November 06, 2006

To Prospective Students

November 06, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

If reading this blog has left you interested in learning more about the Comparative Media Studies Program, you might want to check out an online information session at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. If you are interested in participating, please send your AOL instant messanger name to generoso@mit.edu and he will send you the information needed to participate. Thanks.

October 31, 2006

Games as Art Discussion Tonight

October 31, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

update: If you would like to read the transcript of the event, Jesper Juuls runs it on his blog, The Ludologist, I am not sure if we broke much new ground but it was a spirited discussion. Join Manifesto Games on Wednesday, November 1st for a chat with on the subject of games and art with Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Marc LeBlanc, and Eric Zimmerman.

Network: irc.freenode.net

Channel: #gamesandart

Time: 6PM PST, 9PM EST, 2 AM GMT

See Manifesto's page on how to get on IRC.

More About the Topic:

Hideo Kojima says "If 100 people walk by and a single person is captivated by whatever that piece radiates, it's art. But videogames aren't trying to capture one person. A videogame should make sure that all 100 people that play that game should enjoy the service provided by that videogame. It's something of a service. It's not art."

And Roger Ebert says "To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers... for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."

Contrariwise, Henry Jenkins says "Computer games are art--a popular art, an emerging art, a largely unrecognized art, but art nevertheless... The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century."

Are games art? If not, why not? And if so, why? Is thinking of games as art useful or actually a hindrance for game developers? If games are art, what should our aspirations for the form be?

Participants:

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including the recently published Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and an Assistant Professor in video game theory and design at the Center for Computer Game Research Copenhagen. He is author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and numerous articles about games, and his prestigious and influential blog is The Ludologist.

Marc LeBlanc is a twelve-year veteran of the game industry. At Looking Glass Studios, he was a core contributor to several award-winning games, including the Thief and System Shock series. In collaboration with Andrew Leker, he developed Oasis, the 2004 Independent Games Festival Game of the Year in the web/downloadable category.

Santiago Siri is an Argentinean game designer whose work includes Football Deluxe and Utopia (forthcoming). He works for Three Melons, an advergaming firm that offers innovative branding through games. He is also a writer and theoretician, and his blog, Games as Art, is a resource for all members of the game community.

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and academic exploring the theory and practice of game design. He is the is the co-founder and CEO of gameLab, a game development company based in New York City. He is the co-editor of several works in the field, including Rules of Play, a seminal study of game design technique.

Anyone who would like a preview of my perspective on this question should check out "Games, the New Lively Art" which will be reprinted in my forthcoming anthology, The Wow Climax.

October 31, 2006

The Independent Games Movement (Part Four): Behind the Scenes at Indiecade

October 31, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has long served as the showcase of the games industry. The event's host, the Electronic Software Association, announced this summer that the event was going to be discontinued, leading to heated debates in the blogosphere about what this decision might be signaling about the cultural status of games. The noisy, garish, spectacular quality of E3 had set the tone for the commercial games industry: this was the place where the buyers for the major retail chains went to see the new product and design and marketing decisions were often made with an eye to what would look really spectacular when displayed on the big monitors that dominated the floor at E3. One could even argue that the costuming of game characters were designed so that those characters could be embodied by the "booth babes" who worked the floor, trying to lather up the mostly male patrons of the convention, and get them "excited" about some new title. Many people wondered what would happen if this show disappeared. In this blog, I argued for one possible scenario:

One step is to separate out the various functions which E3 served and see whether they should be combined or remain separate. Clearly, the industry will need some ways to introduce its new products to retailers and there's some danger that the next step will be to fragment this process -- allowing the major companies to have their own shows (as Next Generation suggests) but leaving the smaller publishers out in the cold. I don't think that would be a very good thing for the games industry. A second key function would be to inform the public about the current state of the games industry. For example, the Penny Arcade Expo may function more like San Diego Comiccon in providing a space where industry figures communicate more directly with their fans, while there are moves underway to develop an independent games festival that functions more like Sundance does within the film industry, offering a place to showcase work by smaller publishers or games that fall further outside the commercial mainstream. We are seeing a growing number of gatherings with more specialized focuses, such as those centering on casual games, mobile games, serious games, even religious games, each of which serves a specific niche as compared to the general interest focus of E3. The Game Developers Conference may absorb more of the training and recruitment functions that were associated with E3. And so forth.

One of the new events which have emerged in the wake of the collapse of E3 is the Indiecade, which is presenting itself as a celebration of games and play in all of their many manifestations. As envisioned by Stephanie Barish and her collaborators, the Indiecade will be an event designed to heighten public awareness of the diversity of games production and to recognize innovative and distinctive work across all games platforms. It will be an event where new games, as well as works in progress, get displayed. So, if E3 helped to shape the content and style of commercial games, one may wonder what will happen if there is another kind of event which really does attract critical awareness and public interest and which operates with different aesthetic, economic, and pedagogical goals.

Last time, Barish offered some thoughts about the current state of the games industry and why she feels an independent games movement and a games festival is needed. Today, I am running the second part of that interview, allowing Barish to talk about what kind of role her festival hopes to play for the producers and consumers of independent games. I am running it as part of an ongoing series showcasing key movers and shakers within the independent games movement.

For more information about the festival, check out their home page. The festival is scheduled to run in Fall of 2007 in Santa Monica, California.

Barish asked me to acknowledge the contributions of her collaborators to shaping her responses to these questions:Scott Chamberlin (Partner) , Janine Fron (Conference Chair), Sam Gustman (CMC V.P., Partner), Kirsten Paul (IndieCade Program Manager), and Celia Pearce (IndieCade Festival Chair).

*Sidebar: Anyone who would like to see my keynote address from the Serious Games Conference can see it here.

What roles do you see Indiecade playing in fostering an Independent games movement?

While the industry needs the equivalent of Run Lola Run, Billy Elliot, and any number of other important independent work, independent game designers don't necessarily need IndieCade for inspiration. They are already inspired. Independent gamemakers make games for the same reason independent filmmakers make movies, to express something they are passionate about. Of course they hope to make money as well, but this is not necessarily their driving force. On the other hand, they do need and want a public forum to show their work, a place to meet collaborators, a community, and public acknowledgment of their work. In other words, a wide-scale dedicated universal gathering. At least in the United States, all of the other independent game festivals are buried under a film festival (Slamdance) or an industry conference (GDC). We need a forum of our own, fully playable, inclusive of all forms and screens, and with public access. "Play" needs to be exalted. Independent games need an environment dedicated to making them successful, and that is our dedication.

Can a games festival serve the same needs as a film festival given the very different nature of the two media (that is, films are designed to be watched in large scale social settings, where-as most games facilitate only a limited number of participants.)

Effectively showcasing interactive media is one of our biggest challenges, particularly since games are generally designed as such an intimate experience. We're all leveraging our diverse backgrounds to think beyond rows of computer kiosks or big-screen auditorium. We have had to design the IndieCade experience from the ground up, to design exhibition experiences in keeping with the spirit of the games themselves. Games need to be given a forum that speaks to their innovations. Our goal is to capture the excitement and creativity in the content and translate it into the festival.

One of our team partners, KTGY (led by exhibition designer Jeff Mayer) has had a lot of experience with events like SIGGRAPH, E3, and the foundational designs for GameWorks. Among others, they are helping us realize some of the inspirations we have had for sharing game experiences among multiple participants playing roles across the player/spectator spectrum. New forms can be challenging in many ways, and they need to be presented in an appropriate context. We have seen this done very well, and want to ensure that the audience has a play experience, even as spectators.

You are creating a games festival at the same time that the games industry is

abandoning its major trade show. How has this decision benefited or hurt your

efforts?

Well, on the negative side we lost our fabulous location for board meetings, and like so many others we have come to rely on E3 for the inside scoop, the community of practice, the inspiration, the radical socializing, and the overwhelming sensory experience. But generally the operative word for us is synergy. As you know, the President and Senior Vice President of the ESA, Douglas Lowenstein and Carolyn Rauch, are on our advisory board, and we're working closely with them to forge a kind of complementary relationship between the new E3 and IndieCade.

Happily, they have scheduled E3 close to our own date and moved it over to our location, Santa Monica. I think that we can also say that with the number of exhibitors so drastically reduced (only 30 of the usual 400 will be exhibiting in the new E3), there is even more of a sense of the power of the major publishers and thus even more of a need for an independent counterpoint.

Without a doubt, the move creates a bigger demand for IndieCade. We believe that one of the reasons for the downsizing of E3 is that the big companies don't need it anymore; they already have their distribution channels in place. On the other hand, smaller companies and international participants get a lot out of E3 because it exposes them to potential distributors and publishers. So the E3 reduction is really going to impact the little guy more than anyone and we are receiving an extremely positive reaction from this constituency, as well as the public who regularly attends the expo, and the public who always wanted to attend but didn't have the industry credentials.

Art films have been celebrated as offering us windows into cultural difference, giving us access to the beliefs and everyday practices of distinctive cultures around the world. Do you think games also reflect cultural differences in this way or has the global circulation of games meant that from the beginning they have developed a culturally neutral style and content?

I wouldn't be here if I didn't see an incredible potential in games for cross-cultural interactions, far beyond watching a new experience in a film. The collaborative aspect to certain games will give us an unprecedented window into cultural dialogue in the future, particularly as more diverse gamemakers emerge. We are now seeing a glimpse of what is possible as American kids embrace Japanese games and their culture, aesthetics, and play styles - the Wii and the DS being great examples. Indeed, a lot more of the world could be seen through the lens of games.

There are three ways to think about it. One is games that are specifically about other cultures, much parallel to film. The Games for Change movement is to be lauded for working to make headway in this area - focusing on political games and games about different cultures. Another is games in which people from diverse cultures cohabitate and collaborate and opportunities exist, particularly in the MMOG sphere, to create more connection between people of different cultures. Cross-cultural exchange is particularly interesting because often it is within the framework of a non-culturally-neutral game. I think more people are aware of Korea today because of games like Lineage and Ragnarok. And finally, ways in which game makers can challenge mainstream game culture through modding the game itself afford us opportunities for questioning, countering, and commenting upon culture that other media simply just cannot offer. I believe this ability to connect with others and to author, facilitates questioning that can address cultural differences and enable us to interact with them on a global level.

Getting to your question, though: on the formal side, I do not agree that games are culturally neutral. To the contrary, I think they reflect the biases of the fairly homogenous gamemakers who design them. And in terms of content, I don't think games have yet been able to approach the nuances of culture and human understanding that film has reached.

But, what makes independent games so exciting is that they represent new voices and new points of view. We want to pave paths for many more voices to come to the mix and the public eye. It is our desire to follow in the footsteps of the independent film community and salute the creative forces that take risks, run up their credit cards to follow a vision, and turn convention on its head to make independent games that are truly innovative and expand our definitions and experiences of play.

October 30, 2006

If You Live in Boston...

October 30, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

The What: CMS has agreed to act as the local organizer for a street-game called Cruel 2 B Kind, which will be held on Halloween night -- that's October 31 -- from 6:30-8:30 PM near Harvard Square. Cruel 2 B Kind was created by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost (both sometimes readers and responders to this blog).

Here's what their website says about the game:

Cruel 2 B Kind is a game of benevolent assassination.

At the beginning of the game, you and a partner-in-crime are assigned a secret weapon. To onlookers, it will seem like a random act of kindness. But to a select group of other players, the seemingly benevolent gesture is a deadly maneuver that will bring them to their knees.

Some players will be slain by a serenade. Others will be killed by a compliment. You and your partner might be taken down by an innocent group cheer.

You will be given no information about your targets. No name, no photo, nothing but the guarantee that they will remain within the outdoor game boundaries during the designated playing time. Anyone you encounter could be your target. The only way to find out is to attack them with your secret weapon.

Watch out: The hunter is also the hunted. At the beginning of the game, you and your partner will also be assigned your own secret weakness. Other pairs of players have been given your secret weakness as their secret weapon, and they're coming to get you. Anything out of the ordinary you do to assassinate YOUR targets may reveal your own secret identity to the other players who want you dead.

As targets are successfully assassinated, the dead players join forces with their killers to continue stalking the surviving players. The teams grow bigger and bigger until two final mobs of benevolent assassins descend upon each other for a spectacular, climactic kill.

Will innocents be caught in the cross-fire? Oh, yes. But when your secret weapon is a random act of kindness, it's only cruel to be kind to other players...

Not sure you're cruel enough to play as an assassin? Don't worry - you can still experience killer kindness. Just show up to any game site at the right time. You can hang out, watch the game, and play along as an "innocent bystander"!

Sorry for the last minute notice -- I've been traveling and have just now gotten my hands on the relevent information.

You can sign up to play in game here.

http://www.cruelgame.com/signup/

All you need to play is a partner (the game starts off in pairs), and a cell phone that can receive text messages (to get instructions and updates during the game).

Hope to see some of you there.

October 29, 2006

Announcing: Media in Transition Conference

October 29, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

I wanted to direct my reader's attention to an event our program will be hosting in April 2007 -- our 5th Media in Transition Conference. We try to use these events to bring together scholars from across a range of different disciplines and from around the world to talk about underlying issues that cut across media platforms and across historical periods. We also very much encourage participation from artists, community leaders, and industry people who also might want to share their perspectives on these issues. This year's topic should be of particular interest to many of the different groups represented among regular readers of this blog, including fans, media literacy educators, and others. media in transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

April 27-29, 2007

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

These and related cultural practices have generated heated contention and debate. What constitutes fair use of another's intellectual property? What ethical issues are posed when sounds, images, and stories move from one culture or subculture to another? Or when materials created by a community or religious or ethnic tradition are appropriated by technologically powerful outsiders? What constitutes creativity and originality in expressive formats based on sampling and remixing? What obligations do artists owe to those who have inspired and informed their work and how much creative freedom should they exercise over their borrowed or shared materials?

One source of answers to such questions lies in the past - in the ways in which traditional printed texts - and films and TV shows as well - invoke, allude to and define themselves against their rivals and ancestors; and - perhaps even more saliently - in the ways in which folk and popular cultures may nourish and reward not originality in our modern sense, but familiarity, repetition, borrowing, collaboration.

This fifth Media in Transition conference, then, aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices. We hope this event will appeal widely across disciplines and scholarly and professional boundaries. For example, we hope this conference will bring together such figures as:

* anthropologists of oral and folk cultures

* historians of the book and reading publics

* political scientists and legal scholars interested in alternative approaches to intellectual property

* media educators who aim to help students think about their ethical responsibilities in this new participatory culture

* artists ready to discuss appropriation and collaboration in their own work

* economists and business leaders interested in the new relationships that are emerging between media producers and consumers

* activists and netizens interested in the ways new technologies democratize who has the right to be an author

Among topics the conference might explore:

* history of authorship and copyright

* folk practices in traditional and contemporary society

* appropriating materials from other cultures: political and ethical dilemmas

* poetics and politics of fan culture

* blogging, podcasting, and collective intelligence

* media literacy and the ethics of participatory culture

* artistic collaboration and cultural production, past and present

* fair use and intellectual property

* sampling and remixing in popular music

* cultural production in traditional and developing societies

* Web 2.0 and the "architecture of participation"

* creative industries and user-generated content

* parody, spoofs, and mash-ups as critical commentary

* game mods and machinima

* the workings of genre in different media systems

* law and technological change

Short abstracts of no more than 200 words for papers or panels should be sent via email to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than January 5, 2007. Brad can be reached by phone at 617-253-3521. Email submissions are preferred, but abstracts can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell

14N-430

MIT

Cambridge , MA 02139

October 26, 2006

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Six)

October 26, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

Today's post wraps up my list of the eleven social skills and cultural competencies which I argue we should be incorporating into our educational practices with transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. Next time, I will wrap up with some recommendations about what this might all mean for parents, schools, and after school programs. We haven't received many responses here from readers but I am very pleased to see localized discussions of some of these issues start to spring up on a number of other blogs. Do let me know what you think about some of the issues raised here?

Transmedia Navigation -- the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

In an era of convergence, consumers become hunters and gatherers pulling together information from multiple sources to form a new synthesis. Storytellers exploit this potential for transmedia storytelling; advertisers talk about branding as depending on multiple touch points; networks seek to exploit their intellectual properties across many different channels. As they do so, we encounter the same information, the same stories, the same characters and worlds across multiple modes of representation. Transmedia stories at the most basic level are stories told across multiple media. At the present time, the most significant stories tend to flow across multiple media platforms.

Consider, for example, the PokÃ©mon phenomenon. As Buckingham and Sefton-Green explain, "PokÃ©mon is something you do, not just something you read or watch or consume." Several hundred different PokÃ©mon exist, each with multiple evolutionary forms and a complex set of rivalries and attachments. There is no one text for information about these various species. Rather, the child assembles information from various media, with the result that each child knows something his or her friends do not. As a result, the child can share his or her expertise with others. As Buckingham and Sefton-Green explain, "Children may watch the television cartoon, for example, as a way of gathering knowledge that they can later utilize in playing the computer game or in trading cards, and vice versa. The fact that information can be transferred between media (or platforms) of course adds to the sense that PokÃ©mon is unavoidable. In order to be a master, it is necessary to 'catch' all its various manifestations" .

Such information feeds back into social interactions, including face-to-face contact within local communities and mediated contact online with a more dispersed population. These children's properties offer multiple points of entry, enable many different forms of participation, and facilitate the interests of multiple consumers.

One dimension of this phenomenon points us back to collective intelligence, given that what Ito calls "hypersociability" emerges as children trade notes and exchange artifacts associated with their favorite television shows. A second dimension of this phenomenon points us to what Kress calls multimodality. Consider a simple example. The same character (say, Spider-Man) may look different when featured in an animated video than in a video game, or a printed comic book, or as a molded plastic action figure, or in a live-action movie. How then do readers learn to recognize this character across all of these different media? How do they link what they have learned about the character in one context to what they learned in a completely different media channel? How do they determine which of these representations are linked (part of the same interpretation of the character) and which are separate (separate versions of the character that are meant to be understood autonomously)? These are the kinds of conceptual problems youth encounter regularly in their participation in contemporary media franchises.

Kress stresses that modern literacy requires the ability to express ideas across a broad range of different systems of representation and signification (including "words, spoken or written; image, still and moving; musical...3D models..."). Each medium has its own affordances, its own systems of representation, its own strategies for producing and organizing knowledge. Participants in the new media landscape learn to navigate these different and sometimes conflicting modes of representation and to make meaningful choices about the best ways to express their ideas in each context. All of this sounds more complicated than it is. As the New Media Consortium's 2005 report on twenty-first century literacy suggests, "Young people adept at interpreting meaning in sound, music, still and moving images, and interactive components not only seem quite able to cope with messages that engage several of these pathways at once, but in many cases prefer them."

Kress argues that this tendency toward multimodality changes how we teach composition, because students must learn to sort through a range of different possible modes of expression, determine which is most effective in reaching their audience and communicating their message, and to grasp which techniques work best in conveying information through this channel. Kress advocates moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as the basic expressive competency of the modern era. This shift does not displace printed texts with images, as some advocates of visual literacy have suggested. Rather, it develops a more complex vocabulary for communicating ideas that requires students to be equally adept at reading and writing through images, texts, sounds, and simulations. The filmmaker George Lucas offers an equally expansive understanding of what literacy might mean today:

We must teach communication comprehensively in all its forms. Today we work with the written or spoken word as the primary form of communication. But we also need to understand the importance of graphics, music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people's culture. We live and work in a visually sophisticated world, so we must be sophisticated in using all the forms of communication, not just the written word.

