Fieldnotes from Shanghai: Cult of the Unscrutable Colonial

In Search of the Inscrutable Colonial... Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age refers to a future Chinese cult around the "inscrutable Colonial" who never revealed the secrets of his recipe for fried chicken. We saw plenty of signs that this cult was taking shape when we visited Shanghai but we also saw even greater symptoms of another religion in the making -- perhaps centered around the resurrection of a certain character from Battlestar Galactica. If nothing else, these images suggest how transnational brands get adapted to fit within culturally specific contexts.

Photographs by Sasha Barab

Fieldnotes from Shanghai: Signs for Desperate Tourists

The following are signs for rest rooms seen in the Yu Gardens in Shanghai. 'Nuff Said.

Photographs taken by Eric Klopfer

Field Notes from Shanghai: Fansubbing in China

I had dinner on my last night in Shanghai with Yu Liu, a reporter who covers digital culture for Lifeweek Magazine, which is roughly the equivalent of Time. She shared with me a story she had written about the growing fan culture around Prison Break in China. As she notes, Prison Break's focus on strong filial bonds resonate powerfully with Chinese cultural tradition. (This left me wondering about the popularity of Supernatural in China -- which has the strong brotherly affection coupled with ghost stories and would seem ready made for this market, but I didn't see any signs of it.)

Prison Break had already been mentioned to me several times during the visit as a series which was sparking strong fan response here. Yu Liu's report describes the elaborate collaborative network which has emerged to allow Chinese fans to translate and recirculate Prison Break episodes within twelve hours of their airing in the United States. As we spoke, she drew strong parallels to the fan subbing practices around anime in the western world, which I have discussed here in the blog in the past.

She said that during the first season, the Chinese fans had discovered the series on dvds sold on street corners as part of the black market in entertainment properties here. By the second season, the fans primarily relied on the internet to access content, impatient with the longer turnaround time of dvd production. Like American anime fans, they took the media in their own hands.

She notes that some of the amateur media fan groups in China can translate as many as twenty television shows a week, suggesting how Prison Break fits within larger patterns of cultural practice. She noted that the technical languages used on contemporary procedurals such as CSI and the slang used on many American programs posed particular difficulties for Chinese translators, who had mastered textbook English but had less exposure to more specialized argots.

The internet distribution of this content had special implications for rural communities, which had enjoyed less access to dvds than their urban counterparts. Web-based fan cultures were allowing rural youths to more actively engage with their urban counterparts and to become more fully integrated into online communities because they could consume the same television and film properties without significant delays.

Such access, however, was also fostering greater dissatisfaction with what many fans saw as the inferior quality of local media content. Chinese programs, produced under a state service model, had less of a focus on entertainment and fewer of the hallmarks of cult media than programs produced from outside the country, including not only American series but also Korean soaps and Japanese anime programs. Such programs, however, gain little airtime on Chinese television given the government’s long standing quotas on how much foreign content can be distributed within the country.

I was reminded of how I first got into Hong Kong Action films in part through a local dealer who had made pirated dubs of films from Japanese dvds, many of which were not available commercially here in the United States. Over time, I watched attendance at local screenings grow and grow because more and more people got access to films which no one imagined we would be interested in seeing in the first place. You started to see websites emerge which offered more information about the filmmakers and stars. All of this proceeded a wave of immigration during which people like Michelle Yeoh, Chow-Yun Fat, and Jackie Chan, began to appear in western films. Here, again, as I suggest in Convergence Culture, piracy becomes promotion.

Field Notes from Shanghai: Whatever Happened to Shanghai Swing?

Shanghai had been a thriving center for jazz and swing music during the 1930s and 1940s. These night clubs are vividly recreated in the opening segments of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . I got deeper into this world when I had a chance to see some 1930s and 1940s era Chinese musicals when I attended the Hong Kong film festival a decade or so ago. Unlike Hollywood's representation, Shanghai swing was not simply derivative, appropriating western tunes and translating them into a new language. Rather, Shanghai Swing offered a fusion of western syncopation with classical Chinese instruments and sounds. It was, in effect, an early predecessor of today's world music movement. I was able to find a few rare recordings of the 1930s Shanghai Swing, mostly taken from film soundtracks, during a trip to Beijing five years ago and it has a cherished place on my ipod. So, I was determined to learn more about the contemporary swing scene during this trip.

A little research suggests that there are at least some new groups seeking to revive this popular music tradition, much as neo-swing music has enjoyed at least niche success off and on across the western world over the past few decades. I was able to find this website which offers some background on "Yellow Music," as Shanghai Swing was known among some of its followers. They explain:

In the colourful cabarets and sepia-lit dance halls of Old Shanghai, Jazz music set the background score to a fleshy world of mobsters, adventurers, and sing-song girls. Old Shanghai was the uncontested Jazz capital of Asia, where musicians from the World over tested their musical mettle nightly to the delight of enthusiastic audiences. In 1935, Du Yu Sheng, the notorious overlord of Shanghai's ominous "Green Gang" ordered into creation the first all-Chinese jazz group, called "The Clear Wind Dance Band", to perform at the Yangtze River Hotel Dance Hall. Critics called this music 'pornographic,' but the band played on just the same. The wheels of time brought Shanghai's heady heyday to an end as the once-bustling nightclubs were boarded up or converted into Communist factory buildings, and Jazz music was outlawed as an 'indecent' form of entertainment...Until Now.

This site publicizes the efforts of the Yellow Music Ensemble to revive his rich cultural tradition, through a series of albums which promise us "musical seductions from China’s Age of Decedence," a phrase which turns decades of anti-jazz criticisms among Chinese cultural and political leaders on its head, even as it continues to exploit western orientalist fantasies about musical exotica from the East. In explaining their name, the site suggests,

The term 'yellow music' was used as early as 1926 by May 4th musical reformers condemning the works of composer Li Jun Hui, labeling them as 'fleshy', 'pornographic' and 'decadent'. Fusing Chinese folk melodies with western jazz and the styles of such composers as George Gershwin seems innocent enough, but having them performed by rows of teenage girls 'clad in costumes that left their arms and legs unencumbered' , drew its' critics . This yellowness to which the authorities objected was not so much the exposed skin color or even the urban pentatonic quality of the music, but its' Chinese-ness, and perhaps its' blackness as well. During the 1920s jazz was racialized and assigned to the lowest rungs of the musical evolutionary ladder, the Shanghai Conservatory considered jazz to be 'a bad form of Western music' much the same manner as were Chinese folk tunes; 'primitive music composed with a pentatonic scale'. This is obviously not the case in the 21st century. We have revived this concept in describing the modern instrumental fusion of Chinese and Western musical styles.

The group has produced three albums so far, which don't seem to be for sale on the site. I have friends in China trying to track down copies for me. The site does offer some mp3 samples as well as an interesting video showing Shanghai Swing then and now. The design of the album covers evoke the aesthetics of old Chinese calendar art, a popular collectible among western visitors to this country, though I suspect few of them connect these amber images of beautiful women in traditional garb back to the thriving entertainment industry in Shanghai during the pre-war years

Field Notes from Shanghai: My Newest Avatar

Last time, I offered some perspectives on the current state of serious games in China, based on a conference I recently intended in Shanghai. Today, I want to share some other impressions of the place of popular culture and digital media in contemporary Shanghai based on other experiences and encounters I had in the country. MY NEWEST AVATAR

While visiting the Yu Gardens, I stumbled onto a series of craftspeople from the region, including a sculpture who was producing likenesses of visitors by carving colored dough. Being obsessed with multiple personas, I could not resist the temptation to have him sculpt a "mini-me," my term, not his. The process took about twenty minutes from start to finish. Sitting for the clay portrait gave me a chance to watch him apply his skills as a craftsman involved in an activity which I am told goes back centuries. I have reproduced the likeness here (though the piece was damaged slightly during my trip back to the United States and seems to be falling apart day by day as the clay dries.) It was interesting to see what someone from another culture would emphasize in representing me. I'd just had a hair cut and beard trim before the trip so you don't get the full 'shaggy man' Henry look, but he does capture my salt and pepper beard. He spent a great deal of time trying to replicate the precise pattern and coloring of my blue and purple striped shirt. I was wearing my black leather jacket so you don't get to see my trademark suspenders.

The practice involves rolling very thin strips of clay which may be cut and shaped using tiny implements. He also mixes his colors from a more limited palette, a skill which especially came into play as he tried to match the coloring of my beard.

Wu Ming on Convergence Culture

I was very flattered to have the Wu Ming Foundation write the introduction to the Italian language edition of Convergence Culture, which came out late last year. I have been corresponding with Wu Ming 1 off and on over the past year. You may recall the interview I did with Wu Ming 1 and 2 in the blog late in 2006. I've been dying to read what they have to say about the book and Wu Ming 1 just shared with me an English translation of their text. Their introduction does a first rate job of linking the arguments of the book to the current work I am doing on new media literacies, mostly by relying on content originally published on this blog. They open with some interesting comments about what my book might contribute to European discussions of popular culture and cyberculture, which I thought would be of interest to my readers here:

In the best of possible Italies, the publication of this book would be a telluric event, one that would shake the debate on the Internet and the new technologies of communication. If nothing happens, not even a twitch, it will mean that there's no actual debate, no semblance of life, only a deserted house with loose shutters in the wind. In comparison, poltergeist activity in a graveyard will sound like Rio de Janeiro's carnival.

Convergence Culture is a revolutionary work in many ways. It remains a fascinating and comprehensible reading all the way through, and it's crammed with examples and evidence. The works of European theorists are often cited, explained in a vivid language, and used to analyze concrete behaviors and practices, with none of the original intricacies. It works like magic: in the pages of this book any obscure convolution turns to crystal-clear, no-nonsense talk. Professor Jenkins plunges into the culture of our time and gives an accurate picture of how the new technologies are changing it, then he re-emerges and gives us a report not so much on the media, but on the people who are using them to communicate. The picture shows us, all of us.

A propos of this, it is necessary to make a distinction clear.

In Italian, by "cultura popolare" we usually mean folk culture, a pre-industrial heritage whose manifestations have managed to survive until today. Sardinian cantores and tarantella dances are cultura popolare. Those who use the phrase in other contexts do it with reference to the English homologue "popular culture", which is more commonly translated as "cultura di massa". Although the latter expression also exists in English ("mass culture"), it may cause equivocation and - as Jenkins observes - there are different shades of meaning between "popular culture" and "mass culture".

Equivocation: la cultura di massa is transmitted through the [mass] media (cinema, tv, print etc.), but it isn't necessarily aimed at the big masses. It may also include music addressed to a niche of listeners, or cinematic sub-genres appealing to specific subcultures. In fact, the majority of today's cultural products are not di massa. We live in a world of countless niches and subgenres. The mainstream, what we call "il nazional-popolare", is far less important than it once used to be, and it keeps getting smaller.

Shades of meaning: the expression "mass culture" stresses the way this culture is transmitted, i.e. through the media. On the contrary, "popular culture" emphasizes the role of the people who receive it and then reappropriate it. Usually, when we talk about what a song or a film means in someone's life ("Listen, it's our song!"), or how a crime novel or a comic book influenced its era, we call it "popular culture".

The problem is that, ninety times out of a hundred, the Italian debate on pop culture focuses on junk TV, as if that were the only way to be "popular", as though there were no quality distinctions and historical evolutions, as though Sandokan, Star Trek, Lost, TG4 and Beauty and the Geek were all of the same mould. It's like saying that there are no differences between Bruce Springsteen, REM, Frank Zappa and Shakira, and no possible distinctions between Stephen King books and Totti-joke collections, since both categories of books hit the top charts.

There are two armies fighting each other, and we should stay away from both of them. On one side are those who shield behind the "popular" to produce and peddle crap. On the other side, those who despise anything not aimed at an elite audience or readership.

These positions are perfectly symmetrical, they feed each other and share common views. One is that pop culture only addresses mute audiences probed by people meters, masses that express themselves only as percentages in opinion polls or figures at the box office.

And here's another merit Convergence Culture has: it gets to the roots of equivocation and puts them out. The focus shifts from an inextricable tangle of banalities to a new perspective, a way of tackling all issues by redrawing known boundaries and barricade lines.

