October 17, 2011

A Virtual Bullpen?: How the USC Cinema School Has Embraced ARGs To Shape The Experience of Entering Students (Part One)

October 17, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

A few weeks ago, I was sent a pack of collector's cards -- with my picture on them! -- and asked to show up in the courtyard outside the USC Cinematic Arts facilities so that I could pass them out to students who showed up and said "convergence." I camped out and soon small clusters of students started showing up, enthusiastically saying "convergence" and waiting for me to hand them their tokens. Very quickly, I gave out of cards and for the most part, the students did not mind. In fact, a bunch of those who arrived later hung out and started a conversation, which kept growing until at its peek I had twenty or so undergraduates sitting all around me asking questions about transmedia storytelling, fan culture, new media literacies, spreadable media, and an astonishing array of other topics from my blog. This photograph was shot surreptitiously by Tracy Fullerton, one of my Cinema School colleagues, who was staking out a vantage point not far away.

All of this cloak and dagger stuff was part of an innovative game -- an Alternate Reality Game of sorts -- which is being conducted amongst the entering Cinema School undergraduates this year. If my own experiences are any indication, the game is proving to be enormously successful at getting students involved, excited about entering the Cinema School, more aware of its resources, more connected to its faculty, more engaged with its research, more connected across different divisions. It is also getting them involved in collaborative and production like activities than most entering students who have had to wait for a bit before they would be allowed to take production classes. I've seen lots of discussion over the past few years about the potentials of using ARGS for pedagogical purposes. But, this is the first time I've seen such a large scale experiment in integrating ARG activities across an entire school to orient entering students to a program and to serve a range of instructional goals. The passion the game is motivating in USC students is palpable. And I can tell you that many of the faculty, who have gotten pulled into the game through one play mechanic or another, are feeling a real pride in their school for its willingness to embrace this kind of experimentation and innovation.

I've wanted for some time to share with you some of the insights of the people most involved in this project -- Jeff Watson, Tracey Fullerton, and Simon Wiscombe, who wish to be identified here as the "co-designers/conspirators" behind the Game. In this interview, they tell us more about how the game came about, the design and teaching goals shaping it, the core mechanics, and the impact it has had on the school and especially this remarkable group of entering students. I have a feeling we are going to want to track its impact for the next four years to see what kind of difference it has made in their relations to each other and to the school.

The three of you have been co-conspirators in the development of an alternate reality game which has captured the passions and interests of the incoming students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts this fall. Can you give us some background on the project? What got it started?

Tracy Fullerton: The project actually came out of a committee established by the dean of the School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) in 2009 after a full faculty retreat. The charge for that committee was to envision the future of the SCA, and one of the key initiatives was to establish a "gateway experience" for incoming students that introduced them to the changing media landscape, the history and future of the school, the possibilities that can emerge from the SCA network of current and past students, and the importance of bridging the divisions of the school while they are here, both socially and academically.

The gateway course was envisioned as introducing a new kind of social networking for SCA students, both on and offline, that would become critical to their involvement in courses and with each other. As the class developed, it became clear that a game layer would be a perfect way to achieve all of the goals set out by the committee without falling victim to the general survey or lecture class tradition we wanted to move beyond. So, while the curriculum for the gateway class and the game aren't "officially" linked, they are intertwined in vision and purpose and serve to bring students from all divisions together in multiple ways that will purposefully drive the social dynamics and the cross-media collaboration.

From its inception, the gateway class was envisioned as having a companion social network, which linked to a digital library of information about media history and theory and SCA's past and future. The design of the card game, with its "high touch" in-person mechanics, is just the beginning of implementing that vision. On each card, history and theory are linked to practice with a piece of knowledge on one side and a prompt to creative practice on the other. This bridge between theory and practice, like the ones we hope to forge between divisions here, is a critical statement at the heart of the game.

Jeff Watson: As an iMAP PhD student, finding ways to bring together theory and practice is central to my doctoral research. Over the past couple of years, I had been looking for a dissertation project that would enable me to put into practice my research into transmedia interaction design and alternate reality games. I wanted this project to be something that played out in the real world and had a tangible and measurable impact. I didn't want it to be a demo or a proof of concept. I wanted to play with real stakes, real players, and real outcomes. I wanted the project to be able to fail if it wasn't designed properly. So when Holly Willis, the chair of the Future Committee, came to me with the mandates that Tracy just outlined and asked if I would be able to come up with a pitch for an ARG that could be played by all the incoming students of the SCA, I jumped at the chance. This was a real design challenge that touched on all the corners of my research, from participatory culture to social and mobile media to interventionist art practice.

