom a bit, and talk about the ways that you see media fans doing something different, and what--since the title of this is "The sociology of media fandom"--how do fans behave that's not the way Lucasfilm behaves? If you find that interesting. And where do you think that comes from?

Camille: Well, first... I don't do sociology, I do anthropology. It's a little bit different. But that's okay, because that's what we called this panel anyway. So if there's any sociologists out there who are sitting there saying, "That's not sociology," I know that.

NB: That's another territorial battle in itself.

Camille: Yes, it is.

Henry: I'd say we poach right across that one and keep going...

Shoshanna: And we're not going to fight that one.

Camille: It's hard for me to say because one of the things that I really feel strongly about is that media fans are doing something, in a particular way, that is a folk process that goes on in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of things, everywhere all around the world. The problem we have is that we tend to think that what happens in straight white male America is the norm. In fact, it is the exception. And what women in media fandom, what the guys who come into media fandom, are doing is what everybody else all over the world is doing. They are taking the items of their culture, they are recombining them, remanufacturing them... The notion of originality has to do with how well you can represent the norm, what you can bring to the aesthetic conventions of what you already hold dear. The important thing is not to write a slash story that's completely different from every other slash story. This would be a total waste of effort. No one would want to read it. The point is, you want to write the slash story that is the best slash story because it does what everybody else does, better. It does the same theme, but does it with a little more insight. Or even with the same amount of insight as this other story you liked. Or you're recombining this element instead of that element. But this whole notion that you have to be different to be good is different from--it's what we think of as high art, but it's different from the way most of the world conducts its art.

Henry: If I could follow up on that... The other thing that I think is radically different is the economic relations involved in fandom. What excites me is the degree to which fandom is really based on the communal notion that you have something that you want to share with the community, not you have something you want to make a profit off of. And fandom at its best is when fans... The circuit is a good example of this. Things are distributed at cost. Ideally, zine publishing as it started was a matter of, I will charge you what it cost to produce the zine, with maybe enough more to let me start up the next zine. You're not profiteering off of zine publishing. The fan filk clubs trade tapes back and forth. The fan video artists make, you know, "Send me a tape and I'll give you a copy of my videos." I see some danger of that changing, and I'm a little concerned at the advent of semi-pro filk organizations that publish conglomerate filk, or at some of the new conglomerates of zine publishing that are just sucking in zines and selling them, and there's now a middleman between the writer and the reader. What I like about fandom is that, unlike in professional publishing, the writer and the reader actually have something to say to each other. I write a letter to a zine editor and say, "I'd like to read your zine." She sends it back to me. I write back and say, "That was a great story. I really liked this, this, and this." That creates a channel in which the reader can become a writer, the writer is always a reader, the roles are not as rigidly bound up apart from each other, and that sense of possessiveness and profiteering is absent, in favor of a sense of community, of sharing, of giving back. You write your stories to be read by your friends, you don't write them to be read by your customers, and I think that that is something that's really important about fandom, and very different from the notions of intellectual properties that we've been talking about, in corporate America.

Camille: And again, much like the rest of the world has conducted its art since time began.

Henry: Absolutely.

BT: [mostly unintelligible; then:] ...having their [i.e. fans'] own community, partly because no one else wants to be in it [Laughter] and partly because it's something that's theirs and they don't want other people in it. So fans become possessive about some of the academic interest in the community.

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em>Shoshanna: I would suggest that it's not just possessive, it's defensive. Because we've seen so many Newsweek magazine articles that begin, "Hang on! You're being beamed to one of those weirdo Trekkie cons!" And there's a sense of being made fun of. It's very exciting for me to be up here sitting on this panel between two academic authors who are not making fun of us. And that's because they are us.

Camille: Oh, I saw the first review of my book. It was written by a literary scholar, and the funny thing was, several of the people who brought this to my attention laughed and said, it doesn't look like he even quite knows what anthropology is. But his positive evaluation of the book, and he really thought this was a positive evaluation of the book, was that when he started reading this book he thought these people were really really weird. And I was sufficiently persuasive that by the end he didn't think they were quite as weird as he had when he started. And it's like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Back up. Read it over again. Read my lips, you know? You're weird.

Henry: I talk in the book some about this policing of boundaries. There are these stereotypes out there. And I've had the same sets of experiences, where in the academic community they read it and say, you took a subject that I thought was indefensible, you took a subject that... I thought I could not be made sympathetic with these people at all, and I started to understand where they were coming from. And that to me is powerful praise, because that's the fight we're fighting out here. The mundane world does not get it. It simply does not get what fandom's about, and it needs to be explained to them. Once it's explained, I think there's not the hostility, maybe, as much. There's a certain fear... slash provokes its own anxieties within the homophobia of the culture we live in, there's a certain fear about women writing their own stories about men--that spooks the daylights out of a lot of men in our society--but the notion of, once you start thinking intelligently about what's going on here, one can change. But fandom is defensive, for very good reasons.

Camille: But you don't want those guys poking around in your dresser drawers.

NB: You can answer this question, or not answer this question, because this particular fan convention is a Gay-laxicon, and... I've read countless analyses of how the straight mundane community reacts to fandom, or media fandom or what have you, and I've gotten varied reactions from people in the--when I say "gay," I mean gay, lesbian, bisexual, trisexual, whatever--I've gotten varied responses from people within the gay community. Depending on which parts... I mean, anything from politically correct lesbian feminists who say, why are you writing about all these men, to again, the breaking up of the notion that it's all a bunch of heterosexual... I mean, I am a fanzine editor, and I thought I was the only lesbian who liked to read and write male slash stories, until I met a whole bunch of other lesbians, and bisexuals and what have you, and met a couple of gay men. And so you've got a significant part of the gay community in this. And then there are gay men, a few, a minority, that like to write slash stories, and then other gay men who sit there and say, this is not realistic, or a man I talked to was saying, "Slash writers aren't writing about me," was one reaction I talked to somebody about. So I'd like to see whether you have any comments about, or what you would think about sociological, anthropological, what have you, about how all this impacts on the gay community, and gay fandom.

Camille: What I did when I was working on my book, particularly when I hit slash, was, my field, folklore, is overwhelmingly gay. It's overwhelmingly gay. So this may be one of the few fields in academia where heterosexual people are in the minority. And so it was very easy for me to just go to any number of my classmates and just, cold, slap a fanzine on their desk and say, tell me what you make of this. Generally speaking, the gay men thought it was hysterically funny, and there was this Professionals story called "Masquerade." [It's on the circuit.] When they hit "Masquerade," they would come back to me and they would say, "I've seen it." Not, "I've seen this story," but "I've seen this in real life. I have seen this dance," they would call it, this first-time dance. There were some stories that were totally ludicrous, and in fact one very dear friend, who is a gay man and who does write the stories, and in fact likes the most romantic, just to be authentically slash will deliberately put at least five impossible sexual acts into his stories. [Laughter.] And he called me up one day and he was devastated, because his library had just gotten in a copy of the Joy of Gay Sex and he discovered one of his impossible sexual acts was in fact possible. [Laughter.] So now he had to think up another one. I'm looking for a picture here, I can't find it... Because one of the things that--yes, I found it. However, one day... [She is getting ready to hold her book up; laughter.] Now this is not a wildly filthy picture I'm going to open this book up to. However, this picture came in one day and I showed it to one of my friends, and first his mouth dropped open. Then a couple of hours later, we were in the archives, he came back with a friend of his, and said, show him the picture. And his mouth dropped open. Now the thing is, that's the picture. [She holds it up. It's on page 185, for all you folks reading along; it's a TACS portrait of Doyle, shrouded in mist and gazing piercingly out at you, with his shirt and jacket open to show his chest and his trousers unzipped to show pubic hair but no genitalia. It originally appeared in Discovered in a Graveyard.] Now these are people who had no idea who this person was, but it sort of got them. The gay women that I showed it to had no interest in it at all; they thought that this was totally politically incorrectly stupid. And they basically said, you know, if I want to read men together, I'll read The Deerslayer; I don't have to read these, you know? And they would say to me, where are the stories about the two women? And I would say, I don't have any. Or I only have these, and I'd give them copies of this one fanzine that I had, and it would be, like, this thick, and it maybe had two pages [of female slash]. And they would say, well, I'm not interested in this anyway, and they'd put it aside [? unclear].