Next Time: Thoughts on the Serious Games Movement in China

Resources for Science Fiction Fans

For science fiction fans, let me suggest two potentially interesting links. Flow TV recently ran a special issue last month focused entirely around Battlestar Galactica, including an interview with Mary McDonnell (Laura Roslin on the show), reflections by Bob Rehak on the role of remakes and reboots in contemporary television, Sarah Toton's thoughts on the Battlestar Wiki, Anne Kustritz's reflections on the interplay between the series producers and their fans, and a piece from Julie Levin Russo which gets billed as 'A transmedia love story''. (My wife and I have spent the past four months madly trying to catch up on the series through a combination of dvds and downloads. We've now caught up and are waiting for the return of the series later this year.) Fun, Fun, Fun! The second comes curtesy of Reason Magazine's Jesse Walker, a regular reader and sometimes commentor on this blog. Jesse sent me a lead to io9, a blog which describes itself as "strung out on science fiction." I certainly know where you are coming from, dude, and feel your pain. There Annalee Newitz has put together a chart which shows the ideological shifts that occur in Doctor Who over time with The Doctor sometimes seen as preserving the status quo and other times fermenting revolt among the underclasses. Newitz shows how these shifts in ethical and ideological frameworks correspond with shifts in political leadership in the United Kingdom, though readers write in to suggest a range of other factors explaining some of the philosophical inconsistencies of the show.

American Idol and the Variety Show Tradition

I also recently had a chance to contribute a guest blog for the PBS Remotely Connected Site. I was asked to write about a current PBS series, Pioneers of Television, which is a first rate exploration of tv history featuring interviews with more than a hundred key players in the early history of the medium. My post dealt primarily with an episode centered on variety programming. Near the end of the post I made an argument that in many ways American Idol has taken on some of the functions which variety programming used to serve. I wrote:

Vestigial elements of variety survive. If the episode had paid more attention to amateur variety competitions, an important sub-genre which goes back to Major Bowles on radio and Godfrey on television, we would see the clear links to contemporary series, such as So You Want to Dance, Dancing with The Stars, Americas Got Talent, and of course, American Idol. Such talent competition series fuse aspects of the game show and the variety traditions, even if they are now lumped into the larger category of reality programming. Consider some of the similarities:

• These shows are often performed live, much like the earlier variety shows.
• These shows are much more likely to be watched as they are aired than other contemporary programming, helping to create that sense of a national audience.
• These shows are more likely to be watched in a social context, whether among family members or roommates.
• The performances provide music, while the judge offer recurring comic characters.
• Such programs combine classic old songs with emerging performers, much like the repertoire of Tin Pan Alley standards which were the stock and trade of variety show musical numbers.
• Such programs offer constant shifts in style which move up and down the taste hierarchy -- ballroom dancing one week, hip hop moves the next.
• Hosts like American Idol's Ryan Seacrest play much the same functions that Ed Sullivan performed on his program, introducing the performers and warming up the audience between acts.

The Writers Strike and Transmedia Entertainment

I was going to run a series of short items today. I am experimenting with breaking these down into a series of smaller posts, instead. I have not had a chance to write extensively here about the Writers' Strike. By this point, there are some very good discussions of the strike out there by other media researchers which more or less say what I would have said on the topic. For example, check out Jason Mittell's Post. I did participate in a discussion on the future of online content early this year organized by newteevee.com. Here's what I said there about the likely impact of the strike:

The writers' strike is a struggle over transmedia content and as a consumer, I certainly hope that the writers gain significant ground in their current efforts. As long as the media companies see online content purely in terms of promotion, they will not fully integrate it into the storytelling system. As long as creatives see generating 'extensions' as extra unpaid work, they will not put their best effort into this content.

The other interesting thing about the writers' strike as it intersects online video is the fact that the writers have been so much more effective than the producers at using YouTube and other online platforms to get their messages out to the public. Most mainstream media coverage of the strike has focused on how it inconveniences consumers -- after all, it is being produced by the same companies the writers are striking against. But the writers have been inventive at generating compelling online video which does get spread by their consumer base and helps to explain the underlying issues of the conflict. If nothing else, this shows how much better they understand the new media ecology than the people they are working for.

My Own Personal Writer's Strike...

Hi gang! I'm back after a somewhat longer hiatus from blogging than I had initially anticipated. I haven't posted new content on the blog in almost a month. I've been joking to people that I declared my own personal writer's strike. In reality, my absence has been caused by several factors: for one thing, we've been transferring the blog to a new server and setting up some new systems which should allow us to post comments more promptly and should result in less frustration all around. But secondly, I have needed to focus my energy on catching up on some other writing projects including some significant revisions of Convergence Culture as NYU Press gets ready to issue the paperback edition of the book. And finally, I've spent the last week or so in Shanghai attending a conference on games and education. You will be seeing a burst of posts about my China experiences over the next week or so.

Now for the sad news: I've struggled for some time trying to figure out how I maintain the pace of this blog, given increased demands on my time on other fronts. The past few years have been transformative in my career, with each week opening up new opportunities. I have a bad habbit of saying yes when confronted with an interesting invitation or when given a chance to do something I've never done before. I am on the road someplace almost every week and I am trying to manage an expanding portfolio of research projects back at MIT.

When I first started the blog, the advice I got was that the only way to sustain such an activity was to take deadlines seriously. You should figure out how many times a week you want to post, set a schedule for yourself, and stick with it. Naively, I figured I could put out content five days a week and I promised myself that I would do my best to hold to that schedule for the first full year. I succeeded. In that first year, I didn't miss a single day and I think the richness and diversity of my output speaks for itself. By last summer, I was finding it harder and harder to sustain that pace, but the Gender and Fan Culture series helped to reign in my panic because it meant that I needed to produce content for only three days a week. By the end of last term, I was having trouble doing that and so I missed some days there near the end of the year, which made me unhappy with life.

My new year's resolution, thus, is to lower the pressure on myself a bit more by stating outright that I am going to be producing content three days a week. Some weeks I may be able to do better than that, but let me lower expectations a bit. I doubt that there are very many readers out there who fully read everything I post now.

Cutting back will have some impact on the diversity of what I can cover clearly and as it was, there were topics that I wanted to write about – J.K. Rowling's outing of Dumbledore, the Writers' Strike being two examples – which I just couldn’t find time to catch up on. So, this will still be a source of tension for me, but I think life will be better if I scale back just a little bit.

I have no desire to stop blogging, altogether. Have no fear. Doing this blogging has been an enormously rewarding experience for me. Almost everywhere I go these days, I meet people who are reading the blog and I love the chance to talk with them and get their perspectives about what I've written. I confess to being totally addicted to the various blog search engines especially with seeing what other bloggers have to add to the discussions we’ve started here. When I first graduated from college, my goal had been to become a professional journalist but I wasn't able to find full time employment. In some ways, blogging has allowed me to merge the career I thought I wanted (as a journalist) with the career I have pursued (as a college professor). Writing in the blog has forced me to find ways to be even clearer and more accessible in my prose as I have been able to build up a readership here which is overwhelmingly composed of people who are not academics.

Through the interviews and guest blog posts, I have been able to expand public awareness of the work of many other media scholars and in the process, have helped to mentor them about what is involving in expanding the readership for their work. I have been able to use this blog to host important conversations in our field, such as the marathon series of exchanges on gender and fan culture we ran starting in the summer. I hope to hold other such conversations in the future. Hosting the blog has allowed me to share some of the outstanding work of my students and colleagues to a larger public and has given me a chance to collaborate with some alums of our program as they share their interests with this community.

The blog has had a huge impact on the admissions for our graduate program. More and more of the students applying understand what is unique about our program. As a result, we are getting students who are more motivated to take advantage of the opportunities we offer. They become regular readers of the blog once they are accepted and thus come to campus already feeling a part of the CMS community.

The blog has also helped our alums to feel more attachment to the program and maintain greater awareness of what we are trying to accomplish. The blog has helped to bridge between a range of different conversations about media change including those involving fans and gamers, within the brand and entertainment industries, among media literacy advocates, and among academic media researchers.

Having a regular channel through which to share my insights to the world has increased my professional visibility, calling my work to the attention of researchers in a range of different fields and dramatically increased speaking invitations. It has also allowed me to help set the agenda for how media gets covered in the press with a growing number of reporters using the topics we discuss here as a spring board for stories.

Convergence Culture has probably sold more copies than my other eleven books combined and I am certain a large portion of those sales can be traced back to the ways that this blog has increased public awareness of my work. In this case, as in many others, giving away a daily sample of my content for free has increased public interest and resulted in more book sales, not fewer. So, for these and countless other reasons. I am finding the time I pt into this blog as intensely rewarding. But I do need to cut back just a little on the time I put into this project if I am going to do justice to all of the other things people want me to do.

I've said it before and I will say it again. I see this blog as an experiment in how academics might use emerging technologies to expand their role as public intellectuals. For too long, academics were dependent on old media channels to get their ideas out to a larger public. One of my early blog posts centered on my concern that academic publishing had become a kind of ghetto which was cut off from the larger conversations which impacted our culture. I had hoped that blogging might provide an alternative means of circulating ideas and engaging in conversations.

In doing so, though, I did not want to give up on those things I value about academic writing -- the ability to connect local or topical issues to much larger, more abstract concerns; the ability to dig into substantive issues in a deeper way than would be possible through a mass media channel; the ability to provide a historical context for contemporary developments or to deal comparatively with developments in different national contexts or within different media sectors. All of this requires depth and doesn't result in the short posts which have typically characterized other forms of blogging.

The length of my posts remain one of the most controversial aspects of this blog. Some people bust me for writing too much, saying that what I do isn’t really blogging. For me, what makes blogging exciting is that when we step outside of commercial contexts, space limits become relatively arbitrary and people are free to do their own things using the new media platforms. In general, I find that my longer posts get more discussion, not less, despite those who insist that if I wrote shorter, I would have greater impact. I am finding blog posts are getting cited in academic papers because they gain some element of scholarly respectability even as they are being used as springboard for casual conversations among my regular readers because they maintain timeliness. I am going to try this year for some posts that are shorter but I don't think I can or want to move away from the longer posts which have been an aspect of this site from the start. If you want shorter posts, there are many other very good blogs out there to read. And in any case, I try to write even my longer posts in modular units which make it easy for people to duck in, read as much as they want, skim through the rest.

We are still working on finalize the new comments mechanism for the site. Be patient a little longer and we hope to improve a situation which has long frustrated me and many of you.

Gender and Fan Culture (Wrapping Up, Part Three)

Editor's Note: We continued to be struggling to repair the damage done by the hackers. I remain interested in your comments. I have posted those received so far at the end of this entry and will post anything I receive from readers via my e-mail account. In the meantime, if you want to participate in a discussion, check out http://community.livejournal.com/fandebate Abigail Derecho:

First of all, many many thanks to Kristina Busse for inspiring this wonderful series of

conversations, and to Henry Jenkins for organizing the exchanges and hosting them on his

blog.

Although I had read the existing literature on gender and fan studies, and had gotten to

know some of the emerging scholars in the field, this exchange made me understand just

how much more there is to be done, and also gave me hope that so many excellent scholars

are interested in this field and willing to do new and urgently important work.

Through these conversations, I have found a terrific intellectual partner in Sam Ford,

and we are now in the process of co- editing a new volume on soap operas. We hope to

bring "soap studies" into the digital age, and aim to address the role of gender, and

the role that fans play, in the production, circulation, and distribution of daytime

soaps and soap-related texts. Two great university presses have already expressed

interest in this project. We think our volume will be a strong contribution to the

fields of media (especially new media and television) studies and fan studies, and it

would never have come into being without the conversations that took place this summer

and fall on this blog. (And at least a couple of the authors whose essays we will

include also participated in the Gender and Fan Culture exchanges!)

Sam isn't the only great connection I've made through these conversations. I've been

fortunate enough to develop significant professional relationships with other

participants, and have become a fan of many other people's work just by reading about

their ideas in this forum. Now that this exchange has ended, I am a thousand percent

more committed to using my position as an emerging academic (as a scholar, teacher, and

member of a college community) to expand on some of the terrific thinking around gender

and fandom that was discussed here. In the short term, this means giving conference

papers and writing essays that turn the spotlight on these issues. In the longer term,

I envision myself organizing symposia and conferences, and essay collections, that bring

gender and fandom more and more into "mainstream" media studies, and even into

mainstream media production. The conversations on this blog have empowered me to

become a leader with regards to publicizing these matters, for which I'm incredibly

grateful.

Matt Hills:

I found participating in this discussion most useful, perhaps oddly, not directly in relation to issues of gender per se, but instead in relation to where theories of fandom are to be found, and

what can or should be counted as a 'proper' scholarly reference.