What were the core learning goals for the design and deployment of this game?

Tracy Fullerton: The core learning goals for the game are all around fostering the kind of complex skills that are sometimes called 21st century skills. Of course, these skills, such as team-building, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and innovation, are not unique to the 21st century and they have been at the heart of the curriculum here at SCA for a very long time. The difference here is activating students right from the start of their SCA experience with the knowledge that these skills are critical building blocks to their success as media makers, and also that the development and improvement of these skills is something they need to take responsibility for themselves from day one.

The game wraps these learning goals into a kind of induction into the SCA culture of networking and support which is something students certainly leave USC with, but we wanted to use the game to start surfacing these ideas for them earlier in their development.

Jeff Watson: When we first met to brainstorm what we wanted students to be able to discover through this game, we filled up a 16 foot whiteboard and still felt like we hadn't scratched the surface. On top of the kinds of building block skills Tracy just mentioned, faculty members from each division of the SCA had very granular lists of the kinds of things that they felt Cinematic Arts students should be aware of as they commence their tenure as undergraduates. Writing professors wanted the game to encourage the exploration of character and story; production faculty wanted to make sure all students acquired basic knowledge about cameras, editing, and safety; critical studies pushed for more opportunities for analysis, historical contextualization, and reflection; animation wanted to make sure their students would have more ways to connect with students from other divisions; and interactive media pushed for a deeper integration of notions of iterative design and systems thinking. At the end of the meeting, I took a picture of the whiteboard with my iPhone. It was a crazy tangled bird's nest of inspiration.

To make sense of it all, we took the mass of ideas generated during that whiteboard session and started looking for connective tissue. We noticed that all the learning goals we had brainstormed fell into one of three broad categories, which we ended up calling Literacy, Craft, and Social. Literacy goals were those that pertained to knowledge of all kinds: from highly local lore about the school and its resources, to basic understandings about the history and theory of media-making. Craft goals were those that had anything to do with the act of making -- from writing prose to shooting video to designing board games. Finally, Social goals were all those that related to the discovery of and connection with peers, alumni, faculty, and the broader community. Since the "content" of each of these categories of learning was agnostic with respect to the various divisions of the SCA, the first challenge of breaking down divisional/disciplinary boundaries had been met. The question became how to make a game that would motivate players to traverse the networks of Literacy, Craft, and Social goals that we had identified for inclusion. This became the starting point for our prototyping.

Can you describe some of the basic mechanics of the game?

Simon Wiscombe: The game is, at its core, a project creation game. When players elect to join, they're given a pack of cards containing green "maker" cards (e.g. "30 second short," "Board Game," etc.), pink "property" cards (e.g. "About love", "In the SCA Courtyard", etc.), and one orange "people" card (which contains the name of one first year undergrad in the USC film school). These cards can be combined together or with other players' cards to make a "Deal," the simplest of which is composed of one maker card and one property card -- although an almost unlimited number of property cards can be attached so long as there are enough connectors. After laying out a Deal, players go out and actually create it (i.e. "A 30 second short about love in the SCA courtyard"). They then submit it to the site, and justify it in the game office -- at which point it's uploaded, they get points for the Deal, and everyone in the game can see it.

Jeff Watson: This whole process is outlined with pictures and video on the game website . Since it's such a highly visual interactive experience, readers who want to get a good sense of how it feels to play should head over there and check out the intro materials.

Simon Wiscombe: Yes, visit the website -- it explains everything and also showcases the amazing work the players have created so far.

What relationship does this game have with other alternate reality games which have been used for entertainment or training purposes in the past?

Jeff Watson: The "meat" of this game is structured creative improvisation. As Simon has described, the core interaction here involves players trading, sharing, and combining collectible playing cards in order to generate creative prompts known as "Deals". Responding to these prompts by submitting completed artifacts results in advancement on the game's various leaderboards, unlocking special game content. This special content constitutes what might be called the "sauce" on the meat of the game.

This "sauce" is the closest we get to "traditional" alternate reality game content. For example, toward the end of the second week of gameplay, we sent clues to several players who were leading in key Deal-making categories. The clues provided the players with a time and a location and nothing else. Bravely enough, the students showed up. Once there, they were greeted by a formally-attired Oud player. Accompanied by the Oudist, the players were transported without explanation to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Once in the museum, the players encountered two alums of the SCA, Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago (designers of critically-acclaimed games such as Flow, Flower, and Journey), who were wandering around in the darkness wearing sequined masquerade masks. Upon discovering them, the players were presented with a special game power which enabled them to score additional points on subsequent Deals, and were then treated to 90 minutes of informal discussion about game design, art, and media making.