In short, new media literacies involve the ability to think across media, whether understood at the level of simple recognition (identifying the same content as it is translated across different modes of representation), or at the level of narrative logic (understanding the connections between story communicated through different media), or at the level of rhetoric (learning to express an idea within a single medium or across the media spectrum). Transmedia navigation involves both processing new types of stories and arguments that are emerging within a convergence culture and expressing ideas in ways that exploit the opportunities and affordances represented by the new media landscape. In other words, it involves the ability to both read and write across all available modes of expression.

What Might Be Done

Students learn about multimodality and transmedia navigation when they take time to focus on how stories change as they move across different contexts of production and reception, as they give consideration to the affordances and conventions of different media, and as they learn to create using a range of different media tools.

â€¢ Students in literature classes are asked to take a familiar fairy tale, myth, or legend and identify how this story has been retold across different media, different historical periods, and different national contexts. Students search for recurring elements as well as signs of the changes that occur as the story are retold in a new context.

â€¢ French language students in New York recreate characters from various French literary works in the best-selling video game The Sims 2. Students then tell new stories by playing out the interactions between different characters inside the game world. Characters are projected onto a screen in front of the class for students to do live performances with their characters. see http://www.mylenecatel.com

â€¢ An exercise developed by MIT's New Media Literacies asks students to tell the same story across a range of different media. For example, they script dialogue using instant messenger; they storyboard using Powerpoint and images appropriated from the Internet; they might later reenact their story and record it using a camera or video camera; they might illustrate it by drawing pictures. As they do so, they are encouraged to think about what each new tool contributes to their overall experience of the story as well as what needs to remain the same for viewers to recognize the same characters and situations across these various media.

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

In a world in which knowledge production is collective and communication occurs across an array of different media, the capacity to network emerges as a core social skill and cultural competency. A resourceful student is no longer one who personally possesses a wide palette of resources and information from which to choose, but rather, one who is able to successfully navigate an already abundant and continually changing world of information. Increasingly, students achieve this by tapping into a myriad of socially based search systems, including the following popular sites.

â€¢ Google.com: At the core of the now ubiquitous Google search engine is an algorithm that analyzes the links between websites to measure which sites different website creators consider valuable or relevant to particular topics.

â€¢ Amazon.com: Suggests books a customer may like on the basis of patterns gleaned from analyzing similar customers.

â€¢ Movielens.org: Predicts if a particular user will like a given movie based on preferences from similar users.

â€¢ Ebay.com: Creates a complex reputation system between users to establish trust for a given seller.

â€¢ Epinions.com: Establishes reliability of a given product on the basis of previous consumer experiences

â€¢ last.fm: Generates personalized radio stations on the basis of correlations between similar listeners' music preferences.

â€¢ Del.icio.us: Suggests relevant websites for a given term on the basis of other users' bookmarking habits

â€¢ Answers.google.com: Offers a mass collective-intelligence marketplace in which users can offer money to anyone worldwide who may have answers to their questions.

â€¢ Citeulike.org: Academic citation manager that both helps users locate relevant articles on the basis of other users' citation management and allows users to flag important information about given articles, such as inaccuracies.

â€¢ Getoutfoxed.com: Allows trusted friends and users to provide annotations and meta-discussion about a given website that a user might be browsing, such as warnings about inaccurate content.

â€¢ RSS: Intelligently aggregates and consolidates content produced by friends and trusted sources to help efficiently share resources across networks.

Business guru Tim O'Reilly has coined the term, "Web 2.0" to refer to how the value of these new networks depends not on the hardware or the content, but on how they tap the participation of large-scale social communities, who become invested in collecting and annotating data for other users. Some of these platforms require the active participation of consumers, relying on a social ethos based on knowledge-sharing. Others depend on automated analysis of collective behavior. In both cases, though, the value of the information depends on one's understanding of how it is generated and one's analysis of the social and psychological factors that shape collective behavior.

In such a world, students can no longer rely on expert gatekeepers to tell them what is worth knowing. Instead, they must become more reflective of how individuals know what they know and how they assess the motives and knowledge of different communities. Students must be able to identify which group is most aware of relevant resources and choose a search system matched to the appropriate criteria: people with similar tastes; similar viewpoints; divergent viewpoints; similar goals; general popularity; trusted, unbiased, third-party assessment, and so forth. If transmedia navigation involves learning to understand the relations between different media systems, networking involves the ability to navigate across different social communities.

Schools are beginning to teach youth how to search out valuable resources through such activities as "webquests." In the last ten years, webquests, that is, activities designed by teachers "in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet", have exploded in popularity. In a typical webquest, students are given a scenario that requires them to extract information or images from a series of websites and then compile their findings into a final report. For example, students might be told they are part of a team of experts brought in to determine the most appropriate method for disposing of a canister of nuclear waste. They are provided a series of websites relevant to waste disposal and asked to present a final proposal to the teacher. For many educators, webquests provide a practical means for using new media to broaden students' exposure to different perspectives and provide fresh curricular materials. Rather than requiring textbook authors to develop "neutral" accounts of facts, teachers develop and share webquests by simply referencing existing web content. This both exposes students to a variety of opinions and trains them to synthesize their own perspectives. Yet, critics argue that most existing webquests fall short of fully exploiting the potential of social networks--both in terms of teaching students how to exploit networking to track down information and in terms of using networks to distribute the byproducts of their research.

Networking is only partially about identifying potential resources; it also involves a process of synthesis, during which multiple resources are combined to produce new knowledge. In discussing "The Wisdom of Crowds," Suroweicki describes the conditions needed to receive the maximum benefit from collective intelligence:

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

Because new research processes depend on young people's resourcefulness as networkers, students must understand how to sample and distill multiple, independent perspectives. Guinee and Eagleton have been researching how students take notes in the digital environment, discovering, to their dismay, that young people tend to copy large blocks of text rather than paraphrasing it for future reference. In the process, they often lose track of the distinction between their own words and material borrowed from other sources. They also skip over the need to assess any contradictions that might exist in the information they have copied. In short, they show only a minimal ability to create a meaningful synthesis from the resources they have gathered.

Networking also implies the ability to effectively tap social networks to disperse one's own ideas and media products. Many youth are creating independent media productions, but only some learn how to be heard by large audiences. Increasingly, young artists are tapping networks of fans or gamers with the goal of reaching a broader readership for their work. They create within existing cultural communities not because they were inspired by a particular media property, but because they want to reach that property's audience of loyal consumers. Young people are learning to link their websites together into web-rings in part to increase the visibility of any given site and also to increase the profile of the group. Teachers are finding that students are often more motivated if they can share what they create with a larger community. As students make their work accessible to a larger public, they face public consequences for what they write and, thus, they face the kind of ethical dilemmas we identified earlier in this document.

At the present time, social networking software is under fire from adult authorities, and federal law makes it more difficult to access and deploy these tools in the classroom. Yet, we would argue that schools have a different obligation--to help all children learn to use such tools effectively and to understand the value of networking as a means of acquiring knowledge and distributing information. Learning in a networked society involves understanding how networks work and how to deploy them for one's own ends. It involves understanding the social and cultural contexts within which different information emerges, when to trust and when not to trust others to filter and prioritize relevant data, and how to use networks to get one's own work out into the world and in front of a relevant and, with hope, appreciative public.

What Might Be Done

Educators take advantage of social networking when they link learners with others who might share their interests or when they encourage students to publish works produced to a larger public.

â€¢ Noel Jenkins, a British junior high teacher, created a geography unit in which he asks students to play the roles of city planners determining the most appropriate location for a new hospital in San Francisco. First, students familiarize themselves with the city layout by exploring satellites imagery of the city, navigating through three-dimensional maps and watching webcam streams from different parts of the city. Next, students are shown how to layer the data most relevant to their decision atop their city maps. Finally, students are asked to decide on a final location for their hospital and illustrate their maps with annotations justifying their decision. See http://www.juicygeography.co.uk/googleearthsanfran.htm

â€¢ Students use online storefront services such as cafepress.com and zazzle.com to share their artistic creations and personal hobbies with the general public. In many cases, young entrepreneurs are able to make up to $18,000 per year doing so.

â€¢ Educational Technology enthusiast Will Richardson used the community news application crispynews.com to create edbloggernews.crispynews.com, an online nexus for teachers to share educational resources with one another. Each participant helps to rank the different curricular suggestions using collaborative filtering technologies.

â€¢ Students at Grandview Elementary School publish an online newspaper and podcast their works. See http://www.grandviewlibrary.org/Fold/GrandviewNews.aspx

â€¢ Outraged by a House bill that would make illegal immigration a felony, more than 15,000 high school students in Los Angeles staged a protest coordinated primarily through Myspace.

Negotiation-- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms

The fluid communication within the new media environment brings together groups who otherwise might have lived segregated lives. Culture flows easily from one community to another. People online encounter conflicting values and assumptions, come to grips with competing claims about the meanings of shared artifacts and experiences. Everything about this process ensures that we will be provoked by cultural difference. Little about this process ensures that we will develop an understanding of the contexts within which these different cultural communities operate. When white suburban youth consume hip hop or Western youth consume Japanese manga, new kinds of cultural understanding can emerge. Yet, just as often, the new experiences are read through existing prejudices and assumptions. Culture travels easily, but the individuals who initially produced and consumed such culture are not always welcome everywhere it circulates.

Cyber communities often bring together groups that would have no direct contact in the physical world, resulting in heated conflicts about values or norms. Increasingly, critics are focusing on attempts to segregate membership or participation within online social groups. The massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft has faced controversies about whether the formation of groups for gay, lesbian, and bisexual players increased or decreased the likelihood of sexual harassment or whether the formation of groups based on English competency reflected the importance of communication skills in games or constituted a form of discrimination motivated by stereotypes about the ethics and actions of Asian players. The social networking software that has become so central to youth culture can function as a vehicle for expressing and strengthening a sense of affiliation, but it can also be deployed as a weapon of exclusion and, as a consequence, a tool for enforcing conformity to peer expectations.

In such a world, it becomes increasingly critical to help students acquire skills in understanding multiple perspectives, respecting and even embracing diversity of views, understanding a variety of social norms, and negotiating between conflicting opinions. Traditionally, media literacy has addressed these concerns by teaching children to read through media-constructed stereotypes about race, class, sex, ethnic, religious, and other forms of cultural differences. Such work remains valuable in that it helps students to understand the preconceptions that may shape their interactions, but it takes on added importance as young people themselves create media content, which may perpetuate stereotypes or contribute to misunderstandings. If, as writers such as Suroweicki and Levy suggest, the wisdom of the crowd depends on the opportunity for diverse and independent insights and other inputs, then these new knowledge cultures require participants to master new social skills that allow them to listen to and respond to a range of different perspectives. We are defining this skill negotiation in two ways: first, as the ability to negotiate between dissenting perspectives, and second, as the ability to negotiate through diverse communities.

The most meaningful interventions will start from a commitment to the process of deliberation and negotiation across differences. They depend on the development of skills in active listening and ethical principles designed to ensure mutual respect. Participants agree to some rules of conduct that allow them to talk through similarities and differences in perspective in ways that may allow for compromise, or at least agreeing to disagree. In either case, such an approach seems essential if we are going to learn to share knowledge and collaborate within an increasingly multicultural society. Such an approach does not ignore differences: diversity of perspective is essential if the collective intelligence process is to work well. Rather, it helps us to appreciate and value differences in background, experience, and resources as contributing to a richer pool of knowledge.

What Might Be Done

Educators can foster negotiation skills when they bring together groups from diverse backgrounds and provide them with resources and processes that insure careful listening and deeper communication.

â€¢ Researchers at Stanford University's Center for Deliberative Democracy have been experimenting with new forms of civic engagement that depend on bringing people together from multiple backgrounds, exposing them to a broad array of perspectives, encouraging them to closely examine underlying claims and the evidence to support them, and creating a context in which they can learn from one another. Their initial reports suggest that this process generates powerful new perspectives on complex public policy issues, which gain the support of all parties involved. For some participants, the process strengthens their commitment to core beliefs and values. For others, it creates a context in which they are more open to alternative points of view and are able to find middle-ground positions. The project's focus on the process of deliberation--and not simply on the outcome--represents a useful model to incorporate into the classroom. Rather than having traditional pro-con debates that depend on a fixed and adversarial relationship between participants, schools should focus more attention on group deliberation and decision-making processes and on mechanisms that ensure that all parties listen and learn from one another's arguments.

â€¢ The Cultura project, developed by Furstenberg, links students in classrooms in North America and France. In the first phases, they are asked to complete a series of sentences ("A good parent is someone who..." ), address a series of questions ("What do you do if you see a mother strike a child in the grocery store?"), and define a range of core terms and concepts ("individualism"). The French students write in French, the American students in English, allowing both classes to practice their language skills and understand the links between linguistic and cultural practices. Students are then asked to compare the different ways that people living in different parts of the world responded to these questions, seeking insights into differences in values and lifestyles. For example, individualism in France is seen as a vice, equated with selfishness, whereas for Americans, individualism is seen as a virtue, closely linked with freedom. These interpretations unfold in online forums where students from both countries can respond to and critique attempts to characterize their attitudes. As the process continues, students are encouraged to upload their own media texts, which capture important aspects of their everyday lives, artifacts they believe speak to the larger cultural questions at the center of their discussions. In this way, they learn to see themselves and one another more clearly, and they come away with a greater appreciation of cultural difference.

â€¢ Rev. Denis Haak of the Ransom Fellowship has developed a series of probing questions and exercises intended to help Christians work through their responses to popular culture. Rejecting a culture war rhetoric based on sharp divisions, these exercises are intended to help Christians to identify and preserve their own values even as they come to understand "what non-believers believe." The Discernment movement sees discussing popular culture as a means of making sense of competing and contradictory value systems that interact in contemporary society. For this process to work, the program encourages participants to learn how to "disagree agreeably," how to stake out competing positions without personalizing the conflict.

â€¢ Schools historically have used the adversarial process of formal debate to encourage students to do research, construct arguments, and mobilize evidence. Yet, there is a danger that this process forces students to adopt fixed and opposing positions on complex problems. One might instead adopt a deliberative process in the classroom that encourages collaboration and discussion across different positions, and thus creates a context for opposing parties to learn from one another and reformulate their positions accordingly.

â€¢ Sites such as Wikipedia and Wikinews include a tab labeled "discussion" above each article or news entry. Here readers can view or participate in an online discussion with people of different viewpoints to arrive at a neutral point-of-view framing of the issue to be displayed on the main page.

We began this

discussion by suggesting that literacy in the twenty-first century be understood as a social rather than individual skill and that what students must acquire should be understood as skills and cultural competencies. Each of the skills we have identified above represents modes of thought, ways of processing information, and ways of interacting with others to produce and circulate knowledge. These are skills that enable participation in the new communities emerging within a networked society. They enable students to exploit new simulation tools, information appliances, and social networks; they facilitate the exchange of information between diverse communities and the ability to move easily across different media platforms and social networks. Many of the skills schools have been teaching all along, although the emergence of digital media creates new pressure on schools to prepare students for their future roles as citizens and workers. Others are skills that emerge from the affordances of these new communications technologies and the social communities and cultural practices that have grown up around them.

October 25, 2006

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Five)

October 25, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

Today, I continue our serialization of the white paper written for the MacArthur Foundation. Today's excerpt outlines three more of the social skills and cultural competencies we think young people need to develop if they are going to be able to fully participate in the new media landscape: Distributed Cognition, Collective Intelligence, and Judgment. Distributed Cognition-- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities.

Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that intelligence is distributed across "brain, body, and world", looping through an extended technological and sociocultural environment. Explaining this idea, Pea notes,

"When I say that intelligence is distributed, I mean that the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed in configurations across people, environments, and situations. In other words, intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed"

. Work in distributed cognition focuses on forms of reasoning that would not be possible without the presence of artifacts or information appliances and that expand and augment human's cognitive capacities. These devices might be forms that externalize memory, such as a database, or they can be devices that externalize processes, such as the widely used spell checker. The more we rely on the capacities of technologies as a part of our work, the more it may seem that cognition is distributed.

Teachers have long encouraged students to bring scratch paper with them into math examinations, realizing that the ability to construct representations and record processes was vital in solving complex problems. If, as Clark notes, technologies are inextricably interwoven with thinking, it makes no sense to "factor out" what the human brain is doing as the "real" part of thinking, and to view what the technology is doing as a "cheat" or "crutch." Rather, we can understand cognitive activity as shared among a number of people and artifacts, and cognitive acts as learning to think with other people and artifacts. Following this theory, students need to know how to think with and through their tools as much as they need to record information in their heads.

Gamers may be acquiring some of these distributed cognition skills through their participation in squadron-based video games. Gee suggests that in playing such games, one must form a mental map of what player and nonplayer characters are doing (nonplayer characters are characters controlled by the A.I of the game). To plan appropriately, players may not need to know what other participants know, but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do. Moreover, in playing the games, one may need to flip through a range of different representations of the state of the game world and of the actions that are occurring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment, understanding the value of each representational technology, knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occurring. Instead of thinking as an autonomous problem-solver, the player becomes part of a social and technological system that is generating and deploying information at a rapid pace. Humans are able to play much more complex games (and to solve much more complex problems) in a world in which keeping track of key data and enacting well-understood computational processes can be trusted to the processing power of the computer, and they can thus focus more attention on strategic decision making.

Distributed cognition is not simply about technologies; it is also about tapping social institutions and practices or remote experts whose knowledge may be useful in solving a particular problem. According to this understanding, expertise comes in many shapes and sizes (both human and non-human). Experts can be expert practitioners, who can be consulted through such technologies as video conferencing, instant messaging, or email; some knowledge can emerge from technologies such as calculators, spread sheets, and expert systems; new insights can originate from the teacher or students or both. The key is having expertise somewhere within the distributed learning environment and making sure students understand how to access and deploy it.

Distributed Cognition-- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities.

"When I say that intelligence is distributed, I mean that the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed in configurations across people, environments, and situations. In other words, intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed"

Applications of the distributed cognition perspective to education suggest that students must learn the affordances of different tools and information technologies, and know which functions tools and technologies excel at and in what contexts they can be trusted. Students need to acquire patterns of thought that regularly cycle through available sources of information as they make sense of developments in the world around them. Distributed intelligence is not simply a technical skill, although it depends on knowing how to use tools effectively; it is also a cognitive skill, which involves thinking across "brain, body, and world." The term "distributed intelligence" emphasizes the role that technologies play in this process, but it is closely related to the social production of knowledge that we are calling collective intelligence.

What Might Be Done

The theory of distributed cognition informs educational research and practice when it provides a perspective for envisioning new learning contexts, tools, curricula and pedagogy, participant structures, and goals for schooling.

