Textual Poachers Turns Twenty!

This past week, I received in the mail my author's copy of my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. This book, my first, is now twenty years old (meaning that it is old enough to drink and vote) and that means that I am old enough to... (well, never mind that part!) When I wrote this book as a first year assistant professor, I would never have anticipated the impact it would have and I certainly would not have imagined that Routledge would be willing to reissue it to mark the twentieth anniversary of its publication. One of the challenges of producing this edition was the struggle to come up with the right approach to the cover design. To be honest, it was very hard for me to let go of the original cover, which was constructed around a wonderful piece of Star Trek fan art by Jean Kluge, which my wife, Cynthia, had bought for me as a gift at MediaWest and which had been close at hand throughout the process of drafting the book.

But, in the end, we were able to produce a cover I am really very proud of -- in collaboration with a contemporary fan artist who has chosen to go here by the name of GLM:

Here's part of the explanation for the cover design I wrote for the book:

My hopes for the new cover were that it should represent, as the original did, the work of a fan artist and it should employ an aesthetic that grows out of the fan community's own modes of cultural production; that it should represent a transformative use of existing source material; and that it should suggest the dynamic nature of fandom, which has absorbed new content and embraced new forms of production since the original book was published....

This cover embodies the new aesthetic of photo-manipulation, which remains controversial among some fans but which has also represented a clear demonstration of the way that fans turn borrowed materials into resource for their own collective expression. While the original cover was based on a pre-existing fan work, this new cover was commissioned from and developed in conceptual collaboration with the artist. As with the original, we wanted to suggest the play with alternative universes, which is a staple of fan fiction. We chose four characters -- Spock, Darth Vader, Buffy and Xena -- who represented four key fantoms that span the past two decades, and we positioned them in an alternative reality fantasy that allowed us the chance to imagine interactions between them. Keep in mind that Jean Kluge's original was an alternative universe version of Star Trek: The Next Generation read through the lens of Arthurian romance. These characters are meant to stand in for the hundreds of fictional figures who have inspired fan devotion and creativity since Textual Poachers first appeared.

The selection of these figures was a challenge: we needed characters that were likely to be recognized by non-fan readers but which also had a rich role in the history of fan culture, and the press was a little nervous about certain rights holders who had a reputation for being a bit litigious in going after infringers (so no Disney, no Harry Potter...). So this is what we came up with.

It has occurred to me that there is probably more than one fan story to be written to explain the configuration of characters and settings presented here. So, let me throw out my own fan challenge: I will happily send along one autographed copy of the new edition of Textual Poachers to any fan author who wants to write the story to accompany this picture (especially if you will let us publish the story through my blog.) Send it to me at hjenkins@usc.edu.

The book also includes a detailed artist's statement in which GLM explains the process of photographic manipulation through which she generated the core image. The finish image, she tells us, involved 200 layers and 242MB of data.

For the reissue of the book, Suzanne Scott, a rising young fan scholar, did an extensive interview with me, in which she posed challenging questions about what has happened to fandom and fan studies over the past twenty years. Here's a small excerpt from that exchange:

Like many first wave fan studies, Textual Poachers spoke back to dominant representations of fans as “brainless consumers”(10).  Fans have moved from the margins to the mainstream within convergence culture, and echoing this shift we’ve seen a proliferation of fan and geek characters within popular culture.  Many of these representations still trade in stereotypes, suggesting that fans “get a life” (e.g. The 40 Year Old Virgin, The Big Bang Theory), and the etymological ties between “fandom” and “fanaticism” continue to be reinforced by the popular press (e.g. coverage of Twilight fangirls), but there are notable exceptions.  Do you think the trend towards recasting fanboys as superheroes (Heroes, Kick-Ass) or action heroes (Chuck, Ready Player One) has dulled the dominant representation of fans as feminized through their ties to mass culture?  Has hegemonic masculinity shifted to tentatively incorporate the fanboy, as a character archetype as well as a consumer identity?

Suzanne, you’ve spent more time looking at this question than I have, but I was struck rereading Chapter One by how much these contemporary representations continue to play around with the same themes as earlier fan stereotypes rather than offering us an alternative conception of what it might mean to be a fan. So, in 40 Year Old Virgin, a key step into heterosexual normality comes when the protagonist sells his action figure collection; we can see Virgin as a prototype for a whole cycle of comedies which celebrate “arrested development” as a masculine virtue/priviledge, but the more manly the characters are, the more likely their interests are in sports or rock, rather than in science fiction and comics. Fan boys have been, by and large, better served by literary representations by authors such as Nick Hornby (1996), Michael Chabon (2000), Jonathem Letham (2004), or Junot Diaz (2008), than in media depictions.

The Big Bang Theory is a much more complex text than the “Get a Life” sketch for a number of reasons, but it starts with the same core cliches: Leonard has been given a love life, but despite a sort of romantic entanglement with Amy Farrah Fowler, Sheldon is still depicted as asexual; Howard still lives in his mother’s basement, even as he is engaged to be married; there are running jokes which queer the relations between Howard and Rajesh (not that there’s anything wrong with it); we have had episodes which hinged on the value of Leonard Nimoy’s autograph and the boy’s collecting impulses are sometimes depicted as bordering on the irrational. At the same time, though, we are encouraged to see the world from the fan characters’ perspectives, we value their friendship and intellectual mastery, and over multiple seasons, they have become more complex than the stereotypes upon which they were based. Most significantly, the show insures that it gets its geek references right, anticipated that the show is being watched by people who will know what “frak” and “grok” mean, who have opinions about the comics or video games the characters are buying, who might actually play “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock,” and who will appreciate cameo appearances by Wil Wheaton, Brent Spiner, Katee Sackoff, and Summer Glau.

What’s striking, though, is that even though Big Bang has added female characters in recent seasons, the women remain largely outside the fannish circle: it’s almost a crisis anytime women venture into the comic shop; Bernadette and Amy are both female scientists, but they do not show much interest in science fiction. Big Bang shows some sympathy to fan boys, but doesn’t share the love with fan girls.

I have spent less time looking at Chuck, so I can’t really comment there,  but it seems to me that Kick-Ass and Super, among the new action films, still pathologize their fan characters (seeing them as acting out unfulfilled fantasies or turning personal frustrations into violent rage), even if they have become the protagonists rather than the antagonists (as in, say, King of Comedy or Unbreakable). I tend to like these newer representations better because they often address us as “fans” but we still lack alternative forms of fan identities in popular culture that might reflect several decades of academic research on fans and fandom.

The exception may be in nonfiction. More and more journalists are themselves fans and thus openly display fan expertise and engagement. Commercial blogs, such as io9, Blastr, and the Los Angeles Time’s Hero Complex, take fans seriously as a demographic, and San Diego Comic-Con gets cover stories in Entertainment Weekly, which often assume a fan rather than “mundane” reader. Documentaries like The People vs. George Lucas have taken the side of the fan over the producer (though here, again, with a strong gender bias; the history of female fan complaints about Star Wars get little to no attention). And, as you’ve suggested, more and more show runners and filmmakers have used their blogs, podcasts, and director’s commentary, to construct a “fan boy auteur” identity, to help authenticate their relationship with a more participatory audience (an option which has so far not been open to female showrunners) (Scott, 2012). This is where the mainstreaming of fan culture has taken place (and in turn, this process may make some of the more sympathetic elements in Big Bang, say, more accessible to a general audience.)

Big Bang Theory’s dual address seems to perfectly encapsulate the industry’s conflicted desire to acknowledge fans’ growing cultural influence, while still containing them through sitcom conventions.  I agree that the recent influx of fanboy characters reinforce old stereotypes more frequently than they challenge or complicate them, but as you note above the comparative scarcity of fangirl representations - Liz Lemon on 30 Rock aside - suggests that while the industry is beginning to take fanboys seriously as a demographic, fangirls (or women, generally) are still considered a surplus audience.  While I’m an avid reader of  the Los Angeles Time’s Hero Complex, it’s difficult not to notice the gendered language of their tagline, “for your inner fanboy.”

Some of this, I think, has to do with the particular role of San Diego Comic-Con as the primary point of intersection between Hollywood and the fan community (Jenkins, 2012a). Coming out of comics and science fiction fandom, rather than out of media fandom, Comic-Con has very much been shaped by male-centric fan traditions, norms, and assumptions, and until very recently, the attendees were overwhelmingly male. So, when Hollywood went to talk to the fans, or when the news media did its annual fandom story, they mostly encountered men, and this served a particular push right now within the media industry to try to hold onto the young male demographic, which is the “lost audience segment,” because they have been abandoning television for games and other digital media. So, even as fan studies has suggested the centrality of women to fan culture, the media industry clings to somewhat outmoded understandings of what kind of people are fans. Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increase of women coming to Comic-Con (partially in response to Twilight and True Blood, but really, across the board), so there may be some hope that the industry might develop a more diverse understanding of the fan audience.  Witness a largely sympathetic account of female “shippers” in Entertainment Weekly (Jensen, 2012) which included acknowledgement by industry insiders of their increasing significance in shaping the reception of especially procedural programs like Castle and Bones. Because of its location in San Diego, Comic-Con is more racially and ethnically diverse than most other fan gatherings. As a consequence, it is becoming a key site for minority fans to organize and call out the industry for its often stereotyped representations of people of color.

Another factor that may change this pattern has to do with the growing number of cult television shows produced by women -- in many cases, they are produced by husband and wife teams, but there are also a number of female show runners who inherit series from male mentors (such as the relationship between Joss Whedon/Ron Moore and Jane Espensen). It says something positive about the so-called “fan boy auteurs” that so many of them have invested in helping women break into the industry. You can argue that the industry’s address to male fans reflect the male producer’s intuitive understanding of what fans want to see and thus diversifying who produces media can help diversify the kinds of media produced. Of course, it remains to be seen if these women will have the same freedom to proclaim their fan investments their male counterparts now take for granted or whether they are still under a lot of pressure to demonstrate their professionalism and are not “simply fan girls.”

And the book closes with a study guide by Louisa Ellen Stein, exploring what Textual Poachers might contribute in the contemporary classroom, providing questions for discussion, readings for further consideration, and other resources which might help educators in using this work more effectively with their students.

If I was delighted to be working with a next generation fan artist for the cover, I was also very proud to be working with two next generation Aca-fen to help me reflect on the book's legacy. We all hope that the book's re-release encourages you to revisit Textual Poachers or perhaps read it for the first time.

The whole process has left me nostalgic about the experience of creating Textual Poachers. At the time, I sent out copies of the manuscript to everyone quoted, and I still have a bulging file of letters I received in response from countless fan women. I know some of you are still reading this blog twenty years later, and I'd love to encourage you to post comments here, sharing your own reflections about what has happened to fandom over the past two decades since this book first appeared. I think our blog response software is working much better than it has sometimes done in the past, but if you have any problems posting your comments, send them to me at hjenkins@usc.edu

Rethinking the Industrial Mindset: An Interview with No Straight Lines' Alan Moore (Part Three)

You describe mobile communications as both a disruptive and transformative technology. Why? What do you see as the long term impact of the growth of mobile communications in our lives?

I describe mobile as our remote control for life. If we think that the fixed internet has been a disruptive force, mobile devices of which there are more on this planet now than people will have an impact of a higher order of magnitude. From east side LA to the Masai in Africa and onwards to the rain forests of Peru, we are all connected up to and across each other, enabling flows of data / information that can be described in the same way as when Eleanor Roosevelt first saw Iguassu Falls where the Amazon meets Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil and exclaim “poor Niagara”.

Mobile is transformative we see this in Africa, a continent that is vast that could never benefit from the fixed internet in the same way the US or Europe has for example. By the constraint of design mobile communications has become the platform by which Africa is dealing with banking, education, healthcare, and trade. MPesa a mobile banking system allows people to pay for goods and services, to have salaries paid, and is used as a payment system for people working via their mobile devices (translations / fact checking) so that they have the potential to increase their income from $2 per day by making $2 for every hour worked. Four years after introducing mobile banking and mobile payment into Kenya, 25% of the total Kenyan economy is transmitted through mobile phones and 70% of the population uses MPesa. There are 74 mobile phones for every 100 Kenyans, well above the African average of 65. And nearly 99% of internet subscriptions in Kenya are on mobile phones. And, Kenya’s biggest bank, Equity Bank is opening an innovation centre in Nairobi focusing on mobile technology.

M-Farm is a service that gives farmers access to market prices for the cost of a text message and allows them to group together to buy and sell products. Something similar is happening in India.

Worldreader.org is providing African children with mobile enabled kindles giving them the first time the opportunity to access information, books, knowledge and learning at a price they can afford.

The crisis management platform Ushahidi could never have worked without mobile technology and its unique characteristics; the ability to harness time critical information using GPS and time stamped location data. Ushahidi is now used in many ways to help gather data - mapping information into a cartography around human crisis issues from natural disasters (Japan and Haiti) to the harassment of women in Egypt by predatory men, to citizen journalism and civic engagement.

In Japan data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It’s the evolution of what we would call a smart city.

The rainforest tribe the Achuar are using mobile GPS devices to map their land using that data by transferring it onto mining maps augmenting them so that companies buying land from the Peruvian government for mineral extraction can now see for the first time that their activities have a devastating effect on people that wish to live a way of life that has been continuous for many thousands of years.

Museums can become platforms and start to provide services that create additional assets and additional revenue streams. Their audience is global from day one.

These are but a few glimpses of the transformative power of mobile, Africa upgrading itself in part through mobile connectivity to itself and the rest of the world. It can now plug into the world economy.

So mobile is the Iguassu rather than the Niagra – an enabler of all aspects of our lives – an empowering us, providing us with greater autonomy, freedom, efficiency and effectiveness. Even more beautiful with the arrival of smart phone technology that enables us to interface with the world around us with ever decreasing interference in new and exciting ways, contributing to the step change in humanities progress.

You write about the relationship between “data” and “democracy.” I would want to draw a distinction between “data” which can be collected and aggregated without the knowledge of participants (as is increasingly the case in Web 2.0 services) and “discourse” which emerges from the active and conscious deliberation of communities who are working towards a shared goal. Are these two models equally democratic?

Democracy as data the black gold of the 21st Century

I made this observation in 2004, and like all resources of great value, conflict is never far behind.

And I completely agree with your observation and distinction. Data is integral to what comes next, thinking from a perspective of openness and aesthetics of design in that only ugly thoughts bring to bear ugly realities. It may not at first seem a clear connection between data, individual sovereignty and democracy. However once we understand that at high level the commercial world seeks to influence and in some cases coerce political institutions then we have to see them as linked. Or indeed that political ideology seeks to direct the course of political outcomes as is the case in Pennsylvania at the moment and elsewhere where Republicans seeks to make it much harder for various sections of the African-American community to vote in the hope they weaken Obama’s chances of re-election.

In Britain there are attempts by the Government of the day to legislate so that they can access and extract comprehensive, fine-grained covert surveillance of entire populations. All our digital activity: voice, text, Google searches, a level of surveillance that is unprecedented and as John Naughton describes as pernicious.

The recent phone hacking debacle in the UK in which it was found The News of the World hacked into the voice mail of thousands of people including murdered school girl Milly Dowler to sell tabloid newspapers demonstrating a rubicon has been crossed.

Data whichever way you look at it is about power and everyone is at it.

These examples are not democratic, they are harvesting data for personal or state gain. Which is why so many organizations work so hard to fight for the democratic rights of individual sovereignty around the world. It is a battle we must all be part of as 1984 just might be here already.

The opportunity of the open society

Whereas if we see shared data as a life enhancing resource that amplifies cooperative capability built upon mutuality rather than extraction of information for individual gain – then there are reasons to be optimistic.

The Ordnance Survey, the owner of all the topographical data of the UK, has opened up its data-base under a creative commons license to enable other to build upon the work of others, Ushahidi, the crisis management platform, could not work without data. Open source platforms allow diversity to flourish a default setting of nature, and they are extremely resilient and adaptive.

Like all things it is about asking the right question – is what we create for the collective good – where mutualism and trusted networks of relationships can flourish? The increase in the use of Creative Commons and open innovation demonstrates this can work in commercial and non-commercial contexts – there must rules of engagement but these rules are built upon what I describe as the economics of sharing.

We could go one further with the idea of the open commons region. What data could be released into the public domain to aid local communities be better communities to become, as the Shareable Magazine in San Francisco describes as, ‘shareable cities’. Where a multitude of neighbourhood resources can be shared; car rides, urban farming, skills, culture, civic innovation. Like an initiative called Brickstarter, this open approach enables citizens to submit ideas which then get registered on a website. Then based on ideas submitted to the platform, the service then connects visitors, and invites them into project groups. Project groups have their own project page with more information, upcoming events, feedback, etc. Projects can also form connections to existing city resources and community organizations. In July 2011 the City of New York invited volunteer-led community groups to apply for a Change by Us NYC grant to fund ongoing projects.

These initiatives are citizen led, grassroots, networked and flat in hierarchy. As C. Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U describes, “as an evolved geometry that devolves power from hierarchies to evolving trusted networks of relationships”. The aesthetics of such design processes lead to exemplary outcomes.

You introduced me to Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman and Sennett’s arguments play a key role in this book in defining what you see as the ideal form of labor for the future. What do you see as the core insights we might take from Sennett’s book, which deals with much earlier moments in the history of work, to think about how people might relate to their “jobs” in a networked culture?

Insights to Craftsmanship

Richard Sennett in The Craftsman reminds us of a number of things to reflect upon. First the craftsman represents the special human condition of being ‘engaged’.

Secondly, Hephaestus was the Greek god presiding over the craftsman, the bringer of peace and the maker of civilization. ‘More than a technician, the civilizing craftsman has used his tools for a collective good’, he writes. And it was through the spirit of the Enlightenment that the craftsman brought forward a huge surge of social and creative innovation that made the lot of ordinary humans better. So the craftsman questions why he makes things; he must evaluate the energy, effort and time that will consume him in his craft and the final act of creation – is he doing good, is he solving a real problem and offering up something better, is he using all his skills as a civilizing force? These questions must weigh constantly in his mind.

The craftsman is always in beta

His mind must be open to new ideas, techniques, tools and processes; to close his mind to the new, or new ways of doing things, is the greatest risk he will take. The ability to bring two unlikes together in close adjacency and recognise a pattern or a new possibility is the true act of creation; Lennon and McCartney or the fusion of medical knowledge and computing are but two real life examples of what I mean. The craftsman must combine technique and expression so that he is also able to act intuitively.

This can only happen when he possesses deep or what is called implicit knowledge. Rather than acting only upon empirical information, the craftsman’s ultimate act is one of unique expression which can only be delivered through the mastery of these skills.

The engaged craftsman is a committed craftsman, ergo the engaged organization is a committed organization and will work far more effectively.

Does this description describe work for the majority in the early 21st Century? I was asked by a senior leader of a large organization, when I was running a Transformation LAB, whether craftsmanship as a culture could truly be inculcated into a large organization – my answer was yes but it does require a change of culture. The ability to create a dynamic where space is created for a constant process of creating, critiquing, collaborating and communicating.

We are all designed to be risk averse, yet there are ways to mitigate risk, and that is through pattern recognition. Where people see no connection, no pattern, no new pathways, only chaos, the craftsman see patterns, which he can then deconstruct into steps that will lead him successfully to achieving his goal. ‘What do you see?’ and ‘What do I see?’ are questions we need to ask as we seek. For example, if I use Creative Commons legal frameworks in the design and manufacture of cars, what might that mean to accelerate innovation? If I use a highly motivated community open source software connected up to Google APIs and mobile GPS technology, what might that mean? If I use revenue sharing, how will that make my business more attractive yet more disruptive at the same time? Pattern recognition comes from insight – it doesn’t come from an inflexible linear process.

This is also a form of systems thinking – the craftsman thinks about the whole system.

The craftsman also knows how to deliver quality without it necessarily costing the earth.

This then leads on to the idea of whether creativity is a resource or a competence. Organizations from a linear world are designed to function at 100% efficiency, which largely means there is no way in which they can also be creative organizations, as this requires room for reflection, deliberation, conversation, trying stuff out; that’s the practical stuff, but also industrial organisations ideologically fear creativity – anything deemed ‘creative’ is outsourced – but for the craftsman, and the crafted organization, creativity, to be creative, to think and act creatively is something that is a fundamental part of what makes them who they are.

This is the pathway I argue to how we make work more meaningful and life-enhancing which is also a part of our new Human Operating System.

Many are arguing that our current notions of intellectual property emerged and reflected a world where a limited number of people had access to the capacities of cultural production and circulation, and they are reaching a crisis point as we expand the number of participants in the communication systems. How central is copy-right reform to the emergence of the kind of alternative social and culture structures you propose? What would a better model look like?

This is an extremely important question, as law is the hidden framework that underpins and shapes all our lives – in so many ways. The framing by large media conglomerates that all file sharing, and modding of content is ‘piracy on the high seas’, demonstrates an unwillingness by those that believe only they have the right to manufacture culture to adapt to the shape of a more participatory world.

Copy-right reform is central to creating a more diverse and rich cultural and economic landscape. A better model is created out of a commons approach that provides different types of permissions for usage as expressed through the creative commons licenses.

I also think that this parallel universe to law should be taught at law and business schools so our next generation leaders and practitioners of law can learn to assess the granular benefits of an economy built upon sharing and open frameworks as separate to an ideology of strict one-way controls.

Lets face it if copy-right had existed when Dvorak was writing some of his great works based on folk tunes, folk myths and folk culture we would not have that work, nor the great work of many others. They built upon the work of others.

It is of course a difficult area to negotiate; if I had invested $160m in making a movie I might feel very unhappy if I saw no return on that investment based upon piracy. However one could build a model where elements of the movie could be made available for modding, reinterpretation and for sharing and this engaged fan fiction approach could be of great value to creators of expensive content – through marketing, development of innovative ideas and even new content.

And of course we see and extraordinary surge in innovation through the open source movement – the ability to innovate at a much lower cost at greater speed.

So this redistribution of wealth and value, wealth of knowledge, the value of creating better, the ability to build multiple services shows that openness encourages diversity the default setting for life to flourish. As Weber writes in the Success of Open Source the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. But it does challenges the dominant logic of an industrial society.

For myself I published No Straight Lines in an open access epub format which is globally accessible to anyone with a browser and I ask people to tweet to pay, which I think is fair compensation for seven years hard work – but the work also exists in paperback and kindle formats and we ask payment for these. Some people are happy to pay, some people are happy to pay with a tweet, some people are happy to make a donation.

The point is I seek more than short-term monetary value by giving permission for my story to flow and to be part of a global consciousness which would not have been possible otherwise. To emphasize I have used combinations of legal frameworks as an author I am seeking various values and not all are financial. Standing on the shoulders of giants

If we look back to the 60’s it was the Grateful Dead that perfected the idea of sharing as an economic and cultural means to spread their music, hence more people came to the concerts, more people bought the T-shirts and a tribe of Deadheads were born.

So this new model is adaptive, flexible in allowing value to be created in a variety of ways. The economy and aesthetics of sharing creates cultural value, intellectual value and a richer and more diverse pool from which our wider humanity can profit from in a multiplicity of ways. It is a model created from the ethos of mutualism rather than cultural and economic monoculture and strangulation.

