DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part One)

This is the first of an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was developed by Sasha Constanza-Chock.

Activist Media: curated by Sasha Costanza-Chock

I was invited by Steve Anderson and Mimi Ito to curate a program of 'Activist Video' for DIY Video 2010. I was happy to get involved since this is an area that I both study (as a postdoc at the ASC&J and a Fellow at the Berkman Center [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/scostanzachock]) and have been an active participant in for about 10 years now.

I first got connected to DIY activist video through Indymedia, a worldwide network of grassroots journalists working from within the global justice movement that was inspired by the Zapatistas in southern México. Indymedia videographers used cheap video cameras to document the spectacular wave of popular mobilizations that rocked global financial meetings from 1999 forward, edited those videos on personal computers, and used Free/Libre Open Source Software platforms to circulate them transnationally via the net (this was back before the rise of blogs, social network sites, and especially YouTube as the hegemonic web video space).

In 1999, some friends of mine from Big Noise Films were cutting together footage shot by over 100 street videographers at the protests that shut down the WTO in Seattle, and asked me to help work on the soundtrack for a collaborative, DIY documentary called This Is What Democracy Looks Like The film captured the energy of the moment and was seen very widely, subtitled and distributed around the world for thousands of screenings in homes, community centers, and activist spaces. I was inspired and hooked, and over the next few years spent a lot of time helping to organize new Independent Media Centers, getting video cameras and computers into the hands of grassroots activists in the global justice movement, and shooting, editing, and coordinating collaborative DIY video documentaries (for example, check out The Miami Model [http://www.archive.org/details/miamimodel].) I was also part of the editorial collective for video.indymedia.org].

The Indymedia network is really an interesting phenomenon, and one that's often overlooked by academics studying political media, despite the large number of people involved, the technological innovations it produced, and the huge amount of traffic it (still!) actually gets. It has also been a generative space for many people who went on to become innovators in social movement technology spaces as well as web 2.0 firms more broadly. But the still-quite-recent history of innovative DIY video activism on the web, let alone the much longer history of DIY video (and film!) in general, is too often ignored these days when we talk about activist media. For those interested in a little more history and theory of media activism, check out this short article on "New Media Activism: Looking beyond the last 5 minutes", or for a book-length text see John Downing's excellent "Radical Media: Rebellious communication and social movements."

Besides the disappearance of history from narratives about media and social movements, it seems to me that conversations about 'activist media' in general, but especially 'online activism,' all too often begin by asking the wrong question, usually some version of 'does x media technology produce social change?' Just to take a recent example, see Malcom Gladwell's article "Why the revolution will not be tweeted". My response:

> "We can avoid both cyberutopianism and don't-tweet-on-me reactions with a quite simple strategy: look at how 'real' social movements communicate, rather than start with communication tools and then argue about whether they are revolutionary. Start from the social movement, then ask 'how is this movement using ICTs, from old to new, to achieve its goals?' The revolution will be tweeted - but tweets do not the revolution make." (You can read the rest here

This is similar in a lot of ways to the position put forward by Kevin Driscoll, who argues that we should focus on how networked social movements actually use new tools I agree: start from the movements, then look at the media practices. This is the strategy that I used for my work on transmedia mobilization in the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, and it's the curatorial strategy I employed when I assembled the 'Activist Media' program for DIY Video 2010.

To put it simply, I started by thinking about mobilizations that took place since the last DIY festival in 2008, and about social movement organizations and networks that had significant impact during that time, then went looking for DIY videos made by participants in these movements. Deciding which movements to include (and exclude) was of course difficult, but also energizing, since despite the persistent pessimism of pundits about the 'decline of civic engagement,' once you actually go looking, there is just an overwhelming amount of diverse movement activity going on everywhere :)

I ended up narrowing it down to 10 categories, most of which felt to me like they just *had* to be included: the 2008 US presidential election cycle; the Green uprising in Iran; the movement against the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the protests against Prop 8 and for GLBTQ rights; the immigrant rights movement; the murder of Oscar Grant and the movement against police brutality; the environmental movement and the Copenhagen climate conference, and struggles against gentrification. I also decided to include a video from Haiti, since DIY and local perspectives on the crisis there were so sorely lacking in both mass media and online coverage, and to look for a 'meta' video about the last few years of video activism.

I then let networks of community organizers and video makers, like the Transmission Network, know that I was pulling together this program, and received lots of video links via email and Internet Relay Chat. Most of the videos that made it into the program came from culling through all this material, although there were a few videos that I knew I wanted to include from the beginning. Some of the videomakers I know personally, and it was simple to let them know that their work would be included in the program. Others I contacted to ask for permission, and everyone who got back to me responded positively. Two, I was not able to reach, but in all cases the context of the videos and their wide circulation across the web made it fairly clear that the makers would want them to be seen as widely as possible.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on the critical political economy of communication and on the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. He holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a postdoctoral research associate. He's also a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a member of the community board of VozMob.net.

Digital Media and Learning: New Video Series

Last spring, I expressed my dismay over what I saw as the failure of PBS's Digital Nation documentary to adequately express the work being done as part of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a project which has brought together some of the smartest contemporary thinkers about formal and informal learning in the digital age. I was not the only one disappointed in the documentary and so I was delighted to be working with folks from the Pearson Foundation who were producing an alternative account, which is scheduled to be aired on PBS stations around the country next spring. Their project will be called Digital Media, New Learners of the 21st Century. In advance of the broadcast, they have started to release a series of video profiles of leading thinkers about media and learning via a temporary Vimeo site. They have said that there are more profiles coming and that they are in the process of building a spiffier website to showcase the material. But I wanted to take advantage of my inside knowledge to give you a sneak peak at the forthcoming project.

Here is the profile they constructed about my work. It was shot in and around my new digs at the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Henry Jenkins from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

One of the things I really admire about this series of videos is their attempt to situate each "thinker" in their real world context -- to show where we live and/or work and to suggest some of the factors in our surroundings which shape our thoughts. This next one focused on John Seeley Brown does a beautiful job of showing the natural environment that surrounds his home in Hawaii and how he draws insight from the surfing culture there that shapes how he thinks about the learning process. (I am not sure what to make of the focus on athletics in their depiction of me -- trust me, I'm no jock, though I do enjoy an office which backs up to the field where the USC Marching Band practices.) The profile of James Paul Gee, which you can find at their site, also situates the educator taking a walk in a beautiful natural setting, again refusing to construct images which pit the digital (or the life of the mind) against the natural.

John Seely Brown from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

This profile of Katie Salen offers us some intriguing glimpses into the Quest to Learn School, an innovative charter school in New York City which uses game design principles to encourage young people to develop systems thinking. You might contrast the respectful way that the school is depicted here with the disorientating representation the project received in the Digital Nation documentary. Here, we have a sense of what young people are doing, why they find it engaging, and how it relates to traditional curricular standards.

Katie Salen from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

Check out their Vimeo site to see the other profiles of James Paul Gee, Mimi Ito, Nicole Pinkard, and Diana Rhoten. Each makes important and inspiring contributions to our understanding of digital media and learning.

Henry Jenkins The Movie or How Does Fandom Happen?

Around the same time as Teenage Paparazzo first appeared on HBO, I was participating in a Social Media week event billed as a "Fanthropology" workshop here in Los Angeles, hosted by Cimarron Digital, and intended to share insights with area media makers about how they might productively reframe their relations with their fans. I was asked to deliver some opening remarks as a "fan expert" and then join a panel of entertainment bloggers as they talked about their relations with the media industry. My fellow speakers were:

• Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net movie blog, Owner and Executive Editor
• Brett Erlich of Current TV, host of The Rotten Tomatoes Show and the Webby Award winning Viral Video Film School segment on infoMania.
• Babette Pepaj, CEO of BakeSpace.com, the Webby-award nominated largest food-themed social network, which has created social campaigns for Desperate Housewives, Julie & Julia, Grey's Anatomy, It's Complicated, Ugly Betty, etc.
• Scott Perry, New Music Tipsheet music blog founder
• Eloise Hess, 15on15, 15-yr-old Creator, Producer, Host. 15on15 is a live music, video web series and music blog which has interviewed bands including Dead Man's Bones, Local Natives and Titus Andronicus @15on15
• Jovana Grbic is the Creator, Editor and Creative Director of ScriptPhD.com, a blog and creative consulting company focused on science and entertainment

and the event was moderated by Digital LA founder Kevin Winston and Cimarron's Kristen Olson.

How Does Fandom Happen? from Cimarron Digital on Vimeo.

Stitched through the discussion was a power point presentation created by the Cimarron Digital team which explored the stages through which the media industry fed and responded to fan interest surrounding the emergence of a media property.

Much to my amusement, the slides were organized around Henry Jenkins the Movie. A highlight for me was a photoshopped image that shows what the more or less appropriately aged and built Bruce Willis would look like wearing suspenders, glasses, a grey beard, and my alternately bald and shaggy pate -- that is, in the branded, trademarked, and copyrighted persona of Professor Jenkins which I sometimes play in the media.

Here's part of a synopsis created for the rather unlikely Henry Jenkins vehicle:

In the Summer of 2011, America's attention is held in thrall by the 24/7 news machine, focusing on the deterioration of the Space Station and last-minute rescue attempts to remove the scientists and experiments aboard it before it potentially crashes to earth. For Henry Jenkins, however, business goes on as usual in preparing to attend the San Diego Comic Con... until a mysterious woman leaves a mildew-ed, yellowing packet of papers in his office containing an ancient prophecy predicting the space station's crash, and suggesting that only George Takei can stop it. He brushes it off until reaching Comic Con and discovering the situation is dire: not only are several major cities threatened by the crash, but the suggestion of sabotage has the makings of an international incident. As San Diego is one of the cities under threat, organizers have curtailed activities in cooperation with local authorities.

Though he dismisses his own concerns as foolish, the product of an idle mind, Henry is compelled to find George Takei and show him the papers. Despite being a respected professor, he can't even get close; Takei's people won't let Henry see him, and the papers are scattered. He can only recover a few, but as he does, he realizes that the George Takei depicted isn't the George Takei of today, but of 1967, during Star Trek's second season. Confused and frustrated, and figuring someone has played a practical joke on him, he makes his way out of the exhibition hall, colliding with a young woman in steampunk gear, Sally. The papers go flying again, but this time he leaves them. Sally picks them up and returns them to him anyway, and noticing their content, offers to help him with his "time travel problem."

Of course, he's still going to need Takei - otherwise he won't be able to find his past self. So Henry waits for an opportune moment during the Con and grabs Takei, stuffing him into an elaborate costume to avoid detection. When Takei wakes up, they're in the basement of a San Diego hotel with Sally and her steampunk friends. One of whom is suspiciously military-looking. He hands them a couple of devices that don't look anything like steampunk technology, and, before Takei can object, zaps them back to 1967. No explanations, instructions, or anything. Just zap!

Takei is furious. He immediately attempts to kill Henry in an epic fight, before calming down and remembering he's a pacifist. Henry shows him the few papers he has left, and by his reaction, it becomes clear that they mean something different to George than to Henry. He immediately recognizes the nickname of a man he met in 1967 called "The Dreamer." He doesn't know what he has to do with it, but he agrees to take Henry to where he was when he met The Dreamer... The Monterey Pop Festival in San Francisco. But neither one of them has a car...

I don't know about you but I'd certainly buy multiple tickets to that movie and almost certainly grab it when it came out on DVD! Your stakes might be a bit lower than mine, but still, you can surely see why this movie would generate buzz. We might call it William Shatner In Love With Himself or as the Hollywood team preferred, The Redemption of Sulu.

As it happens, I do not know George Takei, but I did have a chance to moderate a panel featuring the Star Trek actor at MIT where he was taping narration for a game in which he played one of my faculty colleagues, Shigeru Miyagawa, so sometimes reality is almost as strange as fiction. At the time, our biggest concern was heading off likely audience questions that might attempt to out the still closeted Star Trek performer, though today, he's a poster child for gay marriage in California.

For the presentation, the Hollywood types had mocked up everything from Tweets and Facebook updates to blog posts, suggesting how the fan community would respond to news about the production -- from its initial announcement through to subsequent announcements and promotions. The goal was to prod the panelists into reflecting on the ways that they, as entertainment bloggers, interfaced with the publicity machine surrounding a major studio release. They did a very effective job at simulating the courtship dance between producers and fans, including unauthorized leaks (and strategies for dealing with them) and fan objections to race-bending casting decisions as well as more carefully controlled PR releases. Below are a sample of the materials generated for this event.

As the presentation's narration explains:

A film is in social media as soon as it's announced - because today, that announcement always occurs through an online news source. An aggressive social media strategy means you leverage every drop of content, using it when it will be most effective. As soon as you announce a film, there will be people - we call them "bleeding edges" - that will be looking for information. Setting up channels for information early establishes the studio as an accessible and important news source.

Their presentation worked through how the studio gradually reveals information about the production, how it responds to fan speculation and gossip, how it fuels and expands audience interest, and how it incorporates grassroots intermediaries into the information flow. It is a strategy designed to build buzz and cultivate but not regulate the growing fan base around this property. I've included some samples from their slides below.

How does fandom happen

All in all, I felt they did a plausible job of modeling fan response, including how the fan base emerges from existing fan communities, how interest gets expressed initially through speculation and later through various kinds of cultural production, how fans develop a sense of ownership over the property and sometimes doubt the legitimacy of the people producing it, and how this buzz may or may not translate into box office success.

After all, Scott Pilgram went through this entire cycle only to disappoint its producers, though I have argued this has as much to do with inflated budgets leading to inflated expectations. After all, if Scott Pilgram was a small budget indie film (on the same level as the comic on which it was based), it would have been fantastic to see it ranked fifth in that week's box office, where-as seeing a highly touted major studio release there was a devastating disappointment.

After all of this excitement, I will now go back to my normal life as a mild-mannered, absent-minded, and over-worked USC professor who wants to make the world safe for participatory culture. But you never know when I may get pulled back into duty as a time-traveling adventurer or when I may find myself being played on screen by Bruce Willis. When duty calls, I hope to have the smart folks at Cimarron Digital build the PR campaign for my big screen adventures.

How YouTube Became OurTube

In 2008, the University of Southern California hosted 24/7: A DIY Video Summit, which was organized by Steve Anderson, Mimi Ito, and the fine folks at the Center for Multimedia Literacies. Here's some of what I wrote about the conference at the time:

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.

Ito and Anderson recently returned to these same curators to see if they could offer us an updated view of their corners of DIY video culture. The IML team edited together a remarkable compilation representing of the key trends in contemporary online video for a screening last month at Los Angeles's Hammer Museum.

24/7 DIY 2010: Collective Action from IML @ USC on Vimeo.

I was asked to give some remarks after the screening and I thought I would write out some of my core ideas below. I have also asked the various curators to share their selections (with commentary) through my blog over the next few months. So, keep an eye open for what should be a fascinating series of snapshots of the best of contemporary DIY video.

How YouTube Became OurTube

I always stumble over pronouns when thinking about YouTube. After all, in the English language, "You" is both singular and plural. Most accounts of YouTube assume that it is a space for personal expression, yet if this is the case, why used networked technologies. It is not simply a site for self-branding or "broadcasting". Rather it is a site for collective expression, with many of the videos posted there coming from specific subcultural communities, each of which has a longer history than YouTube itself, each of which has evolved its own traditions of cultural production and circulation. So, for my purposes, let's consider the "You" in "Do-it-Yourself" as plural, multiple, collective, rather than singular, personal, individual.

This sense of YouTube as composed of many different production communities is vividly illustrated by the opening segment of this video, which shows how "I'm On a Boat," traveled from a Feb. 2009 sketch on Saturday Night Live, across many of the different subcultural communities represented in this program -- as it gets applied to anime and Star Trek, as it gets performed by A Capella groups and by the U.S. Navy, as it gets rewritten into "I'm on a Blimp" or "I'm on a Broom" to better fit the interests of specific fan communities. What we see here are the consequences of these various DIY media production communities coming together to a shared site where they can see what each is doing and where they can quickly apply what they learn to their own work. We can see this process as one which both impacts these various subgroups and starts to create a shared culture which runs across all of those populations who have chosen to use YouTube as a site for distributing their work.

All of this is a vivid illustration of what I've described elsewhere as "participatory culture." In a participatory culture, there are relatively low barriers for engagement and participation, there is strong support for sharing your creations with others, there is a system of informal mentorship where experienced participants help train newbies, and there is a sense that others care about what you say and create. Each of the subcultures represented here have some if not all of the properties of a participatory culture, and when YouTube provides a home for these communities, it acquires some of those properties as well, though it is less clear whether anyone has a primary identification with YouTube and it is very clear that in some ways YouTube itself (especially in its comments sections) can be hostile to the diversity that a participatory culture needs to thrive.

All of this is to say that Web 2.0 is not participatory culture. The Web 2.0 companies seek to court, capture, and commercialize aspects of participatory culture but they do not create it and they do not own it and often, their commercial interests are imperfectly alligned with the noncommercial interests which motivate DIY cultural production. What I am calling participatory culture has a long history -- we can trace its roots back to the folk cultural logic which has shaped human expression throughout much of its history; throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, participatory culture has run through many struggles of everyday people to capture the means of cultural production and to communicate their own stories to the world, a history which runs across many different technological platforms and many different cultural communities.

As I suggested in my essay, "What Happened Before YouTube?," our society was ready for YouTube when it appeared, which is why it was flooded so quickly with all forms of amateur and noncommercial media production, many of which had been looking for a site for circulation and exhibition. While the mad rush to get their work on YouTube is impressive by any criteria, it was a byproduct of long-standing interests within these various groups in producing and sharing media with each other. Some of the practices represented in this program build on those traditions, while others reflect the new potentials which have emerged as a consequence of the hybrid media ecology which has formed at the cultural crossroads which YouTube represents.

Confronting the quick spread of themes and sounds represented by the "I'm On a Boat" phenomenon, many fall back on empty phrases, such as "viral" or "meme" to explain what is going on. In our forthcoming Spreadable Media book, Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and I dissect these concepts, suggesting that they each mystify rather than clarify the process of cultural production and circulation by treating culture as if it were "self-replicating" rather than acknowledging the human agency involved. In particular, the "I'm on a Boat" videos break down the notion of "fidelity" which runs through writing on Memes and Viruses: we do not simply pass these songs on from mind to mind, rather each new group makes its own contributions, leaves its own mark on what the others have produced. These videos are not simply spreading rapidly, like a contagion, but they are evolving rapidly, through a high speed and high tech version of the folk process.

Some of what gets produced for YouTube may start as self-branding, but the work that matters to people matters because it invites their participation, because it encourages them to join the action, even if only through spreading the word. We see this process at work in the segment featured here showing Matthew Harding's "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos, which began as one man's tour of the world, dancing to the sound of his own drummer, but ends with larger and larger groups of people dancing along with Matt. Other featured videos turn our attention towards collective action -- encouraging people to share images of their communities working towards shared interests or agendas. This tendency is spectacularly represented here by the 350 Movement and The GayClic Collab Against Homophobia, both represented in the "All Together Now" portion of the video. In other cases, the videos function as a call and response system, encouraging people to jam together, even though they remain geographically dispersed, as can be seen in "The Mother of All Cords." This desire to express collaborative or collective expression may be what fuels the proliferation of windows, a set of formal practices which gets singled out later in the program.

The program also offers us some examples of how the community passes along knowledge to newer members, shown here in "AMV Technique Beat," an Anime Music Video about the conventions shaping the Anime Music Video genre. And elsewhere, we get the sense of the video platform as a site for important community conversations, as the curators brought together a selection of the different responses to the Derrion Albert beating. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have noted in their book about YouTube, even seemingly unprocessed clips, segments taken from commercial films and television series, may serve as resources for the community's conversations, with the comment sections on the site and elsewhere being as important to the process as the video itself. YouTube has become a platform where we go to talk about, through, and around videos, and the site's willingness to make it possible for us to embed these videos on social networking sites and blogs is another key factor in enabling it to support these kinds of dialogues between and within diverse populations.

As I reflect on this process of transforming media content into resources for conversation and communication, I am reminded of the work of my mentor, John Fiske:

"If the cultural commodities or texts do not contain resources out of which the people can make their own meanings of their social relations and identities, they will be rejected and will fail in the marketplace. They will not be made popular."

Fiske insisted that mass culture texts only became popular culture when the public took them up as "resources" through which they could express their own perspectives.

