February 04, 2011

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part Three)

February 04, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Let me ask the painfully obvious one first just to get it out of the way. Many of those who dismiss YouTube and other video sharing platforms as exhibitionistic are probably visualizing something like the classic video blog. How have these charges been confronted within the videoblogging community?

In the beginning, a majority of the videos being shared were people talking into the camera, or showing a day in their life, so there were a few critics who called videoblogging narcisistic, self centered and boring. Basically 'Who wants to see that?'. The reaction the community had was two fold. First of all, we wanted to see that, so that's what we were making for each other. And we challenged anyone who didn't want to see that, to make something else. If you have a camera and an idea, make it happen. There were no limits to what you could make. The best defense to criticism of any online media is the choice not to watch or participate. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it. It's really that simple. To take that a step further, maybe it will even inspire you to make something that you think is better. In fact, that's why a lot of us started- because several had been television producers and editors and wanted to make something different.

What has been the response within the videoblog community to projects such as Lonelygirl15 which have sought to imitate the visual rhetoric of the videoblog in order to create "fake" or fictional materials?

The initial reaction to Lonelygirl15 within the community was fear that a wider audience would now question the authenticity of our videos as well. It was the first project that really called into question wether what we were saying was real or not. Several of us were trying very deliberately not to be produced or written like a television show, but to simply share genuine, personal and creative moments. Eventually the buzz about the Lonleygirl project died down and they moved onto to more obviously fictional interactive project but the fear of having your genuine voice questioned was a real one that has stuck with a lot of creators.

As you've emphasized here, these video blogs are part of an ongoing regular series of communications. To what degree can they be viewed and understood outside of the sequence of their original production?

The context of the videos could never be fully controlled on the web, that's true now more than ever with videos being shared on facebook, twitter, etc.

A lot of the original videos from 2004 were part of a series of conversations, but could be viewed as their own individual moments as well. I feel like the videos we made back then weren't meant to be as portable as they are now, but we didn't have video on phones or wifi on planes then either. A lot of us have moved from strictly editing video for a blog and distributed through RSS to shooting moments on our iPhones, emailing to flickr and automatically posting to Twitter.

You also suggest that these videoblogs constitute a system of communication between multiple people who have gotten to know each other as friends. Does this suggest something significant is lost when we view the work of one videoblogger without looking at others with whom they are communicating?

This was more true in 2004-2005. There is so much video online right now, it really depends on what you're watching. I find that some communities online are very exclusive and are often making videos for very specific people, maybe mentioning them by name and referring to previous conversations. But there are so many micro-communities happening at this point, that it's truly like the wild west. Watching a section of a conversation could mean just as much to you as the people it was intended for. That's why I love video on the web. Everyone has their own interpretation of the importance or coolness of one single video. If you want to trace the conversation back to it's beginnings, most likely, you can. If you just want to enjoy one piece or one part of a meme, you can do that too.

How has the videoblog changed with the rise of a range of other social media, which also allow for and support these communications within a community?

As I've mentioned before, for me personally, Twitter changed the way I videoblogged dramatically. I felt i could share ideas and have conversations more quickly and fluidly, whereas on my videoblog, it would take a lot more time and effort. With the introduction of video on the iPhone and video hosting on places like Flickr and Facebook, several videobloggers have all but abandoned their blogs for the instant gratification of shooting to sharing in the same 5 minutes. This is not to say that creators have forgotten about making more complex content. Using these tools to sketch and have conversations and collaborations has opened up the flood gates of creativity, in my opinion. Making ideas flow faster and further breaking down the barriers to media access is nothing but good for everyone- creators and participants alike.

You suggest that the videoblog is becoming more visually sophisticated as some veterans have sought to move beyond to face in camera approach. As this happens, are they looking towards other kinds of media production for inspiration in how to create more experimental modes of expression?

A lot of us were media producers before we were videobloggers. And every one of us has been influenced by television and films since birth. As the tools get smaller, cheaper and the quality gets higher, people expand what they feel they are capable of. I have a small, DSLR HD camera with a relatively inexpensive lens and mic. I have seen, in the last 6 months, several independent films and a couple TV shows shot with almost the same equipment. If you have the idea and the gumption, the distribution exists, there should be nothing stopping you from making something just as compelling and creative as what comes out of Hollywood.

Ryanne Hodson (RyanEdit.com, RyanIsHungry.com) co-author of the first published vlogging book, The Secrets of Videoblogging, started her career as a video editor at WGBH PBS Boston and in Boston public access television. From Bangkok to Delhi, Amsterdam to San Francisco, Ryanne has taught diverse audiences the hows and whys of videoblogging. With partner Jay Dedman, she produces RyanIsHungry.com featuring stories of individuals hacking everyday life and exchanging notes on survival.

February 02, 2011

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part Two)

February 02, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

As several videobloggers, myself included, have celebrated their 5th and 6th anniversaries of publishing video work online, we find ourselves wanting to show more than just our talking heads. With the creation of Twitter and Facebook, many of us have been able to stay personally connected on a daily basis, sharing what we used to share through our videoblogs. The need to create deeper and more artistic narratives has begun to shine through. Here are some of my favorites.

Wreck and Salvage- Shirts Get Dirty

talkbot.tv- Ep. 04 Lady Time

Mary Matthews- REM 30

Jennifer Proctor- Grand Rapids in Miniature

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman- Beijing, China: August 2008

Kerry Brogen- Seeing

Jay Dedman- Sure

Robert Croma- Night Impromptu

January 30, 2011

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part One)

January 30, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

This is the sixth in 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 is a curatorial statement by Ryanne Hodson, author of The Secrets of Videoblogging. Videoblogging emerged as the bandwidth hogging stepchild of podcasting or 'audio blogging' in early 2004, a little over a year before YouTube. We can put media files in a blog and have it delivered right to people's computers as we update? This is it! This is what we as artists, filmmakers, cable access producers, frustrated television editors and moms and dads with camcorders have been looking for for so long. The big D, Distribution. We have all these ideas floating in our heads, now we can get them out and share them with no gatekeepers or higher ups telling us it's not 'broadcast quality' or 'green light worthy'. We're "making stuff up and...putting it on the internet, and you can't do shit about that " (Michael Verdi, Vlog Anarchy).

Technical note: In the beginning, videos were uploaded in the Quicktime format and not easily embeddable/sharable on other blogs like Flash (and soon the HTML5 video tag) is now, so I'm linking to the original blog posts for viewing. My second round of videos will be embedded for your viewing ease.

First Mantra- Kicked To The Head- Daniel Liss- 11/25/2005

there are so many kinds of videos to choose from made by videobloggers since 2004. For the first 24/7 DIY Video Summit in 2008 I chose a selection based on personal connections.

Excited- RyanEdit- Ryanne Hodson- 12/01/2004

Many of these people have become my close friends and collaborators over the past 5 years.

Vlog Anarchy- Michael Verdi- 2/20/2005

I've slept on their couches, I've played with their kids, I'm about to get married to one of them.

Became A Nurse- Miss B Havens- 3/10/2006

Videoblogging can be anything the creator wants it to be. Some say it's just simply video on a blog, or even broader, just video online.

This Cheese Sandwich- The Faux Press- Jan McLaughlin-7/17/2006

Most of us were video makers before we were bloggers.

Private Screening- Scratch Video- Charlene Rule- 2005

Blogging was just a way to distribute our creations free and wide- whether it was a conversation, a documentary, a political statement, a home movie or just a tiny moment that was recorded.

Mad As Hell- Twittervlog- Rupert Howe- 7/13/2007

These are people whose work from 2004-2007 inspired and changed me. All of them are still active videobloggers. Some, including myself, have morphed their methods to include more instant videoblogging through iPhones, flickr, Facebook and Twitter- our ideas scattered throughout the web.

Hand Carved Tusk- Hopper Video- Rob Parrish- 6/10/2006

For the most recent 24/7 DIY Video event, I explored these creators' evolution into more experimental endeavors. I will be sharing these in my next installment. Enjoy!

The End- Twittervlog- Rupert Howe- 6/11/2007

January 21, 2011

A New Culture of Learning: An Interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas (Part Two)

January 21, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

You describe educators in the new culture of learning as mentors, rather than teachers. Can you explain the difference between the two?

The key difference for us is that in the new culture of learning mentors are very likely to be peers who may have picked up something a little ahead of the curve or who may have more experience in something than their peers. Mentorship is a much more flexible concept and one which is tied less tightly to authority. Since so much of what we see as the key to future learning is passion-based, we think it makes more sense to understand the process of learning as something that can be guided by a mentor, as opposed to being taught by a teacher. No one can teach you to follow your passions, but they can help guide you once you discover what motivates you.

You write about learning collectives. Often, when I try to describe this concept, I run up against the deeply embedded tradition of individualism, which has made all forms of collective sound, well, "socialist." Have you found effective ways of responding to American's ideological revulsion against collective identities and experiences?

Collectives, as we use the term, have nothing to do with the politics or economics of socialism. Instead what we are trying to capture is the formation of new institutional structures that are radically different from more traditional notions of community. Collectives are literally collections of people who form around a central platform. What is interesting is that collectives tend to promote individual agency and may actually be more consistent with individualism than they are with even community based theories of social interaction. Collectives, as we use the term, are actually institutions that enable and enhance individual agency. And because the costs of entry and exit are usually negligible, they tend to have much less persistence than more traditional institutions have had in the past and hence they don't outlive their usefulness as the world changes around them.

One of the key contrasts we need to draw is between notions of communities and collectives. Communities are institutions that are designed to facilitate a sense of belonging. Collectives are institutions that facilitate individual agency. Anyone who joins a collective looking for a sense of belonging is going to wind up disappointed, because that is not how they function. Collective are more social platforms than social entities. Communities may form within a collective, but they need not form in order for the collective to function. The key point is that because collectives are agency driven, they form the perfect environment for the cultivation of imagination. In other words, the collective amplifies what I can do by tapping its collective experience.

In that sense "collective identity" is something of an oxymoron. Collectives are spaces in which individual identity is critically important. It makes no sense to talk about the "Facebook community" or the "Google community" because people are using those platforms in such incredibly different ways. Yet at the same time, Facebook and Google have become such common and shared practices that they are almost regarded as part of the fabric of online life. No one goes to Google for a sense of belonging, yet there is no denying it has had a powerful, even transformative, social effect. Our book is an argument for these collectives as environments where the cultivation of imagination is possible like it never has been before. But we are also very careful to say it is not just a matter of exposure. Cultivation is a purposeful act, not something that just happens as a result of exposure or access, but what we are discussing may also be a new sense of cultivation, one where the collective itself is committed to making the individual better.