You end the book with a series of core principles, one of which is adaptiveness. Why do you see this trait as central to your “nonlinear” culture? What roles can education play in preparing future citizens to be more “adaptive” to a changing environment?

I see this as a core principle because if Humanity is demanding an upgrade from all our industrial institutions which are now proven to be inappropriate for our time – seeking to unleash the full creative potential of every human being and in so doing enhances their wellbeing and that of the wider society – from healthcare to education to the workplace, allowing humanity to surge forward united by a common purpose. We have to ask what do organizations look like in a human-centric world – and how do traditional organizations innovate to upgrade themselves to be able to belong to the extraordinary story of human evolution that now points towards a more participatory, cooperative, and regenerative model of our society?

So learning to be adaptive is central to the story. From an education perspective – we need to prepare our citizens and our organizations to be able to upgrade themselves constantly. Many of the skills I learnt as a typographer whilst at college were obsolete within three years of leaving. And so for me it is an important and key lesson – that we need to teach people to be curious about the world they live in, to want to play in it, and that life long learning – the requirement to be in constant beta (a skill the craftsman possesses) is a necessary condition of thriving in a non-linear world. Adaptiveness is upgrading personal capability, organizational capability, our economies and by default the means by which we do business.

More specifically the ability to individually and collectively: create, critique, collaborate and communicate are the necessary conditions to learning to be adaptive. Your work for the MacArthur Foundation also inspired me to think about adaptiveness as a core principle. You cite the need for play, to appropriate, to simulate – by which you express the need to be able to be a good builder of patterns that can bring new insight – and I would also suggest a new language to describe new and novel ways to create, to ‘scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details’. There is an emphasis on collective intelligence which for me connects to participatory leadership – which ascribes to the view that a best possible future lies in the minds of the many. Teaching our children the power of participatory leadership would bring great value to our general society and therefore great rewards to individuals.

I worry these skills are not being taught, and I worry that there is a growing disconnect between the world we are creating and how education prepares the next cohort to inhabit that world meaningfully. We have to teach our children to be creative actors, and creators in our non-linear world – not to be passive consumers. As Proust observed “the real voyage of discovery is not to seek new landscapes but to look upon the world with fresh eyes”, and in that way we too can learn to adapt well to a changing world.

Alan  Moore sits on the “board of inspiration” at the Dutch Think Tank Freedom Lab. He acts as “Head of Vision” for the Grow Venture Community, is a board director of the crisis management NGO Ushahidi and is as a special advisor to a number of innovative companies and organizations including publishing, mobile, the theatre and finance.

Rethinking the Industrial Mindset: An Interview with No Straight Lines' Alan Moore (Part One)

In early 2007, I featured an interview on my blog with Alan Moore, then the CEO of SMLXL, the Cambridge based “engagement marketing” firm, and the co-author ofCommunities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century. At the time he explained, "Engagement marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create." Through the years, we have remained in touch. Moore remains one of the most thoughtful people I have met in the contemporary marketing world -- someone who reads broadly, who asks challenging questions, who is willing to explore alternative perspectives, and who is trying to construct his own theoretical model for the changes that are impacting our contemporary society.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y0a30z-v20&feature=player_embedded

All of that probing and reading comes together in his new book, No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Nonlinear World. No Straight Lines offers a fascinating perspective who roams far and wide across the worlds of business, media and entertainment, politics, education, even healthcare, suggesting a new framework for understanding the way the world is changing in the 21st century. And Moore has been putting his money where his mouth is experimenting with new kinds of relationship with his readers. The above video tells you how you can access a copy of the book at the price of a tweet, and below, he describes some of the ways that readers can participate within what he calls a "read/write" version of the book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j9SXNUQWXA&feature=relmfu In the conversation which follows, Moore explores a few of the many dimensions of the book, talking about how he can function as both a cultural critic and an industry leader, his critiques of Web 2.0, and his thoughts on core concepts such as participation, information, networks, and democracy.

You begin No Straight Lines with a provocative statement, “the purpose of this book is to highlight the corrosive effect that an industrial mindset and free market economy has ultimately inflicted upon humanity. My hypothesis is that we have got to the point where our industrial economy, projected onto society, can no longer support humanity.” These are strong and somewhat unexpected words coming from someone who has worked as the CEO of an branding company. How do you reconcile your positions as a cultural critic and as an industry leader? Does advertising have a constructive role to play in dismantling the industrial mindset which you claim has robbed us of aspects of our basic humanity? Or is advertising a key force promoting the old industrial model?

Craft

My early career originates in design, and design thinking. Deep is the connection between designers and their work as socially relevant to the world, so there is DNA in there.

I have often speculated that this is umbilically connected to craft – the craftsman works for the collective good. The creative marks yielded by my tools must have some form of satisfaction. Good work, good craft – yes, but also good for who else other than myself?

The shoemaker, the baker, the master craftsman used their skills and expertise to give something to society. And even the early industrial revolution through wrenching was geared towards giving light, heat mobility, communication, education etc., to a wider humanity.

Journey

My journey has been profound – I have worked for some of the biggest businesses in the world, but in my professional experience, and in the work I have undertaken initially for Communities Dominate Brands and now No Straight Lines I could see there was a systems problem.

I witnessed many organizations had lost their role and purpose for the wider society that a world defined purely by a commercial material culture had no value. Either through the products and services they were trying to sell, and or indeed the internal culture of these organizations.

The role of commerce in a networked world

These organizations were not asking – is what we create for the collective good?

I could see marketing had become harvesting cash flow for the quarterly numbers and shareholder returns. In many ways your book Convergence Culture demonstrated, to me anyway, humanities extraordinary need to create meaningful connection, to create culture and identity. Whereas you point to the cultural industries resisting any notion the idea that consumers had any right to participate in cultural production. Their job was to be good consumers.

So I asked myself do I need to help these organizations sell more or can I try to find a better use of my intent, my craft, creativity and skills? And that question led me to write No Straight Lines. Today my work is about helping large organizations see and create a better future.

Is advertising bad?

To your specific point advertising per se is not inherently bad – but its context on the whole is geared towards “I” and not “we”. With these jeans “I” will look cooler, more attractive, with this car “I” will feel more free, more important, with this black credit card it says “I” am important. Advertising represents the sharp end of the commercial intent of the organizations that define our world, its dominant logic is consumer culture is our salvation and I am afraid I have to disagree.

To demonstrate that lets briefly survey our commercial landscape – the bank HSBC has been laundering billions of drug cartel money in effect supporting murder, rape and torture; Barclays bank with others was fixing the interbank lending rate and undertaking massive tax fraud as we went into financial meltdown;  the subprime mortgage scandal in the US unleashed the global banking crisis which is still having significant implications for sovereign states today. Whilst they all advertise a better life through consumerism and debt.

Or in the UK the newspaper The News of the World that thought it was OK to hack into the voicemail of murdered school girls to sell tabloid newspapers and generate revenue through advertising. I would argue in pursuit of financial gain we have crossed a moral rubicon.

I was very happy to be in service of an industry which I believed to be inherently good – where commerce and society lived in mutual co-existence – but this is sadly no longer the case.

Part of your critique of the industrial era is that it forced humans to think and act in a very linear fashion, where-as you advocate a world where there are few if any “straight lines.” What do you see as some of the defining characteristics of the world you are advocating? What signs do you see that a post-industrial society is already moving us in that direction?

Firstly the defining characteristics I see are encapsulated in what I term the Human-OS (operating system).

This OS wants greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater empowerment, a revitalized sense of justice, a world where mutualism and participatory cultures are the default setting, where openness is seen as resilience and diversity is understood as a good thing, where we have greater autonomy and that seeks a greater aesthetic in everything we do: beautiful buildings, civic spaces, organizational design, it is as easy to make something beautiful as it is to make it ugly. So why choose the latter over the former? That question has always baffled me other than knowing ugly thoughts realize ugly realities.

This OS is the key driver to the systems change we are witnessing. I see this Human-OS in the transformational change of all the examples cited in No Straight Lines: from agriculture, hospital design, and healthcare service design, educational programmes, the response to complex civic challenges, manufacturing, NGO’s, the nature of finance, innovation and commerce itself. This OS is the story of why our networked world with its new Human OS is directing the shape of our post industrial future, which is why on the floors of our factories, in the waiting rooms of our hospitals, the classrooms of our schools, people are asking not what if – but how. How can we create a world designed around the wider needs of humanity, and that serves that humanity in ways in which our industrial society no longer can. As others have observed, when you get institutional failure you lose the right to lead and people learn to get what they need from each other – that is essentially what is happening.

There is also the well-documented insight that technology only succeeds when it meets fundamental human needs – if we are currently wrapping an interactive socially orientated communications membrane around the world we have to understand this is what the Human OS wants.

It demands we rethink a few things; how we educate our young, how we teach business, our sense of ourselves in relation to our communities and civic spaces the nature of the organisation and political institutions, legal frameworks, the nature of work, happiness and play.

And in fact there is not a single industry on this planet where people are not investigating ways in which these things can be achieved. And of course the old industrial order politically, socially, organizationally is resisting.

Alan  Moore sits on the “board of inspiration” at the Dutch Think Tank Freedom Lab. He acts as “Head of Vision” for the Grow Venture Community, is a board director of the crisis management NGO Ushahidi and is as a special advisor to a number of innovative companies and organizations including publishing, mobile, the theatre and finance.

Creating Transmedia: An Interview with Andrea Phillips (Part Three)

Game designers have long debated how they might create a game that makes people cry or indeed, whether people cry about games all the time (and not just from frustration.) I am often asked a similar question about transmedia.  Is our experience of transmedia a necessarily cold and analytic one -- putting together pieces of a puzzle, searching for clues which provide insights -- or does it produce its own range of emotional impacts on the audience? 

The idea that weeping is the sole arbiter of emotional response is absurd. The fact is that not only can games and interactive narrative produce a range of emotions -- the same tears and laughter and boredom you can get from flat media -- but also a whole new palette of emotions that require the audience to have agency. Frustration, as you say, but also fiero. Guilt over one's actions. Pride over an accomplishment. Relief at escaping from danger.

Many transmedia narratives share that element of interaction, and hence can open up that broader range of human emotions to provoke. Indeed, this is one of the things I find the most exciting, as a writer -- if the goal if a story is to provide an emotional experience, then surely the forms that allow you to access a wider scope of emotions is the clear winner.

The idea that a transmedia experience must be cold and analytic is equally misdirected. It's mistaking form and structure for content. The emotional payload is carried by the context and meaning each piece has, not by how you consume it. You wouldn't call a business letter anything but a cold and emotionless format, but the memo that hires you or fires you is going to have tremendous emotional weight because of the meaning you bring to it as a reader.

It also bears noting that insight based on fragmented evidence is our natural experience of life. Not to go down that "the whole world is a transmedia experience" path, but there is definitely a seed of truth there -- attaching meaning and therefore emotional weight to what amount to breadcrumbs is a very common and very human activity, whether the stories we're engaging with are authored fiction or not.

Writers have often described film and theater in terms of the willful suspension of disbelief, yet it can be hard to sustain disbelief across a story which is dispersed across so many different media. Indeed, transmedia often calls attention to the processes of its own production and circulation in ways which can impact its emotional reality. This may be why early ARGS claimed “this is not a game” and thus incorporated the reality of the web into the story. I’ve suggested we might think about the active production of belief as part of the expectation the transmedia storyteller places on their audience. What insights do you have about the problem of maintaining the credibility of a transmedia story?

This is an issue I've wrestled with quite a lot, because there are tremendous ethical and legal questions around pervasive fiction. How do you account for bystanders misinterpreting your content -- and maybe reporting you to the authorities? And yet how do you create an immersive experience if you're lamp shading the fact that your story isn't really real?

The solution, I think, is to separate the idea of realism and verisimilitude from the idea of emotional and narrative authenticity. It's easy to mistake the two, because they're both interpretations of truth. This isn't a new problem, either. In the 18th century, many novels claimed to be papers found in an attic, journals arrived in a mysterious parcel, and the like. They, too, were striving for realism in an effort to stake out credibility and authenticity, as the novel was considered a low form at the time. But now we've grown comfortable with the idea that a novel is outright fabricated by a writer, and that novels have cultural value, too.

Transmedia narrative will get there as well, and I suspect a lot faster, because audiences now have much more sophisticated media habits than audiences three hundred years ago. The audience will happily forgive you for gaps in realism. The hero rarely has to take a bathroom break, after all, and the bad guys are nearly always terrible marksmen. But if you have a character react to a situation in a way that doesn't feel true to the audience, you'll simply lose them.

Once you recognize this key distinction, it liberates you from striving to make things all look perfectly and completely realistic. The audience wants to buy into your story, so using intro and outro bumpers on video clips and corporate footers on websites don't damage the heart of the experience.

Classic Hollywood developed principles of redundancy so that every detail that mattered was repeated multiple times -- they sometimes talked about the Law of Threes. Does redundancy become more or less important in a transmedia text? What are some strategies that are effective for building redundancy into the text without boring your most dedicated fans? Are there other principles which should be used to insure the accessibility of a transmedia story?

As with many parts of transmedia creation, there's no one right answer. It depends on what works best for the project you're trying to make. Outright repetition could be necessary in some works and not others.

The one hard rule I'd put is this: if you're providing multiple entry points to your story, then you need to provide enough context for the audience to understand what's going on at exactly that point. If that means you have to repeat important details, then so be it, but a more elegant solution might be to provide easy access to that information in an out-of-story reference source. It might also be possible to include certain key information in entry pieces of content and then never repeat them. If you're making a sprawling Star Wars-style venture, you probably don't need to explain what a Jedi is in every new book or film; you can assume a certain amount of canon knowledge in your audience.

There is one more consideration, though, and that's the effect of fandom on a work. In an emergent and adaptive narrative, you may not even know what details will be important ahead of time. You simply choose the things your audience has focused on and reward that focus to the best of your ability.

Some communities thrive on explaining the story to one another, as well. Homestuck comes to mind -- it's recently been described as the Ulysses of the internet by the Idea Channel. It's nominally a web comic, but there are strong game influences and even outright games, music, and heavy audience influence over the events of the story. At this point, there are dozens of characters and an incredibly convoluted universe that operates under some very specific rules. The story can be nearly inscrutable in places if you aren't active in the fan community one way or another.

But if the creator, Andrew Hussie, were to repeat important details in the way that Hollywood might suggest, it would disrupt the flow of the story, limit its scope to what could be planned ahead of time, and it would remove the need for a sort of social grooming that happens in the fan community, of sharing common knowledge about the story and world. I don't think that fandom would be as robust if Homestuck itself wasn't as opaque.

Some argue that elements built into a transmedia story in order to intensify fan engagement can seem overwhelming to a more casual consumer who wants to just sit back and be entertained. Is this tension inevitable around a transmedia work or can we, as Christy Dena has argued, created different forms and levels of participation for different segments of a transmedia audience?

We can design for different levels of participation, and in fact for the most part we do. But there is a point of diminishing returns. If only ten people in the world will ever see a piece of content, perhaps you're better spending your budget on something else. You do in general have to choose between providing a very rich and deep experience for very few people, or providing a somewhat shallower experience to a much broader audience.

The fashionable solution right now is to make each platform a self-encapsulated narrative, completely accessible to casual audiences. Star Wars works just as one movie. Lizzie Bennett Diaries works just as a web series. Lance Weiler's Pandemic works just as a short film, and so on and so forth. But there are varying degrees of immersion available if you're motivated for all three of these. For Star Wars, you get entire other stories. For Lizzie Bennett, you get just a little characterization and depth.

And again, the issue of fandom rears its head. In a classic alternate reality game, most people will never actually solve a serious puzzle or pick up documents in a secret meeting at midnight. But the players who do jump through those hoops actually become a part of the entertainment for more passive audience members. The experience becomes something akin to a spectator sport.

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author. Her book A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling is published by McGraw-Hill. Her work includes educational and commercial projects such as The Maester's Path for HBO's Game of Thrones with Campfire Media, America 2049 with human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, Routes for Channel 4 Education, the independent commercial ARG Perplex City, and The 2012 Experience for Sony Pictures. These projects have variously won the Prix Jeunesse Interactivity Prize, a Broadband Digital award, a BIMA, an IVCA Grand Prix award, the Origins Vanguard Innovation Award, and others.

Creating Transmedia: An Interview with Andrea Phillips (Part Two)

By now, we have enough experiments to start to develop some core insights about what kinds of stories work best in a transmedia context. How would you define the goals and properties of a good transmedia story?

 

The core goal should always be to create a compelling story. Every facet of the work would reflect that, in a perfect world. But it's interesting to think about what elements of a story will actually sustain it, and what won't.

A lot of great transmedia works share certain surface characteristics: intricate mythologies or story worlds, a thread of the mysterious unknown, and some form of group identity the audience can relate to and imagine being a part of. Science fiction and fantasy are of course the main stock of transmedia so far, both because those genres easily fit those criteria, and because their fans tend to both interrogate their fiction relentlessly and sit early on the tech adoption curve. But we also see a lot of thrillers and mysteries, because those provoke seeking and solving behaviors; the audience actively wants more angles to the story and is motivated to seek them out.

There are a few genres that haven't yet been explored very well, though, and so I think we've found only a few things that work. How I Met Your Mother is pioneering the extended transmedia punch line. We'll definitely see more and more of that. And MTV's Valemont and now Lizzie Bennett Diaries tap into a potentially rich vein of complex social drama, for example. I think there's potentially a thriving market for soap-style transmedia relationship drama, but there haven't been as many efforts in that direction so far.

There's a related question: Is there anything in transmedia guaranteed not to work? I think very internal, literary stories might struggle to carry an expanded treatment without transforming into something entirely different. The Old Man and the Sea, for example, is a moving piece of writing, a work of classic literature, absolutely worth your time. But not really a great candidate to create a transmedia property. If you were to fracture it into pieces or expand the core of the story, you'd inevitably lose the power of the work as it stands. That's a huge part of being a transmedia creator, too; knowing when to leave well enough alone, because applying your tools will make the story worse, not better.

You describe yourself as a “big fan of physical artifacts” which help expand the world of the story. So often, transmedia is associated with digital media in popular discourse. What are some rich examples of projects which brought tangible and tactile media experiences into the mix? What do you see as the value of doing so?

Tangibility is a profoundly powerful thing. It's why we bring back souvenirs from trips, and why we cherish old concert t-shirts, why we buy replicas of rings and swords from movies we love. It's almost like locking all of the feelings and memories about a certain time and place into that object for safekeeping. I couldn't begin to explain the neuroscience, but I know the tool is that compelling. As an artist, of course I want to use that tool for the benefit of my story! And as a businesswoman, if people are willing to pay for that depth of experience, then I should definitely make it available.

Of course the HBO Game of Thrones campaign The Maester's Path is a great example of physical artifacts in transmedia marketing. The scent chests and food trucks dreamed up by Campfire were beautifully executed and well received (and I say this as someone who was on the team but definitely not the genius who dreamed up the strategy). Alternate reality games as a whole have an enormous history or providing tangible goods, to such an extent that the annual conference ARGfest sets up a museum every year so people can see and touch that history for themselves.

I'm working on an indie project right now called Balance of Powers, and just a few weeks ago, Kickstarter backers were sent an eight-page newspaper from the story world. It had display ads, classified ads, horoscopes, political news, a crossword puzzle -- just like a real newspaper, but all slightly altered to give information about the alternate-history universe where the story is taking place. The audience loves it, we have a way to make a little more revenue, and the story world expands in breadth and depth. It's a winning proposition all around. I am determined at this point to make a tangible element for every project I make, if I can manage it -- it's that powerful.

But as with many of the tools we place under the transmedia umbrella now, it's not even a very new practice! Video games used to use tangibility all the time. I loved Infocom text adventures, back in the day. The games themselves had no sound or graphics, but the boxes they came in were works of art. I remember letters and postcards, a swizzle stick shaped like a palm tree, a plastic evidence envelope with "cyanide" pills inside, maps and journals. Ultima games did it, too: coins and tarot cards and cloth maps. These objects both helped to evoke the game world right off the bat, and became cherished objects long after you'd finished the game. Games still do some of this, but they've switched to the revenue model, as well. You only get Master Chief's helmet if you shell out for the premium edition of Halo III.

I am a naysayer and don't consider all licensed objects to have that power, though. For me, there has to be an element of touching the story world. A toy light saber? Absolutely yes. Action figures and bed sheets? Maybe not so much. Those may be important sentimental objects, but they don't feel like objects from a fictional world that have materialized in our universe the way a replica of The One Ring might.

One common misunderstanding in transmedia is that because the information is dispersed across media, it can be consumed in any sequence and thus the story is essentially nonlinear. What roles do you see sequencing of information playing in shaping the transmedia franchise and what are some strategies people are using to influence to order in which we engage with the different segments they have produced?

This is one of the big structural challenges we deal with again and again. You can make entirely nonlinear experiences, but they're the exception, not the rule. That said, it is common for a minor component of a project to become a vector for introducing people to the greater work -- one wonder how many new people gave How I Met Your Mother a chance after the Robin Sparkles "Let's Go To The Mall" video. So you can certainly make discrete pieces that don't have much bearing on the chronology of the overarching storyline.

There are several possible solutions to the problem, though. One is to make it very obvious what your intended sequence of consumption is.  Reading or viewing guides, for example, for finished works. It's also good design to account for that in your structure; to make entry points obvious and numerous. Everybody knows where to get started with Star Wars -- you watch the movies.

For an experience that plays out in real time, finding a way to catch up new audience members is an enormous challenge, but an important one if you want to keep your audience growing. One of the things I'm most impressed with from The Lizzie Bennett Diaries is their recap model. Of course viewing order for the web series is obvious from looking at the YouTube channel. But there's also a handy reference page where important Tumblr posts and Storified social media exchanges are archived.

And then there's the Fourth Wall Studios approach with Dirty Work -- there's a main linear narrative with a distinct and obvious path through it. Other elements add to that, but it's not strictly necessary to consume them at all -- and they're all anchored in the main video so that it's literally not possible to access them from the wrong spot.

I think, though, that all of this is still a little clumsy. This is one of those elements of transmedia narrative where I feel like we haven't yet established the right conventions and vocabulary. In film, you know how to interpret a montage or a scene with calendar pages dropping to the floor. One day, we'll have simple and agreed method for showing an audience the best and intended way to navigate a transmedia experience, even if we're not quite there yet.

You use the example of “Chekhov’s Gun” to describe a particular kind of storytelling, where everything introduced must have a clear function within the narrative. Once you introduce a gun into the story, at some point you have to have a character fire it or otherwise what's the point. Yet, transmedia expands the potential range of functions which a device or detail might serve. For example, it might simply tell us something about the world which goes beyond the demands of a particular story, or it might be a rabbit hole which opens up places for the audience to explore beyond what’s explicitly on the screen. How, then, do transmedia producers know when to stop adding details? How do you answer the core question which many game designers learn to address early in their creative process -- what’s not in the game?

That's a particularly pertinent question in light of the reaction to Prometheus. The film centered around explaining a mystery from the first Alien film -- at least in part; there were a few points of conflict between the two accounts. But many viewers of both films were very unhappy with how that mystery was answered. They felt that by spelling out the origin of that first alien, the original work lost some of its impact.