Fiske's theories in the 1980s helped prepare me and many media scholars of my generation for contemporary remix culture. The "Deconstructing Our Icons" and "Putting Words in Our Mouths" sections here show this remix process at work. Each of the subcultures that are reflected in the current program draws some of its raw materials from popular culture, but several of them -- the Fan Vidders, the Anime Music Vids, Machinema, and the Political Remix vids -- in particular are built around different strategies for appropriating and remixing video content. In some cases, the original content is abstracted beyond the point of recognizability, while in others, the point is for us to recognize it both in terms of its original context and the new context into which it has been inserted. There are several striking examples here from the last presidential campaign, including "Terrorizing Dissent" where McCain's convention speech is juxtaposed against the police's assault on protesters outside, "Dance Off" where McCain, Obama, and Palin dance for their awe-struck publics, and "Synchronized Presidential Debating" which makes visible the candidate's reliance on preset soundbytes rather than spontaneous engagement with their rivals. The selections from the Fan Vidding world also show us how the form is being increasingly used to make critical comments on the culture around them, as illustrated by the "Art Bitch" video based on Battlestar: Galactica and the "Piece of Me" video commenting on Brittany Spears and celebrity culture.

A striking shift from the 2008 to the 2010 videos has been the increasingly globalized nature of this grassroots media production. We see this in playful ways as media makers from the developing world join the "lip dub" movement or contribute to pass-along video compilations, but we also saw it in the ways that protesters in Iran were able to capture and transmit powerful footage of the action in the streets in the aftermath of their failed elections. The images of Neda gave a face to the movement and will remain key icons of the 21st century. If some have described, with a certain degree of mythologization, what happened in Iran as a "Twitter Riot," we need to also recognize that it was also a YouTube and Flickr riot. In each case, though, we need to recognize that these media were directed towards us in the west rather than being resources used in Tehran to mobilize the revolution that never quite came. The Iranians tapped new technologies and their strong diasporic network to get word out of their often closed country and to court public opinion around the world. This too is part of the story of DIY media in recent years.

Through this process of media sharing, we have collectively distilled attention around key images and moments which now form key elements of our cultural archive -- some of these elements come from mass media (such as Kanye West's disruptions and eruptions), some from the grassroots media (such as "Charley Bit Me," "Keyboard Cat," or "Double Rainbow,"). In either case, these images have become culturally central because they have provided many different groups with expressive resources. They have gained resonance as they have been deployed and redeployed through countless other videos and thus they have become part of the shared culture of the various networks which pass through YouTube.

In this context, each new formal innovation (capacities to autotune sounds, to layer on windows, or to use Little Big Planet to design characters and levels) travels rapidly from one producing community to another. Early on, the tool may become a source of fascination in its own right, while later, it simply becomes one more device which can be used to create a fan vid or score a political point. In such a context, it becomes challenging to maintain any sharp dividing line between different kinds of subcultural practices. What seemed relatively distinct in 2008 seems less so in 2010.

For me, one of the most compelling segments of this video involved the "lip dub," a practice of grassroots performance where communities of people get together and produce elabroate, single-take music numbers. As I watched these, I was delighted by the sense of collective joy as places of work -- stores, offices, and schools primarily -- get transformed into performance spaces, taken over as sites of play. Behind each such video there is a story of collaborative production, often creative expression which straddles other kinds of hierarchies - as bosses and workers, teachers and students, doctors and patients, work together to create something which allows each of them to feel a moment of stardom. Compared to many traditional societies our culture has surprisingly few such moments of collective joy, few chances to transcend fixed relationships and imagine new ways of singing and dancing together.

Here's a complete list of the videos featured in the program:

Get on the #@&$! Boat

"I'm on a Boat" A Capella | Acquire A Capella of UC Santa Cruz | 2009

I'm on a Boat - Star Trek | kiki_miserychic | 2009

I'm on A Boat (Wind Waker Version) | Matthew Gallant | 2009

Pokemon I'm on a Boat Music Video | DJPhiUp | 2009

I'm on a Blimp (ft. Teddy) | LittleKuriboh | 2009

In a Snuggie | Mikey and Big Bob | 2009

I'm on a Boat Navy Edition | Eychner | 2009

One Piece Tribute: "I'm on a Boat" | fishytoothy | 2009

I'm on a Broom (I'm on a Boat parody) | heynadine | 2009

All Together Now

Day 18 NaVloPoMo | Ermander |2009

Day 10 NaVloPoMo | miglsd | 2009

navlopomo#08 | Miguel Serradas Duarte | 2009

shadow out of time | AliaK | 2009

It's Time | Videolution | 2009

Why Would Anyone Want to Stop You from Voting? | Ian Inaba | 2008

The Day the World Came Together - The 350 Movement: October 24, 2009 | 350org | 2009

Where the Hell Is Matt? | Matthew Harding | 2008

THE BIG FAT GAY COLLAB! | steviebeebishop | 2009

The GayClic Collab Against Homophobia (from France) - Fuck You by Lily Allen | GayClicTube | 2009

SOUR '日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)' | Masashi Kawamura + Hal Kirkland + Magico Nakamura + Masayoshi Nakamura | 2009

Deconstructing Our Icons

Ian Fleming's Property of a Lady | qwaga | 2009

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed | Jonathan McIntosh | 2009

Piece of Me | obsessive24 | 2008

Art Bitch | hollywoodgrrl | 2009

Creepy Mario 64 | LightningWolf3 | 2008

Terrorizing Dissent RNC08 - Trailer | terrorizingdissent.org | 2008

See it, Shoot it, Share it

Neda Agha Soltan, killed 20.06.2009, Presidential Election Protest, Tehran, IRAN | AliJahanii | 2009

DERRION ALBERT- BEATIN TO DEATH SEP, 27 2009 | laurenmonique19 | 2009

RE:Chicago student Derrion Albert KILLED in a FIGHT | lovelyti2002 | 2009

DERRION ALBERTS BEAT TO DEATH AT 16YRS OLD (Fenger Highschool) | dncmoneyblogtv1 | 2009

RE: Raw Video of Derrion Albert 16 teen year old beaten to death in chicago sep 27 2009 | nate4keys, 2009

Teach it Yourself

The Story of Stuff | Annie Leonard | 2009

RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism | theRSAorg | 2010

Charts Music | Johannes Kreidler | 2009

Marines - The Red Stripe | Patrick St. John | 2009

The Cycle of Insanity: The Real Story of Water | The Surfrider Foundation | 2010

Little Big Mods

Little big planet COSTUMES SACKBOY | xxxNUCKxxx | 2008

Little Big Planet: Takeshi's Castle | IGNentertainment | 2008

Little Big Planet: Love and Marriage (Engagement Proposal) | Jed05 | 2008

Frost* - Toys - Little Big Planet Music Video | Pete Waite | 2008

Little Big Revenge | Michael Van Ostade and Kaat Schellen | 2009

LittleBigPlanet - This is Sparta (300 parody) | DarkAslox | 2009

Little Big Planet - Watchmen Trailer | Machinima.com | 2009

Little Daft Punk | DanteND | 2009

MTBig Planet | DanteND | 2009

Put Some Words in My Mouth

AMV Technique Beat | Douggie | 2007

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - Queen Elizabeth II of England | World Economic Forum | 2010

HTC Evo VS iPhone 4 | Brian Maupin | 2010

White Wedding: Literal Video Version | DustoMcNeato | 2009

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - ADM CEO Patricia Woertz | World Economic Forum | 2010

Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version | David A. Scott | 2009

Obama and McCain - Dance Off! | David Morgasen | 2008

Gimme More Windows

Kutiman-Thru-you - 01 - Mother of All Funk Chords | Kutiman | 2009

Mario Kart Love Song (Original) | Sam Hart | 2008

Mario Kart Love Song Matlock Project ( cover ) | matrockrecords | 2009

Alice - Pogo Remix | Pogo | 2009

Alice - Pogo Remix - YooouuuTuuube Remix | David Kraftsow (YooouuuTuuube) | 2009

Only Bob | Infinity Squared | 2009

Synchronized Presidential Debating | 236.com | 2008

A Soundtrack for our Life

A Day at the Office | sfeder331 | 2009

The first LIP-DUB in the Arab World and Africa | Anas Benkirane | 2010

Hey Ya: A music video | Shorecrest Video Department | 2009

Shorewood Lip Dub | Shorewood High School | 2009

Hôpital Sacré-Coeur Lip Dub | HSCM2009 | 2009

Lip Dub TOYS R US NANTES Martin Solveig | Toys R Us Nantes | 2009

University LipDub - Brazil - FACCAMP | Campo LImpo Paulista College | 2009

Weird Science- Office Lip Dub! | rancidbry | 2010

lipdub MINI STORE rennes | Mini Store Rennes | 2009

Lip Dub - "Miley Cyrus" by KIIS FM Staff | KIIS-FM Staff | 2008

Tune it Yourself

Dude You Have No Quran AUTOTUNE REMIX | Bart Baker | 2010

This Year in Auto-Tune 2009 - That Really Happened?! | DJ Steve Porter | 2009

Auto-Tune Cute Kids and Kanye | The Gregory Brothers | 2009

Auto-Tune the News #2: pirates. drugs. gay marriage | The Gregory Brothers | 2009

Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10 | Yosemitebear | 2010

Double Rainbow Song | The Gregory Brothers and Yosemitebear | 2010

Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science) | John Boswell | 2009

Wedding Dance Videos

JK Wedding Entrance Dance | TheKheinz | 2009

JK Divorce Entrance Dance | NYVideoProduction | 2009

Spanish Wedding Dancers | Gonzalo Garcia Martinez | 2009

wedding entrance dance spain- entrada boda bailando Miguel y Loida Forever | rbkme | 2009

DK Wedding Reception Entrance Dance | MrPandit33 | 2009

VIJAY & NISHA BEST EVER ASIAN RECEPTION | cookiesclients | 2009

Moran & Irit's wedding Entrance Dance surprise | irimori | 2009

MK Wedding Entrance Dance by Chippendales | chippendales | 2010

JK Wedding Entrance Dance Webkinz Style | PuppyDawg1022 | 2009

JK Wedding Entrance Dance Baby | http://lifeinarabia.org | 2009

Credits

Event Coordinators: Steve Anderson, Mimi Ito, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro and Holly Willis

Program Editor: Ana Shepherd Video Coordinator: Miranda Peter-Lazaro Legal Advisor: Jason Schultz

24/7 2010 Curators: Matteo Bittanti, Francesca Coppa, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Ryanne Hodson, Jonathan McIntosh, Tim Park and Mike Wesch

Special thanks to Jonathan Wells, Meg Grey-Wells and the staff of The Hammer Museum

Sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Towards a New Civic Ecology: Addressing the Grand Challenges

Last week, I was asked to deliver one of the keynotes for the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges conference which was hosted on the USC campus. I had not been aware of the Grand Challenges program previously, but it seems to bring together engineering students and faculty to work together to confront some of the major problems of the 21st century, seeking to inspire them to direct their research towards the public good and social betterment. I was asked to open a panel on Communications by telling them what they needed to know about how to share their insights and ideas with key stakeholders in the current media landscape.

What follows is my attempt to capture some of the key insights that I shared during my presentation.

Towards a New Civic Ecology

If you are going to confront and overcome the Grand Challenges, you are going to need to learn how to navigate through an increasing complex communications infrastructure. Communicating your core insights is the responsibility of all of us in this room -- the engineers and educators, the journalists and communicators. As you do so, you are going to need to be able to deploy a range of different media platforms and practices. And like the rest of us, you are going to need to do what you can to build and support a robust, diverse communications system which can allow you to educate and motivate all of the many people you are going to have to work with to overcome the obstacles and achieve the solutions you are here to discuss.

Seen through that lens, the contemporary communications system is at once struggling with the threat that many major news outlets which have been the backbone of civic information over the past century are crumbling in the face of competition from new media. We may not be able to count on the traditional newspaper, news magazine or network newscast to do the work we could take for granted in the past. We are already seeing science, health, and technology reporters as especially vulnerable to lay-offs as the news media struggle to maintain economic viability and cultural relevance. At the same time, we are seeing expanded communications opportunities in the hands of everyday people -- including in the hands of academics and other experts who traditionally had little means of direct communication with the various publics impacted by their work. The problem at the present time is that existing channels of professional journalism are crumbling faster than we are developing alternative solutions which will support the kinds of information and communication needed for a democratic society.

Often, this moment of transition has been framed in terms of the concept of citizen journalism. As someone who blogs, I have many problems with this concept and not simply the one which Morley Safer raised when he said "I would trust citizen journalism as much as I would trust citizen surgery." This comment was a sharp defense of the professional skills which our students acquire through journalism schools and apply in the course of their working lives in the news media. As I've noted here before, citizen journalism is a transitional concept at best. Like the phrase, horseless carriage, it defines what is emerging in terms of legacy practices. Today, if I asked you to list ten things about your car, it is unlikely most of you would identify the fact that it is not pulled by horses, yet there was a time when the salience of this description was strong enough that it framed our understanding of what an auto was. Now, we seem to be determined to describe what citizens are doing in a language which pits them in competition with rather than in collaboration with professional journalism. In doing so, we set up several false oppositions.

First, last time I looked, most journalists were also citizens and there is a big danger in them abstracting themselves from their status as citizens when they write about the news. Second, there is often an implication that those who are not journalists are amateurs. But, when I write this blog, I am not writing as an amateur journalist. I am writing as a professional in my own right, someone who has expertise which I seek to share with a larger public, and someone whose expertise is only passed along in fragments by the traditional news media. And finally, I see what citizens as building as more expansive than journalism. We are collectively creating a communications system to support our civic engagement. For the purposes of this argument, I am going to be calling this infrastructure the civic ecology.

Thinking about a civic ecology helps us to recognize that while journalists do important work in gathering and vetting the information we need to make appropriate decisions as citizens, they are only part of a larger system through which key ideas get exchanged and discussed. We understand this if we think about the classic coffee houses which Habermaas saw as part of the ideal public sphere. The proprietors, we are told, stocked them with a range of publications -- broadsides, pamplets, newspapers, journals, and magazines -- which are intended to provide resources for debate and discussion among the paper who are gathered there on any given evening. We might think about the ways that the newspapers in colonial America were supplemented by a wide array of different kinds of political speech -- from petitions, resolutions, and proclamations to various kinds of correspondence (both personal and collective), from speeches, parades, sermons, and songs to street corner gossip.

By this same token, the present moment is characterized by both commercial and noncommercial forms of communication. As the comic strip, Zits, explains, "If it wasn't for blogs, podcasts, and twitter, I'd never know whar was going on." And of course part of the joke is that these new forms of communication are part of how his entire generation follows and makes sense of civic discourse, though often, what they are doing is monitoring and directing attention towards information which originated through professional news channels.

The 2010 State of the News report found that Americans were getting an increasing amount of news and information in the course of their day but they were doing so by "grazing" across the civic ecology -- consuming bits and pieces of information across their day from many different news channels rather than sitting down to read the morning newspaper or watch the evening news from start to finish. They flip on the television to CNN while getting dressed, they catch a few minutes in the radio in the car or listening to their ipod on the subway, they flip across a news app on their iPhone while waiting for class, they pick up a discarded newspaper at lunch and flip through it, they follow a link sent via twitter and brouse around a site on the web, and so it goes across the day and across the week. Their civic education doesn't rest on a single profession, publication, or platform, but is rather constructed across platforms. The news system is porous -- enough so that ideas flow from community to community -- until we do not always know where they originated.

A recent report from the Knight Foundation on the information needs of local communities identifies three core challenges which impact the future of news which you need to factor into the solutions you propose to the Grand challenges:

• Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all americans and their communities;
• Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information; and
• Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community.

Let's consider each of these challenges in turn as we think about the strategies you need to adopt to reach the folks who will be most effected by your discoveries and innovations.

Challenge One: Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information

The good news is that this new civic ecology maximizes the potential of scholars -- scientists, engineers, researchers of all kinds -- to communicate directly with the publics they seek to inform without going through professional intermediaries. The bad news is that most of you are so bad about communicating your ideas in languages that laypeople can understand and most of you see doing so as below your pay grade.

It is going to be up to the generation currently in graduate school to turn this around -- seeing science writing as something more than scrawling formulas on the blackboard. This means learning how to use the wide array of tools and platforms the digital media makes available to you. This means figuring out how to translate what you know into content which is going to engage the interests of non-specialist readers, and that means figuring out the conversations they are already having and providing the resources they need to conduct those changes better. You need to build a trusted relationship with those readers; they need to recognize the value of the information you provide and learn to respect the expertise you offer.

When should you start? There's no time like the presence. I regularly encourage my own graduate students to start a blog around their research topics. Doing so expands their research networks. Many of them get jobs based on the reputations they build through these practices. Many of them discover that they have something new and important to add to ongoing conversations. If this is going to be a regular part of your professional practices in the future, graduate school is the best time to practice these skills. Form partnerships with other graduate students either at your own institutions or elsewhere, and see if you can set a regular schedule for sharing what you know with the world.

But keep in mind that blogs are only one possible mechanism for contributing your expertise to larger conversations. At the talk, I shared a visualization of the science entries on Wikipedia. I did so for two reasons: 1) to encourage scientists, engineers, and educators to contribute what they know to the larger project of collaborative knowledge production that Wikipedia represents and 2) to reflect on the ways that new tools for producing and sharing visualizations, such as those offered by the Many Eyes project, expands the resources through which STEM experts can share what they know with others.

As you reflect on these new opportunities, you also need to recognize that the new communication environment does not respect national borders. I was struck recently talking to some veteran journalists that they kept insisting that Americans did not value "foreign news" and I responded that part of the problem is that professional journalists still think of it as "foreign," when Americans now come from all of these countries and are often seeking information from their mother countries, when American youth are actively seeking out entertainment content from many corners of the world through digital sharing platforms, and where America's political and economic interests are global and not geographically local. The point is not to construct some "foreign" place -- those people over there -- and try to engage us with it but rather to insert global insights into all of the conversations we are having as a society. And as you do so, also to recognize that American news escapes our borders and because a resource which gets deployed, sometimes embraced, sometimes attacked, in all of these other conversations.

For many of the problems you want to confront, you are going to have to break through national silos and speak to a global population which needs to understand the changes you are proposing. As you do so, you need to embrace whatever works, whatever constitutes the most appropriate technologies for reaching those varied populations. And that means mixing high tech and low tech communication strategies. What begins as digital content in the developed world may be translated into images which can be printed out and pasted on walls in the developing world. What begins as a podcast in the global north may become a cassette tape which is passed hand to hand in the global south.

Again, thinking of this as a civic ecology helps us to understand how different channels reach different niches and how communication may occur between different sectors or nations by translating content from one medium to another and passing information from one person to another. This process is central to my forthcoming book on Spreadable Media. There, we distinguish between distribution, which is a top-down process under the control of mass media, and circulation, which is a hybrid process which involves movement between commercial and noncommercial participants.

Challenge Two: Strengthen the capacity to engage with information

The Knight commission correctly notes that educational reform should go hand in hand with our efforts to restructure the civic ecology. As I've shown in my work for the MacArthur foundation, young people need to acquire a range of skills and competencies if they are going to meaningfully engage in the new participatory culture. As they scan the media ecology for bits and pieces of information, they need more discernment than ever before and that comes only if they are able to count on their schools to help them overcome the connected concerns of the digital divide, the participation gap, and the civic engagement gap.

The Digital Divide has to do with access to networked communication technologies -- with many still relying on schools and public libraries to provide them with access. The Participation Gap has to do with access to skills and competencies (as well as the experiences through which they are acquired). And the Civic Engagement Gap has to do with access to a sense of empowerment and entitlement which allows one to feel like your voice matters when you tap into the new communication networks to share your thoughts.

Unfortunately, we've wired the classrooms in this country and then disabled the computers; we've blocked young people from participating in the new forms of participatory culture; and we've taught them that they are not ready to speak in public by sequestering them to walled gardens rather than allowing them to try their voices through public forums. To overcome these challenges, scientists and engineers may need to work against their own vested interests in the short run. Despite constant cries against scientific illiteracy, our public funding for education has strip-minded the funding for all other subject matters in order to support STEM education decade after decade with devastating effects. Certainly, we need to be more effective at training kids to think in scientific and engineering terms, but that does not mean we should crush humanities, arts, and social science education in order to do so. The problems you identify are as much social problems as they are technical problems and if you want your solutions to work, you have to have an educated and empowered citizenry who are able to act upon the information you provide them.

As we do so, we need to recognize that in the new civic ecology, we are going to confront conflicting regimes of truth, which is why so many Americans believe that evolution and global warming are myths or that Obama is a secret Muslim, an alien, or even someone who comes from Star Trek's mirror mirror universe. We need to understand those other regimes of truth if we are going to find ways to communicate across them. Again, this may be a social or cultural problem but it can not be left to us humanist and social scientists if you are going to achieve your goals.