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Henry: I could address your question. Your question poses a number of possible responses to me, all of which, I think, are important to raise. One is that one of the problems I've had with Joanna Russ and other writers who have written about slash--is that the question is often posed as, why do straight women want to write sex about gay men? And it became immediately clear to me, as I was doing this, exactly what you're saying: there are large numbers of lesbians and bisexual women in the slash community, and there needs to be a way to account for that pleasure. I'm not sure I fully address it, but at least I think it comes up in my book, with accounts that don't hinge on heterosexual fantasies, which I think some of the earlier accounts did pose a very heterocentrist conception of what is going on when people read and write slash. The second point I'd make, and I'm going three different directions here, is that I've shared this with David Halperin, a colleague of mine and a noted gay historian, and he became very excited and has written an essay comparing the myths of Gilgamesh and the Iliad to slash. [Laughter.] Because his work is about Greek sexuality, and his point was, the ancient Greeks went back and reread Homer, and the Greeks had a sexuality which was based on a much broader range of sexual object choices than present-day society--he doesn't like to use the word "homosexual," or "gay," because it's inappropriate historically--but same-sex relationships were quite regular. When they reread the Iliad , they slashed it, in effect. And there are lots of Greek manuscripts about Achilles and his charioteer, that Homer probably didn't read those relationships as lovers. But many of the Greeks did, and, in fact, began to rewrite it. So he sees slash as continuing with that, and there's now a great deal of excitement in the gay and lesbian studies community about it. And the third point I would make is more personal, which grows out of my own experience reading slash, as someone who had thought of himself in primarily heterosexual terms; I'm married, I have a son. But in the process of reading slash, I discovered that I was bi. I discovered something that was very important to me, that I really did take pleasure in this, that this fantasy really appealed to me, it opened me up to a variety of other types of experiences to think about, [to think about] my sexuality in very different terms. And I think that that process is potentially going on more large scale in our society right now. If you look at Penthouse Letters right now, for example, they've moved gradually over the ten years of porn reading that I've gone through from having ménage à trois scenarios that involved two men and one woman and the two men don't touch, to having the woman direct the men to suck each other off, to now there are now columns of gay scenarios, first-time stories, published for the predominantly straight readership of Penthouse, which are completely two gay men, or a gay man introducing a straight man to the experience of gay sex is what normally the scenario is. That's just a broadening of acceptance of this in the straight male community. And I think slash is part of--could potentially be part of that process of changing the homophobia in our society, or at least opening straight men to admit their own bisexuality, and to admit desires that they're not publicly allowed to express, the very desires that are repressed in the television narratives slash builds on.

Camille: I just wanted to add something that I thought was very interesting. I started my study in 1982. And what I found was that the representation of gay and bisexual women in particular increased dramatically in fandom after 1986, when Joanna Russ's article came out. [This article was published in two versions. One, aimed at non-fans and entitled "Pornography By Women, For Women, With Love," was in her collection of essays Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts (Crossing Press, 1985); the other, aimed at fans and entitled "Another Addict Raves About K/S," was published in a K/S zine--I think it was Nome 8 but I'm not certain. It has been circulating informally in fandom since.] That article seemed to make-- It was not really just a matter of that an audience became aware of this that didn't know about it, but an audience also was told that it was for them. And I think that was a very important thing for many people, because many people said that that's where they heard about it.

NB: [unclear; in Darkover fandom, lesbian slash is written] not only by lesbians, and bisexuals maybe, but by perfectly straight women who maybe are just exploring that tiny bit of bisexuality, and some of them... a couple of the best lesbian slash--I mean, they have that lesbian slash feel that's been in the professionally published anthologies, have been written by women I know are straight, and some of them by straight men... [something unclear, suggesting that Darkover fandom/fan writing isn't segregated by gender or orientation, unlike media fandom, which] is kind of segregated, you know... I am a writer of lesbian as well as male slash, and I can't, you know... I just wrote a Thelma and Louise story, and it was published, and the editor called me up and said it's getting a positive response, and I'd like to think that there are some straight women who are responding positively, as well as gay women and everybody else. One of the big problems with lesbian media slash is the lack of credible women; it probably is the main problem, that tv and movies don't give us... They are terrified of women in pairs; look at the big brouhaha over Thelma and Louise.

Henry: But I think it's possible to reclaim those characters in the margin. I've read Yar/Troi stories, for example--which are a stretch, and a big one--but there is a way in which you're playing two different styles of femininity against each other that works on the printed page.

NB: I wrote an Uhura/Saavik story, which will be published in the fall--I mean, that's a real stretch, but I was just fantasizing...

Henry: Blake's 7 characters... The treatment of women on Blake's 7 lends itself to some interesting slash pairings as well.

Male audience member: [unclear; he'd like to bring it back to] the question of appropriating cultural icons for dissemination. I don't know--how large is the typical circulation for a fanzine? How many fanzines are there? What is the approximate composition of the people who write and read fanzines? [something unclear; then] Part of the question for the art is that people tend, in my knowledge of folk culture, people tend to appropriate, but they produce art for local consumption, a very small community rather than a mass community, which gets back to the difference between Lucasfilm, which is producing a mass amount of stuff [laughter], or now we have the technology for self-publishing large amounts of [unclear; of slash SW stories] for your family, for your friends, for your local club. My real question is, what is the population? I don't know.

Henry: Maybe you can answer this better than I can, Camille; you have numbers in the book. I swore off counting things in my book.

Camille: Yeah, okay. There's thousands and thousands and thousands of fanzines. There were over thirty thousand people who had written in them when I stopped counting in 1986. The fanzines that I know that have sold the most are pretty much mainstream genzines--well, not genzines; what that word means has changed its meaning in fandom, in the fan community. The ones that have sold the most are some of the oldest zines, and they're still selling. Jean Lorrah's Night of the Twin Moons has sold--each individual fanzine has sold over five thousand copies. DL regularly will sell out her Star Trek, basically PG-rated fanzines with no slash content, and she can sell out fifteen hundred copies regularly, and she comes out with two or three different ones a year. Slash... the most explosively distributed fanzine that I recall in slash was Courts of Honor. It sold six hundred--they printed six hundred copies. And I believe Nome, which is another very big, very well-respected Trek zine, does between six and seven hundred copies. So we're talking very different numbers for slash. And once you leave Star Trek, the numbers drop dramatically, so that a print run for a minor... less... for what used to be called a "fringe" fandom, but fandom has changed, is between two hundred and a hundred copies. So the numbers really start to drop off pretty sharply when you get into slash, and that's a major move up in slash. Now what was the other question?

Shoshanna: In terms of number of fans, it's worth saying that there are fan communities on every English-speaking continent. There are very large ones in the States, obviously; there are very large ones in Great Britain; there's a good-sized fan community in Australia; there are also smaller fan communities that I know of, because I've visited them, in France and in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is really small, the one I know of. But anywhere that these media products are available, there are fans.

