My Inner Fan Boy Escapes, or Memoirs of a Comic-Con Newbie

Last time, I shared some reflections on my first time experience of San Diego Comic-con last month. I wanted to add a few more thoughts today. The biggest shift in the media coverage of the convention this year has come from growing attention to the women who attended to conference. As we've noted here in the past, San Diego is often depicted as the seat of power in the fan boy universe and over the past few years, we've seen a steady stream of articles stressing the renewed influence of male fans on the decisions made by the film and television industries. Yet, this time, primarily as a result of the phenomenal turnout for the Twilight panel, the press has finally started to notice that there are ladies in the house. As I noted in my exchange earlier this week with Kristin Thompson, there were certainly still more male than female attendees. I don't have access to any statistics but at a glance women represented between a quarter to a third of those attending the event. Yet, they made their presences felt and heard at pretty much every event I attended and to nobody's surprise, they were interested in different things than some of the guys in the room.

At the risk of stereotyping things, the archtypical fan boy at San Diego seemed preoccupied with getting spoilers. Almost every panel started with someone explaining that they were not going to be able to tell the audience much about the coming season. And the fan boys would see this as a competition, asking spoiler questions again and again, until someone let something slip and you knew it would be all over the blogs in a heart beat. The industry has helped to create this phenomenon by using the convention as a space to roll out preview reels, clips, or even whole episodes worth of forthcoming material, seeing the gathering both as a way to gauge response and as a publicity mechanism to get buzz going around their projects. The audience has gotten so spoiled that there's almost total indifference if the panel simply shows something that's already been released on the web -- even a few days before. The focus is relentlessly on the future -- everybody wants to know something before the general population -- and that's become half the reason why you wait in the long lines and sit in the back of a packed auditorium, hoping to see a few scenes of your favorite series before it reaches the air. And be forewarned, the notes that follow probably represent the rumblings of my inner fan boy.

Female fans are certainly interested in spoilers, but my experience was that they were much more likely to ask questions designed to get greater insights into the ongoing relationships on the series -- either those between characters or on the set. Rather than always racing ahead, they seemed to have a deeper interest in understanding what the series was all about and how the production staff thought about some of the issues which had sparked conversation on Live Journal or have started to inspire fan fiction. As a rule, these questions were more apt to get substantive responses from the panelists, rather than get shot down because they weren't going to share any spoilers. The male questions are all or nothing and most of the time they yielded nothing, where-as the fan girl questions are more apt to spark a bit of fun interplay between cast members or even, heaven forbid, shed some light on the programs and films of which we are fans.

While we are on the subjects of female fan culture, I wanted to do a shout out to Francesca Coppa who was interviewed in a recent issue of Reason Magazine about the history and practices of fan vidding. It's a very smart interview which contributes to the ongoing struggle of fan vidders to gain a bit more recognition for their historical contributions to remix culture. My bet is that anyone who's read this far into the post will find it a rewarding read.

My big bad confession is that while I came to San Diego for the comics, I didn't really attend any of the comics-related sessions. I was as star struck as anyone else by the sheer number of my favorite actors and creative artists in attendance and tended to camp out in the larger venues to learn more about film and television shows I liked. And to make matters worse, the one comics panel I attended -- a session featuring Stan Lee and Grant Morrison -- made it onto my schedule because it was right before the Doctor Who and Torchwood sessions and I was afraid I wouldn't get a seat. I convinced myself I was morally superior to the others camping out all around me because at least I know who Lee and Morrison were, and I could even rationalize being there because the topic was supposed to be about Virgin Comics and I have a grad student doing a thesis on Virgin. But to be honest, I've seen Stan the Man before and once you've heard him do his "I'm so egotistical..." jokes once, you've probably heard them enough to last a lifetime. And I also have to confess that I've never really liked Morrison's comics as much as I am supposed to -- you might apply this to any comic which is described as "cosmic." I don't do "cosmic." I like my comics to have richly drawn characters and witty dialog alongside the action scenes -- and not go trapsing off into other dimensions (spirital or otherwise). If I wanted mysticism, I'd buy a pack of Tarot Cards -- which some of Morrison or Moore's worst stuff seems to resemble.

The Doctor Who panel, on the other hand, was a real treat -- even if Russel T. Davies did not make his announced appearance. We still had an hour to bask in the wit and intelligence of Stephen Moffat who has not only written some of my favorite episodes of Who but also is the man behind Jekyll, a really stunning mini-series about a contemporary descendant of Doctor Jekyll. And things really came alive when John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness on Doctor Who and Torchwood came on stage). Barrowman is even more out-going in person than he is as a character and he brought the other castmembers and creators out of their shell. As with everything else, the audience had more fun when it looked like the actors were having fun and Barrowman was having a total blast.

But fan loyalties call me elsewhere and I had to sneak out of the room half way through the Torchwood panel in order to make sure I'd get a seat at the Middleman session. I sang this series praises after seeing only the first episode earlier this summer and I have to say it has gotten stronger and stronger with each episode, as we've gotten to know the characters and learned more Middleman backstory and as the writers and actors have found their voice. If you missed any episodes, get thee to iTunes. You missed what I think was the strongest television of the summer -- So You Want to Dance being the other series which helped me get through the hot and sweaty months. Alas, no Natalie Morales at the Middleman panel, continuing a panel of disappointing no-shows. But I did get a chance to hear Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the series creator and executive producer, and Matt Kesslar who plays the Middleman. This was a much cozier affair -- in a room that seated only a few hundred rather than several thousand -- but there was a sense that all of us in the room had made a discovery together of this little known cult series which needed our support.

And we ended an exhausting day with the panel focused on HBO's True Blood, a forthcoming vampire series created by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), and starring, among others, Anna Paquin, both of whom were in attendance, along with pretty much the rest of the cast. Like Twilight, this is a "my boyfriend's a vampire" story, this time with lots of local color stemming from the New Orleans location. It seemed good enough to motivated me checking it out in September, but there was little here to distinguish it from any other recent vampire series on television, other than the fact that Ball has a pretty good track record and they have a very imaginative ad campaign involving mock billboards that we had seen all over Los Angeles earlier in the trip. The big problem is that most of the folks on the panel didn't seem to recognize that they were speaking in genre cliches and acted as if they were inventing most of these elements from scratch. If you want to read a good comic with a similar plot line, see Jessica Abel's Life Sucks.

Friday, like everyone else at the convention, the goal was to get a seat for the Watchmen session. And we made it -- barely. Zach Snyder, the Director from 300 who finally managed to get one of my all time favorite graphic novels on the screen, was there was pretty much the entire top tier cast of the movie. I had been nervous about what Watchmen was going to look like on screen, especially after the really tacky pictures which were in Entertainment Weekly, but once they got through showing the extended preview a few times and I picked my jaws off the ground, it was clear that I was going to love this movie. As someone who has taught the book more than once, I recognized pretty much every shot in the preview as coming from a specific panel in the graphic novel. And it was clear that they captured not just the look but also the tone of the story here. Snyder himself was mumbling and inarticulate. I suppose I now know why his movies are rich in images and sparse in spoken language.

We stuck through an hour's worth of screening of film previews (which disappointed primarily because most of them were already in the theaters and because so few of them really fell into the genres that drew me to the con in the first place) and then a short session showcasing the forthcoming remake of The Wolfman. Benicio Del Toro, who plays the Lawrence Talbot role made famous by Lon Chaney Jr. in the original Universal film, and Emily Blunt, who plays his love interest, were there in person as was veteran special effects artist Rick Baker. Baker totally sold me on the film -- as recapturing the spirit of the old Universal and Hammer horror films that I loved so much in elementary school, while giving them an adult spin. To be honest, I have been anticipating the release of this film since I saw the first stills of Del Toro in his monster make-up because it was so clear that the creature was crafted with enormous respect for the old style monster movies.

And then it was The Spirit session, including Frank Miller and Samuel R. Jackson, not to mention several of the actresses who played Femme Fatales in the film. This one made me a great deal more uneasy. Jackson was Jackson and that was worth all of the effort of coming to San Diego. And it looks like it should be a beautiful movie to watch, other than the fact that it looks just like Sin City. Miller was giving speeches about his long time relationship with Will Eisner and his respect for the original and so forth, but in reality, I came away seeing much more of Frank Miller on the screen than of Eisner. That's too bad because I love when Darwyn Cooke has been doing with The Spirit in recent comics and I admire the Eisner original, and this felt so radically different from either. I could go with it if I felt it was taking us some place fresh and different but so far, it just looks like they just kept on shooting when they finished the second Sin City movie and they just wanted more of the same. Maybe I will be proven wrong, but this was probably my biggest disappointment at the Con.

On Saturday, I felt even more victorious having waited in a line which seemed to have no end that I made it into the Heroes panel. And this was the Comic-Con experience I'd been waiting for. They brought out the entire cast of the series, as well as most of the creative talent behind the series, and they seemed as excited to see us as we were to see them. And as I wrote in my earlier post, it was nothing short of heart-stopping to be able to watch a new episode of the series in a room of more than 6000 hardcore fans. In many ways, Comic-Con had been the place where the cult following of Heroes began and the first season showed that more people than anyone had expected would rally around this well-made ensemble drama. I've suggested before that Heroes feels more like an alternative comics take on the superhero genre, less like Marvel and DC, and for that reason, it's exciting to see some many people get excited about its approach. I liked the second season better than most of my friends did but I still wasn't prepared for just how good the third season opener is. It's found its pace; it's rediscovered its characters; it's gone back to the plot elements that intrigue us; it's playing around with back story and flash forwards in a compelling way. (I think last season's Lost has probably paved the way for a discovery of how valuable flashforwards can be in serial drama but Heroes was also doing this in Season one.) If the rest of Season Three is anywhere near this good, it's going to be a hell of a year.

And, then we saw Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku talk about their new series, Dollhouse. They were nothing short of delightful to see on stage together. It's clear that they really are very close friends and that the series is a labor of love which emerged from Whedon's interest to give Dushku something to show off her range as an actress. Dushku plays an escort, who gets stripped of her memory over and over again and then reprogrammed to do what the client wants. This allows them to put Dushku into a range of different genres and to play an array of diverse kinds of characters, all within a series which nevertheless has some serial elements, as her character is starting to remember things from one transformation to the next and a detective is doggedly trying to figure out what's going on. This one looks fun, though there was little here that showed the wit and humor that I value so much from Whedon's earlier series.

And, then came Battlestar Galactica, with Ron Moore and most of the lead cast members, minus Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell. They had just finished shooting the final episode of the series a few weeks before and this was the closest thing to a public goodbye party you could possibly ask for. I could have done without Kevin Smith as a moderator. Smith felt compelled to perform the part of Kevin Smith and he was anything but Silent Bob. In this context, I would have much preferred a moderator who got the cast members talking and then got out of the way. In any other circumstances, I would have really enjoyed seeing Smith. I've been hooked on his movies going back to the first release of Clerks but this was a bit like pouring really good chocolate on raw oysters. Either by itself will tickle my tastebuds but not all great tastes belong together.

And then my final Comic-Con experience was seeing J.J. Abrams and cast talk about Fringe. Abrams was as smart and thoughtful in person as I could have hoped for. He didn't fully sell me on the series premise but I was going to check it out before I went to the panel and nothing convinced me otherwise.

So, this was a classic Comic-Con experience -- in the course of three packed days, I got to hear Stephen Moffat, Alan Ball, Joss Whedon, Ron Moore, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, and J.J. Abrams, not to mention the casts of many of my current favorite series. I spent way too much time and money in the dealer's room. And I reassured myself that this was still a fan convention, despite its lofty trappings, by seeing bad paintings of cats, wolves, dragons, and scantly clad women in the art show. (Somethings in fandom never change!) I will certainly come back next year, though I doubt I will spend quite so much time camping out in Hall H, because I missed out on so many of my favorite comics writers and artists and on some of the smaller shows that are also programmed onto my Tivo. The absurdity of Comic-Con hit home when I found myself trying to figure out whether to stay for the Lost panel and run the risk of not getting in to see Joss Whedon who was going to be speaking right afterwards in another room. And we weren't there on Sunday to see the Harry Potter and Supernatural panels. You can't do even all of the E Ticket things at Comic-Con and you just have to control your hyper-fan-boy instincts.

One of the good things that came out of the con for me was discovering two blogs which offer extensive coverage of all the things that fans like -- Hero Complex, run by the Los Angeles Times, did the best coverage of the convention and I'm finding myself reading it a lot since I've been back, and io9, which is run by an old friend, Annalee Newitz, and again covers the world of genre entertainment very well. I'm sure I'm the last fan in the universe to discover these blogs, but in case, you are also totally off in Tralfamadore, check them out.

My inner fan boy has left my body and I will now go back to more high minded topics for the next few posts, in any case.

Down Time...

Hi, gang. My wife and my staff had conspired to make sure that I actually take a vacation this year. They have threatened the physically separate me from my keyboard. So, it seems likely that blogging activitie will be erratic if not non-existent for the next few weeks. I do have some interviews out there which I am hoping will come back soon and if they do, I will toss them up. I may also have an irresistible impulse. Otherwise, expect to see my return in early August.

Augmented Learning: An Interview with Eric Klopfer (Part Two)

Critics of the serious games movement accuse its supporters of being "technophiles." How would you respond to the charge that you might be placing your enthusiasm for a new technical platform above concern for what constitutes good pedagogical practices?

I've heard it argued that educational technologies need to be designed by strictly starting with the educational need and then designing the appropriate technology around that need. I've seen this done, and the result is technology that is clearly designed by educational theorists. That is, it clearly has some good fundamentals, but it also has deficiencies in usability, engagement, experience, and often applicability. Similarly, educational technologies designed strictly by technologists while high on usability and engagement may miss educational fundamentals. In reality, there needs to components of both to work well. But we can also learn things from projects that are heavy on one side or the other, that have outcomes that can be applied elsewhere. Our design is typically quite iterative. We have a number of educational outcomes that we're looking for, and we have a number of technologies circulating around. When those come together we try to push a project forward that combines them.

What criteria should we use to evaluate educational games? Which games do you think best match your criteria?

I'm not sure I can come up with one standard for evaluation, but like the last question, any criteria should include both technological contributions (playability, innovation, etc.) as well as pedagogical contributions (learning theory, outcomes, etc.). There are many researchers who are focusing on learning through Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) games - anything from SimCity through World of Warcraft. I think there is a lot to be learned from this research, but our work focuses exclusively on games that were explicitly designed to be educational. Examples of this type are somewhat sparse (at least from the last decade). However, the number of examples is fortunately growing through a reinvigoration of this space.

Back in the early and mid 1990s, I was working as a computer teacher for young kids. At the time, my favorite educational game was the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (no kidding). Fortunately today, Scot Osterweil, the co-creator of that game, is working here with us. His new game, Labyrinth, which he is designing in collaboration with Fablevision and Maryland Public Television, is one of my favorite modern examples. It is a fun game AND it is educational. Kids would clearly play this game just for the fun of it, and yet I can clearly point out to teachers how specific content from the game maps to important learning goals in their classes.