Challenge 3: Promote engagement with information

It is no longer enough simply to inform. You must inspire and motivate, you must engage and enthrall the public, if you want to cut through the clutter of the new media landscape. I've often talked about the ways entertainment franchises are both creating cultural attractors which draw like-minded people together and cultural activators which gives them something to do.

Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide have written about Public Media 2.0, suggesting that we should no longer think about public service media (as if the knowledge simply flowed from above) but rather public facilitating and public mobilizing media that creates a context for meaningful conversations and helps point towards actions which the public might take to address its concerns. It is no longer enough to produce science documentaries which point to distance stars without giving the public something it can do to support your efforts and absorb your insights into motivated action.

I've been inspired lately by the efforts of Brave New Films, the producers of progressive documentaries, to motivate grassroots activism. Initially, the films were distributed via dvds which could be mailed to supporters who would host house parties where they would be discussed and where local activists might point towards concrete steps that could be taken. Now, they are distributing them as online videos which can be embeded into blogs and social networking sites and thus place the burden of their circulation into the hands of their supporters. This strikes me as a strategy which could be embraced by scientists and engineers who want to build a base of support behind their projects.

Historically, one of the best tools for capturing the imagination and rallying the support of scientifically literate segements of the population was through science fiction. Science fiction was designed as an intervention into the public debates around science and technology -- pushing us to the limits of known science, speculating about the implications of new technological discoveries, and creating a community ready to discuss what they read. The science fiction fan world became major supporters of NASA and remained supporters of manned space flight well after the rest of the public turned their eyes elsewhere. Indeed, several key science fiction blogs still publish NASA photographs of deep space exploration as "space porn" -- that is, images of heavenly bodies that will remain untouched by human hands. As you move forward with your grand challenges, see if you can find ways to engage with science fiction writers and deploy them as key allies helping to shape the public imagination so we as a society are ready for the great discoveries and innovations you generate through your research.

So there you have it, the three core challenges of communication. Each of these requires bold action just as much as will be needed to solve the energy crisis or to confront global hunger or climate change. This is why it becomes so important for you to forge cross-disciplinary partnerships throughout your graduate career. You need to walk across campus and engage in conversation with people who are pursuing other majors, who are trying to make a difference through other sectors.

Wanted: Post-Doc to Help Research Youth and Civic Engagement

I sent word via Twitter and Facebook a few days ago that we are now searching for a Post Doc who can work with out Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics research group. This is a project that is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a larger network of affiliated researchers seeking to understand young people's civic engagement. You can learn more about our research here and our group blog is here. USC's Annenberg School for Communication is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join its Media, Activism, Participatory Politics (MAPP) Case Studies Project.

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will assume significant responsibility in conducting case study based research for the Project. This research will investigate the continuities between participatory culture and civic engagement. As such, qualified candidates should be aware of current research trends in fan studies, civics, globalization and/or media studies and should be ready to apply that knowledge to the case study research.

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will have earned an advanced degree and/or conducted previous qualitative research in one or more of the above listed areas. Successful candidates must be able to work independently and apply knowledge of domestic and international participatory cultures and civic action to the development of innovative models of civic learning and identity. Fluency in one foreign language, especially Spanish, is strongly preferred. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will report to the Project's Research Director.

The University of Southern California (USC), founded in 1880, is located in the heart of downtown L.A. and is the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. As an employee of USC, you will be a part of a world-class research university and a member of the "Trojan Family," which is comprised of the faculty, students and staff that make the university what it is.

Job Accountabilities:

• Serves as a research trainee for the purpose of enhancing and developing research competencies. Participates in planning, designing and conducting highly technical and complex research projects under the direction of a supervisor. May or may not work independently.
• Identifies, researches, compiles and evaluates data sources, background information and/or technology related to area of specialization.
• Analyzes and evaluates research data utilizing computers and provides interpretations requiring significant knowledge of a specialized area of research. Searches literature, utilizing all available resources including electronic, regarding new methodology and designs experiments accordingly.
• Contributes to the development of research documentation for publication and/or prepares technical reports, papers and/or records.
• Performs other related duties as assigned or requested. The University reserves the right to add or change duties at any time.
• The University of Southern California values diversity and is committed to equal opportunity in employment.

Start date is as soon as possible.

Position is open until filled.

more information about posted position and application details

Raising the Digital Generation: What Parents Need to Know About Digital Media and Learning

A few weeks ago, I was asked to represent the School of Communications by giving a talk for Trojans Parent Weekend at USC. (For those who do not follow American universities and their team mascots, the Trojans is the name for the USC sports team and thus, the name that is attached to anyone affiliated with the university.) Below, you can find the webcast version of my remarks, which sought to congratulate parents on their obvious success in raising a child smart enough to become part of our student body and to challenge some of their preconceptions about the forms of informal learning their offspring may have encountered in the course of their interactions with new media platforms and practices.

I felt that this talk might be of interest to my readers, many of whom are educators and/or parents, and who have displayed in the past great interest in my posts on new media and learning. Parents receive so little advice about how to confront the real challenges of navigating the digital environment which is unfamiliar to them and often to their children. Most often, they are told just say no. The more you restrict media use, the better parent you are. And for God's sake, keep the computer out of the kid's bedroom. But none of that feels adequate for a world where there is real learning taking place on line, where learning to navigate the new media environment is going to be key for your offspring's future success. Our schools are already blocking access to many of these core technologies and often refusing to advise youth about how to use them ethically, safely, and creatively. If parents start shutting off computers in the home, they really do close down potentials for their children's growth and development. And if they start snooping through their young person's internet accounts, they run the risk of damaging trust that is going to be vital for their long term relationship. My core advice to parents: Kids need someone to watch their back and not snoop over their shoulders. They need adults who are as engaged in their online lives as they are with their off-line lives -- not less and not more.

Some of what you hear here will be familiar, reflecting other talks and essays I've published on the work of Project New Media Literacies. Some will be newer, having to do with my ongoing projects in the area of youth, new media, and civic engagement.

I mentioned there in passing that we are in the process of creating the Participatory Culture and Learning Lab in the Annenberg School. Participatory Culture has long been the over-arching theme of my work, whether applied to think about creative industries and consumer/fan culture, new media literacies and education, or civic engagement. Over the past year, I have been transitioning out of many of the research roles I played through the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and consolidating my research efforts here at USC. I have been lucky to draw several key members of my research staff on the East coast to join me here in sunny California -- including Erin Reilly who has long been the research director of the New Media Literacies team (and now is building affiliations with the Annenberg Innovation Lab) -- and I have reunited with Sangita Shreshtova, a CMS alum, who is now Research Director for the work we are doing on civic engagement with the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations. PCL (which people are already calling Pickle) represents an umbrella organization which will sustain these efforts while opening up a space for new research initiatives down the line.

Perhaps a revolution is not what we need

A few weeks ago, Malcolm Gladwell, he of the Tipping Point, set off a fire storm in the blogosphere and twitterverse in response to a pointed critique of the political value of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Gladwell's comments drew a sharp comparison between the kinds of activism which fueled the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the kinds of activism which emerge through the new digital platforms. From where I sit, Gladwell is comparing apples to oranges or in this case, movements and platforms. The Civil Rights Movement certainly tapped into networks of all kinds -- from the congregations of churches to the sisterhood of sororities, and deployed a broad range of communications technologies available at the time. Twitter is however simply one of many communications platforms through which we forge politics in the 21st century. There's a tendency to look at it and try to read its features as totally embodying a new kind of public, but that is profoundly misleading. We do not live on a platform; we live across platforms. We choose the right tools for the right jobs. We need to look at the full range of tools a movement deploys at any given moment -- including some old fashion ones like door to door canvasing, public oratory, and street corner petitions, to understand the work which goes into campaigns for social change. In any case, I think critiques like Gladwell's does important work -- it stirs the pot; it forces us to articulate what we really mean; the debates which follow clears away old stereotypes and cliches. That's why I am as interested in what people are saying in response to Gladwell as I am interest in Gladwell's original comments. So, for example, my former student, Ramesh Srinivasan, now a faculty member at UCLA and someone who spends lots of time getting new media technologies and practices into the hands of marginalized and disenfranchised groups around the world, has written an excellent post over at his blog. Here's a little of what he had to say:

It's hard for me to think about revolutions without remembering the incredible Battle of Algiers film, which apparently the CIA studied when the government was deciding to take the curious step of invading Afghanistan. The success of the resistance network in Algiers was its horizontal structure. There was no point of centrality that could be attacked to then take down the overall network. Classic studies of effective movements of this sort have been conducted by the Rand Corporation, for example, in their research on Information Wars and Networks. Examples as these show that even if Gladwell is correct in that networks largely lack organization, they certainly are difficult to stifle, as we see throughout history around examples of guerilla, distributed wars.

What is notable in the Algerian example is that this effective movement was not hierarchical, but a coordinated network! And that these networks are actually extremely well organized. Organization and decentralization thus need not be mutually exclusive, though of course in some cases they may be (as did indeed seem to be the case in the iran example as well). Thus, perhaps Gladwell is making the mistake of comparing apples and oranges by contrasting most uses of social media (which are passive, require little commitment and are indeed weak ties) with the committment and organization needed within successful revolutions.

Instead, I would suggest that some elements of social media *can be utilized* to generate and cement ties and coordination between those committed to the revolutionary cause. Moreover, by spreading awareness via weak ties, other social roles can be defined and filled, perhaps by some individuals less strongly committed the cause but important in terms of their positions within the network (hit the 'donate here' button!). This is exactly what my colleague Adam Fish and I uncovered in our analysis of oppositional political bloggers in Kyrgyzstan (Internet Authorship in Kyrgyzstan: Social and Political Implications). We found that while it was not the medium itself that 'tweeted revolution', it did serve a purpose of refining a message and philosophy, and most importantly connecting a small but influential group of activists. It was the strong, not weak ties, associated with social media, that made the difference.

There's more great insights on his blog.

Speaking of blogs, we recently launched a blog to support the ongoing research my team at Annnenberg School of Communications and Journalism have been doing around youth, activism, and participatory politics. Here, too, we've been closely dissecting Gladwell's arguments. Kevin Driscoll, an alum of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program and now an Annenberg PHD Candidate, offers his perspectives below, including links to a wide array of other reactions and critiques of the original New Yorker piece.

Perhaps a revolution is not what we need

by Kevin Driscoll

Malcolm Gladwell joins a rising chorus of skeptics in his latest piece for the New Yorker, Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. Responding to what he calls an "outsized enthusiasm" for social media technologies as activist tools, he argues that the weak ties enabled by services like Twitter cannot inspire the kind of commitment and bravery required of "high-risk activism" like the civil rights movement.

It's a compelling argument and, to his credit, Gladwell works hard to name the sources of this "enthusiasm". Among his slacktivist hall of shame: oversold "Twitter Revolutions" in Moldova and Iran, massive awareness campaigns on Facebook, and the Legend of the Stolen Cellphone (as told by Clay Shirky).

Despite careful attention to some very real weaknesses of network activism, Gladwell's argument suffers from a lack of detail in two important areas: technology and history.

What is "Twitter"?

Twitter is the representative social media technology throughout most of Gladwell's article. But as an admitted non-user, Gladwell overlooks features and user scenarios that would add a critical complexity to his argument. Like email or the telephone, Twitter is a non-prescriptive communication platform. Each user experiences "Twitter" differently depending on the time of day and frequency she checks her feed, the other people she follows, and the interface(s) she uses to access the network. Because of this flexibility, norms emerge, mutate, collide, and fade away among Twitter users with a fluidity that may not be easily apprehendable to a non-user like Gladwell.

Twitter may feel like a new phenomenon but listen closely and you will find echoes of older technological paradigms at its borders. A Twitter feed is expressed using the same protocols that syndicate blog content and its famous 140-character limit ensures compatibility with a text messaging standard from 1985. These design decisions afford Twitter data a powerful mobility. You can subscribe to a Twitter feed with an blog reader and send a tweet from any old mobile phone. Technically speaking, there is little "new" about it.

Although Andrew Sullivan and others initially reported that the 2009 protests in Iran were coordinated by Twitter, it turns out that most of the Twitter activity was taking place in Europe and the U.S.. This narrative meets the needs of Gladwell's argument - Twitter use did not contribute to direct action on the streets of Tehran - but misses an opportunity to investigate an odd parallel: thousands of people with internet access spent days fixated on a geographically-remote street protest.

Who was that fixated population? Amin Vafa suggests that young diasporic Iranians like himself ("lucky enough to move to the US back in the late 1980s") may have played a critical role in the flurry of English-language activity on Twitter. He recalls obsessively seeking information to retweet, "I knew at the time it wasn’t much, but it was something." Messages sent among family and friends within and without Iran provided countless small bridges between the primarily SMS-based communication paradigm in Iran and the tweet-based ecology of the US/EU.

Such connections among far-flung members of Iranian families represent strong ties of a type similar to those that Gladwell admires in the civil-rights movement. And Vafa's experience suggests that the specific technological affordances of Twitter enabled people to exercise those ties on a transnational scale. This is not to recommend either Twitter or SMS as effective tools for organizing an uprising (when things get hectic, cell phone service is the first to go) but instead to highlight the critical importance of including technical detail in any discussion of social media activism.

What is "the civil-rights movement"?

Gladwell presents the civil-rights movement as a touchstone for "traditional" activism. In vivid narrative passages, he recounts moments of breathtaking heroism among black activists in the face of hate, discrimination, and brutality. This bravery, he argues, was inspired by strong local ties and enabled by support from hierarchically-structured organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. The movement, as he finds it, was "disciplined", "precise", and "strategic"; systematically mobilizing thousands of participants in the execution of long-term plans toward well-defined goals. "If you're taking on a powerful and organized establishment," he concludes, "you have to be a hierarchy."

Absent from this discussion, however, is consideration for the role of history in our present-day understanding of the civil-rights movement. During a visit to our research group last week, Steven Classen reminded us that our cultural memory of the civil-rights era is built on an incomplete record. Civil-rights activism was, in Gladwell's terms, "high-risk" activism and carried the threat of injury or death. For this reason, activist communication was covert and empheral; the kind that does not leave traces to be collected and preserved in an archive.

Before the civil-rights movement can provide data to support an analysis of hierarchical activist organizations, consideration must be made for the thousands of "silent heroes" whose whose risks and labor were not recorded in any official history. Classen's interviews and archival research revealed an enlarged history of the civil-rights movement in which the highly-visible actions of centralized organizations were accompanied by small acts of resistance among seemingly autonomous groups in rural communities throughout Mississippi. How should researchers account for these gaps and discrepancies? In spite of the sheer quantity of data produced by today's social media use, there will always be aspects of social movements that are lost, forgotten, obscured, and excluded.

The same risk of injury that once obscured many human stories from the dominant history of the civil-rights movement is fundamental to Gladwell's categorization of different types of activism. On one hand, he is right to distinguish "high-risk" activism like the civil-rights movement from comparatively safe acts like joining a Facebook Cause but when he writes that, "activism that challenges the status quo [...] is not for the faint of heart", he seems to imply that violence is a necessary condition for effecting social change. In response, Linda Raftree recalls the nerve-wracking experience of carrying a politically-themed t-shirt through the streets of El Salvador in the early 1990s. The very same act that seems innocuous to a U.S. citizen can be extremely risky within a different political regime. As social media networks and their users increasingly cross national boundaries, the line between "high" and "low" risks will blur. Depending on one's geographic, cultural, and religious position, participation in social media activism may involve considerable risks: social ostracization, joblessness, displacement, or spiritual alienation.

What works?

The most hierarchical organizations in the civil-rights movement focused on (and succeeded in changing) the most hierarchical problems they faced: discriminatory laws and policies. But racism is not a highly-structured problem. In fact, racism is a dispersed, slippery evil that circulates, mutates, and evolves as it moves through groups of people across time and space. The hierarchical civil-rights movement defeated Jim Crow, an instantiation of racism, but could not eradicate racism itself.

Perhaps network problems like racism require non-hierarchical, network solutions. Stetson Kennedy's "Frown Power" campaign of the 1940s and 1950s was an effort to address racism in a network fashion. To combat everyday racism, Kennedy encouraged anti-racist whites to respond to racist remarks simply by frowning. Dan Savage's It Gets Better project is a similar present-day example. Angered and saddened by the persistence of homophobic bullying among high school students, Savage asks queer adults to speak directly to victimized teens using web video. Both campaigns are activism for the "faint of heart". They effect a slow, quiet change rather than large-scale revolution.

And maybe a focus on outcomes is what this conversation needs. Creating a hard distinction between "traditional" activism and "social media" activism is a dead end. Whether the medium is Twitter, pirate radio, a drum, or lanterns hung in a Boston church tower, "real world" activism depends on the tactical selection of social media technologies. Rather than fret about "slacktivism" or dismiss popular new tools because of their hype, we should be looking critically at history for examples of network campaigns like Frown Power that take advantage of their culture and technological circumstances to effect new kinds of social change.

Avatar Activism and Beyond

A few weeks ago, I published an op-ed piece in Le Monde Diplomatique about what I am calling "Avatar Activism." The ideas in this piece emerged from the conversations I've been having at the University of Southern California with an amazing team of PhD candidates, drawn from both the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism and the Cinema School and managed by our research director, Sangita Shreshtova (an alum of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program). Every week, this volunteer army gets together and explores the blurring line between participatory culture (especially as manisfested through fandom) and participatory politics (with a strong focus on youth engagement). Collectively, we've begun to generate conference presentations and publications, including jointly editing a forthcoming issue of Transformative Works and Culture, which is going to deal with fan activism. We've now received funding from the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations to do field work looking at political organizations which are engaging youth with the political process often through unconventional means. Our current focus is on Invisible Children and The Harry Potter Alliance, though other members of our group have been looking at a range of other examples. You can see some of our earliest accounts of this process on the web here.

Those of you who follow my Twitter account will already have seen the Avatar Activism piece in its published form, but I thought I would share here the extended version, including the bits that ended up on the cutting room floor. And after the article, I want to talk about an interesting response to the piece which was recently posted.

Avatar Activism

By Henry Jenkins

In February, five Palestinian, Israeli and International Activists painted themselves blue to resemble the Nav'I from James Cameron's science fiction blockbuster, Avatar, and marched through the occupied village of Bil'n. The Israeli military assaulted the Azure-skinned protestors, whose garb combined traditional Keffiyeh and Hijab scarfs with tails and pointy ears, with tear gas and sound bombs. The camcorder footage of the incident was juxtaposed with borrowed shots from the Hollywood film and circulated on YouTube. We hear the movie characters proclaim, "We will show the Sky People that they can not take whatever they want! This, this is our land!"

By now, most of us have read more than we ever wanted to read about Avatar so rest assured that this essay is not about the film, its use of 3D cinematography and digital effects, or its box office. Rather, my focus is citizens around the world are mobilizing icons and myths from popular culture as resources for political speech. Call it Avatar Activism.

Even relatively apolitical critics for local newspapers recognized that Avatar spoke to contemporary political concerns. Conservative publications, such as The National Review or the Weekly Standard, denounced Avatar as anti-American, Anti-military, and Anti-capitalist. A Vatican film critic argued that it promoted "nature worship," while some environmentalists embraced Avatar as "the most epic piece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid." Many on the left ridiculed the film's contradictory critique of colonialism and embrace of white liberal guilt fantasies, calling it "Dances with Smurfs." One of the most nuanced critiques of the film came from Daniel Heath Justice, an activist from the Cherokee nation, who felt that Avatar was directing attention on the rights of indigeneous people even as Cameron over-simplified the evils of colonialism, creating embodiments of the military-industrial complex which are easy to hate and hard to understand.

Such ideological critiques encourage a healthy skepticism towards the production of popular mythologies and are a step above critics who see popular culture as essentially trivial and meaningless, as offering only distractions from our real world problems. The meaning of a popular film like Avatar lies at the intersection between what the author wants to say and how the audience deploys his creation for their own communicative purposes.

The Bel'in protestors recognized potential parallels between the Nav'I's struggles to defend their Eden against the Sky People and their own attempts to regain lands they feel were unjustly taken from them. (The YouTube video makes clear the contrast between the lush jungles of Pandora and the arid, dusty landscape of the occupied territories.) The film's larger-than-life imagery offered them an empowered image of their own struggles. Thanks to Hollywood's publicity machine, Images from Avatar would be recognized world-wide. The site of a blue-skinned alien writhing in the dust, choking on tear gas, shocked many into paying attention to messages we too often turn off and tune out, much as Iranian protestors used Twitter to grab the interest of the digitally aware outside their country.