You draw on the concept of "concerted cultivation" or what others called the "hidden curriculum" to explain why what happens outside of schools has a powerful influence on young people's performance in the classroom. To what degree does it make sense to extend this well established educational principle to think about the informal learning which takes place online? Isn't part of the point the alignment of the values in a middle class home and the classroom? Would this principle work only if schools were ready to embrace the values of the online world? Yet, elsewhere, you suggest some core conflicts between the two.

This goes back to the core thesis of the book. What we were able to identify were two radically different learning environments, one which was overly structured (such as the contemporary classroom) where boundaries are put in place to actually discourage play, experimentation and real inquiry based learning. The other environment is completely unbounded and unlimited, best represented by the information explosion on the Internet. Absent some sort of structure or boundaries, learning is not any more likely to happen in an unrestricted space than it is in a tightly controlled one. What we see happening in the most successful learning environments is a fusion of these two ideals. Like a petri dish, the best learning environments have boundaries which control and limit them, but within those boundaries permit almost unrestricted growth, experimentation and play. Neither innovation nor learning can happen in a vacuum and we have seen time and again that it is the constraints that students face that provide the opportunity for really innovative learning to happen.

The core conflict is a matter of mentality. Our schools believe that teaching more, faster, with better technology is preparing our students for the 21st century. Their answer to dealing with change is to keep doing the same thing faster. To our way of thinking, this is like trying to fix a leaky bucket by pouring more water in it. We do think there needs to be more of an alignment on both sides. We hear over and over again how our schools are broken. That metaphor only works if you treat them as machines. When you think of schools as learning environments, it no longer makes sense to say the environment is "broken." What we hope this book does is, like the work on concerted cultivation, help people see that the line between schools and the world or the world place and daily life is illusory. Learning is happening everywhere, all the time.

This brings us back to imagination and the last line of the book: Where imaginations play, learning happens.

As you note, people not only learn in "different ways" but they also learn "different things" when confronting the same information. Yet, doesn't this insight run against the current culture of schooling with its emphasis on standardized testing? How can we as a culture work past this contradiction between our understanding of learning and our policies for measuring classroom success?

What no one seems to pick up on is that innovation by its very nature runs counter to the idea of standardization. Something is innovative because it is outside of the standard. If we are serious about learning and embracing change in the 21st century, we need to also start thinking about evaluating learning in more sophisticated ways. Standardized testing is easy. It is also efficient. Again, these are the standards that we use to judge machinery. But we should be surprised when our students who go through the machine end up emerging looking like cogs.

Another key distinction we are trying to make is to understand the difference between creativity and imagination, two terms that are often used interchangeably. Creativity is a much later stage and something that can not be taught. It is the product of a fertile imagination. Imagination, on the other hand, is something that can be cultivated in response to a learning environment. Much of what we found in our research was that there is no creativity without imagination and that imagination, the true life of the mind, is something that is not given much (if any) space in classrooms or workplaces. Part of why we think collectives are such powerful environments for learning is that they stimulate imagination by encouraging activities like play, experimentation, and inquiry.

You describe inquiry as a core principle of the new culture of learning. In true inquiry, we follow our interests where-ever they lead us. Is true inquiry possible within the current structure of disciplines which shape our schooling practices?

Is it possible within the current structure? Probably not. What this book is pointing to is the need for a complete overhaul in our educational philosophy. Our schools are training people for the jobs of the 20th (and sometimes 19th !) century. Inquiry is not a new idea. Is was a core principle of Plato's academy and it was the cornerstone of John Dewey's education philosophy. Until now, however, it has not really been possible on a large scale. We now possess a technological infrastructure which makes it possible to engage in inquiry and to truly follow our interests. But at the same time, we believe there need for some constraints or boundaries on how far and in what direction those interests go. In large part, the role of the teacher needs to shift from transferring information to shaping, constructing, and overseeing learning environments. We take the idea of cultivation very seriously. You don't teach imagination; you create an environment in which it can take root, grow and flourish.

How do we understand the value of diversity in this new culture of learning? Do learning networks work better if they include homogenous mixes of people pursuing the same goals or heterogeneous groups pursuing different interests? To what degrees are our current schooling practices a product of a historically segregated culture?

This is a great question that we don't get to go into much in the book. The thing that makes learning different in the 21st century from any other time in the past is the diversity of information, knowledge, experience, and interaction that is available to us in the digital age. This new culture of learning only works if it can be fed by an enormous influx of constantly updated information. It is driven by change, so it is a way of looking at the world that is maladjusted to homogeny. In the theory of inquiry we spell out, we talk repeatedly about the questions being more important than the answers and the idea that solutions to one problem are gateways to dealing with increasingly more sophisticated problems and deeper questions. People in learning environments are inherently curious. Diversity is not only a value; we would say it is the key ingredient in formulating a new culture of learning in the 21st century.

What do you see as the value of remixing as a means of learning? Many teachers confuse remix culture with plagiarism, which they have been taught to prevent at all costs. How can you help educators resolve these competing understanding of what it means to build on the work of others?

The crux of the issue is one of content versus context. Plagiarism is the intentional misrepresentation of someone else's ideas as your own; it is about content. Remix is an effort to fundamentally transform meaning by shifting or altering the context. The idea of making meaning through context is a relatively new one, because it is only recently that we have had the technological tools available to us to reshape contexts and then disseminate that information on a large scale.

What we have had, however, are things like parody, social satire, and commentary, all of which rely on very similar mechanisms to make arguments about meaning. Once you start thinking of remix as reshaping context rather than content creation, it becomes much easier to understand both its power and it utility. Of course as an added benefit, the easier it is for the average user to manipulate context, the more transparent the tradition of mainstream media doing the same thing becomes. There are countless examples of editing, tight focus, perspective and so on which have radically remade the meaning of events and have reshaped national and international perspectives.

You talk about learning, making, and playing as the core mindsets that support education. Despite a decade now of work on games for learning, many will be surprised to see "playing" on this list, in part because our schools are shaped by a puritan work ethic which distrusts play as frivolous. What would need to change for formal education to fully grasp and embrace the value of play?

There are two critical things to realize. First, play is not trivial, frivolous or non-serious, in fact, quite the opposite. Play can be the place where we do our most serious learning. And second, it is something we do all the time. When we explore, we play. When we experiment, we play. When we tinker or fiddle, we play. Science is play. Art is play. Life, to a great extent, is play. Every great invention of the past hundred years has had an element of play in its creation. So we are using the word in a very deep and serious way. A big influence on our work was Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens, which goes so far as to make the argument that culture grew out of play, not the other way around. So, from Huizinga's perspective play is the most basic and most human part of us.

When education became more "mechanized" it began to lose that sense of play. After all, who wants "play" in their machinery? Play is not precise or efficient; it is messy. But play also exemplifies what we think of as the ideal learning environment. Play is defined by a set of rules which form a bounded environment. But within those rules players have as much freedom as they like to create, innovate and experiment. Just think of all the amazing athletic feats that have emerged from a game like soccer, simply from the rule "you may not touch the ball with your hands." It is that boundary that sets off an incredible set of innovations and ideas and in doing so, forms an extremely rich learning environment.

Those same principles can be applied to any environment that values learning and we believe that if we follow those ideas, we will see a revolution in education that will create a new generation of explorers, innovators, and people who understand both the ways to and value of embracing change.

Douglas Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research focuses on the intersections of technology and culture. It has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center for Communication. Doug is also the author of the book Hacker Culture and a coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies and Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age. He is the founding editor of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, an international, interdisciplinary journal focused on games research.

John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar and an adviser to the provost at the University of Southern California and an independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He is an author or a coauthor of several books, including The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion; The Only Sustainable Edge; and The Social Life of Information, which has been translated into nine languages. He has also authored or coauthored more than 100 papers in scientific journals.

Prior to his current position, John was the chief scientist of Xerox and, for nearly two decades, the director of the company's Palo Alto Research Center. He was also a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

January 19, 2011

A New Culture of Learning: An Interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas (Part One)

January 19, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

It is my privilege and pleasure from time to time to showcase through this blog new books by important thinkers who are exploring the relations between digital media and learning, concerns which have become more and more central through the years to my own interests in participatory culture. Today, I want to call attention to a significant new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, written by two of my new colleagues at the University of Southern California -- Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. Asked to write a blurb for this book, here's what I had to say:

A New Culture of Learning may be for the Digital Media and Learning movement what Thomas Paine's Common Sense provided for the American Revolution -- a straight forward, direct explanation of what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against. John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas lay out a step by step argument for why learning is changing in the 21st century and what schools need to do to accommodate these new practices. Using vivid narratives of people, institutions, and practices at the heart of the changes and drawing from a growing body of literature outlining new pedagogical paradigms, they place the terms of the argument in language which should be accessible to lay readers, offering a book you can give to the educator in your life who wants to become an agent of change. My hope is that our schools will soon embrace the book's emphasis on knowing, making, and playing.

This book really is a gift, one which arrived too late for the Christmas season, but just in time for the start of the new semester. I know that I will be drawing on its insights to shape my own New Media Literacies grad seminar this term and to inform the new afterschool program we are launching at the RFK Schools here in Los Angeles. I admire it for both its clarity of vision and clarity of prose, not a common combination. In the interview which follows, I play devil's advocate, challenging some of the core premises of the book, with the goal of addressing critics and skeptics who may not yet be ready to sign on for the substantive reforms in pedagogical practices and institutions they are advocating.

Doug, you shared a story of how your students gradually took over control of your class. On one level, this sounds like teachers' worst nightmares of where all of this may be leading, but it sounds like you discovered this process has its own rewards. Can you share some of what you learned about student-directed learning? How might you speak to the concerns of educators who are worried about their jobs and about satisfying various standards currently shaping the educational process?

This was a fascinating experience for me and it speaks directly to the distinction we are making throughout the book between teaching and learning. Even after having thought long and hard about what it means to be an educator and being open to ideas such as student-directed learning, I still found that I was carrying a whole lot of baggage about what it meant to be a responsible educator. Primarily, what that meant was transmitting valuable information and testing how well that information was received, absorbed, and processed. What I had not really thought about was the ways in which that limits and cuts off opportunities for exploration, play, and following one's passions.

The fear is easy to understand. What we are essentially doing when we move to student-directed learning is undermining our own relatively stable (though I would argue obsolete) notions of expertise and replacing them something new and different.

That doesn't mean there is no role for teachers and educators. Quite the opposite. One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments. In a way, that is a much more challenging, but also much more rewarding, role. You get to see students learn, discover, explore, play, and develop, which is the primary reason I think that most of us got into the job of teaching.

"Lifelong learning" has become a cliché. What is it about the world of networked computing you describe which transforms this abstract concept into a reality? Are the kinds of learning experiences you discuss here scalable and sustainable?