â€¢ Augmented reality games represent one potential application of distributed intelligence to the learning process. Klopfer and Squire developed a range of games in which students use location-aware, GPS-enabled handheld computers to solve fictional problems in real spaces. For example, in Environmental Detectives, students determine the source of an imaginary chemical leak, which is causing environmental hazards on the MIT campus. Students can use their handhelds to drill imaginary wells and take readings on the soil conditions, but to do so, they must travel to the actual location. Data drawn from the computer is read against their actual physical surroundings--the distance between locations, the slope of the land, its proximity to the Charles River--and multiple players compare notes as they seek to resolve the game scenario.

â€¢ Students in the Comparative Media Studies Program have experimented with the use of handhelds to allow tourists to access old photographs of historic neighborhoods and compare them with what they are seeing on location . Elsewhere, students travel across the battlefield at Lexington conducting interviews with historical personage to better understand their perspective on what happened there in 1775 . In each case, direct perceptions of the real world and information drawn from information appliances are mutually reinforcing. The players combine multiple information sources in completing the tasks at hand.

â€¢ Byline is an Internet-based publishing and editing tool designed to focus attention on the organizational and structural features of journalism. By providing a space for the body of the story, the byline, and the lead, this "smart tool" scaffolds students' processes of learning to write a journalistic story. By cueing students on what to write, where to write it, and even into such journalistic values as the need to catch the reader's attention, this specially designed program helps students to learn the conventions and values of journalism.

â€¢ A classroom designed to foster distributed cognition encourages students to participate with a range of people, artifacts, and devices. The various forms of participation composing such cognitive activity might be understood more generally as the skill of knowing how to act within distributed knowledge systems. Interested in designing learning environments that would foster such a skill, Bell and Winn describe a classroom not only in which participation requires active collaborations with people and tools that are physically present, but also with people and tools that are virtually present through, for example, video conferencing with a science practitioner, using the web to connect to a database in Japan, and using Excel spreadsheets to simulate a mass spectrometer. In such classrooms, knowing how to act within the distributed knowledge system is more important than learning content. Because content is something that can be "held" by technologies such as databases, websites, wikis, and so forth, the curricular focus is on learning how to generate, evaluate, interpret, and deploy data.

â€¢ With new technologies, new cognitive possibilities arise. Educators need to create new activities when new technologies are introduced into the classroom. If the calculator is used to add 2+2, it is the capacities of the calculator that are solving the problem; when calculation is "off loaded" onto the calculator, the student is free to solve more complex problems. The proliferation of digital technologies requires a concerted effort to envision activities that enable students to engage in more complex problem domains. For example, as a vehicle for assessing the various ways ecommerce affects the environment, students could be given the problem of comparing the environmental impact of shipping 250,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire directly to individual customers rather than to bookstores. Reflecting on the intended outcome for such a comparison, Yagelski notes, "The click of the computer mouse to order a copy of Harry Potter from Amazon.com can seem a simple and almost natural act, yet it represents participation in this bewilderingly complex web of material connections that is anything but simple. And that participation contributes to the condition of our planet." See http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/6.2/features/yagelski/crisis.htm.

Collective Intelligence-- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal

As users learn to exploit the potential of networked communication, they participate in a process that Levy calls "collective intelligence." Like-minded individuals gather online to embrace common enterprises, which often involve access and processing information. In such a world, Levy argues, everyone knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole. We are still experimenting with how to work within these knowledge cultures and what they can accomplish when we pool knowledge. Levy argues that as a society, we are currently at an apprenticeship phase, during which we try out and refine skills and institutions that will sustain the social production of knowledge. Levy sees collective intelligence as an alternative source of power, one that allows grassroots communities to respond effectively to government institutions that emerge from the nation state or to corporate interests that sustain multinational commerce. Already, we are seeing governments and industries seek ways to "harness collective intelligence," which has become the driving force behind what people are calling Web 2.0.

Currently, children and adults are acquiring the skills to operate within knowledge communities be interacting with popular culture. As has often been the case, we learn through play that we later apply to more serious tasks. So, for example, the young PokÃ©mon fans, who each know some crucial detail about the various species, constitute a collective intelligence whose knowledge is extended each time two youth on the playground share something about the franchise.

Such knowledge sharing can assume more sophisticated functions as it moves online. For example, Matrix fans have created elaborate guides which help them track information about the fictional Zion resistance movement featured in the film. Young people are playing with collective intelligence as they participate in the vast knowledge communities that emerged from the online game I Love Bees. Some estimate that as many as 3 million players participated in history's most challenging scavenger hunt. After working through puzzles so complicated they mandated the effective collaboration of massive numbers of people with expertise across a variety of domains and geographic locations, players gathered clues by answering more than 40,000 payphone calls across all 50 U.S. states and eight countries. They then fed those clues back into online tools designed to support large-scale collaboration for all players to deconstruct and analyze. If players were unfamiliar with how to participate in the community, other players would train them in the necessary skills. In another example, fans of the television show Survivor have used the Internet to track down information and identify the names of contestants before they are announced by the network. They have also used satellite photographs to identify the location of the Survivor base camp despite the producer's "no fly over" agreements with local governments. These knowledge communities change the very nature of media consumption--a shift from the personalized media that was central to the idea of the digital revolution toward socialized or communalized media that is central to the culture of media convergence.

As players learn to work and play in such knowledge cultures, they come to think of problem-solving as an exercise in teamwork. Consider the following postings made by members of The Cloudmakers, a team formed in a game similar to I Love Bees:

The solutions do not lie in the puzzles we are presented with, they lie in the connections we make, between the ideas and between one another. These are what will last. I look down at myself and see that I, too, have been incorporated into the whole, connections flowing to me and from me, ideas flowing freely as we work together, as individuals and as a group, to solve the challenges we are presented with. The solution, however, does not lie in the story. We are the solution.

* * *

The 7500+ people in this group ... we are all one. We have made manifest the idea of an unbelievably intricate intelligence. We are one mind, one voice ... made of 7500+ neurons... We are not one person secluded from the rest of the world... We have become a part of something greater than ourselves.

Indeed, these groups have been drawn from playing games to confronting real-world social problems, such as tracking campaign finances or trying to solve local crimes, as they develop a new sense of self-confidence in their ability to tackle challenges collectively, challenges that, as individuals, they would be unable to face.

This focus on teamwork and collaboration is also, not coincidentally, how the modern workplace is structured--around ad-hoc configurations of employees, brought together because their diverse skills and knowledge are needed to confront a specific challenge, then dispersed into different clusters of workers when new needs arise. Doctorow has called such systems "ad-hocracies," suggesting that they contrast in every possible way with prior hierarchies and bureaucracies. Our schools do an excellent job, consciously or unconsciously, teaching youth how to function within bureaucracies. They do almost nothing to help youth learn how to operate within an ad-hocracy.

Collective intelligence is increasingly shaping how we respond to real-world problems. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore apart the levee that protected New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Not only was the ability of ordinary citizens to share self-produced media and information pivotal in shaping the view of the situation for the outside world (thereby bringing in more relief funds), but it allowed for those affected by the disaster to effectively assist one another. After Jonathan Mendez's parents evacuated from Louisiana to his home in Austin, Texas, he was eager to find out if the floods had destroyed their home in Louisiana. Unfortunately for him, media coverage of the event was focused exclusively on the most devastated parts of New Orleans, with little information about the neighborhood where his parents lived. With some help from his coworker, they were able, within a matter of hours, to modify the popular "Google maps" web service to allow users to overlay any information they had about the devastation directly onto a satellite map of New Orleans. Shortly after making their modification public, more than 14,000 submissions covered their map. This allowed victims scattered throughout the United States to find information about any specific location--including verifying that the Mendez's house was still intact.

Unfortunately, most contemporary education focuses on training autonomous problem solvers and is not well suited to equip students with these skills. Whereas a collective intelligence community encourages ownership of work as a group, schools grade individuals. Whereas Jonathan Mendez was admired for having appropriated Google's mapping web service , students in school are often asked to swear that what they turn is their "own work."

Leadership within a knowledge community requires the ability to identify specific functions for each member of the team based on his or her expertise and to interact with the team members in an appropriate fashion. Teamwork involves a high degree of interdiscipline--the ability to reconfigure knowledge across traditional categories of expertise. In early February 2004, Eric Klopfer, an MIT professor of urban studies and planning, along with a team of researchers from the Education Arcade, conducted "a Hi-Tech Who Done It" for middle-school youth and their parents inside the Boston Museum of Science. Teams of three adult-child pairs were given handhelds to search for clues of the whereabouts and identity of the notorious Pink Flamingo Gang, who had stolen an artifact and substituted a fake in its place. Thanks to museum's newly installed wi-fi network and the players' location-aware handhelds, each gallery offered the opportunity to interview cyber-suspects, download objects, examine them with virtual equipment, and trade their findings. Each parent-child unit was assigned a different role-- biologists, detectives, or technologists--enabling them to use different tools on the evidence they gathered. This is simply one of many recent cooperative games that assigned distinct roles to each player, giving each access to a different set of information, and thus creating strong incentives for them to pool resources.

Schools, on the other hand, often seek to develop generalists rather than allowing students to assume different roles based on their emerging expertise. The ideal of the Renaissance man was someone who knew everything or at least knew a great deal about a range of different topics. The ideal of a collective intelligence is a community that knows everything and individuals who know how to tap the community to acquire knowledge on a just-in-time basis. Minimally, schools should be teaching students to thrive in both worlds: having a broad background on a range of topics, but also knowing when they should turn to a larger community for relevant expertise. They must know how to solve problems on their own but also how to expand their intellectual capacity by working on a problem within a social community. To be a meaningful participant in such a knowledge culture, students must acquire greater skills at assessing the reliability of information, which may come from multiple sources, some of which are governed by traditional gatekeepers, others of which must be crosschecked and vetted within a collective intelligence.

What Might Be Done

Schools can deploy aspects of collective intelligence when students pool observations and work through interpretations with others studying the same problems at scattered locations. Such knowledge communities can confront problems of greater scale and complexity than any given student might be able to handle.

â€¢ Scientists in fields requiring simple, yet extensive, data analysis tasks could partner with junior high teachers to have students help collect or analyze real data. Eelgrass is both the most abundant seagrass in Massachusetts and one of the most ecologically valuable marine and estuarine habitats in North American coastal waters. The MIT Sea Grant College Program developed a project where students in different schools learn to cultivate eelgrass and collaboratively share data regarding the levels of nitrates, oxygen, and so forth in affected habitats through the project website: http://seagrantdev.mit.edu/eelgrass/

â€¢ Sites such as ning.com offers nonprogrammers tools for rapidly creating social web applications that allow users to interact with and share information with one another. For example, a Mandarin teacher could easily create an online travel guide in which students (potentially nationwide) would each contribute write-ups of interesting sites in their local areas that would be of interest to visitors from China.

â€¢ Students taking civic classes might be encouraged to map their local governments using a Wikipedia-like program, bringing together names of government officials, reports on government meetings, and key policy debates. The information would be accessible to others in their own communities. They might also compare notes with students living in other parts of the country to identify policy alternatives that might address problems or concerns in their communities.

Judgment-- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Although it is exciting to see players harness collective intelligence to successfully solve problems of unprecedented complexity, this process also involves a large number of errors. Misinformation emerges, is worked over, refined or dismissed before a new consensus emerges. We are taught to think of knowledge as a product, but within a collective intelligence, knowledge is also always in process. As such, one must understand where one is in the vetting process to know how much trust to place in any given piece of information. In a game such as I Love Bees, these mistakes are generally of little consequence and often serve as a source of amusement than anything else. As these same technologies are employed in understanding world events, we must better understand the strengths and limitations of these new practices of knowledge production.

For example, one key technology in online collective intelligence communities is a wiki. Although it may be possible for a small group of individuals to contribute erroneous information, wiki enthusiasts argue that giving all members of a larger community the ability to correct any mistakes will ultimately lead to more accurate information. In many cases, this concept has proved surprisingly effective. In one study, Nature magazine compared the accuracy of articles in Wikipedia, an enormous online encyclopedia constructed entirely through the efforts of volunteers using wiki technologies, with equivalent articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. They concluded the accuracy levels of the two to be roughly the same. (This wasn't because Wikipedia was flawless, but rather because even sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica are flawed). Students must be taught to read both sources from a critical perspective.

The Nature article also identifies that wikis perform best when a large number of participants are actively using the technology to correct mistakes. Whereas the Wikipedia article on global warming enjoys more than 10,000 authors, each passionately committed to ensuring the accuracy of its content, the biographical article on John Seigenthaler cited him as having a possible involvement in the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy for a period of 132 days before someone corrected it. Given the disparity in the accuracy of different articles, students need to develop an intuitive understanding of how the contents of a wiki are produced by participating in their construction, and then actively reflecting on the different possibilities for inaccuracies.

In truth, schools should always teach students critical thinking skills for "sussing out" the quality of information, yet historically schools have had a tendency to fall back on the gatekeeping functions of professional editors and journalists, not to mention of textbook selection committee and librarians, to ensure that the information is generally reliable. Once students enter cyberspace, where anyone can post anything, they need skills in evaluating the quality of different sources, how perspectives and interests can color representations, and the likely mechanisms by which misinformation is perpetuated or corrected. We need to balance a trust of traditional gatekeeping organizations (Public Television, Smithsonian, National Geographic, for example) with the self-correcting potential of grassroots knowledge communities. Traditional logic would suggest, for example, that 60 Minutes, a long-standing network news show, would be more accurate than a partisan blog, but in fall 2004, bloggers working together recognized flaws in the evidence that had been vetted by the established news agency. As Gillmore notes, we are entering a world in which citizen journalists often challenge and sometimes correct the work of established journalists, even as journalists debunk the urban folklore circulated in the blogging community.

Misinformation abounds online, but so do mechanisms for self-correction. In such a world, we can only trust established institutions so far. We all must learn how to read one source of information against another; to understand the contexts within which information is produced and circulated; to identify the mechanisms that ensure the accuracy of information as well as realizing under which circumstances those mechanisms work best. Confronted with a world in which information is unreliable, many of us fall back on cynicism, distrusting everything we read. Rather, we should foster a climate of healthy skepticism, in which all truth claims are weighed carefully, but there is an ethical commitment to identifying and reporting the truth.

Students are theoretically taught in school how to critically assess the pros and cons of an argument. In an increasingly pervasive media environment, they also must be able to recognize when arguments are not explicitly identified as such. The new mediated landscape of mainstream news sources, collaborative blog projects, unsourced news sites, and increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques aimed at ever-younger consumers demand that students be taught how to distinguish fact from fiction, argument from documentation, real from fake, and marketing from enlightenment.

"To be a functioning adult in a mediated society, one needs to be able to distinguish between different media forms and know how to ask basic questions about everything we watch, read, or hear," says Thoman and Jolls.

"Although most adults learned through English classes to distinguish a poem from an essay, it is amazing how many people do not understand the difference between a daily newspaper and a supermarket tabloid, what makes one website legitimate and another one a hoax, or how advertisers package products to entice us to buy"

Even when media content has been determined credible, it is vital for students to also identify and analyze the perspective of the producer: who is presenting what to whom, and why. Existing media literacy materials excel in examining the forces behind controversial media properties, particularly provocative visuals, its intentions, and effects.

As Buckingham notes, children may lack some of the core life experiences and basic knowledge that might help them to discriminate between accurate and inaccurate accounts:

[T]here is as yet relatively little research about how children make judgements about the reliability of information on the Internet, or how they learn to deal with unwelcome or potentially upsetting content. Children may have more experience of these media than many adults, but they mostly lack the real-world experience with which media representations can be compared; and this may make it harder for them to detect inaccuracy and bias"

Reviewing the literature on how children make sense of online resources, Buckingham finds that students lack both knowledge and interest in assessing how information was produced for and within digital environments: "

Digital content was 'often seen as originating not from people, organisations, and businesses with particular cultural inclinations or objectives, but as a universal repository that simply existed 'out there'"

. Other studies find that children remain unaware of the motives behind the creation of websites, have difficulty separating commercial from noncommercial sites, and lack the background to identify the sources of authority behind claims made by website authors.

As this discussion has suggested, judgment might be seen as part of our existing conception of literacy--a core research skill of the kind that has long been fundamental to the school curriculum. Yet, this discussion also underscores that judgment operates differently in an era of distributed cognition and collective intelligence. Judgment requires not simply logic, but also an understanding of how different media institutions and cultural communities operate. Judgment works not simply on knowledge as the product of traditional expertise, but also on the process by which grassroots communities work together to generate and authenticate new information.

What Might Be Done

Judgment has long been the focus of media literacy education in the United States and around the world as students are encouraged to ask critical questions about the information they are consuming.

â€¢ The Boston-based Youth Voice Collaborative has developed an exercise that gives students a range of news stories and asks them to rank the stories according to traditional news standards. The process is designed to encourage students to understand what criteria journalists use to determine the "news value" of different events and to encourage students to express their own priorities about what information matters to them and why.

â€¢ http://news.google.com aggregates articles from thousands of news sources worldwide. This allows users to compare and contrast the framing of a single issue from different media sources. Students are encouraged to read several articles closely, underlining words they believe might shape how readers understand and feel about what they are reading.

â€¢ The New Medial Literacies project at MIT has developed a set of activities to involve students in understanding how representations of "truth" and "fiction" vary in different media forms and, therefore, how different techniques must be learned, and choices must be made, when seeking to manipulate meanings by altering representations. For example, in an image manipulation activity, students search for an image of an event (such as the March on Washington, the Kennedy assassination) and are taught how to change the picture in a way that changes the meaning. By manipulating images, students become familiar with the ways images may be altered to persuade and influence. In developing this manipulation skill, students are encouraged to think about why image, sound, and textual representations are altered and what that means to them as consumers, voters, and citizens.

â€¢ A growing number of teachers are using the Talk Pages for contested Wikipedia entries as illustrations of the types of questions one might want to ask about any information and the processes and criteria by which disputes about knowledge might be resolved.

â€¢ Tools such as lijit.com allow readers of a website to alert friends who subsequently read the same website that its content may be suspect. Students might also be encouraged to take advantage of sites such as snopes.com, which regularly report on frauds and misinformation circulating online and provide good illustrations of the ways that one could test the credibility of information

October 24, 2006

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Four)

October 24, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

I have been serializing in this blog the white paper I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on youth, learning, and participatory culture. If you want to read the whole report, you can find it here. My collaborators on this report were Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison.

Yesterday, I began to identify some of the core social skills and cultural competencies that we think should be embedded in contemporary educational practices. These skills reflect the best contemporary research on the informal learning which is taking place as young people assume roles as fans, gamers, and bloggers. Yesterday, we spoke about Play and Simulation; today, we will discuss Performance, Appropriation, and Multitasking.

I am hoping that if you are enjoying reading this discussion, you will bring it to the attention of parents, teachers, church leaders, librarians, and others who regularly interact with young people. We would very much like to use this report to open up discussions about the place of media in young people's lives. Yet, we want to have a discussion which is not led by our fears and anxieties about what media is doing to our children but rather one that reflects our best research into what our children are doing with media.