When I was thinking about interesting work on fandom that I'd read recently, the dialogue brought home to me the fact that I had very much been thinking of traditionally published academic work, and not online fan discussion, or 'meta', or even blog content for that matter! And this despite the fact that I've written on scholar-fans/fan-scholars, and the possibility that fandom theorises itself (as per arguments on 'vernacular theory').

This blindspot is certainly to do with my professional identity as a paid academic, but it may also be partly and unwittingly correlated with issues of gender, given the possibility that the fan

communities I'm not often reading or citing may be predominantly spaces occupied by female fan intellectuals and thinkers who are perhaps not paid academics.

And there is also a professional time pressure linked to this; I have to make time to seek to keep up with 'traditional' published academic work in my area, and so I quite possibly prioritise this over and above participating in online discussion groups/blogs and so on. I feel that my

professional identity requires that I keep up with certain forms of published work, and this leads

to a lack of time and attention for what may be perceived to be less securely 'consecrated' forms of fan debate and dialogue.

Right now, I don't even have the time that I'd like to give to discovering new fan objects, passions, and interests, for instance my recent engagement with the reimagined Battlestar Galactica -- I've now seen everything up to the end of series 3 -- was frequently deferred and delayed due to work projects, despite the fact that many, many people told me that I "had" to see it. They were right, of course. But by the time I managed to catch up with BSG, I was far behind committed fans' debates and speculations.

So, what the fandom and gender debate really brought home to me, time and again, was the painful extent to which I was up against the clock, very much having to dip in and out, and having to schedule periods of work on my own contributions with my partner in crime.

These may not seem to be quite 'proper' matters for discussion, but what my PhD supervisor Professor Roger Silverstone once called, after Bourdieu, "temporal capital" is, I think, the most significant delimitation and restriction on what I am currently able to consume (as a fan) and engage with (as a scholar-fan) and integrate into my cultural repertoires (as fan, scholar, and any hybridised version and multiplication of those identities).

What I need -- and what would enable me to participate adequately and properly in online discussion spaces as well as venues of academic publication -- is quite simply a TARDIS. (Failing that, extensive research leave, or a 'fan retreat').

But when I encountered a few discussions as to how male participants were less frequently to be found in specific online spaces (LJ), I thought to myself "but I want to be here, I want to have

time to do this, I want to speak to these people". And I wanted to participate in blog discussions.

But I was time-poor, lacking in temporal capital.

And that problem isn't, I think, necessarily a matter of gender (though it is certainly open to

gendered analysis: am I too intent on academia as a 'career', for instance, with that being

articulated to a reactionary masculinist focus on career-as-identity. Perhaps).

A lack of time is, however, very much a matter of the contemporary University-as-industry, and the duties that are expected of academics in the UK HE sector, and the pressures to publish (in 'approved' cultural spaces -- quite literally, no marks for blogging!) that, with the RAE, are as

forceful now in the UK as I suspect they are for those seeking tenure in the US. In short, I suspect that some of my own blindspots and pressures here (reading trad, published "academic" work more than blogs and LJs) can be partly traced back to forms of academic governmentality operating in my national context. Even publishing in online journals is devalued here; the whole system of governmental evaluation is geared towards valorized print culture (books/journals with consecrated sources such as University Presses and well-established publishers) rather than, say, blog interactions. Whilst the US system may be far more techno-embracing, I feel that my national work context strongly favours 'slow' cultures of academia

Melissa A. Click:

I was excited to participate in this discussion because it aspired to address two issues in which I've been interested: the meaning of the term "fan" and the gender divide in our field. The last few months have been eye-opening, mind-blowing, frustrating, and productive. The experience has exposed me to the positions and viewpoints of a range of thoughtful and talented scholars--for me, that is the best possible outcome of the project. I do still think we have work to do, though, and I'm looking forward to it.

Perhaps because I am not an avid blogger, I wonder if the web is the best place to continue this discussion--it feels like there are too many folks talking in too many different places to feel as though we're all on the same page in the conversation. I think we need to take advantage of occasions when we can continue these conversations face-to-face. More formal conversations in conference sessions are great for provocative discussion, but what about also making time after hours, where we can add to our theoretical work with social work--building on what we've begun here by developing our connections to each other. Drinks at ICA, anyone?

Derek R. Johnson:

Without a doubt, this conversation has been a valuable one. Scholars with diverse interests in and concerns about fandom as an intellectual enterprise have collaborated to provide a snapshot of the field. Evidenced over and over for me was the sense that to understand the multiplicity of fandom, we cannot rely on the methodologies or research questions of any one scholarly approach. We cannot understand fandom without thinking about gender, for example, but we cannot reduce fandom to gender issues either. We need an integrated approach. The future fruits of our labor here, I'd wager, will come from the way this conversation has brought our multiple approaches into direct dialogue.

Significantly, this conversation gave voice to the claim that some perspectives on fandom operate from the margins because of inequalities based in gender--both the gendered practices of fans and gendered researchers themselves. For enabling this expression of gender strife alone, this conversation succeeded. And yet, after months of discussion, I'm ultimately not sure how productive the boys vs. girls format was. Even though our goal was to find "commonalities and differences" in our approaches, and discussion quickly moved beyond these initial grievances, the presentation of each entry as a "round" still conveyed a sense of pugilistic combat to me. This is meant as no sleight to Henry--not only was this format a logical way to organize content for an exciting blog series, but it directly responded to the boys vs. girls antagonism felt by some and communicated to him earlier this year. Indeed, Henry's intervention should be credited with valuably bringing our multiple approaches to fandom together. But to me, the awkwardness of the gender-divided format calls into question what boys vs. girls issues were actually in play. More often than not, men and women seemed to dialectically find common ground, and when it came down to it, no one could really make a convincing argument (to me, at least) that men study fans and navigate the field in one specific way, and women in another, etc. I saw very little in our diverse approaches to fandom that could be even imperfectly mapped on to the binary of gender that organized the conversation. In that sense, while I certainly acknowledge institutionalized gender inequality in the academy, I remain skeptical about some of the perceptions of gender-based methodological and relational schisms that inspired our discussion. But I find it simultaneously reassuring that when positioned for gender opposition, we could thwart it, rising above trying to take down "the other side" and reaching mutual understanding, cooperation, and collaboration. If there's anywhere for us to go from here, it's there.

Julie Levin Russo:

I'd like to thank everyone who participated in our rich, extensive, and provocative

dialogue. This project, like all aca/fan activities, was contoured from the start by an

uneven topography of power (from Henry's position as the patriarch of our field to the

divergent interfaces of the personal blog and the LiveJournal community), and my hope

is that, at the very least, it brought this landscape into clearer focus. As a reader, I

became ever more convinced of the importance of modeling fandom in terms of multiple

axes of engagement rather than a monolithic binary. These axes are all gendered to

varying degrees, ideologically and/or empirically, and are also raced, classed,

nationalized, etc. Mobilizing the term "fanboy" or "fangirl" activates some

overdetermined soup of meanings, often mostly from the left or right column of such

oppositions as casual/ watercooler vs. avid, individual vs. community, "as is" vs.

"creative," closure vs. openness, knowledge vs. relationships, transformative vs.

derivative, public vs. private, straight vs. queer, mainstream vs. fringe, and consuming

vs. producing (or vice versa) -- but not with equal emphasis and certainly not with

precision. I trust that this set of conversations has pushed others as well as myself to

attend to the particulars and complexities of gender and other inequalities on whichever

of these planes we're working, and also in the institutional context of this work.

Overall, I found the series especially fruitful in materializing and cultivating a

network of scholars, and I look forward to continuing our discussion in the blogosphere

and IRL (at Console-ing Passions, for one).

Catherine Tosenberger:

I found the entire process extremely rewarding, and not simply the exposure to others' interesting work - though that was definitely my favorite part. I think the entire series reinforced that this discussion of gender and fandom studies needed to happen, and needs to keep happening. In several cases, including my own segment, we wound up reproducing the stereotypical gendered discourses that this series was intended to call out and examine. It was both frustrating and enlightening, and I hope that we can use this as fodder for further discussions of the issue, as an impetus to continue critical examination of our own field and its assumptions.

As for practical and structural issues, while I understand and appreciate the grounding in the blog community, I'm wondering if perhaps, if this were to take place again, a move to a more "message-board" format might be fun to try, just to mix it up a bit; it might be more conducive to free-flowing discussion, and not just because the much-maligned wait period for posting comments might be avoided. A message-board format might encourage more people to comment, since it's the very nature of a blog to function as someone's personal forum, and the sense of... "invading" isn't the right word, but it's the only one springing to mind, someone else's personal space. This is not a commentary on Henry as host, as he was completely gracious and hands-off; I was thinking more in terms of the perceptions of Jane Random Fan, who might feel more comfortable - especially if disagreeing with the OP -- posting on a message board that doesn't appear to "belong" to anyone than in a named someone's blog. (Not that this stops blog-conversant fans, but not all fannishness takes place in the blogosphere.) We got some overlap, with the cross-posting on LJ, but I'm wondering if an entire space set aside specifically for all comers to the debate would bring in a wider base; neutral ground and all that.

Sam Ford:

Thanks again to everyone for what has been 22 rounds of fascinating discussion that have

raised a wealth of issues. I am sure we all share the feeling of being overwhelmed by

the content that this discussion has generated and all have secret guilt about certain

weeks we weren't able to internalize all of the discussion we would have liked, but I

think what we should be most excited about is the textual archive of this discussion and

that it can continue providing richness for all our discussions as an ongoing discourse.

This discussion showed both the positives and negatives of discussing these issues in

the blogosphere and in a style of writing that can be quite different from traditional

academic prose. This led to a type of direct address that is only possible on the

blogosphere, which is why I am quite the proponent of using the blog as a tool of

discourse that throws off the power structure and closed walls of traditional academic

conversation. That raw honesty empowered this discussion, but the insertion of emotion

and personal address into this discourse also led to some occasionally heated exchanges

that weren't always productive and ultimately served to obfuscate some of the most

important issues. I know we all felt frustration at one point or another with how

certain rounds went, and with the direction conversations turned.

Ultimately, looking at this conversation through the construct of a continuous

trajectory doesn't serve us well. The fact that a different pair picked up the

discussion each week and that each conversation is somewhat disjointed from the last

means that we should not necessarily expect the last round of this series to

necessarily be more "enlightened" than the first. And of course we raised many more

problems than we solved, but I feel that was the purpose of this conversation to begin

with, to bring tensions more to the surface and to get us all thinking more overtly

about the issues both of gender in fan communities and gender in fan studies.

I am most indebted to this discussion for the awareness it has provided me for the

community that exists around fan studies and the wide variety of interesting voices who

surround these discussions. For me, I was aware of some of the C3-related folks who

have been involved in this project--Joshua Green, Geoffrey Long, Aswin Punathambekar,

Rob Kozinets, etc., some of the folks heavily involved in these discussions on

LiveJournal that I had the pleasure of meeting through the Media in Transition 5

conference here at MIT, and the soaps-related researchers whose work I was familiar with

and who greatly shaped my thesis writing, in particular Lee Harrington and Nancy Baym.

In the process, I've launched a preliminary project comparing daytime and primetime

dramas with Jason Mittell that I hope will further the discourse started here and that

spilled over into Jason's blog, Just TV. I have been invited to participate in a

workshop at Consol-ing Passions with all sorts of fascinating people who I got to know

over the past year, directly stemming from the conversation that began here--Bob Rehak,

Suzanne Scott, Louisa Stein, and Julie Levin Russo. And I met Abigail Derecho and,

through our realization of a common interest in contemporary soap opera fandom, we have

started the task of co-editing our first anthology together, on the current state of the

soap opera industry and its future.

Ultimately, I think this series was most valuable in this community- forming function.

Since my "other self" is a small-town journalist, I see this scholarly community as not

that unlike the small towns I covered. Everyone here is bound by common goals and

issues, but it doesn't mean we always agree. Nor, perhaps, should we. But I am

thankful for the time everyone put into making this conversation happen, and I hope we

all stay committed to pursuing the issues raised here further in our own work and

conversations.

A final thank you to all those who were not part of the debates but who joined the

conversation throughout the summer. Henry and others write often about "aca/fans," but

I am interested in doing what we can to include "criti/fans" in this debate as well. As

the people surrounding this conversation has shown, there are a lot of very intelligent

and articulate people outside academia who are interested in these conversations. How

can we adapt our practices to make them more a part of this conversation, while also

opening up our resources to help "criti/fans" who don't live within the haven of a

university system obtain the resources to become involved with the scholarly side of

these discussions?