We take it as a truism that kids learn about the world through play. In fact we encourage that kind of exploration. It is how children explore and gain information about the world around them. Since the time of Piaget we have known that at that age, play and learning are indistinguishable. The premise of A New Culture of Learning is grounded in the idea that we are now living in a world of constant change and flux, which means that more often than not, we are faced with the same problem that vexes children. How do I make sense of this strange, changing, amazing world? By returning to play as a modality of learning, we can see how a world in constant flux is no longer a challenge or hurdle to overcome; it becomes a limitless resource to engage, stimulate, and cultivate the imagination. Our argument brings to the fore the old aphorism "imagination is more important than knowledge." In a networked world, information is always available and getting easier and easier to access. Imagination, what you actually do with that information, is the new challenge.

Essentially what this means is that as the world grows more complicated, more complex, and more fluid, opportunities for innovation, imagination, and play increase. Information and knowledge begin to function like currency: the more of it you have, the more opportunities you will have to do things. To us, asking if this kind of learning is scalable or sustainable is like asking if wealth is scalable and sustainable. But instead of finances, we are talking about knowledge. Education seems to us to be one of the few places we should not be afraid of having too many resources or too much opportunity.

You argue that many of the failures of current teaching practice start from "the belief that most of what we know will remain relatively unchanged for a long enough period of time to be worth the effort of transferring it." Granted the world is changing rapidly, how do we identify the narrowing range of content which probably does fall into this category and which provides a common baseline for other kinds of learning?

The problem is not with facts remaining constant. There are some things we know that we have known for a very long time and are not likely to change. The force that seems to be pushing the knowledge curve forward at an exponential rate is two fold. First, it is the generation of new content and knowledge that is the result of simply participating in any knowledge economy. This leads to a second related dimension: while content may remain stable at some abstract level, the context in which it has meaning (and therefore its meaning) is open to near constant change. The kind of work you have been examining from the point of view of convergence culture is a prime example: users are not so much creating content as they are constantly reshaping context. The very idea of remix is about the productions of new meanings by reframing or shifting the context in which something means. The 21st century has really marked the time in our history where the tools to manipulate context have become as commonplace as the ones for content creation and we now have a low cost or free network of distribution that can allow for worldwide dissemination of new contexts in amazingly brief periods of time.

If you look at something as simple as Google News, the simple act of viewing a news story provides data which is fed back into the system to determine the value and placement of that story for future users. Millions of micro-transactions, each of which are trivial as "content" powerfully and constantly reshape the context in which news and current events have meaning.

You challenge here what James Paul Gee has called the "content fetish," stressing that how we learn is more important than what we learn. How far are you willing to push this? Doesn't it matter whether children are learning the periodic table or the forms of alchemy practiced in the Harry Potter books? Or that they know Obama is Christian rather than Muslim?

Ah, this question throws us into one of the key traps of 20th century thinking about learning. Learning is not a binary construction which pits how against what. In fact, throughout the book, we stress that knowledge, now more than ever, is becoming a where rather than a what or how.

Where something means or its context raises questions about institutions and agency, about reliability and credibility and it always invites us to interrogate the relationship between meaning and context.

In our framework, we stress that every piece of knowledge has both an explicit and a tacit dimension. The explicit is only one kind of content, which tells you what something means. The tacit has its own layer of meaning. It tells why something is important to you, how it relates to your life and social practices. It is the dimension where the context and content interact. Our teaching institutions have paid almost no attention to the tacit and we believe that it is the tacit dimension that allows us to navigate meaning in a changing world.

Knowledge may maintain consistency in the explicit, while undergoing radical changes in the tacit and we believe that understanding how knowledge is both created and how it flows in the tacit is the key to understanding and transforming learning in the 21st century.

January 14, 2011

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part Two)

January 14, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

LittleBigRevenge

Seakitten Collective (Belgium)

2009

genre: the video uses a blend of real footage and in-game footage

keywords: LittleBigPlanet, fandom, comedy

LittleBigRevenge uses a blend of real footage and in-game footage of Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet in a creative and engaging way The video, starring the game avatars Sackboy and Sackgirl, asks the viewers "what would happen if a diplomatic mistake causes [sackboys] to take revenge on humanity? A Belgian couple finds out right in their living room..."

"MTBig Planet"

DanteNeverDies (Spain)

2009

genre: machinima music video

keywords: Music video, Montage, parody

An irresistible spoof of famous dance music videos created with Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet. PlayList: Flatbeat - Mr Oizo; Sing it Back - Moloko; Satisfaction - Benny Bennasi; Destination Calabria - Alex Gaudino; Right Here Right Now - FatboySlim; Who's Your Daddy - Benny Bennassi; Starlight - Supermen Lovers; DANCE - Justice; My Boobs are Ok - Lene Alexandre; Hey Boy; Hey Girl - The Chemical Brothers; Call on me - Eric Prydz; Invaders Must Die - The Prodigy; One More Time - Daft Punk.

"LittleDaftPunk"

DanteNeverDies (Spain)

2009

genre: machinima music video

keywords: Music video, Montage, parody

A visual medley of Draft Punk's most celebrated songs recreated with Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet by DanteNeverDies.

"I'm On a Boat"

Matthew Gallant (Canada)

2009

genre: machinima music video

keywords: Machinima Music Video, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo), Saturday Night Live

Matthew Gallant mixes Saturday Night Live with Zelda and creates the (explicit) Wind Waker version of I'm On a Boat. In his own words: "Like all stupid ideas, it began on the Internet"

"Half-Life2: All sounds replaced with my voice"

-Trase- aKa Patcher aKa Tr45e (Ukraine)

2009

genre: Gameplay footage

keywords: BHuman beat Box, Mod,

The author replaced 1327 sound files with his voice ("I did not edit any of them, its fresh from the microphone"). The result is incredibly funny and started a new meme on the internt. (He left untouched: "Ambient noises like wind; some zombie voices; character voices (it would sound dumb); maybe i missed some minor physics like a trap door hidden somewhere in ravenholm and no one ever opens it").

"Infinite Mario AI -Long Level"

Robin Baumgarten (United Kingdom)

2009

genre: Gameplay footage, speedrun

keywords: speedrun, skill, AI, music

This incredible video won the Super Mario Competition in September 2009 which invited players to submit their game performances. Robin Baumgarten, a PhD student at Imperial College, London, produced an enhanced run which pulls off a major coup halfway through when it walljumps out of a pit. In his own words: In this version of Mario, when you're jumping while sliding on a wall, you jump backwards and upwards away from it").

"Project Blackjack: Trials HD - Stunt Video"

BLKJ Son (United States)

2009

genre: Gameplay footage with Music (Bonnie Tayler's "I Need a Hero")

keywords: Skill, Trials HD, montage

Videos stunts performed in Trials HD, a motorbike game available on Xbox Live arcade. The author - BLKJ Son - presumably filmed his television screen and edited the video adding a rock soundtrack (the screams and wows from the player can be heard as well). BLKJ Son's description: " Trials HD is the sickest game ever. You know how we get down ... BLKJ Son". I law the "raw footage" nature of this video.

"What A Wonderful L4D"

James McVinnie (originally from the UK, living in Canada)

2009

genre Edited gameplay Footage with soundtrack

keywords: Gameplay, montage, music

This video creates a powerful cognitive dissonance by juxtaposing scenes from the ultra-violent horror game Left 4 Dead (Valve) and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". The effect is similar to Microsoft's famous TV ad for "Gears of Wars" featuring Gary Jule's "Mad World".

In his own words: "I play Left 4 Dead waaaay too much. It deserves a vid. Please ignore the lag spikes and such, i rushed this out over 2 days and didn't really have time to fix up all the bugs. The reason Louis doesnt make much of an appearance is the fact that i'm always Louis, so he was doing all the camera work."

What a Wonderful Left 4 Dead (Machinima) from James McVinnie on Vimeo.

"The Adventures of Ledo and iX"

Emil Carmichael (US)

2009

genre Game-Inspired Animation

keywords: Homage, 16-bit aesthetics, lo-fi

The Adventures of Ledo & Ix online is a low-fi (but conceptually rich) five minute faux-16-bit short by Emily 'Kid Can Drive' Carmichael.

In His Own Words: "In many ways, Ledo and Ix are just like us. Sleeping under the stars makes them philosophical. Sometimes they wonder if they should have chosen different careers. They avoid dens of monsters when possible. But in one crucial way, they're different--they're fantasy adventurers in an extremely small-scale video game epic. What exactly do video game characters do when we're not around? What if they chat and bicker like we do, wonder and dream like we do, feel boredom and dread like we do, despite being 48 pixels tall? A sort of eight-bit tribute to Waiting for Godot, The Adventures of Ledo and Ix uses the visual vocabulary of retro video games to explore the human fear of both the unknown and the known."

"Creepy Mario 64"

LightningWolf3 (US)

2009

genre Manipulated Game Footage of Super Mario 64 (Nintendo)

keywords: Gameplay Footage

A manipulated version of Super Mario 64 that evokes David Lynch's cinematic nightmares.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.

January 12, 2011

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part One)

January 12, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

This is the fifth in 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 is the curator's statement from Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab.
I have always been fascinated by the tension between different forms of cultural productions, by the ongoing diatribe between the artistic nature of gaming, which to me has much more to do with the notion of gaming as a set of practices rather than gaming as a specific set of artifacts. That is: I am more interested in understanding the broad range of gaming performances by different social players than defining/defending a canon. A key assumption is that there is nothing intrinsically artistic about the medium of the videogame - or any medium/artform for that matter, although one could argue that "interactivity" is the special ingredient that does the magic for digital games. Whatever. It all comes down to rhetoric. As for art, well, it is simply a label, a socially constructed definition that serves a political, ideological, and economic agenda.

My selection for the DIY festival juxtaposed two forms of game-related productions that are simultaneously close - in terms of aesthetics - and distant - in relation to their cultural positioning. There are several fan-made productions -e.g. the LittleBigPlanet music videos - that have limited "artistic" appeal, that is, are extremely popular and well received among gamers but ignored/dismissed in the "official" artworld - that is, the marketplace that values sharks in formaldehyde and museum sit-ins performances. And there are a few "artistic" productions that are highly regarded among art practitioners, but unknown/dismissed or even derided by "gamers". There are two set of mutually exclusive forms of capital at play in two different factions/subculture: the "gaming capital" of gamers celebrating skill-based performances (e.g. speedruns, stunts, replays, machinima that expand/reflect upon/joke about the narrative world of the games they are based on, and so on) and the "cultural capital" of the artworld - that rewards marketable ideas and intents (e.g. illustrating, via a specific installation to be installed in a specific context - an art gallery - the 'essence of the gaming medium', 'its effects on human psyche', 'the commodification of leisure', 'the game of identity', 'the blurring between the so-called real and the so-called 'virtual'', 'hacking/modding as a political subversion' etc. etc.).