In short, our approach uses a rule-based play system (the card game) to drive the bulk of the experience, and employs more traditional ARG techniques around the edges, as rewards and tonal elements. This approach is in many ways a practical implementation of the ideas and critiques I presented last year on your blog in my essay, "ARG 2.0". In most "traditional" ARGs, our "sauce" is the full meal. The player experience in such games unfolds around a kind of scavenger hunt activity wherein game runners moderate and manage player communities as they plow through a sequence of puzzles, curated action prompts, and side-quests.

While this logistically-complex structure is appropriate for certain team-building and talent sourcing applications, we wanted to make something that would have the capacity to perpetuate itself without relying on the constant generation of puzzle and narrative content by game runners. More importantly, we wanted our game to emphasize an active engagement with media-making: while scavenger hunts might help to build social bonds and search/analysis skills, we felt that they are inherently about solving puzzles or responding to prompts created by someone else -- and as such are a kind of consumption-oriented form of play. We wanted to make this game about the players' creativity, not ours.

October 03, 2011

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part One)

October 03, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

I have had a chance to watch Anne Balsamo at work in many different contexts -- as a junior faculty member at Georgia Tech focusing on cyberfeminism and reconceptualizations of the body; as a designer in residence at Xerox Parc where she was developing devices intended to embody alternative conceptions of the future of publication and reading; as someone dispatched by the MacArthur Foundation to encourage us to reflect on the nature of "design literacy"; and most recently, as a colleague at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC where we are working together to launch an expanded ebook project. She is someone who has been able to pursue a shared research agenda in a range of different contexts (both academic and industrial) and in the process, to build upon the work of others around her, to carry with her what she's learned into these new spaces. What I love about Balsamo is her fearlessness in moving beyond her own comfort zone and her ability to inspire creativity and reflection in those she finds around her. I am so blessed to have a chance to work with people like Balsamo and her other colleagues at the Innovation Lab on a regular basis. Her newest book, Designing Cultures: The Technological Imagination at Work, could only have come about as a result of her experiences working in these many different environments. It is one part autobiography, one part portfolio (she shares some of her great projects through an attached disc), and one part theoretical reflection. Above all, it is an intervention by someone deeply rooted into the humanities into the current debates about technological innovation. Her conceptual models and frameworks are sure to spark discussions at digital humanities labs around the world, but my hope is that they do not end there, that they offer engineers and programmers and designers a way to reflect on their own contributions to culture (and their own contexts of innovation).

In this interview that follows, we talk together about some of the key themes of her book, which, as the title playfully suggests, deals both with the design of culture and with the cultural contexts where design takes place.

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Early in the book, you make the statement, "the wellspring of technological innovation is the exercise of the technological imagination." Can you break that down for us? What is the "technological imagination" and how does this concept bridge between technology and culture?

Inspired by the concept of the "sociological imagination," first developed by C. Wright Mills in the 1960s, I define the technological imagination as a mindset that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. This imagination is performative: it improvises within constraints to create something new. It is through the exercise of their technological imaginations that people engage the materiality of the world, creating the conditions for future world-making. Most importantly, this is the capacity to understand that all technologies come from somewhere, that they could always be different from what they are, and that they always have multiple and contradictory impacts.

In the active engagement between human beings and technological elements, culture too is reworked through the development of new narratives, new myths, new rituals, new modes of expression, and new knowledges that make the innovations meaningful. When people participate in the activities of producing "innovation," their technological imaginations are engaged in a complex process of meaning-making whereby both technology and culture are created anew.

Throughout the book, you talk about "innovation," which as you note is a widely deployed concept these days. What do you mean by "innovation" and how does your use of the term differ from some of the notions currently shaping industry and government discourse?

Innovation is a process, not a product. Innovation changes how life will be lived in the future. I think that many people--industry pundits and government spokespeople--believe that innovation is a "thing." I make the distinction between "invention" which implies the creation of new things--new applications, services, devices, processes--and "innovation" which is the process whereby the elements of human life are rearranged such that life in the future is lived differently.

You suggest that a key aim of the book is to get your humanities colleagues more engaged with the process of technological innovation. Why? What will they gain from participating in a process which may seem alien to many of them? What will humanities people bring to the table that is currently missing from our conversations around technology?