Now for comments from readers:

Thank you, Henry! Thank you for listening to me and writing to me when anyone's first reaction would have been to be defensive and protective of those I summarily attacked; thank you for spending your--clearly overbooked and precious--time to organizing this and making it possible; thank you for worrying enough about younger scholars and our concerns to want to hear what we have to say; and thank you for trying ceaselessly to be a voice and spokesperson for fandom when you need to be and trying to pass over the reins when you can.

Like most of us, I've experienced moments of frustration at various points this summer, but more importantly, I've also felt that we've begun to build something. There's an intellectual excitement for me and many I talk to for which the summer gender debate is not solely responsible, but is in large parts.

As "partner in crime" I probably have seen more than most how much effort and energy and thought you've put into this, so: THANKS!

-- Kristina Busse

.

Thank you for hosting the discussion. I think it was really important.

BTW, most of the female scholars I'm familiar with have a blog as well as an LJ.... Why do the men of your acquaintance say they are not comfortable in LJ? This honestly puzzles me because it's not an exclusively female space.... there are plenty of men there, and a man invented it. Fanfic, yes -- tons more women than men. LJ, no.

Again -- thanks for the thinky.

Dana Sterling

I want to address just one issue which I think is important.

The internet in its current formation is for linking. Yet you say:

Female scholars are more likely to start a Live Journal page than to

start a blog. Live Journal seems a much more personal and private space so

sending large numbers of readers of this blog trampling through some one's

Live Journal seems inappropriate. Or for that matter, it doesn't always feel

right to take something which is being discussed in LJland and bring it into

the blogosphere.

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, but I can note a few of the

following points

One of the reasons this whole debate started (in terms of the people I know

talking about problems) was the on-going perception that the male scholars

in blogland in effect dismissed scholarship in LJ, dismissed women scholars

in LJ. If that attitude is reified, then there's a real problem. It's

sloppy stereotypical thinking. Nobody says that LJ is the only place for

acafen, but to dismiss it as unintellectual/girly space, or as a female

space that has to be protected from males is just too Victorian for words.

(LJ actually does allow a lot more protection than some of the other

internet spaces, but that is not only about gender, I assume.)

There are differences in communication practices between blogs and LJ, but

there are differences bewteen blogs and blogs (I read a lot of the feminist

blogs), and between different LJ users.

People ignoring everybody else won't solve the problem of lack of

communication between differentn disciplines or different genders. I, and

others I know, read some blogs (not always commenting because it's such a

pain over here), but the blog writers apparently often don't bother to read

LJ..

We now know the name and online personas and spaces of a bunch of new

acafan. I've seen several of the women set up blogs and participate in

discussion over here. I've seen several of the men set up LJs and

participate in discussion over there. That is to the good, I think.

But after reading this post, one aspiring academic has already asked me if

she should get a blog, fearing that the LJ will not be enough if she

continues her academic work. I find her response incredibly disturbing,

hinting at yet more ways in which "male" spaces (which aren't male because

many females are there, but somehow ignored) are privileged over "female"

spaces (which haved males in them, but they are somehow ignored).

Not all the female scholars in the aca-fan debates are in LJ (nor should

they be!).

There are men in LJ online fandoms.

I think LJ is the most exciting fandom space right now, but that's my

evaluation, my choice, and my focus for scholarship. There are other

areas--and fan studies will be stronger for being more inclusive and aware

of multiple spaces (to avoid that pesky "all fans are X" problem). I don't

assume that just because I'm not interested in a fan space or topic that it

is inherently uninteresting or unimportant. I try to read as widely as I can

about areas of fandom I'm not interestd in writing about, just as I try to

read scholarship in different areas. Nobody can read everything, but marking

off a whole space as if "there be dragons over there," is frustrating

(speaking as one of the dragons).

I am not going to get a blog--and given all the complaints I hear about spam

over here, I am wondering why anybody bothers. LJ doesn't have spam

problems (now, ads, well that's another issue, but that's all over the

internet as well). The comparison between the level of discussion on the

acafan posts here and the ones in fandebate shows, I think, that more

discussion is possible in the LJ format, and certainly more community

building.

The point (if I have one) is not that LJ is better or blogs are better--but

that good scholarship will come from being aware of what's out there so

one's own focus/argument can be stronger rather than assuming that one's

ignorance of large areas of fandom isn't a problem.

Deciding that it's just too rude or invasive to link to LJ (as if all LJ

users are the same) is, to my eyes, a retreat of sorts. As far as I'm

concerned, feel totally free to link to anything I post in either of my LJs:

robin_anne_reid or ithiliana (most of the public posts in my fan journal are

fanfiction, so not of interest in terms of academic discussions, but I do

meta once in a while).

I recently posted about the ethics of analyzing fandom, and human subjects

protection, in my fan journal (I find that there's a lot of overlap between

the two journals!). The post garnered over 130 responses (some of those were

my replies to people): it was a great discussion, and an incredible part of

my process/writing. I tend to post ideas in process, as I present on newer

ideas, to get feedback and try out my ideas. I learned a lot. The disussion

is here:

http://ithiliana.livejournal.com/789235.html

It was linked in metafandom, and probably in some friends' journals as well.

I have my comment settings set to screen anonymous comments (but that's no

different than this blog!), but I don't at all mind people trampling over to

read and comment. That's sort of the point as far as I'm concerned.

In my professional journal, I'm currently posting on online teaching, new

media literacies in terms of my own work and a new program starting up in my

department, and racism imbroglios in fandom. I'm posting about two

presentations that I'll be giving this spring, because the whole time the

acafan debate was going on, with very little mention of race, there were

conflicts in multiple fandoms over racism in source texts, racism in fan

fiction, use of racist language, and the responses of fandom as a whole to

concerns raised by fans of color.

You linked to some fan posts over the fanlib issue: I thought that was

excellent. Failing to link to them while writing about fanlib or allowing

Chris Williams the space to talk about his project would have been

incredibly problematic: that is, you would be denying fans their voice and

agency. You've never done that as a scholar--that's only one reason, I

think, why so many (fans and acafan) admire your work..

Why would you deny the same courtesy to acafen in LJ?

I can see a material problem: the sheer number of LJs. I can RSS feed blogs

and read without having to bookmark each one. I doubt any blog could "feed"

LJ in the same way (but I don't know--I know that people can track LJs

outside LJ--I just don't know if you could do it). When Kristina started her

blog, I went over the pointed out she could "link" in the blogroll section

to LJs, and why not do it. I know some people in LJ feel awkward or silly

about dropping links to their own posts in a blog response (but I don't

understand why--when one blogger links back and and comments on a blog post,

that's considered a good thing.

I'd suggest the best place to feed or bookmark is

which links to a range of interesting discussions in LJ (and if people don't

want to be linked, they're not).

http://community.livejournal.com/metafandom/profile

People who have to maintain a certain amount of anonymity will have their

journals locked, or some posts will be locked. Others, however, do not lock

and welcome discussion from others. Many in LJ do see/feel it as a private

protected space, but they learn pretty fast that if you want privacy, you

friends lock. Some in LJ do want it as a protected space for fandoms, but

it's not likely to be that way--anything in public on the internet can be

seen by anyone. If you're worried about linking, it only takes a few

moments to ask (it's considered polite to notify people if you're linking to

them, in a comment).

And if it comes to that: I've seen a lot of rhetoric on various blog

debates about how a blog is the owner's private space, and people commenting

have to be polite, and they all have anti-trolling policies, etc. Sounds to

me a lot like the discussions in LJ over commenting, IP logging, etc.

In LJ (and around fandoms), we link all over the place--there are

newsletters like meta-fandom devoted to linking. There are conventions

about communicating, just as there are everywhere, but given that a LJ post

is likely to get anywhere from 50-150 comments very quickly (if it interests

people--it can get 0 as well), when I've rarely seen that sort of response

here, I'm baffled by the idea that somehow we don't want comments.

Sure, most of those comments are from LJ users--but we don't all agree,

we're not all female, we're not all academics, and all of those

disagreements and debates go on all the time.

-- Robin Reid

Henry,

I didn't comment when you first asked for responses, but the other scholars's responses you posted are so interesting I feel like I want to add my $0.02, albeit late.

My experience in reading and writing during this debate has been so mixed. On the one hand, I think the most progress on the gender debate per se was made in those conversations which got most hairy and uncomfortable (either directly in your blog, or in the ensuing livejournal/blogosphere conversations). Real underlying thorny issues were revealed, real disagreements came for us, and people got a chance to learn from each other.

But on the other hand, those uncomfortable conversations were, well, uncomfortable. Women feeling like the contributions of female academics or fans are marginalized; men feeling like they were attacked as sexist -- these left some pretty raw wounds. Whereas my conversation with Alan was pleasurable throughout.

There were places I didn't poke in my exchange with Alan. Not that I thought it would have turned into an uncomfortable, hairy situation. No part of that conversation was anything other than pleasant, enjoyable, and educational. But I'm an independent scholar -- and a woman, socialized to avoid public disagreement -- and I was having a very public conversation with a male credentialed associate professor in my field. I was far too wary to prod at any statements I disagreed with. Not that I think Alan would have responded negatively. On the contrary, I think

further questioning on my part would have only enriched our conversation and added to our pleasure in the exchange. I went through drafts of e-mails I didn't send to Alan in which I did

raise questions about assertions he made. But I rejected those drafts out of nervous suspicions that I was out of line.

This isn't the fault of Alan or Henry or any of the participants in the conversation giving me this irrational sense of risk. I think it comes back to the professional/amateur divide which Kristina reiterated, and which is part of a larger question: why does the balance of faculty to independent scholar in our field (and academia in general) appear tied to gender, and what can we do about it? (Whether what we do about it is address that gender balance, or instead address the lack of support for independent scholarship is yet another question.)

That being said, I had so much fun in my conversations with Alan -- they were interesting, compelling, and entertaining. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't accuse him of being a patriarchal

oppressor, no matter what he claims!

Thank you so much for setting this up. I had a fabulous time.

-Deborah Kaplan

Gender and Fan Culture (Wrapping Up, Part One)

Last May, I announced my plan to host an ongoing conversation between male and female scholars around the topic of gender and fan culture. To be honest, I had no idea what to expect when I made that announcement. I felt like the moment was right to celebrate a generation of younger scholars -- male and female -- who were doing groundbreaking work in the areas of fan studies and cult media. I was hoping that the series would give me a chance to get to know these researchers and their work better. While I had read some of the recent scholarship, it had been hard to sort out the emerging players on the basis of one or two essays. I knew, however, that the field was now more methodologically and theoretically diverse than any one had yet acknowledged and I also knew that many of these people, working in different disciplines and operating with different social networks, did not know each other. I had been distressed by suggestions that there was a growing disconnect between the work male and female scholars were doing in this space and concerned that the roots of fan studies in feminist scholarship and female cultural practice might get lost. I was interested in the ways that the entertainment industry was embracing new models of audience participation but often with unequal and differential treatment of forms of participation that were historically coded as masculine or feminine (an issue I raised in Convergence Culture in relation to the Star Wars fan cinema competitions.) I felt then that the best way to break down some of the walls was to pair up male and female scholars, who shared similar interests but who might not have known each other, for the purpose of a public conversation. My hope had been that if we chose a sufficiently diverse set of scholars, we would complicate existing assumptions about how gender impacted fan culture, suggesting some overlap as well as some differences in cultural preferences, interpretive practices, cultural activities, and social communities.

I also wanted to explore how a blog might be used in a community building activity, creating a space of dialog rather than monolog, enabling a different kind of exchange among scholars than might occur in the more structured and familiar space of an academic convention, and at the same time, I wanted to push others to embrace a new mode of scholarly discourse which engaged with the general public rather than remaining within a purely academic space.

Those were my hopes for this series. Each participant brought their own hopes to this project and that accounts, in part, for some of the mixed signals which have always circulated around this project. Some saw the discussion as centrally about breaking down walls between individual scholars or perhaps of building a new social network around this topic which would include both male and female researchers. My hope was that if we got to know each other better, we'd be more likely to hang out together at conferences, more likely to construct anthologies or conference panels that were more inclusive and diverse. Some hoped that the project might offer new theoretical perspectives in the field -- helping to revise the language of feminist scholarship to reflect emerging media and cultural practices or more generally, raising new questions which we might address through our scholarship. Some hoped that the project might provide support for younger researchers who needed to demonstrate to their advisors or tenure committees that fan studies was a legitimate field of research, one which was generating scholarly interest around the world. Still others hoped that the project might call attention to structural factors and systemic discrimination which resulted in the unequal treatment of women in the academia.