Do some forms of content lend themselves better to learning through games than others?

Absolutely. We are often approached by teachers, researchers, publishers, etc. who tell us "concept X" is hard and boring for kids, and ask how can we make a game out of it. There are a number of things wrong with that question, but the notion that you can make a game out of anything just doesn't work. In general, if you can boil the learning down to process, it is much easier to think about how to design games that incorporate that kind of learning than it is to design around content. That is, it is easier and better to design games around understanding that it is around memorizing.

For example, we've had a number of requests for games around DNA replication, a challenging part of biology classes. If what this means is memorizing specific steps of the process, then it would be hard to design a good game around this mechanic. If instead the goal is understanding the concepts in a more abstract way, then this potentially becomes a good basis for a game.

In your book, you cite Brain Age as an important recent example of an educational game. Why do you see this as an important example to consider? What do you see as its strengths and limitations in terms of pedagogical design?

Brain Age is significant because of the market it reached, and the interest that it demonstrated in games of this type. In most ways, the design of the game is simple or even rudimentary. However, it did utilize some interesting features of the DS, like audio and touchscreen inputs. These choices not only pushed some of the boundaries for the platform, but also opened up the game to a market that wasn't interested in "button mashing". These, typically older (sometimes defined as over 25, but in this case it reached man players over 40), players were willing to play the game not only because of the "educational" content, but because it involved fun and simple interactions that were made possible by the mobility of the device.

You make strong arguments that we need to break with the "computer room paradigm" and develop tools, resources, and practices which teachers can integrate into their own classrooms. Explain. What elements have you built into your games to facilitate play in the classroom?

We've taken a few approaches to this. One approach, as we have taken for our participatory simulations, is to design activities that can be played like a lot of other non-technological role-playing games. Even without using technology, teachers often will run activities in a class where "everyone pretends that they're a DNA nucleotide" or something similar. These activities are facilitated by a teacher, collaborative, and easy to break up into chunks, meaning they can readily fit into class periods. Teachers are comfortable running these activities without a lot of training. Another approach we have conducted research around is to have students primarily play the games outside of class, and connect that game play back to in-class discussion. We have started to take this approach in our new mobile games. Students play collaborative casual games for short periods of time frequently outside of class. Teachers can tap into the data generated from student gameplay to connect game play to in-class learning. Another example is with many of our AR games. Classes play a game for a day or two out in the field, and connect their experiences back to curriculum that can last weeks in the classroom anchored in that field experience. Finally, we have a number of initiatives focusing on students doing game design, which is a different take on using games in the classroom.

Many have argued that educational games can't keep pace with commercial games because young people expect high end graphics. You've taken a very different perspective through your work. Explain.

It is true, at least in the short term, that educational games can't keep pace with the graphics and sounds of commercial games. But, they can stand out through innovation in design and experience, a place where commercial games are much more conservative and often behind the times. In fact, I think that the push towards high fidelity 3D worlds as the "gold standard" for educational games is misplaced. For one reason, many students don't like 3D virtual worlds. They find them confusing and disorienting. But more importantly, if the game play is good, players quickly look past the surface of the game and focus on the game play instead of the graphics. Graphics are important for shelf appeal. But in the world of educational games, where they are part of a class or curriculum, that shelf appeal doesn't apply.

Developing games which encourage collaborative learning has been a key design goal for many of your games. What do you see as the pedagogical benefits of collaborative problem solving and how have you built this principle into your games?

There is a lot of research on collaborative learning, and the benefits it achieves through peer teaching and learning, communication, and perspective-taking. Additionally, we find that building collaboration skills is an important goal. The ability to work effectively in teams, communicate with others, and get work down collaboratively is critical in the 21st century workplace, regardless of whether you're a doctor or media producer. In our work we try both to use collaboration as a means to learning, and an end to work towards.

Aussie Comedy: A Taste Americans May Soon Acquire

I have friends who get excited about the latest Japanese anime and manga. I have other friends who are avidly following Asian drama from Korean, Japan, and China. And Of course, I have many friends who are convinced that BritComs and science fiction are vastly superior to anything produced for American television. Each of these groups has, in their own way, exploited the potentials of digital media to expand their access to entertainment content from some other part of the world, content which it would historically have been difficult to consume with any regularity in the context of the American entertainment media. Well, OK, PBS has relied heavily on British television content for several decades now; it's become the staple of their pledge drives, but we still aren't seeing very much British content on American prime time network programming. By comparison, many parts of the world struggle to insure than 15-20 percent of their prime time hours are occupied by local content, while American shows dominate much of the airtime. Well, I'm a fan of Australian comedy. I've fallen under the spell of programs from the Australian Broadcasting Company during my many previous trips to the country. And I've long believed that these quirky, unexpected, and highly original series would gain wider popularity in the American context if they were more widely available in this country. Australia has been producing compelling films since the Silent Era yet for most of that time, it has had difficulty getting its content seen in other parts of the world. Early on, it was cost prohibitive to ship heavy film canisters from the South to the North, or so it was claimed, while others saw the content as too nationally specific to be understood in a broader context. So far, some Americans have learned to love Neighbors, Prisoner in Cell Block H, Bananas in Pajamas, and Crocodile Hunter, but for the most part, we've never given a chance to sample the best of what this country producers. Yet, as digital distribution begins to remove some of the barriers to entry, I've long predicted that Australia would begin to compete for eyeballs across the English speaking world and beyond.

The ABC produces a smaller number of new programs each year than the American networks, focusing on programming which they think will have local appeal and which offers a compelling alternative to imports from the United States. In particular, they have tapped the comedy clubs around Sydney and Melbourne to find hip, off the wall talents and turned them loose to produce original comedies which are unlike anything I've seen on television before. Far from politically correct, these comedies adopt an in your face, no holds barred approach which fits the country like a glove. In their own way, they are as intelligent and crafted as the best shows coming out of the BBC, yet they are unafraid to draw on the raw vitality of popular culture, allowing them to merge high and low with unpredictable results.

I had a chance to catch up with four contemporary ABC comedies during my flight back from Australia this past weekend -- The Chaser's War on Everything, Summer Heights High, The Librarians, and Frontline.

Of these four, Frontline was the most like an American series -- reminding me very much of Sports Night or 30 Rock. In this case, the series is set behind the scenes at an Australian news network, combining humor at the expense of self-centered Anchors with reflections on journalistic ethics. The scripts were smart, the characters well drawn, and the storylines each had something to contribute to our overall understanding of how the news is produced.

Qantas Airlines allowed me to watch the full run of The Librarians -- all together six episodes or three hours worth of material. As the title suggests, the series is another workplace comedy, taking place at a local library in a somewhat seedy neighborhood as the staff struggles to deal with patrons who deface their books, get ready for special programs to serve their community, and deal with internal conflicts which threaten to have them all at their throats by the time the curtain falls. The trajectory of the series focuses on two estranged childhood friends who end up working at the same place years later and have to confront their unresolved feelings for each other (which combine competitiveness and lust). Here's a promo for the release of the series on DVD:

And here's a "previously on" segment from early in the series which suggests some of the character interactions which made the show so compelling:

The supporting cast is first rate, each taking what could be a broad comic type and giving them nuance and vitality. I particularly enjoyed Nada al Farhouk, an dignified and outspoken Moslem woman who has to suffer no end of small minded comments from head librarian Frances Obrien. It was delightful to see a sympathetic Islamic female character on television, something the U.S. media hasn't pulled off yet. Other standouts include a dyslexic male librarian who was hired as eye candy for the boss; a wheel chair bound librarian who keeps rolling over everyone and everything in sight; an ex-convict doing his community service; a hip gay librarian far too sophisticated for the people around him; and a pompous local poet who loves to brag about his commitment to nudism.

As for The Chasers, imagine what would happen if news comedy we associate with The Daily Show spilled over into the streets. The Chasers gained some limited news coverage here when they got access to the APEC meeting in Australia in part by trying to pass themselves off as Canadian.

They take contemporary issues and insert themselves into very public places. Here, for example, they follow up on news reports about a gay club which refuses to admit heterosexuals by using the bouncer's "gaydar" to determine once and for all whether Tinky Winky is or is not queer.

Many of their most provocative stunts center around the security consciousness (or lack thereof) of the Post-9/11 world. Here are a few examples:

The series does some of the best commercial parodies since the original Saturday Night Live days.

And they also try to literalize the absurd claims made in television commercials in the real world, often with hysterical results.

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And one of my favorite recurring segments, "If Life Were a Musical," stages elaborate production numbers in real world settings just to watch how unsuspecting bystanders respond. Some try to get away quickly, some get into the show, and some look totally bug-eyed.

There are so many clips from the show on YouTube in part because the ABC and the Chasers have made a conscious decision to use the platform to generate visibility, hoping, in part, to break into the global media marketplace.

Summer Height High is a mockumentary very much in the spirit of Waiting for Guffman or The Office. In this case, it depicts a year in the life of an Australian public school through the eyes of a troubled young man with anger management issues from Tonga

a caring and idiosyncratic drama teacher

and a prissy young woman who recently transfered from a private school.

As it happens, all three characters -- different ages, races, and genders -- are all played by actor Chris Lilley. The comedy can be awkward and painful, sometimes raising troubling issues, but that's part of the point: Lilley uses comedy to challenge preconceptions about class, race, gender, sexuality, and education. He's also a very gifted shapeshifter who manages to totally occupy each of the parts he plays and looking for other Lilley clips on YouTube suggests that the show doesn't come anywhere near exhausting his range.

You can see many more at the series website. In this case, the series has already been picked up for distribution via HBO and BBC Three. The series was consistently in the middle of controversy but it also proved to be a huge ratings success, especially among hard to reach Australian teens.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed hoping we will see more ABC series on American television or that we will get fuller access to them online. Meanwhile, you should check out just how much material from some of these programs can be found at YouTube.

From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (Part Two)

Friday, I ran the first installment of this two part interview with Queensland University of Technology's Axel Bruns, who discussed his core thesis about the blurring of the role of consumer and producer in the new cultural economy. Today, he extends this concept of "produsage" to explore its implications for knowledge production, citizenship, and learning, as well as provides us a glimpse into the innovative academic community which has informed his work. What are the implications of the produsage model for understanding how knowledge gets produced and circulated? You clearly are interested in this book in Wikipedia. What core insights can we take from Wikipedia that might be applied to other collaborative enterprises?

In the first place, perhaps, I think it would be great if Wikipedians themselves could draw some further insights from the way Wikipedia has developed so far, and better understand the drivers of its success. Its very success is a threat to its future survival, if it means that there is a growing disconnect between middle and upper levels of Wikipedia's administration and everyday users and contributors. The project has been remarkably resilient to internal and external threats, of course, but that doesn't mean that it will continue to weather any storm that comes its way. In particular, I would argue that Wikipedia should work to enshrine the prerequisites for produsage as absolutely fundamental, inalienable principles of the project, and protect them even against well-meaning suggestions for change. (That doesn't mean locking down its present modus operandi for all eternity, of course - but whatever changes are made must be made very carefully and with due consultation.)

The crucial question for Wikipedia and other produsage projects concerned with building and growing repositories of community knowledge is that of how to engage with those who are regarded as experts in their field, of course. Both sides of this debate have valid arguments in their favour, of course - people like Wikipedia dissident and Citizendium founder Larry Sanger point to the fact that clearly, different people do have different levels of knowledge about any given topic, while others believe that any a priori elevation of the contributor level of such experts (or ultimately, exclusion of non-experts) is unnecessary: if these people have superior knowledge and the sources to back it up, that knowledge should come through collective evaluation processes unscathed.

Ultimately, I think that a compromise will be needed. Perhaps established expertise in a field should be highlighted to other contributors to produsage processes - this is something which happens over time in longer-term collaborative communities anyway, as through both their collaborative and their social interactions in the community individuals get to know one another a little better. Those who are more than just purely random contributors, dropping in and out of the community, could be encouraged more directly and immediately to create a profile and identify who they are (and the community could sanction more strongly those contributors who falsify their profiles in order to claim expertise that they don't have).

At the same time, however, as both addition and alternative to such external markers of expertise it would also be important to trace more explicitly the quality of contributions made to the produsage project, as an internal marker of demonstrated expertise. Citizen journalism communities like Slashdot and many others already provide a model for this, which could be translated relatively easily to Wikipedia and other more recent projects - while the model isn't completely tamper-proof, there, internal 'karma' scores mark the accumulated social status of contributors as judged by their peers, and post signatures and personal profiles enable contributors to provide some pointers to external information about who they are.

Slashdot's own model isn't ideal, but what its and other models of combining internal karma and external accreditation point towards is essentially an attempt to embed ongoing internal processes of peer-to-peer evaluation in the community within the broader landscape of knowledge and expertise that exists around it. What's crucial in this is to strike a fine balance between admitting and recognising, and even encouraging, the contribution of such external expertise, and allowing for the discovery and ascendance of experts who arise as entirely indigenous to the produsage community. Such latter trends can be observed for example in open source software development, where there are plenty of stories of initially amateur programmers who showcased their growing skills through contribution to software projects and eventually gained paid employment in the software industry (which today no longer means leaving open source produsage behind, incidentally).

Zooming out from Wikipedia or any one produsage project, what this could point to is the potential for a fruitful combination of knowledge produsage (which is obviously based on the logic of Chris Anderson's 'long tail' and aims to harness the distributed knowledge of a large and diverse community) and conventional knowledge production (built around a more industrial closed model centred around the sharp spike from which the long tail extends). From that perspective, experts and their expertise cover no more than the tips of the iceberg of human knowledge, and the hierarchies of expertise which exist in conventional disciplinary frameworks are revealed to be themselves no more than the peaks of the wider heterarchical structures of the knowledge space. Through Leadbeater & Miller's boundary-crossing 'Pro-Ams', we are able to join together these spaces of knowledge regardless of their very different internal logics.

(No judgment of quality is implied in this description - the less visible bulk of this iceberg of knowledge that sits below the waterline of professionalism is no more or less important to the whole than the visible tip above it. At the risk of belabouring the metaphor: it's the bulk of the iceberg that makes the whole thing float and keeps the tip above water.)

What's just as important as a willingness of produsage communities to engage established experts with respect (but without undue deference), though, is a recognition by the other side that this arrangement can only be sustainable if produsage communities, too, are respected - and not simply exploited as cheap labour, or a convenient incubator of new ideas. Especially where knowledge generated through produsage has direct value for industry, there is a clear danger of commercial exploitation - your own work on Fanlib's ham-fisted attempt to commercialise fan fiction makes for a great case in point here.