Performance-- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

So far, we have focused on game play as a mode of problem solving which involves modeling the world and acting upon those models. Yet, game play also is one of a range of contemporary forms of youth popular culture which encourage young people to perform fictive identities and in this process, develop a richer understanding of themselves and their social roles. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee coins the term, "projective identity" to refer to the fusion that takes place between game players and their avatars. Gee sees the term as playing on two senses of the word, "project": "to project one's values and desires onto the virtual character" and "seeing the virtual character as one's own project in the making". This projected identity allows the player to strongly identify with her character and thus have an immersive experience within the game and at the same time, to use the character as a mirror to reflect on her own values and choices.

Testing the educational video game Revolution with middle school students, Russell Francis found a number of compelling examples where projected identities had pedagogical payoffs for participants. For example, Margaret, a girl who played a loyalist character in the game which was set in Colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution, was shaken when she was shot by the redcoats in the midst of a street riot:

"The towns people were very mad. They went to the Governor's mansion to attack. I support the red coats, but they started shooting at me, and then they arrested me. I felt horrified that they would do something like that to me. I don't even believe in violence. I wonder what is going to happen to me. I run the tavern and I have no family. Will I get sent back to England or will I be able to stay here?

" She had seen herself as a supporter of the British troops, at worst an innocent bystander, but she came away from the experience with critical insights about political violence.

Francis built on this process of introspection and projection by asking students to write journals or compose short films reflecting in character on the events that unfolded in the game. In constructing and inhabiting these virtual characters, participants drew together multiple sources of knowledge, mixing things they had read or learned in other educational contexts, information explicitly contained within the game, and their own introspection based on life experiences to create characters that were more compelling to them than the simple digital avatars the designers had constructed. One can think of the process as closely paralleling what actors do when preparing to play a role. Here, for example, is how a young African-American girl explained her experiences in playing Hanmah, a house slave (an explanation which reaches well beyond anything explicitly present in the games and even invents actions for the non-player characters in order to help her make sense of her place in the social order being depicted):

"You don't really have as much support as you would like because being a house slave they call you names, just because most of the time you're lighter skin -- you're the master's kid technically...I had to find the ways to get by because, you know, it was hard. On one side you don't want to get on the Master's bad side because he can beat you. On the other side the slaves they ridicule you and are being mean."

Children acquire basic literacies and competencies through learning to manipulate core cultural materials. In The Braid of Literature: Children's World of Reading, Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath trace the forms of play which shaped Wolf's two preschooler daughters' relationship to the "world of words" and stories. Wolf and Heath are interested in how children embody the characters, situations, generic rules, even specific turns of phrase, through their socio-linquistic play. Children do not simply read books or listen to stories; they re-enact these narratives in ways that transform them and in this process, the authors argue, children demonstrate they really understand what they have read.This play helps them to navigate the world of stories and at the same time, elements of stories help them to navigate real world social situations. Children learn to verbalize their experiences of reading through these performances and in the process, develop an analytic framework for thinking about literacy. Anne Haas Dyson's Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy extends this analysis of the connection between performance and literacy into the classroom, exploring how educators have used dramatizations to teach children to reflect more deeply on their experiences of stories. Wolf and Heath describe individualized play in the context of the home; Dyson recounts social play among peers. In both cases, children start with a shared frame of reference -- stories they have in common, genres they all understand -- so that they understand the roles they are to play and the rules of their interaction. Performing these shared fantasies (such as the scenarios which emerge in superhero comics) allows children to better understand who they are and how they connect with the other people around them.

Role play is a persistent interest among contemporary youth whether we are looking at the coplay of young anime fans, the role play that takes place around Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic or Hero Clips, the fusion with a digital avatar through computer gaming or fantasy role playing, or the construction of alternative personas in sub cultural communities like the Goths. Such play has long been read as testing identities, trying on possible selves, and exploring different social spaces. Susannah Stern has stressed the forms of self-representation which occur on teenagers websites and blogs: "the ability to repeatedly reinvent oneself is particularly appealing since home pages and blogs can be updated as often as desired and because they may be produced anonymously".

These more elaborated and complex forms of role-play may also provide a point of entry into larger spheres of knowledge. Consider, for example, this interview Comparative Media Studies graduate student Vanessa Bertozzi did with a 17 year old American girl named Chloe Metcalf: "

I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in sixth grade. When I was in the seventh grade, I started studying Japanese on my own. When I got into high school, I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College. I got into costuming through anime which is actually how I got interested in Japanese. And I taught myself how to sew. ...I'm a stage hog. I like to get attention and recognition. I love acting and theater. The biggest payoff of cosplay is to go to the conventions where there are other people who know who you are dressed as and can appreciate your effort. At the first convention I ever went to, I must have had fifty people take my picture and at least ten of them came up and hugged me. It's almost like whoever you dress up as, you become that person for a day....People put the pictures up on their websites after the con. So after a con, you can search for pictures of yourself and if you are lucky, you will find five or ten"

For Chloe, assuming the role of a Jpop character demonstrated her mastery over favorite texts. Assuming this new identity requires a close analysis of the originating texts, its genre conventions, its social roles, its linguistic codes, and so forth. She has to go deep inside the story in order to find her own place within its world. In this case, she also has to step outside the culture that immediately surrounds her to embrace a text from a radically different cultural tradition. She has sought out more and more information about forms of Asian popular culture. And in the process, she has begun to re-imagine her relations to the world -- as part of an international fan culture which remains deeply rooted in the everyday life of Japan. This search for more information expresses itself across a range of media - the videos or DVDs she watches of Japanese produced anime, the recordings of JPop music which may consumed on MP3 or on CD, the information she finds on the internet as well as information she shares with her fellow fans about her own activities, the physical costumes she generates as well as all of the photographs that get taken of her costumes, the magazines and comics she reads to learn more about Japanese popular culture, her face to face contacts with fellow fans. These activities around popular culture in turn translate into other kinds of learning. As a middle school student Chloe began to study Japanese language and culture first on her own and later at a local college.

Role play, in particular, should be seen as a fundamental skill used across multiple academic domains. So far, we have suggested its relevance to history, language arts, and cultural geography. Yet, this only scratches the surface. Whether it be children on a playground acting out and deciphering the complex universe of PokÃ©mon,Orville Wright pretending to be a buzzard gliding over sand dunes, or Einstein imagining himself to be a photon speeding over the earth -- role playing enables us to envision and collaboratively theorize about manipulations of entirely new worlds. Consider, for example, the way role-play informs contemporary design processes. Increasingly designers construct personae of would-be users, who can serve to illustrate different contexts of use or different interests in the product. These personae are then inserted into fictional scenarios so that designers can mentally test the viability of their designs and its ability to serve diverse needs. In some cases, this process also involves the designers themselves acting out the different roles and thereby, identifying the strengths and limits of their approaches. Improvisational performance, then, represents an important life skill, one which balances problem solving and creative expression, one which invites us to reimagine ourselves and the world and allows participants to examine a problem from multiple perspectives.

Educators have for too long treated role play as a means to an end -- a fun way to introduce other kinds of content -- yet we are arguing here that role play skills may be valuable in their own right and are increasingly central to the way adult institutions function. Performance brings with it capacities to understand problems from multiple points of view, to assimilate information, to exert mastery over core cultural materials, and to improvise in response to a changing environment. As with play and simulation, performance places a new stress on learning processes -- on how we learn more than what we learn. These learning processes are apt to sustain growth and learning well beyond the school years.

What Might Be Done:

Performance enters into education when students are asked to adopt fictive identities and think through scenarios from their perspective. These identities may be assumed within the physical world or the virtual world.

*The Model United Nations, a well-established educational project, brings together students from many different schools, each representing delegations from different member countries. Over the course of a weekend, participants work through current debates in foreign policy and simulate the actual procedures and policies of the international organization. Students prepare for the Model United Nations by doing library research, listening to lectures, and participating in group discussions and they return from the event to share what they learned with other classmates through presentations and written reports.

*The Savannah Project, created by researchers at the University of Bristol, has children playing the parts of lions stalking their prey in physical spaces, such as the school playground, but reading them through fictional data provided on handheld devices. This approach encourages students to master the complex ecosystem of the veldt from the inside out -- learning the conditions which impinge upon the lion's chances of survival and the skills they need in order to feed on other local wildlife.

*Teachers in a range of subjects can deploy what David Shaffer calls "epistemic games." In an epistemic game, the game world is designed to simulate the social context of a profession (say, urban planning), and by working through realistic but simulated problems players learn the ways of acting, interacting, and interpreting that are necessary for participating in the professional community. In effect, rather than memorizing facts or formulas, through performances of being an urban planner, lawyer, doctor, engineer, carpenter, historian, teacher, or physicist the player learns the particular ways of thinking of these professions.

*Medieval Space, a MySpace clone created by teachers at Byrd Middle school, asked students to create online profiles for the various historical figures studied in their classes. Rather than seeing figures such as Richard III, Henry VI and Queen Elizbeth as distinct characters, students explored the complex social relationships between them by imagining how they might have interacted if they had online spaces in the 15th century. For example, students were asked to imagine what their character's current song might be, with as 2Pac's "Only God Can Judge Me Now" listed for Richard III.

Appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Journalists have frequently used the term "Napster generation" to describe the young people who have come of age in this era of participatory culture, reducing their complex forms of appropriation and transformation into the simple, arguably illegal action of ripping and burning someone else's music for the purpose of file sharing. Recall that the Pew study cited earlier found that almost a quarter of American teens had sampled and remixed existing media content. The digital remixing of media content makes visible the degree to which all cultural expression builds upon what has come before. Appropriation is understood here as a process by which students learn by taking culture apart and putting it back together again.

Art doesn't emerge whole cloth from individual imaginations. Rather, art emerges through the artist's engagement with previous cultural materials. Artists build on, take inspiration from, appropriate and transform other artist's work: they do so by tapping into a cultural tradition or deploying the conventions of a particular genre. Beginning artists undergo an apprenticeship phase during which they try on for size the styles and techniques of other more established artists. And even well established artists work with images and themes that already have some currency within the culture. Of course, this isn't generally the way we talk about creativity in schools, where the tendency is still to focus on individual artists who rise upon or stand outside any aesthetic tradition.

Our focus on autonomous creative expression falsifies the actual process by which meaning gets generated and new works get produced. Most of the classics we teach in the schools are themselves the product of appropriation and transformation or what we would now call sampling and remixing. So Homer remixed Greek myths to construct The Iliad and the Odyssey; Shakespeare sampled his plots and characters from other authors' plays; The Sistine Chapel Ceiling mashes up stories and images from across the entire Biblical tradition. Lewis Carroll spoofs the vocabulary of exemplary verses which were a standard part of formal education during his period. Many core works of the western canon emerged through a process of retelling and elaboration: the figure of King Arthur goes from an obscure footnote in an early chronicle into the full blown text of Morte D'Arthur in a few centuries, as the original story gets built upon by many generations of storytellers.

Many of the forms of expression that are most important to American youth accent this sampling and remixing process, in part because digitization makes it much easier to combine and repurpose media content than ever before. Jazz, for example, evolved through improvisation around familiar themes and standard songs, yet the digital remixing of actual sounds which occurs in techno or hip hop music has raised much greater alarm among those who would insist on strong protections of copyright. Fan fiction clearly involves the transformative use of existing media content, yet it is often treated as if it were simply a new form of piracy. Collage has been a central artistic practice running across the 20th century, one closely associated with the kinds of new creative works that kids are generating manipulating images through Photoshop. Despite the pervasiveness of these cultural practices, school arts and creative writing programs remain hostile to overt signs of repurposed content, emphasizing the ideal of the autonomous artist. Yet in doing so they sacrifice the opportunity to help kids think more deeply about the ethical and legal implications of repurposing existing media content; they often do not provide them with the conceptual tools students need to analyze and interpret works produced in this appropriative process.

Appropriation may be understood as a process which involves both analysis and commentary. Sampling intelligently from the existing cultural reservoir requires a close analysis of the existing structures and uses of this material; remixing requires an appreciation of emerging structures and latent potential meanings. Often, remixing involves the creative juxtaposition of materials which otherwise occupy very different cultural niches. For beginning creators, appropriation provides a scaffolding, allowing them to focus on some dimensions of cultural production and rely on the existing materials to sustain others. They are, say, able to focus more attention on description or exposition if they can build on existing characters and plots. They learn how to capture the voice of a character by trying to mix borrowed dialog with their own words. Mapping their emotional issues onto preexisting characters allowed the young writers to reflect on their own lives from a certain critical distance and work through issues, such as their emerging sexualities, without facing the stigma which might surround confessing such feelings through autobiographical essays. These students learn to use small details in the original works as probes for their own imagination, overcoming some of the anxiety of staring at a blank computer screen. Building on existing stories attracts wider interest in their work, allowing it to circulate far beyond the community of family and friends. In turn, because they are working with a shared narrative and many others have stakes in what happens to these characters, they receive more feedback on their writing.

Classically, engineers learn by taking machines apart and reassembling them, acquiring in the process familiarity with core processes and materials and with an underlying logic that will shape their future construction projects. Appropriation represents this same learning process applied to cultural rather than technological materials. In a world where creativity is often expressed through sampling and remixing, schools need to make their peace with these creative and highly generative processes: they need to help students to better understand the poetics and politics of remixing, to understand how artists draw inspiration from their tradition and what ethical responsibilities they bear in their treatment of materials that others have generated.

What Might Be Done:

Appropriation enters education when learners are encouraged to dissect, transform, sample, or remix existing cultural materials.

*The MIT Comparative Media Studies Program runs a workshop each year, asking students to work in teams to think through what would be involved in transforming an existing media property (a book, film, television series, or comic book) into a video or computer game and then preparing a "pitch" presentation for their game: starting from a preexisting property allows students to get started quickly and more or less on equal footing since they are able to build on a text they have in common as readers rather than one created by an individual student author; the process of identifying core properties of the original work teaches students important skills at narrative and formal analysis while the development of an alternative version of the story in another medium emphasizes the creative expansion of the original content.

*The crew of Public Radio International's program, Sound & Spirit, has gone into schools around Boston, encouraging students to develop scripts and to record radio broadcasts which involve critical commentary around existing songs to explore a common theme or topic. They have found that this process of sampling and remixing music motivates kids to think more deeply about the sounds they hear around them and motivates them to approach school related topics from a fresh perspective.

*Artist and filmmaker Juan Devis , has been working with the University of Southern California Film School, the Institute for Media Literacy, and the Los Angeles Leadership Academy, on a project which will eventually have minority youth developing an online game based on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Devis drew a number of strong parallels between the experiences of minority youth in LA and the world depicted in Twain's novel -- including parallels between "crews" of taggers and the gang of youth that surround Huck and Tom, the use of slang as a means of separating themselves out from their parents culture, the complex experience of race in a society undergoing social transitions, and the sense of mobility and "escape" from adult supervision.

*Ricardo Pitts-Wiley,the Artistic Director of Mixed Magic Theatre, has been working with students from Pawtucket (RI) area high schools to develop what he calls his "urban Moby Dick" project. Students worked closely with mentors -- artists, law enforcement officers, business leaders, from the local community -- to explore Herman Melville's classic novel together. Through a process of reading, discussion, improvisation, and writing, they are scripting and staging a modern version of the classic whaling story, one that acknowledges the realities of contemporary urban America. In their version, the "Great White" turns out not to be a whale but the international drug cartel. Ish and Quay are two members of Ahab's posse as he goes after the vicious force which took his leg and killed his wife. Through re-imagining and reworking Melville's story, they come to a deeper understanding of the relationships between the characters and of some of the core themes about male bonding and obsession which run through the book.

*Renee Hobbs, a 20-year veteran of the media literacy movement, recently launched a new website -- My Pop Studio -- which encourages young middle school and early high school aged girls to reflect more deeply about some of the media they consume -- pop music, reality television, celebrity magazines, and the like -- by stepping into the roles of media producers. The site offers a range of engaging activities -- including designing your own animated pop star and scripting their next sensation, re-editing footage for a reality television show, designing the layout for a teen magazine. Along the way, they are asked to reflect on the messages the media offers about what it is like to be a teen girl in America today and to think about the economic factors shaping the culture that has become so much a part of their everyday interactions with their friends.

Multitasking-- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus onto salient details on an ad hoc basis.

Perhaps one of the changes most alarming to many adults about the new media landscape has been the perceived decline in young people's attention spans. Attention is undoubtedly an important cognitive ability: all information to be processed by our brains needs to be temporarily held in short-term memory and the capacity of our short-term memory is sharply limited. Attention is critical: learners need to filter out extraneous information that is not relevant to the task at hand and sharpen their focus on the most salient details of their environment. Instead of focusing on narrowing attention, young people often respond to a rich media environment through a strategy of multitasking, scanning for relevant shifts in the information flow while taking in multiple stimuli at once. Multitasking and attention should not be seen as oppositional forces -- rather, we should think of them as two complementary skills, both strategically employed by the brain in order to intelligently manage constraints on short-term memory. Whereas attention seeks to prevent information overload by controlling what information enters short-term memory, successful multitaskers seek to reduce demands on short-term memory by mapping where different information is externally stored within their immediate environment.

In Growing up Digital, John Seely Brown (2002) describes an encounter he had:

Recently I was with a young twenty- something who had actually wired a Web browser into his eyeglasses. As he talked with me, he had his left hand in his pocket to cord in keystrokes to bring up my Web page and read about me, all the while carrying on with his part of the conversation! I was astonished that he could do all this in parallel and so unobtrusively.

People my age tend to think that kids who are multiprocessing can't be concentrating. That may not be true. Indeed, one of the things we noticed is that the attention span of the teens at PARC--often between 30 seconds and five minutes--parallels that of top managers, who operate in a world of fast context-switching. So the short attention spans of today's kids may turn out to be far from dysfunctional for future work worlds.

Right now, young people are playing with these skills as they engage with games or social activities which reward the ability to maintain a mental picture of complex sets of relationships and to adjust quickly to shifts in perceptual cues. We can already see the multitasking process being applied to news and information, embodied within the "scrawl" of contemporary television news: the screen is organized around a series of information surfaces, each contains a relevant bit of data, none of which offers the complete picture. Our eyes scan across electoral maps and ticker tapes, moving images and headlines, trying to complete a coherent picture of the day's events, and to understand the relationship between the data inputs. Similarly, as Gunther Kress notes, the contemporary textbook is increasingly deploying a broader array of different modalities as it represents information students need to know about a given topic: here, again, readers are being taught to scan the informational environment rather than fix attention on a single element.

Historically, we might have distinguished between the skills required of farmers and those expected of hunters. The farmer must complete a sequence of tasks which require localized attention; the hunter must scan a complex landscape in search of signs and cues of where their prey may be hiding. For centuries schools have been designed to create "farmers" . In such an organization, the ideal is to have all students focusing on one thing, and, indeed, attention is conceived of as the ability to concentrate on one thing for an extended period of time while the inability or refusal to maintain such a narrow focus gets characterized as a "disorder." Yet, fixed attention would be maladjusted to the needs of hunters, who must search high and low for their game. Schools adapted to the needs of hunters would have very different practices and might well value the ability to identify the relationship between seemingly unrelated developments within a complex visual field. As we look to the future, one possibility is that schools will be designed to support both "hunters" and "farmers," ensuring that each child develops multiple modes of learning, multiple strategies for processing information. In such a world, neither attentional style is viewed as superior but both are assessed in terms of their relative value within a given context.