When you're writing a complex work of fiction, it's often the case that you'll have a lot of information about backstory that you aren't going to pass on to your audience. It might seem like a waste to generate that knowledge and then not use it as content. But sometimes it's crucial to get your story straight about events and motivations you never want to spell out -- you're creating a negative space, and that space has to remain consistent. In order to preserve consistency, though, you have to be completely clear about what occupies that space.

I think, though, that part of this is simply the art of storytelling. The act of telling a story is implicitly the act of choosing a frame. There will always be things that happen before your story begins, and after it's over; there will always be things that occur during the story that you choose not to include. The art of narrative is to curate what you include in order to create the most satisfying possible story. Unfortunately, that's one of the hardest skills for a writer to learn.

The best (but still imperfect) advice I'd have is to understand what parts of your story are absolutely immutable, and which you can change. If you can cut something out of the story and still have a comprehensible story, then that element has to go through a harder vetting process. What is it adding? If you can't put your finger on a rock-solid reason to keep it in, maybe that's your signal that you shouldn't include it at all.

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author. Her book A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling is published by McGraw-Hill. Her work includes educational and commercial projects such as The Maester's Path for HBO's Game of Thrones with Campfire Media, America 2049 with human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, Routes for Channel 4 Education, the independent commercial ARG Perplex City, and The 2012 Experience for Sony Pictures. These projects have variously won the Prix Jeunesse Interactivity Prize, a Broadband Digital award, a BIMA, an IVCA Grand Prix award, the Origins Vanguard Innovation Award, and others.

Creating Transmedia: An Interview with Andrea Phillips (Part One)

Over the past few years, there has been a minor publishing industry emerging around books which seek to explain the aesthetics and economics of transmedia or crossmedia entertainment production. Among them: Drew Davidson (from Carnegie Melon University’s Entertainment Technology Program) contributed Cross-Media Communication (2010); Wired Magazine’s Frank Rose (2010) published The Art of Immersion; Nuno Bernardo (2011), a Portugal-based transmedia producer who has done work in Canada, Europe, and the United States, published A Producer’s Guide to Transmedia; the similarly titled A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Platforms  is the work of Andrea Phillips (2012), whose clients have included HBO, Sony Pictures, and Channel 4, and Max Gionavagnoli (2011), an Italian based transmedia producer and teacher who has organized the Ted X Transmedia events, recently published a more theoretical work, Transmedia Storytelling: Imagery, Shapes, and Techniques. It is not simply that these books come from both industry and academic sources or that they come from both the United States and Europe, but the individual authors also often straddle borders, as creative producers who work sometimes in academic settings, or as producers who work in multiple national contexts. These books engage in what might be described as speculative aesthetics, theorizing future directions in transmedia, alongside pragmatic advice for would be producers.  

As someone who teaches courses in this space (and regularly hears from other faculty who are developing such classes), it is great to have such a rich array of texts to use to instruct and inspire our students. I am committed to using this blog to run interviews showcasing this projects: so far, I have run interviews with Davidson and with Rose, and now, I am happy to share this exchange with Andrea Phillips.

Phillips is one of the most thoughtful writers working in this space today: she manages to hit the right balance between pragmatism and vision, between describing the conditions under which transmedia producers work today and spelling out the long term potentials of this still emerging form. She has the weight of hard experience behind her, but she is also deft at exploring theoretical and aesthetic dimensions of her project. I learned a ton from reading her book, and I learned more from her response to some potentially challenging questions I threw her way. I hope you enjoy this interview which I will run across the next few installments. I am very much looking forward to meeting her in person at the Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT next week. (And, shameless plug, it's not too late for you to register to join us there.)

I was delighted to see such a strong emphasis on the audience in the title of your book. Many people want to see transmedia as centrally about textual practices or about technological affordances. What model of audience underlies the approach you take in your book?

I come to the creation of transmedia narrative as an audience member myself, first and foremost. As a result, I'm absolutely militant about making sure that the story has value to my intended audience, even across a spectrum of consumption styles. This approach arguably has as much in common with software design as with other kinds of storytelling: use cases and user flows become just as important as emotional texture and pacing.

There's an interesting piece of mental gymnastics required when you're thinking explicitly about your audience. On the one hand, the audience is made of multiple individuals who will each have different experiences of the narrative, depending on factors like mood and context you have no control over. And for many people, that individual experience is all they'll have.

On the other hand, your audience is made up of individuals who talk to one another -- on forums or other digital communities, on social media, in person. Just as your work is hopefully greater than the sum of its parts, so too is the audience. It's smarter than the single smartest person. It's a living organism that makes decisions about how to engage with your story on behalf of a huge share of your audience.

You have to be able to hold both of these ideas in your head, and plan both for the individual and for the hive mind simultaneously. That can be a tricky maneuver. It's easier to design simple for a single-player experience or assume every audience member will be experiencing your story through the lens of a collective. But it's much better practice to take both angles into account.

Your first sentence tells us, “there’s never been a more exciting time to be a storyteller.” Why? 

We're in the middle of an epochal shift in how human beings communicate with each other. There have been other disruptions in the past, of course. The printing press and television were both incredible disrupting technologies that totally altered our communications landscape. But the internet and the mass availability of the tools of production have for the first time put the power of one-to-many and many-to-one communications in the hands of just about everyone. (Gibson's unevenly distributed future notwithstanding.)

The result is a revolution in how we view and consume news, in how we engage politically, how we promote and fund businesses, how we spend our leisure time. And more to the point, it's completely altered the landscape of the possible for art and for artists. We have new tools and new ways to reach audiences -- and that's amazing.

But the part that gets me incredibly excited is that we're experimenting with new forms, too, or changing old ones into something breathtakingly novel. We're making new kinds of art that can exist only in the intersections between media, not just taking old media to new places. It's not every generation that gets to feel like you're shaping a whole new art form.

You write in the book about the East Coast and West Coast Schools of transmedia design philosophy. How important do you think these geographic distinctions have been in the ways transmedia has evolved over recent years? And what happens when we open transmedia to a more global perspective? Surely, East and West Coast mean something different if we are talking about Europe, Latin America, or Australia, each of which has made innovative transmedia properties.

In a way, I regret codifying that West Coast vs. East Coast ideology in the book, because the distinction I was addressing has much more to do with philosophy than with geography -- it's meant to underline a cultural difference created by different underlying industries and mechanisms of productions. Of course Los Angeles transmedia is heavily influenced by Hollywood and the TV industry that exists out there -- many of the people coming into transmedia in that region happen to come in already having that skill set, and it's wise to use the skills you have.

Meanwhile, New York has a very strong live theater community, and a strong network supporting independent film. So it makes perfect sense that works in that region would be influenced by proximity to those artists.

I find it extremely frustrating that a perception exists that big franchise-style intertextual works and very personalized independent works can't both be transmedia at the same time. It doesn't need to be a value judgment. Removing either one cheapens the whole of transmedia and what's possible under that umbrella.

Of course there are tremendous transmedia works coming out of Canada, Australia, the UK, Scandinavia -- and it's not easy to slot those into East Coast vs. West Coast. They all have their own distinct style and flavor, because of varying local factors. Canada, for example, has a world-class presence for transmedia documentary and nonfiction, as a side effect of how its funding bodies operate.

As we open our eyes to even more work being done globally, we'll find more interesting variations in approach than even that. In fact, I'd put down money that distinctions in that work already exist, but they haven't yet been thoroughly documented in English. What's the state of transmedia in Bollywood? What strides are occurring in the Korean MMO community?

It would be remarkably arrogant to just assume there are none -- it's a better bet to imagine there are marvelous works being created that the English-speaking transmedia community simply hasn't encountered yet. This is doubly true when you consider how many creators in English have independently stumbled into transmedia by making it before they ever heard the term.

From the start, transmedia has been caught in the competing pulls of marketing and storytelling. But, is this really different from any other form of commercial or popular entertainment form, which have historically been described in terms of the tension between Art and Commerce? What’s at stake in seeing transmedia as a form of storytelling as opposed to a form of marketing?

It's not a brand new thing, or unique to transmedia, not at all. This is the same old song and dance that early film went through, in particular. We have to navigate a tangled web of issues ranging from the credibility of art and artists, the need to make a living, public perceptions of the form, and the filters that audiences use to view any given work. The net result, though, is that being viewed solely as a potential marketing vehicle is very definitely a huge risk to the development of transmedia storytelling as an independent industry.

These risks are threefold. First, it means transmedia is on the hook to produce successful marketing outcomes in order for ongoing production of new projects to continue. This is problematic because transmedia isn't inherently a particularly good or efficient marketing vehicle. Transmedia marketing campaigns projects have created some amazing press buzz, to be sure, but the efficacy of a transmedia marketing campaign varies tremendously. And even in the areas where transmedia marketing excels (creating depth of engagement, for example) it's notoriously hard to measure how A few high-profile, expensive failures could chill any client's appetite for transmedia work. It would be a tragedy for something like that to smother the industry in the cradle.

And it means that audiences approaching a transmedia work will always be trying to ferret out the hidden brand message. Worse, it means that the creators are beholden to stay on message, limiting the scope of possible work enormously. A marketing client may place limits ranging anywhere from a mild "no swearing" to something as confining as "no responding to Tweets or comments." These limitations can hinder the viability of individual projects. But they're invisible to the public -- all they'll see is a transmedia marketing campaign that just doesn't quite work, and before you know it, transmedia itself is written off as an unviable mode of creation.

But equating transmedia with marketing, not storytelling, also means that independent artists have a more difficult time with winning grants, for example, or even generating press coverage. This does rise from that tension between art and commerce you mention; there is a myth that real artists don't sully their hands with concerns about mere money, the romanticizing of the starving artist in a garret producing purer work. Meanwhile, some of the finest art of our time is created as design work for advertisements. But it's not considered "art" in the purest sense because it was commissioned for a commercial purpose.

Ultimately, the credibility of transmedia as an art form is on the line, and therefore the willingness for programs to permit it as a course of study, for funding bodies to award money, or for investors to contribute will all suffer.

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author. Her book A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling is published by McGraw-Hill. Her work includes educational and commercial projects such as The Maester's Path for HBO's Game of Thrones with Campfire Media, America 2049 with human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, Routes for Channel 4 Education, the independent commercial ARG Perplex City, and The 2012 Experience for Sony Pictures. These projects have variously won the Prix Jeunesse Interactivity Prize, a Broadband Digital award, a BIMA, an IVCA Grand Prix award, the Origins Vanguard Innovation Award, and others.

Derrais Carter and Nicholas Yanes Talk About "Iconic Obama" (Part Two)

Today, we continue our exploration of "Iconic Obama" and the current president's unique relationship to popular culture. Inspired by this interview, I thought I would share a few more recent representations of Obama and the political process which have recently crossed my desk.The first represents an effective pastiche of a number from the successful Broadway musical, Les Miserables, to convey the participant's perceptions of the stakes in the current election. (It was shared with me by Virginia Nightingale from New South Wales).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WHw32bv9BQ The second, just released today by the Obama campaign, features Girls creator Lena Dunham and is specifically targeted at getting young women to vote (ideally for their candidate).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o6G3nwhPuR4

And the third is a really witty critique of the "town hall" debate created by Ze Frank, himself an icon of the video blog world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKRz6640B04

Now, back to the regularly scheduled interview.

The 2012 campaign has been much more centered around traditional news coverage and political advertising than on references in popular culture or imaginative use of new media platforms. What factors do you think have contributed to this much more conservative approach to selling Obama during this election cycle?

            Yanes:  I think one reason why this news cycle is centered around traditional news coverage is that both President Obama and Gov. Romney have executive records.  In 2008, both presidential-nominees Obama and McCain were Senators with legislative records, but no real political leadership roles for media outlets to form a narrative about their leadership qualities.

For the 2012 Election, however, President Obama has over three years in the White House and presidential-nominee Romney not only has governing in his background, he also has his time with Bain Capital.  To me, this means that news outlets have actual leadership histories on both men that they can draw from to craft narratives about the current state of politics.

More importantly, I think a main reason why this campaign has been so anchored to traditional news coverage is that neither candidate is particularly interesting.  The excitement surrounding President Obama because of his “newness” has largely faded.  And when compared to the headline grabbing individuals that ran for the Republican presidential nomination, Romney not only seems like the one with the best chance of winning, he came off as rather unexciting.  In other words, neither Obama nor Romney in 2012 made for the compelling pop culture fodder that was generated in the 2008 election.

As your contributors note, Obama proved to be a particularly popular figure in contemporary comic books. Why do you think Obama was so persistently incorporated into comics and what impact, if any, did these comics play in helping to define our understanding of Obama?

Yanes:  I observed this about Obama when he was a presidential nominee.  When I asked comic book creator, Larry Hama, about this, he stated “It’s probably about who the majority of current comics creators are.  Rich old conservative white males don’t generally want to make comic books.  I’m not any of those things, except old—but I guess I still think of myself in my head as a kid....At the time of his election, Obama was generating the kind of excitement I had only ever witnessed before in regards to JFK.” (The Iconic Obama, 128 - 129)

Additionally, I also felt that he had three other characteristics that made it easy to insert him into a comic book. One, he was in shape.  Comic books typically feature heroic men with a low body fat percentage, and President Obama easily fits into narratives filled with action heroes.

Two, Obama is also a geek.  It was known that he collected Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books as a child, and given his love technology, he’d probably have been an avid gamer if he was raised in the 90s.  So it makes sense that fellow geeks (or nerds depending on which term you prefer) who create comic books, would think its cool to include him in their narratives.

Third, given that longtime comic book fans still feel as though they have been largely marginalized by what they consider to be “the mainstream” (i.e., anyone who doesn’t read comic books), having a popular political figure who was a fan of comic books was simply too good of an opportunity to make money for comic book publishers to pass up.  So while President Obama himself may have enjoyed reading some of these comics, and many comic book fans did enjoy seeing a candidate they supported in their favorite medium, the reality that publishers made a lot of money by simply including Obama in their books as a marketing stunt can’t be forgotten.  (Robert G Weiner and Shelley E. Barba Obama specifically engage in an aspect of this topic in their essay “Spider-Man: A Meta-Data Media Analysis of an Unlikely Pairing” which is also in this book collection.)

It might be interesting to think about two highly iconic representations of Obama: on the one hand, the Shepard Fairey Hope poster, and on the other, the Joker/Obama iconography associated with the Tea Party. What do these two examples tell us about the opportunities and risks that arise when a candidate or their agenda gets translated into popular iconography?

Yanes: The one thing I find interesting about the Joker-Obama image is that it wasn’t created out of malice.  The origin narrative that I have always known about this image was that college student named, Firas Alkhateeb, created this image to try out a technique he learned in a class and...out of boredom.  Alkhateeb then posted this image onto Flickr which was then downloaded and had the word “Socialism” added to it.  From then, its popularity skyrocketed in conservative circles.  (The National did an excellent article on the subject that can be found here.)

Overall, these images still highlight the power pictures can have when communicating political messages.  Both Fairey’s and Alkhateeb’s pictures are fairly simplistic.  They both contain about four colors and feature one word at the bottom.  And it’s because of their simplicity that they are so effective.

Reductionist imagery allows creators to communicate a message that is so effective because in the end, it is the audience that projects their meaning onto the image.  The Joker/Obama & the Fairey “Hope” image allows those who support or are against Obama to project their convoluted and simplistic definitions of “Socialism” and “Hope” onto the candidate.

The involvement of pop culture figures, such asWill.i.am or for that matter, the "Obama Girl" were closely linked to Obama's success in motivating young voters to participate in the political process for the first time. What links do you and your contributors draw between the two?

            Yanes: I think one reason why pop culture figures drew the attention of young voters to Obama is because they understood how young people interact with new media.  In my opinion, the main difference in behavior between those who rely on traditional media and those who rely on new media is that new media is constantly being thrown at consumers and is always available to be observed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

For example, if the “Obama Girl” video were to have been played on MTV at first, it would have never generated the attention it received.  That would have required people to sit still long enough to watch MTV and then waiting for the video to show.  Instead, people were able to see their friends post the video on their facebook page, and after seeing more and more friends discuss the video, they were then able to click on a link and watch the video for themselves.  Regardless of what time it was or where they were at, new media allowed these pro-Obama ads to be available to consumers.  This availability is something standard television networks can’t replicate yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yq0tMYPDJQ

Additionally, I believe “Obama Girl” and Will.I.Am’s efforts also came off as divorced from explicitly trying to generate money for a private company.  Though “ObamaGirl” clearly generated money for YouTube, and several other companies and people profited from taking advantage of Obama’s popularity, buying these products or watching these videos never seemed like a regular economic transaction.  Instead, buying these products felt like one was trying to build a political movement.  And I should note that I feel that this is true regardless of if someone was buying pro or anti-Obama material.

How might a focus on the study of popular iconography help us to understand the differences in the ways that the dominant media have framed Obama and Romney as candidates in this current election cycle? Why, for example, did the Clint Eastwood strategy fail, while Obama still seems to gain some aura from his ties to hip hop performers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoqKdWY692k

Carter: Popular iconography is excellent for unpacking the narratives that govern society and inform our political alignments. For this reason, it is hard to say if the Eastwood strategy failed. His Hollywood western, gun-brandishing, type of masculinity (see the background during his speech entrance) clearly represents America through the rose-colored lens of anti-intellectual and oddly nativist nostalgia. His exchange with a fictional Obama also imagines the POTUS as an angry black man. During his interrogation of the invisible Obama, Eastwood implies that Obama wants his to “Shut Up.” Eastwood also remarks “I can’t tell [Romney] to do that. He can’t do that to himself. You’re crazy.” His intimation that Obama wants Romney to “go f**k himself” is highly uncharacteristic of Obama or any president in recent memory for that matter. Eastwood, though is not invested in this reality. Instead relies on dated xenophobic tropes and a good-old-boy rhetoric to align the masses. If we are to say that Eastwood “failed” it is for these reasons. His so-called verbal joust with the POTUS says more about the a sense of entitlement associated with the Republican Party than it does about American social and political progress.

Whereas Eastwood fits within a narrative rooted in the grand old past, when racial and gender exclusion was the order of the day. Obama, conversely, relies on the narratives of progress and prosperity that characterize the youthful zest of his first campaign. One of our contributors, Travis Gosa, notes this in his essay “The Audacity of Dope: Rap Music, Race, and the Obama Presidency.” In many ways, Obama’s campaign plays on the idea that youth, technology, and post-racial narratives are the driving forces of contemporary American progress.This is part why we like to see Jay-Z and Beyonce host a fundraiser for Obama. They are two of the most talented performers of this generation (Jay-Z is linked to the past two generations). Additionally, their business savvy has made them international superstars. That they also make time to be politically involved with the Obama campaign suggests that Obama is worth their time and ours. These narratives  associated with Obama promise a better tomorrow and encourage political engagement facility this change. The reality, though, is that there are no guarantees.

As the closing contributions suggest, the American president exerts an influence on a global scale. How has Obama's image been taken up outside of the American media sphere?

Yanes:  We were lucky to include three excellent pieces on Obama’s global popularity - Yuya Kiuchi’s essay “Obama for Obama: Barack Obama in Japanese Popular Culture,” Zafer Parlak’s and Tanfer Emin Tunc’s essay “Obama-Mania in Turkey: Popular Culture and the Forty-Fourth President of the United States in a Secular Muslim Nation,” and an interview with French journalist Sébastian Compagnon on France’s news media coverage of the 2008 election.

One of the things I learned from working on with these individuals was just how much other countries are invested in US policies and popular entertainment.  American media like movies, television shows, and music is often hugely popular in other countries.  So given the impact Obama had on US popular culture, it is unsurprising to me that popular entertainment of other nations’ media would become fixated on the multitude of interpretations that could be drawn from the President’s popularity.  What did surprise me were the number of examples I came across in which people used Obama’s election as a means to comment on what they saw as political problems in their own countries.

Though a significant portion of President Obama’s popularity was simply because he was not President George W. Bush, he represented, for lack of a better word, a ‘new-ness’ to American politics.  How much of this ‘new-ness’ was based on Obama’s actual policies and how much of it was based on what people across the globe projected on to him is unknown, but what is significant is that Obama did come off as a global citizen.

An essay for the collection that I co-wrote with Etse Sikanku (who is from Dzita, a village in the Volta region of Ghana), “The Modern E Pluribus Unum Man: How Obama Constructed His American Identity from His Global Background,” discusses how Obama’s international experiences growing up shaped him.  I bring this up because one significant reason why I believe people from across the globe wanted Obama to become the US President was because he came off as more than just an American who was only concerned about the American people, but as a person that could emotionally and intellectually understand how interconnected the world is in the 21st century.

For those interested in buying a copy of The Iconic Obama, they can purchase it from Amazon here or directly from the publisher here.

 Bios:

Derrais Carter is an American Studies doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa. His dissertation examines representations of the New Negro in Washington, D.C. His research interests include gender studies, performance studies, and black popular culture.

Nicholas Yanes is currently an American Studies PhD candidate (ABD) and Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Iowa.  His professional and academic interests are Early US History, Contemporary Popular Culture, and the Industries of Popular Entertainment - specifically, comic books, movies & video games.  He freelance writes for Scifipulse.net, and the Casual Gaming Association’s gaming magazine, Casual Connect, and its industry resource, GameSauce.  He is the co-editor of and contributed to his first book project, The Iconic Obama.  His dissertation will analyze the corporate evolution of EC Comics & MAD Magazine, and he is set to defend it in March 2013.

If this interview has sparked your interest in the relationship between politics and popular culture, let me direct your attention to this panel at the upcoming Futures of Entertainment conference.

4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.: From Participatory Culture to Political Participation

Around the world, activists, educators, and nonprofit organizations are discovering new power through their capacity to appropriate, remix, and recirculate elements of popular culture. In some cases, these groups are forging formal partnerships with media producers. In other cases, they are deploying what some have called “cultural acupuncture,” making unauthorized extensions which tap into the public’s interest in entertainment properties to direct their attention  to other social problems. Some of these transmedia campaigns — Occupy, for example — are criticized for not having a unified message, yet it is their capacity to take many forms and to connect together diverse communities which have made these efforts so effective at provoking conversation and inspiring participation. And, as content spreads across cultural borders, these activists and producers are confronting new kinds of critiques —such as the heated debates surrounding the rapid spread of the KONY 2012 video. Are new means of creating and circulating content empowering citizens, creating new forms of engagement, or do they trivialize the political process, resulting in so-called “slactivism”? What are these producers and circulators learning from media companies and marketers, and vice versa? What new kinds of organizations and networks are deploying this tactics to gain the attention of young consumer-citizens? And, for all of us, what do we need to consider as we receive, engage with, and consider sharing content created by these individuals and groups?

Panelists:

Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media, MIT

Dorian Electra, performing artist (“I’m in Love with Friedrich Hayek”; “Roll with the Flow”)

Lauren Bird, Creative Media Coordinator, Harry Potter Alliance

Aman Ali, co-creator, 30 Mosques in 30 Days

Bassam Tariq, co-creator, 30 Mosques in 30 Days

Moderator: Sangita Shresthova, Research Director of CivicPaths, University of Southern California

For more information, visit the Futures of Entertainment website.