I argue that the process of technological innovation is actually NOT at all alien to humanists; it is the process of engaging with technologies to change the shape of the way culture is lived, reproduced, and expressed in the future. This is an abiding interest and contribution of the humanities that is more commonly understood as the process of education through their engagement with a range of technologies of literacy (i.e., the book, historical narrative, aesthetic materials of expression). If one believes, as I do, that innovation is the process whereby culture is rearranged, then it is easy to see the valuable role of humanists in providing the tools and the critical frameworks for understanding not only how culture might change in the future, but also how current cultural arrangements structure conditions of possibility of any effort of innovation.

How a Robot Got its Groove from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Our colleague, Tara McPherson, has argued that issues of gender and race tend to be pushed aside when people talk about designing new media. How and why do these questions surface throughout your book?

This book, indeed the entire project that goes by the name "Designing Culture" is a direct outgrowth of my earlier work on the biotechnological reproduction of gendered bodies. In my first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke 1996), I examined the cultural implications of what were then (in the 1980s-1990s) emergent bio-technologies. What I learned through that project was how to critique the technocultural arrangements that reproduced gendered identities for the bodies that engaged with new technologies (body building, cosmetic surgery, surrogate motherhood, computer-mediated communication, and virtual reality). By the time I finished, I realized that if I were to take my feminist political commitments seriously, it was not enough for me to critique the ideological work of emergent technologies, I had to go further to examine how the critique might suggest ways of doing things differently in the future.

In some sense, all my work is influenced by Donna Haraway's assertion that "all technologies are reproductive technologies." Whereas the first book examined a broad range of BIOLOGICAL reproductive technologies that were innovative during the last two decades of the 20th century, the new work examined what I believed were going to be the DOMINANT reproductive technologies of the 21st century: digital media technologies. This "turn to reproduction" is but one way in which feminist theory--as a way of thinking gender--informs all my research.

Thus I formulated new research questions that directed my attention to study and participate in the processes whereby new technologies are developed which enabled me to build a framework to understand the techno-social-cultural conditions of technological innovation. Put simply, I continued to study the processes of technologically-assisted cultural reproduction...but with the new project the focus was on the creation of new digital media technologies rather than on biological technologies.

To follow these questions, I turned my attention to the investigation of the practices of technological design and I immersed myself in projects that would allow me to learn how to use new media technologies to create new digital applications. My first project--to create the interactive documentary called "Women of the World Talk Back"-- was the result of my experiments with a range of (what were then) innovative new media digital authoring tools for the purposes of creating feminist activist interactive media. Through collaborations with colleagues and students--who had a much more developed set of technological design skills than I did--my technological imagination was inspired and shaped to think differently about the cultural possibilities of new technologies.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

October 03, 2011

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part Two)

October 03, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

You worked at Xerox PARC, which, as you note, has become a mythic locale in the early history of digital technology. What do you think the current myths about Xerox PARC get right and what do they misunderstand?

Among the many lessons I learned during my time working at Xerox PARC is the understanding that the future is created first in the imagination, and then is enacted through the many activities of the research laboratory (among other places). Contrary to the old adage--that the best way to predict the future is to invent it--what I came to appreciate is the important role of narrative in creating an imaginary relationship between the FUTURE and the present. The first act of innovation is an act of story-making--which involves the spinning of a narrative that features technologies, materials, beliefs about "needs" and "opportunities," and is performed by researchers who (as in the case of Xerox PARC) are employed in the business of innovation. I'm not sure how that matches with the cultural work of Xerox PARC today--the scene has changed in the decade since I left. But I suspect that the researchers there are still eagerly engaged in the cultural processes--and performance--of innovation.

You argue that technologists should "pay attention to the technological literacy of the intended users off the technology-under-development." What advice can you offer to technologists about the best way to "pay attention"? What are the "ethical responsibilities" of technologists in regard to those who will be left behind if their tools and platforms are more widely adopted?

My approach to the topic of "paying attention" is grounded in the theory of "strong objectivity" developed by the philosopher of science, Sandra Harding. This argument is best situated within the debates about objectivity, scientism, and relativism of the late 1990s that were spurred by important work in critical feminist science studies. Harding argues that we need NOT to abandon ideals of "scientific objectivity"--as some feminists might have than been accused of advocating--but rather we need to be more RIGOROUSLY objective in understanding that reality is multidimensional; and that science, to be a truly objective explanatory enterprise needs to engage the minds and points of view of people who have been trained (socialized) to see the matter of the world from different perspectives.