Camille: It is also not true that the appropriation of materials is only done in very small communities for very small distribution. Because what often happens, and has happened since at least the fifteenth century, or actually the twelfth, I suppose, is stories may start in a small community, but they will travel very rapidly. So for example, the story of Cinderella originated in China in the fourth century, traveled all over, all over the world. So these kinds of folk articles have as much globe-trotting capacity as what we're doing today. It takes a little bit longer; it may take a few hundred years instead of a few hundred milliseconds, but this stuff has always traveled.

Henry: One of the things that interests me is precisely the global circulation of zines. You read zines from England, Australia, Iceland. These zines are read, and people can build a national or even international reputation in fandom that nobody on the street would have even heard of. Artists at cons... I have JK's artwork on the cover of the book, and that may mean something to media fans, and her name on a painting at MediaWest, say, will up its price six, seven hundred dollars fairly regularly. My publisher, of course, never heard of her. This is, so far as I know, the first commercial book cover that JK has ever done. But I chose it with the confidence that that name recognition would be there for media fans, and it would be a signal that this book, despite its kind of academic title, is addressed to them as well. The notion in our society that women, particularly, have so few outlets for gaining status, that women who are in low-paying jobs, who are in secretarial positions, who are, you know, in service sector jobs, can gain a national and international reputation as an artist, as a writer, as an editor, is a very important aspect of fandom, I think; precisely that it is a larger community that you can become important in. And I think that matters to people on a lot of levels; I think it's really important that such a space exists.

Camille: It really matters if you travel, because you can travel from house to house all around the world; it's really great fun.

Henry: And at the same time, the process, like the folk process... I ran into Leslie Fish's filk songs in the southern cons, for example, where people sang the songs but had no idea that Leslie Fish had written them. They had become so much part of a community and had traveled, like your Cinderella story, across these spaces, often without people knowing, intermediate, where they had come from, and they really had been taken up as a folk text, in a very traditional sense, the same way, presumably, earlier folk songs lost their authors in the process.

Shoshanna: And, circularly enough, there is a filk song--filk music is science fiction folk music--there is a filk song entitled "Look What They've Done to My Song," which is the filk singer who goes to a convention and hears other people singing his song, only they've changed it. [Laughter.]

Camille: Yes, and he probably stole the tune anyway.

Shoshanna: We have about three minutes left. Do you guys have wrap-up comments, or does any audience member want to get something in quick? [Pause.] All right, sum your books up in two minutes each.

Henry: Well, rather than summing my book up, I wanted to stress that we're not unique in this. There are large numbers of graduate students and junior faculty people out there who, like me, came up through fandom, who are part of the fan community and who are now choosing, in whatever discipline they're in, to write about it. I know of so many projects out there that I think are real important dialogue beginning to take place, at least in media studies and film studies, between fans and the academic way of approaching media. And I think fandom offers the academy new models for criticism, new models of engaging with texts that are going to be very productive. We're learning from you, and I'm glad to be part of you at the same time.

Camille: Well, I suppose that it's time to 'fess up. All the while that I was doing my book, I was an academic, and that's all I did. And I would actually write stories, and I would go around from group to group, and get them to finish the stories for me, and tell me what to write, so that I'd know what was going on, and what the process was. But when I finished the book and put it all away, I discovered there was this one little set of stories that I couldn't put away. And so somehow I had gone native in this one little tiny section, and the problem is... It's not the big section like, you know, Star Trek--If I ever saw Kirk and Spock again...well, you know, I'm here. One of the reasons we don't have many people here [at the con] is they're probably all over watching Bill and Len's Excellent Adventure as we speak, because they're at the Civic Center, Shatner and Nimoy [at a CreationCon the same weekend]. But there's this little tiny group called Pros--The Professionals. And it's a show that you've never seen, unless you're from England, in which case you won't admit to having seen it because it is total trash. Oh, it is, it is...if it wasn't trash I wouldn't like it. [Laughter.] But I couldn't--some of the stories were really neat and I couldn't stop. So, if anybody's got anything that's been written in the last two years about the Professionals, I want it. And I want it now! [Laughter.]

Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith at Gaylaxicon 1992 (Part One)

This week, I am continuing to share a second piece from the historic archives of the Aca-Fan world: an exchange between Camille Bacon-Smith and myself at Gaylaxicon 1992. You should know that both Enterprising Women and Textual Poachers were very new books at the time this exchange took place, having appeared just a few months apart, and that the fan world was still trying to process what it meant to be the object of academic study. I would later, in fact, write an essay on the Gaylaxians themselves which appeared in my book (written with John Tulloch), Science Fiction Audiences, and was reprinted in an edited form in Fans, Bloggers and Gamers. I am hoping that these documents may be a source of nostalgia for some and a historical resource for others. In this segment, the two authors introduce themselves, their relations to fandom, and the central arguments of their books, and then instantly get pulled into a discussion of copyright and authorial rights, issues never far from the surface when fandom is concerned.
Transcript of a panel discussion between Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith, moderated by Shoshanna, at Gaylaxicon 92, a science fiction convention by and for gay fandom and its friends, on 18 July 1992. At that time Henry was about to publish Textual poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992); Camille had published Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and Popular Culture (U. of Penn. Press, 1992). Shoshanna is a fan. All fans identified here are identified with the name/pseud they requested.

Shoshanna: Welcome to the panel on Sociology of media fandom. My name is Shoshanna, and I'm moderating this panel because I'm not actually one of the experts on it. [Camille and Henry laugh.] I'm here to introduce people. On my left is Henry Jenkins, whose book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is about to be released [it is, of course, now available]; and on my right is Camille Bacon-Smith, whose book Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and Popular Culture is already out. Camille and Henry have been studying, and have written books on, media fandom, which is a little different from science fiction fandom in that we're talking about fans of television and movie characters, mostly, rather than of science fiction books. But it's a similar kind of community. And they've written very interesting books from somewhat different perspectives. Camille came out of anthropology and ethnology, and she was a science fiction fan but she was not a media fan when she began the study--she went into the community because it looked like an interesting thing to study. Henry, on the other hand, comes from a different academic discipline--he's coming out of popular culture and media studies--and he was a media fan already. That's part of the reason he went into that academic field; he was a fan, and it looked like an interesting tool with which to look at what he was already doing. So we have two people with two interesting books coming at the same community with two different takes, looking at some of the interesting things that people in this community do. For instance, the community is largely female, as you can see if you look around the room--we welcome men [Henry laughs]--but heavily focused on male characters. When female characters are used by the fans who write stories about television characters, it can be problematic; that's one of the things we're going to talk about. And in particular one of the things that fans do--I am a media fan, and I do all the things I'm talking about, I am the community that they're studying [Laughter; Camille sings "We are the world..."]... One of the things that we fans do frequently--not always, and not even most of us, but many of us--is write homoerotic, homosexual stories, where we take two characters, almost always male, like Kirk and Spock, or Starsky and Hutch, and create them as lovers. And we write pornography, or erotica, or whatever word you like, but definitely one of the reasons is because it turns us on, and one of the reasons is because we're really interested in the characters. These range from PG-rated to triple-X-your-mother-would-die. And the question of why does this almost entirely female community write all this almost entirely gay male erotica is a really interesting question that I hope we can get into. I'm just laying out some introductory comments on these people; I'm going to now ask each of them to talk about takes they want to take and things they want to talk about on this panel. Camille, why don't you start, since your book is already out, and some of these people may have read it?

Camille: Okay. What did you want me to say about it?

Shoshanna: Bring up some interesting questions, or particular things that surprised you about the community that you found, so we can talk about them.