Derrais Carter and Nicholas Yanes Talk About "Iconic Obama"

The U.S. Presidential Election is now less than two weeks away and counting. All of the major media events that pundits pay attention to -- from the conventions through the debates -- have already taken place. Ad buys have reached record numbers, thanks to the contributions of a few wealthy Americans. The producers of memes are working overtime to try to keep up with "Mansplaining Ryan," "Binders of Women," "Bayonets and Horses," and "Romneysia" related Tumblr sites. And the race is still so close that few feel safe predicting the outcomes, with the oh so precise polling data spreading "all over the map." So what's left to say? I recently was sent a new book, The Iconic Obama, 2007-2009, which invites us to consider our first impressions of this remarkable candidate, as he made his way from First Time Senator through to becoming the first black president of the United States. From the start, he was closely linked to developments in popular culture and someone whose campaign was aggressively testing the waters in terms of the innovative use of new and emerging technologies. It's sometimes hard to recall how exciting that Obama campaign has been compared to the largely negative, largely joyless, and largely top-down model which the Obama campaign has adopted this time around. The book explores both how Obama drew on popular culture and new media to frame his campaign and the ways that popular media responded to the energy which surrounded Obama in 2008, especially as it relates to constructions of race in contemporary America.

So, I contacted the two editors of Iconic Obama -- Derrais Carter and Nicholas Yanes -- to reflect a bit on how the Obama legend was created and how it is being deployed/managed/shelved throughout the current campaign. Along the way, I am sharing some emblematic examples of Obama-related media, which may help inform our discussion. For example, we might compare the "snarky" tone of this 2012 campaign ad attacking Romney with the even more sarcastic advertisement which the McCain campaign released in 2008 attacking Obama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mopkn0lPzM8

Or perhaps we might discuss what's being said about Obama and his constituencies through these two GOP spots, the first released in 2010, the second part of the current campaign:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SWV5-1LXvwg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zoekOZTuTvU

Your book is called "The Iconic Obama." How are you defining Iconic? Aren't all presidents iconic? It's hard to be more iconic than having your face carved on the side of a mountain or printed on a postage stamp. What makes Obama a particularly or distinctively iconic figure in our culture?

Derrais Carter: Yes. Presidents are iconic in that they represent the United States of America. This is evidence in monuments, postage stamps, libraries, etc. What captured us the most about Obama was the proliferation of representations stretching across mediums and communities throughout the globe.

For me, race was a contributing factor in defining Obama’s iconic status. Foregoing a rehearsal of debates about dominant representations of black people in American media, I will say that we should take seriously what it means to attach and/or detach race from our readings of the American presidency. In the context of the U.S. popular culture, we have seen this in the New Yorker cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama adorned in “terrorist” garb. Similarly, the infamous “beer summit” following the arrest of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates challenges the way that we think about race and the American presidency by situating us between discourses of race and political leadership.

Nicholas Yanes: While many presidents may have been popular enough to be voted into office, I wouldn’t state that every US president galvanized the public’s imagination in a manner that Obama has.  After all, not every president appears on Mount Rushmore or on US currency.  Yes, Obama and recent presidents did have electronic mass media to broadcast their faces and campaign logos across the country, something that presidents like Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce didn’t have access to, but there seems to be timelessness quality already forming around Obama’s legacy.  While several of his policies build upon many of Bush’s policies, there is a desire by both his opponents and supporters to frame President Obama as though he has set the United States on a course completely counter to what has been done before.

In addition to being the nation’s first African American President, he also inspired a base in a manner few presidents have done before hand.  While many of his supporters may not be as enthusiastic in the 2012 election as they were in 2008, there is still a large swath of the population that not only supports his policies, but support a presidency that they passionately project on to him.

In many ways, one of the key things that defines Obama as uniquely “Iconic” is not just that he is fairly popular, but that he has created a brand about himself that allows people to see what they want in his work.  It’s a stroke of genius that allowed him to build the campaign juggernaut in 2008 that got him into the White House.

As some of your contributors note, there has been a long history of portrayals in both comedy and drama of what the first black president might look like. How have these popular representations helped to frame our understanding of Obama? To what degree has he had to struggle with popular representations of blackness?

Yanes:  I think the primary representation of blackness that Obama has had to struggle with is not that of portrayals of black presidents, but that of “The Angry Black Man.”  Still present in much of popular media, I’ve always felt that one reason why Obama’s opposition was so dedicated to ridiculing him, even going so far as for one person to call him a liar while he was giving a State of the Union Address, was because many knew that Obama showing anger in public would come back to haunt him.  With movies, television shows and other media frequently depicting black men as unreasonably and physically threatening, and this stereotype clearly cemented into popular imagination, I feel that Obama has been kept from passionately defending his record for fear that he would be seen as “too aggressive.”

In regards to the specific nature of your question, I’d like to turn to Dr. Justin S. Vaughn’s contribution to this collection, “Character-in Chief: Barack Obama and His Pop Culture Predecessors.”  In this essay, Vaughn writes, “Upon consideration of the actual substance of the few portrayals of black presidents in American film and television history, it becomes quite evident that the journalistic trope about how the David Palmers and Tom Becks of Hollywood paved the way for America’s first African American president are not only poorly supported; they are flawed and false.”  Vaughn goes on to conclude by writing “Indeed, a far more plausible statement to make is that Barack Obama became the nation’s forty-fourth president not because of Dennis Haysbert’s portrayal of his fictional predecessor, not to mention those by Chris Rock and Deebo (Tommy Lister), but rather in spite of it. Stated otherwise, the 2008 election was less an example of life imitating art than of it defying the expectations of popular entertainment.” (The Iconic Obama, pg. 60)

Overall, while it is understandably desirable to find evidence of popular culture setting the groundwork for President Obama’s election, there is just little evidence to support that fictional black presidents did much to accomplish this goal.

I would argue that the campaign spot which Samuel R. Jackson recently released in support of Obama might represent one of the most compelling spot to emerge so far from the 2012 campaign. How does this spot play with the "post-racial" framing of Obama in the 2008 election? What aspects of popular culture and blackness does Jackson bring to Obama's Iconic status?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og35U0d6WKY

Yanes:  One thing that I have felt is missing from most discussions of the “Wake the F&*K Up” ad is that was created by the Jewish Council for Education and Research.  This is the same organization that produced the pro-Obama video, “The Great Schlep” featuring Sarah Silverman for the 2008 election; yet the “Wake the F&*K Up” ad is devoid of any specific references to issues specific to the Jewish-American community, and has no explicit references to any religious issues or imagery.  I bring this up because I believe that any discussion of a popular campaign ad should acknowledge those behind its creation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHHX9R4Qtk

As to Samuel L. Jackson and the issue of blackness, it’s important to note that since his role in Pulp Fiction, Jackson has crafted a persona of being a tough, direct, no nonsense man that always has an aura of authority.  While these characteristics are clearly in line with the black male protagonists of blaxploitation films, Jackson has not only made these elements his own, he has made them acceptable to mainstream American audiences.

With that said, “How does this spot play with the ‘post-racial’ framing of Obama in the 2008 election?”  I don’t know.  I feel that the notion of the United States being ‘post-racial’ overlooks clear disparities between peoples of different ethnic backgrounds and is often deployed as a means to argue that issues of race and racial prejudices are no longer relevant.  Though I’m light skinned, I am an Hispanic American and I don’t see evidence that the nation has truly moved past issues surrounding race.

As for the ads relationship to popular culture, it does seem more reminiscent of the popular entertainment materials produced in 2008.  Overall, I feel that one of this ad’s main goals is to inspire not just the support President Obama had in 2008, but the fandom his campaign created.

Carter: The ad sadly reinforces the idea that a post-racial America literally resides in a white suburban household and a quick examination of cultural texts referenced in the ads suggest as much. I find Jackson’s role particularly intriguing.

When Adam Mansbach’s book Go the F**k to Sleep came out last year, it became an instant hit. The book’s reputation picked up when Jackson recorded an humorous audio version of it. Nick is right to link Jackson’s success to the “no nonsense” demeanor, but I find it remarkably odd that during the presidential election, there’s an ad that features a black man “magically” appearing in a suburban white home and scaring three generations to get out and vote. The widespread post-racial lore leftover from the 2008 campaign is certainly the driving force.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCL3OtOzYuQ

Also, I get that the message to “Wake the F*ck Up!” is provocative and funny especially coming from Samuel L. Jackson and a child actor, but this isn’t the first time Jackson has told us to “wake up.” Does anybody remember Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing (1989)? In it, Jackson plays a radio dj who tells us to “wake up” . Though  This gesture is a recurring practice in Lee’s films.We also see in School Daze (1988).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg8Oq_Sd3Bw

Lee wants his audience to awaken from the racial slumber that has so greatly affected the nation and communities of color in particular. The ad is intended to wake voters up and propel them to the polls. This can’t be done if there’s too much “race talk.” Even after 4 years of critical commentary on race during the Obama administration, there’s still a need to reach back to 2008 galvanize the same supporters with the same strategies. It’s definitely a step back.

Bios

Derrais Carter is an American Studies doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa. His dissertation examines representations of the New Negro in Washington, D.C. His research interests include gender studies, performance studies, and black popular culture.

Nicholas Yanes is currently an American Studies PhD candidate (ABD) and Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Iowa.  His professional and academic interests are Early US History, Contemporary Popular Culture, and the Industries of Popular Entertainment - specifically, comic books, movies & video games.  He freelance writes for Scifipulse.net, and the Casual Gaming Association’s gaming magazine, Casual Connect, and its industry resource, GameSauce.  He is the co-editor of and contributed to his first book project, The Iconic Obama.  His dissertation will analyze the corporate evolution of EC Comics & MAD Magazine, and he is set to defend it in March 2013.

Concerning Intellectual Property: A Conversation Between Pat Aufderheide and Ellen Seiter (Part Five)

The current situation of fan fiction represents an interesting point for thinking about how change may be occurring. The fan community has deployed the concept of “transformative works” to justify their practice through advocacy groups such as the Organization for Transformative Works, where-as the industry seems internally to have decided that they cause more damage to their consumer relations by aggressively shutting down fan fiction so the number of cease-and-desists have slowed down. What do you see as the risks and benefits of these two ways of dealing with the conflicts we are discussing?

Pat: I love the Organization for Transformative Works. These people are heroes/heroines, and they are among the folks who have gone to the Copyright Tribunal to demand (and win!) DMCA exemptions. They made it possible for all makers of noncommercial videos for any reason to break encryption for fair use without penalty. They showcase great work, explore important issues in a scholarly way, and pave the way for others.

Whew.

OK, where were we? So they are great examples and exemplars in the fan community. The industry response to me also seems very healthy, and an appropriate recognition of the simple fact that fair use exists (and works for the industry, hello Viacom and Colbert Report).

I think asserting rights is good, and recognizing rights is good.

Ellen: The problem with fan production on the internet is that they have encouraged everyone to offer up lots of free labor-- whether it’s fan fiction, or Facebook reporting on the last music video you liked, YouTube fan vids or new worlds (just heard about an entire one recreating Game of Thrones) on MindCraft. It’s all very fun and creative, but I am more worried about getting paying work for the next generation, and I don’t see that happening without speaking up for unions and guilds. And authors still need to be able to get a decent payment for published works. In the long term, I think we have to look at how even fan fiction is free publicity, and even if it’s a labor of love, we still want to consider the possibility of getting paid for fan work.

Certainly things are very much in flux on how the big studios and publishers handle these relationships to get the most out of fan word-of-mouth without alienating fans for shutting them down.

Many feel that the category of the “public domain” has been endangered as the terms covered by Copyright have expanded dramatically, yet as a consequence of this expansion, we are dealing with more and more “orphan works,” where there is no one any longer asserting ownership over these materials, yet artists and the public are not legally protected if they wish to reproduce, recirculate, or remix them? See for example some of the issues which Nina Paley has encountered in her use of classic jazz recordings in her film, Sita Sings the Blues. The archive plays an ever more central role in contemporary culture, which critic Simon Reynolds has argued, is entering a moment of “retromania.” What mechanisms might best allow us to address the contradictions between current legal efforts to extend copyright and current cultural trends which encourage artists and audiences alike to build on past works?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zcTgyGpens

Pat: You’re right that archives are central to new creation, always have been, and will increasingly be important to people who never thought about them before, because of the growing capacity for DIY media creation. There’s the orphan works problem; there’s the “greedy generation” problem (private archives run by the descendants of the creators, requiring clearance and even approval of the final product for access); there’s the pricing problem (some archives and media holders don’t have prices acceptable to smaller-scale productions and certainly don’t have any way to deal with noncommercial work; people who want to pay, but can’t pay a lot, often find nobody will get back to them, even to refuse); and there’s the problem of just trying to find out where stuff is and who owns or controls it. And then of course there’s the fact that many social-media materials and digital-only works such as music that only appears on iTunes are disappearing without being archived anywhere.

Of these problems, orphan works was probably the most tractable. Win-win legislation was proposed and had a life before contention among the stakeholders (including photographers who became intransigent for fear someone would make an unlicensed use of a photograph for any purpose) made the deal fall apart. That’s a benchmark. If you can’t fix orphan works in Congress, you probably can’t get any more ambitious than that with that remedy, at this point in time.

Rick Prelinger showed us all a beautiful model in his Prelinger Archive, which is housed within the Internet Archive. He took his entire collection of audio-visual materials, a substantial portion of which is public domain but which he makes available easily, which had been his living for decades, and digitized it all at lower resolution. It’s all available for any noncommercial use you may make of it. (Film students use it every semester.) He sold the actual collection to Getty, which will sell you the material you want to use at market rates and at a high resolution (they return a portion of proceeds to Rick). Rick’s deal is generating more money for him than the previous form of his business did, and now customers do their own shopping and selection of materials without his help.

That’s an example of how you can be a good actor in archival space, while also monetizing your assets. It also depends on the (sometimes quixotic) kindness of strangers, since ‘90s dot-com rich guy and Internet philanthropist Brewster Kahle hosts the material online.

Other archives are struggling to find out how to accommodate the emergent environment’s opportunities without losing their current advantages, and they have not yet come up with something.

So users need to think about what they can do themselves, with material that may not be being offered conveniently to them. If they have independent access to the materials (say, a DVD of a movie or a download of a song), then they can explore fair use. You can see why fair use rises to the top of my list, given the paucity of options. If their uses would not be fair, or if there’s no independent access, they don’t have great remedies at the moment.

While I could imagine a lot of better ways to do things, they all have a “if pigs had wings they would fly” character, in this environment.

For the most part, you have both focused on the nature of intellectual property within the U.S. context, yet America has increasingly imposed its copyright regimes on the rest of the world, whether or not the core premises of those laws are consistent with their own cultural traditions or needs. What do you see as the transnational implications of the struggles we have been describing?

Ellen: I think the most worrying development on the horizon is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that is supposed to reflect American priorities, i.e. copyright holders. The TPP is being developed with great secrecy, and it has not attracted the notice it should because the name sounds like it is about container shipments when in fact it is a radical change to copyright in signatory countries. The results as it is currently outlined would block access to open materials, permit “digital locks” on content like songs and TV shows, and put all kinds of restrictions to open access in place. It is more dangerous than SOPA and PIPA because it is being written by stakeholders, handled like an international trade agreement, and only large stakeholders are in on the drafting and revision process. See this recent post in Slate

Pat: I think that the international environment is very complex, and as Ellen points out the U.S. federal government has tied international trade issues to copyright policy and its enforcement in a way that has privileged monopoly rights holders against users’ interests, European interests have also been important in unbalancing copyright further.

“Harmonization,” as it’s called--getting more conformity across national copyright regimes--has so far been pretty much a story of expanding monopoly rights. It’s possible to imagine harmonization on the exceptions/limitations side. Certainly that’s what many activists called for around the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty, which is about counterfeiting (including digital “piracy”). Large media interests had insisted on sweeping IP issues into a treaty that was supposed to be about hard goods, pushing for ever greater imbalance. The activists were very nearly excluded, but their protests contributed ultimately to rejection of ACTA. The rejection demonstrated, one hopes, some interest in Europe in the value of its exceptions and limitations.

At the same time, you see great interest internationally in changing copyright policy to expand user access to copyrighted material with clauses that look and sound a lot like fair use. In 2008, Israel actually imported US fair use lock, stock and barrel. The Australians introduced “flexible dealing,” which in some situations can be used in ways somewhat like fair use. In early July, 2012, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled on clutch of copyright cases, setting precedents that make Canadian fair dealing--a version of exemptions in which kinds of uses are itemized more precisely--look much more like U.S. fair use. David Cameron in the UK has suggested that the UK should import fair use, since it is so conducive to innovation and the UK economy needs innovation.

Meanwhile, all copyright regimes do have some exceptions and limitations on monopoly rights. Often, they have gone unchallenged and undefined. For instance, “right of quotation” is a rather vague and widely included exception, rarely litigated.

A highly significant feature of the international landscape, in practice, is that outside the US, copyright penalties do not include statutory damages. This is very important, because it damps down litigation. There is little to be gained by taking a copyright dispute through the courts, if the outcome is getting the user to pay the license fee--which would only be a tiny portion of the costs of litigation. In fact, copyright litigation in Europe is very sparse. So that makes it much easier for Europeans to use their exceptions and limitations, because the risk, in practice, is lower.

At the same time, it’s frustrating in Europe for creators, because they hope to cross national borders with their work, and each country has different copyright policy. No one has ever done a survey of where there is overlap in exceptions and limitations; that would be an extremely valuable service.

Since the U.S. is the largest market currently for creative works, many makers of work that is pitched internationally conform to U.S. copyright policy. This certainly is common among documentary filmmakers. In general, it seems to work pretty well

Editor's Note: I hope you have enjoyed this conversation between two extraordinary media scholars discussing the current state of intellectual property law. If you would like to see further discussion around this topic, let me put in a plug here for the upcoming Futures of Entertainment conference, to be held at MIT, on November 8-10. I will be participating there in a conversation about IP issues with Jonathon Taplin, the director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and with composer/musician T Bone Burnett. You can learn more and registered for the event here.

Pat Aufderheide is the Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author with Peter Jaszi of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, July 2011), and author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She heads the Fair Use and Free Speech research project at the Center, in conjunction with Prof. Peter Jaszi in American University's Washington College of Law.

Ellen Seiter holds the Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches courses on television and new media history, theory and criticism in the Critical Studies Division. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993) and Remote Control; Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989). Her latest book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.

Concerning Intellectual Property: A Conversation with Pat Aufderheide and Ellen Seiter (Part Four)

In some ways, independent media-makers seem caught in the middle of this struggle, seeking ways to protect their own creative products, but also often at the mercy of bigger corporate interests. What do we gain by looking at the issues from their perspective?

Ellen: It is crucial to preserve the civic participation element of digital media, the social consciousness of so many independent media makers, and the necessity of keeping content free to use by teachers. This is why Pat and Peter’s “Best Practices book is so incredibly helpful” as well as the whole Reclaiming Fair Use book (which includes an amazing set of best practices materials at the end.)

Pat: I think the interests of people like journalists and documentary filmmakers look a lot like the interests of many noncommercial creators. Many noncommercial creators are actually invested in some control over their work. One of the things you can learn from the professional communities that have created codes of best practices is that balance is possible; it’s possible to have some control, and also for other people to use your work without your permission. Context is everything.

One thing that’s interesting to watch in this process is the role of attribution or credit. It seems that no matter where you go--and my colleague Peter Jaszi has been to the backest of the beyond in Indonesia to look at folk art practices--people really want attribution. They may or may not care about payment. But recognition is huge. Look at the concern that kids on the Scratch remixing site have. The computer automatically credits their work when another child uses it, but that’s not enough for many of the kids; they want the new creator to recognize them and even say why their work was useful in the new work. (I’m cribbing on this last one from the work of Andres Monroy-Hernandez, btw.)

Even though attribution is so important to people--it often wards off copyright claims--it’s not required or even mentioned under fair use in the law. It happens to sway judges, but not because it’s in the law but because it shows good faith so they have a reason to think of you as well intentioned.

So again, practice matters. I think in our emergent DIY universe, attribution will be extremely important.

Many of these issues came to a head earlier this year around SOPA. What is your analysis of the debate around this law? What do you see as the fallout from what happened when citizens weighed in more heavily in response to this proposed legislation?

Pat: The SOPA/PIPA debate suffered from some of the Copyright Wars problems. Many creators were enlisted by large media companies, which informed them that piracy was going to take the bread out of their children’s mouths. Many Wikimedians and Wikipedia users saw the struggle--and let others construe it as such--as being about why information wants to be free. Meanwhile, the threats to the very communication infrastructure, as Google folk were painfully aware, were very real. The largest Internet companies and think tanks/NGOs did a good job of making that clear.

The polarization between copyright maximalists and copyright minimalists around SOPA/PIPA will, I think, make it harder to have a rational discussion when, as it inevitably will, the bill returns in some form. Some legislators were outraged at the blackouts, which occurred at a time when serious negotiations taking into consideration the concerns of critics, were going on, and derailed them.

One lesson of the conflict was that it’s important to develop a discourse in which balanced copyright is featured, rather than a moral-panic atmosphere. It is important to address the challenge of making copyright workable rather than construing the problem as either embracing or rejecting copyright’s monopoly rights as property. It is also clear, by the way, that people don’t have enough information about the basics of Internet infrastructure. The reason why fooling around with the Domain Name System was a terrible idea just wasn’t clear to most people.

What do we see as the most effective mechanisms for changing current policies around intellectual property? Which mechanisms do you think give the most hope to copyright holders? to grassroots participants? To independent artists?

Pat: I hope I’ve given some idea in this discussion of the importance of education, and an investment in understanding creativity as a social act. I think more constructive political actions will follow a shift in habitus, to invoke Bourdieu, around creativity in culture. Some of that change is happening around the spread of DIY culture, but it needs to be accompanied by a claiming of Constitutional rights in copyright to avoid a construction of DIY culture as the consumer end of commercial culture.

Ellen: I do not feel optimistic. The size of Google and its moves to enter the realm of mainstream TV, film and publishing as a distributor does not bode well. Politicians are, of course, very dependent on media distribution companies for their own election campaigns and this will always hamper what can be achieved in terms of legislative action.

What do you see as the value of attempts such as Creative Commons or Copy Left to imagine alternative copyright regimes as opposed to shifting interpretations of existing laws and practices?

Ellen: Creative Commons, for anyone new to this debate, is a non profit corporation founded by legal schlars Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle and their collaborators. It has helped thousands of artists and scholars to share their work in a way that protects their rights while also letting others freely use, distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work, as long as they give you credit. It has been a powerful force in keeping the Internet and publishing more open. The “Share Alike” license offered by Creative Commons means that you can find work (photos, music, etc.) to use in your own project but then your project must also comply with the “Share Alike” model. It has been a lifesaver for academics and amateur video makers. I still have the feeling that CC licenses primarily work for content creators who have another means of making a living-- a day job, if you will-- like academics. Or a trust fund. Some other revenue stream. With the increasing globalization of Big Media-- there are going to be increased challenges.

Pat: To the extent Creative Commons is seen as one of the tools people have to rebalance copyright, a tool that resides on the monopoly rights holder side of the equation, I think it’s great. If it’s seen as either a guerrilla attack on copyright or the dawn of copyright-free culture, well, that kind of thinking stops people from getting to any kind of a solution.