Perhaps the key issue here is that what we are to "pay attention to" is multidimensional; thus the ethical responsibility of any technologist is to actively seek to see the world through different eyes, and not to assume that the point of view that one embodies is privileged as the only "point of view." Haraway calls this the "god trick." The ethical response is to understand how one's perspective is always partial, and to seek out other points of view (as it were) when developing or experimenting with the creation of new technologies.

I don't see the issue as one about people who will be "left behind"--because I understand that technologies are not simply objects, but rather a whole technocultural formation. Everyone lives in a current technological cultural moment that is constantly unfolding; an individual's position within that technocultural formation is what we really need to address when we think about "access to technology." No one is actually "left behind" in a cultural formation; they are differently positioned, constrained, enabled, empowered, with different (and often unequal) access to resources such as tools, knowledge, economic goods. I would argue that issues that are framed in terms of "people left behind" do not reflect a complex understanding about the nature of technoculture and cultural reproduction. To frame this question in this way presupposes an answer that puts the emphasis solely on "access to technology." Yet we know that simply providing access--dumping computers into classrooms for example--doesn't work to address the broader issues of inequality in power, economic resources, and intellectual support. Its time to start thinking more complexly about strategies for rearticulating dominant technocultural formations to allow for more liberatory and equal participation.

What is Literacy? from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

What does your book's focus on "design" contribute to the larger conversation around New Media Literacies and Digital Learning which has been sparked by the recent interventions of the MacArthur Foundation?

As I elaborated in the book, I make explicit the connections between the processes of design thinking and the skills and sensibilities that you list as key 21st century literacies. I argue that we need to teach designing practices across the curriculum; I support the notion that "design is a new liberal art." The issue of designing (design thinking, critical design skills) emerges as an important topic as we come to appreciate the many ways in which young people use new digital technologies to create and participate in innovative learning experiences. As they are called to be "designers/authors" of their own learning experiences, they will be well served (I assert) by learning also important design methods and critical frameworks for the analysis of their designed efforts.

The central premise of the book is that the work of design is one of the most important sites of cultural reproduction in a digital age. When I turn my attention to the designing/authoring efforts of students, I understand that even when these students think they are making it all up for the first time, they are actually engaged in the process of reproducing cultural understandings that came before them, and setting up the conditions for the reproduction of these understandings in the future. Thus for me to teach design also requires the teaching of ethics and the training of the historical imagination....both of these concepts are less fashionable to speak of these days

DML efforts might cast these concerns as "civic engagement" or as topics for "learning games." While there is nothing wrong with that approach--who could argue against "civic engagement" as an important topic for contemporary new media and digital learning--as I elaborate in the book I believe that there are additional insights to glean from discussions about ethics and about history in the context of understanding the praxis of designing and the reproduction of culture.

Given your discussion throughout about the need to reimagine the book, I am curious about the process which led you to develop Designing Culture as a print based book with digital extensions. What do you see each medium contributing to our experience of the whole?

The book and the digital projects were designed/authored simultaneously; but at any point, one creative project would take precedence over the others. This is because I'm not really good about multitasking at the broadest levels. It is also because the knowledge making process that is invoked during the course of creating digital media applications is different for me than the knowledge making process that emerges through the act of writing/authoring.

I wrote the book, as I explained in the conclusion, for personal, professional, and theoretical reasons. One of the most salient theoretical reasons is that the book is well suited to one of the most critical, but most commonly overlooked stages of designing: the stage when the designer returns to the design effort (and outputs) to critically assess the lessons learned and the cultural impact of the project. This stage of self-reflexive assessment is not easily accommodated in digital media genres of the museum exhibit, videos, interactive applications, and such.

The technological form of the printed book allows for the theoretical elaboration of abstract concepts and of self-reflexive accounts of designing practice. The book I wrote was neither a factual account of a series of moments long past, nor was it a simply a work of speculative design fiction. It was an authored account that was both factual and fictional; that was highly determined by my own biography and set of theoretical commitments, but not able to be reduced to either biography or theory.

If we return to C. Wright Mills notion of the "sociological imagination" we will hear him call for this kind of disposition--the sociological imagination for him was the capacity to make the connections between one's own personal biographies and the broader social and institutional forces and formations that invariably shape those biographies. This is the deep theoretical tradition I was trained in as a cultural theorist: to seek to make connections between my personal investments and biographical moments and the broader technocultural formation that I participate in as a subject/author and that I am "subjected to" through the work of ideology and other shaping forces.