Perhaps the project's biggest success was its most mundane. We've just had a project in which 44 academics from all over the world all met their deadlines. A few posts have been late by a day or so. But the vast majority got their work in on time -- an act which is almost without precedence in my experience.

Thanks to everyone involved for their hard work, their personal engagement, their intellectual honesty, and their willingness to stage these exchanges in public. I realize that all of you were playing without a net -- taking professional and emotional risks, trusting your partners and the others involved in these exchange, to respect your thinking as a work in progress.

There have certainly been times when I have been frustrated by one or another side of the exchange, fearing that our project would not be allowed to succeed, worrying that one or another of us would fall into gender traps, but I have to say that in the end, I have felt encouraged by the quality of your contributions and encouraged by the recognition of the overlap between these different intellectual projects.

There is still a lot of work to be done -- no doubt.Most if not all of the women included very clearly saw themselves as part of a shared intellectual field called fan studies and most of them saw themselves also as actively connected to the social network of fandom. For many of the men involved, neither was necessarily true. They would have described their work in some other category of research -- transmedia storytelling, consumer research, cult media, creative industries, audience studies, global studies -- within which the study of fandom mattered but might not be the central focus of their interests. The stakes for the two groups in this conversation were different, accordingly. Some have suggested the conversation would have looked different if I had reached out as broadly to bring in female scholars who were not working on fandom per se but were working on other related areas. But I had wanted to include everyone who asked to participate and there were just more women lined up at the start of this than men. I consider it a major victory under the circumstances that I was able to find a male counterpart for every female participant.

My hope is that these exchange has helped all of us to think more clearly about what fan studies contributes to and draws from these other fields of inquiry, but it may also indicate some of the challenges we face if we want to bridge between the genders in terms of our social and professional networks.

The other thing that we've struggled with in this discussion series has been the different modes of communication within the existing social networks of male and female scholars. I have been struck by the number of female participants who have expressed discomfort with blogs or the number of male participants who have said that they didn't feel at home on Live Journal. The result has often been parallel conversations along similar tracks, compounded by misunderstandings about the style and tone of the exchanges which emerge from discursive practices in the two spaces.

Again, this points to work which still remains to be done if we are going to learn to listen and respect each other's points of view. And more interestingly, I am finding myself pondering the correct way of interfacing between the two worlds. Male scholars, for example, often write to me to tell me that they are creating a blog and I have used this space to publicize their efforts. Female scholars are more likely to start a Live Journal page than to start a blog. Live Journal seems a much more personal and private space so sending large numbers of readers of this blog trampling through some one's Live Journal seems inappropriate. Or for that matter, it doesn't always feel right to take something which is being discussed in LJland and bring it into the blogosphere.

So, what's the solution? Do these two different modes of communication represent a kind of gender segregation? If more and more important conversations impacting our research take place within these online spaces, then how does this impact the scholarship which we produce?

The nature of this exchange, the challenges of writing as aca-fen, is that we have personal and professional stakes within this conversation and where misunderstandings occurred, it has often struck me that they emerged from a confusion between different orders of discourse.

And in some cases, I fear that structuring the discussion around male and female "teams" may have solidified gender borders even as the project here was to break down such rigid categories. I am reminded of the work of Barrie Thorne who has described the kind of "gender work" which occurs within schools where the easy classification of children into "girls and boys" plays itself out in the playground culture as well: even when many boys and girls play together in their own neighborhoods, they tend to gender stratify in the school space, because those categories are ever present in the way they think of themselves.

I know that I have found myself feeling protective at times when one or another male scholar has been "under attack" or uncomfortably implicated when they said something that was ill-considered or inappropriate, even though in my own work in fandom I have always felt comfortable interacting with female fans and often more at home working with female scholars. So, in some ways, the pairings served our various causes and in some ways, they provoked the very behaviors and attitudes they were meant to resolve. But, even this may be instructive if they forced us to confront some of the factors which divide us and if we learn from each other in the process.

This work isn't done. It has only begun. I hope to continue to find ways to use this blog to host important conversations within our emerging field. I hope to use my role as a conference organizer to create other contexts which bring together scholars of diverse backgrounds and interests to share work with each other. I have always found myself recommending participants here to other editors and conference organizers, including people who were not on my radar when the project began. I have already found myself making more extensive reference to participants in my own writing and speaking. My early work on fandom had centrally been about gender and sexuality issues, my more recent work less so, and so I am finding myself struggling to build stronger and more visible connections between the two bodies of work as I look towards the next phases of my research.

Let me close my comments by thanking everyone who participated and especially Kristina Busse who has been my partner in crime making this whole thing possible.

Starting on Friday I will run comments from others who participated in the exchange. I haven't heard back from everyone and I still welcome further comments on the process -- either posted here as comments on the blog or if necessary, I will devote another set of posts to wrapping up the series. I want to make sure that everyone who wants to be heard gets a chance to speak.

A Plethora of Podcasts...

Whew! I have been totally pulled into administrivia for the past few weeks and have had very little time to focus on the blog, but I am starting to dig my way back out and have lots of cool stuff planned for the next few weeks. While I have been focused elsewhere, there have been a surge of new podcasts of CMS colloquium events or of my talks around the country which might be of interest to my regular readers. I figured I would take a day out just to catch up with these and make sure they got to the attention of anyone who might be interested. For those of you interested in our work on creative industries, Forrester Research has posted highlights of their Consumer Forum 2007, including some short segments from my conversation with Josh Bernoff, but also some very interesting segments involving Playboy's Christie Heffner, MTV's Christina Norman, Microsoft's Robert J. Bach, Brightcove's Jeremy Allaire, and Ze Frank, among others. It's a good place to go if you want to get in the mood for our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference which is coming up in just a few weeks.

I participated several weeks ago in a really outstanding conference at the University of Utah. It's theme was "Frontiers of New Media: Historical and Cultural Explorations of Region, Identity, and Power in the Development of New Communications Technologies" and it featured some outstanding papers by a range of folks from Media Studies, Technology Studies, and history, dealing with everything from the introduction of the telegraph and the telephone to contemporary digital practices. I was honored to be asked to give the keynote address at this event and spoke about some of the contradictions in the "moral economy of 'web 2.0'." This talk was based on an essay which Joshua Green and I authored for a forthcoming collection on creative industries and is essentially the same presentation as I made a week or so ago at the Association of Internet Researchers in Vancouver. You can listen to the podcast of the Utah version here. While you are visiting the site, check out some of the other sessions. This was a consistently strong conference and offers you some glimpses into some of the best contemporary work in media history.

Bill Densmore was nice enough to record and post the audio from my recent keynote address at the recent conference, "Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture," which was organized by Home Inc. and hosted at MIT by our program. Here, I was trying to explain some of the governing ideas behind our New Media Literacies initiative, having things to say about Soulja Boy, Herman Melville, Digital Natives, and Cosplay, among other topics.

Meanwhile, the Program has played host to a range of interesting guests and as always, we are posting podcasts of these events as soon as possible. Here's some you might have missed:

Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance talked to our students about the ways his organization fuses fandom and activism. We are hoping to feature an interview here on the blog with Slack about his work before much longer.

Industry and cultural analyst B. Joseph Pine II shared some of his most recent thinking about "Technology and Media in the Experience Economy."

The Communication Forum and the Center for Future Civic Media hosted an event around the key question, "What is Civic Media?"

Media Strategist Lee Hunt shared with us his perspectives on the "best practices" in contemporary branded entertainment.

The MIT Communications Forum hosted a discussion on the nature of "Collective Intelligence" with Thomas Malone (The Future of Work) and others associated with his new Center on Collective Intelligence.

Coming Soon: Katie Salens on games and education.

"Meet me at my crib . . .": Reading the official "Crank That" video

Yesterday, I shared the first of two blog post which Xiaochang Li, a CMS masters student, wrote about Soulja Boy for our Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Today, I run part two which centers around the official version of the "Crank Dat" video, which, like the many fan remakes, circulates via YouTube -- in this case with the active support of Soulja Boy himself. I can't decide what fascinates me the most about this story: the fact that this teenager broke into the front ranks of the entertainment industry by using tools and processes which in theory are accessible to every other person of his generation or the fact that he has recognized intuitively the value in spreading his content and engaging his audience as an active part of his promotional process. As Xiaochang notes here, it's really intriguing that his video lays out his own analysis of the relations between the old media power of the labels and the new media power that brought him to fame in the first place. She recently shared with me another fascinating clip -- Soulja Boy at BET hip hop music awards-- and notes that his vision of participatory culture extends to getting everyone else to do the Crank Dat dance while making only the most minimal gestures towards performing it himself.

"Meet Me at My Crib...": Reading the Official "Crank Dat" Video

by Xiaochang Li

Yesterday, I brought up the phenomenon surrounding Soulja Boy and the "Crank Dat" dance craze that propelled him to success and touched upon a few of the things that drew my attention to this particular case. Today I thought I'd dig in a little further, and try to tease out some of the things that Soulja Boy really embodies for me (as a concept more than as a musician or performer) through a closer examination of his official music video, which touches upon a lot of these themes of production, participation, and distribution in the age of convergence.

Before I can talk about the content of the video, though, I have to talk a little bit about the context in which I'm watching it. I have to admit, I watch television almost exclusively on my computer, so I can't say for certain whether or not this video is getting airtime on MTV. What I do know is that it is on YouTube, uploaded by Soulja Boy himself, and has been viewed there over 15 million times, framed by the thousands of comments and hundreds of response videos. Rather than repurposing the track for (re)distribution within a traditional broadcast model, here we are given Crank That in its natural habitat -- not a discreet media product, but one video within a network of thousands of others that make up the phenomenon.

The video itself is a retelling of Soulja Boy's rise to fame in three acts: Collipark's discovery of Soulja Boy, Collipark's ride to Soulja Boy's house to sign him, and then the signing. In the process of reenactiment, it then dramatizes many of the themes central to the Soulja Boy phenomenon, presenting at the center a dichotomy between the established music industry and its trappings and the ground-up, digitally mediated methods of production, promotion, and distribution that Soulja Boy employes.

In the opening sequence in the video, before the song even starts, Collipark plays the part of the ignorant executive, asking a couple of kids dancing in his office " "Who's Soulja Boy, and what in the heck is that dance?" to which they they respond by reasking the question, incredulous, to each other, as if Collipark's ignorance of Soulja Boy isolates him to the extent that he can no longer be part of the same discourse.

As an answer to the question, the video cuts to a following shot of Soulja Boy, a webcam passing conspicuously in the foreground as he pulls his chair up to a computer and the song begins. But instead of getting up to dance and sing, Soulja Boy instead focuses on his computer screen, where we see images of streaming video of people doing the dance, surrounded by enthusiastic user comments. This is crosscut with shots of Collipark gazing at his own computer screen, and culminates in a shot of a chat client window:

CP: This is Mr. Collipark, I want to sign you to a record deal.

Soulja Boy: Meet me at my crib . . .

The emphasis on cribs, or home turfs, is interesting here, considering the way Soulja Boy's space is populated with devices of digital production and distribution, and Collipark's office is burdened with the structures and divisions of industry -- assistants, paperwork, gold records on the wall, and a huge desk separating him from the kids who are in the know. The video also starts out in letterbox, opening to full-screen only once the song begins, to further delineate the two spaces. And Collipark finally meets Soulja Boy on his own turf in yet another way, by contacting him through a chat client instead of by phone or mail.

The second act, in which Collipark makes good on this request, we see shots of him in the darkened back of a limo as he drives through the streets crosscut with various groups of people -- girls in the park, boys on a bridge, two old men with canes, a man in a superman costume, a traffic cop -- all either watching the video on mobile devices or starting up the dance or some combination thereof. It is only once Collipark finishes watching the video on his own mobile device that he looks out his window, gaping at all the Soulja Boy performances taking place all around him.

The whole sequence comes across like an ad for media convergence. The video and dance is shown spreading through numerous devices and, more importantly, generating discussion, sharing, and participation, quickly establishing itself as a social practice instead of just a media property spread over numerous technologies.

And here again we see the contrast of the record exec isolated in what is visual shorthand for entertainment industry success (riding in the back of a limo in near-darkness), but instead of presenting an image of success, it shows how sealed off he is from what's happening in the world around him, literally kept in the dark about what young people are doing everywhere outside his car. What's interesting here is not only the depiction of the seclusion the record industry versus the mobilization of the audience, but that the internet is repeated collapsed into the physical world. What happens on the videos is what's happening outside, and the internet phenomenon is translated into a real-world phenomenon.