Copyleft work generally has done a great job of putting copyright issues on the map. If people get so frustrated that they despair of rebalancing copyright, they will, I’m afraid, move from idealism to cynicism. So it’s important to avoid alarmism, moralizing, and utopianism, if we want to find ways to foster culture-creating for a digital, DIY environment. Dreams are great, ideals are great, but solutions for waking-world problems always deal with the highly imperfect environment we live in. Ellen’s book is full of great practical advice for just that.

Part of what has given some moral and ethical complexity to the debates about copyright is that the industry often seeks to defend the “rights of artists” but in practice, artists are often forced to sign their rights away to corporate ownership and may be as badly exploited by studios and labels as they are threatened by infringement by unauthorized consumers. Where do the artists themselves stand in current debates around intellectual property?

Ellen: Yes, the entire history of the film/TV/music industry is full of exploitation of artists. If young people today were better educated about the bloody struggles to get unions, they would understand more about their value. Artists’ have a fighting chance when a contract is involved, and an even better chance if they are members of a guild, a union, or some kind of professional association that can educate them about their rights-- and this takes some time. Just because artists’ are ripped off by studios and music companies, however, does not mean we want to do away with employment contracts, because that is what the entire structure of labor protections are based on. There is a lot of lawyer-bashing in the DIY community, which I think is extremely short-sighted. Of course there are corrupt lawyers out there. But we need to get past some of the early utopianism of this movement and also take a long, hard look at what is happening in terms of shrinking employment and the myriad ways young people are enticed to work for free. I am hoping some of the pushback on unpaid internships by educational institutions will begin to make for some policy changes. We need lawyers like Peter Jaszi and Michael Donaldson, and it takes about one second for a talented kid to figure out why he might want to be represented by a professional agent or attorney once the prospect of real financial remuneration comes through.

Pat: Yes, I agree with Ellen that people need to know the history that won them the rights they have. I also think doing this work has allowed me to meet many creative and supportive lawyers, whose work has helped to change the environment for artists. It is altogether true that large media corporations have all too easily enlisted artists into the company’s private-interest battles using Romantic notions of artistry and alarmism.

Another recent controversy concerned the role of parody in our current understanding of intellectual property law as playwright David Adjmi received a cease-and-desist notice for his play, 3C, which appropriated and responded to the classic sitcom Three’s Company. More and more of our current creative practices involve acts of sampling and remixing, some of which meet legal standards of parody and others do not. How effective and appropriate do you see current law at policing the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate forms of remix?

Ellen: David Adjmi’s 3C is an interesting example because this case involved a clear example of fair use under the satire or parody ”safe harbor.” It also sheds light on the differences between theatrical and television understandings and professional practice of copyright. The play is set in the 70s and centers on roommates in an apartment in Santa Monica. It deliberately evoked the popular 70s sitcom where two women and a man are roommates, and the man has to pretend he is gay to satisfy the uptight landlord that no co-habitation is going on-- and for half the show’s gags. Three’s Company” ran on ABC from 1977-1984-- and is notorious for Suzanne Sommers as a classic dumb blonde type. Adjmi’s version is a black comedy in which the male roommate really is gay and the satire and pathos revolve around him “playing” gay When the cease and desist letter came out, Adjimi, even though he is a published playwright, did not have the funds for a legal defense. Reviewers of the production, which ran for five weeks off-Broadway, called 3C a black comedy-- Adjmi said he tried to imagine what Chekhov would do with “Three’s Company.” The production went on as planned, and the show closed. What I would want to point out about the case, though, is that Adjmi, as a member of the Dramatist’s Guild, was able to rely on some important friends-- Stephen Sondheim and Tony Kushner were among the signatories on a letter in support of Adjmi, and Jon Robin Baitz (“Other Desert Cities”, and the TV series Brothers and Sisters”) rallied the theatre community and offered to pay his legal fees. This is a case where a community of professional artists in one of the last bastions of unionism-- NY theatre---- may have kept the lawyers at bay. Adjmi did not respond to the letter, which said it could not be performed again or published. It’s worth noting, however, that nothing can invite the wrath of studio lawyers quicker than tampering with a television show that has syndication earnings.

Pat: I appreciate this background. I haven’t seen the play, and so can’t have an opinion on its employment of fair use (in which parody is an instance), since context is everything in fair use, so I have no opinion on the case. David Adjimi appeared, according to the New York Times, to be stalled out at first no because he hadn’t sought out legal counsel and didn’t want to incur any costs.

I’m glad he has influential friends. But I also think that if he does have a fair use argument, he also has friendly organizations to turn to. I believe there is substantial pro bono legal counsel on viable fair use cases. If I were him, I would turn to the ACLU or to the Stanford Fair Use Project, or to the IP legal clinics at University of Southern California, University of California at Berkeley, or Fordham University. They all, along with Electronic Frontier Foundation, have lawyers who litigate pro bono on fair use issues. (EFF typically deals with digital issues.) I hear from lawyers from all of them, calling me looking for promising cases.

Adjimi’s fair use argument does not have to be that he has a parody. He merely has to have a transformative purpose, and use the appropriate amount to meet that purpose. He has to not be using the elements of the sitcom in order to give the same kind of pleasure to the audience in the same way that the original does. I gather from the scanty description of the play that I can access online and from Ellen’s description that the play depends on the audience’s familiarity with “Three’s Company” to make a statement about the cultural values invoked and expressed by the sitcom. Well, that’s a transformative purpose. I probably would have to see the play to decide for myself if the amount taken was appropriate. But certainly if you’re going to invoke “Three’s Company” you want to have a certain amount of the package of the elements to play with.

How effective is the law at policing the boundaries? Well, that depends on what you mean, I guess. The law isn’t an abstract element. We carry our sense of the law with us. David Adjimi appears to have a fairly shaky idea of his rights under fair use, and his advisors do too. He doesn’t have a great way to do a risk analysis, since his community of practice, playwrights, haven’t acted as a community to decide what they need from the law and asserted it within a code of best practices in fair use. He hasn’t chosen to find out how related communities of practice think about it, by consulting their codes of best practices in fair use. Or at least he hadn’t as of the reports I read.

It’s easy for the “Three’s Company” folk to issue a cease-and-desist letter. It’s routine, as Ellen notes, when you have a valuable property. It costs nothing more than the price of a lawyer’s time to dictate the letter, and under the law no matter what they say in that letter, there’s no penalty. So they can claim, bluster, threaten, as they like. David would have to know his rights or find a pro bono lawyer who does, in order to resist.

But the law is pretty good, actually, on the fair use side. And not just for David, but for remixers in many media. It’s flexible, accessible, adaptable. Judge’s interpretations have been pretty stable in stressing transformative purpose combined with appropriate amount for 25 years. But in practice it means what it means to the people who most use it. So if the cease-and-desist letter writers use it and the receivers of the letters don’t, then the cease-and-desist letter writers win.

If the law weren’t otherwise so pathologically unbalanced, we wouldn’t have to care about fair use. But since copyright is effectively eternal (at least for our creative lifetimes), default, and extending so far through derivative works, we have to care. Sigh.

Good news? The more we understand our rights, the quicker we can get on with DIY remixing and sampling.

And let me take this moment to say it’s a dang shame that musicians haven’t been able to organize themselves to decide what they need from existing music in order to make new music. The law would in theory permit a wide range of borrowing. Several cases have come close to engaging fair use and music, including the first two Bridgeport cases (discussed in the book). But people settle out of court after a first-level judgment that doesn’t address fair use, and a precedent is set. This leaves judges and music producers down the line with the general impression that in music, people always get licenses. Practice. Practice is really really a big thing. If musicians practice a clearance culture, they create precedents that lead to more clearance culture.

Pat Aufderheide is the Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author with Peter Jaszi of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, July 2011), and author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She heads the Fair Use and Free Speech research project at the Center, in conjunction with Prof. Peter Jaszi in American University's Washington College of Law.

Ellen Seiter holds the Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches courses on television and new media history, theory and criticism in the Critical Studies Division. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993) and Remote Control; Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989). Her latest book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.

Concerning Intellectual Property: A Conversation Between Pat Aufderheide and Ellen Seiter (Part Three)

Copyright was historically constructed as a “balancing act” between the interests in authors in gaining compensation for their ideas and the public in being able to meaningfully deploy those ideas towards the common benefit. Yet, copyright is now increasingly understood through a conflictual lens, where one group must benefit at the cost of the other, or as Ellen characterizes it at one point, “an arms race between content creators and content users.” Is there any way to move this back from a conflict-based frame in ways that might create a win-win scenario for all participants? Why or why not?

Ellen: This is capitalism we are dealing with, so I don’t expect there to be a happy ending. In fact, I think it would be better to look as harshly as possible about the competing interests and recognize the class war embedded in it. If anything, I think copyright can help us to understand how much labor is being devalued and how much has already been given away. So I am less interested in protecting the freedom of fans, for example, and more interested in protecting those professionals (and in this I include the below-the-line workers in the media industries) to be able to sustain a living wage and even a steady income for those who are successful. It is precisely on the battleground of Internet streaming (where so much can be captured for free and repurposed) that the WGA and SAG suffered serious losses, since the studios deemed it merely promotional and therefore not a use that bore on residuals.

Digital Content Creation shook the media industries by providing new distribution outlets for creative work and a demand for new skill sets among creative workers, something that has exacerbated the tendency to favor the young for employment and discard the older, more experienced, and more labor-savvy workers. When we look at dramatic/ fictional media creation the picture shifts considerably from the issues in documentary work. The expansion of dreams of “making it” as a director, an actor, a musician or a writer has produced a new and quite unrealistic model of training in which young people are encouraged to invest enormous resources in training, self-promotion, technology, and unpaid content creation—in the hopes of being discovered, or securing an unpaid internship. My main concern is that digital content creation has been exploited by studios, talent agencies and television networks to undermine the creative and craft guilds in Hollywood. In these historic labor struggles, talent gave away their rights through work-for-hire contracts, but the consolation prize was decent wages, benefits and residual payments to make up for the long periods of unemployment and the long periods of unremunerated preparation for these jobs. Now that Google is moving in the direction of big media, distributing expensive, professionally produced content, there is a lot of room for further exploitation, where creative talent is paid merely in ad revenues, not by salary or residuals.

Pat: I couldn’t agree more that the rhetorical positioning is now conflictual. Bill Patry, in his smart book Copyright Wars, calls this a moral panic. A moral panic is when people are arguing about the wrong problem in a highly emotional way. Or to quote Wikipedia, without employing fair use, since all the stuff on Wikipedia is made freely available under a Creative Commons license, “Moral panics are in essence controversies that involve arguments and social tension and in which disagreement is difficult because the matter at its center is taboo.”

I’ve talked about the photographers. They’re emblematic of one side of the debate, where all unauthorized use is immoral. I recently saw the other side in action, when I attended Wikimania 2012. I went to the debate on whether fair use should always or never be used in Wikipedia. This is quite a hot discussion topic, actually, on the Talk pages of Wikipedia. It was interesting to see the heated emotion displayed, primarily by users (the pro-fair use side was staffed by lawyers, who tended not to get passionate), on the side of the argument that said it should never be used. There are some practical difficulties (will downstream users really understand that they can’t remix that stuff without doing an assessment of their own? will laws in other countries match up with U.S. fair use?) but the biggest obstacle, it seemed, was a profound disgust with copyright as an unfree regime. Even though copyright permits unlicensed use, that right was not seen as a right so much as a begrudging permission by an ungenerous uncle. They saw it as besmirching a beautiful product, beautiful because it was free.

The problem is, though, that the mission of Wikipedia is to be a free encyclopedia of human knowledge, not--as Brandon Butler on the panel put it--an encyclopedia of free human knowledge. He argued that including copyrighted material when it was necessary to make mission was sensible, even if it had to be employed under fair use. Respondents argued that leaving blank spaces clearly labelled to show unavailability because of copyright reasons was consistent with the mission to be free and also a lesson in the costs of having copyright.

Is there a way to get out of this mess? One way is to recognize the truths that Ellen is pointing to--that the business model issue is separate from the copyright issue. The business model issue is very real. Traditional media business models are eroding, which affects vast swaths of middle managers. At the same time, the industry’s business model crisis interacts with a trend that has been accumulating particular strength since 1980 and the conservative resurgence, to disempower workers. The business model crisis creates an incentive to further exploit working people in media, especially the newest entrants. It is heartening, however, to note that even as incumbent businesses flounder, the total revenues for entertainment fields are growing, according to the impressive and extensively documented report, “The Sky Is Rising” (http://www.techdirt.com/skyisrising/).

Those who are frustrated by copyright sometimes turn to a copyleft alternative model. I don’t think constructing some alternate world, for instance, getting everybody to agree to give their stuff away with Creative Commons licenses, will work.. I think too much stuff will never go into the commons; you’ll never persuade the photographers, much less HBO, to give it away. Too much significant work in our culture--including the stuff that makes up some of the most memorable remixes and fan fiction--is made on commercial terms. Moreover, many, many people are actually really invested in having their copyright monopoly rights. I also agree with Ellen that it’s important to think about how to reward the actual makers of work. I use Creative Commons licensed work in my own, and I have Creative Commons licenses on some of my work, but I see it as a limited, if important, tool in the kit of resources to rebalance copyright.

I do see a big change in the communities of practice that have created codes of best practices in fair use. I’ve seen a big change in how creators think about what they want to do. I’ve seen changes in industry practice, e.g. how insurers for errors and omissions now treat fair use claims. Perhaps most exciting to me has been to see people who reclaim their own fair use rights come to see those rights as rights worthy of political defense. I’ve seen people who in previous years didn’t even know they had fair use rights go to the Copyright Office, ask for an exemption for their group of people (professors, documentary filmmakers, vidders) from the DMCA’s criminal penalties for breaking encryption for fair use, and.....win! Admittedly that’s not a game changer for the copyright regime, but an accommodation within a terrible law. But it is evident that people can see themselves as part of a political constituency.

We wrote the book precisely to contribute to reframing the discussion, away from an emotionally laden moral discussion toward a discussion of how we can get to the job of creating more culture better. I think when people move from a “permissions culture” to a position of agency, that is a political move, and it enables them to think about these and other issues from a more collective viewpoint, which should also encourage association and union participation.

I have seen that when you show people the consequences of their actions, they understand much better what risks they are taking. Suddenly the risk of not creating culture, not getting to create, to express, to use their freedom of speech, becomes significant and real to them. The risk of getting sued for copyright infringement becomes a risk you can calculate instead of, as one filmmaker called it, “the monster in the closet.” They can see the risks the same way they see risks in other employment of their First Amendment rights. After all, libel, treason, obscenity laws all have ugly penalties, and they all are triggered by inappropriate First Amendment acts. That doesn’t stop people from criticizing fat cats or crooked cops or using terms for female body parts while discussing reproductive health. And when people see copyright within that First Amendment lens, the discussion is very different.

I wish I had stronger faith in legislative or judicial options at the moment, but without having a mobilized and sizeable constituency, I’m afraid I don’t. At the moment. I am impressed at what a difference practice makes, and I think practice can shape the building of constituency. I think we saw what a difference the blacking out of Wikipedia made to SOPA/PIPA. There had been a lot of crucial inside-the-Beltway work done on those shockingly poorly crafted bills before that moment, so I don’t want to act like Wikipedia brought them down. But Wikipedia and other blacked-out sites did make a difference. And the action taught a lot of people in that ambit the power of numbers of outraged citizens. Wikipedia’s leaders are mildly alarmed by the precedent set, though. SOPA/PIPA would directly and negatively have affected Internet culture, and so it was squarely within Wikipedia’s wheelhouse. Wikipedia’s leaders (both Jimmy Wales and the head counsel of Wikipedia spoke about this) are worried that Wikimedians may decide to use this tactic on issues that are not specifically a life threat to Wikipedia itself, which would jeopardize the foundation’s tax status, could weaken the organization by creating factions, and be ineffective to boot. So I don’t think that one act has a natural next one within Wikipedia. But it clearly educated a lot of Wikimedians and Wikipedia users about political action.

As we look at the current struggles over intellectual property, it seems that commercial producers and grassroots participants (for lack of better terms as these relationships are somewhat shifting) look at these debates through different lens. So, first, what do we see as the primary concerns, fears, anxieties, hopes of copyright holders in these struggles to define what constitutes appropriate policy?

Ellen: Copyright holders are attentive to their specific markets. Take the case of a viral sensation of the summer of 2012: The Snuggie version of Beyonce’s song "Countdown."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4aiwTkDwCY

Here is an amateur video, performed and directed by a teenager (who is a shining example of how much people can learn and achieve in DIY media) using a major pop song. But he is also a member of the target market for pop divas: and this market segment is more likely than others to go ahead and purchase the music download, buy the CD and go to the concert. So there is a motivation to be lenient and even to use amateur videos to publicize the songs, both because they don’t want to alienate this market-- which has been performing pop hits in bedrooms before mirrors for decades--and because they are not at risk in the same way of losing all sales.

There are varying levels of policing and it is important to look at the cases where DIY media is welcomed (this was formerly the case with anime distribution, as Mimi Ito’s work has so effectively demonstrated) and there is a kind of tacit agreement that you do your part as a consumer.

So Beyonce posts the Snuggie video on her website and calls it brilliant and better than the original. No word from Snuggie yet, although they must be delighted.

Pat: It’s great to remember, as Ellen reminds us, that there are endless accommodations by businesses to their best interests in practice. In terms of creating new policy formally, I think that incumbent corporations with significant revenues from media have a deer-in-the-headlights approach at the moment. Copyright policy is one tool they have to resist the future. On the other hand, everybody saw what happened to the music industry, and nobody wants to be Kodak, so that may shift the vigor of their approach to shoring up their assets with even more extended copyright terms and stiffer penalties for perceived infringement and technical overrides of fair use. Maybe. But actually in DC there is strong expectation that we will see a bill introduced fairly soon extending copyright terms....again. And SOPA/PIPA haven’t really gone away.

I think makers and users of all kinds have a different set of concerns, which I’ve discussed above in part. Many people have a Romantic notion of creativity, in which originality is prized, copying is regarded as cheating, and creativity is produced at a high personal psychic cost. That infuses how they then think about copyright.

This is true both for the copyrightists and the copyleft, actually. Artists often construe themselves as fearless appropriators and then are outraged at unauthorized reuse of their work, even when it’s clearly fair use. The copyleft community is, I think, an early adopter phenomenon rather than the beginning of a dominant “commoner” culture. As more and more people create digitally, I don’t see new waves of copyleft people; rather, I see sudden interest in figuring out how to claim and exercise monopoly rights, concern about unfair commercialization of one’s work, etc. Even within the copyleft, there is great anxiety about inappropriate (e.g. commercial) use of their work.

This Romantic construction of creativity (about which my co-author Peter Jaszi has written quite a bit, and very interestingly) is often exploited by corporate actors in lobbying.

At the same time, people are definitely enjoying, in greater and greater numbers, the kind of remixing (machinima, video remixes, all kinds of photographic memes) that used to be much harder to do. This group of people is now much much bigger than the geeky early adopters. So they’re getting a greater stake in accessing the copyrighted world around them. I can see corporate efforts to meet that appetite with new forms of licensing and apps, but these efforts aren’t moving quickly enough. Copyright law really makes more streamlined licensing rather difficult. But I do wonder if the perceived needs of many people who are not ideologically motivated when they remix and do DIY culture will be met with some kind of inferior (to me, certainly) licensed service. That certainly is true now with a lot of machinima, which is often done within the terms the game company set.

So I think this is an exciting moment in which people might be able to move beyond their (often new-found) frustration with their access to copyrighted culture, productively, if they understand the basis of copyright better. And they would become part of a political constituency for a more balanced copyright, not just for easier access to licensed databases provided on company terms.

Pat Aufderheide is the Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author with Peter Jaszi of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, July 2011), and author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She heads the Fair Use and Free Speech research project at the Center, in conjunction with Prof. Peter Jaszi in American University's Washington College of Law.

Ellen Seiter holds the Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches courses on television and new media history, theory and criticism in the Critical Studies Division. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993) and Remote Control; Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989). Her latest book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.

Concerning Intellectual Property: A Conversation Between Pat Aufderheide and Ellen Seiter (Part Two)

Mitt Romney’s campaign recently faced a takedown notice from BMG on YouTube for incorporating a news clip of Obama singing a song owned by BMG. What does this case say about the current state of the debate? As these struggles reach those in power, will they develop a better understanding of what’s at stake for ordinary people in their dealings with major media companies?

Ellen: Important to note that all kinds of “legal” issues are tightly linked to the politics of race and class. Was BMG taking Obama’s side? Was YouTube? Meanwhile the Romney campaign just went to Vimeo and re-posted it, but without a link to their campaign website.

Now the counterpoint to this political ad, Romney’s rather weak vocal performance of “America the Beautiful” reminds us of a tried and true techniques for young media makers: use something in the public domain. But it ALSO refers back to an era where sheet music was a big money maker and many copyright statutes focused on protecting the rights of composers, music publishers, even player piano manufacturers. The laws derive from interest groups and from technologies of distribution—those on their way up and those on their way out. America the Beautiful was first published in 1910. Good to remember that we are always dealing with media industries under assault by new technologies -- for the sheet music business that meant player pianos, records, and later xeroxing.

Interesting to compare to the Jackson Browne controversy during the last campaign, where Jackson Brown won damages for McCain using his song “Running on Empty.” Again it is a legal case inextricable from social and political contexts. But I also think that Jackson Browne still has the right to protect his intellectual property rights and control their use.

Pat:This kerfuffle demonstrates a number of things about the current state of fair use. First, it caused a huge media uproar; so copyright issues definitely are in the public eye, and they are generating conversations about how we can both circulate and grow culture.

Second, it shows how people come to exaggerate the issues. YouTube is required by law (the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to take down any video that a content holder flags as infringing. As Ellen noted earlier, many copyright holders do issue takedown notices, typically the result of automatic programs matching content, which means a lot of fair uses get swept up into the net.

Then it’s up to the person who uploaded it to challenge the take down by employing their fair use rights, and explaining to YouTube why they believe it’s fair use. (Under law, you don’t have to be exactly precisely on-the-nose right with your fair use choices; you have to demonstrate reasonable judgment, and the law permits some squish.) Then if YouTube finds that credible, the video goes back up, and if the content holder wants to pursue legal action directly with the uploader, they can. In this case, it’s very likely that BMG issued the takedown request as a result of bot detection, not person detection. Romney’s campaign people explained it was fair use, and YouTube put it back up. No more has been heard from BMG and I’ll be shocked if there is.

Ellen: According to Politico it was at the request of BMG-- but I guess that could have been bot-generated. Here’s some more discussion of it all.

Pat: So, my point on this one is that the system, such as it is, worked. Now, you could definitely say, and we definitely have, that pre-emptive takedowns are a hindrance to the employment of fair use, and disrespectful of that important First Amendment right. I haven’t noticed any policymakers listening to me or Public Knowledge or Electronic Frontier Foundation or any of the other geeky media policy folk more than they’re listening to Hollywood, music companies, and software companies; but it would be great to see a more organized constituency pushing on the DMCA. I wonder personally if the arrival in Washington, D.C. of Google and Facebook (aren’t you surprised it took them this long to set up DC offices??) will change the discussion. Ellen’s concern about Google’s media-ization are widely shared; but at the same time, Google and Facebook were opposed to media interests on SOPA/PIPA. Right now, though, copyright policy reform (e.g. DMCA reform) has a third-rail quality.