Camille: Okay, well... The reason I studied this community at all was because I'd actually started to study the science fiction community; that's my next book. But while I was studying science fiction fans, I kept bumping into these attitudes, or I'd talk to these guy fans and they'd say, "Well, gee, you should have been here before all these women came in with their Spock ears, and screaming teenybopper things." And then I was, of course, talking to women, and they'd say, "I am in Star Trek fandom." And I'd say, "How did you get into it?" and they'd say things like, "Well, I'd been reading science fiction since I was nine or ten..." and a funny thing about that--when I asked guys how they got interested in science fiction, they'd say, "Well, I started reading it when I was nine or ten." And so it was like, hmm...something's wrong here. You know? These women, who seemed to be in their twenties and thirties and forties and fifties, didn't look like the teenyboppers with Spock ears who went screaming after stars, and passing out, and behaving like I did when I was thirteen and the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. They have master's degrees, this woman is a chemist, this woman is a botanist, this woman is an English literature professor... So I had this real peculiar dichotomy, difference, between the perception of women in the science fiction community and what those women really turned out to be. So I decided that the more interesting question at that time was, well, if these women are not doing what everybody thinks they're doing, what the hell is it that they're doing? So that's what I went to find out. What I found out was that they were writing. Just thousands and thousands of stories. Billions and billions of stories. And every one of them had sentient life. Well, most of them had sentient life; some of them just had mad rutting sex, and they're the ones I collect the most. [Laughter.] Can you say "hatstand"? That is a very insider word for a story that is very very short and exists only for the purpose of presenting a sex scene.

Shoshanna: It originates from a British fan who looked at these stories once and said of the men in them, "They're all bent as bloody hatstands!"

Camille: Yes. So I started studying this, and then I started studying what people were reading and writing, and then... why were they writing this? I mean, not just for slash but for just about everything I read, I sort of had this question: Why do all the women have to be so young, so smart, so god-awful perky, and in particular, at the end, why do they have to be so dead?

Shoshanna: In the stories that the women are writing?

Camille: Yes, in the stories that the women are writing. And with the slash stories, you know, gee...hmm... Where are the women? Where are the women in these stories? Why are there no women? And of course in the hurt/comfort story, "you only hurt the one you love"...and why? So I had all these "why" questions, and I spent years in school being told that "why" was a question you couldn't answer, that it was an inappropriate question to ask, and that I had to restructure my question into something that was more askable. But unfortunately I never got past six years old. So "why" remained my question, and that's what I'm trying to answer.

Henry: Well, as Shoshanna mentioned, I have been part of the fandom, I guess for fifteen years now. I discovered it when I was in high school. I'd always been attached to television shows like Batman when I was a kid, playacting in the back yard, reading Forrest Ackerman publications and so forth. Between high school and college I started going to cons, and met a number of people that I liked. At that time I was involved with the woman who is now my partner, and she really introduced me to the fanzine scene. And part of getting to know her was getting to know fanzines, and understanding them. Initially I thought, "This is not something I'm interested in." The questions they were asking, trying to patch up holes in episodes, I said, "Well, it's because the production crew screwed up." My initial move as a male fan and male reader was to say, any problems I couldn't account for within the text, I accounted for by appealing to outside forces, like authors and producers. And this [what the female fans were doing] is a very unusual way to read, to actually feel comfortable making up part of the story, to be involved enough with these characters to feel that I have the right to speak about them, and to move beyond my respect for the author. And that growth process really changed the way I thought about television, and the way in which I thought about the media, and really got me excited about media.

So I decided to go to graduate school and study media, so that I could teach and talk about television. And what I encountered there was a variant of "Get a life." That is, the way in which academics talk about the audience, by and large, is not unlike the way mundane journalists talk about fandom: as mindless consumption, as stupid passive acceptance of whatever the text gives out; you just sort of suck it in, "yes, I've been programmed by the television show." And I said, this doesn't make any sense, given what I'm seeing going on out there in fandom; be it panel discussions of episodes, or zine writing, or other forms of fan creativity, it just doesn't match up with the stereotypes. So I decided that it was important to me, as a fan, to write a book that addressed that set of stereotypes, and is addressed doubly to a fan readership, which I think needs to hear about itself and needs to be proud of itself, and to an academic readership, which I think needs to hear what's going on out there, what fandom is about. And I wrote it in communication with the fan community; some of the people I worked with on the book are in this room. It was an ethnographic project in some senses; it was also text-based. I spend a fair amount of time talking about what goes on in letterzine criticism, what goes on in certain forms of fanzine writing. And it's also aware of structures of television, the way in which the fanzine stories relate to the structures of the original episode.

I should explain the title, Textual Poachers. Camille, I think, has a much more reader-friendly title, Enterprising Women; you know more or less what she's getting at, there. "Textual poachers" is a metaphor that runs through the book, and one that has a certain resonance in many academic communities, but I've found that fans don't always know what to do with it. It comes out of the work of a French sociologist, Michel de Certeau, who argues that reading, essentially, is a matter of appropriation. As we read, we take up materials that someone else created for their reasons, and we make them our own. We take them over and reallocate them, to speak to alternative interests. And I think that's certainly, dramatically, what takes place in Star Trek fandom or other fandoms. People don't just literally reproduce the episode; they rewrite it. They restructure its orientation. I have a subsection in my book called "Ten Ways to Write a Television Show." It identifies ten very different ways that fans restructure the television shows they're given, to make them speak to the alternative interests of that particular community. And the term "poaching" refers to that.

And I think what's important about it is that it also recognizes the power relations that are involved, and the political dimension of what it means to be a fan. Which is that there's someone out there who controls the means of production and the networks, who controls what makes it on the airwaves, and controls the content. And we as viewers are in subordinate positions; but we have the power that the traditional poachers, the original peasant rebel groups, had to take up the resources belonging to the landowners and reroute them, and make them our own. You can think about Robin Hood as a classic poacher, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. And, essentially, what I see taking place in fandom is that process, where we steal the cultural resources that belong to the networks and we remake them, to speak to what we as fans want them to be, be they concerns as women, or racial concerns, sexual politics questions or whatever. That's what I think happens most of the time, when people are engaged in fan writing, in one way or another. And I'd like to talk some about intellectual property at some point in this, but I wanted to move on to other questions.

Camille: Could I address one other thing?

Henry: Sure.

Camille: One of the things that's real interesting about Henry's book is that, historically... I'm an anthropologist, but my specialty is folklore. And I study folk esthetic production, and I've studied it historically as well as contemporary folklore. And one of the interesting things is that the "folk" have done precisely the same thing, historically, as far back as you can imagine.

Henry: Absolutely.

Camille: In the forties, people would appropriate the tunes to pop songs so that they could write their own ballads, and even our national anthem is appropriated from a drinking song. So this concept of appropriating the artifacts of our culture is a long-standing tradition; it has been in practice far longer than copyright or trademark law have been.

Henry: Just to follow up on that...this is absolutely right. One reason we don't see it as political--and fans often don't talk about themselves as political, even though this tactic is one that most marginal groups and political groups have used, and certainly is part of folklore going way way back--is that we don't have a politics of cultural preference that mirrors things like the politics of sexual preference. We don't think of our cultural choices as political, or as part of our political life. But if the personal is political, in that aesthetic judgements have a great deal of political dimension as well, and even if we don't talk about the political content of fan writing, simply the act of choosing a text that means something to you, and using it in a way that violates intellectual property, that violates copyright law, to make it your own, is, to my mind, a profoundly political act.

BT, in audience: [unclear; suggesting that women may understand texts differently than men do.]

Camille: Mm-hmm.

Henry: Absolutely.