While they both use digital games a platform/canvas//raw material for creative expression, their nature as fan-art objects or artistic artifacts is not specifically defined by technical craft, but by a dispositif/apparatus that is both cultural (thus social =>human-based) and technical (machine-based). A network that comprises both human beings in various contexts (intellectual production/criticism/consumption) and automated delivery systems (e.g. Youtube, vimeo, flickr etc). Just to clarify: I am not suggesting that a speedrun is not artistic. The matter to me is almost irrelevant. I am just saying that until an influential art critic demonstrates that a speedrun is "artistic" by placing it in a socially recognized artistic context (e.g. a museum, an art gallery, a prestigious film festival), a speedrun will remain confined to a fan-only context. The context is everything. If I can have my speedrun on display at the Gagosian, Saatchi, or at the MoMa, I can sell it in the market place for $$$ - if that's my goal. Clearly, in order to sell my speedrun for $$$, I need the aforementioned influential art critic(s) that will justify the market value of my piece with a convincing critical assessment that will explain/justify/make up its cultural relevance to a broader public, a public unfamiliar with - and likely uninterested in - the conventions/language/aesthetics of the medium.

This also applies to those videogame-based artworks that have acquired weight (= market value) in the "official" artworld - I'm thinking about works by artists such as Cory Arcangel, Miltos Manetas, Joseph Delappe, Feng Mengbo and more (but not many more). For instance, I consider Miltos Manetas the first machinima-maker not because he was the first one to make machinima - today being "first" only matters if you're writing comments online, and especially if you are a troll - but because he was the first one to have his game-based videos recognized as a significant, groundbreaking artistic achievements by a critic who matters (Nicolas Bourriaud), in a NY gallery that matters, in the mid-Nineties, while the Ill Clan was creating the first Quake movies. Obviously, if one's goal is to gain reputation, admiration and status within the gaming community by being the greatest player in the world, the most skilled performer, the greatest e-athlete, the funniest commentator, then she/he will not give a toss about "Art". Or pretend not to: dismissing the artworld as "irrelevant" in today's society is instrumental in acquiring/increasing/solidifying street cred in other contexts.

This eclectic selection features a variety of video-game videos ranging from gameplay footage to game music videos. The main criterion behind this extravagant assortment is the urgent need to redefine the very notion of machinima in order to include the most enthralling audiovisual experiments produced, shared, and discussed by and within the game community. It also represents an explicit criticism toward the narrative-based machinima: the vast majority of the videos included steer clear of a traditional, conventional, linear form of narration. The success of DIY/Sandbox games like Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet and the proliferation of movie editing tools have spawned a new generation of creators that transcend the confines of game culture. This is a small sample is by no means an adequate reflection of the ginormous (sic) production of game videos currently floating in the seven seas of the electronets. Nonetheless, I hope you'll find them interesting. Expect the unexpected.

Street Fighter Deconstructed

Dylan Hayes (US)

2009

genre: gameplay videos

keywords: abstract, deconstructionism; glitch art

Dylan Hayes is literally tearing down Capcom's Street Fighter to its constituent parts in order to bring in the foreground the true essence of this seminal beat'em up game. The result is a series of mesmerizing experiments in ludic abstractionism and glitch art that nostalgically evoke an 8-bit past that never was. We begin with "Palette Change Test" (described by the author as "palette change tests on SFII. almost 8-bit, i kinda dig it"), we continue with "Shapes" only to end with "Block Test 01", where the original game is so deconstructed that it becomes almost unrecognizable.

Palette Change Test from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

Shapes 02 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

Block Tests 01 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

DM Spectrum

Matthew Bradley (UK)

2009

genre: gameplay video and teaser of a computer mod

keywords: teaser, gameplay video, music, abstract

DM-Spectrum is a custom UT3 deathmatch level developed by Matthew Bradley. The video selection includes a teaser and a gameplay video.

DM-Spectrum from Matthew Bradley on Vimeo.

DM_Spectrum Gameplay from Matthew Bradley on Vimeo.

January 09, 2011

Introduction to Communications Technologies

January 09, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

For those who might be interested, this entry has been translated into Ukrainian by Aloyna Lompar http://www.fatcow.com/edu/introduction-communications-ua/">here. Well, it is hard for me to believe that the University of Southern California semester starts back today. I think spending 20 years at MIT spoiled me. MIT has this glorious month long "Independent Activity Period", which allows faculty to both catch up on their own research and to test innovative new ideas, host public lectures, and otherwise engage in the intellectual life of the university. It was my favorite time of the academic year and I could use it this year as I have been grinding all break trying to finish up our (Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and my) new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. I will be saying more about the book here throughout the year, but for the moment, let me just say that our draft is so close to being done that we can taste it!

That said, I am also very excited to be teaching my first big lecture hall class since moving to USC. At MIT, my biggest class was 75, while enrollment for this class is over 200 students. I have a great team of TAs to help with the teaching. This class is one which rotates between a range of Annenberg faculty and is intended to introduce undergraduates to basic issues around technology and society. I am using new media in two senses here -- one is focused specifically on digital and mobile technologies, the wave of emerging communication tools and practices that have emerged over the past few decades and the other is focused on the process by which any emerging media technology gets absorbed into the culture. So, there is a constant movement in the class between contemporary and historical developments. For example, the first session we will watch The Honeymooners episode ("To TV or To Not TV") where the two couples go in together and buy a television set. Lynn Spigel introduced me to this episode several decades ago and it remains a staple in my teaching because it shows so many of the conflicts and tensions which surrounded the introduction of television into the home. I will then unpack it for a lecture, drawing on ideas from Raymond Williams and Nancy Baym, about the social construction of technologies. And from there, we will venture into the early history of the web. I am hoping that this constant movement between past and present will off-set a tendency to talk about new media as if they were without precedent and as if their social impacts were inescapable.

I've thought a lot going into this class about the issue of laptop use in large lecture hall classes and we've decided to make that issue an explicit part of our strategies for the class. Specifically, we are going to be deploying a Backchannel platform which we have experimented with at the Futures of Entertainment conferences back at MIT. It allows people to post questions and for the audience to vote them up or down so that one gets a rough ranking of their priority for the group as a whole. The questions will be projected onto a second screen in front of the class. This will allow me to respond on the fly to what the audience is thinking and at the same time, ideally, will keep laptop use focused on what's going on in the class. We will see what happens.

Anyway, I have made it a habit since moving to USC to post my new syllabi on this blog for anyone who might be interested. So here's the syllabus for my Intro class. You will see that I've worked hard to find the most accessible versions of certain arguments, including the use of interviews, bog posts, and journalistic writing by key thinkers on issues of media change.

For those wondering, I will also be teaching my graduate seminar on New Media Literacies this semester. This is the version of the syllabus I posted last year, which still forms the core of what I am doing this term. The key difference is that I will be involving my students in developing and teaching lessons through an afterschool program which Project New Media Literacies will be launching this semester through the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles. I will have more to say about this down the line.

Henry Jenkins

COMM 202

Introduction to Communications Technology

This course is intended as an introduction to the ways new and emerging communications technologies impact our culture. While the primary focus will be on digital and mobile technologies and practices (contemporary new media), the course will also consider a range of older media when they were new - including print culture, cinema, television, recorded sound, photography, and the telephone. The course is divided into three broad units:

Understanding Technological Change is intended to offer broad conceptual frameworks for thinking about the relations between technology and culture.
Reinventing... takes as its starting point the ways that the emergence of digital, networked, and mobile communications technology has impacted pre-existing media forms.
Rethinking... examines a range of institutions and practices as they are re-imagined in response to the introduction of new communications technologies.

Taken as a whole, this class will introduce students to:

Core issues concerning the study of communications technologies
The process of media in transition
The ways that new media impact existing media and institutions
Core digital platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, eBay, Flickr, Second Life, etc.) and the ways they are reshaping our everyday lives.

The course readings are intended to introduce core thinkers and debates surrounding these technological and cultural shifts. And student assignments are designed to introduce a range of research methods and conceptual models commonly deployed to examine the interface between new communications technologies and cultural practices.

Assignments:

1. Participation in online forum. Every week, students will be expected to use Blackboard's Forum to share a core question or thought that emerges from the assigned readings. These questions can be a paragraph or so and informal, but they are intended to help the instructors better understand how the students are relating to the class materials and content. Such questions are also intended as springboards for the recitation session. (20 percent)

2. Autobiographical essay. Students will draft a short (5 page) essay exploring their own relationship to new communications technologies and practices. There are many valid ways of approaching this assignment. You might describe a particular program you use regularly and how it impacts your day to day activities. You might trace your evolving relations to computers from elementary school to the present. You might describe a specific activity that is important to you and talk about the range of technologies you deploy in the pursuit of these interests. In each case, the paper is going to be evaluated based on the ways you deploy your personal experience to construct an argument about the nature of new communications technologies and practices and their impact on everyday life. The more specific you can be at pointing to uses of these technologies, the better. You do not need to make sweeping arguments about "Today's Society" but you do need to argue how they impacted specific aspects of your own experience. (10 percent)

3. Contextualizing a YouTube video. Each video on YouTube has a story. While it can be hard to trace the origins of some of these videos, each was posted by someone, for some reason. Most reflect ongoing conversations within particular subculture communities. Each may inspire comments either as written texts or response videos. And each may travel from YouTube to other communities through social networking tools. Choose a video and help us to better understand where it came from, how it relates to the existing genres of participation on YouTube, how the YouTube community responded to the video, and how it has been taken up by other online communities. Tell us that story in a five page analytic essay. The core goal of this paper is analysis and documentation, not description. You will be expected to refer to specific outside sources to support your core factual claims. You will be evaluated based on the amount of research performed, on the quality of the analysis you offer, on how you build off concepts from the readings and the lectures to help frame your analysis (including, ideally, direct references to specific readings), and on how well you understanding the nature of the new communications environment. (20 Percent)

4. Reporting on Wikipedia. Identify a Wikipedia entry that has undergone substantial revision. Review the process by which the entry was written and the debates which have surrounded its revision. Write a five-page essay discussing what you learn about the process by which Wikipedia entries are produced and vetted. How does the discussion and debate around the entry draw on the core principles of the Wikipedia community? Again, this paper is intended to combine research and analysis. You will be evaluated based on the amount of research performed, on the quality of the analysis you offer, on how you build off concepts from the readings and the lectures to help frame your analysis (including, ideally, direct references to specific readings), and on how well you understanding the nature of the new communications environment. (20 Percent)

5. Midterm and Final Exams. The exams will be open-notes, open-text. They will combine identification terms, short answer, and essay questions. The terms and essay questions will be selected from a list circulated in advance. The Midterm Exam will cover material from the first two units of the class; the final exam will cover material in the final unit. (15 Percent for each exam)

Students will be allowed to revise one of the three essays to be considered for a higher grade. The paper must be turned in at least two weeks after the original paper was returned. The grade will only be raised if the revisions substantively address one or more of the criteria for the paper's evaluation. Students who simply correct cosmetic or grammatical errors identified by the grader will not receive a higher score.