There's a continuum of potential commercial approaches here, from what JC Herz has called "harnessing the hive" (for example by building legitimate business models around free and open source software) through to harvesting the hive (no longer necessarily so benign in nature), and through to hijacking the hive (where strong produsage communities are lured into commercial spaces, in order to monetise their work - recent controversies around Facebook's approach to user-generated content and data might serve as examples here). This latter strategy may generate good short-term profit, but is likely to poison relationships with the community for the longer term; I think industry still has much to learn about how to engage with produsage communities in a sustainable and respectful fashion, and ignores these questions at its own risk.

Is it appropriate to apply the same concepts to talk about our new roles as consumers/producers of culture and our shifting roles as citizens?

I think so, yes. It's not far to go from active cultural to active political participation, and we're seeing more examples of using the tools of produsage for political effect every day. Building in part on Pierre Lévy's discussion of "molecular politics" in his Collective Intelligence, I've tried to develop a first rough sketch of this produsage politics - or perhaps produsage of politics - in my paper at the MiT5 conference last year, and extended this further for one of the later chapters in the book.

One thing, I think, is certain in this context: a produsage-based approach to politics would look significantly different from the current mass media-driven and ultimately industrial model of politics as it exists in the US, Australia, and many other developed nations. To bear any resemblance to produsage as it exists in other domains, to begin with, it would have to operate on a much more deliberative, open, and inclusive basis than political processes have operated during the height of the mass media age - and groups such as MoveOn in the US and ,a href="http://getup.org.au/">GetUp in Australia may be early indications that such shifts are now being attempted by interested parties, if haltingly and uneasily.

One of the major obstacles to moving further along that road, however, are the mainstream media, who have oversimplified our understanding of politics to an eternal contest between left and right - this is politics as a sport, scored in opinion polls and delegate counts, and analysed from the sidelines by pundits and commentators. This leaves little room for nuance, for broad, constructive, and open-ended deliberation; such deliberation may take place (we hope) in parliamentary committees and party rooms, and (we know) in grassroots political communities from MoveOn to the central hubs of the political blogosphere, but the media play a very effective spoiler role that prevents these two sides from connecting successfully.

Politicians who engage with the diverse voices of the grassroots and are prepared to change their minds in the process are condemned as weak and prone to backflips, while those who listen only to what they want to hear are hailed as strong leaders. Jon Stewart had it right when he said to the hosts of CNN's now-defunct politicotainment show Crossfire "please stop. You're hurting America" - and the situation isn't much better elsewhere.

So, my hopes for a shift to produsage politics remain limited in the short term - though at the same time, I firmly believe that the stranglehold of the mass media over societal processes is waning, and as it decays, more opportunities for direct involvement in political processes by active citizens are becoming available. This doesn't necessarily equate to a shift of politics in favour of what would conventionally be described as a 'progressive' direction, incidentally - produsage politics is likely to represent in the first place simply the views of those who participate, whatever their views may be...

In talking about education, you describe a shift from "literacies" to "capacities." Explain. What kinds of skills are required to become a produser and what steps might schools take to insure access to those skills?

Especially in light of what I've said in the political context, education becomes even more crucial. The more central produsage becomes to our society on a cultural, social, and political level, the more do we need to work to close the "participation gap" that you've highlighted in your own work. I see this as a two-step process, which mirrors the two elements that come together to form produsage itself: on the one hand, there's a need for people to become sophisticated users of the tools and content artefacts provided by produsage - they need to understand how these things have come to be, and what they represent (for example, how trustworthy and reliable they are, whose ideas are reflected in them, how they may be utilised, and with what limitations).

This, I think, is centrally a question of literacy: much as conventional media literacy enables us to receive, understand, decode, and interpret media messages, so should produsage literacy enable us to trace and evaluate the processes of produsage which have led to the resources we have in front of us. Produsage literacy enables us to separate the layers of the palimpsest that is represented by each entry in Wikipedia, by each story in citizen journalism, for example - it gives us the skills to check discussion and edit histories and see whether the choices made along the way were acceptable to us. (In my experience, a remarkable number of otherwise very knowledgeable people are worryingly unaware that this is even possible.)

A second step, then, is the need to provide people with the ability to make active, productive contributions to produsage projects - to move from user to produser. This is the "leap to authorship" that Rushkoff describes; it ensures that people are able not only to benefit from hearing the voices of others, but also to add their own voices to the discussion. To date, this remains a serious problem for produsage: what's represented so far are still only the voices, views, and ideas of a minority; even a project as large as Wikipedia reflects not the diversity of views in society as a whole, for example, but only the different opinions present in its contributor base. (In that sense, as much as it is sometimes accused of elitism, given that studies show stronger participation by relatively affluent and well-educated users Wikipedia is itself elitist!)

To contribute in this way and be a genuine produser rather than just a user, I think, requires a set of specific capacities for participation that goes beyond the level of produsage literacy. Building on work I've done with my QUT colleagues Jude Smith, Stephen Towers, and Rachel Cobcroft, I think there's a set of five core collaborative capacities (I call them the C5C for short): creative, collaborative, critical, combinatory, and communicative capacities. None of these are inherently new, of course, but I would argue that education must aim to increase its effort to build such capacities in learners with a particular view to how they might be applied in communal produsage environments. So, for example, it's no longer enough to nourish a creative drive, or support a critical mindset: instead, the question becomes how we might express our creativity or criticism in the collaborative context of produsage in a way that benefits rather than undermines the shared project.

For educational institutions, this begins quite simply with putting learners in a position where they might experience both the outcomes and the dynamics of produsage processes (and also involves offering help and support where such processes are confronting) - schools and universities which close off access to Wikipedia on a wholesale basis, for example, do their students a significant disservice, and would be better advised to take learners on a guided tour of exploration of that space; such a tour could highlight the pros and cons of community-based produsage processes in comparison to the industrial model of knowledge management which is practiced in other encyclopaedias, for example. It would thereby provide better insight into when and under what circumstances to trust Wikipedia content, how to evaluate it against other sources, and indeed whether to have blind faith in any information source, produced or prodused. Sadly, even such simple steps have proven too far for some schools, which have chosen to bury their heads in the sand and effectively leave their students to explore produsage spaces in their spare time, without supervision and support.

A second step would involve a more active exploration of produsage as a way of collaborative creating content - either within existing online produsage communities themselves, or in a safer internal space that models the processes which occur outside. Only this second step, aiming to develop learners' capacities for active contribution to produsage projects, would also provide direct support for learners' transition to the active forms of citizenship which are required for political produsage models; additionally, of course, possessing such produsage capacities may also be of significant benefit for the individual's personal and professional career as produsage models become more embedded in commercial activities.

Your work has very much been informed by the context in which you work. Can you share with us some sense of the intellectual community which has emerged around the Creative Industries group at Queensland University of Technology? What commonalities do you see across your projects?

Creative Industries, as I see it, is itself a way to look beyond recognised realms of cultural and creative activity, and to highlight the social as well as commercial impact of creativity well beyond traditional "high culture". I've talked in the context of knowledge and expertise about the way in which produsage and expert communities may join together as the below-water bulk and the above-water tip of the iceberg, and it seems to me, for example, that the work being done at QUT to map the impact of creative industries activity on economy and society follows a very similar logic. What happens at the top end - highly visible commercial and taxpayer-funded cultural production - really couldn't exist without the presence of a much larger, much harder to grasp bulk of everyday grassroots and Pro-Am creative practice. The grassroots sector is the incubator and proving ground for new creative talent and ideas, some of which gradually gain enough visibility to be drawn out into the open and into the creative industries proper - at this grassroots level, there's a strong similarity to what I've described as produsage, then.

Recently, some of this work by my colleagues has focussed strongly on applying quantitative models gleaned from other disciplines to tracing and predicting the evolution of cultural trends, and I'm very interested to see what impact these developments may have on my own work. My colleague John Hartley is currently leading the charge towards a blending of elements from cultural studies, evolutionary economics, and anthropology (and a few other bits and pieces) into what he calls 'cultural science'. This resonates with several elements of my work on produsage: for example, what preconditions are necessary for a large-scale collaborative project like the Wikipedia to gradually appreciate rather than deteriorate in quality - in simple terms, is there an ideal community size or structure that enables collective intelligence to emerge and operate most successfully; how diverse or how uniform should a community be in order to maintain some sort of cohesion and shared purpose while also preventing a descent into uncritical groupthink?

To borrow from a scientific discipline not (yet) represented in the cultural science project: astronomers speak of a 'habitable zone' around a sun - a range within which there's just enough energy coming in to keep water liquid and the atmosphere gaseous, neither too cold nor too hot, which enables the evolution of life. Our Earth is just far enough away from the sun to be in that zone; Venus and Mars probably aren't, and Mercury or the outer gas giants certainly aren't. In a similar way, by accident or by design, Linux, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and the other success stories of produsage have managed to find their own habitable zones, and life there is flourishing; can we use cultural science to establish a clearer picture of exactly is required to sustain these lifeforms?

That's one thing which really excites me about produsage, creative industries, and cultural science - there's plenty more work to be done, and it feels as if we're close to many important new discoveries. Wherever that takes us, it will be an exhilarating ride from here...

If you'll permit me a final aside: I've been a little surprised by the opposition from some quarters (even from some new media scholars) to new terms like produsage. Perhaps there's a difference in mindsets here that's comparable to that between engineers and scientists: the engineer's first response is usually "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and it's true, our language for describing these new produsage phenomena ain't entirely broke: we're just forced to use cumbersome workarounds like 'user-led content creation' to even come close to describing what's going on here. That's a bit like applying the umpteenth service pack to Windows to enable it to interface with a new piece of hardware - it'll work, but not necessarily as well as it could.

The scientific process is (ideally) based on a more risk-taking approach of developing theories and hypotheses and seeing if they can be proven to work, and that's the one I'd like to think I'm following in developing the produsage idea. Its equivalent in software, in turn, is Linus Torvalds's approach in kickstarting the Linux juggernaut: develop it as far as you can, and then throw it out there to see if it takes off. If it does, there's an opportunity for us to collaborative develop a modern alternative to what we've been forced to work with so far - something that does exactly what we want and need it to do.

I'd like to see the concept of produsage in similar terms: I've studied and described its operations in as much detail as I'm able to, for now - and I'll continue to contribute my updates via Produsage.org - but it's over to others now to evaluate, adapt, develop and change the concept on a more collaborative basis. What comes out of this at the end may no longer be exactly what I had in mind, but it's got the potential to provide many more of us with a common ground for developing a shared understanding of what's really going on here - and ultimately, how better to develop the idea of produsage than by taking a produsage-based approach in the first place?

Dr Axel Bruns (http://produsage.org/) is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). He is a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has also authored Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005) and edited Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture which publishes M/C Journal, M/C Reviews, M/C Dialogue, and the M/Cyclopedia of New Media, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. His general research and commentary blog is located at snurb.info , and he also contributes to a research blog on citizen journalism, Gatewatching.org with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders.

The Further Adventures of The "Henry Jenkins" Cartoon Character

In response to my post earlier this week, reader Iain Robert Smith from the University of Nottingham shared with me this "Henry Jenkins" cartoon.

This one made my wife and I both laugh out loud. I have this conversation with myself all the time.

Children as Storytellers: The Making of TikaTok (Part One)

When our son was three years old, we began the practice of having him compose stories for us before bed. We traded off nights. Some nights we'd read him a story. Some nights he would make up a story which we typed out on the computer for him, word for word, without changes. Sometimes he would take a few friendly prods to get moving but we were very careful to preserve the structure and details of his imagination. We would print out the stories and have him draw pictures to illustrate them. We would then photocopy the whole and send them to his grandparents on birthdays and other major holidays as a time capsule of his creative life. The process emerged, no doubt, because both his mother and father were fans and we knew the value of fan fiction. It benefited us as a family because it gave us a regular time when we could talk about the media he was consuming -- trust me, key themes of the stories came from television shows, movies, and from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyworld, which was a core influence on his thinking from early on. It allowed us to share our values with him, including the sense that he was empowered not simply to consume media but to rewrite it. And it helped him develop skills and a self identity as a writer which he has carried over into his adult life. I included an essay we wrote together in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. He also wrote and published an essay about his evolving relationship to professional wrestling in Nic Sammond's Steel Chair to the Head. All of this came back to me when I went on a walk recently with Neal Grgisby, who graduated a year ago with a Masters from the Comparative Media Studies Program, and has now taken on a job as the Director of Online Community for a startup company, TikaTok, which is trying to promote the idea of children writing, illustrating, and editing stories to share with other children. Interestingly, he's ended up working for a company started by an alum of the MIT Media Lab, so part of the story he shared with me had to do with the value of collaborations between the two groups. In the interview which follows, Neal and Orit Zuckerman, the company's CTO, talk about what they are trying to accomplish and in the process, they share some cutting edge thinking about how and why we can help children discover the power of authorship.

Tell us about your goals for Tikatok. What do you see as the core needs your company serves? What age groups are your targeting and why?

Orit: Tikatok's goal is to give young children (ages 5-12) a stage to show their creativity, cultivate it, and create a continuum of creativity and creation into their adult life. Young kids are encouraged to draw, to tell stories, and to let their imaginations go wild, yet when they start going to school this creativity tends to fade away (unless they have exceptional talent). We find that every child has a story to tell and a picture to show, and you don't need to be an exceptional talent to interest other kids in what you have to say. We believe that an active community of kids who like books can support this activity and give each other the confidence and help they need in the book making process.

Neal: I would add that we provide a space for younger kids to get in on what many of their teen siblings already enjoy: the ability to share their creative content on the Web. Due in part to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, children under 13 are explicitly prohibited from contributing to sites like YouTube and MySpace, and the sites made for younger children like Webkinz are so restricted that meaningful personal expression is nearly impossible. We believe that it's possible to protect the privacy of children without depriving them of their voices. Picture books provide a form that they are very familiar with and that can grow out of the kinds of activities they already enjoy. It is essentially taking digital what children have always done at their kitchen tables.

What do you see as the value of allowing young people to become authors at

such an early age? Are there any disadvantages?

Orit: The value is showing to the world the amount of creativity that this age group has in telling a story. If you look at their stories, especially the younger ages, you see they are truly creating from within with much less external influence than older kids have, and the results are fascinating. The disadvantage is that in many cases the stories are not in a format or quality we expect a story to be, and sometimes the stories make sense only to the parents. I believe, though, that we are not in a place to judge those stories because we look at it with an adult's eyes while they are intended for the eyes of children.

Neal: Right, the advantages and disadvantages are nearly one in the same. Their lack of experience and prejudice gives them such a fresh and unadulterated perspective, but it also means they haven't fully developed the strategies and tricks that an author uses to work through a story. The blank page can be really intimidating, so we try to provide them some support and structure if they want it. Also, children are computer novices at this age, so we can't overwhelm them with complicated tools - the editor has to be very elegant and intuitive, which is a huge design challenge.