Shoshanna: And what we're looking at here is women--the fan community being largely women--understand Kirk and Spock differently from the way straight male culture does, and the way that Gene Roddenberry did, and reappropriate what they see, and recontextualize it for their own use.

Henry: I had said I would say something about intellectual property... There's a slogan that I've heard--I don't even know the source of it--that says, "If creativity is a field, copyright is a fence." And I like that as a statement of what I think fandom is about. That is, we as a culture have crushed the potential for cultural production, by creating fences around intellectual property. And I'm very much opposed-- I think copyright is ultimately the death of culture. That the notion of individual authorship, individual possession, and corporate right to control characters ultimately prevents the kind of growth and cross-pollination of culture that we see in classic folktales, for example. The character of Coyote, and the character of Bre'r Rabbit, and the character of King Arthur have been rewritten countless times without regard to any boundaries separating authors and readers. What fandom does is precisely refuse to recognize those boundaries. It's our perfect right-- They beam into our living room every week, and we have the right to tell stories about them, because they are part of our culture.

Camille: I remember in--I think it was eighty-three, the Baltimore WorldCon--does anybody remember when Baltimore's WorldCon was? [Pause.] You're all too young to have been alive then, I know. There was a really interesting panel among the professional science fiction writers, the commercially published science fiction writers, because it was right about that time that the controversy over Marion Zimmer Bradley's sponsored fanzines came up. Because writers were very much afraid of the precedent that Marion Zimmer Bradley's allowing fans who did not ask her specific permission to write stories in her universe, what implications that would have as a precedent for their ownership of their own characters and universes. Because what they feared was that, if this terrible movement got out of hand, there was the potential for a change in the law, and they would by precedent have the right to control their own characters taken away from them. So this was right at the point where shared universes were coming into being; it was before Merovingian Nights, before Damnation Alley--I think that's Roger Zelazny's shared universe--and this whole concept of, if you share the universe, have you lost the rights to it? And if you share the universe today, and want it back tomorrow, do you have the right to take it back, or have you lost the right altogether? It was a huge controversy at the time, it was a major, major controversy in the Science Fiction Writers of America [a world-wide, not just US, professional organization], and the entire thing pretty much died down, not because it was even tested by law, but simply because people began to realize that there is a certain etiquette and courtesy that goes on. That material that is borrowed tends to remain at the folk level, and in material that moves out of the folk level, there is a very carefully maintained sense of etiquette. So that people ask people if they can use their characters; even fans ask other fans if they can use the characters they created. And this very interesting thing goes on in fan writing, that they will use the commercial characters with impunity, but ask permission for the character that the fan writer created. And I think that this has been a very interesting balancing force in this whole ownership of creativity kind of argument.

Shoshanna: I want to mention in this context the Lucasfilm flap, which happened at about the same time as what Camille is talking about. Fans were writing Star Wars fan stories, and some of these were slash stories, and that means stories that pair two characters and set them up as gay, so we're talking Han and Luke as lovers, or whatever.

BT: Actually, the stories Lucasfilm saw and objected to were all straight stories.

Shoshanna: Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. So Lucasfilm was objecting to explicit straight stories. And what they said was, "You may not do this. This is our property. We will let you use the characters for things that we approve of, but you are not currently following the family values of the Star Wars films, and so we will not let you do this. We will sue." And what happened was, first of all, Lucasfilm's lawyers were bigger than our lawyers, and so people stopped publishing this stuff, but it went underground, and it throve underground, and I've seen a number of stories that begin, "Lucasfilm says we can't do this. Lucasfilm has no right to say we can't do this. I am doing this partly to piss Lucasfilm off." And there were other fans who said Lucasfilm did have the right. So the whole issue of intellectual property became crucial there, and it centered around sexuality, which I find interesting.

Henry: I actually in the book have a quote from the Lucasfilm lawyers, which says, [reading from the book] "Lucasfilm LTD does own all rights to the Star Wars characters, and we're going to insist upon no pornography. This may mean no fanzines if this measure is what is necessary to stop the few from darkening the reputation our company is so proud of. Since all of the Star Wars saga is PG-rated, any story these publishers print should also be PG. Lucasfilm does not produce any X-rated Star Wars episodes, so why should we be placed in a light where people think we do? You don't own these characters and can't publish anything about them without permission." And so that's the language that Lucasfilm was using. And many fans, as Shoshanna was suggesting, turned that back and said, "no. You don't have the right to determine what these characters mean, you don't have the right to determine what our fantasies involving them are going to look like, and we will continue to do so," but to protect themselves, pushed themselves further underground, toward a circuit structure rather than a fanzine structure. Because I've got in my files a number of circuit stories involving Star Wars characters that came out after that.

Camille: But I didn't talk about them in my book, and I don't recall your talking about those particular stories...

Henry: I just acknowledge the existence of them, but I don't discuss them directly, because I didn't want to--

Camille: --didn't want to get sued, didn't want the other person to get sued.

NB, in audience: That's kind of died down, Lucasfilm, because I just recently read a Star Wars story that has been published in a zine.

Shoshanna: Oh, yeah. It's died down. On the other hand, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has just sicced her lawyers on a fanzine publisher and confiscated all unsold issues because they made unauthorized use of a character of hers. It still goes on. It's still a fight.

NB: Oh, yeah. C. J. Cherryh, I heard her in a panel at Darkover Grand Council, where she said anyone--she has a trademark, not a copyright, it's a trademark, and anyone who writes in her universe without her permission, she's going to sue them. I'm a fanzine editor, and I had to reject a story because it was based in C. J. Cherryh's universe, and I can not afford to be sued, and the story is now on the circuit. I haven't read it, I understand it's wonderful--I've read the author's other stories--and I'm sorry I couldn't use it.

Henry: The interesting thing about trademark is that trademark originated to protect the consumer against false advertising. The whole point of trademark law two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, when it was set up in this country, was that you want to be able to tell that this is an authentic good by a producer, not a fake one. The legal precedent over the last how-many-umpteen years has rewritten it completely, so that it's now to protect the producers against the consumers taking up, for their own use, those characters. And it's even gotten to the point where academics have difficulty writing about trademarked characters. Camille and I were both involved in a book on Batman, in which no artwork was allowed to be reproduced, because DC had trademark control over everything, and had not authorized the project, with the result that the cover of The Many Faces of the Batman has to suggest "Batman-ness" without having anything on it that is literally Batman. And its potential for stifling, again, intellectual growth, cultural growth, communication of subcultures, is astonishing.

Male audience member: I think it goes beyond media fiction, and goes on into all fiction; and not just fiction, but even in things like software, there's a movement to patent ideas for computer programs, and it's really very disturbing. And I wonder what is behind it [? unclear] in our society, what is the sociological phenomenon that's going on.

Camille: Property. It's territory and property. It's the sort of thing that you can say, "My wife, my husband, my child. My book." We tend to perceive things in terms of property, and what we have, we hold, and we'll fight to protect the fact that it's ours. Even though we want desperately for everybody else to make use of it, we want to control that use as well, because it's ours.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Escapade 1993: A Blast From the Past (Part One)

Next week, I will be joining Constance Penley and Shoshanna at Escapade, a long-running Southern California slash convention, for a discussion of fandom and academia. The event marks the 17th anniversary of a public conversation the three of us, along with Meg G. had held at the same convention shortly after my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture was published. As we have been preparing for this reunion (I'm bummed that Meg is not going to be able to join us), Shoshanna pulled out of some long forgotten trunk the hard copy transcript of that original conversation, which was circulating in fandom for some years, but which has never been published. The conversation represents an interesting snap shot to how the slash fan world was responding to the growing academic attention being pointed in their direction. The early 1990s had been a bumper period for fan studies since it also saw the publication of some of Penley's ground-breaking essays on slash and of Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Some have described this moment as the birth of fan studies, though as this discussion makes clear there was a long history of academic writing about fandom and about slash before our work was published. Yet, it is fair to say that our three projects exerted a very strong influence on subsequent academic research on this topic and helped to pave the way for Aca-Fen who have followed us.