Third, the incident shows the ubiquity of fair use in our landscape. We see it in every daily newspaper (oh look, they quoted from a think tank report!), in the television news and in those invaluable and Viacom-owned shows The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; in every student paper (that footnoted quotation), in every scholarly work. And political campaigns routinely incorporate existing material, often edited in a way to denigrate the opponent.

There’s a common use of copyrighted material in political campaigns that is much dicier--the part where campaigns use popular songs without permission to attract and energize the crowd and as intros to the candidate jogging up to the platform. It’s just not clear how that use is transformative; it’s one of the uses the market serves directly. It usually comes to light because performers don’t agree with a politician’s perspective. And the politicians always claim fair use. Often the cases are just settled, either with payment or the candidate agreeing not to use the music any more.

You both are writing about legal issues from the perspective of media scholars. What do you think media scholars bring to these debates which are missing from previous work on intellectual property law? What do you think media scholars have to learn from legal authorities working in this space?

Pat: I am profoundly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Peter Jaszi since 2004 on the various projects that inform our book. I have learned an enormous amount, not just about the law but about how people regard, use and shape the law through their conceptualization, discussion and actions. Peter Jaszi is a legal scholar whose work is informed by some reading that media scholars do as well, especially in the areas of cultural studies and post-structuralism. I have brought a perspective shaped by the perspective of John Dewey on political participation and by Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and other cultural theorists on the process of cultural production.

As a media scholar, one of the assets I also brought to the project was my networks of contacts in practitioner communities. Our work with documentary filmmakers, journalists, film scholars, communication scholars, and remixers has all been informed by earlier work on and with these communities.

Another asset I brought to the project was a long history of working on communication and media policy issues, in which access, public participation, and democratic process were major themes. Copyright policy is another realm of knowledge, but it is shaped by the same political process, economic and political stakeholders, and institutional structures that other policies are. And as with other communication policy issues, the infrastructural elements shaping expression often go unnoticed by most people, often until it’s too late to undo bad decisions.

Our work focuses on copyright policy, but copyright policy as it intersects with creative action. So we have been able to see inside people’s heads, in a way, to see not only what they think and think about but what they are avoiding thinking about. This has been absolutely fascinating. It has been a privilege.

Ellen: The work that Pat and Peter Jaszi have done for over a decade through American University’s Center for Social Media has made a tremendous contribution to the understanding of media scholars, while offering vital assistance to media practitioners, teachers and lawyers. Their work has really brought fair use to the attention of media studies scholars-- who are not always rushing into legal topics-- as well as media makers. We owe them a great deal.

I think media scholars bring an important HISTORICAL knowledge about audiences and about distribution technologies that is invaluable to these debates. All that stuff about the patent wars over film technology that you learn in film history class in college is still extremely relevant to the shifting power dynamics among those who invent and sell the technology and those who want to use it for creative purposes, as well as the middle managers in the distribution business.

My interest in this entire topic has been repeatedly revitalized by the work of two legal scholars who write the kind of painstakingly researched, thrillingly written, and deeply creative stories about our legal past that are a model of humanities work. I am thinking here of Adrien Johns and Catherine Fiske. Johns is important for his book Piracy in which he takes a very long perspective on history and how often the winners and losers can change in copyright and patent battles. Fiske is important for introducing a keenly focused attention to labor and how people control or lose the rights to their own work in her book Working Knowledge. Both scholars help us to remember that what happened in book publishing in the 18th and 19th centuries must be kept in mind as we deal with audio visual media.

How did you each become involved in work on intellectual property law? What motivates your recent books on this topic? How does it relate to your previous work?

Ellen: Way back in the 70s when I was a senior at UCLA, my family wanted me to go to law school. So I applied to film schools and law schools at the same time. I am eternally grateful to my sister Rose who advocated on my behalf that I could always go to law school later, but if I went to law school then I would never get back to film school. My co-author, Bill Seiter, is my brother and an IP attorney, so this stuff has been dinner conversation for twenty-five years. It was a fascinating part of the process of writing this book to recognize the differences in our disciplinary perspectives and which parts of the puzzle each of us were missing, given our academic training and professional experience.

Now I actually want to go to law school. JK.

But my initial interest in these matters came from my own experiences as a filmmaker, and from teaching film and video production for twenty years.. I finished my MFA in 1978 making experimental shorts and documentaries. We used optical printers then, no computers, and it was painstaking, but we did amazing things with found footage, and we freely used all kinds of materials. Even then, however, we knew not to mess with the music, but try to commission musicians for soundtracks. It always breaks my heart when students pour hours of work into a film and haven’t thought out what they can and cannot use from the onset if they want to be able to submit to festivals, etc.

By 2005, when I made my most recent documentary, Projecting Cultures: Perceptions of Arab and American Film, at USC, I was getting quotes of 20K for one minute of a 1950s feature film that was exclusively for educational use. (You can see the video and the clips from Hollywood and Egyptian films here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmd4cUY7g-s

I had to conform to the requirements of my funding agency (The Sunnylands Trust/ Annenberg Center for Public Policy) and of USC School of Cinematic Arts. Like all big institutions they are wary of fair use and have undoubtedly made the situation much worse. Like many publishers, colleges and universities, and festivals, the bottom line is that they do not want to offend the donors, and in the case of my school that involved a big movie star who had appeared in the film and the studio that distributed it. We eventually got all three film distributors whose films we used to agree to give the clips for free, but only after we had used a lot of the budget for a rights clearance specialist, because studios don’t return calls from your average filmmaker. They want to know that everything about transferring the quality version of the dub, etc., will be done exactly as they specified. Pat has done so much important work (along with Peter Jaszi, and with extraordinary support from LA lawyer Michael Donaldson) on advocating for documentary filmmakers and their fair use rights, but to “win” still often involves a hefty price tag either in legal fees or clearance specialists.

Pat: Of all film schools, USC is the most rigid to my knowledge, and I agree with Ellen that it’s entirely related to the special relationship with major studio figures. It’s not just frustrating to USC filmmakers but to many others including staff who want to support teachers and researchers and who know the law is available to them. It’s also a reminder of the importance of practice in determining access to the law.

Peter Jaszi and I plunged into the lived experience of filmmakers’ creative struggles with copyright together. I knew Peter Jaszi from previous conferences on communication policy and copyright issues, when he invited me to a conference on copyright and culture. Like other non-lawyers there (he had made sure to get cultural actors there!), I found the concerns of scholars about “tight copyright” very compelling, but I was puzzled by why the media makers I knew weren’t complaining about it themselves.

That is still a fascinating issue for me. Many professional creators focus only on the threats in the digital landscape to traditional business models. Photographers in particular believe their profession is imperiled. Photographers never seem to worry, though, about the fact that most photographs capture copyrighted material in the picture taken. The reality that all cultural expression is in some way recombinant--that it all uses existing culture as a platform, that every one of us “stands on the shoulders of giants” (and no, Isaac Newton did not think up that phrase)--has been buried under a deluge of Romantic sensibility (the artist in the garret, creating a work of tortured genius in complete originality), bad teaching practices in K-12 (you can only use pictures from these licensed databases, and don’t copy!), and alarming FBI notices on our movies.

People confuse business models with creative process, and they moralize one part of the copyright regime. They believe they have simple property rights in stuff they’ve created, and that even if other people have a legal right to use it, that’s an immoral act. Many remixers, of course, just flip that problem around. They say it’s an immoral act to hoard your stuff, and you should give it away. Meanwhile, the law both incentivizes creative acts by granting a monopoly right that is limited, and by encouraging use of copyrighted material if you are making new culture in some way.

Anyway, I loved the idea of exploring that problem of how creative actors think about copyright in their creative process, and so did Peter Jaszi. We were lucky enough to get interest from Joan Shigekawa at the Rockefeller Foundation (she’s now doing great things at the NEA), and that one grant plunged us into an odyssey that hasn’t stopped.

Oh and by the way the answer to my question--we focused on documentary filmmakers, since I knew so many of them--was that documentary filmmakers simply were not aware of the depth of their self-censorship. When they learned how profoundly their creative process was crippled by their confusion on copyright and fair use, they created a code of best practices in fair use that changed their industry.

Pat Aufderheide is the Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author with Peter Jaszi of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, July 2011), and author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She heads the Fair Use and Free Speech research project at the Center, in conjunction with Prof. Peter Jaszi in American University's Washington College of Law.

Ellen Seiter holds the Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches courses on television and new media history, theory and criticism in the Critical Studies Division. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993) and Remote Control; Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989). Her latest book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.

Concerning Intellectual Property: A Conversation Between Ellen Seiter and Pat Aufderheide (Part One)

The grassroots efforts to block the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) represented simply the most recent and most highly publicized skirmish in ongoing struggles over the nature of intellectual property law and how it impacts the new media landscape. If intellectual property law might once have seemed to be a narrow and somewhat obscure focus for legal scholarship, it has become more and more central to the field of media and communication studies, as it has become part of the everyday reality of fans, artists, and teachers, struggling to figure out the extent of their Fair Use rights. As more and more of us are producing and circulating media, sometimes within, sometimes outside, current legal frameworks, intellectual property constitutes both an enabling mechanism and a constraint of our expressive possibilities. Seiter's book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production, co-authored with Bill Seiter, was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.   Pat Aufderheide's  Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, co-authored with Peter Jaszi was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011. Both represent indispensable guides to the current legal landscape  by veteran communication scholars (working in each case with a lawyer) which address how IP law impacts the production, circulation, and consumption of media. Both combine pragmatic understanding of the often contested status of current law as well as a theoretical understanding of how these decisions impact the future of communications.

My goal here was to spark a conversation between Aufderheide and Seiter, which explored some of the key themes in their books, and addressed some of the central controversies around intellectual property. I could not have imagined the commitment they would both show to this exchange and the depth of insights they brought to their interactions with each other. My job now is to get out of the way and let this exchange unfold over the next five blog posts.

Ellen’s section on copyright opens with the sentence, “One of these days you are going to receive a Cease and Desist letter.” This would not have been true at earlier moments in history where the communications and creative practices of most people would not have been exposed to this kind of legal scrutiny. So, what do you think are the consequences of this wide-spread engagement with legal struggles over intellectual property? How might larger public concerns inform our current understanding of this area of the law?

Pat: In fact, most people today are not going to get a Cease and Desist letter (though many more are likely to get a Content ID match or a takedown on YouTube, of which more later.) Ellen’s book is of course written for professional artists, who are more likely than the general public but still not very likely to get one. But one cease and desist letter sent to one person echoes through the culture, and then mythologizes into a full-blown lawsuit before you can stamp out a rumor. (We document some of this mythmaking in our book.) So it’s an excellent way to begin, to get people’s attention, demystify them, and also help them put themselves in a position where they are even more unlikely to get one.

Ellen: Google reports receiving over a million copyright notices per week, and these are passed on to users through takedown notices, usually within 24 hours. We wrote our book to speak to young, technologically savvy and admittedly ambitious media artists, who do post aggressively and frequently on line and, especially when they are enrolled at a college or university with a lot at stake as ISP providers do tend to police the students very stringently-- cease and desist or we will take down your email account. Pat is right that there can be a panic around these things-- many of my students in my anime course (who are avid amateur media makers) for example, worried that the campus police would be knocking on their door the minute they downloaded a bittorrent file, while others were very creative. So it is fairly common for intense young filmmakers eager to be discovered to get such a letter and we wanted to defuse the fear and use the specter of the letter as a teachable moment. According to Google’s transparency report, Comcast’s NBCUniversal rank near the top of senders of copyright notices. Now that YouTube and NBCUniversal are partners on projects like streaming the Olympics, we can expect that Google will become more and more friendly with the major media conglomerates. In fact, they have begun penalizing recipients of takedown notices by moving their content down the search engine algorithm.

Pat:Yes, it’s wise to know what to do with bullies, and many cease and desist letters are acts of bullying, as are many takedown notices on YouTube. And that’s why these days people in general need to know what their rights as users are under copyright.

You’re so right, Henry, that this didn’t use to be the case. Before 1978 (and Ellen’s book is great at many specifics of this story), when a 1976 overhauling of copyright went into effect, many works were not copyrighted at all. Many copyrighted works had not had their copyright renewed. Copyright was relatively short. All that is changed. These days, copyright is default--everything I just typed is now copyrighted to me. And copyright is looooooong--this paragraph is copyrighted to me until 70 years after my death. The monopoly right I hold on this paragraph extends to derivative products--so don’t try to make a poem, a song, or a play out of this paragraph. If I send you a cease and desist letter (I’ll see if my lawyer buddy will send it on his letterhead), I’ll talk about the “statutory damages,” or extra fines, you might get slapped with if you’re found to be infringing my monopoly right. They can be as high as $150,000 per infringement, although they never actually are.

Ellen: I have watched the growth of copyright intimidation since I got an MFA in filmmaking in 1976 at Northwestern. In those days we borrowed found footage and music for soundtracks freely, shot on 16mm, and screened our work in lecture halls and art galleries like Chicago Filmmakers and even festivals did not look very closely at any kinds of rights clearances. Through thirty years of teaching, much of it in production classes, I have seen the rights culture grow but also the scale of students’ ambitions. We just wanted a hundred or so other cool experimental filmmakers to know our work-- now students angle for overnight stardom and a contract from CAA, and this does lead to trouble. This type of individual-- who we wrote the book for -- has a lot of nerve, frankly, and does not intimidate so easily.

Pat: Artists face particular challenges in the remix era, in which everything is both copyable and copyrighted, and it’s wonderful that they they are so assertive. Our dream, and I think Ellen’s as well, is to make sure they know their (and others’!) rights, they don’t accept copyright bullying, and they don’t unnecessarily self-criminalize. It’s always sad to me to see someone fiercely declare their courageous act of piracy when it might be a perfectly legal fair use. For every courageous person, there have to be ten who didn’t take the “risk,” and self-censored.

This issue matters to everybody, actually, because copyright law intersects with ordinary creative practice--not just making the great American painting or writing the great American novel or making the great American movie, but everyday tasks such as composing a birthday slide show, or making a poster for the meeting, or writing a comment on somebody’s blog, or posting a clip from your trip to the club last night on your Facebook page.

When people are intimidated by what they understand--or misunderstand--to be copyright-driven limitations on their ability to create, they stifle their own thinking, much less their creative actions. This is what Prof. Peter Jaszi and I learned from in-depth studies of creative practice in ten different creative communities, as we discuss in our book.

When they understand that copyright protects both new users and copyright holders, in the service of creating more culture, they are able to exercise their First Amendment rights with greater confidence, and this has deep ramifications in creative practice. It changes how they think about their creative choices, long before they shape a creative act.

So copyright, as one branch of what has come (in my mind, unfortunately) to be called intellectual “property,” is part of the apparatus that shapes our individual contributions to the culture. Like trademark and patent law (also part of that sphere of law that lawyers just call IP), it both constrains and rewards cultural expression. As participants in this culture, we are stuck caring about IP policy, if we care about the future of our culture.

Ellen: I differ from Pat in two ways in my focus. First, I think the bad guys will ultimately be companies like Google (owner of YouTube) and Apple. They are the next giants of media monopolization and increasingly participate in takedown notices. Google is so big by now (Apple, too) and we are so intertwined with it, that there is little way out of their terms of service. Their financial and political alliances will make them argue for free posting when it suits their interests, litigate the hell out of competitors over patent infringements when THAT suits their interests, and send out takedown notices when it is to their political and business advantage to placate copyright holders. Meanwhile they will be implacable about their own terms of use or adhesion contracts, and make up a lot of their own rules about how people access content, what is taken down, what is hate speech (as we have seen in recent weeks), and when they cooperate with governments and when they don’t.

Pat: Thank you, Ellen, for pointing out that Google isn’t necessarily not evil in this story. I don’t want to be sanguine about the future of Google or any other companies that have created path dependence or effectively offer utility services. Terms of service have a grisly ability to override rights, and vertically integrated companies have special opportunities to take advantage of customer goodwill.

People often put up with outrageous terms of service because they’re not fully aware of what they’re giving up. This is why we think it’s so important to understand what’s at risk. At the moment, copyright policy is dangerously unbalanced, tilted in favor of monopoly rights holders (I can’t in conscience call them owners, since I don’t think they own their copyright, I think they’ve been given a limited monopoly over that stuff by the government). At the same time, large media companies strongly assert their political influence over the policy process. So it’s a very unpredictable and hazardous process to try to rebalance copyright directly via legislation. It’s also very chancy to try to get more balance in the law through lawsuits, since they typically occur around outlier cases, and you can never count on a judge thinking the way you do. So practice becomes extremely important as a way to shift balance. That’s why we wrote the book--to help people take that action to rebalance via practice.

Without the empowering knowledge that they have First Amendment rights within copyright, many frustrated people who create using other people’s materials--such as remix artists--imagine falsely that they are committing a criminal act. They call themselves “pirates,” and believe they’re standing up courageously to repression. But copyright law actually permits, under fair use, people to employ other people’s copyrighted material for the creation of new culture. Our book goes into the basic logic to make a fair use decision, but basically you need to ask two questions: 1) am I using this material for its original purpose or am I repurposing in order to do something different with it? and 2) am I using the appropriate amount to accomplish my goal? And this doesn’t even have to be creating new work. Archivists and librarians routinely repurpose copyrighted material without paying for it, employing fair use successfully and without being challenged.

Pat Aufderheide is the Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author with Peter Jaszi of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, July 2011), and author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She heads the Fair Use and Free Speech research project at the Center, in conjunction with Prof. Peter Jaszi in American University's Washington College of Law.

Ellen Seiter holds the Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches courses on television and new media history, theory and criticism in the Critical Studies Division. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993) and Remote Control; Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989). Her latest book, The Creative Artist's Legal Guide:Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part Three)

Today’s civil rights movements, such as the struggles over the DREAM act, are more likely to play out in digital media than through broadcast media, and once again, the debates seem to want to focus on digital media as technology, rather than as a set of social, cultural, and political practices. What lessons might we take from your work on 1960s television to help us understand the role of new media in contemporary political resistance movements?  

Let’s remember that television news in the early 1960s was the era’s “new media,” as digital media like Twitter and Facebook are today.  Any successful social change movement is going to want to exploit and make use of the newest communication tools of its era.  Today it’s social media.

These forms of media obviously do somewhat different things than “old media” like television – the form of communication and contact is different, appeal to audiences is different.  I hear the term “Twitter Revolution” and it puts my teeth on edge.  Twitter no more caused the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement than television caused the civil rights movement or the anti-Vietnam war movement.  In both cases, social change movements used the communication tools of the day and certainly the tools have an impact on how one can communicate, who one can reach, how quickly we can organize, and all the rest.

What concerns me is the centering on the technology as technology and the utopian discourses that surround it all.  As far as digital media, I think Morozov’s The Net Delusion is a useful corrective to the notion that new social media are inherently liberatory.  Social change movements create the impetus for social change – and that requires the hard work of organizing.  Television coverage and social media tools help, but they don’t substitute for organizing and getting lots of people together in real time and space pressing a change agenda and dialoguing with others and confronting others about it.  Some of this can occur in virtual spaces (I think Facebook and Twitter can be great organizing tools – mostly because they are fast and efficient), but I still would argue that social change activists do have to get into the streets and into public spaces as Occupy did – and as the civil rights movement did. 

One of the most important contributions of your book is your focus on reception, specifically the ways that different groups (not simply black vs. white or north vs. south, but different groups of white southerners, say) used television content to stage debates about what forms of social change were or were not acceptable. Too often, we end up with pretty univocal accounts of how southerners responded to the civil rights movement. What were some of the core points of difference that surface when you look at audience response to these broadcasts?

It’s pretty easy to stereotype white Southerners in the civil rights era: either benighted, evil or buffoonish racists or latter-day Atticus Finches taking on the good fight for victimized blacks.  I was interested in really trying to understand how white Southerners responded to the fundamental challenge to their segregationist world view when national media, network television in particular, throws a nationwide spotlight onto race relations in their locales, in particular Birmingham and Selma.

Working with the very large number of letters to the editor I found in Alabama newspapers, along with editorials and commentary that directly addressed media coverage I wanted to analyze and provide interpretive readings of these responses.  One thing I found was a significant degree of media awareness and savvy among white Southerners – they were far more aware of the workings of the media than were non-Southerners or African American commentary in the black press.

In fact, during the key civil rights years (early-mid 1960s) I was struck by how little discussion of the media I found in the black press.  It was like, since the media wasn’t a “problem” for the black empowerment movement, the medium as medium tended to disappear.  The media was telling the truth, “reflecting” what was really happening in the South, so there wasn’t the felt need to interrogate how the media was operating.  At least, that’s my attempt to hypothesize about the dearth of discourse about media in the black press during this period.

The situation is very different in the Alabama press.  Lots of attention to the role played by national media and particularly the “new media”: television.   And since most of these Southerners didn’t want to believe that what they were seeing on their TVs was true, they had to explain what was going on.  There were a lot of accusations that King and the movement merely wanted “publicity.”  Publicity for what?  Well, King was power mad or wanted to curry influence in Washington.  The movement’s stated reasons for the publicity campaigns couldn’t be grappled with.

These Southerners were, of course, correct that King and the movement staged marches and demonstrations to get media attention: they needed publicity on a national scale.  The movement, on the other hand, could never admit that they were staging “media events.”  White Southerners could see this, but for the most part had to stop right there.  To engage the next question: why do these marchers want this national attention, what are they marching for and against, would lead to scary answers.

If the Southern white worldview is founded, as it was, on the premise that segregation works for everyone and that blacks are just as content with the situation as whites, then to really engage the fundamental question profoundly threatens that worldview.  So many white Southerners had to evade and look for other things to focus on: the “Northern-ness” of network television, for instance.  Or media bias: why the focus on bad race relations in Selma when blacks and whites are killing each other in New York subways?  Why doesn’t the media focus on racism in the North?  Valid questions, but they do help to evade the big issue about Jim Crow and voter disenfranchisement.

Occasionally with some letter writers and editorialists, the media images broke through: especially during the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, particularly when white volunteers got murdered.  In a number of cases, there were anguished concerns about the “image” of Alabama that the rest of the country is getting: what does this say about Alabama?  Who are we?  How are we going to have to change?  I see these as cracks in the hegemonic segregationist armour and clues to how a previously naturalized worldview starts slowly to disintegrate.

As a historian of reception practices, the one thing I wanted to try to do was avoid taking a condescending attitude to these segregationist discourses and the people who were producing this discourse.  It’s easy to feel superior and know that these folks were on the wrong side of history.  They didn’t know that.  I

n some ways I found Northerners, particularly those who responded to the East Side/West Side episodes that explored race relations topics in Northern locales, as equally blinkered.  Even though these episodes were clearly marked as occurring in New York City and its environs, numerous letter writers would discursively locate the problem back to the South.  The real race problem was there; Southerners were the ones who should be watching these shows to learn about the plight of black people.   “Dumb” white Southerners were the problem, no matter where blacks faced oppression and discrimination.