How does Tikatok fit within the ongoing conversations about the value of participatory culture? For example, what similarities and differences do you see between what you are doing with younger children and what teens and adults do through fan fiction?

Neal: I definitely see Tikatok as helping to lower the barriers to creation and circulation of creative works for this cohort of kids Like many fan fiction communities have done, I hope we can encourage a culture of peer support on the site that will help kids refine their abilities in a less formal or judgmental atmosphere than they may be used to at school. And of course, writing is not a niche cultural practice, so I believe we can really foster multiple affinity groups within the community around any number of genres and styles, that is, we can bring kids with similar tastes and goals together in a way that will be very motivating.

Recently some members of the team were browsing the magazine Stone Soup, which is a really amazing thing: a literary magazine that publishes the best writing and illustrations of authors up to 13 years of age. I think we share many of the same ambitions of the editors of that magazine: to show that children can create works of real value, to give those works visibility, and, as a result, to give other children the confidence to create. But equally meaningful to us is the work that doesn't necessarily meet universal editorial standards, work that may be of more personal value to the child or the parent, or that may just represent a small step in a child's writing development. On the Stone Soup website they claim that they receive, and therefore reject, tens of thousands of story submissions from children a year. That figure really brought home the importance of an approach that is different but complimentary to theirs, one that only digital media and print-on-demand can provide.

What kind of relationship do you picture evolving between readers and writers? What do you see as the values of kids reading and responding to each other's work?

Orit: I believe that some people will be more active writers waiting for fans and critique, while some will be avid readers that collect favorite books and authors. The immediacy of the internet will evolve this relationship to more of a co-dependency rather than that of a remote creator-reviewer. The creations of the writers will be highly influenced by the readers because they can see the unfinished product and even be part of the creation. The readers are not just bystanders, they are more involved and as such their reading experience is completely different.

Neal: First of all, I can personally admit to being surprised by just how excited kids are to read books by other children that they don't know. I think my niece and nephew have literally read every book that has been shared with the community (authors have the option to keep their books to themselves or to their network of friends), and when they find a book that they like they become filled with curiosity about the author; it has really been great to see them so engaged.

My own hope is that reading will become a way into writing for our users--that a child will be sent a book by a friend, or will spend some time browsing and reading the books on the front page, and will eventually become inspired or provoked enough to respond with his or her own story. Of course there is no contradiction between being a writer and a reader--far from it--and we hope that the community of writers will grow to support each other by posting constructive criticism, making creative suggestions, and becoming fans of each other. It is a huge motivator for kids just to know that other people are reading their books.

I think it will be incredibly valuable, personally and intellectually, for these kids to get and give feedback. Commenting and contributing to discussion is another vital form of participation on the site, and it forces a child to put into words what may begin as a gut feeling about a given book. Even if the initial way of giving feedback is just to say "I like this," eventually he will run into an author who will respond with, "thanks, why?" And there he will have the beginning of a conversation that will likely get both the reader and writer to reflect and articulate something about their tastes and develop their ideas about storytelling and design. Especially if a child is both an engaged writer and a reader, having to shift perspectives from one to the other will likely make him better at both. It will give them a more personal stake in their literacy learning.

And as a site for the youngest of Internet users, I think the reader/writer model is a fairly powerful one for learning about the ethics of online participation. Like many online communities our site has community guidelines--the rules for participation--but instead of just providing a simple list of do's and don'ts, I tried to ground our rules with reference to this paradigm. So instead of decontextualized commands like "don't copy another user's work," the guidelines begin with some thoughts about how great writers stick together and respect each other. We still have rules, of course, but we try to show how they grow naturally from an ethical framework, and hope that they will remain relevant to our users as they discover other communities and have other opportunities for participation.

You describe Tikatok as "where kids channel their imaginations into stories." How would you respond to critics who felt your templates did too much to "channel" young imaginations into particular narrative formulas. Some evidence suggest that children conceive stories in different terms than adults. Do your templates teach them to find what adults see as stories or allow them to articulate their own imaginations?

Neal: It can be a thin line between scaffolding a child's ability to express herself and shoehorning her into a certain mode of expression, and we try to be very sensitive to this in our designs and the creation of the templates, which we call StorySparks. The templates themselves are relatively minimal: a smidgeon of character and setting, the beginnings of a conflict, and some hints about where they might want to take the story next. Few provide guidance beyond what you might call the "first act" of a story. They are written to be inspirational rather than prescriptive.

We do have plans to add other ways of scaffolding that are less textual. Probably the way that most kids tell stories is not through writing or drawing at all, but through objects. You put GI Joe in the Barbie dream car and put Barbie in the tank, and you have a scenario just ripe for a story. I'm very excited about our designs for a story scaffolding system that is more improvisational and object oriented.

Until then, user choice has really been an overarching design principle. Using a StorySpark is optional, and for those that do choose to write with a template, we have a huge library to choose from. In writing the templates I tried to pull ideas from everywhere to compliment any personality: mythology, fairy tales, classic literature, pop culture, etc. Once a template is chosen, we prompt the child to personalize it with their own character names and genders. Any aspect of it can be changed or ignored, and we have good evidence to show that kids are comfortable with taking what they need from a template and going in their own direction. At Tikatok you can definitely draw, and write, "outside the lines."

I absolutely hope that the children will write stories that fly in the face of adult logic and I can't wait to read them. It is really the reason for the site to exist: to publish the authentic expressions of child authors. But for the kids that want the help, the StorySparks can be very useful in allowing them to overcome the tyranny of the blank page, or for getting them to think about conflict and resolution. Research shows that even very young children can recognize good stories--or, if you like, stories that track with what adults consider good stories--but that their ability to generate those kinds of stories lags behind. I think it would be presumptive of us to assume that children do not want to progress to more adult-like stories. It is the same with drawing: it is fascinating to see how children process the world visually and translate that into an illustration, and often the final result is far more colorful and beautiful than the most realistically rendered landscape. But at some point in one's learning, to take a completely random example let's say when an individual reaches his 30s, it is just frustrating to him that he can't draw better, and he wishes someone would have given him some tips.

Finally, I believe that adults are the ones who are most anxious about transgressing boundaries and authority. It comes naturally to kids. I am sure they will subvert whatever story idea I had in mind when I wrote these templates, and I welcome that.

One of your story templates features the arrival of a new and unknown game console. Many book lovers set up an opposition between reading/writing and game playing. Yet, here you are using young people's interest in games as an opening into writing. How do you think about the relationship between these two modes of engaging with stories?

Neal: That template has been the most popular choice for kids participating in our offline workshops, by far. Mostly I think it gives them the opportunity to follow that ages-old maxim: write what you know. Here is a topic that they are experts in, and they are so excited to have a chance to put their knowledge and experience to use.

The success of that template gives a certain credence to the theory that the experience of playing a game has some similarities to the task of authoring a story. Where there is overlap we have tried to exploit it in our designs. For example our decision to prompt kids to pick character names and genders for their templates was influenced by the fact that this is a standard practice in games; and we hoped it would help ease them into a situation where they have to take more control over the story. I would say you can put reading, writing, and playing videos games on the same spectrum where the axis is control. Reading a book gives you very little control over the outcome of the story, whereas writing a book gives you maximum control. Playing a video game, or at least a video game with a narrative, is somewhere in the middle. You and the designer are co-authors of the narrative experience.

But there is definitely a critical point along that spectrum that video games have not crossed, and maybe can never really cross. There are non-trivial differences between firing up the Wii to play Super Mario Galaxy and writing a story on Tikatok, even when using a template. At times we have been tempted to push further towards the gaming model, to give kids tools for point and click, branching-path story generation, but that is just not what our site is about. We want to challenge kids to really use their imaginations and focus. I see our task as not trying to make writing easy, because if it was easy it wouldn't be writing. Our task is to make it less intimidating and more rewarding.

That said, the success of games among kids has really paved the way to allow many people to understand why it is the right time for a site like ours. A decade ago maybe no one would agree that kids would be willing or able to do for fun something as complex as making a book, or that it would be a product for a very small niche of gifted children. Now we can point to games and say: kids routinely master incredibly complex systems and can't get enough. Not only are they willing to engage with these participatory forms of culture, but they will soon demand it from all of their entertainment.

Orit Zuckerman - Co-founder and CTO

Orit has designed online communities since 1996, when she worked for Gizmoz Networks. In 1999, Orit co-founded uTOK Inc., a San Francisco-based Internet startup that created a "decentralized blogging community." She designed the community product, and supervised the R&D team. Most recently, Orit earned her Master's

Degree from the MIT Media Lab, where she designed and implemented an innovative communication system for children. Orit has also exhibited her interactive portraiture installations in Milan, Monaco, Boston, British Telecom headquarters, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

Neal Grigsby - Director of Online Community

Neal Grigsby worked for seven years at LookSmart.com, where he managed volunteers on a user-generated Web directory, co-managed partnerships and developed content for FindArticles, and designed education-themed search verticals. Neal recently earned his Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where he produced educational media for the Macarthur-funded Project for New Media Literacies, and

designed video games for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Neal also holds a BA from UC Berkeley.

The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part Three)

The Value of Engagement and Participation

"Corporations will allow the public to participate in the construction and representation of their creations or they will, eventually, compromise the commercial value of their properties. The new consumer will help to create value or they will refuse it... Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it." --Grant McCracken (1997)

At the most basic level, the distribution and publicity mechanisms of networked computing renders visible the often "invisible" labor fans perform in supporting their favorite properties. As Jenkins explains:

If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public (Jenkins 2006a, pp. 18-19).

Fans act as "grassroots intermediaries," shaping the circulation of media content at a moment when the industry is concerned about market fragmentation. The result has been a revaluing of fan loyalty and participation based on "affective economics" (Jenkins 2006a). Older audience measurements were based on the concept of "impressions," counting the number of eyeballs watching a particular program at a particular time. Scaling up via samples said to be statistically significant, this counting determined the potential number of people exposed to advertisements. An impressions model assesses the frequency of exposure and contexts where ads are placed. Over time, "impressions" have been supplemented by demographic measurements, seeking more precise information about the kinds of viewers watching particular programs, given that different "demos" hold different value for different brands.

These same companies now search for signs of audience activity and "engagement." For example, research done by Initiative Media found that less than ten percent of the viewers of most network television shows regard the program to be a favorite, while some shows -- especially cult programs -- are regarded as top choices by as many as 50 percent of their viewers (as described in Jenkins 2006a). The research, further developed through a close study of viewers of American Idol, suggests that viewers watching a favorite series were twice as likely as more casual viewers to pay attention to advertisements, less likely to switch channels during commercial breaks, and had significantly higher brand recall. Almost half of loyal American Idol viewers search the web for more information about the show and thus had more extensive exposure to affiliated brand messages. The researchers advised their industry clients that a show with a high level of engagement may be a better investment than a program with higher overall ratings but only superficial audience interest.

Under this model, the value of consumer loyalty is still being read primarily in relation to traditional consumption roles: watching television programs and purchasing advertised products. Other companies push further, developing feedback mechanisms which tap consumer's individual and collective insights to refine the production process. In his book Democratizing Innovation, Eric Von Hippel (2005) describes how manufacturers have enabled low cost innovation by closely engaging with their "lead users." The earliest adopters frequently adapt products to their particular needs and interests. By incorporating these "lead users" into the design process, Von Hippel argues, companies can discover new and unanticipated uses for their products or locate untapped markets. Von Hippel talks about the emergence of an "innovation commons" as companies monitor social networks for user insights. In some cases, companies actively solicit such feedback throughout their design and development process; Lego engaged its most hardcore fans in a feedback loop when improving its Mindstorms product (Jenkins 2006b). "Crowdsourcing" constitutes a more formalized version of the innovation commons: companies such as Threadless, iStockphoto, and InnoCentive solicit design ideas from their consumers, using their online community to weight their attractiveness, and sharing revenue with the amateur creators whose products the companies produce and distribute (Brabham 2008).

While Von Hippel writes about manufacturing processes, similar practices occur within the creative industries. Historically, fan cultures have most often involved what the industry regarded as "fringe viewers" who fell outside of the desired demographic -- for example, the most active reworking of program content came from female fans of action-adventure series or adult fans of children's culture (Ford et al. 2006). Increasingly, more sophisticated companies pay attention to such "surplus" consumers because they represent ways of extending their potential market. Modest shifts in the program content, for example, spending more time on a beloved secondary character or adding more serial elements, can broaden interest while spin-off products sometimes directly target these consumers. Similarly, some video game companies (Jenkins 2006a) allow player access to development tools , resulting in a "mod" culture where amateur designers produce and circulate "skins" for characters, new levels of game play, or animated films (machinima). Mods provide a low cost, minimal risk way of determining what refinements might generate consumer interests. Minimally, these practices extend the shelf life of the original products (since the amateur content can only be played with the original software) and in some cases, these companies have hired these amateur designers or contracted to distribute their mods as part of official expansion packs (Camper 2005).

As John Banks (2002; 2005) discusses, Brisbane-based developer Auran distributes player-modded elements of their train simulator Trainz. The company develops a "third party developers" relationship with these amateur co-creators, enabling Auran to better align their product with the community's desires. Auran has effectively expanded its workforce by releasing design guidelines and production tools and providing enthusiasts access to Auran's professional design team. These amateur teams sometimes generate labor intensive features the company couldn't otherwise afford to produce. This model has been so successful for Auran that they also use the fan network to manage the distribution and promotion of their product at gamer events.

Harnessing productive fans is not always so straightforward. Raph Koster, the man in charge of the development of the multiplayer game, Star Wars Galaxies, incorporated the fans of George Lucas's science fiction saga as clients in the design process, making early specs for the game available via the web (Squire et al. 2000; Jenkins 2006a). Koster's early courtship of these fans resulted in an immediate fan base when the game launched but power struggles within the company (2006c) resulted in significant deviations from the recommended policies. Retooling the game in hopes of expanding its market, the company alienated the original players without generating new interest. Van Hippel (2005) acknowledges that the earliest adopters are not necessarily representative of the larger market and thus their insights need to be weighed carefully in predicting market interest. Moreover, incorporating users into the design process requires trust; companies risk alienation and backlash when they pull back from what consumers perceive as commitments.

Tapping a creative user-base requires balancing market and non-market motivations. Discussing the Auran example, Humphreys et al. note that hobbyists often operate along different timetables than publishers. Motivated by passion, interest, and social rewards, amateur developers often fall behind timetables and they demand more attention than companies can afford. Humphreys et al argue this relationship reveals not the exploitative nature of mobilizing users as co-creators, but the complexity of the power relationships shaping participatory culture.