Moreover, the DESIGNING CULTURE project is an example of the technological imagination at work in that the project manifested across a range of media technologies: where each part of the project was realized and expressed in the modality that was best deployed for my particular authorial objectives. Here I borrow Mill's insight to suggest that the technological imagination is the disposition that allows one to make the connections among technological forms and more personal/authorial objectives. Other people might call this paying attention to the "media specificity" of different modalities of cultural expression. Indeed that is what a good story teller always does: chose the best medium for addressing the desired audience that is matched with the story one wants to tell.

You are part of the leadership of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. What opportunities does the Lab offer you to push your concepts to the next level?

My work with the Annenberg Innovation Lab is very exciting for me because it offers an opportunity to collaborate with other people on the project of technological innovation that begins by taking culture seriously. This is the challenge that is laid out in the book: it is time to treat culture as a serious concept in our discussions, learning activities, design projects, and technological inventions.

Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, invokes the mantra for the lab as such: Every day culture eats strategy for lunch. This assertion resonates strongly with the main thesis of the Designing Culture project and sets the stage for a whole range of interesting experiments in the design of innovative technologies and the exercise of the technological imagination.

September 21, 2011

How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"?: USC's Mark Marino on Critical Code Studies (Part Two)

September 21, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

 What do you see as the relationship between critical code studies and platform studies as approaches to understanding digital artifacts?

These approaches are tightly intertwined. On the one hand, you can talk about code independent of platform. That happens in computer science classes all the time. However, if you take the example of a forthcoming book project, you will see how platform plays a key role or rather how the code can point to an understanding of the platform. Over the past year, I have been working on a book under contract with MIT to analyze a single line of code, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. This line of code generates an image that resembles a maze. I should say, rather, that the code generates this image when executed on a Commodore 64 because in addition to using BASIC, which came installed on C64s, it also uses a custom set of ASCII code called PETSCII, which included two characters (2 diagonal lines), to create this image. Our exploration of this code, then, has led us to discuss the platform and its context. So to talk about the code is not to exclude a discussion of the platform, hardware, or larger systems, but rather to use the code as the central axis.

Currently, the various approaches to digital objects are associated with specific critics, projects, and publishing series. As a result, "Software Studies" and "Platform Studies" will be defined by the kinds of things these critics publish, the kinds of readings they perform, and their own theoretical predilections. Comparing these first readings could skew the way the approaches are perceived. Taking the long view, I believe these terms will eventually become abstracted from the readings of those particular critics and will become part of rich assemblages of approaches to digital objects that look at the software, at the platform, at the hardware, and, of course, at the code.

 What has been the response of programmers to the kinds of work you are doing?

Many of the people who do CCS readings are programmers, so I would say on the whole it has been very positive. You know, there are a lot of misconceptions about what humanities people do, particularly regarding interpretation. When I first began suggesting this idea to professional programmers some voiced skepticism because they thought I was advocating treating their code like poetry. They doubted such a study would yield very much. Once I explained that I was interested in, for example, why programmers chose one programming paradigm over another, their process of writing the code, or even why they were laughing when I would show them some code written by someone else, what was the joke - they started to get more of a sense of what I was after. Once we reach that understanding, they typically offer their own critical observations, reflections they've formulated but haven't had an opportunity to discuss.

 You've written, "The distance between the Haiku and the can of Coca Cola as texts marks the shift between the study of artistry and the broader study of signification." So, what does it mean to study code as a kind of "signification"?

Code is a medium of communication, and like other communication substrates, its meaning is not restricted to what its author intended. The way someone writes a line of code, the language they choose, the programming architecture and paradigm, the code they borrow, the libraries they use - all these factors produce meaning in code. That is when code is taken as a sign system with its own material conditions.

At the 2011 CCS Symposium, UCLA Computer Science professor Todd Millstein explained that computer scientists already see code as an aspect of a program that is meant primarily for human readers. It is not, then, heresy to say that code is written for other people to read. By extension, once it is circulated, its meaning expands and changes depending on who is doing the readings. Jeremy Douglass gave a terrific demonstration of this in the second week of the Critical Code Studies Working Group (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/recoded), when he showed how two opposing sides of the Climate debate used the source code associated with Climategate to support conflicting points of view.