As they appropriate Avatar, the actvists rendered some of the most familiar ideological critiques beside the point. Conservative critics worried that Avatar might foster Anti-Americanism, but as the image of the Nav'I has been taken up by protest groups in many parts of the world, the myth has been rewritten to focus on local embodiments of the military-industrial complex: in Bel'in, the focus was on the Israeli army; in China, it was on the struggles of indigeneous people against the Chinese government; In Brazil, it was the Amazon Indians against logging companies. Without painting themselves blue, intellectuals such as Arundhati Roy and Slavoj Zizek have used discussions around Avatar to call attention to the plight of the Dongria Kondh peoples of India, who are struggling with their government over access to traditional territories which are rich in Bauxite. It turns out that America isn't the only "evil empire" left on Planet Earth. Leftist critics worry that the focus on white human protagonists gives an easy point of identification, yet protestors consistently seek to occupy the blue skins of the Nav'I,.

The Avatar activists are tapping into a very old language of popular protest. Cultural historian Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us in her now classic essay "Woman on Top" that protestors in early Modern Europe often masked their identity through various forms of role play, often dressing as peoples, both real (the Moor) and imagined (The Amazons), who were a perceived threat to the civilized order. The good citizens of Boston continued this tradition in the New World when they dressed as native Americans to dump tea in the harbor. And African-Americans in New Orleans formed their own Mardi Gras Indian tribes, taking imagery from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, to signify their own struggles for respect and dignity (a cultural practice being reconsidered in HBO's Treme).

In his book, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy, media theorist Stephen Duncombe argues that the American Left has adopted a rationalist language which can seem cold and exclusionary, speaking to the head and not the heart. Duncombe argues that the contemporary cultural context, with its focus on appropriation and remixing, may offer a new model for activism which is spectacular and participatory, rejects the wonkish vocabulary of most policy discourse, and draws emotional power from its engagement with stories that already matter to a mass public. Duncombe cites, for example, a group called Billionaires for Bush, which posed as mega-tycoons straight out of a Monopoly game, in order to call attention to the corporate interests shaping Republican positions. Yet, he might have been writing about protestors painting themselves blue or Twitter users turning their icons green in solidarity with the Iranian opposition party.

Working with a team of researchers at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, we have been mapping many recent examples of groups repurposing pop culture towards social justice. Our focus is on what we call participatory culture: in contrast to mass media's spectator culture, digital media has allowed many more consumers to take media in their own hands, highjacking culture for their own purposes. Shared narratives provide the foundation for strong social networks, generating spaces where ideas get discussed, knowledge gets produced, and culture gets created. In this process, fans are acquiring skills and building a grassroots infrastructure for sharing their perspectives on the world. Much as young people growing up in a hunting society may play with bows and arrows, young people coming of age in an information society play with information.

The Harry Potter Alliance's Andrew Slack calls this process "cultural acupuncture," suggesting that his organization has identified a vital "pressure point" in the popular imagination and sought to link it to larger social concerns. The Harry Potter Alliance has mobilized more than 100,000 young people world wide to participate in campaigns against genocide in Africa, in support of workers rights and gay marriage, to raise money for disaster relief in Haiti, to call attention to media concentration, and many other causes. Young Harry Potter, Slack argues, realized that the government and the media were lying to the public in order to mask evil in their midst and he organized his classmates to form Dumbledore's Army and went out to change the world. Slack asks his followers what evils Dumbledore's Army would be battling in our world. In Maine, for example, the Alliance organized a competition between fans affiliated with Griffindor, Ravenclaw, and the other Hogwarts houses, to see who could get the most voters to the polls in a referendum on equal marriage rights. The group's playful posture may mobilize young people who have traditionally felt excluded or marginalized from the political process.

Sack acknowledges that journalists are apt to pay much more attention to what's happening at Hogwarts (or at least the opening of the new Harry Potter theme park) than what's happening in Darfer. Such efforts may sound either cynical (giving up on the power of reason to convert the masses) or naïve (believing in myths rather than realities). Actually, these new style activists show a sophisticated understanding of how utopian fantasy often motivates our desires to change the world. In traditional activism, there has been less and less room to imagine what we are fighting for rather than becoming overwhelmed by what we are fighting against. In such movements, there is always a moment when participants push aside the comforting fantasy to deal with the complexities of what's happening on the ground.

This new style of activism doesn't necessarily require us to paint ourselves blue; it does ask that we think in creative ways about the iconography which comes to us through every available media channel. Consider, for example, the ways that Dora the Explorer, the Latina girl at the center of a popular American public television series, has been deployed by both the right and the left to dramatize the likely consequences of Arizona's new "Immigration Reform" law or for that matter, how the American "Tea Parties" have embraced a mash-up of Obama and the Joker from Dark Knight Returns as a recurring image in their battle against health care reform.

Such analogies no more capture the complexities of these policy debates than we can reduce the distinctions between American political parties to, say, the differences between elephants and donkeys (icons from an earlier decade's political cartoonists). Such tactics work only if we read these images as metaphors, standing in for something bigger than they can fully express. Avatar can't do justice to the century old struggle over the occupied territory and the YouTube video the protestors produced is no substitute for informed discourse about what's at stake there. Yet their spectacular and participatory performance does provide the emotional energy they need to keep on fighting and it may direct attention to other resources.

A growing number of people know how to Photoshop images, sample and remix sound, and deploy digital editing tools to mash up footage from their favorite film or television shows. This public is developing a new kind of media literacy, learning to read such deployments of popular icons for what they express about ourselves and our times. And where Photoshop fails us, protestors are turning to blue body paint in their effort to get the attention of potential supporters on Facebook and YouTube.

So, that's where I left it in the original draft of the essay, but the great thing about the blogosphere is that others add to your ideas in unexpected ways and they do so with much more rapid turnaround than would be possible in the sluggish realm of traditional academic publishing. Over the weekend, a response to my essay appeared on line, written by an expert about the tactics and rhetoric shaping politics in the Occupied Territories, and placing the Avatar video from Bilen into the larger context of the ongoing tactics of the group of protestors who created it. The entire post is must-read for anyone who cares about either the politics of the region or the general theme I am exploring here, how activists can use participatory media practices in order to direct greater attention onto their struggles and engage with new supporters. But I thought I would share a few chunks here in the hopes of enticing more of you to check out what Simon's Teaching Blog has to say.

Thus viewers of a video of the Bil'in demonstration on YouTube, or photographs of the same demonstration on Flickr might turn to text-based forms of communication as a means of informing themselves about why these images were produced. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites have suggested that the Abu Ghraib photographs disseminated internationally in 2004 encouraged people to read documents that were already in the public realm, but which had not gained as much attention as they should. Thus they state: 'Strong images can activate strong reading.' (Robert Harimen and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Chicago, 2007)

The organisers of the Avatar demonstration in Bil'in aimed to produce strong images that would have an impact upon those who saw them and would attract the attention of a much wider audience. The video of this demonstration posted on YouTube by Bil'in based video maker Haitam Al Katib has received 245,440 views, at the time of writing, as opposed to the video of Naomi Klein's visit to Bil'in in August 2009 which has received 9,498 views. Taking the motif of blue aliens from a science fiction film and relocating it within the political reality of the West Bank could not be anything but a strong image, generating an uncanny effect and one hopes encouraging reflection and 'strong reading' that might help explain what was being seen. But the potential effects of strong images are not restricted to media audiences. The strength of these images can also shape how these audiences encounter them in the media. Thus Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples have argued that the strong images created by acts of symbolic violence performed by anarchists during the protests against the World Trade Organisation conference in Seattle in 1999 focussed the media spotlight on the concerns of the demonstrators, allowing their ideas to be aired and given a greater degree of serious attention (Kevin Michael DeLua and Jennifer Peeples, 'From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the "Violence" of Seattle', Critical Studies in Media Communication, Volume 19, Number 2, June 2002). With these considerations in mind, it can be suggested that whatever loss of conceptual understanding occurs through the immediate impact of the images of 'Avatar activism' can be made up for in how these images relate to the written word.

Considering Jenkin's fleeting discussion of Bil'in it should be added that the Avatar demonstration was just one instance in which demonstrators in the village appropriated motifs from other contexts, most of which were not related to popular culture. More usual has been imagery related to the broad historical frame of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and current events related to the occupation. Thus the Bil'in Popular Committee have set up demonstrations themed to reference, for example, the iconography of the Holocaust and the storming of the Free Gaza flotilla. This affirms that the image repertoire of the Bil'in demonstrators is much broader and more historically and politically aware than the appropriation of imagery from a Hollywood blockbuster might suggest.

The key point here is that the people of Bil'in have repeatedly appropriated imagery for their demonstrations that is in some way relevant to their cause and that enables them to not only keep going, but also to break out of their isolation. To do this they have had to constantly innovate themes for their demonstrations and develop new props that can become the focal point for demonstrators and the media alike. What this suggests is that although the imagery used in the demonstrations is often simple and involves the reinforcement of crude binaries between oppression and freedom defined in terms of a contrast between the Israeli state and the Palestinian struggle, this mobilisation of simple imagery is the result of a sophisticated understanding of what resources politically weak agents can mobilise in a long term struggle against the power of a sovereign state. The people of Bil'in have committed themselves to non-violence and consequently have had to turn to other media oriented means of resistance to the classic 'weapons of the weak' utilised in the armed struggles of guerrilla and national liberation movements.

It was fantastic to see someone place the Avatar protest in this larger context of other interventions and tactics deployed by this same group of protesters. As someone who lacks expertise on the Middle East, I didn't know anything more about this situation than I had read in existing news reports, though it spoke to the global context where these appropriations are occuring. When we launched our paper call for the Transformative Works and Culture special issue on "Fan Activism," we were surprised that the overwhelming number of submissions on this issue came from researchers working outside of the United States and recounting very powerful examples of such tactics being deployed all over the world. I look forward to sharing more about these issues in future blog posts.

High Tech? Low Tech? No Tech?

Through the work of the New Media Literacies Project, we make a core distinction between the digital divide (which has to do with access to technologies -- especially networked computers and mobile telephones) and the participation gap (which has to do with access to skills and competencies required to meaningfully engage with networked culture). While there is clearly a relationship between the two, we've seen great value in decoupling them -- recognizing that one can have access to the technology without having the support structure around it which would enable you to meaningfully participate in the online world and suggesting that even schools which have little or no access to the technology might still help to foster core literacies which would allow their students some leg-up when and if they were able to gain access to networked computing. We've taken as a challenge the design of activities for low-tech and even no-tech contexts, trying to reassure teachers that ultimately it is about new conceptual models and cultural relations as much or more than it is about new technologies. That's why I am so excited to share the following story with you. It was written by Laurel Felt, a student in USC's Annenberg School, who took my New Media Literacies class last year and has since joined our core research team. I will let her tell her own story in her own way and won't step on her punchlines here, but I hope that all of those schools and teachers who use lack of access to state of the art technology as an excuse for not changing how they teach and what students learn will read this story and perhaps think about their own situation in different terms.

Along the way, Felt builds on her research in my class to explore potential intersections between the frameworks which have emerged from the Emotional Literacy movement and those we've identified through MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning initiatives.

Take it away, Laurel.

High Tech? Low Tech? No Tech?

by Laurel Felt

We'd lost electricity... AGAIN.

Power outages ("coupures" en francais) are hardly a novelty in Dakar, Senegal, during the early summer. Despite the fact that Dakar is Senegal's capital city, and despite the fact that Senegal is known as one of the most advanced sub-Saharan countries in terms of access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the regular but unpredictably-timed blackouts bring digital manipulation to a standstill. Lack of electricity stymies desktop computing and shuts down router-dependent Internet networks.

Those offices/apartment buildings/restaurants/hotels with the means independently purchase backup generators to see them through these periods of electrical deprivation. My workplace, the African Health Education Network (Reseau African d'Education pour la Sante (RAES)), had a backup generator.

It was broken.

After a week or two of persistent outages and incalculable loss of productivity, RAES Director Alexandre Rideau was finally able to wrangle a stop-by from the hotly-in-demand(1) generator repairman. He charged us $400, a small fortune by our non-profit organization's cash-strapped standards, and fixed yet again our mediocre, overtaxed generator. Three days later, due to negligence, the generator was blown. So it was back to the drawing board... only not quite. This time, the generator's shoddy circuitry just couldn't be salvaged. And rather than draw 10,000 non-existent dollars from RAES's red budget to buy a new generator (which was sure to be exhausted in another couple of years, or carelessly destroyed at any moment), Alex ruled that we simply had to manage this season -- powerless.

Oh, did I mention the reason I was in Senegal? To teach teens, among other things, how to harness the New Media Literacies (NMLs).

I can almost hear my fellow educators protesting that teaching NMLs in such a context is impossible. But I can testify, to my colleagues' and my relief and delight, that NMLS are precisely what are needed to survive this challenge. Since NMLs cultivate critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills, and since we, as a teaching team, had benefited from NML training before unrolling the teen workshop, we were able to construct a series of ingenious solutions. While we were powerless in a technical sense - Electrical flow? That'd be a "No" -, we were quite the opposite of "powerless" in a productive sense. Our NML training had made us powerful.

How?

Well, let me explain a bit about NMLs, and Henry Jenkins's course on New Media Literacies and discussed with Project New Media Literacies Research Director Erin Reilly, NMLs don't require technology -- they're not about technology. They're about enriching learners with useful, versatile capacities that help them think sharper, work better, and appreciate fuller the ethical ramifications of their actions.

Who can quibble with that? Who's against supporting kids' intellectual, social, and moral development? Seems like a bipartisan, big tent, "everybody on board" kind of issue to me. But a lot of people doubt the necessity of NML instruction... maybe because they misunderstand it? Maybe it's a name thing, maybe people hear the word "new," and they hear the word "media,"(2) and they think,

"Forget about it! Enough with the bells, enough with the whistles! Enough with time-sucking TECHNOLOGY! Get back to teaching little Johnny and Susie(3) good ol' fundamentals, like reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. How about teaching them how to spell, for goodness sakes?! They don't know how to write anymore!"

Noted. And I basically agree with you. But did I ever mention "technology"? No. NMLs build cultural competencies and social skills -- no technology required.

But fine, let's address technology. I mean, YOU brought it up. It's not like I'm looking to dodge the topic. ;-) Look. You can't deny that technology has entered our lives in a significant way. Personally and professionally, we're accessing digital tools and sifting cybersourced information constantly. In this new context of digital ubiquity, we especially need the critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills that we've always found handy.

Am I making sense? Here's an example: We've always needed to know how to experiment in order to figure things out. How else could we have mastered free throw shooting, can opener using, or parallel parking? But now we especially need to know how to experiment. Why? Because we're confronted with complex cell phones, tricked-out digital cameras, and bewildering new versions of Microsoft Office. Let's face it, unless you're my dad, you're just *not* gonna read the manual. If we're not comfortable pushing buttons, navigating menus, and noticing what happens, we're gonna find ourselves in a jam and/or seriously undertapping potential.

Here's another example: We've always needed to know how to respect diverse perspectives and flourish in unfamiliar environments. How else could we have moved to new towns, traveled overseas, or made friends on our first day of school? But now we especially need to know how to negotiate. Why? Because we're viewing YouTube clips from abroad, joining global communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, and harnessing online tools like Wikis, GoogleDocs, Salesforce and BaseCamp to manage group projects. If we're not proficient in reading and respecting people's ways of functioning, again, we'll be stuck between a rock and a hard place or flagrantly wasting opportunity. And who wants that? I'll tell you who wants that: NOBODY.

But back to Senegal.

I was working for the summer as a consultant to RAES's program Sunukaddu, which means "our voice" in Senegal's indigenous Wolof language.

Funded over the past two years by the Soros Foundation of West Africa (OSIWA), Sunukaddu had already proven itself an innovative and effective force for social change. Its model was participatory and hands-on, connecting local media experts with motivated teens for training in multimedia health message development. Participants learned reporting and writing techniques, as well as manipulated digital cameras, camcorders, audio recording equipment, editing software, and web interfaces. Their products are online and educate all who come and click on youths' perspectives vis-à-vis HIV/AIDS. Notably, this past February, Sunukaddu ran the first public awareness media campaign by youth for youth in West Africa. Thousands of young people submitted their songs, poems, narrative films, documentaries, audio reports, articles, commentaries, and posters.. and soon this authentic content will be disseminated nationally.

Despite this demonstrable success, visionary RAES wanted to push the envelope. RAES dreamed of scaling up Sunukaddu and distributing its curriculum across West Africa. Doing so would require the construction of an explicit pedagogical method, and perhaps a re-invention of some of the ways that Sunukaddu did business...

That's when I met Alex. In our first meeting last October, Alex explained his desire for Sunukaddu to more intensively focus on storytelling, message development and diffusion. He spoke of harnessing additional, diverse media. What about pottery? What about textiles? What about dance and jewelry and cell phones? Finally, he sought to explore the human dimension of HIV/AIDS, emphasizing the relationships between and among this scourge and stigma, discrimination, community support, and human rights.

And so I began by working backwards. These new lessons and tools were Step Three. Figuring out a way to offer them so that the learning stuck was Step Two. And theorizing what was essential for any learning and growing to occur in the first place, that was Step One. So, drawing on my studies of communication, child development, and social policy, I developed a model that, at its most parsimonious, looks something like this:

New Media Literacies Improved Functioning

+

Social and Emotional Learning →

+

Asset Appreciation

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) pairs perfectly with NMLs. In the words of Forrest Gump, they're like peas and carrots. As with the 12 NML skills, SEL's five core competencies --- self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making -- set the stage for meaningful education. In my view, SEL forms the individual, NMLs form the learner.

Back to the cries of skeptics and censurers:

"Our public school system is bankrupt and our students are falling behind. Fourth-graders in Kazkhakstan out-perform our kids in math! Most US students think Beethoven is a dog! So should we really be spending taxpayers' precious dollars on touchy-feely lessons like 'making friends' when kids can (and probably are!) learning these things themselves on the playground?"

Yes, I hear you. And yes, we absolutely should.

What are the prerequisites for learning? And what is the point of school? The first federal Bullying Prevention Summit was convened in Washington, D.C., last week. Director of Healthy School Communities (part of the Whole Child Initiative at educational leadership organization ASCD) Sean Slade summed up associate professor of child development Philip Rodkin's argument:

"Children are there [at school] to learn not only how to read, write, add, and subtract, but also how to work together as a group, a team, a community" (2010, paragraph 4).

Couldn't have said it better myself. This is proponents' rationale for teaching SEL. Sounds awfully similar to our rationale for teaching NMLs, doesn't it? And that is why SEL and NML are like peas and carrots, folks. And why life is like a box of chocolates...

Back to Senegal.

The whole Sunukaddu team agreed, Our workshops should optimize participants' engagement, appropriation, and application of the material. We should also operate as non-hierarchical partners in the learning process, and so create a context in which ideas and knowledge can flow freely in both directions.

So we developed a method that enabled learning via hands-on exploration, game play, improvisation, creation, discussion, and self-reflection. We configured these pedagogical activities such that they cultivated NMLs, SEL, and asset appreciation (a construct that I created that draws on principles from asset-based community development, appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, intrinsic motivation, and resilience). The explicit curriculum was a 12-session workshop supporting teens' efforts to access their voices, make connections, manipulate multiple communication forms and tools, and share their messages with their peers and communities.

Our original curricular outline:

DAY 1: Introduction + Basic Computer Literacy (NML skill of the day: Distributed Cognition)

DAY 2: Basic Computer Literacy + Message Development (NML skill of the day: Multitasking)

DAY 3: Message Development (Classic media literacy; NML skill of the day: Collective Intelligence)

DAY 4: Message Diffusion (Diffusion of Innovation + Stages of Change; NML skill of the day: Networking)

DAY 5: Audio (Hip hop; NML skill of the day: Appropriation)

DAY 6: Non-fiction (Journalism + Positive Deviance; NML skill of the day: Negotiation)

DAY 7: Conflict (NML skill of the day: Performance)

DAY 8: Fiction (Script-writing +Entertainment-education; NML skill of the day: Transmedia Navigation)

DAY 9: Fixed images (Photography + Peer support; NML skill of the day: Play)

DAY 10: Moving images (Cinematography + Human rights; NML skill of the day: Visualization)

DAY 11: Basic Internet Literacy (NML skill of the day: Judgment)

DAY 12: Conclusion (NML skill of the day: Simulation)

Then the power went out.