One of the surprising discoveries you made was that while the networks did cover aspects of the March on Washington “live,” they cut away from what we now see as the key moments in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. What do you think motivated that decision?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs

All three networks carried significant amounts of live coverage of the March on Washington which occurred, by the way, on a Wednesday.  Nowadays it’s no spectacular feat to get masses of people to Washington for a march, but they always happen on the weekend.  Try to get a quarter of a million people to the national Mall on a weekday!

Along with the live coverage during the day, CBS that evening provided a prime time news programme that both recapped the events of the day and provided background about the March.  For people interested in the March, CBS’s prime time coverage is probably where they first got their sense of what happened.  Now this is the pre-sound bite era.  The news special provided long excerpts for quite a number of the speeches that preceded King’s.

Finally we get to King who provided the final speech of the day.  King’s speech can be divided into two halves: the first part provides some rationale for why people are massed at the Mall and why blacks are not satisfied with the racial status quo or the pace of change.  The second part of the speech is the one we all know: the soaring oratory of “I have a dream” and King’s vision of an America redeemed.  So, when CBS news personnel make their decision of what to excerpt from the speech, what do they go with?

Believe it or not, they cut away just as King launches into “I have a dream.”  When I first saw this news programme at the CBS News Archive, my jaw just about hit the floor when I realized that the most important words of the most important speech of the 20^th century ended up on the cutting room floor.  It’s a pretty major journalistic gaffe.  But why?

I suggest that in 1963, reporters and news personnel didn’t know what to do with “I have a dream.”  King isn’t speaking politically any more; he isn’t given a list of grievances.  He is preaching.  Drew Hansen in his book about the speech really helped me to understand what the journalistic decision-making must have been.  King was no longer a political leader, he was now a visionary prophet, akin to Isaiah in the Bible.  This wasn’t a King that journalists were familiar with – outside of black churches, no one had really heard King speaking like this.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part Two)

You suggest that the news media made “common cause” with the civil rights movement in bringing some of their concerns to the American public. What motivated the national news media to embrace this story? What were the limits of their commitment to the cause?  

It was a limited common cause. Around issues such as integration of schools and public spaces, along with voting rights, the media was largely supportive.  But Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also embraced those goals.  The news media, television in particular, tended to be very positively inclined to JFK and was as well to LBJ in the early period of his administration when he appeared to be trying to carry out the Kennedy agenda, particularly the Civil Rights Act that passes in 1964.  The legislative goals of the movement were “legitimated” by the fact that there was significant support among both Democratic and Republican officials outside the South. These were somewhat less partisan times, certainly in media coverage.  Television news deferred quite a bit to the president.

But one thing surprised me as I examined TV news coverage.  Reporters tended to become far more critical of civil rights activists and civil rights campaigns when things turned violent.  In reading transcripts of NBC coverage of the sit-in movement, I was surprised to discover that the reporter refused to identify who was being violent.  The reporter kept using the passive voice so it wasn’t clear that white segregationists were the ones pummeling sit-in demonstrators.

At other times, however, when the violence was so clearly marked between victim and aggressor, there was less criticism of the civil rights activists.  When voting rights marchers in Selma were brutally gassed and beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in full view of a battery of cameras, there was no attempt to suggest that the marchers were participating in creating the mayhem.  However, in another news story from Selma that I viewed, the CBS reporter was somewhat critical of very youthful demonstrators who, unlike their elders, did not present docile bodies, but ranged around the streets and back alleys during their march.  In general, there appeared to be more anxiety about the activities and potential threat of black youths (who were, of course, fundamentally important to the success of civil rights campaigns, particularly those of direct action and civil disobedience).

It’s a weird paradox: TV news was drawn to the civil rights story to some extent because it provided dramatic visuals of violence and a powerful good versus evil narrative, but reporters tended to criticize the violence that drew them to the story in the first place.

You write in the book about “a moment [in the 1960s] of non-stereotypical, respectable middle-class blacks” on fictional television. What factors gave rise to this moment and which led to its decline? How do these fictional black characters relate to the idealized civil rights subject that you suggest was constructed through the evening news?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcOlcDUQ29M

It seems that every era of media representation of African Americans is attempting to respond differently to the era that precedes it.  I open the book with a consideration of The Beulah Show and Amos ‘n’ Andy, the early 1950s shows featuring blacks in starring roles.  We tend to consider them to be stereotyped and degrading images of blacks.  At the time, however, the thinking about these representations was somewhat more complicated.  Beulah, the black housekeeper to a white family, was seen by some (including some in the black press) as equal to her employers, middle-class in deportment, not using dialect, and in general a good role model.  In developing Amos ‘n’ Andy for television, CBS very deliberately elevated them and the Kingfish to middle class status presumably to make them appear less disrespectable and buffoonish.  Nevertheless, both shows, and especially Amos ‘n’ Andy, were subject to high profile protest by the NAACP, and were off the air by 1953.

Prime time becomes a very “white-washed” world from then on till the early-mid 1960s.  Network programming philosophy was: appeal to the most, offend the least.  Black performers tended to cause controversy – witness the case of Nat King Cole and his 1957 variety show which couldn’t secure a sponsor.  The “integrating” of prime time entertainment programming is, of course, a direct result of the civil rights movement.  It was becoming more of a problem to not show at least occasional black performers or black characters.

Herman Gray came up with the concept “civil rights subject” when he was writing about how television tended to remember civil rights.  The civil rights subject in his original formulation is the latter-day beneficiary of the movement: an exemplary figure signified by hard work, individualism, middle-class status.  The Huxtable family of The Cosby Show is the quintessential example of this concept.  What I argue in my book is that this “civil rights subject” is also evident in television representations (both in news coverage and in prime time entertainment) during the civil rights era.  The most notable early example in prime time drama is Bill Cosby again!  In 1965 he’s paired with a white partner in the Cold War espionage series, I Spy.  Cosby’s character can’t just be a spy, though: he’s a Rhodes scholar who speaks eleven languages and is clearly superior to everyone around him (except that his white buddy gets all the girls).  I Spy gives us a colour-blind, post-integrationist world where our two heroes can range around the world to Cold War hot spots (typically in Asian countries that look “exotic”) and represent a black-and-white America that doesn’t have anything to do with racism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6YH3j01Ou8

Bill Cosby’s character is the opposite of a victim, but another form of early 1960s programming did focus on blacks-as-victims – the “social problem” dramas that appeared in direct response to both the idealism of the Kennedy New Frontier and also industry anxiety about tougher regulation by the new FCC chairman, Newton Minow who castigated television as “a vast wasteland.”  One show I look at, East Side/West Side, focuses on the crusades of an idealistic white social worker in New York City.  One very high profile episode examines the plight of a young Harlem couple dealing with the lack of jobs for black men and horrendous ghetto housing conditions (their baby dies after begin bitten by a rat).  Even though the couple is obviously poor and living in degraded conditions, they are presented to us as middle-class seeming, dignified, hard-working, eminently respectable – although James Earl Jones, as the husband, portrays a barely contained rage against his oppression.  The characters, nevertheless, are presented to white viewers as ones deserving of help – the only thing standing in the way of their achieving middle-class status and integration into the white world is employment discrimination and slum housing.  So there’s that similar appeal that we see in news and photojournalism coverage: helpless but worthy blacks, enlightened, caring whites as potential rescuers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn5kDvpiibA

But shows like East Side/West Side were a bit grim for prime time Nielsen families.  The quintessential civil rights subject after Bill Cosby in I Spy was Diahann Carroll in Julia, which came on air in 1968 and was the first TV series to star an African American since the days of Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah.  Julia was colour-blind integration fully achieved.  She’s a nurse with white co-workers and she lives in a LA apartment building with white neighbours.  Except for mostly humourous instances of “prejudice,” Julia and her adorable young son personify a world of interracial harmony.  The show was controversial because as network television’s first high profile attempt to center a show around African Americans, it ran up against the rapid shifts in the black empowerment movement and what was going on with race in the US at that point.  By 1968 with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts having passed, the attention shifted North and there’s more of a focus on economic oppression and “de facto” segregation and the situation with black inner city “ghettos.”  The movement also shifts into more confrontational directions that are more discomforting to liberal and moderate whites.  Julia was a popular show but arguments swirled around it suggesting that the show was out of touch with what was really going on: the show wasn’t “telling it like it is.”

You see the book as seeking to correct some common misunderstandings about the role of television during the civil rights era. What do you see as the most widespread misinterpretations of this period?

I think it’s similar to the misunderstanding about television and the Vietnam War.  Television did not embrace the cause of the anti-war movement and thereby lead the US population to demand the war’s end.  (See Daniel Hallin’s The “Uncensored War.”)  Similarly television didn’t cause the success of the civil rights movement.  Television was not a mouthpiece for the movement; news coverage did not transmit or reflect the positions, perspectives, and arguments of the movement in some simple, one-directional sort of way.  I see this over and over again in histories of the civil rights era: the nation saw it on television and the nation acted.  This reifies the medium, gives us television as a neutral mirror reflecting what’s in front of the camera.   No attention to television as an institution and industry, or to textual construction, or to reception practices – all the issues that we as media scholars explore.  This is preaching to the choir when I say this to fellow media studies folks, but I’m hoping my book gets read by non-media scholars, too!

Was network television in general sympathetic to the legislative goals of the movement?  Yes.  But as I’ve already noted, so were powerful political players.  Was the movement sympathetic to many of the movement’s strategies, including demonstrations, direct action, civil disobedience?  In general, no.  For instance, in the run-up to the March on Washington, the media (and not just television) was very critical of the prospect of a hundred thousand and more black people converging on the nation’s capital.  The recurring news peg was “violence is inevitable” and “mass marches won’t sway congressional votes anyway.”  When violence didn’t occur on the day of the march, the live coverage became largely celebratory with images mostly focused on dignified, middle-class-looking marchers – ideal “civil rights subjects” – who presented docile, smiling, and unthreatening images.  But newsmen covering the event continued to insist that the quarter of a million marchers wouldn’t sway votes, so what was the point of the march.

So I really want to undercut and question a certain amount of technological utopianism and determinism that I see in civil rights historiography and also in popular memory.  Television coverage was crucial to the movement, of course; the movement did not, however, fundamentally control either the medium or its messages.  The medium and the movement were not one and the same; that fact tends to get lost.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Televisionand New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part One)

Many of us may think we know the history of the role which American broadcast television played in fostering public awareness and rallying support behind Martin Luther King and his 1960s era Civil Rights struggle. We can all picture in our heads the black and white fuzzy images of King's powerful remarks in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, for example, and we know that people across the country must have watched those amazing words in their living rooms. Not so fast, argues Aniko Bodroghkozy, the author of a new book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement.  Bodroghkozy certainly argues that television played important roles in sparking the consciences of viewers around the country as the networks and the activists made reluctant, tentative, highly compromised "common cause" with each other to transform the civil rights struggles into a prime time spectacle. But, some of what you believe happened -- starting with how the networks covered the March on Washington -- turns out to be a bit more complex than popular memory and imagination might suggest.

I have had the joy of watching Bodroghkozy develop from a young graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying under John Fiske and Lynn Spigel, to the author of an important first book about the ways the student protests of the 1960s engaged with television, through to the publication of this masterful new book, which represents the culmination of more than a decade's work in the archives. Bodroghkozy has already written the definitive accounts of the controversy surrounding The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the reception of Julia by black and white viewers, both essays often assigned in television history classes around the country. Her work moves back and forth between news and entertainment programming, showing the ways that they were sometimes aligned, sometimes contradictory, in their depictions of the current state of race relations in the 1960s. Her work is surprisingly nuanced in dealing with the diversity of perspectives within the network journalists, within the civil rights movement, and with white southerners, as the country sought to resolve deep rooted conflicts around segregation. She offers rich readings of key programs and broadcasts which are contextualized by contemporary responses from newspapers and letters housed in archives, combining insights from social and political history alongside those she brings to the table as a gifted broadcast historian.

The book's consideration of media and political change is well timed, offering a rich historical counter to current debates about the role of new media in informing recent struggles, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement. For me, it especially resonates with the work that my Civic Paths team at USC has been doing on the DREAMers, undocumented youth whose current civil rights struggles are informed by their saavy use of YouTube and various social media platforms. But, as the country's first black president seeks re-election,  Equal Time offers us some great resources for placing into perspective various attempts to mobilize popular memories of the Civil Rights era.

The following interview demonstrates Bodroghkozy's careful, nuanced, yet engaged mind at work, describing some of the ways that Equal Rights helps to revise our understanding of this important era both in the history of American politics and in the evolution of television as a medium.

You can also follow this link for an interview with the author on public radio.

You begin the book with a powerful quote from Martin Luther King: “We are here to say to the white men that we are not going to let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” To what degree were the tactics King brought to the civil rights movement designed to encourage and shape television attention? What did King and the other civil rights leaders hope to accomplish by getting access to broadcast media?

King’s quote is really noteworthy because he and civil rights leaders of the era so very rarely talked openly about their strategies to elicit television coverage.  To be open about their “media campaign” would have appeared manipulative, anathema for a movement that was attempting to appeal to the moral conscience of the nation.  King and the SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his organization) understood the power of strong visual images and the need to communicate a stark message of moral clarity – and to communicate that message and those images to a national audience that could put pressure on congressmen, senators, and the president to pass federal legislation around civil rights and voting rights.  Accessing a national audience was key.

You have to remember that in the early 1960s, there were few truly national media outlets.  There were the picture magazines, Life and Look, which reached a huge readership, and to a lesser extent the newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.  None, of course, had the reach of network television, which by the early 1960s had over ninety percent penetration in U.S. households.  This time period is also when the networks finally begin to invest significantly in their news divisions (CBS and NBC inaugurate their half hour nightly news shows in the fall of 1963 and throughout the early/mid 1960s large numbers of prime time news documentaries, special reports, bulletins and the like).  So you’ve got network news becoming a serious journalistic venue reaching unprecedented numbers of citizens.

King and the SCLC in particular appeared to intuitively understand the nature of television news and the need for dramatic pictures.  They knew to schedule marches no later than about 2:00 in the afternoon in order to work with the demands of the TV news room: film had to be flown to New York, printed, edited, and readied for broadcast for the nightly news.  And they knew that the news cameras would stick around only if the marches and demonstrations led to confrontation and even violence.  The movement did need to create situations in which white racists would beat and brutalize civil rights activists.

On the one hand, one could say that the movement was manipulating the media as well as Southern white police officials like Birmingham’s Bull Connor or Selma’s Jim Clark by creating a setting for confrontation (and certainly segregationists argued that these were all publicity stunts).  On the other hand, blacks had been beaten, lynched, and brutalized “in the dark corners” for decades and decades.  Staging this brutality out in public and inviting new forms of national media to witness it was a novel and clearly powerful tactic that both assisted the movement in making its larger arguments about Jim Crow and black disempowerment, but also played to the strengths of television as “new media.”

Was the goal to reach white viewers, black viewers, or some kind of community which included people of multiple races?

The goal clearly was primarily to reach white viewers, particularly outside the South.  Frequently network news stories about civil rights would be “blacked out” on Deep South TV stations.  Steven Classen has written superbly in his book, Watching Jim Crow, about the case of Jackson, Mississippi’s WLBT-TV which systematically censored network news stories about civil rights or race relations and eventually, after long legal struggles by civil rights activists, finally had its broadcast license revoked by the Justice Department in 1969.  King would frequently appeal to “the conscience of the nation.”  He was obviously referring to the mass audiences produced by media like network television and to nationally distributed magazines.

The movement really didn’t need television to appeal to African Americans (either in the South or the North).  There was a very robust black press that was very effectively distributed to black communities.  News weeklies like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier had national reach with black train porters often working as an informal distribution system to get these newspapers to black communities around the country, and especially into the Deep South.  The movement needed to reach and impact whites outside the South in order to make the case that segregation in Birmingham, Alabama or Albany, Georgia or voter disenfranchisement in Selma, Alabama weren’t regional issues to be solved at the state level, but rather national problems of concern to all Americans to be dealt with in Washington.  And Washington politicians would only care if they were hearing from constituents en masse.

It’s also important to remember this was the Cold War era and to some extent the movement was aware of the global audience. We aren’t really in the satellite era yet (although the Telstar communications satellite goes up in 1962 and live satellite transmission is possible).  The 1963 March on Washington coverage is transmitted live to most European countries.  Nevertheless images are traveling more quickly in this era and there’s lots of concern about how global audiences are making sense of the “leader of the Free World” oppressing its black citizens.

Does television mean something different in the context of this movement than newspapers and print based media?

I think the distinction is more “visual media” versus “print media.”  My book was going to press just as Martin Berger Seeing Through Race came out.  He examines the photojournalism around the civil rights movement and comes to some similar conclusions to mine about network news coverage.  In both cases, the emphasis is on dramatic images of moral clarity: good versus evil, clearly marked.  It calls to mind Peter Brooks’ arguments about “the melodramatic imagination” and the moral occult: in a secular era, we need narratives to give us that clarity that used to be presumably provided by the church in the pre-modern era.

Both television news and photojournalism assumed a white viewer.  The preferred images are of helpless, supplicating or brutalized black bodies that need assistance.  The white viewer is hailed into the position as saviour or rescuer.  The white viewer, whose conscience is being appealed to, is called on to do something, respond in some way to come to the aid of the helpless black victim.  Berger very usefully traces this trope back to abolitionist iconography with the widely circulated image of the kneeling, supplicant slave holding up his chained arms.  In television news coverage, black civil rights activists are almost always mute; only King is authorized to speak.  Preferred images include docile marchers, praying bodies, and, of course, tear-gassed, whipped, beaten bodies.  Print media had a significant role to play as well and Richard Lentz in his (terribly titled!) book Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King does a great comparative analysis of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report in their coverage of King and the movement.

But ultimately I think the power of the civil right movement comes from its visuality and the movement’s intuitive grasp of how to communicate via imagery.  Print media, I think, functioned in an ancillary role providing background, context, and information to the images.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part Three)

  As you note, there has always been space within the Batman canon for some kinds of alternative interpretations of the character, for “What If?” or Elseworld stories, for alternative histories and authorial differences. Do you see the space for multiplicity within the superhero comics narrowing as Hollywood interests exert greater control over the future of these characters? If so, why?

I don’t, because I think comics are currently and will probably remain a niche interest.

That Morrison’s run on Batman -- an extended, fannish love letter to the character’s seventy-year continuity, including obscure, one-panel references to specific archival stories and reworkings of previously-repressed comic narratives – took place at exactly the time Nolan was helming his own separate and distinctly authored Batman franchise, demonstrates that comic book continuity remains relatively independent from the Hollywood version.

There are overlaps and crossovers – Nolan’s franchise borrowed from specific graphic novels, and Morrison incorporated references to the Nolan Batman into his own story –  but comics run on a parallel track, for a different (and far smaller) audience than movies, and no doubt also far smaller than the video game market.

It is certainly possible to identify a Nolan influence within Batman comics of the last seven years. Lucius Fox is now both regularly written and drawn to evoke Morgan Freeman. Joker is now commonly depicted with knife scars up both cheeks.  A rougher, more cockney Alfred, clearly inspired by Michael Caine, features in one recent graphic novel. Batman regularly appears as a more armoured character, and the Tumbler, his tanklike Batmobile from Nolan’s movies, has frequently appeared on the pages of comics. Characters like Riddler, Penguin and Killer Croc have been re-imagined, within certain titles at least, in a more ‘Nolanised’ style. A new title called simply The Dark Knight was launched in 2010.

However, I would characterise this as ‘influence’ rather than ‘control’. Nolan’s interpretation of Batman and his world has joined the matrix of Batman texts and images, as Adam West’s did in the late 1960s, and facets of the ‘Nolanverse’ will inevitably appear within other Batman stories, just as the comic books became more flat, Pop and cartoonish during the TV show’s successful run. That was a fad, and it faded, and I think the influence of Nolan’s specific Batman will also fade in time, though it will remain part of the broader kaleidoscopic matrix, or mosaic, of what Batman is, and will continue to crop up now and then.

One of the underlying arguments of my book is that meanings occupy places on a spectrum, rather than binary oppositional positions, and that they flow, change places and cross over like energy running around a circuit, rather than like light switches that are either on or off.

So there are constant overlaps and internal contradictions throughout Batman’s history that undermine any sense of clear boundaries and definitions.

The Dark Knight Returns, which is held up as one of the key texts of the ‘purist’, dark, military Batman, and also regarded as ‘faithful’ in tone to Kane’s original, is itself an Elseworlds story and a possible future. The 1970s Batman of O’Neil and Adams is believed to have rebooted the character from the sillier, more playful aesthetic of the 1960s, but it is surprisingly easy to find elements of camp and queerness in those supposedly ‘gritty’ adventures of the ‘Darknight Detective’ and Robin, the Teen Wonder.

And while the New 52 of October 2011 ostensibly reboots Batman into a more contained storyline and space after the complexity and ambiguity of Morrison’s previous run – we are told now that Batman has only been active for five years, which clearly rules much of his history out of continuity – it retains the official line that there are 52 multiple universes, including several in-continuity alternate versions of Batman. So while the New 52 reboot seems to be a move towards control and ‘straightness’, in every sense, at the same time it embraces multiplicity and a sense of possibility.

The dynamic between multiplicity and control in Batman’s universe is not a matter of off/on, then, but push-pull; a constant tension between energies in different directions, rather than a binary which clicks all the way to one extreme, then all the way back to the other

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxlf3ad9q5c

As someone who has written a lot about the meanings of the Joker, especially in relation to Nolan’s film, I wanted to get you to reflect a bit about the Joker/Obama phenomenon. What do these images suggest about the connections you draw between the Joker and folk cultural logics and practices?

I would be tempted to see the Joker/Obama images as an example of the state of contemporary folk culture epitomised by the Joker in modern comics – a distorted, limited, unfunny version of the older folk culture Bakhtin describes, which genuinely belonged to the people and the marketplace, and roamed freely, generously, with healthy mockery of official rituals and structures.

The posters of Obama in the guise of Ledger’s Joker do not strike me as witty or even meaningful. They seem to have no particular conviction behind them; no clear message or purpose.

The first instance of the Jokerised Obama was defended by the Republican students who designed it as simply a pop culture image to get attention, rather than a political statement.

The creator of the most famous Joker/Obama image, Firas Alkhateeb, also claims no political purpose and has said he simply produced it because he was bored. The ‘socialism’ caption was added by someone else, who downloaded Alkhateeb’s image from Flickr. Even with this addition, the poster strikes me as having very little focused meaning. The combination of Ledger’s Joker, Obama’s portrait from the cover of Time and the word ‘socialism’ do not seem to cohere into any resonant message. The racial connotations of the image also seem to be accidental, rather than intended by Alkhateeb, who claims he was simply experimenting with a photoshop technique.

So I would associate this image with the expression of closed-down, contained carnival that Bakhtin tells us evolved from the seventeenth century onwards; a reduced carnival-grotesque, an ‘individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation... laughter was cut down to cold humour, irony, sarcasm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regenerating power was reduced to a minimum.’

Mockery and foolishness have a useful social purpose, whether we agree with their political aims or not, but to my mind, the Jokerised Obama says nothing positive or helpful, whether for the left or the right; it only offers sneering, empty sarcasm and ugliness. ‘The result,’ as Bakhtin says, ‘is a broken grotesque figure.’