Code is a semiotic medium. It has rhetoric, style, art. It is a sign of a process and is in-process in terms of its own development. It circulates within discourse realms. It also bears marks of its authorship, signs of communal affiliation, remnants of its history, and notes and stubs for future development. Code has a special relation to the computational system in which it circulates. To make a legitimate utterance with code, one must comply with and conform to many restrictions that do not exist in, say, spoken language. Moreover, code is typically part of a chain of command, a layer of information represented in a form more easy for humans to read than machine language and binary (though my electrical engineering wife does tell binary jokes). Yet, as Wendy Chun has observed, source code is not the same as the executed code.

To explore the significance of code, though, as you suggested, is not merely to look at what it says but to delve deeply into what it does and how it does it. While the signs themselves can produce meaning, for example in their relationship to natural language constructs (Print, function, if, then, void) as well as in comments and variable names, by constituting the algorithms of the program, the code also represents the logic of the program. Here too lies significance in a way analogous to but not exactly like other sign systems. Discovering the particularities of how code signifies is one of the chief challenges of CCS.

What kinds of work do you see your center contributing to the growth of Critical Code Studies?

The HaCCS Lab has two chief goals: to develop and promote the methodologies of Critical Code Studies and to foster dialogue between computer science and humanities scholars. This summer we hosted our first conference and have several events planned for the coming academic year geared toward bringing a diverse array of scholars together. Also, in the Spring, we plan to host another online forum, the third in three years. More importantly, the lab will serve as a hub for scholars interested in working on CCS, a source for news on the latest publications, and perhaps even a venue for provocations in the current debates surrounding code. We are currently investigating publication venues and are examining opportunities to create new courses and to offer workshops for those interested in joining our broader research community.

Mark Marino is the Director of the newly launched Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at USC, named for a field he initiated in 2006. He is the Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org), as well as a writer and critic of experimental interactive forms, including "a show of hands" (http://hands.literatronica.net) and the LA Flood Project. He blogs at Writer Response Theory and is Editor of Bunk Magazine, an online humor zine. He currently teaches for the Writing Program at USC. He is currently working on two collaborative book projects using CCS methodologies. His portfolio can be found here.

September 19, 2011

How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"?: USC's Mark Marino on Critical Code Studies (Part One)

September 19, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

The Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab opened this summer at the University of Southern California with the specific goal of developing the field and fostering discussion between the Humanities and Computer Science. Current members include USC faculty and students and a host of affiliated scholars from other institutions, including and international advisory board. The HaCCS Lab sponsored its first conference this summer and will be sponsoring other get togethers both on campus and online. Central to its mission is to develop common vocabularies, methodologies, and case-studies of CCS, while promoting publications in the field. Mark Marino, who teaches in the USC Writing Program, is the Director of the new center. He was nice enough to agree to an interview during which he explains what he means by Critical Code Studies, how it relates to other humanistic approaches to studying digital culture, and what he thinks it contributes to our understanding of Code as a cultural practice and as a critical artifact.

 What do you mean by critical code studies?

The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is "the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code." However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning.

Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities. I should note that Critical Code Studies also looks at code separated from functioning software as in the case of some codework poetry, such as Mez's work or Zach Blas' trasnCoder anti-programming language. To that extent, Critical Code Studies is also interested in the culture of code, the art of code, and code in culture more broadly.

At this nascent stage, I also find it useful to point out the plurality and variability of the methodologies that have been already used to analyze code whether in the Critical Code Studies Working Group, at our two conferences, in the HASTAC Scholars Forum, at MLA, and elsewhere. These preliminary readings demonstrate that Critical Code Studies is not an approach but a wide range of approaches that use code as a starting point for a larger discussion. Scholars seem eager to talk about code and are experimenting with ways to unpack it.

Critical Code Studies answers a call from N. Katherine Hayles and others for media specific analysis by taking up for analysis an aspect of digital objects that is unique to the computational realm. Back in 2005 and 2006 when I first began talking to people about code, there weren't many examples of critics, working then under the title "new media," who discussed code, which struck me as unusual since it's such a rich semiotic realm. There just weren't enough critical readings that demonstrated for how to talk about that component of the work. At the time, I was working on my dissertation and was trying to produce readings of conversation agents, or chatbots. That led me to write that initial essay in electronic book review.

For my work, the "critical" component is also crucial because it evokes "critical theory." I don't want to limit the types of theory or philosophy that can be applied to code, but I do want to push for critiques that challenge, that remain sensitive to the socio-historic contexts of the code, the institutional investments, the ideologies and ontologies of code. Code is already studied in the contexts of computer science, while the humanities have something unique to offer in the form of critical analysis and explication or, if you will, exegesis.