In other cases, fans play curatorial roles. For example, American fans of Japanese anime grab content which has not yet been imported, circulating copies through an underground circuit with their own amateur subtitles. While some companies might shut down such "piracy," the Japanese companies watched this black market closely but allowed it to continue. These "fansubbing" practices are credited with identifying properties with American appeal and educating consumers about unfamiliar genres (Jenkins 2006a; Leonard, 2005). Commercial distributors often draw heavily on titles with fan bases established through underground circulation. In many cases, fans have stopped circulating their amateur versions to ensure a viable market (Hatcher 2005). Sam Ford (et al. 2007) argues something similar has occurred among fans of American wrestling, where the underground circulation of wrestling tapes indicated a market for the World Wrestling Entertainment's archives.

Accordingly, Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson's (2006) idea of the "Long Tail" has become a major preoccupation within the creative industries. Drawing on examples such as Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes, Anderson argues that rather than focusing primarily on a small number of expensive properties with generalized viewership, media producers should produce and distribute lower cost materials which may appeal to a range of niche audiences. While most physical stores can only stock those titles which quickly move units, online distribution can sustain a vast backlist. Anderson argues that the "long tail" of storehouse titles will collectively generate greater revenue than the most popular titles. Anderson's model suggests profit from niche markets depends on lowering promotional expenses (by relying more heavily on "buzz" from impassioned and empowered consumers) and distribution costs (through online exchanges). MySpace represents a good example of how this process works: the social network site is a favorite among bands -- big and small -- who want to identify and get information out to their most hardcore fans; here fans form "friend" groups, whose music they like, and then pass cuts along to their friends. Bands, in turn, use their sites to get word out about concerts or allow fans to sample new releases. Similar ideas have been embraced by independent media producers of all kinds. For example, the producers of the independent film, Four Eyed Monsters, have used a range of different Web 2.0 platforms to generate public awareness of their production (Jenkins 2007b). They have, for example, encouraged potential viewers to register their interest in seeing the film. As they identify sufficient numbers of interested viewers in any given locale, they solicit exhibitors, demonstrating a ready market in their area. Some television producers have proposed that fans of cult media producers might sign up in advance, funding the production and distribution of new properties (Jenkins 2006a). A smaller number of shareholders or subscribers might sustain programs which otherwise didn't meet the Nielsen ratings bar required for broadcast television.

If media companies were monitoring fan conversations, they still didn't necessarily understand what they were hearing. In mid-2006, New Line Cinema responded to online anticipation for B-grade horror-thriller Snakes on a Plane. Based on fan feedback, the film went back into production six months after principal photography had concluded to re-shoot scenes to up the films rating to an R (from PG-13) and add dialogue that emerged from fan discussions. Most famously, star Samuel L. Jackson delivered the line, "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane," which originated in a popular Internet parody. Taking a hands-off approach to fan use of Snakes intellectual property (IP), the studio showcased mash-up trailers, artwork, and t-shirts through their official website and relied heavily on the buzz rather than critics previews or expensive marketing campaigns to "open" the movie. This online buzz generated its own interest, both online and off, setting up high box office expectations.

When it failed to deliver a blockbuster opening, Snakes was quickly declared a bomb. This measurement of achievement, however, seems a narrow assessment of its success. While domestic box office didn't match inflated expectations, the energy around the property created by grassroots intermediaries produced pre- and post-opening revenue streams in the form of marketing, merchandising, and ad-sales opportunities a B-grade film like Snakes might not be expected to generate, and, as Jenkins (2006d) notes, a significant measure of the film's success will come further down the tail as Snakes succeeds or fails to generate more revenues as it is released on DVD or shown by campus film societies. The media confused the internet fan following for a focus group, expecting it to scale out across the general population, rather than trying to understand the committed niche audience it attracted. Accounting for its success as a cultural phenomenon requires a more nuanced mode of measurement than box office revenue.

In each of these examples, companies are re-appraising the value of fan engagement and participation -- in some cases, openly collaborating with fans and in others, allowing fans some free space to repurpose their content towards their own ends. Yet, each also suggests potential conflicts since fan and corporate interests are never perfectly aligned.

The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part Two)

Convergence Culture

"The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet." -- Clay Shirkey (2000)

Push-button publishing, citizen journalism, and pro-amateur creative activities dominated early conceptions of the ways digitization would change media production. Newer, so-called "Web 2.0" companies integrate participatory components into their business plans. These activities run from feedback forums and beta-tests to inviting audiences to produce, tag, or remix content. Online services regularly collected under the banner of 'Web 2.0' such as photo sharing site flickr, social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, and video uploading sites such as YouTube and Veoh, have built entire business plans on the back of user-generated content. Software companies engage users as beta-testers and co-creators of content (Banks 2002). Marketing departments build puzzles, scavenger hunts, and interactive components into websites and mixed-media campaigns to generate buzz around branded entertainment properties. Technological, cultural, and marketplace changes make such tactics a necessity.

Henry Jenkins (2006a) describes many of these changes in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The book's argument might be reduced to the following core claims - that convergence is a cultural, rather than technological, process; that networking computing encourages collective intelligence; that a new form of participatory culture is emerging; and that skills acquired through 'leisure' activities are increasingly being applied in more "serious" contexts.

1. Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms.

Convergence is understood here not as the bringing together of all media functions within a single device but rather as a cultural logic involving an ever more complex interplay across multiple channels of distribution. A decade ago, people predicted the digital revolution would displace older one-to-many broadcast media systems with newer many-to-many modes of communication. Today, the major changes emerge from the interactions between old and new media, sometimes working in concert (as in transmedia storytelling or branding efforts) and sometimes in opposition (as when consumers use new media channels to talk back to media conglomerates.). This convergence is being shaped both by media conglomerates' desires to exploit "synergies" between different divisions and consumer demands for media content where, when, and in what form they want it.

2. In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.

This capacity of consumers to work together across geographic and social distances has been at the heart of Web 2.0 discourse. Networked communities, as Pierre Levy (1997) has suggested, represent an alternative source of knowledge and power which intersect, but remain autonomous from, the transnational reach of consumer capitalism and the sovereignty of nation-states over their citizens. Web 2.0 companies incorporate and embrace (in Tim O'Reilly's (2005) terms, "harness") this collective intelligence rather than allowing it to exist as an independent source of consumer power and critique.

3. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests.

Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly altered by new media technologies that enable us to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. An increasingly more digitally enabled and media literate population has taken tools once the reserve of professional media producers and made reworking photographs, video, and music a routine practice. The "remixability" of media content, shared platforms for the distribution of grassroots media, and the social networks that have grown up around media properties are reshaping audience expectations about the entertainment experience.

4. We are acquiring skills now through our play and recreational lives which we will later apply towards more serious ends.

This logic of participation is extending from consumer relations within the entertainment industry towards a broader range of interactions, including the interface of political candidates and government agencies with consumers, ministers with congregations, corporations with their employees, and educators with students. Indeed, as Yochai Benkler (2006) argues in his book, The Wealth of Networks, the emergence of new media technologies, platforms, and practices results in a hybrid media ecology, where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, and educational media producers interact in ever more complex ways, often deploying the same media channels towards very different ends. These groups come together at YouTube, which has provided a distribution channel, or Second Life, which has provided a meeting ground for diverse companies, institutions, and subcultural communities. A model based purely on amateur consumers and commercial producers can't adequately account for the diverse points of intersection between these various stakeholders. Far from the frictionless economy envisioned by some corporate gurus, there seems to be rather a lot of friction when one looks closely at any point of contact between these groups.

Produsers and Other Participatory Audiences

"The term multiplier may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work." -- Grant McCracken (2005)

How audiences are imagined is crucial to the organization of media industries (Ang 1991; Hartley 1987), which rely on such mental models to shape their interface with their public. Convergence culture brings with it a re-conceptualization of the audience - how it is comprised, how it is courted, what it wants, and how to generate value from it. Increasingly, audiences are valued not simply based on what they consume but also on what they produce. The audience is no longer the end point along an industrial chain, and as Bruns (2007a n.p.) argues, they no longer need to "resort to auxiliary media forms."

There are many new labels for "those people formerly known as the audience" (Rosen, 2006). Some call them (us, really) "loyals," (Jenkins 2006a) stressing the value of consumer commitment in an era of channel zapping. Some are calling them "media-actives," (Frank 2004) stressing a generational shift with young people expecting greater opportunities to reshape media content than their parents did. Some are calling them "prosumers," (Toffler, 1980) suggesting that as consumers produce and circulate media, they are blurring the line between amateur and professional. Some are calling them "inspirational consumers" (Roberts 2004), "connectors" or "influencers," suggesting that some people play a more active role than others in shaping media flows. Grant McCracken (2005) calls them "multipliers," stressing their role in proliferating the values and meanings that get attached to particular brands. Each label describes audience practices related to, but significantly different from, the construction of the active audience within media and cultural studies' discussions in the 1970s and 1980s. To talk about participatory audiences now is to talk about how differently-abled, differently resourced, and differently motivated media producers work in the same space. Consumption in a networked culture is a social rather than individualized practice.

Describing the productive consumption within collaborative projects such as the Wikipedia and online news sites, Axel Bruns (2007 a, b) introduces the concept of the 'produser', a "hybrid user/producer" (2007a n.p.) involved in "the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in the pursuit of further improvement" (2007b n.p.). Produsers contribute to the iterative improvement of goods and services, whether explicitly, in the form of online news sites (Slashdot, Digg) or knowledge projects (Wikipedia), or perhaps without their conscious knowledge, as happens when user purchase decisions contribute to Amazon's recommendation services.

Bruns (2007b) outlines four characteristics of produsage, describing a system built on community logics of re-use and permission rather than commercial logics of ownership and restriction. Produsage relies on the belief that with enough size and diversity, the

community can achieve "more than a closed team of professionals" (ibid.). This community is flexibly organized and affords fluid participation. Not only do users move between status as producers and consumers, they participate as much as they are able to, depending on their skill, time, desire, interest, and knowledge. This fluidity reflects the 'ad-hoc' basis of collective intelligence and the ways participatory audiences self-organize to achieve complex tasks. It also means the community is invested in

the re-use and continued development of the "unfinished artifacts" it produces. Rather than commercial products, the fruits of produsage are open to iterative development and re-development. As such, produsage privileges what Bruns describes as "permissive

regimes of engagement", where artifacts are licensed under copyright schemes that allow community re-development but prohibit the commercial uses, especially those that in close off these development rights.

Just as Bruns' category of the produser suggests a blurring of the role of producer and user, these trends also suggest a blurring of the historic distinction between fan and "average" consumer. As the web has made fan culture more accessible to a larger public and as digital tools have made it easier to perform such activities, a growing portion of the population now engages in what might once have been described as fannish modes of consumption. Describing pyramids of participation, some commentators note that the most labor intensive activities are still performed by a self-selected few, while more casual modes of participation extend to a larger population (Horowitz 2006; Koster 2006). It matters that these more casual consumers have the option of a more intensified engagement even if they choose not to participate at that level. But research needs to extend beyond the most visible members of fan communities to encompass more mundane and casual modes of consumption.

While Bruns links produsage to collaborative news gathering, citizen journalism, and the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movement, these core characteristics also describe fan behaviors around branded entertainment. Robert Kozinets (2007) uses the term "wikimedia" production to describe the behavior of Star Trek fan filmmakers, who, in backyards, basements, and home-made studios, have been creating and distributing unofficial "episodes" using high quality equipment and state of the art special effects. Star Trek: New Voyages, for example, hopes to complete the original Enterprise's intended five-year mission (cut short after three seasons) while others raise questions not addressed on the air (including, for example, satisfying a long standing but never fulfilled promise of explicitly queer characters). Kozinets compares this production process, where fans add not only to the original text but also correct, comment on and contribute to other fan productions, to the collaborative process that is generating Wikipedia, a user-built online encyclopedia. Wikimedia is the application of an open source model to branded entertainment - often operating outside but in dialogue with the processes that generate commercial culture (Kozinets 2007, p. 198).

These "collaborative media creators", like produsers, are motivated by a desire to enrich the community of fellow fans. In doing so, Kozinets argues they are also promoting the Star Trek brand, strengthening and prolonging its market value. Looking towards the future, these amateur productions are also providing a training ground from which writers, directors, and producers of any future Star Trek series might be recruited. Something similar occurred around the British television series, Doctor Who, which was off the air for more than a decade but rebounded, in part, based on talent recruited from the fan community (Perryman 2008; Jenkins 2006e). Several of these fan media productions have involved active collaboration with the original creators (actors, writers, and technical crew) from the official Star Trek franchise. Kozinet's description of Star Trek fan cinema challenges the ways that fans have been depicted both within the political economy tradition (as passive consumers of mass generated content rather than as active participants in cultural production and circulation) and within the cultural studies tradition (as autonomous or resistant subcultures rather than as collaborators with commercial shareholders).

The roles of producer and consumer are being blurred further within the new media landscape. Mark Deuze's Media Work (2007) traces these shifts in the relations between media producers and consumers across the advertising, film and television, news, and games industries as part of a larger pattern of changes in the ways creative work is organized and monetized. Deuze notes, however, that companies often feel threatened by the ways this shift of power and responsibility towards consumers disrupts older practices; many companies limit participation, even as they recognize its potential for generating revenue.

The Dreaded 1,2,3 Challenge

The other night, I had dinner with a group of colleagues from the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. Amongst them was Tom Levinson, sometimes producer for Nova, author of three published books on science and culture ( Einstein in Berlin; Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science; and Ice Time: Climate Science and Life on Earth) with a fourth (about Isaac Newton) on the way, and a relative newcomer to the world of blogging. His newly launched blog, The Inverse Square Blog, is full of interesting information and arguments centering around the presentation of science within the public sphere. Check out, for example, his response to the Obama "Yes We Can" video and to the topic of viral marketing, which crops up with some frequency here these days. This morning, I awoke to find that Tom Levinson has tagged me on what is being described as the "1, 2, 3" Meme. Here's how it works:

• Look up page 123 in the nearest book
• Look for the fifth sentence
• Then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.

Sitting next to my computer in my office is a large pile of books, related to various ongoing projects. It says something about my current taste in reading matter (or perhaps the current trend among publishers to reduce all substantive arguments to the thickness of a pamplet) that the first several books I picked up did not have page 123. So here's what I find on the next books in the pile:

"Badiou gives special attention to poetry, whose breaks from the ordinary use of language he finds particularly disruptive. Like mathematics, poetry offers formal categorizations, and in its frenzied structure poetry also enables -- even invites -- reconfiguration. These features of formality, abstractness and disjoinedness also characterize procedural media like videogames, allowing the kind of disruptive recombination that characterizes Badiou's understanding of the purpose of art."

-- Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

"In the Middle Ages, for example, cultured people were expected to have a knowledge of a shared allegorical code, which then allowed a compressed, multilayered reading, such as the four levels of textual fruition (literal, moral, allegoric, and anagogic) famously detailed by Dante in the second book of his Convivio. Once such shared knowledge is lost, subsequent readers have to perform interpretive feats, and much scholarship has sought to clarify the lost layers of allegorical meaning."