Assigned Books:

James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)

Remaining readings can be found on the course's Blackboard site.

Part One: Understanding Technological Change

Week 1

January 10 Overview of the Course; Thinking about Technological Change

screen: The Honeymooners, "To TV or Not To TV"

January 12 The Problem of Technological Determinism

Raymond Williams, "The Technology and The Society," Television: Technology and

Cultural Form (New York: Schoken, 1974)

Nancy Baym, "Making New Media Make Sense," Personal Connection in the Digital

Age (New York: Polity, 2010)

William Boddy, "The Amateur, the Housewife, and the Salesroom Floor: Promoting Post-War U.S. Television," New Media and the Popular Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Week 2

January 17 NO CLASS

January 19 The Origins of Digital Culture

Steven Levy, "The Tech Model Railroad Club" and "The Homebrew Computer Club,"

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor, 1984)

Fred Turner, "The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor," From

Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and

the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Week 3

January 24 The Myth of the Digital Revolution

Nicholas Negroponte, "The Post-Information Age," Being Digital (New York: Vintage,1995)

John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," 1996

John Battelle, "The Data Base of Intentions," The Search: How Google and Its Rivals

Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2006)

Chris Anderson, "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet," Wired, August 2010

January 26 From Mass Culture to Participatory Culture

Henry Jenkins, "Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, May 28 2007.

Henry Jenkins, "What Happened Before YouTube," in Joshua Green and Jean Burgess,

YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (New York: Polity, 2009)

"Andrew Keen vs. David Weinberger," The Wall Street Journal, July 18 2007.

Week 4

January 31 From Technological Utopianism to Steampunk

Howard P. Segal, "The Technological Utopians", Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

Bruce Sterling, "Introduction," Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace, 1988)

Sharon Steel, "Steam Dream," The Boston Phoenix, May 19, 2008.

February 2 From Pirates to Policy Makers

Debora L. Spar, "The View from Partena," Ruling the Waves: From the Compass to the Internet (New York: Mariner, 2003)

Thomas Streeter, "Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: The Discourse of Cable

Television," in Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (eds.), The Revolution Wasn't

Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (London: Routledge, 1997)

Week 5

February 7 Adjusting to a New Media

Lynn Spigel, "Designing the Smart House:Posthuman Domesticity and Conscpicious Production," in Chris Berry, Soyoung Kim, and Lynn Spigel (eds.) Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology and the Experience of Social Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 2010)

Lisa Gitelman, "New Media Users," Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)

February 9 Is Print Culture Endangered?

Sven Birkerts, "The Fate of the Book," in Sven Birkerts, Tolstoy's Dictaphone:

Technology and the Muse (Boston: Graywolfe, 1996)

Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic, August 2008.

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

Part Two Reinventing...

Week 6

February 14 The Library

James J. O'Donnell, "From the Alexandrian Library to The Virtual Library and Beyond"

and "From the Codex Page to the Homepage," Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)

Scott D. N. Cook, "Technological Revolutions and the Guttenberg Myth," in Mark Stefik (ed.) Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

February 16 Television

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming),Chapter 4.

Week 7

February 21 NO CLASS

February 23 Music

William W. Fischer, "The Promise of New Technology" and "An Alternative

Compensation System," Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment (San Francisco: Stanford University Press, 2004)

Sam Carroll, "The Practical Politics of Step-Stealing and Textual Poaching: YouTube, Audio-visual Media and Contemporary Swing Dancers Online," Convergence, 2008, 14, 183-204.

Week 8

February 28 The Telephone

Claude S. Fischer, "Educating the Public," America Calling: A Social History of

the Telephone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)

Misa Matsuda, "Discourses of Keitai in Japan," Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)

March 2 Midterm Exam

Part Three: Rethinking...

Week 9

March 7 Production

Trebor Scholz and Paul Hartzog, "Towards a Critique of the Social Web," Re-Public: Reimagining Democracy

Axel Bruns, "Who Controls the Means of Produsage?," Re-Public: Reimagining

Democracy

Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired, June 2006.

Brendon I. Koerner, "Geeks in Toyland," Wired, February 2006.

March 9 Consumption

Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0," O'Reilly Media, September 30, 2005.

Cory Doctorow, "The Branding of Billy Bailey," A Place So Foreign and Eight More

(San Francisco: Running Press, 2003)

Week 10

March 14 NO CLASS

March 16 NO CLASS

Week 11

March 21 Circulation

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media:

Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society, (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming), Chapters 1-2, 6

March 23 Innovation

Kevin Driscoll, "The Hip Hop Approach," Stepping Your Game Up: Technical Innovation Among Young People of Color in Hip-Hop, MIT Master's thesis, 2009.

Jonathon Zitrain, "The Generative Internet," Harvard Law Review 119.7, 2006

Week 12

March 28 Privacy

danah boyd, "Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity," South by Southwest, March 13 2010.

March 30 Knowledge

Henry Jenkins, "Spoiling Survivor," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006)

Andrew Lih, "Community at Work (The Piranha Effect)," The Wikipedia Revolution (New York: Hyperion, 2009)

Week 13

April 4 Learning

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: A Conversation with the Digital

Youth Project," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, November 21, November 24,

November 26, 2008,

Jeffrey J. Williams, "Culture and Policy: An Interview with Mark Bauerlein," The Minnesota Review, Winter 2005.

April 6 Play

James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)

Week 14

April 11 Community

Julian Dibell, "A Rape in Cyberspace," The Village Voice, December 23, 1993 http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace

danah boyd, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class

Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook." in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, Digital Race Anthology (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

April 13 The Public Sphere

Dayna Cunningham, "Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 2009.

Malcolm Gladwell, "Small Change," The New Yorker, October 2, 2010.

Week 15

April 18 Piracy

Nancy Baym, "The New Shape of Online Community: The Example of Swedish Independent Music Fandom," First Monday, May 16, 2007.

Mizuko Ito, "Contributors Vs. Leechers: Fansubbing Ethics and a Hybrid Public

Culture," Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011)

April 20 Originality

Lawrence Lessig, "Re-Examining the Remix," TED.com.

Aram Sinnreich, "Something Borrowed, Something Blue," Mashed-Up: Music,

Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010)

Week 16

April 25 Final Reflections: What Happens Next

April 27 Review for Final Exam

December 17, 2010

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part Three)

December 17, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

This is the fourth in 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 is an interview with Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org in which he responds to my questions about the anime fan scene.
Many get confused by the superficial resemblances between Fan Vids and Anime Music Vids. Though both are expressions of fan appreciation, they come from very different traditions. How would you describe the similarities and differences between the two?

For this question, I asked AbsoluteDestiny, who started making AMVs in 2001, and switched to making vids in 2005. He's much more familiar with the vidding community than I am, but also has familiarity with the AMV community in order to compare. He wrote:
Henry's question is a really huge one and one I've actually given a lot of thought. There was a time, in the 2vcr days of both vidding and amvs, where there were a lot of similarities between the videos made in the two communities. Hair by Media Cannibals is largely the same vid as Hair by You Know Who, albeit with different gender gazes. As the communities, skills and aesthetics developed, the respective videos started to diverge. The reasons for this are a mixture of three important factors:
1) How the source is read and enjoyed

2) How the source lends itself to video editing techniques

3) What kinds of videos the communities give praise (and reward) to
In very very broad terms, the vidding community grew out of media fandom's more narrative side, fan-fiction and so on, with a strong emphasis on character over genre. Anime fandom, on the other hand, is largely interested in genre, spectacle, Japanese culture and self-referentiality. These differing priorities tend to different subjects for videos - Wonder of Birds (Laura Shapiro) versus AMV Hell (Zarxrax) to take two extremes.
Then we have the very nature of the source. Scenes in anime are not emotionally subtle - visually, especially in TV anime. Much of the emotional nuance is carried by the voice acting and only the more emphasised visual emotions (joy, anger, embarrassment) remain when the footage is removed from its audio. So where vidding can rely on the superbly nuanced body language of the actors, anime can really only pull on whatever aesthetic flourish the source gave them (flowers, blushing, thought bubbles with super-deformed characters beating each other up etc). To do subtle emotion with anime is hard and it's not unknown to rely on external manipulation (such as Playground Love by Nathan Bezner). Thankfully, animation lends itself to external manipulation very well and roto-scoping the footage and puppeteering it to do your bidding is not out of the realm of possibility, which allows for original narratives that are still very much in the spirit of anime (with its genre, spectacle, culture and meta fixations).
Lastly we have the community and how their reception of the works develop and refine aesthetics. The AMV community learned to walk at conventions and even in the early days of Anime Expo and Otakon a formal structure for AMV exposition was created in the form of the contest. Categorisation and the need to find ways to compare highly subjective works led to the formation of AMV genres and a fond regard for technical proficiency (being something that is much more objective when judging a video's quality). While the explosive growth of the community towards the mid 2000s did introduce all kinds of new aesthetics, the major genre categorisation and the search for technical wonders moved amv work further to the side of original spectacle, sometimes very disconnected from the narratives of the sources being used. Ultimately, however, it is a combination of all three elements here that have created the communities we have and the output they produce.
There are wonderful oddities and outliers on both sides but the kinds of work you are likely to find largely fit into the following spectrum:

Vidding tends toward deep analysis of character and show and utilisation of interior movement where amvs tend toward meta, spectacle and genre works with a strong utilisation of external motion, footage, effects and original art.
I've also vaguely plotted some well-known videos (though the amvs totally show my age) onto the graph. It's very rough but this should give an idea as to how I see the whole amv vs vidding spectrum.

[Titles in black are vids, titles in blue are AMVs]

Your account of AMV focuses on their American origins. Are such vids part of the Otaku tradition in Japan or is this a distinctly western response to Anime? If the former, what kinds of contact exists between the artists in the two countries? If the later, is the AMV being picked up by Japanese fans as well?