Multitasking often gets confused with distraction but as understood here, multitasking involves a way of monitoring and responding to the sea of information around us. Students need help distinguishing between being off task and handling multiple tasks at the same time. They need to acquire skills in recognizing the relationship between information coming at them from multiple directions at the same time and they need to acquire skills at making reasonable hypothesis and models based on partial, fragmented, or intermittent information (all part of the world they will confront in the workplace). They need to know when and how to pay close attention to a specific input as well as when and how to scan the environment searching for meaningful data.

What Might Be Done:

Multitasking enters pedagogical practice when teachers recognize the desires of contemporary students to come at topics from multiple directions all at the same time or to maintain what some have called "continuous partial attention," interacting with homework materials while engaged in other activities.

*A teacher's assistant blogs in real time in response to the classroom instructor's lectures, directing student's attentions to relevant links that illustrate and enhance the content being discussed, rather than providing distractions from the core activity. Students are encouraged to draw on this related material as they engage in classroom discussion, grounding their comments in specific examples and quotations from relevant documents.

*At the Brearley School in Manhattan, foreign language class materials are transferred directly from the school's servers to student's iPods. Rather than needing to set aside dedicated study time to practice a foreign language, this allows students to access their homework and foreign songs while walking home from classes or while engaging in other activities (Glassman, 2004).

*The online game cybernations.net, a simulation game that lets players learn about nation building and international diplomacy, breaks player actions down into distinct choices that can be made at the player's own pace. This encourages players to keep a browser window open to periodically check in on updates from their nation throughout the day while working on other tasks, rather than playing the game only during a dedicated play time. Homework assignments in the form of online games could be designed in a similar manner to facilitate patterns of multitasking.

October 23, 2006

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Three)

October 23, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

The following is the third installment of the white paper on youth and participatory culture which I developed for the MacArthur Foundation. You can read the whole paper here. This blog offers more information about the larger Digital Learning and Youth initiative. For the full cites of the materials referenced, please check the white paper. I was assisted in preparing this report by Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison.

Today's installment digs deeper into the relationship between what we are calling the new media literacies and things schools have traditionally taught, and then it starts to lay out the frameworks of social skills and cultural competencies which we think are emerging through youth involvement in participatory culture. Today, I am dealing with the first two of eleven such skills we identify in the report.

These skills are things we think young people need to acquire if they are going to be ready for full participation in the new media cultures. These skills emerge from the existing research on youth, media, and informal learning. We have tried to anchor each skill with a range of examples of existing practices from schools and after school programs which suggest just some of the ways that these skills could be linked to instructional activity. We know many educators are already trying to incorporate these skills and competencies into their pedagogy. We see this white paper as offering them support as well as hopefully more insights that can further inform their efforts.

What Should We Teach?: Rethinking Literacy

"Adolescents need to learn how to integrate knowledge from multiple sources, including music, video, online databases, and other media. They need to think critically about information that can be found nearly instantaneously through out the world. They need to participate in the kinds of collaboration that new communication and information technologies enable, but increasingly demand. Considerations of globalization lead us toward the importance of understanding the perspective of others, developing a historical grounding, and seeing the interconnectedness of economic and ecological systems." -- Bertram C. Bruce (2002)

For the moment, let's take as our starting point a definition of "21st century literacy" offered by the New Media Consortium (2005): "21st century literacy is the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms" We would modify this definition in two ways.

First, textual literacy remains a central skill in the 21st century: the new media literacies include traditional literacies that took shape around print culture as well as the newer forms of literacy that have taken shape around mass and digital media. Much writing about 21st Century Literacies seems to assume that communicating through visual, digital or audiovisual media will displace reading and writing. We fundamentally disagree. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Just as the emergence of written language changed our relationship to orality, and the emergence of printed texts changed our relationship to written language, the emergence of new digital modes of expression changes our relationship to printed texts. In some ways, as researchers such as Rebecca Black and Henry Jenkins have argued, the new digital cultures provide support systems to help youth improve their core competencies as readers and writers. They may provide opportunities for young people to get feedback about their writing and to gain experience in communicating with a larger public, experiences which might once have been restricted to student journalists but are now available to anyone who wants to blog or keep a live journal. So, even on the level of traditional literacies, we need to change our paradigms to reflect the media change which is taking place around us. Re-skilling involves expanding the required competencies, not pushing aside old skills to make room for the new.

Beyond core literacy, students need research skills. Among other things, they need to know how to access books and articles through a library; to take notes on and integrate secondary sources; to assess the reliability of data; to read maps and charts; to make sense of scientific visualizations; to grasp what kinds of information are being conveyed by various systems of representation; to distinguish between fiction and non fiction, fact and opinion; to construct arguments and marshall evidence. If anything, these traditional skills take on even greater importance as students venture beyond collections which have been hand screened by librarians and into the more open space of the web. Some of these skills have traditionally been taught by librarians who, in the modern era, are reconceiving their role -- less as curators of bounded collections and more as information facilitators who can help users find what they need, online or off, and can cultivate good strategies for searching out needed material.

Students also need to develop technical skills -- they need to know how to log on, to search, to use various programs, to focus a camera, to edit footage, to do some basic programming and so forth. Yet, to reduce the new media literacies to these technical skills would be a mistake on the order of confusing penmanship with composition. Since the technologies are undergoing such rapid change, it is probably impossible to codify which technologies or techniques students need to know. Schools have so far conceived of the challenges of digital media primarily in these technical terms with the computer lab displacing the typing classroom but too often, this training occurs in a vacuum cut off from larger notions of literacy or research.

As media literacy advocates have claimed over the past several decades, students also need to acquire a basic understanding of the ways media representations structure our perceptions of the world, the economic and cultural contexts within which mass media is produced and circulated, the motives and goals which shape the media that they consume, and alternative practices which operate outside the commercial mainstream. Such groups have long called for schools to foster a critical understanding of media as one of the most powerful social, economic, political, and cultural institutions of our era. What we are calling here the new media literacies should be taken as an expansion of rather than a substitution for the mass media literacies.

What New Skills Matter?: New Social Skills and Cultural Competencies

All of these skills are necessary, even essential, but they are not sufficient. And that brings us to our second point about the notion of 21st century literacy described above: the new media literacies should be seen as social skills and cultural competencies -- ways of interacting within a larger community -- and not simply as individualized skills to be used for personal expression. The social dimensions of literacy are acknowledged in the New Media Center document only in terms of the distribution of media content. We really need to push further by talking about how meaning emerges collectively and collaboratively in the new media environment and how creativity operates differently in an open-source culture based on sampling, appropriation, transformation, and repurposing. The social production of meaning is more than individual interpretation multiplied; it represents a qualitative difference in the ways we make sense of cultural experience and in that sense, it represents a profound change in how we understand literacy. In such a world, youth need skills at working within social networks, at pooling knowledge within a collective intelligence, at negotiating across cultural differences which shape the governing assumptions of different communities, and of reconciling conflicting bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world around them. We need to integrate these new knowledge cultures into our schools - not only through group work but also through long distance collaborations between different learning communities. Students need to discover what it is like to contribute their own expertise to a process which involves many intelligences, a process which they encounter readily in their participation in fan discussion lists or blogging, for example. Indeed, this may be what is most radical about the new literacies -- that they enable collaboration and knowledge sharing with large-scale communities who may never interact on a face to face basis. Right now, schools are still training autonomous problem-solvers, whereas as students enter the workplace, they are increasingly being asked to work in teams, drawing on different sets of expertise, and collaborating to solve problems.

Changes in the media environment are altering our understanding of literacy and requiring new habits of mind, new ways of processing culture and interacting with the world around us. We are just starting to identify and assess these emerging sets of social skills and cultural competencies. We have only a broad sense of which of these competencies are most apt to matter as young people move from the realms of play and education and into the adult world of work and society. What follows, then, is a provisional list of eleven core skills needed to participate within the new media landscape. These skills have been identified both by reviewing the existing body of scholarship on new media literacies and by surveying the forms of informal learning that are taking place within the participatory culture we are describing here. As suggested above, mastering these skills remains a key step in preparing young people "to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life." In short, these are skills some kids are learning through participatory culture but they are also skills that all kids need to learn if they are going to be equal participants in the world of tomorrow. We identify a range of activities which might be deployed in schools or after school programs, across a range of disciplines and subject matters, to foster these social skills and cultural competencies. These activities are by no means an exhausted list but rather are simply illustrations of the kind of work already being done in each area. Part of the goal of this report is to challenge those who have responsibility for teaching our young people to think more systematically and creatively about the many different ways they might build these skills into their day-to-day activities in ways that are appropriate to the content they want to teach.

Play-- the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem solving

Play, as psychologists and anthropologists have long recognized, has a key role in shaping children's relationship to their bodies, tools, communities, surroundings, and knowledge. Most of children's earliest learning comes through playing with the materials at hand. Through play, children try on roles, experiment with culturally central processes, manipulate core resources, and explore their immediate environments. As they grow older, play can motivate other forms of learning.

Anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt describes what her son and his friend learned through baseball card collecting:

"Sam and Willie learned a lot about phonics that year by trying to decipher surnames on baseball cards, and a lot about cities, states, heights, weights, places of birth, stages of life.... And baseball cards opened the door to baseball books, shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, magazines, histories, biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, even poems.... Literacy began for Sam with the newly pronounceable names on the picture cards and brought him what has been easily the broadest, most varied, most rewarding, and most integrated experience of his 13-year life."

Pratt's account suggests this playful activity motivated three very different kinds of learning. First, the activity itself demanded certain skills and practices, which had clear payoffs for academic subjects. For example, working out batting averages gave Sam an occasion to rehearse his math skills, arranging his cards introduced him to the process of classification, and discussing the cards gave him reason to work on his communication skills. On another level, the cards provided a scaffold, which motivated and shaped his acquisition of other forms of school knowledge. The cards inspired Sam to think about the cities where the teams were located and learn map- reading skills, the history of baseball provided a context through which he understood 20th century American history, and the interest in stadiums introduced some basics about architecture. Third, Sam developed a sense of himself as a learner: "He learned the meaning of expertise, of knowing about something well enough that you can start a conversation with a stranger and feel sure of holding your own" (Pratt, 1991, p. 34).

Game designer Scot Osterweil (The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis) has described the mental attitude which surrounds play as highly conducive for learning:

When children are deep at play they engage with the fierce, intense attention that we'd like to see them apply to their schoolwork. Interestingly enough, no matter how intent and focused a child is at that play, maybe even grimly determined they may be at that game play, if you asked them afterwards, they will say that they were having fun. So, the fun of game play is not non-stop mirth but rather the fun of engaging of attention that demands a lot of you and rewards that effort. I think most good teachers believe that in the best moments classroom learning can be the same kind of fun. But a game is a moment when the kid gets to have that in spades, when the kid gets to be focused and intent and hardworking and having fun at the same time.

You will note here a shift in emphasis from fun (which in our sometimes still puritanical culture gets defined as the opposite of seriousness) to engagement. When you play a game, a fair amount of what you end up doing isn't especially fun at the moment. It can be grindwork, not unlike homework, which allows you to master skills or collect materials or put things in their proper place in anticipation of a payoff down the line. The key is that this activity is deeply motivated. You are willing to go through the grindwork because it has a goal or purpose which matters to you. When that happens, you are engaged -- whether we are talking about the engagement many of us find in our professional lives or in the learning process or the engagement which some of us find through playing games. For the current generation, games may represent the best way of tapping that sense of engagement with learning.

While to date much of the discussion of games and education have seen games as motivating kids to learn other kinds of content (Pratt's move from baseball cards to geography), there has been a growing recognition among researchers that play itself -- as a means of exploring and processing knowledge, as a mode of problem-solving -- may be a valuable skill children need to master as preparation for subsequent roles and responsibilities in the adult world. In other words, by itself, play is helpful for understanding a content area in the sense that it allows a player to "experiment" with a learning environment. Playing with baseball cards won't teach a student the principles of statistics, but it will orient him or her to the experience of thinking about statistical variations.

Part of what makes play valuable as a mode of problem solving and learning is that it lowers the emotional stakes of failing: players are encouraged to suspend some of the real world consequences of the represented actions, to take risks and learn through trial and error. The underlying logic is one of die and do over. As literacy expert James Gee has noted, children often feel locked out of the worlds described in their textbooks through the depersonalized and abstract prose used to describe them. Games construct compelling worlds players move through. Players feel a part of those worlds and have some stake in the events unfolding there. Games not only provide a rationale for learning: what players learn is put immediately to use to solve compelling problems with real consequences in the world of the game. Game designer Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims) has argued, "In some sense, a game is nothing but a set of problems. We're actually selling people problems for 40 bucks a pop....And the more interesting games in my opinion are the ones that have a larger solution space. In other words, there's not one specific way to solve a puzzle, but, in fact, there's an infinite range of solutions. .... The game world becomes an external artifact of their internal representation of the problem space." For Wright, the player's hunger for challenge and complexity motivates them to pick up the game in the first place.

Games follow something akin to the scientific process: Players are asked to make their own discoveries and then apply what they learn to new contexts. No sooner does a player enter a game than she begins identifying core conditions and looking for problems which must be addressed; based on the available information, the player poses a certain hypothesis about how the world works and what are the best ways of bringing its properties under their control; she tests and refines that hypothesis through actions in the game which either fail or succeed; the player refines the model of the world as she goes. More sophisticated games allow her to do something more -- to experiment with the properties of the world, framing new possibilities which involve manipulation of relevant variables and see what happens. Meta-gaming, the discourse which surrounds game play, provides a context for players to reflect upon and articulate what they have learned through game play. Here, for example, is how Kurt Squire describes the meta-gaming which occurs around Civilization III: "Players enroll as advanced players, having spent dozens, if not hundreds of hours with the game and having mastered its basic rules. As players begin to identify and exploit loopholes, they propose and implement changes to the games' rules, identify superior strategies, and invent new game rule systems, including custom modifications and scenarios."

Early readers of this report have expressed some skepticism that schools should or could teach young people how to play. This resistance reflects the confusion between play as a source of fun and play as a form of engagement and experimentation. While it is certainly not a bad idea to introduce more fun into our schools, we are really focusing here on a mode of active engagement, one which encourages experimentation and risk-taking, one which sees the process of solving a problem to be as important as finding the answer, one which offers clearly defined goals and roles which encourage strong identifications and emotional investments. As we will see, this form of play is closely related to two other important skills, Simulation and Performance.

What Might Be Done:

Educators (in school and out) tap into play as a skill when they encourage free-form experimentation and open-ended speculation.

History teachers ask students to entertain alternative history scenarios, speculating on what might have happened if Germany had won World War II or if native Americans had colonized Europe. Such questions can lead to productive explorations centering on why certain events occurred the ways that they did and what impact they had. Such questions also don't have right and wrong answers; they emphasize creative thinking rather than memorization; they allow diverse levels of engagement; they allow students to feel less intimidated by adult expertise; yet they also lend themselves to the construction of arguments and the mobilization of evidence.

*Art and design students are turned loose with a diverse array of everyday materials and encouraged to use them to solve a specified design problem. Such activities encourage students to revisit familiar materials and everyday objects with fresh perspectives, to think through common problems from multiple directions, and to respect alternative responses to the same challenge. This approach is closely associated with the innovative design work of Ideo, a Palo Alto consultant, but can also be seen in various reality television programs, such as Project Runway or The Iron Chef, which require contestants to adopt distinctive and multiple approaches to shared problems.

*Games offer the potential to learn through a new form of direct experience. Physics teachers use the game Supercharged, which was developed as part of the MIT Games to Teach initiative, to help students to better understand core principles of electromagnetism. As a means for learning the laws of electromagnetism through first-hand experience, students navigate electromagnetic mazes by planting electrical charges that attract or repel their vehicles. Teachers can then build on this intuitive and experiential learning in the classroom, introducing equations, diagrams, or visualizations that help them to better understand the underlying principles that they are deploying and then sending them back to play through the levels again and improve their performance.

Simulation -- the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

New media provides powerful new ways of representing and manipulating information. New forms of simulation expand our cognitive capacity, allowing us to deal with larger bodies of information, to experiment with more complex configurations of data, to form hypotheses quickly and test them against different variables in real time. The emergence of systems-based thinking across a range of academic and professional fields has gone hand in hand with the development of digital simulations. Simulations can be effective in representing known knowledge or in testing emerging theories. Because simulations are dynamic, and because they are governed by the systematic application of grounding assumptions, they can be a tool for discovery as researchers observe the emergent properties of these virtual worlds.We learn through simulations by a process of trial and error: new discoveries lead researchers to refine their models, tweaking particular variables, trying out different contingencies. Educators have always known that students learn more through direct observation and experimentation than from reading about something in a textbook or listening to a lecture. Simulations broaden the kinds of experiences users can have with compelling data, giving us a chance to see and do things which would be impossible in the real world.

Contemporary video games allow kids to play with sophisticated simulations and in the process, to develop an intuitive understanding of how we might use simulations to test our assumptions about the way the world works. John Seely Brown tells the story of a 16 year old boy, Colin, for whom the game, Caesar III, had shaped his understanding of the ancient world:

"Colin said: "I don't want to study Rome in high school. Hell, I build Rome every day in my on-line game" ... Of course, we could dismiss this narrative construction as not really being a meaningful learning experience, but a bit later he and his dad were engaged in a discussion about the meaningfulness of class distinctions - lower, middle, etc - and his dad stopped and asked him what class actually means to him. Colin responded: "Well, it's how close you are to the Senate." "Where did you learn that, Colin?" he said, "The closer you are physically to the Senate building, the plazas, the gardens, or the Triumphal Arch raises the desirability of the land, makes you upper class and produces plebians. It's based on simple rules of location to physical objects in the games (Caesar III)". Then, he added, "I know that in the real world the answer is more likely how close you are to the senators, themselves - that defines class. But it's kinda the same."

Colin's story helps us to see two important aspects of simulations for learning: first, students often find simulations far more compelling than more traditional ways of representing knowledge; consequently, they spend more time engaging with them and make more discoveries. Second, students experience what they have learned from a robust simulation as their own discoveries. These simulations expose players to powerful new ways of seeing the world and encourage them to engage in a process of modeling which is central to the way modern science operates. Many contemporary games -- Railroad Tycoons for instance -- incorporate spread sheets, maps, graphs and charts, which students must learn to use in order to play the game. Students are thus motivated to move back and forth across this complex and integrated information system, acting upon the simulated environment on the basis of information gleamed from a wide range of different representations.

As games researcher Eric Klopfer cautions, however, simulations enhance learning only if we understand how to read them:

"As simulations inform us on anything from global warming to hurricane paths to homeland security, we must know how to interpret this information. If we know that simulations give us information on probabilities we can make better decisions. If we understand the assumptions that go into simulations we can better evaluate that evidence and act accordingly. Of course this applies to decision makers who must act upon that information (police, government, insurance, etc.); it also is important that each citizen should be able to make appropriate decisions themselves based on that information. As it is now, such data is either interpreted by the general public as 'fact' or on the contrary 'contrived data with an agenda.' Neither of these perspectives is useful and instead some ability to analyze and weigh such evidence is critical. Simulations are only as good as their underlying models. In a world of competing simulations, we need to know how to critically assess the reliability and credibility of different models for representing the world around us."

(personal correspondence).