Oh yeah, remember that? ;-)

The power left the building early in the intervention, Days 1-4.(4) How do you teach basic computer literacy without computers? How do you teach distributed cognition (defined by Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, and Robinson (2006) as "the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities" (p. 4)) without the digital tools we'd intended?

Is it too jingoistic to holler, "New Media Literacies to the rescue!"? Probably.

Here's the answer: You harness distributed cognition and tap other tools -- we broke out the battery-powered smartphones.

You multi-task -- while the participants were filling out their asset inventories, we powwowed and rejiggered the day's schedule. You play -- along with the participants, we tested our way through this challenge, discovering what happened when we did X, Y, and Z, noting successes and setbacks, evaluating, replicating, discarding, and innovating. Like I said, the NMLs returned power to our powerless situation.

And a few days later, when Sunukaddu instructor Idrissa Mbaye hatched the idea of a Competence Clothesline, the NMLs provided an effective solution to our lack of electric fanning. Because our perceptive participants had pulled down competence cards from the line, they had in their hands... handy hand-fans. How about THAT? ;-)

So what I'm saying is, Who needs electricity when you've got skillz? And these skills don't need digital technology. What they do need are understanding, and they need sharing, with students, colleagues, parents, partners, anyone, everyone.

Now.

(1) literally - no power means no air-conditioning (not that most establishments could afford to buy or run air conditioners) and no standing fans. And this is serious in July, when average daily temperature is 81 degrees Fahrenheit and average relative humidity is 70%.

(2) and the word "literacies" - fuhgeddaboutit. Who even knows what "literacies" means? Seriously - can you define it?

(3) (nowadays, it's more like Aidan and Madison, or Muhammad and Elena)

(4) By Day 5, Alex greenlit the daily rental of a tiny generator.

Laurel Felt is a third-year doctoral student at USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism who only wants to change the world... To do so, she seeks to support youths' development of new media literacies, social and emotional learning, and asset appreciation. Her research also looks at gender, obesity, bullying, and reproductive health.

How New Media is Transforming Storytelling: A New Video Series

Kurt Reinhard from the Institut für Theorie, Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts, recently posted on Vimeo a fascinating series of short videos on the future of storytelling. The videos juxtapose the perspectives of some key thinkers in this space, including Clay Shirkey (NYU), Joshua Green (UCSB), Ian Condry and Nick Montfort (MIT), Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation, Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling, and, hmm, Henry Jenkins (USC), among others. Each video is between five and ten minutes long and tackles some of the ways that shifts in the media environment are changing the nature of stories and storytelling. This opening installment sets the stage with a broad overview of the nature of media change.

Storytelling Part 1: Change of Storytelling from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

Here's a segment that deals specifically with the issues around transmedia storytelling and entertainment.

Storytelling Part 3: Transmedia from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

This one deals with storytelling in relation to social networks.

Storytelling Part 4: Potential of Social Media from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

Another explores collaborative production of stories through processes like crowdsourcing.

Storytelling Part 5: Collective Storytelling from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

And this one explores issues of motivation within participatory culture.

Storytelling Part 8: Motivation to Participate from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

I certainly intend to use these videos in my own teaching. Indeed, I am using segment one to launch my Medium Specificity course later today. There's a real power in hearing the voices of people who are so passionate and thoughtful about the nature of media change and its impact on the kinds of experiences we are able to share with each other.

The video series is intended to call attention to the launch of a new collaboration between European institutions to explore the processes, practices, and literacies surrounding stories and storytelling. Beyond Reinhard's own people at Zurich, he says that the following other researchers are going to be contributing to this project:

* Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Verena Kuni

* European Institute for Participatory Media Berlin, Jasminko Novak

* Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Axel Vogelsang

* University of Zurich, Chair of Marketing and Market Research, Wolfgang Kotowski

* Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Jörg Huber

* coUNDco Online Marketing Agency Zurich, Florian Wieser

Medium Specificity -- a Syllabus

I have been using this blog to share the syllabi of the new courses I am developing for the University of Southern California -- courses which reflect my long-standing research interests. This semester, I was asked to develop a course for the multidisciplinary iMap program in the Cinema School, a program which encourages the interplay between theory and practice. The original subject was developed by the late Anne Friedberg, so I am very much aware of her intellectual legacy as I developed my approach to this subject matter.

I also saw it as a chance to revisit some of my own intellectual roots -- with different topics hearing paying tribute to faculty who have influenced my own intellectual development, including Edward Branigan, Rick Altman, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and David Thorburn -- as well as some such as Tom Gunning and George Lipsitz who have shaped my thinking from afar.

I intend to use this course both to expose students to key ideas drawn from a range of different areas of media studies and to get them to think critically about a range of different media texts. Film, no doubt, plays a special role in this class, because there is such a fully developed tradition of critical and theoretical writing there, but we will also be constantly returning to contemporary developments in digital media as a space against which to test these various theories.

For me, the formal and aesthetic dimensions of this course will form a nice contrast with the more social and ideological issues I am exploring in the Civic Media class that I shared with my blog readers earlier this summer.

Medium Specificity

This course takes as its central themes the borders and boundaries between media. Early on, we will consider some attempts to develop theories of medium specificity - trying to determine what traits define film, photography, and games with a focus on what differentiates them from other existing modes of representation. How is photography distinct from painting? What are the defining traits of the cinematic? Are games narratives? As we deal with these theories, we will show how they each moved from descriptions of the properties of specific medium to prescriptions for what the aesthetics of these media should look like. It is at this intersection where this course most clearly explores the relationship between theory and practice. Even with these medium-specific approaches, we will be exploring how their development required a mode of comparison across media. So, we see Eisenstein, for example, resting his theory of the cinematic on analogies to text-based media and Bazin drawing on notions of photography and theater to talk about cinema. And we will explore how writers like Arnheim sought to resist the coming of sound in order to protect what they saw as the "purity" of their medium specific approach.

As the course continues, we will dig more deeply into media theories and practices which consciously explore the intersections between expressive media rather than marking the borders between them. We will explore notions of interface, affordance, narrative, character, space and spectacle, globalization, and cultural hierarchy as they relate to the interplay between different media systems and practices. Here, we will be looking at theories which celebrate hybridity and border crossing rather than seeing them as problematic. Yet, in doing so, these theories still make implicit assumptions about what each medium does best or what each has to contribute to a transmedia system. So, again, we will find that the notion of medium specificity plays a central role in such formulations.

Across the course, we will be looking at a range of media texts as vehicles through which to test and expand the theories we are studying. These texts are sometimes read as experiments in medium specificity and border crossing and in other cases these works are seen as making their own conceptual contributions to our understanding of the interplay between different kinds of media. In every case, they will be looked at as illustrations of how media theory might inform creative practice and how production may help extend theoretical arguments.

Books:

David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press)

Rick Altman, A Theory of Narrative (Columbia University Press)

Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (Dark Horse)

David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.), Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (MIT Press)

Assignments:

Contributions to Class Forum on Blackboard (20 Percent) Students should share short reflections or questions on the materials read for each week's session, which can be used as a springboard for class discussions. Ideally, these should be posted by 10 a.m. on the day the class is being held.

The Specificity of Digital Media (20 Percent) Much of what we are reading this semester was written in regard to early 20th century media such as film and photography. In what ways have these debates surfaced as our culture has responded to the emergence of new media of expression? What similarities or differences do you see in terms of the debates about games or the web and the debates about these earlier media? Which ideas from the past offer us the best tools for thinking about the present and future of digital expression? (Sept. 27)

Textual Analysis Paper (20 percent) Students should select one of the media texts we have watched through the class session and develop a five page paper which explores the relationship of this work to its medium. You should draw on ideas from one or more of the essays we've read this semester to help you frame your approach. OR you should select a specific theme or creative problem (such as representing simultaniety or microcosm) which has been expressed across media. Select at least three texts representing three different media and discuss how the creative artists involved how exploited the potentials of those media to work through this challenge. (Nov. 8)

Final Paper (40 percent) - Students should write a 20 page essay on a topic of their own interests as they reflect to the core themes and concerns which have run through the class. Students may consider doing a creative project which explores these same issues with permission of the instructor. Students should submit a one to two page abstract of the project by the mid-term so that they can receive feedback as they are developing their concepts. Students will give a 10 minute final presentation sharing their project with the class.(TBD)

August 23rd

Kristin Thompson, "Take My Film, Please," Observations on Film Art

Laura Marks,"The Memory of Touch," The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,

Embodiment and The Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

Donald A. Norman, "Affordances, Conventions and Design," Interactions 6(3):38-43, May 1999, ACM Press.

Screening: Sita Sings the Blues (2009)

The Problem of Medium Specificity (August 30th)

Geoffrey Pingree and Lisa Gitelman, "What's New About New Media?," New Media

1740-1915 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. xi-xxii.

Noel Carroll, "Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts:

Film, Video, and Photography," Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996), pp. 3-24.

D.N. Rodowick, "The Virtual Life of Film," The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.1-24.

David Bordwell, "Defending and Defining the Seventh Art: The Standard Version of

Stylistic History," On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.1-45

Rudolph Arnheim, "Television, a Prediction" and "A New Lacoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film," Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp.199-220.

Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, 'Statement on Sound,'

The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939, edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 234-35.

Screening: Applause (1929)

LABOR DAY, NO CLASS (September 6th)

Medium Specificity in Cinema (September 13th)

David Bordwell, "Against the Seventh Art: Andre Bazin and the Dialectical Program,"

and "The Return to Modernism: Noel Burch and the Oppositional Program," On

the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.46-83.

Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly 13(4)

(Summer 1960), pp. 4-9.

Andre Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," and "Theater and Film", What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today", "The Cinematic Principle and

the Ideogram," Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace,

1949), pp.28-44, 195-256.

Rick Altman, 'Dickens, Griffith and Film Theory Today," in Jane Gaines (ed.), Classical

Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham: Duke University Press,

1992), pp. 9-47.

(Rec. for reading after class: Kristin Thompson, "Playtime: Comedy on the Edge of Perception," Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Trenton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Screening: PlayTime (1967)

Medium Specificity in Photography (September 20th)

David Company, "Stillness," Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), pp. 22-59.

Jane Gaines, "Photography Surprises the Law: The Portrait of Oscar Wilde," Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)

Robert Harriman and John Louis Lucaites, "The Borders of the Genre: Migrant Mother

and the Times Square Kiss," No Captions Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public

Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 49-92.

Susan Sontag, "Photographic Evangels," On Photography (New York: Delta, 1973), pp. 115-152.

Screening: La Jetee (1962)

Medium Specificity in Game Studies (September 27th)

Henry Jenkins, "Games, The New Lively Art"

Markku Eskelinen, "Towards Computer Games Studies"

Janet Murray, "From Game-Story to Cyberdrama"

Jesper Juul, "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for the Heart of Gameness,"

Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, "Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers"

Screening: Run Lola Run (1998)

Windows, Frames, and Mirrors (October 4th)

Anne Friedberg, "The Virtual Window," in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.)

Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 337-354.

Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, "Remediation," Configurations 4(3) (1996),

311-358.

Lev Manovich, "Cinema as a Cultural Interface"

Nicholas Dulac and Andre Gaudrault, "Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the

Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series," in Wanda

Strauven (ed.) The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).

(Rec.) David Bordwell, "Prospects for Progress: Recent Research Programs," On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press)

Screening: Strange Days (1995)

Attractions and Spectacles (October 11th)

David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, "The Aesthetics of Transition," in David Thorburn

and Henry Jenkins (eds.) Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003)

Henry Jenkins, "'A Regular Mine, A Reservoir, a Proving Ground': Reconstructing the

Vaudeville Aesthetic," What Made Pistachio Nuts: Early Sound Comedy and the

Vaudeville Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 59-96.

Henry Jenkins, "'I Like to Hit Myself in the Head': 'Vulgar Modernism' Revisited"

(Forthcoming)

Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-

Garde;" Charles Musser, "Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and

Narrativity;" Scott Bukattman, "Spectacle, Attractions and Visual Pleasure," in Wanda Strauven (ed.) The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp.381-388, 389-416, 71-84.

Screening: Hellzapoppin (1941)

Migratory Characters (Monday, October 18th)

Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (Dark Horse, 2007).

Will Brooker, "Illustrators of Alice" Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (New York: Continuium, 2005), pp. 105-198.

Christina Rossetti, "From Speaking Likenesses (1874)," Frances Hodgson Burnett,

"Behind the White Brick (1876)," and E. Nesbit, "Justnowland (1912)," in Carolyn Sigler (ed.), Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), pp. 50-65, 66-78, 179-192.

Screening: Alice (1988)

Spectacular Media Spaces (October 25th)

Angela Ndalianis, "Architectures of the Senses: Neo-Baroque Entertainment Spectacles,"

in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.) Rethinking Media Change: The

Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp.355-374.

Constance Balides, "Immersion in The Virtual Ornament: Contemporary "Movie Ride"

Films," in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.) Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 315-336.

Scott Bukatman, "There's Always...Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic

Experience," Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Super-Men in the 20th

Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 13-31.

Lauren Rabinovitz, "More Than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture

Through Hale's Tours, IMAX and Motion Simulator Rides," Lauren Rabinovitz

and Abraham Geil (eds.) Memory Bytes: History, Technology and Digital Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp.99-125.

Screening: TBA

Forms of Narrative (November 1st)

Rick Altman, "Dual-Focus Narrative," "Single-Focus Narrative," "Multiple-Focus

Narrative," A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 55-98, 119-190, 241-291.

Screening: Gilda (1946)

Transmedia Logics (November 8th)

Henry Jenkins, "The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling," Confessions of an Aca-Fan,

Screening Sleep Dealer (2008)

Hybridity and the Dialogic (November 15th)

Brian Larkin, "Extravagant Aesthetics: Instability and the Excessive World of Nigerian

Film," Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria

(Durham: Duke University, 2008), pp. 168-216.

George Lipsitz, "Cruising Around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music

in East Central Los Angeles," Time Passages: Collective Memory and American

Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 133-162.

George Lipsitz, "Kalfou Danjere," Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music,

Postmodernism and the Focus on Place (London: Verso, 1997).

Ian Condry, "Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and The Elvis Effect," Hip-Hop Japan:

Rap and The Paths of Cultural Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press,

2006).

Screening: This is Nollywood (2007)

High and Low in Television Culture (November 22nd)

Lynn Spigel, "Hail, Modern Art: Postwar 'American' Painting and the Rise of

Commercial Television," and "Silent TV: Ernie Kovacs and the Noise of Mass

Culture," TV By Design: Modern Art and The Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp.19-67, 178-222.

Screening: Best of Ernie Kovacs, other selections.

Final Presentations (November 29th)

Girls, Gaming, and Gender: An Interview with Game Designer and Researcher Jennifer Jenson (Part Two)

Below is the second installment of my interview with York University's Jennifer Jenson, a designer who has been doing significant research on gender and children's play with video games. You can find more about the 3G summit she is participating in here and here, including information about sponsorship. You suggest that much research on gender and games seeks to identify static "preferences" while gender is being "performed" in specific contexts. Yet the search for preferences seems calculated to identify design principles which seek to mediate inequalities in production and access to games. How might the more performance or actor-centered approach you are advocating lead to design principles that might address these concerns?

The inequalities in production and access to games are much more complex than a pink-colored bandaid can hope to cover, so by understanding first and foremost that preferences are a moving target that games companies and others can't hope to tackle, then certain other structural inequities become illuminated.

First, that it is very common for girls and women to have access to games through their male partners and relations -- sisters play on their brothers' and fathers' xboxes, but rarely have primary access. So this means that they aren't necessarily making decisions about what to purchase, and when to purchase. I think here, Nintendo has been incredibly successful in reaching some of this audience in their Wii advertising, and in the games that have been developed, simply because they have directly addressed a family audience in their marketing and advertising. This of course is still not directly addressing girls -- and maybe that is just fine, but women don't always equate to family. When it is the case that everywhere one turns, the subject of address is a male gamer it makes sense to me at least on some level that women do not feel like they are part of the gamer audience, and to get a sense of how this still works, you need only open a game magazine. The first point would then be: in order to cultivate a gamer audience that is female, it would make sense to begin to actually address them---which isn't the same thing as addressing them as mothers or as the pink people, something that should go without saying, but still doesn't.

Second, while it has been pointed out a number of times over the years that the repertoire of available avatar choices if a player wants to play as something that is marked as a female character is not only far less, but also tends to be hyper-feminized, it remains the case that design choices are consistently being made to reinforce this. One easy 'fix' here seems to me: design games with choice, and choices driven by players' active production and play--ironic, satirical, smart and 'savvy' -- with character avatars.

And finally, it has been the case for nearly 30 years now that women have not chosen to enter computer science and engineering fields, that they have stayed away from programming courses and careers in computer-based industries, and the fact that so few women are a part of the games industry means that the above two issues persist. This inequity falls on the shoulders, I think, of educators and educational institutions who have (with a few exceptions) not been able to turn the tide of so few women participating in the kinds of secondary and higher education that might lead them to career paths as game designers, and here I don't mean by assuming that that inequality will be made up through the 'art production' side of things. We in education need to examine how it is we teach those subjects and who we encourage and at times actively discourage from those related areas, as well as actively promote programs of the kind that we are participating in like the 3G Summit, as at the very least, for a short period of time, it puts girls roles chances are they might not have experience before.

Should we be focused on redesigning the contexts where play takes place rather than redesigning the games themselves?

I like this question -- I think that redesigning the context of play certainly helps. In our work, we have talked about it as "unfettered, hands-on access" to, in this case, playing games. Once we do that, we find that girls play, much like the boys.

Is it possible to use game design in ways which encourages players to perform gender differently? What assumptions are we making about the relationship here between the impact of game design and the impact of social norms?

I think the main assumption in terms of social norms is that the only two available genders are male and female -- by not allowing for a range of 'other' choices, we are automatically black boxing gender -- reducing it to binary sex-based characteristics that in some very real sense do not allow for a lot of 'play'.

The question of how to design games differently to encourage players to perform gender differently is to open up choice, giving players more freedom of movement -- whether or not they choose that would be an interesting question, but allowing for greater choice will at the very least mean that there is more opportunity for that kind of play to happen.

Can you tell us more about your own work as a game designer? In what ways has the theoretical and ethnographic work you've done on gender and games informed the games you are making and vice-versa?

Luckily, the work I have done as a game designer has been, first and foremost, playfully engaging with a fabulous colleague and a team of amazing student programmers, artists, researchers, and play testers, and most of that has been focused on how best to design games that have some educational value, use and impact.

Over the years we have figured a lot out about what that means, and I won't go into that so much here, but I will say that one thing we have figured out is that designing games for education is not about trying to make games that "teach" them something, instead it is about making games that provide opportunities for play and engagement in ways that aren't possible through textbooks or even making a film.

For example, last year we completed a game whose (unlikely!) content is Baroque music, and when we have watched students at all age levels play with that game, we have seen active engagement with a form of music that none of them have ever listened to before or ever experienced. On leaving the game, what is so interesting is that we often find students humming the tunes that they had been playing with -- and that means what we were able to create is a rich experience of Baroque music that they probably never would have had, and just might be interested in finding out more.

How the work on gender and gameplay is inflected in this work is very much in attempting to design for player choice and agency but to interrupt the usual kinds of choices that might be available, for example, in an early game we designed on contagious disease, players customized their avatars with colour choices that did not include skin tones, and we worked very long and hard with artists to draw different kinds of avatars that were not hyper-masculinized or feminized.

You have argued that some progress might be made in these debates if we split apart concepts of sex and gender. Can you describe a bit more what this distinction might contribute to research in this area?

As you probably realize, this is a rather dodgy question, and rather than delve into that certainly perilous territory, from a PR perspective anyway, I'd just refer to people like Donna Haraway's still cutting edge analysis of the distinctions at stake here, and how and why they matter. If only people would read that work, they could surely figure out the rest of themselves. Instead, it seems that bad ideology continues to trump good analysis and the question keeps getting obscured.

As you note, male experience and preferences have been taken for granted in much of this research. What would we gain if more time was spent exploring the construction of/performance of masculinity in relation to games?

What we do not have to date is a careful exploration of masculinities at/in play in games, and I think what such a perspective might offer is nuance and identities that are masked by the blanket presumption that all men play games and they play them a certain way. This of course is not the case, but the fact is we do not have many accounts of boys and men's play, and it would be worth knowing something about the group of men who have played console games together since they were 10, and continue that play into adulthood, or about those who play xbox live sports games at certain times every weekend, or even about the young man labeled "addicted" to videogames -- what about their stories? And then again, what about the men who play bejewelled and not much more and love it?