-- Malfalda Stasi, "The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash Palimpsest," in Karen Helleckson and Kristina Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006).

"Haysbert's role on 24 is thought by some political and cultural commentators to have helped create the space, if not the inspiration, for Barack Obama's 2008 U.S. presidential bid. But the David Palmer character actually shares more historically with Bobby Kennedy: in the very first episode of 24, we meet David Palmer campaigning for the presidency in the California primary and facing an assassination plot that Jack Bauer is assigned to foil. Bobby Kennedy, of course, was actually assassinated on the night he won the California presidential primary in 1968."

-- From the editor's introduction to Stephen Applebaum, "Dennis Haysbert on President Palmer: 'They Killed Me for the Sake of The Ratings,' in Dan Burstein and Arne J. De Keijzer (eds.) Secrets of 24 (New York: Sterling, 2007).

It fascinates me that all three of these books on popular culture, at this particular point in their argument, feel obligated to justify their objects of study in terms of allusions to something which has historically enjoyed much greater academic prestige. We happen to catch Ian Bogost explaining the aesthetics of videogames through reference to poetry, Malfada Stasi explaining the appeal of slash through an account of medieval allegory, and Stephen Applebaum explaining 24 through reference to real world politics. Honestly, I didn't stack the deck here. What does this suggest about the habitual ways we write about popular culture?

Is Ally McBeal a Thing of Beauty?: An Interview with Greg M. Smith (Part Two)

A striking feature of Ally McBeal was the integration of musical numbers into what was essentially a dramatic television series. What functions do these numbers play in the series? Why was Ally successful in this approach when other series -- Cop Rocks or Viva Laughlin come to mind -- have failed in adopting a similar mix of genres?

Music structures the Ally universe. The show has its own "Greek chorus" -- bar singer Vonda Shepard -- who comments on the action, gives the characters advice, and ties the episode's themes together. As you would expect in a show that is concerned with making a long argument, music on Ally is used to persuade. The characters use music in court, they argue using it. Music on Ally is practical. Characters use it backstage to give themselves the strength to perform in public, as when John Cage invokes Barry White to boost his sexual confidence.

Ally insists that amateur musical performance is crucial to making a community. Performing in the bar is a ritual every character must do to prove they belong. Musical performance gives us yet another way to get a glimpse of what's going on inside a character. In some cases (such as Robert Downey's character), the central insight we gain is presented through music.

And yet it's not a musical like Cop Rock and Viva Laughlin (with the exception of one episode entitled "Ally McBeal, The Musical... Almost," an interesting failure that helped reveal exactly how Ally differs from the musical form). Characters don't burst into song unless they're doing it in a naturalistic setting (performing in the bar, sitting at the piano at home) or in fantasy sequences (more like The Singing Detective). In an era when most of us simply listen to professionals performing music, Ally accentuates the amateur performer integrating music into our everyday life.

(Ally's innovative use of music is actually the reason you can only purchase a limited number of episodes on DVD. Ally McBeal began in 1997, long before anyone envisioned that you could sell broadcast TV on DVD, and so the producers purchased only broadcast rights for the music. Now that the world has changed, it's a monstrous task to try to clear the rights for 3-5 songs per episode for 111 episodes.)

One of the scenes most people will remember from the series was the vision of the dancing baby. Can you place that moment into context for us?

The dancing baby is actually a very early instance of viral video. It circulated on the internet at a time when the social network for distributing short video was much less developed and high-speed connection was less widespread. It did come to the attention of the special effects people working on Ally, who incorporated it as one of Ally's numerous hallucinations. Unlike viral video today, most people encountered the dancing baby on television first, not online, although it's becoming more common for cable television shows to feature the "best of" YouTube, sending larger numbers viewers to these popular videos.

Although the dancing baby is Ally's most famous use of special effects, it initially seems to be a bit of a misstep. It appears in the first two seasons, then disappears until Ally's last season. But on viewing the series as a whole, the dancing baby becomes an elegant hint of the series's endgame. Through most of the early part of the show, Ally seems obsessed with finding "the one," her ultimate romantic partner. But the universe has a way of giving us a different answer than the one we expect. Instead of finding a man, Ally is given fulfillment in the form of a child. It becomes clear that Ally McBeal has all along been about the notion of the family, as embodied early on by the dancing baby.

This is an example of the kinds of meanings that become apparent once you look at a series as a whole. If a television show can present a long-running argument, then it's important to listen to the entire argument, not just part of it. Many scholars studying television will deal with only a few episodes or a single season (I've done some of this myself). But there are consequences for doing this: you limit your readings, as the dancing baby example shows.

In addition, if we assume that it's no problem to extrapolate from a few episodes to the series as a whole, that's another way we denigrate TV. Imagine a critic writing about a novel without reading the whole thing! If we assume that the series as a whole won't tell us anything that a few episodes will, then we're saying once more that television isn't complicated.

Critics of the series talked about Ally as self absorbed. How is that criticism linked to the series's interest in subjective experience?

Self-absorbed? Don't you mean whiny, narcissistic, selfish, whimpering, simpering? Other than revulsion at Calista Flockhart's thin body, this is the primary negative knee-jerk response to Ally. And Ally invites this reading because it creates a universe remarkably centered on its protagonist and her values. Everything (including its music, the special effects, the hallucinations) is focused on its eccentric title character, unlike many series that provide us with a safe, "normal" central character to view its oddballs. There's no avoiding the oddball center of Ally, and so the series takes quite a chance at annoying its audience in giving us an up-close-and-personal portrait of an eccentric.

Here's one place to demonstrate how formal/aesthetic analysis can help us see more deeply into the series. Ally uses a remarkable array of formal devices to show us what's going on inside its central character: hallucinations, music, voiceover, special effects, and more. We primarily hear about Ally's self-doubt in these private moments, and so it's easy to think of her as whiny simply because we get so much access to these thoughts. However, this makes it easy to overlook the way that Ally kicks ass in public. In private, she may express doubt; in public, she's a second-wave feminist dream: a highly competent lawyer who will not compromise on her choice for a romantic partner.

If we didn't have access to these private moments through subjective devices, Ally might seem a lot more like Buffy (who started in the same year). Both kick ass in their own public arenas (graveyards and courtrooms), and both whine in private about their fate (how tough it is to be the slayer, how difficult it is to find a lover). And yet how differently we view these two portraits of women. Looking at formal devices like voiceovers and hallucinations helps restore a bit of the balance to our initial appraisals.

If I may dabble in the cultural for a second, I fear that our appraisal of "whininess" may be strongly related to gender. Meredith Gray on Gray's Anatomy (a character who uses voiceover as much as Ally does) is similarly criticized for her self-absorption, but J.D. on Scrubs is considered charmingly self-deprecating when he turns to fantasies and hallucinations of self-doubt. It may be impossible (or at least, unadvisable) to separate culture from aesthetics, but hopefully my work on TV's aesthetics in Ally demonstrates that formal analysis can provide insights that a purely cultural studies approach cannot.

What do you see as the lasting impact of this series on American television? What contemporary series draw most heavily on its innovations?

Ally widened television's capabilities for giving us subjective access into characters. Earlier precursors such as Dream On, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and Herman's Head experimented with subjective access, but Ally's popularity and its bravura use of formal devices opened the floodgates. In addition to shows I've already mentioned (Gray's Anatomy, Scrubs), Ally's other heirs include How I Met Your Mother and Pushing Daisies, shows that constantly interrupt their narratives to show us their characters memories, fantasies, and hallucinations. Special effects may be Ally's most lasting legacy. Before Ally, digital effects were used for big spectacle but rarely to convey interior states.

Not all of Ally's innovations may bear fruit, and so Ally is also interesting as a portrait of the road not taken. I doubt that we will see a mainstream television program use music so centrally in creating the fabric of the universe. We may never see an ensemble show whose world is so warped around the central character's values, because to do so risks alienating too many people. Ally McBeal was an extraordinary mainstream experiment in using serial narrative and formal devices to give us a portrait of an eccentric.

Portrait of an Aca-Fan as a Young Man or How I Became a Qwack!

Recently, going through an old family album, I stumbled upon a photograph of Yours Truly in Seventh grade which I felt an obligation to pass along to my regular readers. Hillary Clinton famously dug out the evidence that Barack Obama has been talking about running for president since he was in Kindergarten. This photograph suggests that I might have had some inkling about my future profession as early as my 13th birthday.

A little explanation is in order: the young gentleman you see before you is a character, "Professor Heinrick Von Jenkins," which I performed in my elementary school talent show. This particular Professor Jenkins was an expert on Children's Literature who is obsessed with the themes of violence found in "Rockabye Baby," "Humpty Dumpty," and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Unlike the modern persona of Professor Jenkins, known for his appearances on radio, television, film, and blogs, critiquing the evidence that media violence leads to real world violence, this earlier comic persona was convinced that reading children such stories would have a traumatic impact on their development. The performance was totally over-the-top but it also offers a snapshot of what I thought a professor was at a moment in my life when I would have known no academics first hand. (At the time, I imagined growing up to be a stand up comic.)

Unlike many of my classmates in graduate school or many of my MIT colleagues today, I didn't grow up within an academic family. Indeed, I was the first member of my family to go to graduate school and certainly the first to become a university professor. The only professors in my life were those I knew from television -- the kindly Mr. Wizard who taught boys and girls how to do experiments using everyday materials, the Professor on Gilligan's Island who seemed to know everything about everything except where the heck they were, the narrator of all of those great Frank Capra science film which Bell Labs produced in the early 1960s, and most importantly, Professor Ludwig Von Drake, who introduced me to the Wonderful World of Color on the Walt Disney television series.

You can see a certain resemblance to Ludwig Von Drake in the image above -- including the glasses pulled down on my nose and the umbrella draped over my arm. (That's not to mention the use of the Germanic, Heinrich, to refer to my fictional persona -- in those days, so many of the experts I encountered on television had German backgrounds).

I always think of Von Drake as the forgotten duck. While comics fans have resurrected Carl Bark's Uncle Scrooge comics, and Don Rosa has done a really wonderful series of new adventures for the character which respectfully integrate as many details from the original works as possible, there has been no such effort to respect the memory of the befuddled yet widely read fowl. Indeed, some years ago, I had a meeting with a top executive at the Disney corporation and suggested that resurrecting Von Drake might be the ideal way for the company to break into the serious games space, given the ways that he had emerged from the company's response a generation before to the Sputnik crisis and the anxiety that young Americans were falling behind in the study of science. Unfortunately, the executive had no memory of the character and when I suggested that he had been modeled after Werner Von Braun, he called him a "Nazi." Needless to say, the conversation didn't go anyplace fruitful from there.

Rediscovering the theme song for the character, I was struck by the interdisciplinary nature of his expertise, including his deft bridging of what C.P. Snow famously described as the Two Worlds of science and humanities: "people say Ludwing what makes you so smart you know everything from science to art I'm forced to admit after study I find it's just my superior mind." Later in the same song, he lists the areas of his expertise: "I'm a wiz at calcalus, psychology, plain geometry and anthropology I'm the living end at entomology and at bridge I excel."

He was indeed a renaissance duck -- he needed to be in order to host the range of instructional specials which Disney ran in that era. In his first appearance, he celebrated the emergence of color television by taking viewers through an exploration of the nature of color. From there, he went on to explore history, geography, mythology, space travel, math, and even the psychology of one Donald Duck. Von Drake, as the song suggests, was egotistical, patronizing, absent-minded, self-bemused, and clumsy. He even once produced an album, Snore Along With Ludwig, which acknowledged that even the best academics sometimes put their audience to sleep. Often, he become so obsessed with the topic at hand that he becomes oblivious to what's taking place in his immediate surroundings. But he also was entertaining and engaging even on topics that as a boy held little to no interest in me. If I now fight hard to bridge the gap between education and popular culture, I suspect some of it grows out of my still vivid memories of what and how I learned at the webbed feet of this highly superior mentor.

Perhaps it is wrong to imagine that the same Qwack could have that impact on the next generation of learners, as I imagined in speaking with the Disney executive, but there is still a great deal we should be able to learn by studying these earlier examples of edutainment which might shape our contemporary work in educational games or new media literacies.

If you share my fondness for the master of arcane knowledge, check out this great fan website dedicated to Ludwig lore.

Recent Discovery: The CBS Radio Workshop

A few months ago, I shared with my blog readers my discovery that Old Time Radio was offering full runs of classic radio programs on mp3 discs at remarkably low costs. Ever since making that discovery, I've been filling my ipod with vintage radio broadcasts, rediscovering series I had remembered fondly from the past but also making fresh discoveries of series which I had never even heard of before. By far, the best new discovery to date is the CBS Radio Workshop (1956-1957). I knew I had found something interesting when the very first episode featured a two part dramatization of Brave New World, narrated by Aldous Huxley with a score by Bernard Herrman. Every subsequent episode offered something different, many of them exploring new directions for radio as a medium. One week, the series might offer a debate about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, another week it might debut the performance of a new opera, and still another week it might offer a documentary about a successful real estate tycoon, one which has the raw edged feel we will associate with Robert Drew and Ricky Leacock's cinema verite documentaries. There are outstanding dramatizations of both classic and then-contemporary fiction, including performances of The Little Prince, Roughing It, The Green Hills of Earth,The Space Merchants. , and Spoon River Anthology. But there are also original radio dramas which rank alongside those of Arch Obler or Norman Corwin.

Many of the episodes seem designed to be taught alongside some of the classic social historical accounts of the 1950s, capturing many of the key transformations the culture was undergoing at the time -- the move towards the suburbs ("The Ex-Urbanites"), debates about permissive child-rearing ("Only Johnny Knows"), the plight of the homeless ("Subways Are For Sleeping"), the deployment of polling data in decision making ("Figger Fallup's Billion Dollar Failure") Madison Avenue ("The Big Event,"), and the Cold War ("A Pride of Carrots"). One amusing episode featuring Vincent Price, "Speaking of Cinderella," suggests the impact of On the Waterfront on American consciousness, exploring what method actors might do with a childhood favorite. The series invited Helen Hayes to introduce us to some of the "Lovers, Villains and Fools" from Shakespeare's plays, Stan Freberg to offer a guide to the value of satire, Sophie Tucker to trace her career on vaudeville, William Conrad to read "The Highway Man" or to offer a guide to the "No Plays of Japan," and Edward R. Murrow and Sen. John F. Kennedy to read "Mediations on Ecclesiasties." One of my favorite episodes, "The Enormous Radio," based on a John Cheever short story, depicts what happens to an average couple when the radio suddenly starts broadcasting sounds from neighboring apartments, forcing them to confront the harsh realities of everyday life. "Report from the We-uns" is an especially amusing representation of 1950s era popular culture as interpreted by anthropologists from the distant future. The series was surprisingly progressive in its politics, including a recurring emphasis on minority-centered stories, at a time when America was confronting some of the first dramatic stirrings of the Civil Rights movement -- See, for example, "The Legend of Jimmy Blue Eyes" or "The Legend of Annie Christmas"

If many of the episodes are fictional, there is also an ongoing interest in different modes of nonfictional programing. One astonishing episode ("I Was the Duke") offers the confessions of a young delinquent, including frank and uncensored language which it is impossible to imagine making it past contemporary standards and practices. A series of audio portraits of New York, London and Paris, simply take recorders out on the streets to capture what urban life sounds like, heightening our awareness of the audioscapes which could be constructed on radio. Others, such as "Cops and Robbers," might contribute to the pre-history of reality television: real cops are asked to apply their normal procedures to investigate a fictional crime. "A Writer at Work" represents a kind of auto-ethnography as Hector Chevieny takes us through his thinking process in composing a script for radio.