Students who deploy simulations through learning have more flexibility in being able to customize models and manipulate data to explore questions which have captured their own curiosity. There is a thin line between reading a simulation (which may involve changing variables and testing outcomes) and designing simulations. As new modeling technologies become more widely available and as the toolkits needed to construct such models are simplified, students have the opportunity to construct their own simulations. Ian Bogost argues that computer games foster what he calls procedural literacy -- a capacity to restructure and reconfigure knowledge, to look at problems from multiple vantage points, and through this process, to develop a greater systemic understanding of the rules and procedures which shape our everyday experience. Bogost writes, "Engendering true procedural literacy means creating multiple opportunities for learners --- children and adults -- to understand and experiment with reconfigurations of basic building blocks of all kinds". Young people are learning how to work with simulations through their game play and schools should build upon such knowledge to help them to become critical readers and effective designers of simulation and modeling tools. They need to be given a critical vocabulary for understanding the kind of thought experiments which get performed through simulations and the way these new digital resources inform research across a range of disciplines.

What Might Be Done:

Students need to learn how to manipulate and interpret existing simulations and how to construct their own dynamic models of real world processes.

*Teachers in a business class ask kids to make imaginary investments in the stock market and then monitor actual business reports to track the rise and falls of their "holdings." This well-established classroom practice mirrors what kids do when they form fantasy sports leagues, tracking the performance of players on the sports page to score their results, and engaging in imaginary trades to enhance their overall standings. Both of these practices share a movement between imaginary scenarios (pretend investments or teams) and a real world data set. The simulated activities introduce them to the logics by which their real world counterparts operate and to actual data sets, research processes, and information sources.

*Groups such as OnRampArts in Los Angeles, Urban Games Academy in Baltimore and Atlanta, or Global Kidz in New York City involve kids in the design of their own games. These groups see a value in having kids translate a body of knowledge -- the history of the settlement of the New World in the case of OnRampArts's Tropical America -- into the activities and iconography of games. Here, students are encouraged to think of alternative ways of modeling knowledge and learn to use the vocabulary of game design to represent central aspects of the world around them.

*Simulation games like SimCity provide a context for learning a skill Andy Clark calls "embracing co-control". In this game, creating and maintaining a city requires exerting various forms of indirect control. Instead of having a top-down control to design a happy thriving city, the player must engage in a bottom-up process, where the player "grows" a city by manipulating such variables as zoning and land prices. It is only through gaining a familiarity with all the parts of the system, and how they interact, that the player is able to nudge the flow in a way that respects the flow. Such a skill can be understood as a process of "com[ing] to grips with decentralized emergent order" , a mandatory skill for understanding complex systems.

*Students in New Mexico facing a summer of raging forest fires throughout their home state used simulations to understand the way flames spread. Manipulating factors such as density of trees, wind and rain, they saw how even minute changes to the environmental conditions could have profound effects on fire growth. This helped them understand the efficacy of common techniques such as forest thinning and controlled burns.

October 10, 2006

Singapore-MIT Collaborate on Games Innovation Lab

October 10, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

I am going to be writing a great deal about this project in the months ahead. I am not able to tell you much more yet than is found in this news article which was released by MIT News Office this morning. But suffice it to say that all of us in the Comparative Media Studies Program are extremely excited about these developments, which have been under negotiation since January. As you will read below, William Uricchio and I will have a central role in this project, which is designed to spur innovation, diversity, and creativity in games design. Singapore - MIT collaboration aims to spur gaming sector

October 9, 2006

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore Media Development Authority have announced an agreement to establish the Singapore-MIT International Game Lab (SMIGL). The pioneering collaboration aims to further digital game research globally, develop world-class academic programs in game technology, and establish Singapore as a vital node in the international game industry.

The directors of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program (CMS) -- Henry Jenkins, DeFlorez Professor of Humanities, and William Uricchio, professor of comparative media studies -- will co-direct SMIGL, which will have offices both in Singapore and at MIT. Jenkins and Uricchio will serve as the leading principal investigators in the collaboration.

In announcing the SMIGL collaboration, Uricchio, a specialist in trans-national media distribution and reception, said, "We are excited by this collaboration with colleagues in Singapore and the opportunity to push game research and the industry in new directions, and we very much look forward to initiating an international dialogue among leading scholars, designers, students and gamers."

Uricchio described SMIGL as a "unique chance to reflect on games and to push them in new and unexpected directions, whether in terms of emerging technologies and interfaces, diverse cultural vocabularies, or important niches that have simply been neglected in the rush to seize the largest market share."

Jenkins researches media and the way people incorporate it into their lives. "The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab collaboration will provide a strong catalyst for innovation by bringing together students, industry leaders and faculty from very different cultures and backgrounds to work together and to conduct research that could have a great impact on the international game industry," he said.

The SMIGL initiative will enable students and researchers from Singapore to collaborate with MIT researchers and game industry professionals in international research projects. Beyond technology development, SMIGL will also conduct research on the artistic, creative, business and social aspects of games. The new initiative will also provide Singapore game researchers and professionals with access to cutting-edge technologies, the latest conceptual developments and links to international game development and research communities.

Michael Yap, executive director of the Interactive & Digital Media R&D Programme Office, said, "Over the next five years, we expect some 300 of our best talents from the industry and academia to take advantage of this unique opportunity to work closely with the best research minds at MIT.

"We are delighted to collaborate with MIT, one of the world's leading technology and research institutes. The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab will initiate and produce groundbreaking research in games, which is rapidly emerging as a global research focus. At the same time, the collaboration will further equip our industry-bound students to make a significant impact on the local game industry," Yap said.

Outcomes planned for SMIGL's initial period include development of both an academic and a high-impact research program, publication of peer-reviewed research papers and production of publicly distributable digital games.

The research resulting from the SMIGL collaboration will expand the ways in which the Singapore game industry can build and develop future products, and will aim to identify unique genres and aesthetics that are relevant to the Singapore game industry. In addition, according to the Media Development Authority, it will enhance the country's competitive advantage in areas such as education and tourism.

October 05, 2006

For Those in the San Francisco Area...

October 05, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

I will be staying in Palo Alto this weekend and will have some time on my hands on Sunday. Several friends suggested that I might organize a meetup of readers of this blog who live in the Bay area. I wondered if there were people out there who might want to meet each other and join me for a Sunday brunch. I am thinking of 11 am or thereabouts at some place in Palo Alto. If you are interested, send me e-mail at henry3@mit.edu and once I get there, I will try to scout out a location.

September 27, 2006

Ms. Doonesbury's Lament or Why She Can't Take Our Class

September 27, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

We've been getting some calls and messages here at the Comparative Media Studies Program regarding the situation with Mike Doonesbury's daughter getting lotteried out of our Introduction to Media Studies subject. See the most recent installments from the long running comic strip.

An installment a few weeks ago introduced the problem, saying that she was lotteried out of a HASS-D subject in Media Studies.

So let me clarify some of the background. In MIT lingo, a HASS-D is a Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Distribution subject. Essentially, this is our variant on the core curriculum. Each student selects from a broad array of possible options. Interestingly, there is only one HASS-D in Media Studies at MIT: the Introduction to Media Studies class which we teach each fall. I created this class in collaboration with Martin Roberts about a decade ago. It is currently being taught by my colleague, Beth Coleman, who doesn't look very much like the guy shown in the cartoon.

The class is a large lecture hall subject which draws 50-75 students and breaks out into a range of smaller discussion sessions.

By design, HASS-Ds are small subjects. We are not allowed to have more than 25 students in the discussion sections. A Lottery system is set up to deal with the overflow problem created by the most popular classes. One of the prides of MIT is that these HASS-D subjects are taught by MIT faculty -- we all spend time in the undergraduate classroom -- unlike a certain place up the road from us, where such subjects would likely be taught by graduate students.

Ironically, Introduction to Media Studies has never actually had a lottery. Gary Trudeau is correct that the subject draws strong interest -- many students share Ms. Doonesbury's passionate engagement in the topic -- but because of the mixture of lecture and breakout session, we have been able to accommodate every student who wants to take the class.

That said, I would have little sympathy for Ms. Doonesbury's protests for special treatment. MIT is very much a meritocracy and would not make exceptions to its policies based on parental pressure or other forms of personal influence. MIT is proud of the fact that it does not allow "legacies" -- students whose parents have MIT degrees do not receive preferential treatment in our process -- and has never given out an honorary degree. Those who wear the brass rat have earned that honor by hard work. We try to be flexible in accommodating special needs of students but at the end of the day, a lottery is probably the fairest way to decide who stays when a class is oversubscribed.

Anyway, I thought people would be interested in knowing the back-story on these particular strips. I can say that we in the Comparative Media Studies program are delighted that Ms. Doonesbury is so enthusiastic about wanting to get into our classes. We hope she makes it one of these days. We'd love to see her become a major. A growing number of frosh are arriving at MIT wanting to major in our program. We are now the largest Humanities major at MIT.

Several people have noted that the guy in the cartoon doesn't look very much like me -- and he looks even less like Beth (who as I said is the person teaching the class this term). So, here's the offer. I will send a free copy of Convergence Culture to the first person who sends me a doctored version of the cartoon which replaces the rather generic professor character with an authentic Henry Jenkins avatar. Send them to me at henry3@mit.edu.

Update!: We have a winner and in record time. Genie, a reader from Australia, was the first to send me a "corrected" (or some would say "doctored") version of the Doonesbury cartoon with my likeness embedded. Here it is:

doctored%20doonesbury.jpg

After all, to "doctor" is to make someone better, isn't it?

September 25, 2006

Update: The Flow Television Poll

September 25, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

A while back, I posted here my choices for Flow's television poll: Flow is an online zine where media scholars share their insights about contemporary developments in the medium with what they hope will be a diverse and engaged general readership. Participants were asked to identify but not rank their top ten favorite television shows of last season. Well, the results are now in and can be read in their entirity over at Flow for anyone who might be interested in what a bunch of academics think is worth watching on television. The top ranks look like this: Lost won overall, identified by 12 of the 24 critics who participated; the second tier down was Arrested Development, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with 10 votes each (Keep in mind that 7 people also voted for Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club which may suggest that news/entertainment got more votes overall than Lost depending on how we count). 8 people (myself included) vote for Veronica Mars; Project Runway and Deadwood got 6 votes each; and altogether, 94 different series, specials, commercials, and YouTube videos got identified by at least one voter. Of the shows I identified on my original list, Spooks/MI-5 was the only one unique to my rankings. I don't know whether I should be depressed because my taste is so mainstream or kind of proud.

As Jason Mittell notes, many of the shows identified reflect the ways that new media is impacting our relationship with television -- shows that have not yet aired legally in the markets where the critics live, content which circulated only on Youtube or as in the case of Colbert's remarks, gained visibility through digital circulation, and series which really only found their audiences among academics once they became available on DVDs. In fact, he suggested that The Wire might have ranked very high indeed, based on feedback from academics who were discovering it on DVD had it not been off the air during the 2005-2006 season and thus been ineligible for inclusion. Mittell predicts it is an early front-runner for status in this coming year on the strength of its new season which is indeed getting rave reviews. (I still have to catch up with Season 3 on dvd before I can watch it but my Tivo is storing away episodes for the cold winter months ahead.)

Anyway, I thought you might be interested.

September 23, 2006

For Those Living In Or Around New York City...

September 23, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

My book tour promoting Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide takes me to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria next week. Here are the details:

Convergence Culture:

A Conversation with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

Wednesday, September 27, 7:00 p.m.

Henry Jenkins, author of the new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, and Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You), two of the nation's most incisive cultural critics, will discuss the ground-shifting and often surprising ways in which audiences are participating in the creation, distribution, and consumption of media in the digital age, and the effects of these developments on entertainment and learning. The program will be followed by a reception and book signing. Tickets: $10 public/$7.50 for students with ID/Free for Museum members, call to RSVP. Buy Tickets Online

I hope to see some of my blog-readers from the Greater New York City area in the audience. I am told that they will put up a streaming audio and transcript of the talk sometime in October and I would announce it here when they do.

I am also scheduled to be interviewed on Tuesday night on the Joey Reynolds Show on WOR and the WOR network. For those not in NYC, the show seems to be available online here.

September 16, 2006

Will Newspapers Survive?

September 16, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

For those of you who are living in or around the Boston area, I wanted to flag two events next week that will be hosted by the MIT Communications Forum and will be free and open to the public.

The Emergence of Citizens' Media

Tuesday, Sept 19

5-7 pm, Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab

Speakers:

Alex Beam, Boston Globe

Ellen Foley, Wisconsin State Journal

Dan Gillmor, Center for Citizen Media

News, Information and the Wealth of Networks

Thursday, Sept 21

5-7 pm, MIT Building 3, Room 270 (3-270)

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

William Uricchio, MIT

The second panel emerged in part because USC anthropologist Mimi Ito wrote an interesting post in her blog comparing Convergence Culture and the Wealth of Networks after Yochai and I had visited her center about a week apart. Here's what she wrote:

Henry's Convergence Culture and Yochai's The Wealth of Networks, are the state of the art in thinking about new media and the Internet. Both provide both rich detail in the form of concrete cases as well as frameworks for understanding the social, technical, and economic changes coming down the pipeline that are both highly original and syncretic. But my goal at the moment is not to do a book review. I just want to ruminate on one thread of conversation that emerged from spending a day each with these thinkers and their texts.

Henry and Yochai are in many ways complementary thinkers who share an appreciation for the bottom-up, emergent, and viral forms of social organization emerging from the maturing media ecology of the Internet. Mostly they are in agreement about the scope and nature of the sweeping changes on the horizon as content turns digitally networked, and they both are actively participating in shaping these conditions of the future to be safer for the creative and knowledge production of everyday folks. But they also have some interesting differences....

Yochai also believes in the power of distributed intelligence and wired prosumers, and he sees amateur cultures such as fan cultural production as examples of "the wealth of networks." But his focus is on what he calls "nonmarket" forms of culture and knowledge production. If Henry's central cases are media fandom and alternative news, Yochai's are open source and distributed models of software and knowledge production such as Linux, Wikipedia, alternative news, and some forms of science (eg. bioinformatics, seti@home). He argues that the dominance of commercially produced forms of knowledge and culture is a historical anomaly, and we are in the midst of a correction that will give more weight to amateur, non-commercial and folk forms. In many ways his argument is probably more radical than what Henry or I might say about the promise of amateur and folk cultures. He sees everyday amateur producers as increasingly the source of generative forms of knowledge and culture, that provide a genuine alternative to commercial media.... At the end of the week, I think what it came down to for me was that this balance depends crucially on the specificities of the cultural forms in question. Yochai pointed out that his argument about distributed nonmarket production really focuses on cultural forms that can be easily decomposed, like software and encyclopedia entries. In his book, he talks about how even in the case of science textbooks, where it seems like this should work, the units are large enough that it is difficult to sustain as a volunteer effort. If we look at music, for example, amateur performance has always persisted because it is a media form that is amenable to local performance. Contrast that with something like feature films or the sustained multi-year (or at least season-long) narratives you get in an anime series, and you start moving into domains that require both a certain amount of capitalization as well as a sustained authorial viewpoint.

This will be the first time Benkler and Jenkins have appeared on stage together -- indeed, the first time we've met face to face. Benkler and I come from very different backgrounds but our books arrive at remarkably similar conclusions about participatory culture in a networked society. This is scheduled to be an unstructured conversation about what our two books might suggest about the future of journalism and civic media. I know we will have a lot to talk about.

For those of you who live outside the Boston area, these events will be available after the fact on streaming audio. I will provide information once the webcasts go up on line.

September 06, 2006

Behind the Scenes: Designing Rocketo

September 06, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

Last Friday, we hosted our orientation for new and returning graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies Program. One of the featured speakers on the program was Frank Espinosa, the creator, writer, and artist behind Rocketo, a comic book series which he is self-publishing through Image comics.

Rocketo has been singled out by Entertainment Magazine as one of the best new comics and is currently in the running for three Eisner Awards. Espinosa came to comics following an extensive career working in animation at Disney and Warner Brothers, which included contributions to the redesign of the classic Warner Brothers characters and the writing of the in-house guidebook for their animators and work in the design of toys, games, and theme park attractions.

Rocketo is not like any comic you have ever held in your hands before -- for one thing, it's an adventure comic (decisively not a superhero saga) at a time when this genre has all but disappeared from view. It borrows as much from classic science fiction (the Lensman books, Cordwainer Smith, among others) as it does from classic mythology (Harpies and Kraken anyone). From the first page, you realize you are entering into a thoroughly imagined, deeply immersive world -- one which mirrors our own and yet is strangely different at the same time -- a world fully stocked with interesting creatures, strange lands, and well defined characters. For another, it's structured horizontally; the artwork is highly expressive and often abstracted (reminding me at times of the most accomplished work to come out of UPA during the 1950). His use of color to capture emotion and movement is nothing short of breathtaking. Rocketo is a remarkable blending of the pulp elements of popular culture and the formal experimentation one associates with the outer limits of alternative comics. The first graphic novel, Adventures in the Hidden Sea, has been published and he is just now finishing his first story arc dealing with this character.

We are lucky enough to have Espinosa as a Martin Luther King Fellow in our program for the coming year, where he will be teaching classes in Character Design and World Building, as well as supporting some of our efforts in educational games and media literacy.

We recorded Espinosa's talk as an experiment and I figured I would pass it along to my readers here. Every Thursday, throughout the term, the Comparative Media Studies Program hosts a speaker series. The series is designed to introduce our students to cutting edge developments in all of the sites being impacted by media change. So, we may bring in a comics artist one week, an advertising executive the next, a filmmaker the week after, and an activist the week after that. We try to mix and match media, to combine academic and practioners, but to keep it all lively and informal. Some weeks, we host large scale public events through the MIT Communications Forum. The Forum has long had webcast versions of its programs, such as this one featuring television writer David Milch (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blues, Deadwood) or this one featuring long-time film industry spokesperson Jack Valenti. As of this term, we are also going to be offering podcasts of our events and I will be flagging them for my readers.

What follows are a few of the highlights of his talk but there's no way to fully capture his wicked sense of humor, his rambunctious intellect and his engaging personality, all of which come through well in this podcast.

Espinosa shared something of the creative process which led to Rocketo. As an animator, he was fascinated with the challenges of telling stories through comics with "no sound, no movement." The book, which deals with a heroic explorer and map-maker, reflected his childhood fascination with the adventures of real world explorers as well as such works as Thief of Baghdad, Flash Gordon, and Terry and the Pirates. He lamented the shift in contemporary science fiction away from space exploration and towards "fighting viruses and Klingons." The book also reflected his fascination with ancient maps when large parts of the world were still unknown and when uncharted territory might be imagined to be the site of strange creatures or exotic peoples. Yet, though he draws on classic influences, he also taps contemporary tensions in the culture, designing a subplot about Rocketo returning home from a war, destroyed and emotionally devastated, in response to news reports from Baghdad.