Studying men/boys might also reveal the complexities of identities and play, and might also reflect something back on the subject positions of women and girls in those relations. One way of being able to cling to stereotypes about women is to not pay attention to men either, so the presumptions don't get challenged from the hegemonic side of things, and obviously won't get challenged from the subordinate one either.

Dr. Jennifer Jenson is Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, Canada. She has published on gender, technology and digital games and games and education, among other topics. She also, with a team of folks, including Suzanne de Castell, designs games for education -- recent titles include: Contagion, Tafelmusik: The Quest for Arundo Donax, and Epidemic: Self Care for Crisis. In addition to a strong penchant for Victorian fiction, her favorite game at the moment is Wario Ware DIY.

Girls, Gaming, and Gender: An Interview with Game Designer and Researcher Jennifer Jenson (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Mindy Faber, the co-organizer of The 3G Summit: The Future of Girls, Gaming and Gender which she described to me as "a visionary 4-day initiative that brings 50 urban teenage girls together with five leading women game designers and scholars for intensive dialogue, inquiry, game-play, and mentorship. It is organized by Open Youth Networks, Interactive Arts and Media and The Institute for Study of Women and Gender in Arts and Media at Columbia College." The designers involved with the event look like a who's who of women who have been doing cutting edge thinking about gender and games and who have also been demonstrating the potentials for developing alternative models of game and play (including two associated with the University of Southern California):

• Mary Flanagan (artist and scholar, author of Critical Play)
• Tracy Fullerton (game designer, educator and writer; Cloud; "flOW; "The Night Journey"
• Jennifer Jenson (scholar of gender and technology, York University)
• Susana Ruiz (independent game designer Darfur is Dying and Finding Zoe)
• Erin Robinson, Indie Game Designer PuzzleBots and Nanobots

As Faber explained:

Because the five women use such different approaches to game design, there is no uniform curriculum or pedagogy. Each of the five teams, consisting of ten girls, one near peer and another woman game facilitator will undoubtedly produce some surprising and intriguing game concepts that are likely to challenge many assumptions we have about what girls like to play. Important to the process is that we do not impose on the girls what types of games they should make or on what platform. Rather we want to remove obstacles that say "you can't do this "or "only this is a real game" and release their imaginations.

I am proud to have made an early contribution to the research in this area through From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, which I co-edited with Justine Cassell, now at Northwestern University. More recently, the MIT Press has published a follow up book, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. I interviewed the editors of that book, Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, and Jill Denner here on the blog when it was first published. The shift from "games" in the original collection to "gaming" in the follow up volume says a lot about the shift from a focus on games as programs to the focus on the process and contexts through which play takes place in and around games.

It was exciting for me to see this project, not only exploring these questions, but applying our emerging understanding of gender and games to help make a difference for a group of young women. There is still such a burning need for women in the games industry and in computer science more generally.

I had a chance to interview York University's Jennifer Jenson, one of the designers participating in the 3G Summit, both about the event and her perspective on gender and games. Both on her own and through her collaborations with Suzanne de Castell, Jenson has been doing some of the most theoretically sophisticated and conceptually advanced research in this space -- especially through introducing perspectives from performance theory to challenge some of the first generation of researchers' and the industry's assumptions about how gender impacted children's play with computer and video games. The interview will appear in this post and a follow-up piece later this week.

Tell us about this forthcoming workshop which you and other female/feminist designers are conducting. What do you hope to achieve? What kinds of researchers do you hope to work with?

One of the primary goals of the workshop is to put the tools for game design development and production in the hands of girls, with near peer and other structured support in an effort to encourage them to see themselves potentially in those roles in future. It continues to be the case that the numbers of women in the games industry compared to men is shockingly low (somewhere around 10%) with most of those positions being in human resources. Not only are women under-represented in the games industry, but they are also underrepresented, and have been for nearly 25 years in fields like computer science and engineering. So a workshop like 3G Summit is an invaluable opportunity for girls at this age to begin to imagine that they might want to do something like this in the future.

Is the goal of this boot camp to impact games research, game design, or both?

My understanding of the boot camp is that it is meant to both impact game design and game research. And as an educator and someone who has worked with girls and women to support their enjoying the pleasures as well as the uses of new technologies since my PhD work, which is now getting on to be nearly 2 decades, and it has also meant, I hope, to impact on the girls themselves. In fact, for me, that would be the number one goal! On the first point, it is a high concentration of girls working with 5 mentors and other near peer mentors to construct games that are meaningful to them, and that can't help but make ripples in terms of game design. I am thinking of it in terms of having a mini-incubator of concentrated talent and raw enthusiasm that can't help but produce very interesting results. In terms of a research agenda, I think this will contribute to growing body of work that examines young people's production of digital games, which has been around for quite a while now -- many have been working for example, for sometime now with kids and game production, work that started to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990's, which saw very early on the positive critical thinking and learning skills that could be developed when young people see their roles as producers, not just consumers of games. In this changed landscape of production, of as you have written, a 'participatory culture' in which individual consumers can take up productive roles in the creation of media, including games, it is critical that girls see themselves in these roles, and especially in relation and in this case, girls seeing themselves as producers of games. And as people who can make a real difference in the kinds of games being made -- which really do need some new inputs, new value bases, and new ideas to get beyond the persistently profit-driven design choices that commercial game companies (no surprise, of course) have made and continue to make. Games can do a LOT more, and do it a lot better than what we have so far seen, not just for girls, but for everyone.

As you've noted, researchers have been examining gender and games since at least the early 1980s. What has shifted over this time in terms of actual women's relationship to games and how have these shifts been reflected in the research being produced?

With this question I'd like to start with the fact that most often when people write, think, and do research on "gender and games" what they are really talking about is girls/women and games -- what we don't have so much to date is a notion of how things might have shifted for boys/men. Recently, Lawrence Katz, a labor economist, speculated that one reason the crime rate in the U.S. might have so significantly dropped, despite the economic recession was that video games had been keeping "the young and idle" busy, and I think that is a provocative starting point for a current study of players in this case, primarily male, as women commit violent crimes at rates much lower than men. The reason why I began here is that much of 'gender and gameplay' research has indeed focused on women and girls and gameplay, and we know a bit more about their play and how things have changed over the last 30 years. We know, for example, that at least in terms of self-reporting more women and girls are playing games than they once did in the past -- the Entertainment Software Review Board, for example. Of course we also know that the kinds of games being played by women, how frequently and how long they play for matters enormously, yet the ESRB and other studies seem disinclined to pay much attention to this -- what we call "raising gender only in order to dismiss it as a problem".

In your writing, you suggest that much current work on gender and games falls into a series of "gender traps," which replicate hegemonic assumptions about gender rather than critique them. What are some of these "gender traps" and what advice would you offer to researchers who want to think around them?

Hmmm..., I'd say again these two things: Trap #1 Gender = Sex further means just women/girls and Trap #2 raising the 'issue' of gender simply in order to dismiss it as any kind of serious challenge or problem.

You have challenged the common claim that girls do not like competition and prefer cooperation within their game play. On what grounds?

On the BASIS of 6 years of grounded, video-based ethnographic fieldwork with games in which we have observed girls and boys and their gameplay over at least a year, and sometimes two or three years on a weekly basis. In that work, we have seen girls perform and enact what can only be called "competition" -- and this ranges from friendly barbs like "you're going to die" to much more aggressive enactments, including bumping of controllers to throw another gamer off course, active 'trash talking', intense pleasure demonstrated when someone wins, and so on. When we compare these kinds of play to the play of boys from the same community and the same place, we see the same kinds of competition. The important thing here to note is that all too often in studies of girls playing games, past research has not systematically looked at the difference between novice and expert play. This has resulted in mistaking "facts about how girls play" with facts about how novices play. In our work (I work quite closely with Suzanne de Castell at Simon Fraser University) we have been able to show that once we 'level up' the girls and they become more expert their play looks very much like the boys: engaged, competitive, and mainly just having fun.

Dr. Jennifer Jenson is Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, Canada. She has published on gender, technology and digital games and games and education, among other topics. She also, with a team of folks, including Suzanne de Castell, designs games for education -- recent titles include: Contagion, Tafelmusik: The Quest for Arundo Donax, and Epidemic: Self Care for Crisis. In addition to a strong penchant for Victorian fiction, her favorite game at the moment is Wario Ware DIY.

ARG 2.0 (Part Two)

V. New Directions

[Studio] execs are mired in next-quarter earnings, and ARGs and other transmedia extensions require time to take root and build active, invested communities. It is decidedly a long-term investment, the fruits of which [may] not be fully realized until a significant period of time post-launch. As such, most studios aren't willing to make the investment needed to bake those components in from the beginning or allocate the funds/resource necessary to ensure their ongoing success (Gennefer Snowfield, Transmedia LA 2010).

Perhaps if ARGs weren't so demanding on marketing budgets, studio executives would be more willing to "bake them in from the beginning" and hang onto them for the long term. One way around this problem is to develop replayable, ongoing ARGs that engage fans in practices rather than the mere consumption of additional layers of a property via interactions with puzzles and in-game characters. Unlike the labor-intensive PM-centric traditional ARG model, such solutions have the capacity to produce the bulk of their content and interactivity through the emergent effects of a ruleset. These kinds of ARGs might not be the future of storytelling; but perhaps they are the future of story facilitating.

Over the past few years, several major ARG projects have attempted to engage fans in the co-creation of narrative content by using a ruleset to structure and guide participation. One of the most well-known of these projects is World Without Oil (Ken Eklund et al, 2007), a collaborative production game that invited players to speculate about what their lives would be like in the event of a sudden oil shock. While this game retained many of the characteristics of the traditional ARG, including an event-driven and time-sensitive structure, it shifted the emphasis away from the collective solving of puzzles and toward the production of content.

In this manner, it effectively turned the tables on the players - instead of in-game events alerting participants to the existence of new PM-created content to decode and analyze, the fictional events that structured the overarching narrative of World Without Oil signaled the players to imaginatively engage with the story world and create - and share - their own content. Unlike previous efforts at "user-submitted content," which often merely offered players a chance to upload their own media artifacts as a kind of bonus activity, in World Without Oil, the players had no other option - collaborative production was the game, full stop.

Further, the content the players submitted would feed back into the game system and in turn was incorporated into the evolving narrative, minimally as an entry on the individual player's profile page, and maximally as a curated or "featured" item on the game's home page. A simple and flexible set of rules governed the players' participation: they could create one of several types of media artifacts; they could work within the bounds of the fictional world or strike out on their own; they could choose to build on the work of other players or make reference only to their own imaginings; and so on. In short, the players were given enough structure such that they knew generally what they were supposed to do, but enough freedom to approach things in a manner that best suited their own interests and competencies.

In his seminal essay on Linux, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2000), Eric Raymond noted that "[it] may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work." But by providing players with a sandbox within which they can meaningfully engage with the world of a media franchise or institutional cause, game designers do more than just streamline the production process. They also win hearts and minds. As veteran ARG writer and player Andrea Phillips told me in a recent interview, "once you've given your audience official permission to collaborate with you in any meaningful sense, they're yours forever, hook, line, and sinker" (Watson 2010).

World Without Oil and other early collaborative production ARGs such as the Playtime Anti-Boredom Society's SFZero (2005) were among the first of a wave of games to articulate simple rulesets via social networking platforms in order to structure participation. Games like Top Secret Dance Off (2008), Superstruct (2008), and Evoke (2010), all designed by World Without Oil collaborator Jane McGonigal; Must Love Robots (2008), designed by Jim Babb and Tanner Ringerud; and, Austin Hill and Alex Eberts' Akoha (2010), further iterate the design of online collaborative production games, adding in new elements such as achievement badges, unlocks, leaderboards, and other player profiling and progress-tracking systems. In some cases, these games, such as SFZero, Top Secret Dance Off, and Akoha, limit or eliminate their structural dependence on time-sensitive events, resulting in ongoing game activities that further lower the bar to entry by doing away with the need for "Story so Far"-style summaries.

These kinds of games draw heavily from casual game design, and reflect an awareness of the powerful affordances of social networking platforms to construct asynchronous and persistent play activities. Further, since the challenges in these games are individual rather than collective, players can effectively customize how and when they participate according to their own desires, available time, and range of skills - an impossibility in traditional ARGs designed to be played by a "hive mind." And since the experience is also inherently social - the point of these games, after all, is to share content and co-create narratives - powerful collective intelligence effects emerge nonetheless, as metadata-rich knowledge archives are produced from the aggregate of the players' contributions and interactions (Institute for the Future 2009; Shirky 2008).

Many similar games and activities have appeared over the past few years that do not operate under the aegis of ARGs or pervasive games, but are nonetheless good illustrations of this kind of participation design. Kongregate, for example, is a website for independent video game designers that is itself a game, awarding players points, badges, and collectible Magic-like game cards in exchange for playing other players' games, having their own games played or rated, and accumulating friends on the network. By adding these layers of game play to what otherwise would be yet another banal social networking hub for Flash programmers, Kongregate not only motivates additional acts of collaboration and production, but creates valuable brand identity and allegiance that extends across the entire range of player-produced games hosted on its servers. This kind of productive social metagaming promises to explode over the next couple of years as Facebook's Open Graph and other (perhaps more legitimately "open") social media standards take hold (Messina 2009; Schell 2010).

Of course, studios and other large media companies aren't always well-received when they attempt to enter domains of independent or fannish production. In such gift economies, to paraphrase Lessig, the studios' money is poison. And while "corporately endorsed produsage or the commercial harboring of produsage communities may enable a wider variety of remixing and mashup activities to take place" (Bruns 2008, 324) within a studio-friendly intellectual property framework, one doesn't have to look too hard to find examples of industry-sanctioned fan production sites that have failed.

Fortunately, then, collaborative production is not the only way of getting around the accessibility, replayability, and scalability problems inherent in traditional ARG design. Experience designers like Jeff Hull build ambient location-based narratives that retain much of alternate reality gaming's tried-and-true transmedia storytelling componentry, but drop its dependence on time-sensitive events and collective problem-solving. Hull's The Jejune Institute (2009) is literally embedded into the fabric of the Bay Area, narrating the evolution of a strange New Age self-help cult through diverse physical and virtual artifacts, including websites, guerilla poster art, a low-powered radio broadcast station, and a physical "headquarters" space on an upper floor of a downtown office tower. The goal, Hull writes, "[is] to present . . . interactions everywhere across the civic realm, so that trap doors and side hatches exist all around you, all the time, [fused] into the urban landscape" (Watson 2010). Players who tumble into The Jejune Institute's trap doors discover a world waiting there for them to explore - a kind of off-kilter transmedia theme park that is meant to be visited and experienced rather than analyzed or "solved."

Finally, it's important to note that, for some use cases, there is good reason to make ARGs less accessible, less replayable, and less scalable. Massive player populations are not always a good thing. As we have seen, such mega-games are not only expensive to run and maintain, but often have to make critical creative compromises in order to broaden their appeal. In cases where the aim is to create or mobilize an elite core of players who can then go on to evangelize for a brand or cause, difficult-to-access once-in-a-lifetime events that cater to small crowds of self-identified "lead users" can actually have much more impact than campaigns designed to attract hundreds of thousands of participants. As Dena (2008b) notes, in many cases "[designers] could improve the 'accessibility' of ARGs but to do so would remove important triggers to hard-core player production and enjoyment." The trick, of course, is to continue to find ways to appeal to a hard-core population that is extremely savvy about storytelling and game design. In this respect, the elite or hard-core ARG must by necessity remain an elusive and dynamic form.

VI. Conclusions

By moving away from the time-sensitive and event-driven structure of traditional ARGs, designers can create more open-ended games that work better as engines for asynchronous participation and community building. Doing so ultimately means replacing a text-centric storytelling mentality with a systems-centric story facilitating approach. This kind of approach is not an abdication of authorship or aesthetic responsibility; rather, it is a shift from the domain of literal content creation to that of procedural content creation. Such a shift has the potential to break the designerly logjams that have afflicted ARGs since the early 2000s, moving mass-audience iterations of the form toward more accessible, replayable, and scalable designs.

VII. Works Cited

Aarseth, Espen J., Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Bogost, Ian, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (The MIT Press, 2007).

DARPA, DARPA Network Challenge Project Report, 16 February 2010.

Dena, Christy, 'ARG Stats', 2008 [accessed 9 May 2010].

---, 'Discover Manoa!: Second Life RPG & the problem with ARGs', 2007 [accessed 8 May 2010].

---, 'Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games', Convergence Journal: International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14 (2008), 41-57.

Down, Kerry Ann, 'Alternate reality games for orientation, socialisation & induction', 2008 [accessed 9 February 2010].

Gee, James Paul, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition, 2nd edn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Gibson, William, Pattern Recognition (Berkley, 2005).

Goodlander, Georgina, 'Fictional Press Releases and Fake Artifacts: How the Smithsonian American Art Museum is Letting Game Players Redefine the Rules' [accessed 19 January 2010].

IGDA ARG SIG, 'Alternate Reality Games SIG/Whitepaper - IGDAwiki', 2006 [accessed 21 February 2010].

Institute for the Future, Superstruct, 2009 [accessed 10 May 2010].

Jenkins, Henry, 'Chasing Bees, Without the Hive Mind', Technology Review [accessed 8 May 2010].

---, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Revised (NYU Press, 2008).

Levy, Pierre, Collective Intelligence, 1st edn (Basic Books, 1997).

McGonigal, Jane, ''This is Not a Game': Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play', in MelbourneDAC (presented at the Melbourne DAC, Melbourne, 2003).

---, 'Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming', The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, - (2007), 199-227 .

---, 'This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century', 2006 [accessed 21 April 2010].

Messina, Chris, and Jyri Engstrom, 'The Web at a New Crossroads', FactoryCity, 2009 [accessed 24 April 2010].

Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Morgan Kaufmann, 2009).

Morris, Chris, Sean Stewart, Elan Lee, and Jim Stewartson, 'Events, not ARGs: Interview with the founders of 4th Wall', 2009 [accessed 21 February 2010].

Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 'A Different City for a Different Life', Internationale situationniste, 3 (1959), 37-40.

Phillips, Andrea, 'ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette' (SXSWi, 2010) [accessed 10 May 2010].

Raymond, Eric Steven, 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' [accessed 8 May 2010].

Schell, Jesse, DICE 2010: Design Outside the Box, 2010 [accessed 22 April 2010].

Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Press HC, The, 2008).

Stewart, Sean, 'Alternate Reality Games', 2004 [accessed 21 February 2010].

Szulborski, Dave, This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Lulu.com, 2005).

Terdiman, Daniel, ''Last Call Poker' celebrates cemeteries', 2005 [accessed 9 May 2010].

The Cloudmakers, 'Puppetmaster FAQ' [accessed 8 May 2010].

The Dot Eaters, 'Coin-op Video Game History', 2007 [accessed 10 May 2010].

Various, 'Transmedia LA Google Group', 2010 [accessed 10 May 2010].

Vinge, Vernor, Rainbows End (Tor Books, 2007).

Walker, Jill, 'Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks', in (presented at the AoIR 5.0, Brighton, UK, 2004).

---, 'How I was played by Online Caroline', 2002 [accessed 9 May 2010].

Watson, Jeff. 'Interviews', 2010.

Jeff Watson is an interdisciplinary media practitioner with a background in screenwriting, filmmaking, and game design. His doctoral research in Media arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts focuses on investigating how ubiquitous computing and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and civic engagement.For more insights from Jeff Watson, you can check out his website or follow his Twitter flow.

ARG 2.0 (Part One)

The Alternate Reality Game (ARG) remains a topic of great interest to me and to my students at MIT and USC. Through the years, we've discovered that the ARG falls at the intersection between our recurring interests in participatory culture, collective intelligence, new media literacies, transmedia entertainment, and civic engagement. In my Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 graduate seminar last spring, Jeff Watson wrote a provocative essay which reviewed and challenged the current state of ARG theory and design, proposing some of the limits of this still emerging genres, as well as identifying some experiments that stretch the ARG in new directions. I immediately knew that I wanted to share this essay with my readers, who have a range of different investments in this space, in hopes that it might serve as a catalyst for enlarging the conversation around ARGS and might give him useful feedback as he hopes to prepare this essay for publication. Watson comes at this topic as a student in the USC's Cinema School's innovative iMAP program, which is designed to bring together students who are interested in both media design and theory. I am going to be teaching a seminar through the program this fall on Medium Specificity, and will be sharing the syllabus here shortly. Each of the students I have met through this program have impressed me with their creative insights and their willingness to test their ideas through experimental practice. The Cinema School as a whole is exploring how to break down the silos between theory and production and between the different craft specializations within production, because the media maker of the future will need to think and create across media platforms. This is yet another of the many reasons I am excited about being at USC right now.