This transcript captures the raucous, free-floating character of that original conversation and helps us to situate this moment of fan research in a larger historical context. I've been thinking a lot about this as I have been teaching my USC seminar on fan culture. In many ways, these books emerged at a key crossroads in American cultural politics -- on the one hand, they came just as the Third Wave of American feminism was starting to emerge, defining itself as much around its cultural preferences as around specific policy differences with the previous generation. In some ways, Bacon-Smith's focus in her book still reflects the Second Wave rhetoric and agenda, no doubt also a product of the fan women with whom she did much of her research, while Penley and I, in different ways, were grasping towards the concepts about gender and sexual politics which would be further articulated in the coming years.

At the same time, there are passing jokes here which remind us that the early Clinton years were a period of increased visibility for issues of sexual identity in American society: while the first generation of slash scholarship had wondered why straight women would read stories about gay men, there are many fans here who are out of the closset and eager to complicate such a framing of the issue. Shoshana, along with Cynthia Jenkins, was my collaborator on "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," which was one fo the first academic essays to acknowledge the strong presence of queers in slash fandom.

And we can see here that fandom itself is still defining its language and practices -- note the use here of "songtapes" throughout rather than the term, "vids," which is apt to be how we would describe these fan-made music videos today.

Next week, I am going to share a second transcript from the archives of the history of fan research -- this one a panel at Gaylaxicon which dealt more directly with issues of sexuality and fandom. If you enjoy these transcripts, please thank Shoshanna for her hard work compiling them and seeking permission from the fans quoted to share them with you. You will note some fans choose to remain nameless (or remained so because we were no longer able to identify them or reach them for permission). We have respected, as far as we know, fan's own choices about how to be identified in this transcript.

Transcript of a panel discussion between Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, Meg G, Shoshanna, and others, at Escapade III, 6 February 1993.

Escapade is an annual slash convention. At that time Henry had published Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Routledge, 1992. Constance had published, among other things, "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology," in Penley and Ross, eds., Technoculture; and "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture," in Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, eds., Cultural studies, Routledge, 1992. Meg and Shoshanna were fans. Many other speakers could not be identified on tape, and are listed as "?". All fans identified here are identified with the name/pseud they requested.

Shoshanna: This is the panel on academia and fandom, the way academia looks at fandom and the way we look back.

Meg: You have to first of all give the two alternative titles that we came up with for this panel.

Shoshanna: Oh, yeah. My alternative title that, for some reason, they would not accept, was The ivory tower meets the collapsible jade pagoda [Laughter]. They wouldn't accept that.

Constance: Inflatable jade pagoda.

Shoshanna: I thought it was "collapsible," but then, I don't like K/S. What was the other one? If not Acamedia...

Meg: Oh, when we talked about fans among the academics, you know, wandering lonely in this alien land... [Laughter]

Shoshana: Um, if there's anyone at this con who hasn't noticed me yet--because I'm fairly pushy--I'm Shoshanna, I'm just a fan. [Laughter] Well, I'm not just a fan. This is Constance Penley, who has written several articles on fandom and the community and intellectual-type stuff; I really meant to reread them the week before I came [to the con], but I moved the week before I came, and that took priority, so I can't say a lot specific about your work, but you will in a minute.

Constance: Yep.

Shoshanna: This is Henry Jenkins, who just wrote a book called Textual poachers, a study of fandom, particularly focussing on slash, on filk, on songtapes, on community, on reading strategies. Both these people are also fans; they're not just academics who come in and go, "Oh, look at the weird ones!"

Meg: Insiders and outsiders at the same time.

Shoshanna: Yeah. Bicultural, sort of. [Laughter] Well, they are two different cultures. They really are. I mean, I straddle the line too. I'm a fan and an academic... This panel [in the program book] listed "Jenkins, Penley, et al." [Pointing to Henry, to Constance, to herself, and to Meg,] Jenkins, Penley, "et," and "al."

Meg: You can call me Al. [Laughter]

?: But where's Sam?

Shoshana: He's leapt into, um...Henry? [Laughter; Henry says, "Oh, boy..."] Can you imagine Sam's face if he leapt into this art show? [Laughter] Can you imagine Al's face if Sam leapt into this art show? Meg, what do you want to say about yourself?

Meg: Well, let's see. I guess I can say that I sort of straddle the line because I'm an academic librarian in my mundane, day-to-day life. I have had an interest for quite some time in how academics view fandom, and once academics started viewing slash fandom I got even more interested in it. I wouldn't say that I'm really an academic, in that the only Master's I have is a library one, and not a real one, as anyone else in these other fields would tell you, so I don't count that way. I did however do some librarian-like things for this panel which include this. I run into some people still who say, well, slash should be private, and shouldn't be studied, and I wanted to make the point with this that it's too late. [Holds up a binder.] This is the bibliography, this is the academic and public media things discussing slash. Not fandom, slash. [Oohs and ahs; a cry of "where?"] This is a bibliography of all of that stuff, everything that I've found.

Shoshanna: [responding to an audience question on the side] It's almost certainly not complete.

Henry: It's not; I've got stuff that isn't on her list.

Meg: Anybody that has anything I don't have, send it to me so I can keep expanding it. If there's anything on here you want to look at, hit me up to look at the notebook; the chapters from the books [i.e. Henry's and Camille Bacon-Smith's books on fandom] are in here but you should buy the full books if you're interested in them. So this sort of validates the reality of the topic of the panel, in that it's too late, and it's been too late for years now; they found us. We have met the enemy and he is us.

Constance: I was happy that Jennifer and Christine [the convention chairs] wanted to put this panel together, because it made me go back and think about how I got into this. And I realized that one of the things I can say about my interest in slash fandom--I know Henry's going to talk a bit about how he was a fan before he was an academic, but I wasn't. And I came to slash fandom when I first started seeing stuff and started ordering it, and more of it, and more of it [Laughter] and for me it was the best--call it pornography, call it erotic writing, whatever--I had ever responded to, you know? I just thought it was great. But then just the idea that all of these women were getting together to--I do feminist film theory and television studies. And a lot of what I do is dealing with people who have these ideas about women consumers of mass culture.

?: Yes, but are they accurate ideas?

Constance: No, they are not; no, they are not.

Meg: There's something to do with passivity...

Constance: Yes, there's something about... You know, consumers are supposed to be bad enough, but you know, the most passive, degraded consumers are supposed to be women consumers of mass culture. So much of this just seemed wrong to me in every way. And interestingly, even some of the women, some of the feminists who are writing about women in mass culture who are quite sympathetic, still came up with what I thought were really very reductive descriptions of what went on when women were dealing with mass culture. So I got an invitation to IdiCon IV; I guess I'd just been ordering so much stuff that you know, somehow... And I went to that, and one of the things I realized was that I'm a fan of slash fandom. [Laughter] That's what my fan activity is. I mean, of course I--you know, to read K/S I went back and completely made myself over as a Star Trek fan, because I couldn't understand any of it, unless I understood the show.

Shoshanna: Are you a fan of slash, or a fan of slash fandom?