What's more, there are a number of disparate groups represented across gender, age, and location, all of them reinterpreting the dance through their own communities, and linked through their ability to watch the videos across various devices, emphasizing at once a sense of connectivity, but also an urge to represent local communities and groups. In short, Soulja Boy as a phenomenon presents itself as more of a mode than a community, a practice that allows existing communities based on characteristics that are generally thought to be "disappeared" in the digital space (gender, age, race etc.) to foreground themselves.

Then finally, after several performance sequences, we have the culmination of the video, where Soulja Boy gets signed (and here again we see the interjection of digital mediation and online discussion). As I mentioned before, the signing takes place at his house, suggesting that the industry has to come to him. Morever, it is done through the passing of bling, a gesture that's more symbolic than official. The necklace bears a strong resemblance to a medal, and he receives it more like an award than an opportunity. In other words, the record signing is not the start of his career, but rather simply the recognition for the work he's already done and will continue doing.

Furthermore, he puts on his sunglasses before the look is complete, suggesting a persona that was crafted prior to industry involvement. And all of this is again framed within networking technologies, with the crucial moment in which Collipark passes the necklace show on a computer screen show only as a streaming video clip, with a chat discussion between two people commenting on the events, suggesting once again the pivotal role of fan participation in the entire ordeal.

An interesting question was brought up by Henry Jenkins regarding some of what has been discussed here: would our reactions to Soulja Boy be the same if we were to find out, some time down the line, that Soulja Boy wasn't real, but rather the next iteration of something like LonelyGirl15?

The answer is yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that we may feel duped, but no in the sense that, in a lot of ways, Soulja Boy already is Lonelygirl15. He has never been shy about his intentions -- from the beginning, he was clear that his goal was to sign a major record deal. There were never pretensions about Youtube and Myspace as merely expressive platforms. For Soulja Boy, it was about promotion from the start, in an effort not to eschew the record industry altogether, but to enter it in untraditional ways. And any discover of disingenuousness of Soulja Boy as an individual would not wholly detract from Soulja Boy as a phenomenon, because what has grown up around him has also grown past him and while he was the beginning, he is no longer the central to what has happened. In other words, we no longer need Soulja Boy in order to Crank That.

Xiaochang Li completed a N.A. at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrucken and going 220 km per hour on the Autobahn. She entered the Masters program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT this fall. Her current researhc interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. She is part of the Convergence Culture Consortium research team.

What Is Civic Media?

An MIT Communications Forum event, on September 20, represented the formal launch of the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a joint effort of the Comparative Media Studies Program and the MIT Media Lab and funded by the Knight Foundation. The event featured Beth Noveck (NYU Law School), Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center, Harvard, and the Global Voices Project), Chris Csikszentmihalyi (MIT Media Lab), and yours truly. You can find a webcast of this event here. This was the first of a series of Forums focused on the ways media can be deployed at the local level to foster greater civic engagement. This event's focus was largely definitional -- trying to map out what we mean by civic media and comparing notes with researchers from other institutions who have a long history of work in this area. An event later this term, featuring Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech) and Mario Armstrong (The Urban Games Academy), will feature of games and civic engagement.

Earlier in the week, I had posted a preview of my remarks on the Center's new blog site. As I did so, I was trying to dispel two common misperceptions of the new center: because it is associated with the Knight foundation, many assume it is exclusively concerned with citizen journalism and because it is associated with the MIT Media Lab, many assume it is exclusively concerned with developing new media technologies. In both cases, this is partially right -- we are very interested in the role of citizen journalists and the future of news more generally and we are interested in developing new tools which activists, governments, journalists, and citizens can use in their everyday lives. But our notion of civic media is broader than journalism and we are interested not simply in designing and deploying new technologies but also thinking about the social contexts within which they operate and the cultural protocols that grow up around their use. Here's part of what I had to say:

Civic media, as I use the term, refers to any use of any medium which fosters or enhances civic engagement. I intend this definition to be as broad and inclusive as possible. Civic media includes but extends well beyond the concept of citizen journalism which is so much in fashion at the moment.

Lisa Gitelman has suggested that a medium should be understood both as a technological platform (a channel of communication) and the social and cultural protocols which grow up around it. As we think about future civic media, we are not simply designing tools or devices which might be deployed to support and sustain citizenship; we are also talking about the practices that grow up around those devices, practices that shape how they get used and how they are understood by the people who use them.

What constitutes a civic use of media? Well, certainly, we have classically considered newspapers to constitute a form of civic media, given the centrality of the concept of the informed citizen to the ideals of a democratic society. Yet, I would argue that even in classic accounts, the concept goes further than this.

So, let's consider, for example, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, where the image of the 1950s and 1960s bowling league embodies the Harvard professor's ideals of civic engagement. In what sense might bowling become a civic act? Putnam suggests it represents a commitment which citizens made to their neighbors, that they would come together socially at regular moments to play and that around the sport, a range of other significant conversations would occur which help sustain their investments within their community. Some of those conversations would contain news of civic importance, many of them would be personal gossip, but the key point was that the conversations occurred on multiple levels and thus helped to knit strong social ties.

Putnam contrasts the public sociability of bowling with our retreat into private space in response to the emergence of television. Here, Putnam confuses two arguments-the domestic consumption of television as a medium and concerns about the centrality of entertainment, rather than news, as its primary content of this medium. For me, his argument breaks down partially on both levels.

First, television is not inherently an isolating medium. We need look no further than the accounts of its introduction which suggests that installing the television set was an intensely social occasion in the 1950s with friends and family gathering to watch those first fuzzy and flickering images. Or we might account for the ways that television is consumed collectively in much of the developing world where people gather at the center of the village and hold important exchanges around broadcasts. So, in other words, television was consumed more socially at a moment of time when there was already a much greater investment in civic engagement or in cultures which have a more communal lifestyle (though even then, it was the newness of the technology which lead to the unusual experience of bringing the whole neighborhood into one's private domestic space). The shift towards more private consumption doesn't have to do with the intrinsic properties of the medium but rather has to do with the ways the medium gets used in a specific historical and cultural context.

But, second, it seems odd for Putnam to suggest that television can only be used for civic purposes when it is conveying news and information, given the fact that he uses bowling as his exemplar of civic participation. In this case, it is not the informational content of bowling but the emotional context in which it is consumed that enhances civic engagement.The conversations held around the game play helped to forge people into a community. And thus, there's no intrinsic reason why a predominantly entertainment or recreational medium might not enhance civic engagement almost as much as one focused on news and information. Whatever people are doing when they form guilds within a multiplayer game, it isn't bowling alone.

We might for a moment move beyond Putnam and consider another classic writer on this theme, Benedict Anderson. Anderson writes in his book, Imagined Communities, about the role which the London Times played in creating a shared sense of identity and fraternity across at least segments of the British empire. He argues that nations are imagined in the sense that we are invited to feel solidarity with people who we may never meet face to face-indeed, we will meet relatively few members of a nation even in the course of our entire lifetime and in the case of the British empire, he's describing how a concept of national culture was extended across the planet (although clearly unequally-understood differently by those who ruled and those who submitted to their rule.) Some of this had to do with the exchange of news and information, some of it had to do with the sense of a shared agenda, some of it had to do with the rituals which re-enforced that sense of social connection. Marshall McLuhan compared reading the newspaper to our morning baths-suggesting that its ritual functions were as important as its informational ones.

This sense of the civic, then, is at once real and virtual, created through media and experienced through face to face contact, sparked by shared activities and by exchanged information. This sense of civic engagement manifests itself through democratic participations (voting, for example) but it also gets displayed through the microprocesses of everyday life-through countless social rituals and seemingly meaningless everyday interactions with some subset of the larger group of people with whom we feel some sense of social connection.

As we think about civic media, then, we need to think about all of the mechanisms that generate that "structure of feeling" of belonging to a community and working together to insure its long term viability. Read side by side, Putnam and Anderson tell us that civic engagement involves the interweaving of weak and strong social ties.

So, what medium can foster civic engagement? All media can do so, depending on their use and the investments we make in other users. Jean Burgess has studied, for example, the local camera culture which grew up in Australia around the use of Flickr. Photography, she argued, is at least partially a local medium-we take pictures of real places while we are standing in front of them-even if the images circulate within digital networks. Flickr function as a social network, helping photographers in the same area find each other. They held meetups to take pictures together and this shared activity led to other conversations and other kinds of social contact. Taking pictures focused their attention on their immediate geographic surroundings, though they looked at them through a range of conceptual lens. They began to feel a greater sense of emotional bonds with other photographers who took pictures of that same area and in some cases, their photography increased their awareness of-and then became a vehicle they used to increase other people's awareness of-local problems and concerns.

We can read this story in two ways: the first emphasizes the affordances of the Flickr technology which enabled us to determine the location of the photographs and to identify the contact coordinates of the photographers; the second emphasizes the social processes-the ways that people organized themselves around the shared rather than individual production and circulation of images, the emergence of the meetup in the context of a networked culture.

My vision for this center, then, is one which combines understandings of technologies and of the social contexts within which they are used. If some writers, like Putnam, blame media for the breakdown of civic engagement, others, like Anderson, suggest that the rituals of shared media consumption can foster social connections and thus spark citizenly participations. Working together, we will produce both technologies and social practices, test them in the field, and publicize best practices. As we do so, we need to think about what might constitute today's equivalent of reading the London Times and today's equivalent of the Bowling League.

If you are interested in civic media, you should check out our blog. Here, smart researchers from CMS or the Media Lab will share their ideas about civic media. Although we've only been up a short while, you can already get a sense of the diversity of content the blog will offer -- from interviews with leading thinkers about civic media (including, so far, Ellen Hume and Ethan Zuckerman). In the future, we will also run reports on efforts in communities across the country and reports on existing and emerging technologies that might be deployed for civic purposes. We welcome tips about existing programs doing interesting work in this area.

I Was a Teenage Terrorist: The Star Simpson Story

A little over a week ago, the MIT campus found itself in the midst of a firestorm of media coverage surrounding an MIT student who was arrested at Boston's Logan Airport wearing a "device" which reporters and police have been calling a "fake" or "hoax bomb." This story cut close to home because the student in question, Star Simpson, had lived for a time in East Campus, a dorm which is right next door to Senior House (where I live). During the course of that first weekend, I had people on all sides of the controversy wanting me to make a public statement to students about what happened, each convinced that I would side with them. I have been reluctant to do so -- not wanting anything I said here to get absorbed into the media circus surrounding this case. My own sense is that both the government officials and the MIT administration issued statements prematurely without really understanding what went on and why and that the result was to inflame the news media.

To get a sense of how this story got covered by television news, you might check out this video produced by one MIT student and circulated on YouTube. The clips here suggest the glee with which reporters linked MIT, terrorism, bombs, and machine guns together to produce a story calculated to hit the hot buttons of their listeners. Joshua Glenn over at Boston.com provided a useful overview of some of the conflicting claims being made about this student. Here's a sample:

"Bringing a fake bomb into Logan Airport gives new meaning to the term sophomoric behavior."

Maybe Star Anna Simpson thought she could saunter through Logan and return to Cambridge with a helluva tale about how no one said a word to her. Or maybe she thought a half-dozen machine guns would do wonders for her Web site profile."

"It was stupid of her to do it, but let's not get hysterical. Give her community service and let's be done with this before we make a mockery of ourselves again."

"Simpson appears to be a classic case of book-smart but not social-smart."

The initial reports suggested a student whose behavior in the words of the official MIT statement was "reckless." Many of those in the know here initially assumed that this was some kind of "hack" (an MIT term for practical joke) which was in bad taste and which might have had fatal results. A very different story emerged when you considered some of the reports produced by web-based reporters and circulated through sites like Boing Boing and the Machinist. Here, Star Simpson comes across as a more typical MIT student, who was very much into a low tech aesthetic, making devices from found materials. Indeed, these reports are far more consistent with what I have been hearing from students who knew Star Simpson and they are consistent with the culture of East Campus, the dorm where she used to live, which has a long-standing tradition of do-it-yourself technology and construction projects. The so-called "hoax bomb" turns out to be a name tag featuring a star logo (for her name) made out of lite brites.

Many of us immediately linked the official responses to this lite-brite name badge back to what is now recognized as a over-reaction to a series of similarly low tech signs for The Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force last January, an incident still produces divergent responses depending on which side of a generational divide you fall. In both cases, the city responded to its own hysteria by charging the people involved with producing a "hoax bomb." Surely, the issue of intentionality is involved here. One has to consciously seek to deceive someone in order to be involved in committing a hoax, which doesn't seem to have been the case in either incident. My own theory is that it is much easier to accept that someone has made a fool of you than to acknowledge that you have made a fool of yourself within incidents which center around misunderstandings or misinterpretations of visual evidence.