ARG 2.0

by Jeff Watson

I. Abstract

As marketing instruments, alternate reality games (ARGs) are powerful tools for generating buzz and fostering audience engagement. Their capacity to initiate and maintain playful and creative dialogue between producers and fans signals the immanence of interactive and participatory transmedia entertainment. However, the established structure of the ARG as a time-sensitive and event-driven experience managed by the behind-the-scenes machinations of "puppet masters" (PMs) forecloses a number of important design possibilities. Consequently, ARGs often lack the qualities of accessibility, replayability, and scalability that are so crucial to the adoption and impact of other kinds of socially-articulated interactive systems. In instances where the objective is to create or engage an elite class of "in the know" participants, such a lack may in fact be a strength; but for other use cases, accessibility, replayability, and scalability are critical. This paper outlines the significance of the absence of these characteristics from many "first generation" ARGs, and points toward an emerging "2.0" iteration of the form through reference to recent projects and practices in both industrial and institutional contexts.

II. Terminology

In contrast to more capacious terms such as "pervasive game" or "big game," the term, "alternate reality game," refers to a very specific and well-defined form of interactive transmedia storytelling that "[takes] the substance of everyday life and [weaves] it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world" (IGDA ARG SIG 2006). In an ARG, players discover the game through an encounter with one or more access points embedded in real world contexts. These access points, known in the parlance of ARGs as "rabbit holes," lead players into a dynamic matrix of story components distributed across various kinds of digital and physical media.

By exploring these components, players discover puzzles and challenges that serve both as impetus to connect with other players, and as time- and context-sensitive content bottlenecks. In order to advance the narrative, players typically work together, first assembling into affinity groups via both official (i.e., game-sanctioned) and unofficial (i.e., player-created) social media structures; then tackling puzzles and challenges collectively, leveraging the range of competencies, geographies, and biographies inherent in a large and distributed player base. As puzzles are solved, the game's content producers, or "puppet masters," release successive cycles of story and interactivity, tweaking their approach along the way based on the observed behavior and emerging collective intelligence capabilities of the players.

This process repeats itself until the narrative concludes, typically with the launch of a product or service. At this point, official support for the player community is usually terminated, primary online game assets are deleted or otherwise rendered inactive, and the game ends.

III. Introduction

Early participants and producers of ARGs compared their emergence to watershed moments in pop music (Phillips 2010) and cinema, with some going so far as to suggest that the ARG is effectively the defining narrative mode of our present communications epoch (Stewart 2004). Indeed, especially in the context of the early 2000s, ARGs represented a uniquely transmedial mode of interactive storytelling, and as such were seen as being natural and inevitable outgrowths of the burgeoning network culture. When playing an ARG, fans consume story in a variety of modes, via a range of devices, channels, settings, and practices. This platform-independent nonlinearity and fragmentary or distributed consumption-participation pattern was seen as a logical outcome of millennial shifts in media habits, and was referenced by various futurists as a model for how stories and games could be designed in the coming era of ubiquitous computing and social media (Gibson 2005; Vinge 2006).

Other observers, invested in visions of participatory and collaborative storytelling, noted that, unlike typical consumers of cinema, television and other few-to-many media forms, the players of ARGs are always already necessary and constitutive elements of the work. That is, in an ARG, audience participation is not a byproduct, but rather an essential and formative component of the text. To practitioners and theorists with a stake in participatory culture, the notion of an interactive storytelling form conceived from the ground up as a means of facilitating the collaborative production of media artifacts provided a "perfect illustration of all of the principles . . . shaping the media landscape at the present time" (Jenkins 2006).

Further, ARGs were viewed as fitting into a long tradition of spatially- and temporally-distributed narrative forms, and for some, their emergence indicated the arrival into the mainstream of practices that had hitherto been relegated to fan subcultures and marginal art movements. Like the critical interventions of Situationism, which sought to reconfigure public space as a "new arena for creation" wherein "unforeseen games will become possible through the inventive use of material conditions" (Nieuwenhuys, 1959), the ambiguously-bounded play of ARGs has the ability to produce dramatic shifts in subjectivity that "[sensitize] participants to affordances, real or imagined," "[make] all data seem connected, or at least plausibly connected," and "make surfaces less convincing" (McGonigal 2003, 43-44). Similarly, ARGs promised to do to mainstream storytelling what "distributed narratives"- experimental narratives spread out across "time, space, and the network" (Walker 2004, 1) - had done to avant garde and electronic literature:

Distributed narratives break down the aesthetics of unity we have followed for millennia. They take this disunity a step further than the bricolage of postmodernism, by collapsing the unity of form as well as that of content and concept. Yet perhaps they also point to a new kind of unity: a unity where the time and space of the narrative are in sync with the time and space of the reader. (Walker 2004, 11)

Finally, by bringing together once disparate practices such as game design, performance art, and cinematic narrative, ARGs were seen as being on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary new media thinking. Great things were forecasted, including the use of ARGs in establishing and leveraging collective intelligences in order to solve real-world problems (McGonigal 2003; Jenkins 2004).

IV. ARGs in Practice: 2001-2010

While ARGs have proven that they have the potential to mobilize elite groups of "lead users" who can co-create content and evangelize for a brand or cause (McGonigal 2003; Szulborski 2005; IGDA ARG SIG 2006; Dena 2008a) - and that they can quickly generate alarmingly efficient collective intelligences (McGonigal 2007; see also DARPA 2010) - they have, perhaps understandably, failed to live up to some of the high expectations set at the turn of the century. ARGs have not seen the kinds of growth in popularity that other forms of gaming and storytelling have seen over the past decade (Schell 2010; compare with Dena 2008a); they have not proven to be a particularly effective way of building lasting communities or collaborative practices, especially when compared to more systems-oriented approaches to organizing and maintaining collective action (see Shirky 2008); and they have failed to maintain the same kind of relevance to contemporary media habits and technologies that they arguably held in the early 2000s, ceding this territory to other kinds of pervasive interactivity such as mobile and social media games, casual games, and collaborative production games (see Montola, et al 2009).

The specific reasons for these shortfalls vary from context to context. In the media industry, for example, ARGs have largely been considered marketing tools, and as such have often not been sufficiently integrated into the development and production processes of the properties they promote, leading to disconnects between fans of the source material, ARG player communities, PMs, and producers. As writer Rich Silverman of the Transmedia LA message board (2010) puts it, "[it's] been my experience that an ARG component of a film or TV property comes to the game too late to be really effective . . . we need to start seeing these things baked into the development process of any show or film they're supporting." In educational and institutional contexts, ARGs are similarly marginalized, typically employed as orientation tools (Down 2008) or experimental promotions (Goodlander 2009), but rarely meshed with the core operations or mandates of their hosts.

It is unclear whether the persistent design problems that constrain or preclude the accessibility, replayability, and scalability of ARGs are the cause or the result of this marginalization. Nevertheless, making such a determination is probably less important than identifying what those core design problems are, and suggesting ways in which the form can evolve or adapt in order to correct them. In general, these problems center on three overlapping and relatively unchallenged aspects of traditional ARG design, namely: 1) that, despite the decidedly playful and improvisatory character of the relationship between puppet masters and players, ARGs are ultimately not game systems but rather vehicles for delivering story; 2) that ARGs treat their core audiences as monadic "collective detectives" rather than groups of living, breathing individuals; and, 3) that ARGs are linear, event-driven experiences.

Indeed, many of the problems associated with ARGs can be traced back to their status as temporally-bounded and sequentially-unfolding experiences. As Jim Stewartson of Fourth Wall Studios puts it, "[ARGs have historically been] essentially rock concerts. Very large, real-time, elaborate experiences that were really cool and really fun for the people who were involved with them" (Morris, et al 2009). This event-like design clearly eliminates any potential for replayability, and it exacts almost equally dire consequences on accessibility and scalability. In a typical ARG, players who don't have the time at the right time to dive into the game can find their experience spoiled by those who do. Even players with high levels of interest in the material and a strong desire to participate in the game's challenges can be reduced to lurking on message boards or merely following along with puppet master- or player-created story summaries if they don't have the time required to keep up with the more hard-core players. Consequently, the vast majority of the players of traditional ARGs aren't "players" at all, but are rather more like spectators, albeit very multi-modal ones:

Of the millions of people who 'experience' an ARG only tens of thousands actually play them, the rest read the texts created by players. Now, as I have stated many times before, this is a very interesting model of audience tiering and shows a preference for player-created narratives above producer-created ones (indeed, the desire for a linear narrative above a fragmented one)...but the large numbers often claimed . . . are not indicative of the people who actually play these forms. They are hardcore games that only a (relatively) small amount of players can actually play directly (due to skill, time and access obstacles). I don't see how a form with such accessibility issues is the ultimate form. (Dena 2007)

Dena (2008b), Montola (2009), and others have pointed out that this "pyramid of participation" enables transmedial designs wherein "different play modes contribute to each other and support an experience that is larger than its parts" (Montola, et al 2009, 121). In such an arrangement, spectators co-exist with variously-engaged players, with the hard-core participants effectively acting as "stars" of the game's narrative ; puppet masters and serious players document the actions of the hard core in real- or near-real-time; and the rest of the player base consumes this documentation serially. This kind of structure has been experimented with to varying degrees of success.

However, since this and other kinds of "tiering" (Dena 2008b) demand the production and management of numerous additional layers of game assets, they also represent some of the most expensive and labor-intensive solutions to the accessibility problem.

Another aspect of the accessibility problem emerges from of the manner in which ARG designers traditionally address their players. As Sean Stewart notes in an interview with members of The Cloudmakers (2001), "[the] premise from Day One was that the entire Internet should be considered as a single player; that we could put an ad in a newspaper in Osaka in the morning and have some kid in Iowa using that information by supper time."

That is, while individual players in an ARG are free to privately interact with characters or artifacts from the game, the puzzles and challenges are designed with such complexity that any information gathered from these interactions needs to be shared with and processed by a collective in order to be properly contextualized and rendered sensible in a timely fashion. While this design encourages the formation of collective intelligences, in the context of a time-based, event-driven, closed information system such as an ARG, it also somewhat counter-intuitively results in an increasing diminishment of the degree to which new players can easily access and enter into the activity.

That is, once a functioning "collective detective" (Cloudmakers 2001) has been established, it will tackle the challenges presented by the puppet masters with a self-refining efficiency that will largely discount the need for new members. Knowledge production structures populated by elite players with available time, an appropriate range of competencies, and relevant social capital will gather, process, and analyze data faster and more thoroughly than a non-integrated outsider ever could. Further, as the game progresses, prospective members without adequate reputation within the player community and in-depth knowledge of "the story so far" (see Dena 2008b, 41) will naturally find it increasingly difficult to find a role within the collective.

To illustrate this problem, consider the recent DARPA Network Challenge crowdsourcing experiment (2009). In this experiment, ten red weather balloons were placed in visible locations around the United States, and the public was challenged to find the balloons using any legal means whatsoever. Nine hours after the event commenced, all ten balloons had been found by a team from MIT (http://balloon.mit.edu/). In this instance, the team, which had conscripted around 5,400 balloon spotters via social media and various public entreaties (DARPA 2010), served its purpose and was quickly dissolved; but what if the DARPA Network Challenge had been only the first of many challenges in a long-term game - that is, if it was merely the opening puzzle of a three month long ARG. How would this emerging collective intelligence have evolved? Would it have become more broad-based like Wikipedia, exploring the diverse interests and passions of its user base, or would it have gravitated toward greater efficiencies, tighter working groups, task-oriented committees, and editorial sub-teams?

According to fieldwork conducted by McGonigal (2007), the latter is more likely: rather than becoming more inclusive or expansive, the group might in fact become increasingly specialized along particular "threads of investigation" tied to the core problems with which it was presented. After all, the puzzles in ARGs are ultimately very specific: unlike Wikipedia, which is almost completely open-ended, the knowledge production demanded by an ARG is focused on a particular story world and an associated set of puzzles with clearly-defined solutions - much like the narrow-but-complex balloon-finding task of the DARPA experiment. Further, since the puzzles in ARGs are often cumulative and informed by the solutions to earlier puzzles, those who were on board for the first discoveries - in this case, those who understood the methodology by which the original 5,400 balloon spotters were coordinated and the information they provided was processed - would arguably be more valuable and acceptable assets to the team than newcomers unaware of those practices and procedures. Somewhat ironically, then, this kind of collective intelligence design, when applied to closed information systems such as ARGs, has steeply diminishing returns when it comes to inclusivity and accessibility.

What all of these problems have in common is an origin in the "non-gameness" of ARGs. ARGs, despite their name, are not, in fact, games; rather, they are ergodic (Aarseth 1997) transmedia texts that, structurally speaking, are much more akin to scavenger hunts or group puzzle-solving activities like the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. Rarely in ARG design do we see the generativity, rulesets, and procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007) that characterize games.

This is fine; not everything has to be a game. But for an activity which so often aspires to take place on a massive scale, both in terms of content and participation, to not use game mechanics as a means of generating and managing interactivity is arguably a recipe for disaster. Indeed, much of ARG design is reminiscent of early experiments in electronic literature and interactive filmmaking which sought to create vast narratives via branching story trees: very quickly, artists who took this approach discovered that to do so meant writing or shooting orders of magnitude more material than the reader or viewer would ever see.

An interactive movie-game like Dragon's Lair (1983), for example, needed a total of 27 minutes of animation stored on custom-made laserdiscs to provide an interactive experience that lasted for a maximum of 6 minutes (The Dot Eaters 2007) - and even then, the gameplay consisted of little more than making a handful of left-or-right decisions about which direction the protagonist should move. Compare this outcome to an even older video game, Rogue (1980), a procedurally-generated dungeon-crawler that remains popular to this day. In Rogue, the virtual world is generated on the fly at runtime via an algorithm. Instead of devoting limited computational resources to storing and displaying pre-rendered content (as in Dragon's Lair), Rogue's programmers used a compact ruleset to create their gameworld, producing an expansive and endlessly replayable realm of fantasy adventure and tabletop RPG-style interactivity that would have been technically impossible to produce using pre-made dungeon scenarios given the limited storage resources of early 1980s home computers. Despite being made for free by hobbyist programmers, Rogue's parsimonious use of algorithms rather than branching content trees resulted in much more interactivity and depth than was presented three years later by Dragon's Lair's spectacular but simplistic left-or-right decision making interface. This is the real power of games: to create dynamic interactive experiences through rules rather than archives of pre-made content. As we shall see below, approaching ARG design from this perspective opens a range of new possibilities for producers.

Finally, because ARGs are so expensive and labor-intensive to maintain, media companies and institutions overwhelmingly abandon the communities they create once the putative purpose for their creation has been satisfied (McGonigal 2003; IGDA ARG SIG 2006). While this instrumental view of community may have short-term benefits to brands and creatives, and while many media companies are likely comfortable with the risk of "blowback" from disaffected ARG fans (especially since said fans will have long since served their purpose by the time their complaints come to the fore), in the long term, such a view effectively undermines one of alternate reality gaming's most important potentials for generating value: the creation and maintenance of strong, persistent communities.

Jeff Watson is an interdisciplinary media practitioner with a background in screenwriting, filmmaking, and game design. His doctoral research in Media arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts focuses on investigating how ubiquitous computing and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and civic engagement. For more insights from Jeff Watson, you can check out his website or follow his Twitter flow.

Civic Media: A Syllabus

Over the past few terms, I've been sharing here the syllabi of the new courses I am developing at the University of Southern California, courses which build upon my own research interests and are intended to open up space for students to pursue their own projects. In the fall, I am going to be teaching two classes, both graduate seminars -- Civic Media for the Journalism School and Medium Specificity for the Cinema School. I am sharing my Civic Media syllabus here and will share the Medium Specificity syllabus later this summer. I am sharing these in part in hopes they prove useful to other researchers and teachers and in part because I am hoping to help spread the word to USC students who might be interested in learning more on these topics. The Civic Media class is intended, as the syllabus suggests, as a nexus between Communications and Journalism students, but I also assume it may appeal to students in Political Science, History, Education, perhaps even some in Engineering or Computer Science who want to build tools for supporting civic engagement or activism. If you know of someone at USC who might be interested in this class, please pass the word. SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION & JOURNALISM

JOUR 599 Special Topics: Civic Media

Fall 2010

3 units

Schedule/Syllabus

Section: 21679D

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2-4:40 p.m.

Classroom: TBD

Professor: Henry Jenkins

Email: hjenkins@usc.edu

Office: ASC 101C

Office hours: By appointment.

Please contact Amanda Ford at: amanda.ford@usc.edu

Course Description and Outcomes:

"Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism...When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society,' the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works.' And what works today isn't the same as what used to work."-- Clay Shirky

Civic Media: any use of any technology for the purposes of increasing civic engagement and public participation, enabling the exchange of meaningful information, fostering social connectivity, constructing critical perspectives, insuring transparency and accountability, or strengthening citizen agency.

This class on "civic media" is designed to provide a meeting ground between those involved in the cultural study of communications and those invested in the study of journalism as we address a common concern with the current moment of media in transition. We will start our semester by considering a series of recent reports exploring the current state and predicting future directions for journalism, public media, and the information needs of communities. What we hope to develop along the way is a functional understanding of the roles journalism has performed in American society over the past 100 or so years. We see professional journalism as both communicating core data vital for informed citizenship and performing central rituals needed to sustain a democratic culture.

Often, we think about democracy as grounded in a rationalist discourse and shaped by structures of information, but democracy also has strong cultural roots and is shaped by what Raymond Williams would call "a structure of feeling." We may ask in the first instance what citizens need to know in order to make wise decisions and, in the second, what it feels like to be an empowered citizen capable of making a difference and sharing common interests with others. Across the trajectory of the course, we will explore a range of other institutions and practices that have similarly contributed to the public awareness, civic engagement, and social connectivity required for a functioning democracy.

Before we can decide where we are going, though, we need to know where we have been -- we will consider everything from broadsides and ballads to wax museums, "living newspapers," underground comics, photo-shopped collages, circus parades, town pageants, scrapbooks, and toy printing presses, in search of historical models of civic media. Just as newspapers are one form of journalism, journalism is one set of practices that help us to perform these functions.

Our expedition will be historical (looking at how these functions were performed in other times and places), theoretical (focusing on how different writers have conceived of civic engagement, public participation, and social capital), technological (understanding how the affordances and uses of different kinds of media enabled them to achieve one or another of these goals), and applied (seeking future models for how citizens, policy makers, and journalists might collaborate to better meet the informational and cultural needs of our times). We will also consider how new media practices may be altering our conception of democracy, government, citizenship, and community, seeking to better grasp what remains the same and what changes as we interact with each other via virtual worlds and social networks rather than in physical coffee houses and bowling allies.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Define key concepts, such as "public sphere," "counterpublic," "imagined communities," and "citizen journalism," which have run through debates about the civic functions of media
• Discuss how professional journalism fits within a larger realm of public and civic communications
• Identify key positions in current debates about the future of news
• Describe a range of different mechanisms through which civic functions have been performed across history
• Recognize alternative conceptions of the role of citizens and their relationship to civic information
• Analyze major shifts in American and global civic life manifesting through the rise of social networks, virtual worlds, and Web 2.0 practices

Grading and Assignments:

1. Students will contribute questions and comments to the class forum. (20 percent)

2. Students will elect one of the white papers we will have read for Week 2 of the class and write a short five-page response, focusing on the following two questions: What do you see as the strengths and the limits of their approach? What recommendations do you see as realistic and achievable? What obstacles would need to be overcome? (20 percent)

3. Students will develop a five-page report on a civic or activist organization they feel is making innovative use of civic media. (20 percent)

4. Students will develop a final project that applies the broad ideas of the course. This project might be a conventional academic essay, an experiment in new journalistic practice, or the prototype for a new civic media tool. Students should discuss their project with the instructor early in the semester so we can set an appropriate scale for this project. Students will be ready to give a 10-15 minute presentation on their project by the final weeks of the class. (40 percent)

Required Books:

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown V. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Peter Levine, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens. Tufts (2007).

Beth Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better,

Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful, Brookings Institution Press

(2009).

Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siecle Paris, University of California Press (1999).

Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That

Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, MIT Press (2007)

Rahaf Harfoush, Yes We Did: How Social Networks Built the Obama Brand, New Riders Press (2009).

Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, New Press (2007)

All other readings will be available through the class blackboard site.