This is very much the Joker of recent, ‘dark’ Batman comics, whose jokes trail off without punchlines, who seems lonely, cold and barren, rather than a joyful, ‘gay devil’, who wants to spread his playful energies across the city.

If it does have a value is, it is perhaps that – like Ledger’s Joker – it destabilises meaning and questions oppositions.

Arguably, the Jokerised Obama image problematises our expectations of political propaganda posters– that they should have a clear intention and carry a coherent message – and works to question and interrogate political oppositions based around personality, celebrity and iconic individuality, through the creator’s stated indifference and lack of any motivation beyond playful experiment. We assume that the combination Joker + Obama must be meant as either celebration or criticism; inherently, though, as far as the creator’s intentions go, it is neither.

The slippery refusal of this image to carry any obvious meaning – its refusal to make sense, its obstinate unwillingness to be readily decoded, despite the fact that it fits the conventional icon + slogan pattern that we are so used to understanding immediately and reading competently in advertising and propaganda – does perhaps have a certain subversive power.

Nolan’s Joker claims to be an agent of chaos, empty of any political agenda or intention, rather than a ‘schemer’, but the fact that his terrorism is clearly carefully planned subverts even this idea of meaningless, motiveless crime. He denies the forces of order the opportunity to classify him as ‘chaotic’; that would be a category in itself.

The Jokerised Obama, by contrast, is assumed to have an agenda and political intention, but in fact, in its original form, was created genuinely without motive, for the sake of appearance alone – an exercise in photoshop that could presumably have been applied to any photograph of any face – rather than parody or propaganda.

As such, the Joker/Obama image, like the other artefacts that swarm and circulate around the film, from news stories to viral marketing to fan-made Bane memes, adds an interesting intertextual echo to the network of meanings that make up The Dark Knight, and the broader Dark Knight trilogy as a whole.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice's Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part Two)

Your book seems to be as much focused on working through some core theoretical debates in media studies using Nolan and the Dark Knight as it is on using theory to explicate this particular franchise. What makes this film series such a good vehicle for asking these kinds of theoretical questions?

The longevity of Batman as a cultural icon and his visible role in popular culture for several decades, across various media, means that recent articulations of Batman are particularly rich examples for considering the role of authorship and the nature of adaptation. I draw various comparisons in the book’s first two chapters, which focus on these questions, between Batman and other popular texts, to demonstrate the extent to which Batman is a broader and more diverse archive of images, interpretations and variants than other stories and franchises.

Batman has been circulating for fifty-eight years longer than Harry Potter, for instance. Unlike other pulp heroes such as Tarzan and the Shadow, he has remained popular throughout every decade since 1939, by changing and adapting to fit the cultural concerns, the audience and the new media of each period. Unlike, say, George Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air, which was published at around the same time as Batman’s first appearance, Batman cannot be pinned down to a single primary text or definitive version, but exists as a shifting, fluid, multiple figure (within a fixed template of identifiable features).

So the idea of adapting ‘Batman’, this seventy-three year-old archive of stories across various media forms into a feature film, raises more questions than usual about the role of the author and the nature of translation.

It challenges the notion of the director as author, and suggests instead that Nolan’s creativity lies in his role as editor or ‘scriptor’, collaging and compiling existing Batman stories and imagery into a new form.

It also problematises the straightforward, one-to-one relationship that is often assumed between primary text and adapted text, as Nolan’s trilogy adapts from several graphic novels, is shaped by previous Batman films and TV series, and in turn influences Batman in other media such as comics and video games.

I am not treating Nolan’s franchise as exceptional though, but suggesting that it provides a particularly visible and vivid example of the way all texts operate within a ‘matrix’, and offers us a way of seeing, with particular clarity, the dialogic process of  authorship and adaptation.

As you note, the core comic book readership is too small to successfully open a major Hollywood film (witness what happened to Scott Pilgrim) so the producers need to  expand the market to more casual viewers, some of whom may be anxious that they lack the basic background knowledge to fully understand a film about a character with a long history in other media. Do concepts like fidelity, continuity, and consistency have any negative consequences for expanding the viewership?

Not in this case, because the ‘fidelity’ of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy to the existing mythos of Batman was extremely selective, and therefore easy for producers to manage and for a broader audience to understand.

Grant Morrison’s run on the main Batman titles from 2006-2011 is more ‘faithful’ to Batman in that it engages with, interrogates and re-incorporates every key articulation and incarnation of Batman from 1939 to the present day. Morrison’s Batman RIP does capture a mosaic cultural icon, and it’s a complex, fragmented narrative that I think would be difficult for a broader, non-fan readership to understand.

By contrast, Nolan’s Batman was ‘faithful’ to a small group of titles from a relatively narrow period, within a specific aesthetic and approach. His films are directly informed and shaped by Denny O’Neil’s short origin story ‘The Man Who Falls’ and his Ra’s al Ghul tales from the 1970s, by Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Year One from the mid-to-late 1980s, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, and by a handful of other 1990s storylines such as No Man’s Land and Knightfall.

A movie adaptation that was truly faithful to ‘Batman’, even in terms of his diverse depiction in comics alone, would result in a kaleidoscopic, encyclopaedic film that might be extremely interesting but would be more of an art project – and perhaps more suited to another medium rather than cinema.

The discourse of ‘fidelity’ at work around Nolan’s movies, particularly Batman Begins – which needed to establish his approach – was more about stressing a distinction between this reboot and the previous Schumacher films, and using ‘fidelity’ as an anchor to a certain tradition within Batman comics. This tradition – dark, tough, masculine, ‘realistic’ – is only a specific strand of what Batman is and has been.

The Dark Knight series had to initially overcome negative perceptions of some earlier media versions of the character, especially the 1960s Batman television series and Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin. The problem in both cases had to do with their camp aesthetic and thus anxieties surrounding homosexuality in relation to the character. So, what are some of the ways the filmmakers signaled a new approach?

The widespread use of the term ‘reboot’ alone helped to signal that Batman Begins was a new approach. ‘Reboot’ is a complex term, and one that media scholar Billy Proctor has been working to define and explore in a series of recent articles, but there is a general understanding that it implies a new, clean start within the existing system. The essential Batman template remains, but the previous characterisation and story are overwritten (though I argue that the older content always shows through).

The producers circulated the distinction between Nolan’s Batman Begins and the late-1990s Joel Schumacher movies (which in turn were broadly associated with the 1960s TV series) in a variety of ways, through publicity materials, interviews, previews and trailers; and these meanings were embraced and confirmed by journalists and fans, creating a powerful discourse that separated Nolan’s project from the previous Batman films.

My book discusses in detail the way this forceful, coherent message of a new, ‘dark’ Batman was articulated – through the visual materials such as shadowy poster designs and a logo based on a rust-coloured throwing-knife, through leaked details such as Bale’s rigorous physical training regime and the focus on actual hardware and stunts rather than CGI, through specific disavowals of the Schumacher approach in interviews with Nolan and his colleagues, and through the tough, no-nonsense tone and language used in reviews and features.

The producers were aided in this approach by the fact that this ‘dark’ Batman was an already-established construction – within fandom, certainly, and to an extent in the broader popular consciousness –  and was already set up in opposition to what I call the ‘Rainbow Batman’, an incarnation of the character associated with play, camp, queerness and colour.

The filmmakers were not creating a new set of meanings but rearticulating an existing distinction between ‘dark’ and ‘camp’ which had been played out between the 1960s TV show and the 1970s Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams Batman, and then the 1960s TV show (again) and the 1986 Frank Miller Batman.

As such, then, the producers could harness the idea of ‘fidelity’ (to the 1970s O’Neil and 1986 Miller Batman, which in turn claimed fidelity to Bob Kane’s 1939 Batman) to insist that they were going back to the ‘original’ and that their version had the benefit of authenticity.

My own view is that the ‘Rainbow Batman’ is equally authentic, ‘pure’ and valid, and that it can equally be evidenced as ‘faithful’ to the comic book texts –  albeit of a different period, and by different creators.

Indeed, I argue that the ‘dark Batman’ consistently defines itself in relation to the camp version, and always brings that brighter, Day-Glo variant back to light when it tries to bury it – in repressing it, it makes it visible again – and further, that every version of Batman exhibits a dynamic struggle between these tendencies towards camp and control, play and seriousness, queerness and containment.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice's Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part One)

Since 2001, Will Brooker has emerged as one of Great Britain's top thinkers about cult media, having tackled Star Wars (Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans), Alice in Wonderland (Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture), Bladerunner (The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic) , and Batman (Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon). Brooker's work starts where Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott's Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987) or Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio's The Many Lives of the Batman (1991) left off. Both of these earlier works sought to explore difference and continuity in the ways "popular heroes" or "migratory characters" evolve over time, across media, and across media audiences. Brooker's work has pushed this tradition to a whole new level -- his writing moves fluidly between history, textual analysis, media theory, and audience ethnography, tracing the ways media franchises (old and new) have left their traces upon popular culture. Such an approach is interested in issues of authorship and fandom, in both how formulas emerge and how elastic they are in responding to shifting tastes and interests. For me, this represents one powerful model for how we can take a comparative media studies approach towards the texts which matter most in our lives.

This summer, I ran into Will Brooker in London where we were both speaking at the Symposium on Popular Media Cultures: Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines, which was being hosted by the Center for Cultural and Creative Research at the University of Portsmouth and by Forbidden Planet, London’s best known comic book shop. Brooker shared some reflections on the construction of Christopher Nolan as an author around the then impending release of The Dark Knight Rises. Anticipating the cultural significance of the film, I asked him if he'd be willing to conduct an interview around the release of his new book, Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, and he agreed. Will being Will has been tweeting to the world about the difficulty of my questions, so now you have a chance to see for yourself what I asked him and how he has risen to the challenge.

What neither of us could know at the time we started this process was the degree to which the opening of this new film would be linked to an act of unspeakable violence. So, this first part of the interview offers some of his thoughts about the tragedy, while subsequent parts will dig deeper into the theoretical issues around multiplicity and seriality in the Dark Knight series.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. In what ways did the Aurora shooting impact the meaning of the Dark Knight film franchise? Conversely, how did the intertextual construction you discuss in the book play into the ways that this news story was covered?  

It’s hard to say, a month after the shooting (at the time of writing), how that event has affected the way Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is framed and discussed. The intertextual nature of Batman, as a ‘mosaic’, did shape the news response to the Colorado events, in that reporters dug back through the archive of Batman texts to find any possible echoes or precursors that could be foregrounded as ‘causes’ of the violence. So a single page from Frank Miller’s 1986 Dark Knight Returns, depicting a shooting in a cinema, was identified as a possible influence.

It’s ironic and unfortunate, I think, that it takes a violent tragedy to prompt reporters to treat comics seriously and study them so closely.

My sense is that the Colorado shootings are currently seen as a footnote to discussion of the third and most recent movie, and that this news story serves as a kind of tag or hypertext link, a postscript that is still pulled into view when we talk about Dark Knight Rises.

It would be impossible not to acknowledge that the shooting is now part of the broader intertextual matrix of meanings that both surrounds and constitutes the Dark Knight trilogy.

That trilogy is essentially a construction and circulation of texts, including the feature films themselves, the stories about Ledger’s death and the ‘Jokerised Obama’ images, the comic book adaptations and the DVD extras. The Colorado shootings, on one level, join that cluster of meanings around the three films.

I think the question is how closely this story will stick and how significant it will seem, over time: whether it will drift to the wider outskirts of what Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy signifies, as a more distant footnote, or whether it will play a more major, longer-term role in shaping how the film is discussed and remembered.

I’m hoping for the former, for a range of reasons.

Firstly because I would rather not see a criminal given the notoriety he seeks; second, because the discussion around the shootings and the film seems to fall into a ‘media effects’ category, which I don’t find especially useful; and third, because I think those involved in the Colorado event, and their families, would probably rather not have their loss trivialised as a ‘Batman shooting’, and have their own personal tragedy permanently associated with a movie.

The shootings were not the first tragedy associated with these films. In what ways did the death of Heath Ledger become part of the meaning of the Dark Knight franchise and how have the producers sought to manage the morbid associations with Ledger's death in handling this current situation?

My impression is that these two tragedies were managed by the film’s producers in very different ways. Ledger’s death can be understood within the already-established context of Brandon Lee’s accidental death during The Crow and Oliver Reed’s during Gladiator, and if anything I think it was seen as adding poignancy and mystery to Ledger’s performance and his role as Joker, and in turn, did the film’s publicity no harm.

I don’t believe any connection was explicitly made in reviews and production materials, but the rumour (circulated by fans and journalists) that Ledger’s intense preparation for and immersion in the role led him to emotional torment, drug abuse and possible suicide echoes the movie’s association with brutal ‘realism’ that was articulated in production discourses through foregrounding of Bale’s physical training regime, the dangerous stunts, the avoidance of CGI, and the military hardware.

I don’t think there was any attempt on the part of the producers to exploit Ledger’s death, but I equally don’t recall any obvious attempt to contain or limit the stories surrounding it, whereas my sense is that the producers aimed to disassociate the film text from the Colorado shootings, and to short-circuit the interpretations of negative cause-and-effect between the two, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The idea that The Dark Knight could have been so ‘realistic’ and absorbing that it consumed and possessed one of its lead actors was, I think, allowed to circulate because of its exceptional, isolated nature and because of the way we perceive Hollywood stars as unique and distinct from ourselves.

That it could have influenced a previously unknown individual to murder other ‘regular’ people in a suburban cinema carries quite a different meaning, because it is too close to the everyday lives of the average viewer and comes across as a reproducible event, rather than an isolated exception.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice's Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Fan Studies at the Crossroads: An Interview with Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (Part Four)

Hurt/Comfort, which is a major focus of this book, has gotten far less attention than slash in recent fan scholarship, despite Bacon-Smith's assertion that it is at the heart of fandom. Why has this genre been neglected and what do you see when you examine it?

 

Lynn: H/C seems like the last subgenre to remain determinedly in the closet. Slash has been written about. BDSM has come out of the closet with a flourish thanks to 50 Shades of Grey. Hurt/comfort remains less discussed and more hidden – perhaps because it is less displaced and therefore more vulnerable to shaming. In some ways, H/C is a more primitive drive than even sex. We are all, at some level, still helpless and frightened little children, dependent on others for comfort and, quite literally, survival. H/C fic taps into those primal needs, expresses the depths of pain and fear, and then rewrites the ending of the story to include the healing that may never have happened in ‘real life’ but is continually wished for. The increased ability to comfort and heal oneself seems to result from the unfolding of the narrative, and especially from the willingness to accept the support and comfort of the group after the telling.

While H/C fanfiction carries the built-in displacement of using recognized fictional characters instead of being autobiographical, the genre seems less displaced than slash. In the Supernatural storyfinders community on Live Journal, posters commonly request fanfic about their own physical and emotional afflictions, explicitly seeking mastery through reading H/C fic about their own challenges. Writers in the genre are less likely to tie their topics to their own experience, maintaining the distance that displacement offers, but some do discuss their motivations as the same drive for mastery.  This tendency to consciously recognize the individual writer or reader’s motivation may be part of the need to keep H/C secret.

H/C fic tackles themes that cultural norms strongly discourage us from expressing openly – namely vulnerability and rage/revenge. Acknowledging vulnerability only makes one feel more vulnerable. For women especially, rage is disallowed and unacknowledged, the human desire for revenge something nobody wants to accept. Incorporating all of these themes into H/C fic is both subversive and personally dangerous, but the drive to do so is powerful. Bacon-Smith recognized the role of emotional expression as integral to coping and healing twenty years ago when she identified hurt/comfort as the heart of fandom, but she also recognized her own negative reaction as one of the reasons that heart remained so hidden.

I think the genre’s secrecy has made it less visible to researchers. It seems, at least at first inspection, to be a smaller genre than slash, but that may just be a reflection of the layers of protection that have grown up around it and the fact that fanfiction which tackles H/C themes may not be labeled H/C. It may be labeled slash, het, or gen, yet essentially be hurt/comfort.

Kathy: It’s another one of those things that seems to reflect badly on women – the desire to see our men bloody. It’s a real turn on for (some) women to see men vulnerable, exposing aspects of themselves that are normally so closely guarded.  H/C knocks down those barriers, and it’s sexy as hell. It’s another glimpse into female sexuality.

You talk throughout the book about the "fourth wall" that many fans feel needs to exist between the producers/stars and the fans. What do you see as the value of this "fourth wall" and in what ways has Supernatural threatened the "safe space" of fandom as it has sought to reconfigure the relations between the industry and the audience?

Kathy: I should preface this by saying that I’m all for fourth wall breaking.  Fan practices serve as critical engagement with the text and breaking that fourth wall encourages dialog which enriches both sides.  That said, it can be done well or poorly and I think Supernatural in particular has done it both ways. “The Monster at the End of This Book” acknowledged fan practices (detailed knowledge, writing fan fiction, factions within fandom, criticism of story lines) and allowed the characters to playfully respond.  Where it erred, in my opinion, was in choosing to portray a particular fan “Becky” who is over invested, inappropriate, and eventually crosses the line into plain creepiness.  She eventually becomes a sad figure of derision and all playfulness is lost, all dialog suspended.

As far as protecting the “safe space” of fandom, I don’t think it was ever really in jeopardy.  The actors don’t have the time or the inclination to hang out in fan spaces (with a few notable exceptions – Joss Whedon commenting on a fan video or members of various bands acknowledging that they’ve regularly read fan fiction about themselves) and showrunners are more interested in what fans think about particular episodes – what works and what doesn’t. There was some anxiety in the SPN fandom when Becky was portrayed writing slash, but this anxiety was more over “outing” fans and exposing their fan practices to non-fans (among them family, friends, co-workers).  Given the levels of shame that surround being a fan this was certainly understandable.

Lynn: Fans see the value of the fourth wall as keeping their valued (and yet shamed) practices secret – and thus safe – from outsiders, including the actors who might be starring in their fanworks. As recently as Comic Con in July, someone asked Supernatural actor JaredPadalecki, “What do you think of this?” and showed him (and the entire gigantic Hall A audience) a piece of fanart depicting him and his costar Jensen Ackles in a slashy embrace, both shirtless in only low-slung jeans. Padalecki, ever the diplomat, replied dryly, “I never wear jeans without a belt.”  Fan response (directed toward the fan who crossed the line)  was predictably scathing.

When Supernatural first changed the rules by depicting fanfiction – and even Wincest – in canon, fan response was mixed, but the ever-present fear of being “outed” as a kinky, slash-writing fangirl prompted many meta posts and some powerful fanart, including a widely-circulated comic expressing a fan’s fear of her husband’s disapproval of her fannish community and interaction after seeing the episode. Most of Supernatural’s forays into fourth wall breaking have been affectionate insider portrayals of fans, poking fun but also affirming fans, and often giving them the role of hero or heroine at the end of the day – or even having them end up in bed with the creator of the show himself (or at least the character who was not-so-loosely portraying him). That changed with a much reviled episode in Season 7, “Time For a Wedding.”  Becky the fangirl somehow morphed from an overly amorous but ultimately heroic Wincest-writing fangirl to a scheming, manipulative stalker, who drugged Sam Winchester and tied him to a bed ala Misery. Fandom was not divided this time – gone was the affectionate poking fun, and in its place was a mean-spirited, seemingly misogynistic and shaming censure. That episode is how not to do fourth wall breaking – at least not if you want to keep your fans.

You spent considerable time interviewing the production team around Supernatural about how they perceive their fans. What surprised you the most about their response?

Kathy: Given the continuing tone of most mass media coverage of fans and fan practices (crazy, needy, cranky, a force to be courted but not necessarily embraced) what we found most surprising was how appreciative the production side was of the fans and how normalizing the encounters were between fans and producers at every level, and how willing they were to understand fan practices.  In many cases we'd get just as many questions about the fans from the production side as we asked.  The actors would often ask us to clarify something - the level of investment, a particular fan practice.

Lynn: What surprised me most was the level of appreciation and respect. Fans continually step up to the microphone at conventions and ask the actors “What’s the craziest thing a fan has ever done?” Actors continually shake their heads and say “Actually our fans are really cool.” That’s not to say that we haven’t heard cautionary tales about fans being outed to actors as ‘slash-writing perverts,’ with very real repercussions. Bacon-Smith writes about the Professionals actor who became close to many of the female fans writing fanfiction about his character, but was so disgusted by his discovery that some of them were writing slash that he banned those fans from his ‘inner circle’ and attempted to get them banned from fandom itself. He didn’t succeed, but that and other cautionary tales have been passed down through the decades and continue to inspire fear in fans of all genres. We heard similar – and more recent – stories from several fans we interviewed for this book, but none of these occurred within the Supernatural fandom.

In our own experience interviewing the Supernatural production team, we never heard a negative reaction. Surprise, even shock – but not censure or judgment. Most of the people on the creative side had worked out where the boundary should be between them and fans. They had been able to locate areas of commonality and connection, but also maintain a distance, especially from fan activities that they understood were intended as fan-only spaces. The vast majority self-identified as fans themselves, and could empathize with fannish passion, even if it seemed jarring when directed at them. They tended to code fans as same instead of different, and thus to avoid too much stereotyping.

What might the back and forth between Supernatural fans and creatives suggest about the future of fandom, given the increasingly personal exchanges facilitated by social media as opposed to the more controlled, regulated access fans historically had in an autograph line?

Kathy: I would caution against reading too much into the “personal exchanges” or the power of Twitter and Facebook.  The technology is quicker, more immediate, and gives the illusion of intimacy,  but by and large these are still anonymous exchanges – the 21^st century version of the snail mail fan letter.  It allows producers to have a better idea of what appeals to fans (and what they will absolutely hate), but I don’t think it influences the actual product all that much.  Fan service is just that – in many cases merely a marketing tool. (A fantastic example of this would be the MTV sponsored video asking fans to vote for Teen Wolf as favorite summer show.  The video plays up the slashy relationship between the two main characters.)  Which is not to say that actors who tweet birthday greetings are doing it simply to further their careers, or that meaningful relationships don’t occasionally occur, they certainly do.  I just think too much has been attributed to social media exchanges between fans and producers.

Lynn: It’s a mixed blessing. While the lines of communication are more open than ever, they are also filtered and constricted and misunderstood on both sides. Many of the actors have confided their struggles with how to use Twitter and Facebook effectively – they’ve found out how easily one sentence can be misconstrued, and how sensitive fans can be about what the celebrities they fan are saying to them (and might think of them). If a celebrity tweets you back, it’s too important to dismiss – if it’s received positively, the fan is euphoric. If it’s received as a negative, the fan is crushed – and in turn may lash back at the celebrity to save face and self esteem.However, the new expectations for communication are not going away, and are likely to expand as platforms proliferate. Both sides are likely to continue struggling to accommodate as technology and associated cultural norms change faster than any of us can keep up with them!

Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and teaches in the Counselor Education program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

Katherine Larsen teaches courses on fame, celebrity and fandom in the University Writing Program at George Washington University. She is the principal editor of the Journal of Fandom Studies.

Dr Zubernis and Dr Larsen are co-editors of the forthcoming Fan Culture: Theory and Practice. They have also published four articles in Supernatural Magazine.