Constance: I'm a fan of--well, both! But if I really have to say where my biggest fannishness is, it's slash fandom. The idea of it and the actuality of it. So in terms of how that intersected with my interests or how that influenced me, at this point it's so difficult to say. But I do know that the three areas that I've been working in are so congruent with what goes on in slash fandom. I've been very interested in popular science or technoculture, so I wrote this one piece on how slash fans make decisions about technology in everyday life in the fan culture. So it was about making songtapes, and about fans and VCRs, and then the last half of this piece was on fantasies of technology in the stories themselves. I'm just interested in various parts of American culture where Americans are thinking through the human relation to technology, and how that might be a democratic relation to technology, with equal access to all. So this was like a perfect example, to be able to talk about this in a very positive way. So just to shamelessly hustle my own publication, that chapter is in this book that I co-edited called Technoculture, and it's all original essays that we got people to write, about hackers, AIDS activists, radical office workers, slash fans, in other words all these people out there who are just, shall we say, appropriating high technology and mass media in ways that they were not supposed to be able to do. So that was the context [of her piece]; I wanted to put that in. The other areas of work that I do have been kind of responsible for helping to start the notorious field of masculinity studies in academia [Laughter], and just this week a book that I edited called Male Trouble came out. And Henry is in that. And all those essays deal with new configurations of masculinity that are found, you know, all over American film and television right now. Fraught versions of it, slashed versions of it--even when they don't know they're slashed [Laughter]--

Shoshanna: Lethal Weapon 3.

Constance: --utopian versions of masculinity. So that was an interest I already had, but certainly what was going on in slash fandom, with the attempt to try to come up with better versions of masculinity--I learned a lot from that. And then the third area I've been interested in is pornography. I just always felt that as a feminist, I was just so sick of the pornography debates, so sick of the Women Against Pornography movement, I was so sick of everybody assuming that every feminist was anti-pornography. And I also saw this as a major obstacle to feminism becoming more accepted and more popular in this country, largely because of the way the media have taken this up; so many people think that all feminists are anti-pornography, and of course anti-sex, and anti-men, and everything else. So anyway, I decided that I really had to go ahead and confront this head-on. So I'm now doing, as far as I know, about the only course in this country--I teach at U. C. Santa Barbara, and I'm doing a course on hard-core pornographic film. And if you read the Santa Barbara News Press tomorrow morning [Laughter] you can see a little comment on my course. The Santa Barbara County Citizens Against Pornography lodged a protest with my chancellor, so... This is, you know, kind of historical pornography, stag films, things like that, going all the way back to the teens and twenties; it's right on up to the big high-production-value films of the seventies: Deep Throat, Inside Misty Beethoven, Behind the Green Door, and right up through lesbian sex videos, gay male hardcore; I'm showing a bunch of the safer-sex shorts from Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, where you've got these really hot vignettes that are meant to demonstrate safer-sex techniques that are still really hot. And I introduce my students to the slash idea in this course, because the emphasis of the course is on people knowing what pornography actually is, rather than what they're told it is, and also on how pornography figures into people's lives. Because one of the things that I've really learned from slash fandom is that so few people have any description or any idea of what pornography means for people, what it can mean for people, what just being able to write your sexual ideas and desires can mean, for a sense of personal liberation, but other kinds of liberation as well. So by this time, I mean, to sum it up, my academic ideas are my fannish ideas, and my involvement is slash fandom is--they're just so tied up together it's impossible to tell. I never thought of myself as studying the fandom, maybe because I was too involved in it, but also because I was--I think of my work as trying to write, so that other people working on women in popular culture, women in consumer culture, women in pornography, so that they can learn from slash fandom what I've learned from slash fandom. So it seems like a kind of work of translation.

Henry: As Constance suggested, I came to academia via fandom to begin with. I have been a media fan for about fifteen years now, starting back in late high school/early undergraduate days, going to cons, meeting the woman who's now my wife via fandom, and she started me reading zines, which were very alien to where I as a male fan was coming from. I can remember early conversations where we'd be discussing an error, or problem, in one of the Star Trek episodes, and I would keep saying well, that problem is there because continuity screwed up, and because the director didn't do his research; I would always refer to the production process to explain the problem. And she would say, well, maybe this is going on in Kirk's life... [Laughter] And it was very curious to me, as we were dating and getting to know each other, that there was such a profound difference in the way in which we read. And I learned, through her, to really appreciate that style of playing with the text, that openness, that flexibility, and started reading zines, and it really started me-- At that time I was planning to be a political scientist. It was not at all what I had planned to do in my life, to go into media studies. But I got so excited about film, about television, by being a fan, by listening to people talk passionately about popular culture and their engagement with it, that I decided that the thing to do was to go to graduate school and study film and television, because that's where my excitement was, that's what did it for me; maybe I could become a professional fan in some fashion [Laughter]. And I arrived at the University of Iowa, and the very first course I took there, I got assigned an article called "Star Trek and the bubble-gum fallacy," by Lawrence and Jewett, which I take on early on in Textual Poachers. But essentially it argued, well, this is an incredible cult religion that has grown up around Star Trek, and it's very much like the Manson family [Laughter]. Like, the Manson family was really attached to the Beatles, and they read it [the Beatles' music] oddly, and they went out and killed people, and these people have just devoted their entire lives to Star Trek. And it begins with an assertion that, well, when you ask these people why they like the show they really can't tell you why they like the show; it's just like bubble gum. And I thought, how incredibly odd, if these guys dealt with the cons that I've dealt with, that they think fans are inarticulate! And it was highly disingenuous, because it included cites to Star Trek Lives, and The World of Star Trek, and other early books that were in fact quoting fans very extensively, so he knew that these writers knew that fans were articulate, and had closed the door to them. So I, in my very first class as a graduate student, said to the instructor, look, I'm going to write an essay that responds to this. Because I was really irked. And so I wrote what was the earliest draft of my first essay on Star Trek, "Star Trek Reread, Rerun, Rewritten" was first coming into being as a graduate student, writing out of anger at the way in which fans had been written about. And it ended up getting published, one of my first publications, in a journal, and from that I got asked to write a book. [Laughter; Meg is holding up each piece he mentions as he mentions it.] She's got it all right here, my entire oeuvre.

Meg: I don't have the bubble-gum one, because it's only about fandom, it's not about slash. This is just slash.

Henry: Slash was something I discovered fairly late in this whole process. And I have to admit I was initially a little uneasy about the idea of plunging into slash. The first couple of pieces [that he read] were really painful pieces; they were hurt/comfort slash stories and they sort of threw me out. And part of it was, even when I read nice stories, there was a sense of, not with my body! [Laughter] Not that I was homophobic exactly, but that I was uncomfortable with the way in which women were writing about men's bodies, and having them doing things that it didn't seem to me would cause me a great deal of pleasure to have done to my body, and I had some trouble reading this fantasy and projecting it outward. As it's gone along, though, slash has really changed how I think about my own sexuality, in a very direct way. I had for years fought an awareness of gay impulses in myself, had fled away from those with a great deal of fear. I now talk of myself as bisexual. I'm in a monogamous relationship more than a decade old that is heterosexual, but my sense of myself, and the label that I attach to myself, have changed through reading slash and recognizing the meaningfulness of those fantasies, and tapping them into thoughts and fantasies I had going very very far back.

So slash really changed me in that way, and has led me to be much more open about dealing with questions of sexuality in my work as a scholar. I just got through teaching a course called "Gender, sexuality, and popular culture," that included some slash stories in it, some of M. Fae Glasgow's stories, and that really was an attempt to engage more fully with the whole issue of sexual identity, and it started with writing about slash for Textual Poachers. So now I can honestly say, as my button [which he's wearing on his shirt] suggests, yes, I am both a male and a slash fan, and have really become excited, because I think that slash really speaks to men, including straight men, in a way that a lot of popular culture doesn't. The sorts of themes I talk about in terms of slash in the book, that breaking through of the barriers to intimacy between men, the creation of communication across the kind of walls that we as men put up around ourselves, is a very profound fantasy that a lot of men have. And I think back about the reality of my friendships with other men...