Week 1: Introduction to Civic Media (Tuesday, August 24th)

James W. Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" and "Reconceiving 'Mass'

and 'Media,'" Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Benedict Anderson, "Introduction," "Cultural Roots," and "Census, Map, Museum,"

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006)

Robert Putnam, "Introduction: Thinking about Social Change in America," Bowling

Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Civic Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001)

Handout with quotations from John Milton, John Stuart Mills, Alexis DeTocqville, John

Dewey, Raymond Williams, Benjamin Barber.

Week 2: Does News Have a Future? (Tuesday, August 31st)

Paul Duguid, "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book" in Geoffrey Nunberg, The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)

Jessica Clark, "Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics" Center for Social Media

Tony Deifell, "The Big Thaw: Charting A New Course for Journalism" The Media

Consortium

Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities, "Informing

Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age,"

Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," March 13 2009

Week 3: Where Publics Gather (Tuesday, September 7th)

Nancy Frazier, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually

Existing Democracy," Social Text, 25-26, 1990

Tom Standage, "Coffee," A History of the World in 6 Glasses (New York: Walker, 2006)

Richard Butsch, "The Politics of Audiences in America," The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics and Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2007)

Mary L. Gray, "From Walmart to Websites: Out in Public," Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York: New York University Press, 2009)

Paul Starr, "The Opening of the Public Sphere, 1600-1860,"The Creation of Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic, 2005)

Handout with key passages from Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

Week 4: Why Media Matters (Tuesday, September 14th)

John Fiske, "Introduction" and "Technostruggles," Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" New Left Review 64, 1970, 13-36.

John Hartley, "The Frequencies of Public Writing: Tomb, Tome, and Time as

Technologies of the Public," in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn (eds.)

Democracy and New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Kirsten Drotner, "Media on the Move: Personalized Media and the Transformation of

Publicness," in Sonia Livingstone (ed.) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural

Engagement Matters for the Public (Bristol: Intellect, 2005).

Paula Petrik. "The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and

Adolescence, 1870-1886," in Elliot West and Paula Petrik (eds.) Small Worlds:

Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. (Kansas City: U of Kansas P, 1992)

Week 5: Rethinking the Informed Citizen (Tuesday, September 21st)

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown V. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Steve Classen, "Introduction", "Conclusion," Watching Jim Crow: The Struggle Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969, Durham: Duke University Press.

Michael Schudson, "Click Here for Democracy: A History and Critique of an

Information-Based Model of Citizenship," in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn

(eds.) Democracy and New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Cynthia Gibson, "Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement" The

Case Foundation

Week 6: The Future of Democracy (Tuesday, September 28th)

Peter Levine, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (Boston: Tufts, 2007)

Sonia Livingstone, "On the Relationship Between Audiences and Publics," and Daniel

Dayan, "Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics, Audiences and Publics," in Sonia Livingstone (ed.) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (London: Intellect, 2005)

Meira Levinson, "The Civic Empowerment Gap" Defining the Problem and Locating

Solutions," in Lonnie Sherrod, Constance Flanagan, and Judith Torney-Purta (eds.) Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth (Boston: John Wiley and Sons 2009)

Henry Jenkins, "A Person's A Person, No Matter How Small: The Democratic

Imagination of Doctor Seuss," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

Week 7: A Digital Revolution? (Tuesday, October 5th)

Anna Everett, "Digital Women: The Case of the Million Woman March Online and On

Television," Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009)

Roger Hurwitz, "Who Needs Politics? Who Needs People?: The Ironies of Democracy in

Cyberspace," in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn (eds.) Democracy and New

Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Cass Sunstein, "The Daily We: Is The Internet Really a Blessing for Democracy," and

Responses, The Boston Review, Summer 2001

Richard A. Ryerson, "Committees of Correspondence," The Revolution is Now Begun: the Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765-1776. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978)

Week 8: Collective Action (Tuesday, October 12th)

Beth Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better,

Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institute Press, 2009)

Yochai Benkler, "The Emergence of a Networked Public Sphere," The Wealth of

Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)

Warren Sack, "What Does a Very Large Scale Conversation Look Like?," Electronic Book Review, March 7 2005.

Jane McGonigel, "This Is Not A Game': Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play,"

Avant-Game,

Week 9: Civic Rituals (Tuesday, October 19th)

Victor Turner, "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative

Symbology," Rice University Studies 60(3), 53-92

Janet M. Davis, "Instruct the Minds of All Classes," The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Marie Ryan, "The American Parade: Representations of 19th Century Social Order,"

in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)

Paul Nadler, "Liberty Censored: Black Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre

Project," African American Review 29 (1995): 615-622

Lynn Hunt, "Pornography and the French Revolution," The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Zone, 1996)

Week 10: Spectacular Reality (Then and Now) (Tuesday, October 26th)

Vanessa R. Schwartz, "Setting the Stage: The Boulevard, the Press and the Framing of

Everyday Life," "Public Visits to the Morgue: Flanerie in the Service of the

State," "The Musee Grevin: Museum and Newspaper in One," Spectacular

Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siecle Paris (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999)

John Hartley, "Reality and the Plebisite," Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in

Popular Culture (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007)

Aswin Punathambekar, "Television, Participatory Culture, and Politics: the Case of

Indian Idol," Flow 10(5)

Pamela Wilson, "Jamming Big Brother USA: Webcasting, Audience Intervention and

Narrative Activism," in Ernest Mathis, Janet Jones (eds.) Big Brother International: Formats, Critics and Publics (London: Wallflower, 2004)

Marwan M. Kraidy, "A Battle of Nations: Superstar and the Lebanon-Syria Media War,"

Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Week 11: Democracy in Virtual Worlds (Tuesday, November 2nd)

Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That

Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009)

Ian Bogost, "Digital Democracy," Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of

Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007)

Joe Kahne, Ellen Middaugh and Chris Evans, The Civic Potential of Video Games (MacArthur Foundation, 2009)

Week 12: Surviving Disasters (Tuesday, November 9th)

Eric Klinenberg, "In the Public Interest," Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control

America's Media (New York: Holt, 2008)

George Lipsitz, "Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism

and Competitive Consumer Citizenship," Cultural Anthropology 21(3), August 2006

Elaine Scarry, "Who Defended The Country?," in Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin

(eds.) Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)

Henry Jenkins, "Captain America Shed His Mighty Tears", in Daniel J. Sherman and

Terry Nardin (eds.) Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)

Huma Yusuf, "Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March

2007-February 2008)," Center for Future Civic Media

Week 13: Social Networks and Participatory Culture (Tuesday, November 16th)

Andrew Kohut, "Social Networking and Online Videos Take Off: Internet's Broader

Role in Campaign 2008," Pew Internet and American Life Project

Rahaf Harfoush, Yes We Did: How Social Networks Built the Obama Brand (San Francisco: New Riders Press, 2009)

Ellen Gruber Garvey, "Scissoring and Scrapbooks: 19th Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating" in Lisa Gitelman (ed.) New Media, 1740-1915 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004)

Week 14: Politics, Fantasy and Parody (Tuesday, November 23rd)

Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007)

Henry Jenkins, "Photoshop for Democracy" and "Why Mitt Romney Won't Debate a

Snowman," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New

York: New York University Press, 2006)

Henry Jenkins, "How Dumbledore's Army Is Changing the Real World: An Interview

with Andrew Slack," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 23 2009,

Week 15: Final Presentations (Tuesday, November 30th)

LAST DAY OF CLASS

The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part Three)

Science fiction media offers us a chance to envision the future of news. What images have surfaced there most frequently?

Journalists of the future apparently have the same problems as journalists in the past. In a TV Sci-Fi series called Dark Angel, created by Jim Cameron in 2000, a journalist, crippled by the enemy, broadcasts news and revolutionary information by hacking into government television. He is a traditional hero in the future. So are Max Headroom and the TV staff around him. They are working in a corrupt system trying to do the best job they can at informing the public. Almost every journalist in science fiction faces the same problems journalists have faced throughout history. The technology is different. The villains can even be aliens. But the problems are the same and the way the journalist faces the problems hasn't changed in 2,000 years. Often, these sci-fi journalists will risk their lives and may even get killed to make sure the public is informed.

In the 1950s, journalists were used in countless sci-fi films (many real-life journalists performing in the movies just as they performed in real life on radio or TV) to give the films more credibility. In the early 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy played on the postwar fear of communism to stage a witch hunt in Hollywood that destroyed many careers and left a legacy of fear that would last for more than a decade.

It diminished the motion picture industry's enthusiasm for making movies about corrupt

politicians and powerful businessmen. And it created an unquestioning, passive reporter who shows up in one science fiction film after another. These reporters always work with the authorities, and worry less about scoops and informing the public. These reporters are more interested in working with the military and the government to extinguish the man-made or outer space threat, than in the people's right to know. These reporters are good Americans first, journalists second and they never question the government's ultimate authority to do the right thing.

You recently put together a case study of representations of "gay journalists." What did you find?

It turns out that gay journalists are pretty much the same as other journalists except for their sexual preferences, which take up a good deal of screen time. In analyzing more than 125 films and TV programs, we discovered that the gay journalist is often ridiculed and used as a comic figure whose stereotypical gay characteristics are a source of either derision or buffoonery. The majority of serious gay journalists in most of the 20th century are usually bitchy columnists or bitter critics whose devastating one-liners can reduce anyone to tears or anger. They have great power, but usually by the last reel are defeated or even murdered. The same is true with reporters overly concerned about doing their job well and less about the perception around them that they are gay.

By the late 1980s, being gay was often acknowledged in one way or another. Many plots involved the growing AIDS epidemic or the problem of being outed as a gay or the problems of being gay in any society. Interestingly enough, most of the sensitive portrayals of gays in the cinema involve films made outside the United States. With the exception of India, whose stereotypes of gay characters seem to be a staple of Bollywood, films made in France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Egypt, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, and the United Kingdom are extremely sensitive and moving portrayals of both male and female gay characters.

As the 20th century came to a close and continuing in the 21st century, gay journalists are accepted as being gay and often their gayness figures prominently in the plot. For some reason, 1997 turned out to be a seminal year previewing the next century's portrayal of gays. Rupert Everett's gay British editor in My Best Friend's Wedding and Tom Selleck's tabloid reporter in In & Out were characters the audiences accepted with affection. But even as film after film featured fully realized gay characters, the ridicule of stereotypical gay characteristics continued in films as recently as He's Just Not That Into You in 2009.

Surprisingly, television programs featuring gay journalists provided far more sensitive portrayals of gay characters. Individual episodes of Night Court, Murphy Brown, Queer as Folk, Dirt, Veronica Mars and The Nanny, and continuing characters in such shows as Ugly Betty, Frasier, Da Ali G and The L Word showed gay journalists who were not afraid or embarrassed to be gay. And the gay journalist in The L Word even gets her own series in 2010.

The gay journalist turns up in all forms of film genres, including horror films, action films, sci-fi and supernatural films, detective films, cartoons and comedies. There's a Ph.D. thesis to be written on the image of the journalist in soft and hard-core adult films and the image of the gay journalist is no exception. All of the stereotypes associated with gays and journalists can be found in soft-core or hard-core pornography featuring gay journalists.

It can also be concluded that lesbians are generally treated more favorably in films and TV than gay men. With the exception of the female who displays male characteristics and is constantly ridiculed and assaulted in films, lesbians with feminine characteristics are among the most favorable images of gay journalists in films and TV.

Some of the more serious films dealing with gays show the influence of parental approval or disapproval on the gay journalist. It is easier for the female to win approval of her lifestyle than the male. Often the male gay journalist is an outcast not only to his family, but also to his fellow workers.

Public relations practitioners display all the characteristics of the image of the public relations practitioners as well as the image of the gay journalist in popular culture. They exhibit all of the stereotypical gay characteristics, they can be ruthless in their pursuit of power, and they often are accepted as being gay and frequently their gayness figures in the plot.

The image of the gay journalist in films and TV is a varied collection of males and females whose sexuality is a primary factor in the plot and character development. They often have close friends of the opposite gender, they exhibit bright minds and devastating one-liners, they seem to be always looking for that significant other and seldom finding him or her, and many seem to have an enormous reservoir of understanding for people who don't get the concept of being gay. More often than not, they appear in comedies. When they appear in dramas, it is usually heavy going involving prejudice, illness and sometimes violence. Gay journalists seem to fare better than other gay characters, possibly because of their sense of humor, their wit and ability to lose themselves in the stories they are working on.

Citizen Kane, the film many consider to be the greatest American movie, deals with a journalist. Is its depiction of the press part of what has made it such an enduring and influential film?

I don't think the fact that Kane was a publisher and surrounded himself with journalists, especially in the early part of the film (which has delightful newspaper sequences), had much to do with making it an enduring and influential film.

The newspaper part came mostly out of Herman Mankiewicz's mind. He was a newspaperman who had written other newspaper films, hated William Randolph Hearst, knew much of the gossip around him because of his friendship with Marian Davies and put practically all of it into the film. It was that part of the film that almost destroyed it.

But Citizen Kane is considered one of the greatest American movies primarily because of its brilliant use of sound, deep focus camera work, and brilliant acting and writing. Nothing like it was ever seen before it appeared on the screen. It was original and daring in its use of audio and video. That is the real secret of its greatness, not its rather coarse story of a publisher who in strategic parts of the film resembled Hearst (the inside joke concerning "Rosebud" will live in infamy).

Is the newspaper film a genre or should we be focusing on the diverse roles journalists play across a range of genres?

Journalists show up in every kind of film ever made. But there is a definite news media film genre. Richard Ness' monumental filmography demonstrates this conclusively. Although the IJPC Database chronicles any journalist in any part of popular culture - even when the journalist shows up for a page or two in a novel, or a scene or two in a movie or TV or radio program - the journalist is a key protagonist enough of the time to warrant its own genre.

The word journalist dates back to 1693 and is defined as someone who makes a living by editing or writing for a public journal or journals. In modern times, the journalist has grown to mean much more than someone simply involved in the production of printed journals. It has become a synonym for reporting in any news media. The IJPC defines journalist as anyone in any century who performs the function of the journalist - to gather and disseminate news and information, to report, to observe, to investigate, to criticize, to inform. The body of film and novels that include this kind of journalist is huge.

Do you see significant differences in the ways journalists are portrayed in films coming from countries which do not have the same tradition of a free press as the United States?

The IJPC Database has more than 2,600 films from other countries that have a journalist in them. Most of the images resemble those of American films. The journalist in any country seems to be depicted in much the same way - either as a hero righting a wrong or the last one standing up for freedom of speech and press, or a villain in cohorts with the government in power.

Many of the problems American journalists face in popular culture are the same as those journalists in foreign films and novels. The concept of a free press and the importance of a free press is a popular theme in most foreign films, even those in which a free press is more of an ideal than a reality. And one Italian film gave us the concept of paparazzi (La Dolce Vita).

About 30 percent of the IJPC Associates are outside the United States. There is great interest in the image of the journalist in American films and TV programs outside of this country. And many of these films and TV programs have had a tremendous influence on the image of the journalist in various non-English speaking films.

In less serious films, the journalist is depicted as an object of humor, and the tabloid press worldwide is the subject of ridicule and sharp satire. Especially in the films labeled Bollywood, many feature a journalist as comic.

Your data base includes many comics. Why do you think the journalist became so centrally linked to the superhero genre?

A reporter is an obvious disguise for a superhero because it puts the superhero right in the thick of the news and gives him or her an opportunity to know what is going on in the city, the country and the world. Also, journalists are always where the news happens so it is also a good cover for a superhero to be where the action is. It is no surprise that the most enduring image of the journalist is the Daily Planet family - Clark Kent (Superman), Lois Lane, Perry White and Jimmy Olsen.

Since they appeared in comic books in 1939-1940, they have not changed at all throughout the last 70 years. They may have been modernized (at one point in the comic books Kent becomes a TV reporter, and in current comic book issues, the Daily Planet is suffering cutbacks and the Internet revolution), but at the heart of it all Kent is still the hard-working reporter who believes in accuracy and fairness, Lois Lane is still the 1940s sob sister more interested in getting the story first than anything else, Perry White is still the gruff editor out of any 1930-1940 film, and Jimmy Olsen, the aspiring cub reporter and later photojournalist is still out to make a name for himself and always following in Kent-Lane's footsteps.

It doesn't matter whether it is the original comic books, the radio show, the early cartoons based on the radio show, the movie serials, the four Superman films, the Lois & Clark TV series, the many TV cartoon versions throughout the years or the brilliant reimagining of the Superman-Clark Kent myth on Smallville, the Daily Planet staff always remains the same - probably the most enduring positive images of the journalist in modern history.

It's no coincidence that the most enduring superheroes - Superman, Spider-man, The Question (TV Reporter Vic Sage), Tabloid Vampire Reporter Becky Burdock, Vulcan (Reporter Johnny Mann), The Megaton Man (Reporter Trent Phloog), The Creeper (Tabloid Columnist-Investigative Reporter Jack Ryder) - are journalists or have journalists around them, superhero partners or rivals - Reporter Lois Lane, Photojournalist Jimmy Olsen, Editor-Reporter Joseph "Robbie" Robertson, Reporter Ben Ulrich, TV Reporter Sweet Polly Purebred, TV Reporter April O'Neil, Magazine Reporter Natsuko Shouno, Reporter Pamela Jointly, Tabloid Reporter Anne-Marie Brogan, Reporter Tully Reed.

The journalist is a good partner, someone who, like a Dr. Watson, is a friend to the superhero and recounts many of the hero's adventures. Also, the audience easily identifies with a journalist, expects that journalist to ask questions and demand answers and is at ease when the journalist narrates the story. For that reason alone, the journalist is often thrown into films and novels simply to be a natural way to give exposition, continuity and reality to a fictional story.

What does the future hold for IJPC? What are your goals for IJPC?

The future, I think, is very bright. Last year, we published the first edition of our peer-reviewed The IJPC Journal giving the field its own academic publication. We hope to have the second volume out by fall, 2010. Now the IJPC Database is updated daily and is available to scholars, students, researches, professionals and anyone else interested in the subject on a daily basis and this should encourage interest in the field.

Our goals are to increase academic scholarship in the field and to publish in areas never before explored. Most of the publication in this field involves movies and some novels. We hope to expand the scholarship to every facet of popular culture.

The IJPC also produces invaluable video compilations filled with images that have never been seen in one place. We have produced seven volumes to date:

• Hollywood Looks at the News: 1925-2007, a one-hour-and-49-minute compilation with 165 movie and TV clips
• Sob Sisters: The Image of the Female Journalist, 1929-2007, a two-hour-and-41 minute video with more than 136 movie and TV clips
• The Image of the Broadcast Journalist in Movies and Television, 1931-2006, a two-hour-and-48-minute compilation with 200 movies and TV clips
• Real-Life Journalists in Movies and Television, 1939-2006, a two-hour-and-13 minute compilation with 79 movie and TV clips
• The Image of the War Correspondent in Movies and Television, 1931 to 2007, a two-disc, 225-minute compilation with 166 movies and TV clips
• The Image of the Gay Journalist in Movies and Television, 1929 to 2009, a three-disc, four-hour and-42 minute compilation with 123 movie and TV clips
• Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies, a 110-minute compilation.

Anyone wanting a copy simply has to join the IJPC Associates (information at the IJPC Website).

Today, more than two dozen universities offer courses in the subject and many use IJPC materials and video compilations in those classes or in other classes on journalism and the news media. I think the IJPC Database going online will expand the use of the IJPC in classrooms around the world.

We also hope to do two national surveys - one exploring how the images of the journalist in films, television and fiction influence the public, and another exploring how the images of the journalist in film, television and fiction have affected and influenced those who work in the media. Most of what we know about the influence of the images of the journalist on popular culture is anecdotal. We need a scientific survey to give us solid evidence that what we have surmised is true.

I know I became a journalist because of Clark Kent and Hildy Johnson (of The Front Page). Most every journalist I know was influenced by similar images - Lois Lane and Brenda Starr were inspirations for many female journalists throughout the latter part of the 20th century. And whenever I talk to someone who hates the media, they usually reference a movie or TV program that lives up to their worst expectations. There is no question in my mind that the image of the journalist in popular culture has a tremendous influence on the public's perception of its news media. And that's why I have spent so much time documenting the IJPC and try to encourage other academics to write on this extraordinary subject. And there's another reason to explore the IJPC. As one of my colleagues put it, "It's just a lot of fun to do."

Joe Saltzman, the director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) and the author of Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film, is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.

He received his B.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California and his M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. After working for several years as a newspaper reporter and editor, Saltzman joined CBS television in Los Angeles in 1964 and for the next ten years produced documentaries, news magazine shows, and daily news shows, winning more than fifty awards, including the Columbia University-duPont broadcast journalism award (the broadcasting equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), four Emmys, four Golden Mikes, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a Silver Gavel, and one of the first NAACP Image Awards.