The world itself started to take shape around "my crazy passion for birdmen and tigermen" and his desires to situate such man/animal hybrid into a coherent and rationalized world. He went through a process of problem solving: How could there be tigermen? Why would you create one in the first place? How do you create a world that allows for exploration and how do you populate it with tigermen? In trying to answer these questions, Espinosa was drawn towards the realm of post-apocalyptic science fiction. He disliked the dirty looking futures represented in the Mad Max series and yet he wanted to see what would happen if he destroyed the world and then resorted the pieces: "now the continents are broken and reconfigured. This gives us a reason to explore again." He populates the world with a variety of genetic mutants, thus providing a rationale for his Tigermen.

Turning his attention to his protagonist, Rocketo, Espinosa explained, "The hero had to be special. Otherwise, the birdmen will steal the show." Rocketo was literally born to be a hero: his parents come from much generation of explorers and mappers; they were genetic designed so that they have a "living compass" under their skin which allows them to navigate in a world which no longer has a magnetic field. Rocketo, he suggests, is "Marco Polo...not motivated by power, lust or money... but by the desire to see new worlds." He can change his body into steel and become a human space ship.

Along side Rocketo stands Spiro, a dogman. His whole family are psychotic warriors but he turns out to be a guy who just wants to live to see another day and if possible, come out on top of one of his many money making schemes. As he explained, "Spiro gave me trouble from day one -- Rocketo is genetically designed to be a hero. Spiro's the hero because he has to make choices." Spiro started out as a "really mean character -- a human pit bull" but he got softer as the book evolved. Espinosa kept searching for an archetype through which to understand this character and finally began to hear Spiro's dialogue being delivered in Humphrey Bogart's voice from Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

As he talks, it is clear that Espinosa takes great pleasure in the freedom that independent comics allows him. For the first time, he says, he is producing his own comics: "there's no Bugs Bunny in it anywhere." As he told the students, Disney asserted claims over everything he produced but Warners was more lax, allowing him time to sit and reflect on his own projects and thus to slowly develop the core concepts and designs that would feed into Rocketo over a five or six year period. The story and themes of Rocketo emerged from an earlier comics project -- Major Rocket -- which was a "funny version of Flash Gordon" and had been aimed for kids. The new book targeted adults but kept Rocket in the name out of "nostalgia." He conceded that the book would have done better in the current market if Rocketo had a "big logo on his chest and wore a mask.": "America is the land of superheroes, whether we like it or not." But the comic has attracted a particularly strong following in Europe, which values its distinctive look and feel and responds well to its borrowings from expressionistic art.

His shattered world framework allows him to mix and match styles and themes from across the planet, to depict ancient Trojan warships in German Expressionist style, to draw his Harpies as if they were African masks brought to life and his Earthmen as if they were walking and talking versions of the heads found on Easter Island, to create multiple variants of flying giraffes and to mix them with mechanisms straight out of Jules Verne, to combine islands which are living coral reefs with giant robots that could destroy the planet and "totem poles as large as the Empire State Building." More than anything else, Espinosa communicated to my students the degree to which even the most idiosyncratic work builds upon a cultural reservoir and takes inspiration from other artist's works. As he explained, "never close your mind to any influence...Every problem has been solved" by some earlier artist or cultural tradition. And so he spends a great deal of time in research -- even though the comic itself is so stylized in its presentation and so wild-eyed in its imagination.

Espinosa suggests that his visual style emerges because he still thinks about comics through the eyes of an animator. In animation, he argues, exaggeration is the norm and if you want to make things realistic, you would be better off photographing them. He suggests that his artwork is interested in capturing movement ("how the torso moves at a particular moment") rather than detail ("How the chain mail fits around the chest"). He wants to convey "the shape of the movement" and allows his colors to do most of the work, suggesting rather than filling in what happens: "Let your mind paint the rest. You are a much better artist than I am." Espinosa described himself as someone who liked to work fest and analyze his choices later, trying to preserve the spontaneous energy and improvisational impulses that shape his work rather than seeking too polished a product.

Espinosa's talk gave our students a vivid picture of his own creative process, the ways that his work is informed by influences that run across history, across media, and across national borders, and the ways that his work depends on the skills in character design and worldbuilding that he will be teaching in his classes this year.

September 03, 2006

Picking Favorites: The Flow Television Poll

September 03, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

As a periodic contributor to the online media studies webzine, Flow, I received an invitation this summer from Jason Mittell (who regularly posts comments here at this blog) to participate in a poll about the highlights of the past television season. Here's how he described our task:

The goal is to solicit the opinions of Flow's esteemed group of writers & editors (past & present) in generating a poll of the best television of the last year, as somewhat arbitrarily defined as July 1 2005 - June 30 2006. ....A few clarifications - we're looking for "new" television only, so any program or series you vote for must have aired new episodes within the 05-06 season, but it does not need to be a new series. The bulk of Flow's contributors are located in the US, so we expect the majority of entries will be American television - however, if you wish to vote for a non-US title, you may (as long as it aired new episodes within the timeframe). If you are not located in the US, you can vote for any show that aired episodes new to your region within the timeframe, including older shows just coming to your locale.... Finally, you may vote for programs that did not air on traditional television (like an online series or unaired pilot), but please include a way for the curious to find it - we are looking for "television" defined somea broadly, so you can vote for things other than a conventional series, but be sure it fits into the television medium better than cinema or another medium.

Some have speculated that there is a kind of academic canon of television -- certain shows that are watched by all academics but are not necessarily highly rated by the rest of the world (I sometimes wonder if everyone who watches Veronica Mars, for exmple, has a PhD or more improtantly, if ever PhD in the world watches the series). Or conversely, that there are programs that are highly rated across the general public but which no academic will be willing to publicly acknowledge. For the moment, I am talking about academics who are proud to say they like television. Don't get me started about the liars and hypocrites who claim not to even own a television set. So, as social experiments go, this looks to be a fascinating one.

I know in my case, it has already forced me to think about whether my taste as a fan and as an academic are necessarily alligned: are there shows that interest me intellectually but not emotionally? Are there shows I love to watch but don't really admire on that level? Are there shows I should be watching (and don't) but might want to list anyway? Are there shows that don't deserve the top ten but might benefit from my listing them more than the predictible choices that I know every other academic is going to list? (It' s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Lost is going to be in the top few vote getters here). Do I want to fall in line or signal my idiosyncratic tastes and interests? How do we pick the best in a medium whose cultural standing is still under question or where there are not widely agreed upon standards of evaluation?

Here are my choices (listed in alphabetical order). I have never been able to rank my favorites very well. You will also see that I am using some of the references here as placeholders for larger trends within the entertainment space.

Colbert at the Washington Press Club Dinner (as Seen on You-Tube): For starters, this is intended to stand in for the entire genre of news comedy -- Daily Show, Bill Mahr, and Colbert Report. Each in its own way has broadened the conversation about news and current events in this country, educating a generation of young viewers to think critically about newsmakers and newscasters alike, sparking debates about contemporary issues which might have otherwise escaped their attention, and broadening the range of voices heard in these public debates. The list of guests on these shows is significantly more diverse ideologically than what is represented on Nightline, for example. For me, Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club Dinner was a highlight of the year within this genre. For one thing, it took an event which long has been associated with the too comfortable relationship between the national news media and the White House and turned it around. The contrast between the skit with Bush and the Bush impersonator (easy laughs) and Colbert's performance (uncomfortable responses) says it all. Whether he was funny or not is beside the point. Seeing him speak truth to power in this context was an astonishing act of courage: the guy's career could have burst into flames at that moment. And it fascinates me that a)the story got so little play on the mainstream news but hit cyberspace so hard; b)many people who never saw this event on CSpan saw it on You-Tube. I can think of no other event last year which more powerfully demonstrated the ability of grassroots media to route around the filters of broadcast media. This, we can hope, is a sign of things to come.

Doctor Who: Within the rules of the contest, I get to play this two ways: the Christopher Eccleston version of the Doctor appeared this year for the first time in the United States (at least legally) on the Sci-Fi Channel and the David Tennant version appeared for the first time this year in England on the BBC. Both are truly spectacular contributions to science fiction television - some of the freshest and most intelligent writing for the genre in some time. As my son, who is the real Doctor Who fan in the family explains, the writers, producers, and cast seem to be starting each episode with the premise "Wouldn't it be fun if..." and then giving themselves the freedom to have fun with the material. This is a classic case of the fans taking over the franchise -- having kept it alive through some dark years -- and then getting to do with it what they want. This shift is generating excitement both in the UK and in the USA. A highlight of the series, of course, is the character of Rose Tyler -- and her chemistry with both of the new Doctors. She is one of the few companions who might have sustained a series of her own -- all the more so because she draws several fascinating secondary characters into her orbit. She embodies a working class girl's transition into adulthood, her growing sense of empowerment and mastery over the universe, her complex feelings of love and friendship for the Doctor, and her efforts to reconstruct a family which was shattered by tragedy. Most of my favorite moments in the series have to do with her character and what she brings to the franchise -- even though I also really liked both of the new doctors.

Entourage -- I discovered this series this summer on DVD, having been skeptical and requiring some convincing from friends whose opinions I trusted. I have generally enjoyed HBO dramas and been left totally cold by their comedies -- including Curb Your Enthusiasm which everyone else seems to love. But this one works for me. I think of it as Sex in the City for men. The friendship between the four (make that, five) central male characters provides the emotional centerpiece of this comedy about people working on the edges of the Hollywood system. It's a toss up as to whether I am most fascinated with the scheming agent, Ari or the puffed up but ultimately pathetic former cult television star, Drama, but I live for the moments either of them are on screen. There's great chemistry between the guys on this series, which offers lots of insights into the nature of male friendship and masculine sexuality. I still haven't caught this summer's new episodes but I am praying for a marathon on HBO before much longer. If I have to wait for the DVD set, I will crawl the walls.

House: My love of House defies all of the rules that normally govern my television viewing. I have always enjoyed shows about cops and lawyers and never ever liked a television show about doctors. I skipped past St. Elsewhere and E.R. for example without the slightest regret. And then I got stuck watching an episode of House while staying at my brother's house and got hooked from the first scene forward. Yes, a lot of it has to do with Hugh Laurie -- though I have never been as infatuated with some his other performances as many people around me. He manages to make me laugh over and over agan and yet still care about what's going on inside his head. He is arguably the most intelligent character on American television (not that there's that much competition) and I tend to prefer to watch shows with intelligent characters. I could care less about the disease of the week plots. For me, it's all about the characters -- and this extends across the ensemble. I care about each of the supporting characters. Each has their own dynamic in relation to House. He is the catalyst who forces them to explore aspects of their personalities that interest me and they in turn touch on different facets of his tortured personality.

Lost: I wrote about Lost here several weeks ago so I will be brief. I admire the complex intertwining of different storylines and elements: the puzzle or mystery elements, the backstory elements, and the story of how these guys form a community and help each other cope with life on the island. What other series on television takes such a global perspective -- taking viewers to stories set in Iraq, Australia, Korea, Ireland, and Africa (all told from a native rather than an outsider's perspective). What other series sustains so many different plotlines involving so many different characters and yet maintains emotional clarity and narrative coherence. I know we all wait breathlessly each week for the producers to screw up and for the series to jump the shark but frankly that's part of the fun. These guys are doing something that's never been done before and they are playing without a net. I frankly don't care if there's a mastery plan or a flair for improvisation driving this as long as it remains as engaging and challenging as it has been so far.

Project Runway: I wanted to put a reality series on the list. Most other years, I would have identified Survivor as perhaps my favorite show. But several things happened this year: Survivor had two pretty off seasons which didn't really engage my interest at a very deep level; there has been a resurgence of dramatic series (and a revitalization of some long standing series) which do grab my attention; and there were some fresh new reality series that showed there was still some life in the genre after all. It was a toss-up for me whether I listed Beauty and the Geek or Project Runway for this slot. I really enjoyed both on different levels and both were in different ways hard sells for me. Beauty and the Geek seemed at first to be exploiting a lot of stereotypes that I dislike, but it turned out to be in fact setting them up so that they could be exploded. There were so many touching moments here as the characters learned things about themselves and each other and found ways to compliment each other's strengths and watch each other's backs. Contestants were honestly thrilled when someone did well, making this the nicest show in reality history, but in this case, niceness didn't mean blandness. But somehow, Project Runway grabbed me even more -- and I am someone who could care less about fashion. My wife, my son, my students will all tell you about my total indifference to the rules of fashion. Yet, I found myself engaged with the assigned tasks and having fun freezing the image and critiquing the clothes along with my wife. By the end, the show had taught me what to look for and I found a fashion competition could be as engaging as, hmm, a spelling bee (Spellbound) or a singing competition (American Idol) or...

Rome: This may be little more than a guilty pleasure. I had mixed feelings about including it in the mix. But, I really did enjoy watching this thing. I loved the historic details about life in ancient Rome. I love the political intrigue and sexual scandel. I loved the over the top dialogue ("Good cock is always appreciated.") There's so little historical fiction on American television and this one brought the qualities one associates with the HBO drama to the form. I know, so does Deadwood, but somehow, I have never gotten over the hump with Deadwood and this one engaged me from the opening credits forward.

Spooks/MI-5: This is the series on my list that is going to be least known to readers of this blog. It's a British series which has received pretty limited airplay in the American market. We heard about it from fan circles, tracked it down on Netflix, and watched it -- in part because it was about MI-5 (and we had really enjoyed a series about a decade ago called The Sandbaggers which dealt with MI-6 and because I really like Greg Rucka's work on the comic book series, Queen and Country, which operates in the same genre tradition). Basically, this is a smart, well-written, intensely paced, complexly drawn British spy series. Most of the episodes deal in one way or another with the war on terror (whether defined in terms of struggles around Islamic fundamentalism or Irish nationalism). As an American, there's real interest in seeing how these issues and debates are impacting popular television in the United Kingdom. We enjoy the trappings of the British bureaucracy. And the show has done a particularly strong job depicting what working as a "spook" does to one's personal life. Like the best British dramas, it has thrown plenty of curves along the road -- not being afraid to kill off major characters or shift key relationships without much warning. This British series barely beats out two American series about law enforcement that I have discovered on DVD and also admire -- The Wire (which deftly criss-crosses between cops and the gangsters, making both seem more morally complex and engaging than anything I've ever seen before) and The Shield (which I am just starting to work my way through and so must withhold judgement but so far has definitely grabbed my attention.)

Veronica Mars: Okay, I agree with many of the critics who say this season was simply too convoluted and added too many subplots about too many secondary characters. But I wonder if we would feel the same way if we could watch the episodes in tighter sequence. It wasn't helped by being stretched so thin with so many pre-emptions and so many reruns sandwiched in the middle. This is a recurring tension right now between series with strong narrative drives which demand real attention and business as usual programming strategies that don't reflect how viewers want to consume the content. But, all these grumblings and excuses aside, I really enjoy this show. I like its sense of humor. I like the emotional dynamics. I like the intelligence of its protagonist. I enjoy the week-in and week-out cases as well as the overarching season long story arcs. It's a fun show to watch.

The West Wing: West Wing is one of my all time favorite series. I am a political junkee and this feeds me precisely what I wanted -- behind the scenes stories (of the kind that I get from Bob Woodward's nonfiction books about the White House and other works in that genre), topical discussions of real world issues (putting this series in the same league with The Daily Show in terms of using entertainment for the purposes of civic education.) But a season or so back, it looked like The West Wing had totally lost steam. But this last season was in my opinion the best ever -- in part because of its willingness to totally reinvent itself. The focus shifts from the White House to the campaign trail. The series dares to imagine American presidential campaigns being run on a different basis -- with intelligent, thoughtful, principled characters in both parties, with a refusal to give over to crude partisanship and a willingness to put the country's needs over personal ambition and party gain. It is the story of what would happen if John McCain was running against Barrack Obama. And along the way, we see the collective damage of 8 years in power upon the personal lives and friendships of the core characters. We watch the forces that split them apart as they enter a period of transition -- as well as what draws holds them together even when they violate our core trust. My big regret is that The West Wing wasn't allowed to complete its transition into a new series. I almost didn't care which of the two candidates won the election. I wanted to see how their presidency differed from the Bartlett administration. Even though I swing Democratic most of the time, I would have been fascinated to see what a Republican West Wing was going to be like. In the end, a series which looked dead two seasons ago ended up dying too soon. My one consolation is that I have seen a sneak preview of the first episode of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on Sunset Strip and it is really really really really good.

Writing these entries, I discovered a few things about my viewing preferences -- the centrality of characters (especially witty and intelligent characters) whether we are judging drama, comedy, or reality television; the imaginative use of genre elements to explore aspects of the world around us; and the interest in serialization over self-contained episodes. I suspect that puts me squarely in the middle of academic taste culture -- even if my fan boy interests in science fiction and superheroes push me to the outer edge. I will be most curious to see how others came out on the poll.

Regular blog reader Dereck Kompare shares his choices over at his own site, Media Musings.

August 31, 2006

Slamming Media Effects

August 31, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

Some of you thought Ian and I were playing a little rough with each other. Wait till you hear about the kind of rough treatment that media effects researchers have been getting lately. CMS graduate student Sam Ford recently told the story over at the Convergence Culture Consortium blog:

In 1999, a team of professors from Wake Forest University made headlines with a quantitative study that found a correlation between watching professional wrestling and participating in fighting while on dates among teenagers, in a study that also highlighted other potential negative behaviors associated with watching pro wrestling.

While the study was not published at the time, it did receive a substantial amount of attention and was covered by most of the major news outlets. Then, last week, when a written essay based on the study and releasing the full results of the study was published, major media outlets once again reported on it.

WWE Owner Vince McMahon was livid. On last week's episode of Monday Night RAW, WWE announcer Jim Ross lashed out and the study and promoted Mr. McMahon's response to be made available on the WWE Web site for fans, and also on the company's corporate site for investors.

That response claimed, among other things, that the study was "junk science" and that the findings were both dated and unsubstantiated. Of course, in true McMahon fashion, Vince went on to say that the study was produced by "some obscure professor who finally got someone to read his paper and is trying to get his name in the media." WWE certainly didn't hide from the issue, even linking to the study on its Web site to bring further attention to the results from fans and engage in a dialogue, although WWE was definitely issuing their response in "wrestling promo" mode.

McMahon brought on board a ringer -- his own academic -- Dr. Robert Thompson, the head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. Thompson -- who works loosely in the cultural studies tradition -- offers his own critique of the Wake Forest research:

What always worries me about these kinds of studies is that they imply a cause; this study claims nothing more than a correlation...So many people immediately see these studies, and they suggest that wrestling is causing these things, and I don't think that is a done deal by any stretch of the imagination....Whether you can make the step that says people who watch wrestling become more violent...is a lot more difficult to prove, and I don't think these studies prove it. I think it would be very, very difficult to put together a study that could actually control enough variables that you could demonstrate that.

Then, a University of Cincinnati sociology graduate student (and self proclaimed wrestling fan) Michael M Wehrman wrote an editorial for the Pro-wrestling Torch, a key publication in the wrestling fan community, claiming that Thompson's credentials for commenting on the matter were "highly questionable" since he comes from a humanistic rather than social science background.

Wehrman concludes that the Wake Forest Study " is fairly shallow, lacks relevant control variables, and seems overreaching in its conclusion," but Wehrman is convinced that he has the background to make such a judgment because he is a social scientist and Thompson doesn't because he's a humanist. In other words, nobody can beat up my kid brother except me.