Learning about hobbyist video editing by fans in Japan and sharing ideas is difficult due to the language barrier. Remix videos in Japan that we're familiar with are called MADs, since one of the early tapes was labelled "Kichigai Tape", or "Tape of Madness". There are many different types of MADs, but early on the AMV community was exposed to a number of Seishiga MADs (and to many, "MAD" came to be a term with only this narrow definition), where still images, often from dating games or visual novels, have motion and other effects applied to them. This creates a distinct aesthetic that was emulated by some North American AMV creators such as VicBond007 in his Believe AMV.
In 2005, one MAD editor named pianos (interview from 2004) came to Anime Weekend Atlanta with a translator, and showed the audience MADs made by him and other editors at his panel. Some of them can be difficult to understand, again due to the language barrier, but there was one short MAD I came across years ago that I liked so much, I remade it for an English-speaking audience.
It used to be fairly difficult to find MADs. I stumbled across some videos where the files were split up between hosts to avoid bandwidth and space limitations. Later on, I came across a collection of them on Usenet. Now you can find Japanese fan videos on Nico Nico Douga, but of course it's a Japanese site so it can be difficult to navigate. Some of them get uploaded to YouTube so you can see them there. They can be hard to find since MAD is a common English word, but you can try searching for "Nico Nico MAD" to find some examples. Several MADs consist of anime-inspired custom artwork, which is relatively rare in AMVs. (Some exceptions: Greed vs. Envy, Utena Daioh, Woolongs For Nothing)

What functions do AMV play within the fan community? Are they primarily consumed by existing fans of the program or are they part of the process of educating American fans about Japanese media content?

A little of both. As I wrote in the first segment, fans at AMV panels at conventions have often indicated that they've bought anime after seeing it in an AMV. For those that are already fans of a particular show, today's search engines make it easy to find an AMV that uses that show.
Now, however, the internet also makes it much easier to find both licensed and unlicensed copies of anime, so I have a feeling that the promotional impact of the hobby is now less than it used to be. Though in some cases, editors seek out shows that haven't been licensed here yet, possibly in order to be the first to use a high-quality new title.

What kinds of relationship exists between the AMV creators and the commercial and semi-commercial groups who are marketing anime in this country?

Views on the hobby depend on which company representative you talk to. I heard of one anime convention panel with ADV Films where one of their employees told Brad DeMoss that they loved his Evangelion/Star Wars Episode I parody. The company, while it existed, was also AMV-friendly in other ways, with employees helping to judge at Iron Editor events. Also, for the final DVD of their release of the Noir series, they contacted four AMV editors, including myself, to create videos to include as Easter eggs on the disc. This took some wrangling on their part with the rights holders in Japan, and due to rights issues we were only allowed to use the opening and ending songs from the show, but it was a pretty cool thing of them to do.
On the other hand, reportedly at the closing ceremonies of Anime Expo one year, a Japanese guest of honour was upset when they played an AMV that incorporated one of his works. I'm not sure who the guest was, but AX stopped playing AMVs at their closing ceremonies after that.
For one final example, Anime Tourist reported on a 2002 interview done with Hiroyuki Yamaga, Co-Founder of Gainax and his friend Takami Akai.
Audience question: What is your opinion on anime music videos from a company standpoint and from a personal standpoint? Have you seen any anime music videos?

Mr. Yamaga: What exactly do you mean?

AQ: Like the anime music videos that we are going to be showing tonight?

Mr. Yamaga: I like them a lot. I think that they are very well done.

Mr. Akai: I didn't know that they existed. I actually like them personally.

Mr. Yamaga: I feel that copyrighting is only for professionals. For people who are doing it for their own enjoyment as a hobby, I feel that the line is very blurry. The reason that copyright laws are so strict is because it is very difficult to make the distinction whether or not someone is professional or amateur. But as Gainax, they got their start doing similar stuff so it's very hard for them to say, "No, We won't allow that'. They also feel that they don't really want to say that. As Gainax, the corporation, they have to say, 'No, we haven't seen it', 'Nope, haven't heard about it'. That is how they deal with it.

I've also heard this "willful ignorance" position from some in the North American industry. (again, from a professional standpoint) Though I've heard of at least one employee calling them a "headache", AMVs and the North American anime industry seem to coexist reasonably peacefully.

Tim Park programs videogames by day, and helps to administrate AnimeMusicVideos.org at night. The site has been online for over ten years and catalogs over 100,000 AMVs. He's edited a few dozen AMVs (and one vid) under the name Doki Doki Productions.

December 15, 2010

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part Two)

December 15, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

Although plenty of interesting results can be made by simply mashing up anime and music, some editors like to push themselves and try to incorporate elements of other mediums into their work. In this example, original CGI is combined with anime to portray a robot pondering what it means to be human.

The following videos were also considered for the event:

A Little Retrospect - by Kitsuner

Using footage from other AMVs is often frowned upon in the community. This is partly because the North American anime industry is still quite small (ie: compared to Hollywood) and if you're going to use some footage, you should support them by buying the DVD. In the case of this video, however, Kitsuner deliberately picked scenes from over 60 AMVs that span a decade to show "how far we've come". (The Strongbad parody clip saying you can use all the AMVs you already have came from Road to Iron Chef)

AMV Minis Episode 3 - compiled by Zarxrax

(Embedding of this video has been disabled. You can view it on YouTube)

Ever since the first one, the AMV Hell series has been hugely popular, with showings of some of the hour-long projects routinely filling screening rooms at conventions. The general idea is, an editor may think a certain part of a song would be a funny pairing with a certain part of an anime, but the joke wouldn't be funny for the entire length of the song. Collect enough of these ideas and put them together Short-Attention-Span-Theatre-style, and you have AMV Hell. It's spawned countless imitators and homages, even in machinima in the form of HMV Hell, based on the Halo game franchise. Zarxrax kept saying he'd retire the AMV Hell series, but its spirit lives on in this shorter-form of the popular rapid-fire comedy shorts. Things are often hit-or-miss based on your sense of humour and knowledge of cultural references, but this was one of my favourite compilations of AMV Minis Season One.

Continuous Play - by Ileia

Although repeated scenes may be a symptom of a lack of effort in a video, it works strikingly well here with the song "Stuck On Repeat". Also, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has scenes that are similar in composition but with different elements or palettes, which makes the video less repetitive and more visually appealing.

Lawl & Order: Legal Tender - by Fall_Child42

Some videos are closer to short stories or parodies than actual music videos. This one tells the story of the criminal justice system. This video was originally done for an Iron Editor event, but Fall_Child42 went on to improve and complete the video after the event.

Time - by qwaqa

qwaqa alters footage from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time to tell his own story of a girl who fixes the past. A "making of" video is directly below, so you can see the work that went into altering footage from the movie.

Kawaii Girls: Ultimate Dating Simulator - by Fizziks

This is a fake parody ad making fun of the Japanese dating simulator game phenomenon.
(Short glossary: kawaii / mecha /moe /otaku)

Attack of the Otaku - by Chiikaboom

After Odorikuruu practically defined the upbeat dance video, there have been constant attempts to one-up videos in the genre with more effects and fun footage. One editor even claimed that he wanted to create an "Odorikuruu killer". This more recent entry to the field makes references to Koopiskeva's prior work, Skittles. One effect on display is masking, or isolating an anime character and removing the background in order to put a character in another scene, or in front of some other effects. Chiikaboom wrote in the video description: "It takes a good 20-30 minutes to mask out one frame. There were 482 frames. Do the math." (And that was just for one scene. A total of 904 frames were masked)

Auriga - by Nostromo

Nostromo specializes in dance videos with electronic music, but instead of cute or fun scenes like in Attack of the Otaku, he typically uses scenes with a higher quality of animation and art than most budget anime TV shows for a different aesthetic. Interestingly, he also used software to interpolate frames, creating more in-between frames for an even smoother look. A description of the process, and higher quality versions of the video are available on the video's profile page.

Twilight - by Koopiskeva

In a similar vein to Only Bob, above, Koopiskeva combines Kanon with original live action footage. The video was inspired by one of the characters asking another, "Have you ever wondered that perhaps we were living in someone else's dream?"

A Feel-Good AMV - by haunter103

What can I say? It's a feel-good AMV! :)

The following videos were made in 2010, too late to be considered for the event:

The Friend Request - by Moonlight Soldier

Here Moonlight Soldier explores anime relationships via Facebook. There are a number of anime and editor in-jokes here, but you should be able to get something out of it. In this video, the female singer is actually speaking for the boy, since Shinji Ikari, the male lead in Evangelion, is portrayed as a bit of a wimp. Other AMVs have also used female voices for him, such as Kevin Caldwell's Engel.

Every Anime Opening Ever Made - by Derek Lieu

This supercut compilation video illustrates how anime opening sequences share

a lot of elements between them, from composition to effects.

RAH HEY! - by Ileia

Cleverly based on the similarity between the pronunciations of "anime" and "enemy" (at least when sung by Green Day), this is a fun "can you name them all" compilation video which includes composites of anime with editing and social networking software.

December 13, 2010

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part One)

December 13, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

This is the fourth in 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 written by Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org. As far as the AMV community is aware, the first Anime Music Videos were created by Jim Kaposztas in 1982. He was inspired by MTV, back when they played music videos. Anime had a slow growth in North America, with few options before the '90s for shows licensed and released in English. Fans would trade tapes recorded by friends in Japan, and often translated into English and subtitled by other fans. Many times there would be some extra room at the end of the tape and so as not to waste any, occasionally people would record AMVs after the show.

To some extent, AMVs have helped advertise the shows that they contain. At AMV panels at anime conventions, when audiences are asked if they've ever bought an anime based on an AMV that they've seen, most hands go up. Apparently when Hold Me Now was shown at Anime Boston, the dealers room sold out of Princess Tutu shortly thereafter.

Before the rise of digital distribution, another common way to see AMVs was at anime conventions. Rather than simply screen them, tradition was that the videos would compete in a contest, perhaps because one of the other most popular events at conventions, cosplay, is also most commonly in the form of a contest. Every year, AMVs shown at Anime Expo and Otakon are seen by thousands of fans, and they can vote for their favourites. (Though in some cases, contests are evaluated by a judging panel) Anime Weekend Atlanta was the first convention to have a 24-hour room dedicated to AMVs for the entire con, and a couple of others have followed suit.

And so, unlike most of the other genres presented at the DIY festival, much of the AMV community is steeped in competition, with multiple rating systems available to grade and evaluate videos at AnimeMusicVideos.org.

One of the reasons for these systems was to help the site's creator (and others) to find good AMVs. There are even "Iron Editor" competitions where two editors have to make the best video they can in two hours with a few predetermined shows... and a secret ingredient of course.

It's not all competition, however. Ever since the first Dance Dance Revolution Project in 2001, where almost 20 editors came together to create a dance mix AMV over an hour long, there have been many cases of people coming together to create something more than just one person could manage. They're called Multi-Editor Projects, or MEPs, and there's also a sub-forum on AnimeMusicVideos.org to help people organize them. Themes for MEPs can include bands, emotions, holidays, or even numbers stations.