If you look at the pictures of the device, it takes a big stretch of the imagination to view what she was wearing as resembling any kind of functioning weapon. Trust me -- if a MIT student wanted to create something which could be confused for a bomb, they could do so with a high degree of accuracy. This doesn't come anywhere close, witness the fact that she has reportedly worn this thing on our campus many times and no one has confused it for a bomb. It might never have crossed her mind that anyone could confuse this for a bomb -- in part because

our students have a more intimate understanding of how technology works than the average airport security guard does.

Some of my friends in the MIT administration have urged me to use my influence with students to warn them that it is not appropriate to play games or do hacks at the Logan Airport, which, after all, needs to be on hyper-alert because it was the site where the airplanes took off on 9/11. So let me be clear: I don't think it would be appropriate for any student to intentionally seek to deceive an airport official into believing that they were wearing a bomb or carrying a weapon. The news media has compared the incident to making jokes about bombs or guns in the security line at the airport. I certainly agree that such behavior would be grossly inappropriate and dangerous, but is that really what happened here? Star Simpson may have been guilty of nothing more than wearing a name badge that security guards mistook for a bomb.

So, how do I help students to predict what security guards are apt to mistake for a bomb? Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but under our constitutional system, it has to be theoretically possible to predict what would constitute criminal behavior.

So, given the two incidents, it would seem that the police have a strong anxiety about lite-brites. Police have also found it suspicious that Simpson was playing with Playdough in the airport. Would Playdough by itself be sufficient to trigger a police response? If so, we should probably be warning parents of small children.

Some have stressed the anxiety created by the circuit board. But many of our students carry around notebooks made from recycled circuit boards which are sold in college bookstores around the country. Should I tell them not to carry such devices to the airport?

The news media made much of the fact that this device lite up and was powered by a battery. This left me concerned since my late mother used to wear a broach to holiday parties which looked like a Christmas tree, lite up, and was battery powered. A star is not that removed from a Christmas tree, after all. Would such a device have been read as a bomb in the current climate? Or would the fact that it was being worn by a seventy something church lady have led to a different response?

My assumption is that if Star had worn a similarly mass produced, high tech device with the same features and functions, it would not have provoked concern from airport officials. It was the low tech, DIY nature of her name tag, perhaps more than anything else, which sparked the reactions of the airport security force, perhaps because the actual terrorists make use of similarly low tech devices. Yet, many at MIT have embraced low tech in part as a reaction to the cult of high tech which is so often associated with our institution, seeking a return to basic materials, hand crafting, simple and appropriate technologies, and so forth.

So, what is it that I warn my students against carrying to the airport?

Please don't think I am making light of this situation. This is not a joking matter. Students should err on the side of caution. As citizens, we should be concerned that airport security take every reasonable precaution to insure the safety of passengers, but we should also be concerned by some of the almost lethal misunderstandings we are hearing about these days.

One of the things that struck me in the news coverage of the incident was the frequency with which reporters described the security force as "taking no chances" in their response to Star. Media scholars have noted the ways that seemingly objective terms can create bias in news coverage. For example often, in covering strikes, management makes "offers" and labor makes "demands," even though both are involved in a process of back and forth negotiation. This language slants our perspective on which is the "reasonable" party and provides a script through which we make sense of labor politics.

In this case, the police "took no chances" if you assume that Star was either wearing a bomb or trying to trick someone into believing she was armed.

But if we consider that police pulled machine guns on an unarmed 19 year old in a public place, then we might think that they took a fair number of chances. I personally read the incident against the backdrop of a growing number of recent reports of students being tasered by campus police or for that matter, news stories which suggest campus police are now increasingly carrying weapons in reaction to the Virginia Tech incident. To me, this suggests that police are "taking chances" on a regular basis, especially given their apparent inability to make meaningful distinctions in responding to unfamiliar technologies or icons.

The news media -- and perhaps the police -- expressed initially confusion about the words on her black hoodie, "Socket To Me / COURSE VI.""; these phrases referred to her electrical engineering major (majors go by numbers in the MIT context) but were read with sinister associations by at least some of the initial news reports. How many of us wear equally cryptic symbols on our T-shirts, unawares, when we go to the airport? I certainly saw plenty of shirts I didn't fully understand when I passed through Logan just last night returning from a speaking gig.

Another thing that struck me looking back on this incident was the difference in the ways the mainstream media and the blogsophere sought to cover this story. The mainstream media sent reporters to the MIT campus who beseiged anyone walking in or out of the East Campus dorm. Keep in mind that the dorm has several hundred residents, most of whom didn't know Star Simpson. I lived across the street from her and to the best of my knowledge have never met her. The blog reporters tapped social network sites -- followed her Facebook links, tracked down her home page, and understood something of the cultural context within which she produced the name tag. We shouldn't be surprised that those immersed in new media understood how to locate and interpret the kinds of traces any college age student leaves on line, where-as the mainstream news reporters were following tried and true but also hit or miss methods which were unlikely to give them any real insight into who this student was.

If the mainstream news media showed limited media literacy skills in their handling of this particular story, I was proud of the ways that the incident got discussed within the context of MIT dorm discussion lists. Students showed initial skepticism of the sensational reporting they were seeing, especially when it was clear that the reporters showed so little understanding of their culture and their lives. They shared and dissected news reports. They sought out alternative information on their own, pooling knowledge to try to understand what took place and why. While the temptation was to rally around an accused fellow student (and that's where most of them ended up), there were some who were willing to play devil's advocate and question the evidence to make sure that they were not guilty of the same kinds of rush to judgment that they were seeing all around them. This was a classic example of collective intelligence at work.

I don't know for sure what happened that day at Logan Airport. There are some nagging details that don't quite add up no matter how I look at the story. But it is pretty clear that there was a significant misunderstanding involved here, that the news media didn't consider alternative framings of the incident and that they were more invested in frightening the public than in finding out what actually occurred.

The title of this post suggests the kind of mental drama that many of those involved in the incident were following -- the Movie of the Week sagas which might pit a mislead American youth against heroic airport guards fighting to protect our homeland security, perhaps even the cold war dramas about communists in our midst. I just hope we have room in our heads to consider other possibilities.

The Fall Season Approaches: Pimp Your New Favorites

Last Fall, I asked readers of this blog to "pimp their favorite television show," and we had a truly inspiring set of responses. Indeed, I discovered Supernatural through a groundswell of responses I received here and it has emerged as one of my very favorite programs and belatedly, this summer, I finally have started to catch up with Battlestar Galactica (I'm now half way through Season 2), another series which was a favorite among readers of this blog. Well, this year, I want to start the process earlier. Many of us are checking out the new fall line-up which is starting in earnest this week. So I thought I'd invite you to share with other blog readers your impressions of the new series.

There are a lot of fannish shows on this year, no doubt influenced by the success of Heroes, but most of them look very much like fannish shows we've seen before: the return of Highlander (New Amsterdam), Forever Night (Moonlight), Quantum Leap (Journeyman), and Alias (Bionic Woman). I've been hearing great things about Pushing Daisies but I haven't managed to get my hands on the pilot for it yet.

So far, I've seen about 20 of the series that will be introduced this season, including some which will not reach the air until mid-season. There are a number of series which I liked well enough to set up my Tivo to record and some that I will watch again if the word of mouth picks up. Of the new series, by far, the favorite in my household is Journeyman, a series which isn't getting much buzz yet. Of course my wife, son, and I are died in the wool Quantum Leap fans so it makes sense we'd want to give this series a close look but I've seen lots of other time travel series which lack the character focus that made Leap so successful in years past. Journeyman is probably my top bet on which new series will be a favorite with the fan community -- though I'm not making any bets on how it will fare with the general viewership. It falls right after Heroes which may help it but the tone is so different even if from a network executive's perspective it probably looks like it falls in the same genre. It has a nice balance between long-term serial developments and self-contained episodic narratives, more like Supernatural than Heroes in that regard. And the performances are good enough that I didn't think about who the actor was until later, even though I've really enjoyed watching Rome in the past. Give it a look!

To help set this discussion in motion and to give a shout out to some fellow Aca-Fen, I wanted to let you know about The Extratextuals, a new blog started by Ivan Askwith, Jonathan Gray, and Derek Johnson -- are teaming up to produce a new blog called The Extratextuals. All three of these guys have made guest appearance in this blog from time to time so they should be no stranger to my readers.

Here's how Askwith, a former CMS student now working for Big Space Ship in NYC, describes the blog's goals:

Our blog will focus primarily on the extratextuals that surround the media. By this, we mean everything but the show itself: previews, merchandising, industry buzz, branding, interviews, posters, spatial context, temporal context, related websites, ARGs, spinoffs, spoilers, schedules, bonus materials, transmedia extras, games, YouTube clips, etc. But we're interested in these things not to be arcane or eccentric; rather, we believe that the extratextuals often make the show what it is. Hence this blog is about the mediation of media.

Gray had a chance to see previews of the new fall series, screened at the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) in New York City, and offers his views about them at the blog. Since I've had a chance to see the pilots of many of these same series, I figured this would give me a good chance to share some of my own responses as well. So, here are some of Gray's thoughts followed by my reactions.

First, here's what Gray has to say about Journeyman:

How it was probably pitched: The Littlest Hobo meets The Time-Traveler's Wife

Okay, so he's not a German Shepherd, as was Canadian TV's The Littlest Hobo (non-Canadians: imagine a roaming Lassie), but our hero's task, as he learns throughout the episode, is to go through time and ensure that the cosmic order works the way it would like to. Kind of Quantum Leapy, in that he often doesn't know what he's meant to do, and must simply follow instinct. Yet no entering of other people's bodies occurs; indeed, this pilot episode keeps him in a San Francisco in which his earlier self is living out his life, so if you're a Kevin McKidd fan (from Rome), you get two of him... It's gimmicky in premise, but smartly done, with nice dramatic elements, and a fine performance by McKidd (though his American accent needs a little work). The neat twist is that his former girlfriend, who he believes to have died in a plane crash, turns out to be a Journey(wo)man too. By the end of the pilot, he has no knowledge of why he is a Journeyman, who chose him, who directs his jumps, and so forth, so though a mystery-a-week program, the pilot builds in prospects for serial development and revelation. If it goes that way, I'll be interested. As it is, it's nothing super special, but still good television.... McKidd's character's confusion is effectively evoked, and in general the show was more demanding of its viewer's attention than I might've expected. Smart stuff.

Another series which has started to generate interest amongst my friends and acquaintances is K-Ville. Check out what Grant McCracken wrote about K-Ville the other day.

And here's what Gray has to say:

K-Ville

How it was probably pitched: NYPD Blue in New Orleans.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, it's a procedural, starring, as the FOX exec who introduced the shows offered, an "in your face" cop, and another who is "a guy looking for a new start, like the city itself." Sounds cliché, right? And it begins that way, as my notes to myself include the words "preachy" and "patronizing." But it softens up along the way. It also started to grab me a bit. This is a sad show at times; for instance, when Anderson's wife explains that she moved to Houston for their daughter's sake because the daughter still cries every time it rains, there's a degree of poignancy and power to the line....At a macro level, the show has a lot that it wants to achieve, some of that important and valuable. How it balances this with the day-to-day procedural is where it will live or die; the pilot concentrated its energies on the macro, thereby letting the procedural fall by the wayside, but whether the show continues to botch its procedural element once it's set the scene will be telling... The Wire it is not, and at the moment a good procedural it is not, but it has some small potential.

From my perspective, the pilot suffers from a split personality as if the producers and the networks are still at war over the series indentity. What I wanted to see, as Gray's last bit suggests, was The Wire set in Post-Katrina New Orleans or maybe Hill Street Blues. At times, the series comes close to achieving this -- filmed on location, deploying many location-specific details, showing us some of the devastation you experience if you drive outside the tourist areas in the city, and sharing some of the reality as it is being experienced on the ground. These images were particularly powerful to me because I had a chance to drive through some of the devastated areas when I was in New Orleans earlier this summer for Phoenix Rising. It was the closest thing to a suburban ghost town I ever expected to see. I haven't been able to put the experience into words which is why I haven't really written about it here. At places, this series brought me back to what I saw and felt when I visited some of these communities, including driving past the headquarters for the production, which really is in one of the gutted areas. Unfortunately, the series seems to also be pulled towards larger-than-life Buddy cop show cliches -- something closer to the recent remake of Miami Vice than to The Wire -- and I fear that's where the networks are going to force it to go. I will give it a second look but I haven't made up my mind about it yet.