One of my best friends as an undergraduate just about died of cancer, and I didn't know it. He just had disappeared for nine months. He couldn't communicate to me this vulnerability, and he was seriously ill before I ever found out and went to his bedside and we talked about it for the first time. But that was the reality, that I didn't notice, he wasn't communicating, and we were both into our little walls to the point that none of the stuff that's in slash was a possibility. The thought of crying, of communicating, of talking between men is so rare in our culture that slash really represents to me one of the few places where you can talk about those questions, where you can engage with it and fantasize about it. And I wish I had friendships with other men that were as good as the sorts of images that crop up in slash. But it's something that politically is very important to me, that I, going back to an undergraduate, during the same time period, ironically enough, was doing male consciousness-raising sessions. And I had been talking about masculinity as an issue, and a lot of my own writing that isn't about fandom deals with questions of gender or masculinity in one way or another. But it was slash, I think, that really opened me up fully to the implications at a most personal level of what I was actually talking about, and helped me understand that much better.

So this book has been both personally and professionally a really important one to me. It's one that was intended to be written as a fan as well as an academic, to both academic and fan audiences. I've been gratified by the responses on both sides.

One last thing I want to say before we open it up was what had changed within the academy over the last ten years that allows this work to be done. That is--I'm thinking about film and media studies--we as a discipline had to define ourselves in opposition to fans and buffs in order to gain admission to the academy. That is, if you're going to be taken seriously, and you're writing about popular culture, the last thing you want to do is be accused of being a fan. Right? You want to say, I am an academic. I'm studying this just like you study art history and you study music history, and you study literature. And you push away those personal implications of this stuff in your own life, and you devalue them. And I think a lot of the attacks on fans by academics previous to us grew out of their desire and discomfort at the relationship or parallel between academic engagement with popular culture and fan engagement with popular culture. I began a conference paper recently by turning to the audience and saying, you know, we've been talking about television this entire weekend, many of you traveled all the way across the country to be here with us today, and I just wanted to say--get a life, will you? [Laughter] And sort of turn the table around and realize that the stereotype of the academic and the fan are virtually the same.

It's only now that there is a secure base for film and media studies within the academy that it is possible for people like me to go through graduate school publicly as a fan, to assert, to out myself as a fan, which a number of people, academics and fans, have referred to in letters about Textual Poachers, that I outed myself as a fan within the academy. And I've in fact heard very negative things from some academics as a result of that. I was quoted in Lingua Franca as saying that I'm a fan first and an academic second, which is actually a misquote. It was a chronological statement; it wasn't a statement of priority. But I said that the things I write about grow out of things that I care about as a fan, and that I choose to write about them and engage with them as an academic as well. But I got a lot of ribbing and uncomfortable remarks from other academics because of that statement.

But I think it is now possible to be a fan academic in the infrastructure of the academy as it's now evolved. And now I get letters from all over the country from graduate students who are writing about their fandoms. Not just fandoms that are included in our world of media fandom, but Stevie Nicks fans, or soap opera fans, and any number of people are beginning to write as fan academics. I know of at least one anthology of fan academic stuff that's in the pipeline right now, of academics writing about fandom, and almost all of the people in it are graduate students or junior faculty who came to the academy as fans of one sort or another, and are writing about things they passionately care about. And so that's why this year Camille's book came out, and my book came out, and Constance's work has been coming out over the last couple of years on this stuff, that it suddenly seems like all of a sudden the academy has discovered fandom. It isn't, in fact; academics have written about fans for a long time. But we discovered a way to talk to fandom about our work, and to talk as fans within the academy. And that's what's changed, is the ability for you to talk back to us, and for us to try to create some dialogue. And it's something that as a student of popular culture I care about very much, is taking what's going on in the academy about popular culture, and breaking down those barriers to talk to the popular communities about it, and it's something I keep struggling in my own work to find more and more ways to do, to engage in discussions like we're having today.

?: But the question we need to know is, should fans be allowed to serve in the military? [Laughter]

Henry: It's probably too late for that...it's a question of identity versus practice. You can have the identity of a fan and be in the military, just don't practice it. [Laughter] I mean, I wouldn't want to take a shower with one... [Laughter]

?: It's too late; they've already got pictures of Spock and Kirk hanging in astronauts' mess halls.

Shoshanna: As a fan, I've been really fascinated to read a lot of the academic work on fandom because it gives me a new language in which to think about what I'm doing. Sometimes it manages to put into words things that I had not been able to put into words before. Sometimes it tells me things I didn't know before. Sometimes it tells me things I didn't know, and I still don't know after they've told me, because I don't believe them for a minute. [Laughter] But even then, unless it's just complete garbage, it forces me to sit down and think about what they're saying, and why it's wrong, and how it works. Camille Bacon-Smith's book I have some real problems with--a lot of people are nodding--but the fact that she wrote it, in the language that she did, meant that I could then try to think about it in that language, and come up with, why doesn't this work, and what's going on...

Constance: What is she on?

Shoshanna: Yeah... um... I'm sorry, train of thought derailed.

Constance: The language it gives you.

Shoshanna: Yeah, um... We have a language we use as fans to talk, and I also speak academic--I have a Master's in history, although I'm now grading classes for Henry in film and television--and I like being able to speak both languages. I gave a copy of Henry's book to my parents--a copy to my father and a copy to my mother, because they're divorced--partly as a way of saying, this is what I've been doing for the last ten years; here it is described in a language you can understand, a language that maybe won't make it seem so stupid to you. It didn't work for my mother; she was infuriated by the book, she was really angered by it. It made her very angry.

?: Why? The book or the subject?

Shoshana: Both. As far as I could tell--and you have to understand, I don't get along with my mother, and I don't share many values with her--as far as I could tell, she was angered that fans spend so much effort on this worthless pastime--

Constance: Oh, yes.

Shoshanna: --and that academics spend so much effort studying this worthless pastime. [Laughter] She thought both of these were a waste.

Meg: It's okay to spend that much time and effort studying Shakespeare, but not Star Trek.

Shoshanna: There's a line I heard somebody say yesterday--I don't remember who said it, just in the middle of a panel or something, talking to someone, and talking about somebody who was particularly impassioned on a subject, and they turned to this person and said, get a hobby! [Laughter] I thought that was beautiful.

Jane: [unclear; what she always thinks of are] those guys that sneer at the big fat media girls, with their Trekkie stuff, who sit in their shows with their friends, and they watch them over and over, and talk about them; as they sit there with their beer guts and watch the Super Bowl, and talk about the plays over and over with all their buddies... [more, unclear; laughter]

?: It was it interesting that you said "Shakespeare," or whoever it was who said "Shakespeare," because that is exactly what was said in a discussion that I had with people who were studying Shakespeare, until I said, yes, but Shakespeare was the television of his time.

Meg: Shakespeare is popular culture. [General sounds of agreement.]

?: And we didn't continue the dialogue, because I think they're still thinking about it.

Meg: Well, the usual comeback to that is that now there's been hundreds of years and it's been proven to be more than popular culture, because it has staying power and it's a classic.

Henry: But the point is that Shakespeare was still popular culture as of the turn of the century. We're not talking hundreds of years ago. It was still a lively part [of popular culture]. And the academy robbed it from popular culture and killed it and stuffed it and put it in a museum. [Laughter] And then sits around and feels proud of itself, that it's done something vital for the survival of mankind.

Meg: Getting it out of the hands of those horrible populists.

(MORE TO COME)