When selecting videos for consideration to be shown at the recent DIY festival,

most were released in 2008-2009.

Videos shown at the DIY 24/7 2010 program:

(With the exception of the YouTube embeds, if you click on the small "link" chain icon in the videos, you'll be taken to the video's profile page at AnimeMusicVideos.org. There you'll find more information on the anime and music used, and any other details about the video that the editor wanted to convey)

I'm On A Blimp (ft. Teddy) - by LittleKuriboh

LittleKuriboh is known for his Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series videos, which consist of abbreviated episodes of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime re-dubbed with humourous dialog. This video parodies The Lonely Island's "I'm On A Boat" with Yu-Gi-Oh footage, but unlike most AMVs, the original song's lyrics have been revised and performed by the creators, in the manner of filk songs. (Another notable example of AMV creators doing their own singing is the Iron Chef Idol series of videos)

Ian Fleming's Property of a Lady - by qwaqa

There are several instances of AMV editors making faux openings or trailers for existing movies or TV shows. In this case, using Noir, Cowboy Bebop, a few other shows, and a lot of editing, qwaqa creates a fake James Bond-style opening for Ian Fleming's story, "Property of a Lady".

AMV Technique Beat - by Douggie

Also called an "AMV For Dummies" (ie: a how-to ~~book~~ video) in the title card, Douggie illustrates a number of techniques and considerations that go into making an AMV. The title is a reference to the "Technique Beat" trilogy of videos by Decoy.

November 30, 2010

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Four)

November 30, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

An interview with Counteragent.

Counteragent is a vidder who is not only a fan of media sources, but of fandom and its discourses; she describes herself as a "fan of meta and fandom in general." Consequently, Counteragent's vids and artworks tend to be not only about television shows and movies, but about fandom's responses to them. Her vids "Still Alive" and "Destiny Calling" are featured in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: What was your first vid and why did you make it/?

Counteragent: "Copacabana." Because there weren't enough Alias vids, and because I knew Yahtzee would like it.

FC: What do you remember about the experience of making the two vids of yours that are included in the show?

Counteragent: "Still Alive": the agony! The structure was very difficult to craft. I wanted to criticize both the fandom and the show but ultimately wanted to make a vid about empowerment and squee. Finding that balance was really hard for me with the way the song worked. I really owe my betas on this one, especially Giandujakiss.

"Destiny Calling": the desperate feeling of falling in love. I'd just met vidding and I was giddy with the flush of infatuation with the craft, the vids, and the vidders. I was shouting my love from the mountaintops.

FC: Have you seen any of the other vids in DIY program?

Counteragent: Yes, all. I'm a big fan. "I'm On A Boat": Fucking fearless song choice. "Handlebars" is a perfect vid to showcase the power of a vid as critical commentary on the source, especially to nonvidders. Simple but really, really effective. "Women's Work" is an institution. "Origin Stories" was gutsy storytelling both for the source and for the larger cultural commentary. Also a really great use of a tough song. "In Exchange for Your Tomorrows": great abstraction. Is "Piece of me" more RPFiction or cultural commentary? Anyway, it's all good. "How Much is that Geisha in the Window" is scaaaaathing. And I was too dumb to get "Art Bitch" the first time I saw it. Great use of outside graphics.

FC: What's the best/worst thing about vidding?

Counteragent: Worst: the amount of time it takes. That it's perceived as worthless by both people close to me and many cultural commentators. Best: the feeling of squee and empowerment. The community.

An interview with kiki_miserychic.

kiki_miserychic is a prolific vidder known for being experimental and for her use of unusual sources (e.g. movie vids, crossovers, etc.) She was the subject of Bradcpu's first Vidder Profile in August, 2009. Her Star Trek reboot vid "I'm On A Boat" was featured in the 2010 DIY show. The below is an audio interview; click to play!

November 29, 2010

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Three)

November 29, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

Vidders: In Their Own Words Vidding curator Francesca Coppa interviews vidders Giandujakiss, Flummery (Part Three), Counteragent, and kiki_miserychik (Coming next time). Coppa and Stanford's Julie Levin Russo will also be co-editing Transformative Works and Cultures' special issue on remix video: anyone interested in submitting should check out the call for papers.

An interview with Giandujakiss.

Giandujakiss is a prolific vidder who has worked in many fandoms. . Notable vids include "Origin Stories" (2008; submitted for the 2010 DIY festival), "It Depends On What You Pay," (2009; a vid critiquing rape in Dollhouse), and Hourglass (2008; a vid which looks at the Groundhog's Day trope in multiple media.) Her vid "Origin Stories" was included in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: What was your first vid and why did you make it?

GK: My first vid was a Highlander slash vid pairing the characters of Duncan and Methos. I made it because I couldn't not make it. A friend had introduced me to the concept of vidding maybe several months or a year earlier, and suddenly I had all of these ideas and I couldn't get them out of my head - they were driving me crazy. So I finally broke down and figured out just enough of the technical aspects to be able to make my own, very low-tech vid.

FC: What do you remember about the experience of making "Origin Stories"?

GK: "Origin Stories" was unusual for me because it's the most collaborative vid I've made. The idea wasn't mine - it was Thuvia Ptarth's - and she came up with the song and the theme and part of the basic structure. The biggest challenge from my "perspective was to figure out ways to make Thuvia's ideas work visually and be clear to the viewer. And that was particularly difficult because the whole point was that we were focusing on characters who were underrepresented, and so the amount of available footage was limited. I also tried to stretch myself technically; that vid made a bit more use of effects and certain stylized cutting than I'd done before.

FC: What kind of reception did "Origin Stories" get when it was released?

GK: The reception was really positive and really overwhelming. There were so many downloads when I first posted it that it blew my site bandwidth after just a few hours. And lots of people started posting long analyses and thoughts about the vid, which was just amazing. I hadn't anticipated any of that - I'm a Buffy fan, obviously, but I hadn't been all that active in the Buffy fandom community, so I hadn't realized how much of a hunger there was for this kind of critique.

There was another thing that really struck me, though. A little while after the vid was posted, Thuvia posted a short essay about Spike and Robin Wood and why she'd wanted the vid made. The purpose of the essay was to explain where the idea for the vid had come from and what she'd hoped it would convey. That essay got linked by a couple of blogs that were outside our internet fandom circle - I think they were race blogs, or feminist blogs. Anyway, what was striking to me was how those blogs overlooked the vid itself, like, they barely even seemed to understand that Thuvia wasn't just writing an essay about Buffy, but was writing an essay about a vid. It really brought home how difficult the concept of "vids" or "vidding" is to grasp if you're unfamiliar with the form. It wasn't just that they didn't understand the vid - it was that they didn't understand that the vid was the primary document in which the argument about Buffy was being made; the essay was just a supplement.

And I'm not mentioning this because of my vanity :-). I'm mentioning it because it was a really visceral demonstration of how hard it is for people to understand even the idea of "vids" when they haven't seen them before.

FC: Have you seen any of the other vids in DIY 2010 vidding program?

GK: I've seen all of them! Within my particular corner of the internet vidding world, most of these vids are quite justly "famous." I think they're all brilliant in different ways - some are more of an internal analysis or celebration of the source material ("I'm on a Boat", "Handlebars"), others are more political critique of the source ("Women's Work", "How Much is that Geisha"), and Counteragent's, of course, are explicitly celebrations of fandom that are almost divorced from the source itself. I think "Still Alive" in many ways captures my experience of fandom - the television show is just a jumping off point; what I'm really here for is the artwork by other fans.

FC: What are the best and worst things about vidding?

GK: The best is probably the experience of "vid farr" - which most vidders have felt at one time or another. The term is a play on the Star Trek phrase "pon farr," and in vidding, it means you're essentially "in the zone." The clips are coming together the way you want them to, you can see your vid developing as you'd hoped or better than you'd hoped, and it's like a compulsion - you can't stop for anything, not sleep, food, or work.

The worst thing for me are the technical challenges. Figuring out how to get the software to work with the source, and formatting and you're tearing your hair because there's some bug in the program ... it's incredibly frustrating. For some reason, for example, my video editing program has decided to declare war on the .wmv format. I don't know why. It always worked fine before!

An interview with Seah and Margie, aka Flummery.

Seah and Margie have been vidding together as Flummery for ten years. . Among their best-known work is the multimedia vid "Walking On The Ground," which tracks the history of vidding through various times and technologies. "Walking On The Ground" was featured in the 2007 24/7 DIY Show at USC. Their Doctor Who vid "Handlebars" was featured in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: Tell us about your first vid.

Flummery: Our first vid was "Kryptonite", for the tv show Invisible Man. We came up with the idea in 2000, listening to the song and thinking that hey, this would make a great I-Man vid! We did a whole outline on it, complete with complicated POV shifts, and sent it off hopefully to one of our favorite vidders asking if she'd be willing to make it, since neither of us could vid. She said no very kindly and gently, leaving us with no option but to eventually figure out how to do it ourselves. That same vidder flew across the country the next year to help us with some basics, and we plugged away at it for months, finally premiering it at Escapade in February 2002.

FC: What was it like making "Handlebars"?

Flummery: We were vidding this [Doctor Who] live - episodes were still airing right up till our deadline. It made things a little tense, as we had to hope that we could find enough footage to fill in the holes we were leaving along the way. It meant that we redid entire sections a lot more than we were used to, ripping things out to rebuild them from scratch as better footage appeared.

We also weren't at all sure what the reception would be. We'd never done a vid where we so blatantly pointed out the negative aspects of our main character before, and we thought there was a really good chance people would hate it. We spent a lot of time being nervous about how it would play at Vividcon.

FC: How was it received?

Flummery: We were gobsmacked at the reception, which has been almost uniformly positive. This vid has gotten more attention than anything we've ever done. The most interesting part about it is that we get the same reaction from fans who love Ten and fans who hate Ten -- they all think we did a good job of capturing him the way they see him. Which is incredibly cool.

FC: For you, what's the best/worst thing about vidding?

Flummery: The worst thing about vidding is discovering that the perfect clip that you KNOW was somewhere in the source is really only in your head. And clipping in general is just a pain.

The best thing about vidding is having made a vid. And really, the way vidding changes the way you think and see -- it's a real shift, at least if you start out as more verbally oriented, the way both of us did. Learning to think visually, and to tell stories visually, is amazing.

Francesca Coppa is Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. She is also a founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. Coppa and OTW recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers like vidders. Coppa also writes about vidding both as a feminist art form and as fair use.