Despite the range of things the series was trying to do, the quality is consistently high. I have only been bored a few times so far, having listened to roughly forty episodes to date. The series included scores by composers like Herrman, Alex North, and Jerry Goldsmith, and if that's not enough, voices actors included William Conrad (Ironsides), Maison Adams (Lou Grant), Hans Conried (5000 Fingers of Dr. T) and Daws Butler (Huckleberry Hound).

I've provided links above to some of the highlights from the series, which you can find online, but for only $5 you can buy the complete series (83 episodes in all) on mp3 from Old Time Radio.

Secret Asian Man and the Art of the Comic Strip: An Interview with Tak Toyoshima

Every year, I ask the students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to interview a media maker and to try to get a sense of the theoretical assumptions underlying their work. In part, this exercise is designed to give students some experience in conducting and interpreting interviews. In part, it is intended to get them out of the classroom and testing how the ideas we've been exploring in academic terms throughout the course relate to what's happening on the ground. I featured one such project at the end of last term – Whitney Trettien's profile of embroidery artist Jenny Hart. Today, I share another – this one focusing on the realm of indie comics. Secret Asian Man and the Art of the Comic Strip

by Lan Xuan Le

Tak Toyoshima is the creator of the comic Secret Asian Man, a national daily strip in the United Features Syndicate. UFS, which acquires titles like Toyoshima's, promotes and sells comic strips to newspapers around the world and nationally distributes series like Dilbert, Marmaduke, and the Peanuts Classics. In a recent move to deliver more diverse content, UFS added Secret Asian Man to its list of comic features, making it the first nationally syndicated comic strip featuring an Asian-American protagonist. Secret Asian Man started in 1999 as two-page spread in Shovel Magazine, an alternative publication that would later become Boston's Weekly Dig newspaper. Appearing both in print and online at Toyoshima's website, Secret Asian Man gained a broad, popular following that eventually vaulted the comic strip onto the national stage this year.

The comic strip Secret Asian Man focuses on the life of Osamu (SAM) Takashi, a second-generation Japanese-American, and his friends and family. SAM is loosely based on the creator and is the mouthpiece for Toyoshima's views on race and marginalization as it functions in the United States. Often shocking and bald in its indictment of racism, sexism, and general intolerance, Secret Asian Man is the only national daily comic strip that regularly focuses on the lives and relations of marginalized groups that include homosexuals, the otherly abled, people of color, and religious minorities. Especially interesting is the strip's representation of discontent Asian-Americans and the ways in which people of color selectively reject or deploy racialized media representations to their advantage.

Medium and Message

For Toyoshima comics are not just funny pictures. They are sequential art. "I've always loved comics, specifically comic books. Sequential art is one of the oldest forms of storytelling dating back to cave paintings. As a child I was always drawing. My dad was an artist, my older brother also enjoyed drawing so it seemed natural. I also loved telling stories and creating characters and adventures which is probably why my brother and I ended up playing thousands of hours of Dungeons and Dragons. The art of comics brings both of those things together. A really good sequential artist can convey a story without any dialog and make that story open to anyone in the world."

The discursive power of comic strips is due in large part to its accessibility. Toyoshima sees a unique intensity in people's relationship to comics, and tries to reach people through this link. "Despite its innocent appearance, comics have a very strong effect on people in a very everyday kind of way. People will cut out comics and tape them to their door or office cubicle. People identify with comics and feel a sense of connection that is very different than other forms of art. It's a very practical medium and a very accessible one. Everyone from kids to the elderly read comics." Comic strips can be read in newspapers, online, or in book compilations, making the physical access to them much easier. The material barriers to the comics medium are also much lower than media like film and radio, requiring at its most basic pencil, paper, and a perhaps a photocopier for distribution.

"Having never been a big newspaper comic strip fan growing up (I read more comic books) I never gave the impact of comic strips much thought. To me most of them were not funny and were just filling the space they were given. There is a safety to the comics page that never appealed to me. Even now, many papers have a 1950's moral code when it comes to their comics despite the fact that they have some gunshot victim on the front cover and a half naked woman on page six." It may be exactly this perception of the comic strip's "1950's moral code" that gives Secret Asian Man the power to reach people. Comic strips have traditionally been a source of comfort and ritual for many people in their daily lives, the introduction of difficult issues via a familiar, reassuring medium may work to Secret Asian Man's advantage.

Toyoshima also considers very carefully the balance of social critique and humor in his strip, especially in light of his commitment to quality. He must because of the charged nature of his subject matter. "The key is to know how to get messages about touchy subjects like race across without scaring everyone away. If I ran in there screaming about racism and injustice I'd be canceled in a week. On the other hand I don't want to pander to their audience and just replace some other safe comic strip with my own." Indeed, pandering is its own danger, because Secret Asian Man would become just another empty gesture to diversity, raising the attendant specter of affirmative action.

Awareness of audience was an aspect that developed over time for Toyoshima, especially as the comic strip moved from the Weekly Dig to newspapers across the nation. "I never had a specific audience in mind. I knew that there would be a natural Asian American following but I didn't intentionally go after them . . . In later years of the weekly strip, I did start to broaden the subject matter to include the racial experiences of other groups. You can only bitch about kung-fu movies so many times before it gets played out." While commitment to and repetition of a core thematic issue works for ongoing comic strips, the repetition of particular jokes is not. The comic artist's challenge is to find the balance between familiarity and freshness.

Being a daily medium, comic strips are very much in dialogue with its audience. It is a relationship that forms over time. "Once you figure out the level of the audience you have to earn their trust. Once you do, you have a very powerful tool in influencing a lot of people. Just being the only Asian on the page is already powerful. Over time I have realized the truth in the saying 'You can catch more flies with honey.' No one likes to be yelled at. I want to entertain people but not without leaving them with something to think about." Again, the comic artist must maintain a tight balance between his message and the entertainment factor, and it is in this productive tension that humor lives. Humor, which has long been the way in which we express pain, is as much the comic strip's medium as newsprint.

The central theme of Secret Asian Man really lies in the interplay of identity, power, and the politics of imaging-making. "The comic strip now focuses on groups and how they shape our identities and perceptions of each other. Everyone belongs to groups and every group has preconceived notions about other groups. Race, religion, sexual orientation, politics, sports teams, economic brackets...etc. . . .That's the dynamic that I love to explore because it's our everyday actions and attitudes that make the world go round." There is room in the daily comic strip to explore the nuances of issues like race and marginalization, to capture the shifting negotiation between groups. In many ways, serial comic art could be a natural home of complex ideas because comics live beside us over months and years in a way that many media do not.

Ultimately, for any artist, Toyoshima values the time it takes to develop one's artistic sensibilities. "You have to have patience if you want your message to be effective but it's also important to go through the brash teen years of your artistic career to help you realize where to go from there. Some people get stuck there for fear of being called a sell-out when they progress, but I think stopping your progression for fear of what others will think of you is the ultimate sell-out move."

Medium and Process

Toyoshima, like most artists, begins with the idea. "The writing comes first. Ideas come at random times so I usually keep a pad and pen handy. Either that or I e-mail myself story ideas and go over them later. The ideas can be as short as one word or as complete as a finished dialog." But each concept requires a different kind of timing and layout to make the humor work. "From there I look at the idea and flesh it out, give it a solid ending and pace it out. Some ideas are best executed in a single panel. Others require some set up and delivery." The wide variety of stories and jokes that must exist to keep a daily comic strip interesting requires that the comic artist have a wide repertoire of narrative techniques from which to draw, which means he must be as able a storyteller as he is a visual artist.

Despite the profusion of digital technologies, ink and paper remain Toyoshima's media of choice. "I'm still a hands on kind of guy but I do use the computer as well. All the roughs and finishes I do with pencil, brush, tech pen and ink. The digital part comes in after the final inks are done and scanned in. Then I take the ins into Photoshop, clean them up and color for Sundays, grayscale for dailies." But art is more than just the product, it is also the process. "The romantic in me loves the feeling of paper and the smell of ink. The experience feels so much more real and personal. Whether it shows in the final product I don't know but it's something I imagine I'll always do. I have very mixed feelings about completely digitally done artwork." Toyoshima really values the materiality of making art, which implies that he sees art as both a physical process and an imaginative process.

The process of creating the artwork, for Toyoshima, is visible in the art itself. It leaves a trace that you can see. "I love the idea that there is an original one of a kind piece out there, not some source file. I love original art and have bought pieces from artists I love (or can afford) and to stare at the artwork an inch away from my face I can learn so much about the artist's process and I get a much deeper appreciation for the piece." Focus on process also implies finding value in craft and the innovation that arises out of mastery of craft.

Toyoshima once worked as the inker for The Tick before starting Secret Asian Man and finds that there are differences in how each format shapes his artistic process. "For years I worked on comic books where you get pages and pages to tell your story. In comic strips you often have less than a quarter of a page to get your point across. I try and reserve the more wordy strips for special occasions." Length and format, he learned, strongly shape the kind of content that can be featured, and consequently the resulting audience. "Building stories is also different. With comics you can tell a continuous story for issues at a time. There is an assumption that readers have been following the series. In comic strips, you can have an ongoing story but you have to reset the story every day just in case someone missed the previous day. I look at the Spider-Man comic strip and to me it's unreadable because it moves so slowly compared to the comic books!" Despite the serial nature of both comic books and comic strips, the length of each format molds the core assumptions about speed, time, and narrative style.

The reduction of length between formats also forces Toyoshima to concentrate on efficient, creative communication of meaning rather than creative use of the comic frame. "The format switch from comic books to comic strips was a little difficult, mostly because of the adjustment to the space allotted. Also, when you draw comics, your canvas is a lot bigger and you have more opportunities to do fun things like break panels, have action bleed to another panel, vary panel sizing etc. With comic strips you're pretty much limited to three to four panels max. You have to set it up, build it up and deliver the punch line very quickly. It can be a challenge to not fall into the habit of doing gag jokes. Just uninspired stuff that fills in the space that day." The reduction in length also requires an increase in the precision of message delivery, especially because each format favors different kinds of content and narrative technique.

Some lessons, however, do carry over between different kinds of comic art. "My experience on The Tick taught me a lot about the art form in terms of knowing what will reproduce well in print, how to add depth to B+W at and most of all it built up my endurance for drawing." Reproducibility on newsprint favors certain robust, bold drawing styles, affecting everything from the level of detail in drawings to the depiction of depth. Print culture, in a way, defines the visual aesthetic of comic strips, favoring simplified, iconic art.

The frequency of a comic strip's publication also creates expectations and parameters about content. The more frequent and popular publications tend towards more conservative values. "Weekly newspapers allow for a lot more freedom in terms of language and subject matter. I look back of a lot of the strips I did for weeklies and there no way they could run in a daily paper. But it also made me realize that sometimes I used bad language unnecessarily and relied on shock humor a little too much. It's easy to get a reaction from people. It's harder to earn their respect." Toyoshima must again balance the tension between broader appeal and addressing his core message.

While a single author can be credited as the creative impulse behind a comic strip, the process involves collaboration and multiple inputs. "Once I pace it out, I rough the strip in pencil, scan in the rough, lay it into a lettering template, add the lettering and word balloons and send a PDF off to my editors at United Features Syndicate. They then turn around some edits, we fight and cuss and the end result is almost always better than the original. They do a great job there." Conflict between creative minds can be a valuable process, especially when it challenges the artist to examine their assumptions. There is value, however, in the way Toyoshima becomes an authorial brand, especially with his presence on the web. Toyoshima is a regular, frank blogger, which allows his audience deeper into the creative process and creates a sense of closeness and community with the creator.

Comics as a medium is defined by its physical constraints – length, avenue of distribution, frequency of publication – as well as its social and aesthetic environment – the type of publication, audience, content, and collaborators. These factors already shape what the comic artist can do with his or her medium, leaving a somewhat defined space in which the artist may work. But out of these constraints creativity may often arise, giving us innovative series like Secret Asian Man, which makes visible – both physically and discursively – the bodies, voices, and experiences of marginalized people.

Lan Xuan Le

Swarthmore College, BA Biology and Asian Studies 2004

Boston University, Masters of Public Health 2007

Lan Xuan Le, who has BAs in both Biology and Asian Studies from Swarthmore College (2004) and a Masters in Public Health from Boston University (2007), has been part of the "games for health movement," conducting a qualitative study and co-authoring a white paper for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the use of games to combat childhood obesity. She also has a strong interest in the globalization of media and the construction of alternative understandings of what it means to be Asian and Asian-American through popular culture, an interest which led her to design, research and execute a library exhibition of anime and manga for Swarthmore's McCabe Library. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on problematic gender and sexual representations in Japanese popular culture with a particular focus on Card Captor Sakura, a paper which won the Swarthmore College Asian Studies Program's top writing prize.

From YouTube to WeTube...

Last week's 24/7 DYI Video Conference at the University of Southern California represented a gathering of the tribes, bringing together and sparking conversations between many of the different communities which have been involved in producing and distributing "amateur" media content in recent years. Mimi Ito and Steve Anderson, the conference organizers, have worked for several years to develop a curatorial process which would respect the different norms and practices of these diverse DIY cultures while providing a context for them to compare notes about how the introduction of new digital production and distribution tools have impacted their communities. The conference featured screenings focused on 8 different traditions of production-- Political Remix, Activist Media, Independent Arts Video, Youth Media, Machinima, Fan Vids, Videoblogging, Anime Music Video. The inclusiveness of the conference is suggested by the range of categories here -- with avant garde and activist videos shown side by side with youth media, machinima, anime music videos, and fanvids. The curators were not outsiders, selecting works based on arbitrary criteria, but insiders, who sought to reflect the ways these communities understood and evaluated their own work. Paul Marino, who directed Hardly Workin', and who has helped organize the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, put together a crackerjack program which took us from the very earliest use of games as animation engines through the most contemporary and cutting edge work, spanning across a range of different gaming platforms, and mixing videos which are about the games world with those which have a more activist or experimental thrust. Laura Shapiro, an experienced video-maker, brought together a range of fan music videos, again representing a diverse cross-section of fandoms, while Francesca Coppa offered informed critical commentary which identified the schools represented and their aesthetic and thematic goals for their works. Tim Park, an experienced AMV producer, put together a program of anime videos drawn from more than half a dozen different countries.