The War Between Effects and Meanings

So, let's stop right there and explore the issue of expertise for a moment. Where media violence is concerned, we face a fundamental problem. A high percentage of the work done in the media effects tradition -- a specific strand of social science research -- has arrived at the conclusion that consuming media violence has some vaguely defined relationship to real world aggression. There is wide disagreement about how much influence, what kind of influence, etc. A high percentage of the work done in the humanistic tradition has arrived at the exact opposite conclusion -- looking at media violence in terms of the meanings it generates within a cultural context as opposed to the direct effects or influence it exerts over the people who consume it. I discuss these two models of how media operates as "the war between effects and meanings" in an essay included in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. I wrote this essay is response to the Limbaugh decision, a ruling in a Federal court which found that computer games were not protected by the First Amendment because they did not convey meanings. (This ruling has since been overturned). Here's part of what I say:

Gamers have expressed bafflement over how Limbaugh can simultaneously claim that video games do not express ideas and that they represent a dangerous influence on American youth. Reformers, in turn, are perplexed that the defenders of games can argue that they have no direct consequences for the people who consume them and yet warrant Constitutional protection. To understand this paradox, we have to recognize a distinction between "effects" and "meanings." Limbaugh and company see games as having social and psychological "effects" (or in some formulations, as constituting "risk factors" that increase the likelihood of violent and antisocial conduct). Their critics argue that gamers produce meanings through game play and related activities. Effects are seen as emerging more or less spontaneously, with little conscious effort, and are not accessible to self examination. Meanings emerge through an active process of interpretation; they reflect our conscious engagement; they can be articulated into words; and they can be critically examined. New meanings take shape around what we already know and what we already think, and thus, each player will come away from a game with a different experience and interpretation. Often, reformers in the "effects" tradition argue that children are particularly susceptible to confusions between fantasy and reality. A focus on meaning, on the other hand, would emphasize the knowledge and competencies possessed by game players starting with their mastery over the aesthetic conventions which distinguish games from real world experience.

Social scientists often act as if their research existed outside of a political, economic, or social context -- as if their findings remained in a world of pure scientific examination. But in fact, the kind of work being discussed here is going to be picked up and deployed by a range of political groups to serve their own causes. In the process, the qualifications and nuances of scientific debate is going to get striped aside. In the end, it doesn't matter whether this is a good or bad study, draws valid or invalid conclusions, deals with causation or correlation. As far as moral reformers are concerned, it is a good study if it can be used as a weapon in the culture wars. The findings are being used as a blunt instrument -- a foreign object, to use a WWE term -- that is being deployed to inflict as much damage as possible on one's opponent. That's how they are going to be played in the news coverage; that's how they will be deployed by reform groups; and that's how they will be mobilized by politicians.

Where I fault at least some of the social scientists working in this space is their refusal to accept responsibility for what happens to their findings when they enter the political process. I believe that a true scientist has an obligation to the truth. In other social policy debates -- such as the debate about porn and violence -- other social scientists -- Edward Donnerstein for example -- did stand up and challenge the distorted use of his findings.

Creating Monsters

In my essay, "Wrestling with Theory, Grappling with Politics" for Nick Sammond's anthology, Steel Chair to the Head, I discuss some of the cultural politics which forms a backdrop for this debate, starting by exploring what it might mean to "demonize" wrestling and other forms of popular culture:

Literary critic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has constructed a theory of the cultural work which the category of the monster performs. The monster, he suggests, "notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes." Monsters are "disturbing hybrids ...[with] externally incoherent bodies;" they embody the contradictions and anxieties shaping a society undergoing profound change. Old modes of thinking are breaking down and the construction of monsters represents a last gasp effort to hold them in place.

This is why wrestling is so often figured as monstrous and perverse. The WWE is a horrifying hybrid -- not sports, sports entertainment; not real, not fake, but someplace in between; appealing to the 'white trash' working class and the college educated alike; courting kids and appealing to adolescents on the basis of its rejection of family values; existing outside the cultural mainstream and yet a commercial success; appealing to national pride even as it shoots a bird at most American institutions; masculine as hell and melodramatic as all get out.

Cohen tells us that the monster is born from a category crisis. Thus, the undead may be considered monsters because they are liminal figures existing betwixt and between life and death. We might call wrestling the "unreal" since it stands on the border between fact and fiction. Activist David Grossman uses the "fakeness" of wrestling to justify larger claims about audience susceptibility: ""People tell me, 'you can't tell me that a 6-year-old in Flint, Mich., couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.... And I say, 'Well, you know, how many adults do you know who think professional wrestling is real?" In their video, Wrestling with Manhood (2002), Sutt Jhally and Jackson Katz argue that television wrestling may be the most dangerous kind of media violence because it passes itself off as real yet acknowledges no real world consequences. Referring to a moment in Wrestling With Shadows (2000), when Mick Foley's children become horrified after watching their father in the ring, Jackson Katz asks, "If Mick Foley's Kids can't see behind the illusion, what chance do kids have who have never been taken behind the curtain?"

One can certainly understand why this category confusion would be of concern for many of these writers. Their own literal-mindedness knows no limits. For them, to represent something is to advocate it; to advocate it is to cause it. Wrestling With Manhood, for example, depicts wrestling spectators as moral monsters and at one point, compares them to the folks who watched and did nothing to stop Hitler's rise to power. (You know an argument is kaput when it resorts to the Nazi card!) The filmmakers never acknowledge that these fans, who come to ringside in costume, mimic the catchphrases, waving signs they hope will get on camera, might see themselves as part of the performance, enacting, spoofing, taking pleasure in the imaginary roles and fantasy values on offer. The narrator explains: "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this is not only what's going on in the ring but the reaction of the crowd, which is wildly cheering what can only be described as a psychic and physical violation. A stadium full of seemingly normal boys and men cheering and getting off on the control, the humiliation, the degradation." Consider the rhetorical work done here by the word, "seemingly," -- as if the deceptiveness of the WWF extended to its audience, who are "seemingly normal" but actually ghouls and monsters. And this same literal-mindedness surfaces in the phrase, "which can only be described." As far as Jhally and Katz are concerned, the wrestling spectacle can only be understood in one way, even though what has fascinated the writers in this collection is the sheer range of meanings such moments might carry.

We respond to the threat of the monster through moral panic; confronting something we don't understand and can't really classify, our normal human response is to run like hell. We can hear such panic in the words of David Walsh, the head of the Institute for Media and the Family:

In the world of pro wrestling, it is appropriate to swear, to make obscene

gestures, to engage in violent behavior, and to objectify women. This is a

violent, unpredictable place where it is okay, for anyone to give in to any

impulse. It is a place where people are rewarded for being loud, crude and

aggressive. Sexual violence, simulated sex acts, foul language, and over-the-

top crudeness are the norm. And the more often kids watch this world on their

TV screens, the more these attitudes and actions seem normal in the real world.

As Cohen suggests, the monster is a figure of transitions and boundaries. The monster calls "horrid attention to the borders that cannot -- must not -- be crossed." The monster is thinkable (though regretfully so), where-as what lies beyond the monster is truly unthinkable. Film critic David Denby refers to popular entertainment as "a shadow world in which our kids are breathing an awful lot of poison without knowing that there is clean air and sunshine elsewhere." Senator Joseph Lieberman refers to a "values vacuum in which our children learn that anything goes." In other words, to move into the realm of popular culture is to move into a twilight zone, a "shadow world," a "values vacuum," "a violent, unpredictable place" where rules and constraints break down. And the biggest fear of all is that the monster will cross over from that alternative reality into our own.

The monster can have no legitimate point of view. The monster has no culture, generates no meaning, and respects no values. The monster exists simply to negate the moral order. Evoking a metaphor straight out of a David Cronenberg film, Leiberman compares contemporary popular culture to "an antibody which has turned against its own immunity system." Former professional wrestler turned evangelist, Superstar Billy Graham, describes his visceral response to the WWE: "I didn't want this stuff coming into my house, my eyes, or my mind. It made me physically ill to my stomach." The WWE muddies the water, mucks up cultural hierarchies, disturbs moral oppositions, and churns up emotional reactions. No wonder critics call it cultural pollution. This is also why the WWE so often proclaims itself to be 'politically incorrect,' relishing its own "barbarian" status, taking pleasure in committing antisocial acts and pissing off those who would police our culture.

Say nothing else about it, moral panic provokes ideological consensus, carves up the world into simple black and white categories, which seem, on the surface, so commonsensical that they are nigh on impossible to dispute. Politics makes for strange tag teams. Orthodox Jew Joseph Lieberman climbs into the ring, hand in hand, with the Christian right, a move all the more remarkable when you consider how often both sides evoke religious language to justify their efforts to police morality. David Grossman, a military psychologist who claims to have taught marines how to kill, joins hands with the Lion and the Lamb Foundation, a organization of concerned moms who feel that violence should never be considered "child's play." For some, wrestling is dangerous because it is so ruthlessly patriarchal and reactionary; for others, because it embodies moral relativism. For some, it is a symptom of a world without gatekeepers and for others, the dangers of media concentratio"n. For most, it is frightening because it crosses class boundaries. They all agree that what we have got to do is protect our children against its seductions and temptations. After a while, the specific ideological claims get absorbed into a more generalized rhetoric of horror and disgust.

Cultural tastes and interests are a central building block of our identities; we use our consumption of popular culture to map who we are and who we are not. As Pierre Bourdieu has noted, perhaps the most powerful way to defend our tastes is through the negation of other tastes. But, the negation of a cultural form necessarily spills over into (and often intentionally taps) our hostility towards specific cultural, social, and ethnic groups who are closely associated with those forms. The concept of "law and order" surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s as a code word for racism, allowing Republicans to appeal to Southern Whites with a covert reassurance that they would keep disorderly blacks in line. Similarly, at a time when it would be offensive to directly attack racial or sexual minorities, the rhetoric of "cultural pollution" functions as a code word for racism, homophobia, class war, and generational conflict. Listen to former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's description of a culture 'slouching towards Gamorrah": "Even those of us who try to avoid the repellent aspects of popular culture know about it through a sort of peripheral vision. The rap blasts out of the car window waiting beside you at the red light; blatant sexuality, often of a perverse nature, assaults the reader in magazine advertisements." Consider how differently this would read if it were Frank Sinatra or country music blasting from the car stereo or if he were protesting the persistence of hetrosexism. If we can keep these forms of culture in line, perhaps we can also control the people who consume them. This connection was made explicit in GOP operative Mike Murphy's post-Columbine comments that "we need goth control, not gun control."

Proponents of the cultural pollution argument are quick to note that they have many minority supporters, and thus cannot be accused of racism. Yet, members of a minority community use culture war rhetoric to police their own borders and separate themselves from unsavory aspects of their own culture.. Eric Michael Dyson, for example, has mapped the tension between jazz and church music in the early twentieth century or jazz and hip hop in the later twentieth century. Expressions of disdain towards godless or trashy music helped to police class and generational boundaries within the African-American community; Jazz and later hip hop were depicted as a threat to the goals of assimilation and upward mobility. So, different groups for different reasons might share a common agenda in terms of policing cultural borders (even if they are pursuing that agenda from different cultural positions or interests).

Writers in the Cultural Studies tradition often characterize the culture war rhetoric as "right wing," "ultraconservative" or "reactionary." As we do so, we are constructing our own monsters, seeking to draw a sharp distinction between those "whackos" over there who want to censor our culture and "nice, thoughtful liberals" like ourselves who would never think of doing that kind of mischief to the Constitution. But, like most attempts to resolve the ambiguities and ambivalence surrounding the monstrous, such representations provide us with a false sense of security. To be sure, conservative Republicans were among the most visible proponents of the culture war rhetoric, as reflected in Daniel Quayle's attempt to displace concerns about the economic causes of poverty onto the breakdown of family values in Murphy Brown, Jerry Farwell's hysterical responses to the thought that one of the Teletubbies might be gay or suggestion that the ACLU might be to blame for September 11, or Pat Buchanon's commitment of the GOP to a "Jihad" against those forces corrupting the American heart and mind. The initial Democratic responses to these arguments were largely negative. Much of the 1992 presidental nominating convention devoted to ridiculing Quayle's rather narrow conception of family values and dismissing the GOP culture war rhetoric as extremist.

However, some "New Democrats" sought to take social and cultural issues "off the table," appealing to moderate Christians by claiming that Democrats would join forces with Republicans to protect American families from "sickening" forms of popular culture. In 1985, for example, Tipper Gore (Wife of then Democratic Senator Albert Gore), Susan Baker (wife of Republican Senator Howard Baker), and some 17 other Congressional spouses helped to form the Parents Music Resource Center; the group received financial support from Mike Love, from the Beach Boys, and Joseph Coors, the owner of Coors beer, and logistical support from Pat Robinson's 700 Club and the Religious Booksellers Convention. Joseph Lieberman rose to political fame largely on the basis of a series of tactical alliances with cultural conservatives. For example, Lieberman serves on the advisory board of L. Brent Bozell III's Parents Television Council; stood alongside Pat Buchanon, Orrin Hatch, and Colin Powell to support an anti-Hollywood petition written by the conservative think tank, Empower America; and has worked closely with David Walsh's Institute for Media and the Family in condemning the video game industry. Leiberman himself described William Bennett as " my brother in arms, because we are engaged together in fighting the culture wars." He explained, "For the better part of two years, we have formed an unofficial, bipartisan partnership to coax, cajole, shout and shame the people who run the electronic media." As former WWF superstar Mick Foley notes, "whenever anyone accuses the PTC of being ultraconservative, he [Bozell] throws Joe Lieberman in their face." Significantly more Democrats joined the culture war following the shootings at Columbine, where one by one liberal Senators stood up at various congressional hearings and denounced the entertainment industry for inspiring teen shooters. It is striking that both candidates on the 2000 Democratic national ticket were men who had been early Democratic backers of this cultural agenda. One lasting legacy of that election is that it will be significantly more difficult for future Democratic candidates to label that perspective as reactionary or extremist.

When media effects research enters into the public debate, it gets taken up as proof that popular culture is a monstrous force in our lives and gets mobilized in support of a moral and political agenda which has little or nothing to do with academic disagreements about methodology or validity. McMahon may have come in slugging but then he at least understood that this was going to be a knife fight or a pissing match, anything but a discussion of scientific findings.

August 19, 2006

Monitoring Snakes on a Plane

August 19, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

I know a good many people who are reading this blog will be going to see Snakes on a Plane this weekend and that you are scattered in cities and towns around the globe. I would like to ask that you send me your observations about the film's reception by 9 pm est weds. night and I will compile them and post them to the blog. Some of the things we will be interested in hearing: When and where you saw the movie; what the attendence was like (packed, sparse, some place in between); memorable examples of interactions between the audience and the film; some sense of the tone of the audience response to the film; some clue as to why the people there came (this may be hard to gleam without talking to people but you can certainly listen to conversations around you, etc.); your own response to the movie. I see this as an experiment in whether we can use blogs to get a nationwide, perhaps world wide snapshot of the public's response to a film. Your notes don't have to be lengthy or sophisticated but your impressions may help us all to better understand the film's reception. Post your responses in the comments section here. (I will do my best to keep rescuing them from the evil Spam Catcher.)

August 08, 2006

ComicCon & The Power of the Devoted Niche

August 08, 2006/ Henry Jenkins

This is the third guest post written by Comparative Media Studies graduate student and media analyst Ivan Askwith about his observations at Comicon. Askwith is beginning work now on a thesis which centers around transmedia and participatory aspects of Lost and Veronica Mars. In my second dispatch from ComicCon, I tried to illustrate how the studios and networks are already beginning to understand the importance of fan support in the era of convergence culture. And while some executives have a better grasp on the core principles than others, it's fair to say that the entertainment industry are starting to think more seriously about how fans power new business models.

Savvy executives, however, will also realize that ComicCon still has a lot to teach them about the significance of fan support, particularly in economic terms.

While recent entries both here and in the C3 Weblog tempt me to describe what I saw at ComicCon as a living illustration of Chris Anderson's Long Tail. After all, the merchandise selections available at ComicCon range from the super-mainstream to the ultra-obscure, which suggests that there is a market for even the most esoteric and specialized collectibles. If the exhibitors at the Con have chosen to use some of their floor space to offer less mainstream product, should we assume that they've embraced the "we can sell less-of-more" ideology? Most of these sellers have been attending the Con for years, which gives me ample reason to believe that if they didn't think they could sell off their more obscure inventory, they wouldn't bother bringing it.

For all of its strengths, however, I don't think the Long Tail is designed to explain the lesson that I would encourage the entertainment industry to take away from their time at ComicCon: that a small audience of super-committed fans can be worth more, in economic terms, than a massive audience of casual viewers and readers.

This isn't an entirely new observation, of course. Recent literature suggests that viewer involvement has a direct correlation to awareness and retention of advertising messages, and more networks are starting to see the merit of offering niche product through on-demand services.

At ComicCon, however, there is ample evidence to suggest that the industry still hasn't realized just how valuable these niche audiences can be. This became particularly clear during a brief conversation that I had with Allan Caplan, the founder of InkWorks, a company specializing in the creation of trading cards and collectibles tied to popular cult television programs. Their current lineup includes Lost, Veronica Mars, The 4400, and Naruto, as well as such discontinued shows as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Firefly, Alias and The X-Files. InkWorks might not be operating on Anderson's Long Tail, but they benefit from a similar principle: that small audiences still have big purchasing power if you cater to their interests.

Case in point: InkWorks is preparing to release their seventh line of collectible cards for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a show that has ended three years ago. One visitor, walking past the stand, asked: "How could there possibly still be a market for new content about a cancelled series?"

(In retrospect, this is an especially odd question to ask in a room where fans are ready and willing to pay well in excess of $1000 for an original out-of-print comic featuring their favorite character.)

Caplan's answer? That every line of Buffy cards InkWorks makes has sold out rapidly, and fans continue to ask them for more. The same is true of other cancelled series, especially Joss Whedon's post-Buffy endeavor, Firefly. Caplan told me that even he had been hesitant to invest in the development of Firefly-affiliated merchandise, until he saw that fans were willing to pay -- and pay well -- for anything connected to the show.

While trading cards aren't an especially new niche business, Inkworks has demonstrated a particularly keen understanding of the fan/collector mentality: in addition to the basic set of cards in each line, there are a number of "bonus cards" distributed at random through the line. The specific content of these cards varies from show to show, but generally includes "Autograph Cards," with actual signatures from cast members and "Pieceworks Cards," which contain tiny pieces of actual costumes worn on-screen during the show. (Other interesting show-specific offerings include invisible ink messages on select cards tied into the spy-fi show Alias, which can only be seen when the card is placed under a black light.)

For reference, a single pack of 6 trading cards costs $2.50.

While I didn't have the presence of mind to record my conversation with Caplan, it was clear to me that he understood (a) the power of creating limited quantities, and (b) that a small, engaged audience can be far more lucrative, especially to niche marketers, than a massive casual audience. After all, as he pointed out to me, there's no market for CSI: Miami trading cards, even if it is the number one show in the world.

One question worth considering: can collectible product lines like this be used as a barometer for the relative popularity of various franchises?

(At some point in the future, I'll be interviewing Caplan, and will post any interesting results that come from that discussion either here or in the C3 Weblog.)

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Henry Jenkins