November 26, 2010

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Two)

November 26, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

A controversial and massively popular video that deliberately cut Supernatural's beloved male protagonists out of the picture to offer a critique of the eroticization of violence against women in media. As Luminosity noted in

an online profile by New York Magazine, "Women are sexually assaulted, murdered, and then laid out in artistic tableaux, chopped into pretty, bloody pieces. They usually further the plot, but they're hardly ever a part of the plot. We wanted to point out that in order for us to love a TV show--and we do--we have to set this horrible part of it aside." If it is women's work to be menaced and killed on tv, it is also clearly women's work to make a vid like this. (Note also that despite being cited in several academic articles and featured in New York Magazine, the vid is not available on YouTube; the audio has been disabled.)

Still Alive, by Counteragent (Supernatural, 3:07)

This vid is part of a conversation in fandom started by "Women's Work", above; or as one fan put it, "Women's Work/Still Alive = problem/solution, yes?" This vid speaks in the voice of both Supernatural's female characters and its fans; the vid's thesis, broadly simplified, is that, yes, female fans are angry at the show's sexism, but we'll keep making our female-oriented fanworks ("doing science") for those of us (women) who are "still alive." The vid ends by moving away from the show's violence to a celebration of female fanworks and fan communities.

Origin Stories, by Gianduja Kiss (Buffy/Angel, 3:47)

"Origin Stories" was released with the tag line, "It's Nikki Wood's fucking coat." This vid is about race and appropriation in the Buffyverse, hung on the fact that fan-favorite Spike's trademark leather coat turns out to be a trophy taken from the body of a black Slayer named Nikki Wood, whose son Robin shows up in season seven to avenge her. The vid not only critiques the text but also the fan response to it, both of which tended to privilege Spike's redemption arc over the stories of Buffy's minority characters. This vid circulated widely through fandom in 2008 as part of a larger conversation about race in both source and fannish texts.

In Exchange For Your Tomorrows, by lim (Harry Potter, 4:01)

A beautifully made character vid about Severis Snape that tells his story through the end of the books using footage from what were then only five films. Lim compensates not only through skillful editing but through making her own footage and special effects, which blend seamlessly with the movie's own magical effects. As Obsessive24 wrote, in her analysis of the vid, "Given that the vid uses existing and limited footage to tell a bigger story, the narrative is nonlinear and driven largely by emotional connectivity and symbolism. Lim uses object symbolism to astonishing effect: in terms of character representation (e.g. repetition of umbrella blowing in the wind) but also in general setting of atmosphere."

* Piece of me, by Obsessive24 (Britney Spears, 3:21)

RPF--or real person fandom--has been increasingly popular within traditional media/science fiction fandom in recent years. This vid uses one of Britney Spears' own songs to analyze not only the tabloid version of Spears' story (divorce, custody battles, substance abuse, bad behavior, etc.) but also Spears' counter-narrative of control. The vid also uses visuals from unconventional sources: including YouTube, tabloid photos, etc.

How Much Is That Geisha In The Window? by Lierduoma (Firefly, 2:55)

A critique of race, this time in Firefly, a show which imagines an Asian-influenced world without any Asian protagonists. Lierduoma brings the show's "Oriental" background to the foreground, focusing on the use of Chinese people and artifacts as set dressing and cutting multiple times to a sign that reads, meaningfully, "Good Dogs." This vid was influential at the DMCA hearings on noncommercial remix as an illustration of the ways in which vidders shift visual emphasis to people and objects on the margins. It became a crucial example of why vidders need to work with high-quality DVD footage - where these background items are visible - rather than lower quality digital video, where details of anything not central might be muddied or lost.

* Art Bitch, by Hollywoodgrrl (Battlestar Galactica, 2:19)

This character study of Starbuck reframes her bad girl behavior as Romantic, self-destructive artistic temperament. The vidder - herself an artist, of course - paints extravagantly over BSG's footage and collaborates with fanartist Deej to put Starbuck on the covers of the art magazine's I-D and Visionaire - which of course also both work as puns, considering Starbuck's identity quest and prophetic powers.

cover of I-D

cover of Visionaire

Destiny Calling: A Tribute To Vidding, by Counteragent (multi, 4:22)

A jubilant metavid made for "More Joy Day" (a fannish holiday dedicated to spreading joy) which demonstrates the vidding community's ability to articulate its own aesthetics, build its own canon, and celebrate its own talent. (Many of these vids and vidders will be easily recognizable to DIY 24/7 participants!)

November 23, 2010

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part One)

November 23, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

This is the third in 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 written by Francesca Coppa, a long time fan and media professor researching the feminist tradition of fan vids. Vidding is one of the oldest forms of DIY remix. Invented and still largely practiced by women, vidding is an art form in which mass media texts, primarily television and movies, are remixed into fan music video. In the mid-1970s, women created vids with slides; in the 1980s, they used VHS footage, editing with home equipment and tape-to-tape machines. Today, vids are made with digital footage using computers and sophisticated digital tools, and vidders - who have always been interested in aesthetics as well as argument - have more and more opportunities to bend the both style and content of pop culture to their will and taste.

Many people still don't "get" fan vids, seeing them either as incomprehensible mashups or mere celebratory slideshows. In fact, vidding, like most forms of remix, is about critical selection and the editing eye: deciding what to put in and what to leave out. Vids can make very sophisticated arguments about the source text's plot and characters, and even its ideology. While some vids are edited to broadly emphasize certain themes, images, or characters, and are thus easily understandable to the uninvested spectator, other vids are made specifically for fellow fans who are assumed to be familiar not only with the source text but also with the conventions and established aesthetics of vidding.

At the most basic level, turning film and television into music video represents a fundamental change of genre. While most mass media stories have a forward-moving, plot-driven structure, music video is more like poetry: expressive rather than descriptive, concerned with feelings and rhythm rather than the distanced narration of events. Like poetry, music video is also a highly concentrated form, distilling hours, days, or even weeks of footage into three or so minutes! Consequently, looking away from the screen during a vid is considered to be as offensive as arbitrarily deciding to skip words in a poem, since every moment, every conjunction of image and music, carries meaning.

While not all vidders are part of the organized communities, there is a longstanding tradition of vidding within shared groups, partly because in the pre-digital age, vidding was complicated and expensive, and so the mostly all-female vidding collectives shared equipment and skills. (See Henry's 1991 chapter on fanvidding in Textual Poachers.) While today most vids are released straight to the web, fans making vids in the 1980s and 1990s had to take their vids to conventions if they wanted anyone to see them, so even today many vidders debut their vids at conventions like MediaWest, Escapade, Bascon, and Vividcon, which is entirely devoted to vidding.

Moreover, the fans who attend these conventions have developed their own critical vocabulary for talking about vidding, and an institutionalized "vid review" based on art show reviews. Escapade features a 2 hour vid review; Vividcon not only has that, but also an additional "in-depth vid review" focused on only one or two vids. Even more recently, vidder bradcpu has been making a series of vidder profiles: short documentary films historicizing and analyzing the work of particular vidders. Like any advanced art form, vidding has developed its own conferences, critical literature, and theoretical apparatus.

Vidding Programme.

* vids marked with an asterisk appeared in the main programme.

The following represent a selection of notable vids made from 2007 - 2010.

* I'm On A Boat, by kiki miserychik (Star Trek, 2:36)

This vid expresses the widespread fannish joy over the 2009 Star Trek movie; it also captures the reboot's younger, more frat-boyish tone compared to the original series. It's worth noting that this vid, along with a wave of others, was made from a camcorder copy in May 2009. (See also: Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor by Sloane in the political remix section.)

Handlebars, by Flummery (Doctor Who, 3:27)

Probably the most successful vid of 2008, this meticulously-crafted character study of the Tenth Doctor spread beyond its community and intended audience almost immediately, eventually reaching--and being praised by--the show's creative team. As one fan noted, "Flummery completely called Ten's character development, and well over a year ago at that. The Doc has, indeed, gone completely handlebars on us."

November 17, 2010

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part Three)

November 17, 2010/ Henry Jenkins

This is the second in 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 is my interview with Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as "a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate." McIntosh was the curator for the Political Remix track of this series.

Your selections here suggest a strong over-lap between fan vidding and political remix. Can you tell us something of the relationship which has emerged between the two DIY video communities?

The overlap in my curated examples is definitely intentional on my part, though I'm not sure how much of a self-conscious relationship there is between the two genres. I can say little about the impact of political remix on vidding but I can detail the impact of vidding on political remix work.

Many of my favorite political remix videos are created by people from a wide range of DIY communities who felt inspired or compelled to make one (or several) remixes addressing a political/social issue. I think many of these people creating remixes with a critical edge would not necessarily describe themselves or their remixes as being part of the political genre.

There are of course, a relatively small group of remixers who primarily do political work, and I am one of them. Unfortunately, within this self-identified group I still find some resistance to include vidding as a legitimate part of the political/critical remix tradition.

From my point of view it seems clear that vidding is not only an integral part of remix history but vidding practice can also can teach political remixers an enormous amount on a wide range of practices and techniques. Through my engagement with vids and vidders I have gained invaluable insights about the fannish use of narratives and pop culture characters in remix videos. When I look at vidding I see as a core element the idea that it is possible to simultaneously enjoy and love a television show while also being critical of aspects of the show's writing, characters, story arc, embedded messages etc.

Most people engage with mass media stories in a subtle and complex way - we both love it and are critical of it. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit this now but I didn't really understand this tension very well before I learned about vidding. I think that part of the resistance to vidding I encounter from other political remixers might be related to this point. They may be uncomfortable with the fannish and or sympathetic relationship that vidders have to their source because self-conscious political remixers often have a relationship of ridicule or animosity to their source.

Political remix video can be a blunt tool that uses ridicule as a way to expose hypocrisy, illuminate tropes, and talk back to power - but it is a little harder to use the form in more subtle ways (especially if you still want to get the lolz).

Learning about vidding really gave me permission to embrace my fannish-side as a political remixer instead of hiding or being ashamed of it. It would have been impossible for me to conceive of making either "Buffy vs Edward" or "Right Wing Radio Duck" without the positive influence of vidding on me and on my work. In both I rely on my fannish (and therefore sympathetic) view of one pop culture icon (The Slayer and Donald Duck) which I use to critique another popular culture character or story (Glenn Beck and Twilight/Edward Cullen).

I would also say that political remix video does not really have a self-conscious or intentional community, at least not in the same way that communities have coalesced around vidding, AMVs or machinima. The love of source material(s) seems to be part of the glue that holds vidding, AMV and machinima communities together. Political remix video as a genre on the other hand does not have a fandom at its core - but rather rallies around a deep shared suspicion of powerful institutions, structures and the media itself. This base of criticism is what, I think, poses challenges to building a larger sustained online community organized specifically around political remix video.