Even in those categories I thought I knew well, I was familiar with only a fragment of the works shown, and even where I thought I knew a work well, I understood it differently when read in the context the curators provided. In some cases, these materials were being shown outside their subcultural community for perhaps the first time. Having written about fanvids since the 1980s, I was delighted to see them gain a public exhibition in this context and for media students to get a sense of the aesthetic complexity and emotional density that is possible working within this form. Again and again, speakers at the conference urged us to place our current moment of participatory culture in a larger historical context, and so it was refreshing to see that a larger historical trajectory was incorporated into most of the programs. The fanvids traced their traditions back to Kandy Fong's slide shows at the early Star Trek conventions; the program on political remix video (organized by Jonathan McIntosh) included some works from the late 1980s and early 1990s; and the program on activist documentary (Curated by Jon Stout) took us from the people's media movements in the streets of Chicago in 1968 through the Indie Media movements of more recent years through a shared focus on works documenting protests at the presidential nominating conventions.

In introducing the fan vids panel, Francesca Coppa quoted a recent news story which traced fan videos back to "the dawn of Youtube" before citing more than 30 years of productions by fan women repurposing the content of television shows and insisting on the importance of this history being part of our understanding of contemporary remix culture. Again and again, speakers at the conference referenced much earlier efforts by citizens to take media in their own hands, as well as the challenges which they faced in gaining distribution and audiences for their works.

One of the things that has excited me about YouTube is the ways that it represents a shared portal where all of these different groups circulate their videos, thus opening up possibilities for cross-polination. Yet, as many at the conference suggests, the mechanisms of YouTube as a platform work to discourage the real exchange of work. YouTube is a participatory channel but it lacks mechanisms which might encourage real diversity or the exchange of ideas. The Forums on YouTube are superficial at best and filled with hate speech at worst, meaning that anyone who tries to do work beyond the mainstream (however narrowly this is defined) is apt to face ridicule and harrasment. The user-moderation system on YouTube, designed to insure the “best content” rises to the top, follow majoritarian assumptions which can often hide minority works from view. Perhaps the biggest problem has to do with the way YouTube strips individual works from their larger contexts -- this was an issue even here where "Closer," a fanvid considered to be emotionally serious within slash fandom, drew laughter from a crowd which hadn't anticipated this construction of same sex desire between Kirk and Spock. This conference, from its preplanning sessions which encouraged people from different communities to work together towards a common end, through the main conference screening which finally juxtaposed videos around shared themes rather than respecting the borders between different traditions, and through conference panels and hallway conversation and hands-on workshops, created a space where different DIY communities could learn from each other (and perhaps as importantly, learn to respect each other's work).

Throughout the conference, there was some healthy questioning of the concept of DIY (Do It Yourself) Media from several angles. One group, perhaps best represented by Alexandra Juhasz, was questioning the expansion of the term from its origins in countercultural politics and its connections with an ongoing critique of mainstream media to incorporate some of the more mundane and everyday practices of video production and distribution in the era of YouTube. I find myself taking a different perspective, drawing on the old feminist claim that "the personal is political" and thus that many of the films about "everyday" matters might still speak within a larger political framework. A case in point might be a disturbing video shown during the youth media session (which was curated by young people from Open Youth Networks and Mindy Farber): a young man had been filming in a school cafeteria when a teacher demands that he stops; when he refuses, she leads him to the principal's office, berating him every step along the way, and then the two of them threaten to confiscate his camera, all the time unaware that it is continuing to film what they are saying. The young man distributed the video via YouTube, thus exposing what took place behind closed doors to greater scrutiny by a larger public. Read on one level, this is a trivial matter -- a misbehaving youth gets punished, rightly or wrongly. But on another level, the video speaks powerfully about what it is like to be a student subjected to manditory education and the strategies by which adult authorites seek to isolate the boy from any base of support he might have in the larger community of students and feels free to say and do what they want behind closed doors. Even where videos remain on the level of sophmoric "jackass" humor, there's no way of predicting when and how these filmmakers may apply skills learned in these trivial pursuits towards larger purposes. We may never know how many of the activists involved in the indie media movement learned their skills recording skateboard stunts or capturing their grafitti exploits. And that's why there's something powerful about a world where all kinds of everyday people can take media in their own hands. As we saw at the screenings of Fan Vids or Machinima, the line between the political/aesthetic avant garde and more popular forms of production is blurry. Works in these programs might engage in quite sophisticated formal experiments or may deal with political issues at unexpected moments.

A second critique of the phrase, DIY, had to do with the focus on the individual rather than on collective forms of expression. Some called for us to talk about DWO (Doing It With Others) or DIT (Doing It Together). I argued that there was a fundamental ambiguity in the "You" in Youtube since in English, You is both singular and collective. When we talked about YouTube, then, we often end up dealing with videos and their producers in isolation, while many of them come from much larger traditions of the kind represented on the currated programs. I ended up one set of remarks with the suggestion that we might think about what it would mean to have a WeTube, rather than a YouTube.

I am writing this post on the airplane on the way back from Los Angeles and am still warm with afterglow of the conference. I was inspired by fellow speakers, such as Marc Davis, Howard Rheingold, John Seely Brown, Yochai Benkler, Joi Ito, Juan Devis, Sam Gregory, and so many others. Ulrike Reinhard has posted some segments from the plenary panel, Envisioning the Future of DIY, which I highly recommend to anyone who missed the event. I was inspired even more by the broad range of different kinds and modes of video production I saw throughout the screening program at this event. I am sure to be drawing on this experience in the weeks and months ahead.

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part Two)

Your team has had good luck developing a set of guidelines to provide more clarity to documentary producers about when their deployment of borrowed materials is protected under current legal understandings. Can you describe some of the impact that this report has had? What lessons might we take from those experiences as we look at the challenges confronting amateur media makers?

PA: Documentary filmmakers found their hands tied creatively, without access to fair use. So in November 2005 they developed a consensus statement, Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, through their national organizations and with our coordination, which describes four typical situations that come up for them, and what the principles of fair use are, along with the limitations on those principles. For instance, the Statement shows that in critiquing a particular piece of media, you can use that media to illustrate your point. The limitation is that you can't use more of it than makes your point. Common sense and good manners require that you let people know what it is (provide credit).

Filmmakers, who want access to television and theaters (that would be most of them) need for gatekeepers to agree to their claims. The Statement almost immediately made that possible, and more and more gatekeepers are turning to it. Only eight weeks after release of the Statement, three films (Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, and The Trials of Darryl Hunt ) went to the Sundance Film Festival -- a make-or-break place for the documentary market -- because they had been able to justify fair use using the Statement. Partly as a result of their Sundance showcasing, all three received television screenings from entities that approved their fair uses of major parts of the films. Hip Hop was picked up by PBS/ITVS Independent Lens; This Film went to the IFC cable channel, which went so far as to write its own internal fair use policy; and Hunt went to HBO.

Filmmakers have also used the Statement in order to conduct reasoned negotiations that lower clearance costs. IFC's Wanderlust, a film about road movies, licensed clips from several studios and used the Statement to lower its costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Television programmers increasingly turn to the Statement. U.S. public television has broadly incorporated the Statement. Independent Television Service (ITVS), which co-produces dozens of television programs a year, endorses it. Producers at WGBH, one of the largest producers in U.S. public TV, give it out to their producers, and use it themselves. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has shared it with all general counsels and general managers in its network. On a case-by-case basis, other cable companies, including HBO, Discovery Times and the Sundance Channel, have accepted fair use claims grounded in the Statement.

Professionals have found the Statement valuable. The legal community has publicly recognized the Statement at The Copyright Society of the U.S.A., the leading association of copyright attorneys, which has showcased fair use and the Statement at regional and national meetings. The University Film and Video Association, the leading association of film and video teachers in higher education, has endorsed it and teachers in the UFVA's Fair Use Working Group have developed boilerplate teaching language.

Online video organizations have found it useful. Joost has endorsed the Statement, and Revver.com links to the Statement on its copyright page for uploaders.

Errors and omissions insurance may well be the best gauge of the adoption of fair use in general, and the Statement in particular, since insurance companies are both the ultimate gatekeepers for television documentary and also historically cautious to adopt practices that involve risk. And since fair use is a right, which can be challenged as well as asserted, insurance companies have typically only accepted fair use claims with considerable negotiation, on a case by case basis, and have much more routinely insisted that rights be licensed. The four companies most used by U.S. documentary filmmakers—AIG, MediaPro, ChubbPro, and OneBeacon—all announced programs to cover fair use claims between January and May of 2007.

The Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use has had a profound effect on the documentary marketplace.

The lesson for the wider and still-emerging participatory environment is that knowing your rights and in particular knowing what acceptable fair use is to your field of practice is critical. Copyright is not broken, but knowledge of copyright law is broken.

You've drawn a distinction between acceptable use and fair use. Explain. Why might a push towards an acceptable use policy prove useful in responding to the current challenges facing amateur media makers?

PJ:In a so-called "acceptable use" policy, a copyright owner (or a group of them) might announce that it simply won't challenge certain kinds of quotations from its material – without giving an opinion, one way or another whether those are the kind of uses (i.e. fair ones) that people actually have a right to make. There's been some talk recently on the part of content owners about this approach, and we certainly don't oppose it. Anything that brings any additional clarity to is welcome.

But owners' announcements about "acceptable use" would be no substitute for "Best Practices" developed by and for particular creative communities. For one thing, "acceptable use" rules are always subject to unilateral change, as markets develop or business models morph. For another, "acceptable use" policies are likely to be more restrictive than fair use. To give one example, most discussions of "acceptable use" focus on private and strictly not-for-profit uses, including education. But fair use also operates robustly in the commercial environment (think of book publishing, for example) and that is exactly the environment into which on-line video production is moving as running platforms becomes a profitable business. So while some of us could benefit from "acceptable use," we all need fair use.

YouTube contributors are not the only group which confronts uncertainties about Fair Use. You've also been looking at the impact of these confusions and anxieties on Media Literacy educators. What have you heard? What kinds of classroom practices are being restricted as a result of fears or confusions about Fair Use?

PA:In company with Temple University's Center for Media Education and Prof. Renee Hobbs, we talked to dozens of seasoned teachers of media literacy, who every day need to quote popular culture to do their work, and issued a report, The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy. We found that teachers' ignorance about copyright -- and particularly their lack of awareness of the fair use provision – impairs their teaching of critical thinking and communication skills. Teachers in language arts, social studies, literature and media literacy, among many others, find themselves hamstrung by copyright practices that do not accord with good law.

The report reveals that teachers who use popular culture in the classroom, and particularly teachers of media literacy, are typically put into educationally untenable situations. Teachers need to reproduce, show and demonstrate the popular culture they are analyzing, but this is often obstructed. One professor was forbidden to bring any media except that available in the university library into the classroom. Another was banned from photocopying illustrative material, including advertisements, for class analysis. Many are strongly discouraged from sharing their students' work outside the classroom, even within the same school.

Furthermore, many internalize these constraints, taking three resorts (sometimes all three): hyper-compliance; studied ignorance; and limiting all work including their own curriculum innovations to their own classrooms. All three result in bad teaching practice for media literacy.

We hope to work with media literacy educators, much as we did with documentary filmmakers, to establish best practices in fair use. These best practices, we believe, will put decision-making back in the hands of the teachers.

More generally, how does the lack of clarity on such matters impact the growth of media literacy in this country?

PJ: As distinctions between teachers, students, makers, users and distributors continue to blur, we are all becoming more and more dependent on fair use -- whether we know it or not. These days, some of the most important "media literacy education" is occurring far from the classroom. People learn about how to understand media in a variety of settings, and in a variety of ways. After-school programs and youth media activities are part of this trend. More broadly still, young people are learning about media from one another, by taking advantage of all the new tools that permit them to be makers rather than mere consumers of content. This is a powerful social development, but it also is a fragile one. Nothing threatens it more than inappropriate applications of copyright discipline. The last lesson we want to teach young people as a society is that it is wrong to participate actively in one's own culture, and that the choice they face is between compliance and transgression. Whichever choice they make will represent destructive mislearning.

What are the next steps for your research group?

PA: As we already mentioned, we're developing a blue-ribbon committee of scholars and lawyers to develop a best-practices code for online video. We are working with media literacy teachers to develop a best-practices code, as well as with dance archivists and other groups. Each of these groups, and other creative communities still discussing the process, provide important examples to others. We're hoping to develop a mechanism by which members of such communities can get free high-quality legal advice about how fair use applies to particular creative projects they have underway. We're also looking at international copyright law exemptions that permit use of copyrighted material without permission or payment, to assess the problems that people who don't have fair-use provisions face.

Pat Aufderheide, one of American University’s Scholar-Teachers, is a critic and scholar of independent media, especially documentary film, and of communications policy issues in the public interest. Her work on fair use in documentary film has changed industry practice, and she has won several journalism awards. She is the founder, in 2001, of the Center for Social Media, which showcases media for democracy, civil society and social justice. She recently received the Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation from the International Documentary Association.

Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. He was Pauline Ruvle Moore Scholar in Public Law from 1981-82; Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Awardee in 1982; and he received the AU Faculty Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Development in 1996. He is a member of the Selden Society (state correspondent for Washington, D.C.). Previously he was a member of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. trustee, 1992-94; International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property; National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., Animal Welfare Board, 1986-present; Library of Congress Advisory Committee on Copyright Registration and Deposit (ACCORD), 1993. He has written many chapters, articles and monographs on copyright, intellectual property, technology and other issues. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994 (with M. Woodmansee) (also published as a law journal issue, 10 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 274, 1992). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, Third Edition (Matthew Bender & Co., 1994).

Fieldnotes from Shanghai: An 'Adult' Playground

Here's me clowning around with some adult playground equipment. We stumbled onto these facilities near an old folk's home in Shanghai. The plastic equipment was heavily used by the older residents for their morning exercise.

Photograph by Eric Klopfer

Fieldnotes from Shanghai: A Psychedelic Subway....

We took a subway underneath the xx River which separates Padong from the main part of Shanghai. The full length of the ride is accompanied by flashing lazer lights, inflated figures, retro electronica music, and a cryptic narration.

Photographs by Sasha Barab

This ends my reports on China. Next time: Confessions of a Superhero

Fieldnotes from Shanghai: The Cathay

The Cathay These two photographs show the exterior and interior of a vintage movie theater in the French Concessions in Shanghai -- a section of town which was among the first to be westernized but which now lags behind the more futuristic sections of the city.

Photographs by Eric Klopfer

Fieldnotes from Shanghai: How to Confuse With Pictures...

The use of pictures is supposed to produce signs which can be understood universally, but we had some difficulty deciphering exactly what was being communicated here...

Photography by Sasha Barab