Gray writes about Big Shots:

How it was probably pitched: Desperate Housewives for men

I'm not sure Big Shots' creators really thought through what they wanted the show to do. On one hand, it's about guys. Not just guys, but guys: the references to penises, checking out women, and the number of scenes involving golf announce the show's raw guyness. On the other hand, its generic format is that of the tawdry evening soap. Granted, I don't see the Nielsen data that ABC does, but I'd presume we have two different demos in tawdry evening soap watchers and penis-&-golf worshippers? Yet its lead-in is Grey's Anatomy, so someone's giving it the sweetheart treatment, and perhaps they think Grey's young female audience want more golf in their lives? I'm dubious. Anyways, all four guys play golf, talk about penises, watch women a lot, and talk about how hard life is being millionaire CEOs.

Again, Gray hits on some of my core concerns with this series. This is the season of social network series -- if we include Big Shots, The Cashmere Mafia, Gossip Girl, The Women's Murder Club, Carpoolers -- each of which deal with groups of friends whose lives are hopelessly intertwined and who connect to each other through a variety of different hardware interfaces, not to mention regular face-to-face communications. Of these, I liked The Cashmere Mafia the best (though my wife thinks I just have a thing for Lucy Liu). And The Women's Murder Club has possibilities -- good cast, not the most inspiring pilot. The men in my family -- my son and I -- squirmed through Big Shots, finding it uncomfortable to watch even though we'd liked many of the cast members in other things, where-as my wife found it amusing. Talking to the students taking our class on network television this term, the gender divide seems pretty consistent: even though it's a series about men, it seems to appeal much more to women. So, that may be the way it is resolving the contradictions that Jonathan identifies here.

Here's what Gray had to say about Big Bang Theory

How it was probably pitched: Beauty and the Geek, the sitcom

If Judd Apatow and a few others have ushered in an era of Geek Chic, nobody seems to have told the writers of this show. In a bizarre way, the show's pathologization of geeks is actually quite impressive, though, and to prove it, try this exercise: try to write a 22 minute script, filling it with as many stereotypes of geeks as possible. Get someone else to count the references. Then get them to watch the pilot of Big Bang Theory, and compare the counts. I bet you'll lose the competition. Important to this exercise, though, is that you should not watch the show yourself, and that you should probably dislike the person required to watch it... N Ultimately, I predict the writers' eagerness to spew stereotypes will get the best of them: surely the Trekker jokes, endless references to MIT (I counted 4 this time), and jokes about math will run out fast.

Okay, I expected to hate Big Bang Theory. I have a very high level of sensitivity to fan stereotypes. But this struck me as much closer to Galaxy Quest than to Trekkies -- that is, the humor comes from the inside rather than the outside. They certainly got all of their science fiction references right and best I can tell from consulting with local experts here, they got their math and science references right too. I frankly laughed harder at this sitcom than any I've seen since Friends. Yes, the stereotypes are broad -- not unusual for a pilot -- and yes, there are plenty of cliches, but there's also a real affection for the characters and a real wit in the ways they deploy the stereotypes which leaves me with some hope for the series. Of course, last year, I thought that Studio 60 on Sunset Strip had a great pilot and then it fell apart almost immediately thereafter. For what it's worth, MIT students who have seen the pilot didn't find it as funny as I did.

Here's Gray on Gossip Girl

How it was probably pitched: (1) product placement for Sidekicks; (2) The OC in the Upper East

Move The OC to New York, put school uniforms on everyone, give everyone Sidekicks that they use every few seconds, add a highly annoying voiceover and you have Gossip Girl. Veronica Mars fans will know that their beloved Kristen Bell does the voiceovers, but I'm sorry to say that this is by far the worst part of the show, a juvenile, silly, forced, even moronic addition. If anything sinks this show, it'll be the voiceover. Otherwise, though, it shows all the signs of succeeding - emaciated actresses, a guy who the show wants us to believe is regarded as a loser at school, yet who is quite handsome, parents who have their own secrets and vices, a passable performance by Blake Lively at its center, buckets of salacious gossip seemingly imported fresh from The Hills, conspicuous consumption, lavish parties, broken hearts, feuding friends, dangerous rich boys, decadence aplenty, characters who are either Evil or Good, oodles of current singles playing in the background (and yes, I believe "oodles" is the correct plural for pop music), and so forth.

Hmmm. To me, this show was much closer to what Cruel Intentions would have been like if it were produced for the CW network -- a dark dark view of adolescent society as over-stated as any teenage drama queen's self perceptions, without a drop of human warmth or any real humor. I agree with Jonathon that the voice-over may be what really sinks it (even though I am a VM fan) but I don't agree with him that there's much to redeem it for me otherwise.

Some other Series I saw and liked (at least as far as one can tell from the pilot):

The Sarah Connor Chronicles (due midseason) -- once you get over the shock of seeing familiar characters played by unfamiliar actors, the series takes over and finds its own footing. Great chemistry between some of the characters, surprisingly intense action scenes for prime time television.

Life is Wild -- OK, this one probably falls squarely in the guilty pleasure category, but I enjoyed it enough that I will probably watch more. It's a totally formulaic family drama set in Africa but I grew up on Daktari and Born Free, not to mention Johnny Quest and American Cowboy in Africa, and it was a kind of comfort food return to childhood favorites. I suspect my response here is idiosyncratic but if you are of the same generation as I am, you might want to give it a look.

Caveman -- I liked it better than I expected from what has been described as a half hour sitcom spun off from an advertising campaign for auto insurance. I don't think the idea has legs; I don't expect to be watching this series a year from now, but they managed to get some engaging social satire of our current attitudes towards class and race out of the caveman gimmick. So catch it while it lasts.

Samantha Who -- Smart enough that I will turn it on for another episode, not engaging enough that it's likely to find a permanent spot on my Tivo.

Bionic Woman -- this one has possibilities, but I feel like I've seen it before. It's not on the level of Alias or La Femme Nikita, even though it wants very hard to be. It's probably closer to Dark Angel, but the fact that we can position it so squarely within this genre tradition doesn't bode well for its originality. It could get stronger, though, as it goes along, so I am not giving up hope for this one just yet.

The Return of Jezebel Jones -- I am surprised how many of the sitcoms this season captured my interest. I haven't really been a sitcom viewer in recent years. But I liked the interplay here between the mismatched sisters, played by Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose. Nothing really remarkable, but some spark which makes me want to root for it.

Series I didn't like:

Carpoolers -- painfully bad!

Miss/Guided -- Truth in Advertising.

Viva Laughlin -- This is being pushed as being a quirky new series -- a musical in the spirit of The Singing Detective or Pennies From Heaven. It owes much more to the late and unlamented Cop Rock. It just didn't work for me.

Life -- A story about a cop who returns to the beat after a decade or more in jail for a crime he didn't commit. I wanted to like this one but found the central performance flat and uninteresting.

There's much more television out there to be watched. So let's try to pool our knowledge here. What shows are you most looking forward to seeing? Which shows sparked a twinkle of fannish enthusiasm from you?

If You Found This Blog Through Game Informer...

The September issue of Game Informer features a profile of someone they describe variously as "one of the leading thinkers about video games in the world" and "The Game Academic." I am not certain I know who they are talking about but the guy in the picture looks remarkably like me. As a result of this story, this blog is probably seeing at least a modest influx of visitors from readers of Game Informer magazine, which is given away free with purchases at one of the leading games retail chains. I thought I would flag for these visitors some past posts on games which extend on points raised in the interview and provide a bit more background about my work in game studies.

Game Aesthetics

Are Games Art? Wii, I Mean, Oui!

More on Games Criticism

More on Games as Art

Applied Game Theory, RIP: Melodrama and Realism, Role Play and Race, Addiction and Copy Right

Games as Meaningful Expression

National Politics within Virtual Game Worlds: The Case of China

Getting Serious About Games

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming

A Few Thoughts About Media Violence

Interviews

With Greg Costikyan

With Stephanie Barish

With Eric Zimmerman

With Chris Kohler

With Peter Ludlow

With Wagner James Au

With David William Schaffer

If you would like to read some more of my writing on games, check out the following articles which are available online:

Eight Myths about Video Games Debunked

Games, the New Lively Art

Game Design as Narrative Architecture

The Penny Arcade Interview

As I suggested in the interview, my interest in games dates back to playing Pong when it first was released in the market. But my transformative experience came when I bought my son a NES for Christmas and I saw Super Mario Bros. for the first time. I was so astonished by what video games had become already and became convinced that this was going to become an even more important medium in the future. I've been studying and writing about video games for sixteen plus years.

Along the way, my involvement with games has led me to:

host several conferences on computer games, including From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games; Computer and Video Games Come of Age; and two Education Arcade conferences held in conjunction with E3, the major trade show in the video games industry;

Doing consulting work for Brenda Laurel at Purple Moon and conducting a Creative Leaders program for EA;

Co-Editing From Barbie to Mortal Kombat with Justine Castell;

Testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee about games and violence in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting;

Defending Grand Theft Auto on the Donahue Program and taking some hits for my efforts;

helping to establish the Games to Teach Project and more recently, the Education Arcade, exploring the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games;

authoring a white paper for the MacArthur Foundation which, among other things, stresses the value of games-based skills;

overseeing a team which is producing digital documentaries on topics, such as the Big Games Movement;

appearing in a range of documentary films about games and games culture, including PBS's Video Games Revolution;

helping to start GAMBIT, a collaboration between MIT and the Singapore Media Development Authority to conduct games design and research projects;

overseeing a range of thesis projects dealing with games secrets, morality and ethics in game design, mastery and multiplayer games, representations of adolescence in games, and a range of other topics;

Writing the monthly Applied Game Theory column with Kurt Squire for Computer Games Magazine;

and much much more.

In the interview, I talked about the growth of games studies as a field. I thought I would also throw out some pointers to those wanting to learn more about academic games studies.

Here are some pointers:

Some Key Blogs:

Ludology.org

Gamasutra

Joystick 101

Water Cooler Games

Grand Text Auto

Some Journals

Game Studies

Games and Culture

Some Conferences and Organizations

Digital Games Research Association

Games, Learning and Society Conference

Some recent books I'd recommend:

Jesper Juuls, Half Real

T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds

Mia Consalvo, Cheating

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games

James Paul Gee, Video Games Are Good For Your Soul

Pat Harrigan and Noah Waldrup-Fruin, Second Person

Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens, The Game Design Reader

This list only scratches the surface, but hopefully it will allow those of you who are discovering academic game studies for the first time a point of entry into this much much larger conversation.

Gone Fishing...

I am afraid I won't be able to write a full post today. I have been in Aspen, Colorado for the past few days at the Aspen Institute, which is hosting a roundtable discussion among industry leaders, policy makers, and academics on the topic of media and values. It is the hallmark of the Aspen Institute that they bring together people from all sides of a topic, sit them down at a table together, and create protocols which enable them to speak with and listen to each other in a way designed to generate meaningful compromises and productive results. The past few days we have been discussing such topics as the future of the local newspaper, the value of media literacy education, and the need for a better balance between fair use and copyright. Many of the sessions have been recorded to air later on C-Span. Ground Report is also streaming the sessions live via the web -- in case anyone has time tomorrow and wants to see this process in action. They have also said that they will make an archive of the webcast which can be downloaded later. As soon as I have more details on this, I will pass it along to my readers, since I think many of the conversations I've heard here will be very useful in teaching media policy and will be of interest to the general public. I also hope to write a fuller account of this experience shortly, though it is going to be impossible to distill down the essence of such rich and varied discussions.

Gender and Fan Studies: Join the Party

I am sorry that there have been so many technical difficulties posting comments on the blog this week. People have been working behind the scenes trying to locate the source of the problems which have sent anti-spam messages to many of you who have tried to post. I can't tell you how frustrated I am by the situation which comes just as I am traveling in Europe with less than ideal internet access and just as we are trying to jump start this conversation about gender and fan culture. In the short run, Kristina Busse has helped to set up an alternative location for us to have the more interactive aspects of this conversation. I will continue to post the main entires here and cross post them at the new space and periodically I will collect comments from the other site and run them in a digest form through the blog. It is a kludge, at best, a cobbled together solution, but it should allow anyone who wants to post to be heard. So, if you are enjoying the Gender and Fan Studies series here, check it out.

Whatever my automated technology may be telling you, I really want to hear what you are thinking about the issues raised by the Gender and Fan Studies series.