 Your published definition of the field stresses the "extra-functional significance" of code. Why separate out meaning from effect? Why not study the relationship between significance and function?

The "extra" in "extra-functional" does not mean "outside of" or "beyond" but rather "growing out from."  Function is certainly an important component of the way code signifies, but it is important to distinguish CCS from the study of code that concentrates primarily on function.  Perhaps more important to this moment of CCS is to discuss the difference between an interpretive approach that seeks implications and meaning rather than a utilitarian approach that is primarily concerned with making code function. Again, while I agree with you that the two aspects are inseparable, the search for meaning goes beyond denotation into the connotations, resonance, implication, evocation, et cetera.

 How much technical skill and knowledge is required to look at code critically?  Is this a potential space for collaboration between the humanities and the technical fields?

It is the contention of CCS and the newly formed Humanities and Critical Code Studies lab that everyone should have at least some literacy in how code works, whether at a base-level understanding of algorithms, some basic knowledge of programming principals, and/or a basic ability to parse code in whatever language.  That said, the HaCCS lab is working to foster dialogue and collaboration between the Humanities and Computer Science scholars because more engaged critical readings come from the fullest understanding of the culture out of which that code emanates.  Without that dialogue, CCS could become a kind of imperialist project, subject to the same kinds of over-writing, misinterpretation, and misreading that such relationships engender.

In my own readings, I tend to engage in lengthy discussions with programmers, including the authors of the code, so that I can get a more nuanced understanding of how they perceive the code. Again, part of what I'm after are the layers of meaning that code has as it circulates through different discourse communities in different contexts. I look forward to courses in Critical Code Studies co-taught by Humanities and Computer Science faculty to students from across the university looking at code together using the lenses from all their disciplines.

At the same time, CCS tends to attract the programmer-scholar, the hacker-theorist, critics who build things. Being versant in both programming and critical theory helps these critics to apply the theoretical approaches without doing violence or overwriting the ways in which coding conventions are understood within programming circles.

Is the goal to develop an "aesthetics" of "good code"? Is critical code studies a kind of formalism?

No, Critical Code Studies is not primarily focused on "good code," although the discussions of the aesthetics of code or Don Knuth's formulation of "beautiful code" offer an opening for a conversation that will be familiar to Humanities scholars, namely who defines the aesthetics of beautiful code, why have they chosen this criteria, and what alternatives have been surpassed. Such discussions often turn to programming anomalies such as the obfuscated code contests. Nonetheless, the discussion of aesthetics makes a fundamental notion of CCS clear: code is not a pure, inevitable formulation. As Knuth said in his Turing Award lecture, programming is an art.

As to the second question, Critical Code Studies is not formalist, but instead requires a deeply contextualized reading. On one of the earliest pages we published on CriticalCodeStudies.com, you will find a list of ways to read code that includes reading code against the factors of its creation, it funding source, its composer's work, its implementation and circulation in cultural as well as material contexts such as the platforms on which it operated, and the other code with which it interacts. Critical Code Studies focuses on examining the code in its historical moment to better understand the culture out of which it developed.

Bio:

Mark Marino is the Director of the newly launched Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at USC, named for a field he initiated in 2006. He is the Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org), as well as a writer and critic of experimental interactive forms, including "a show of hands" (http://hands.literatronica.net) and the LA Flood Project. He blogs at Writer Response Theory and is Editor of Bunk Magazine, an online humor zine. He currently teaches for the Writing Program at USC. He is currently working on two collaborative book projects using CCS methodologies. His portfolio can be found here.

September 06, 2011

Back to School Special 2: Syllabus for my Transmedia Entertainment Class

September 06, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

One of the challenges of teaching cutting edge subject matter is that you need to totally revamp your syllabus each time you teach a class. The following is the updated syllabus for the class on Transmedia Entertainment I am offering this term through the USC Cinema School. Our long-range hope is that a significant number of the students studying film production at USC will end up with a basic conceptual vocabulary in transmedia storytelling and will thus enter the industry already able to collaborate across media platforms in a meaningful way. Indeed, I would argue that the "movie brats" who have long been poster-children for the Cinema School, the guys whose names are on the buildings -- Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis, were never "pure filmmakers" in the classical sense but had always worked across media platforms and indeed, paved the way for contemporary transmedia practice. So, USC is the appropriate place to be developing such a subject. As you will see, the class relies heavily on guest speakers from across the media industry and it also relies on a simulation activity in which our students develop transmedia proposals (including Bibles) and pitch their approach to a panel of industry experts. I am not a designer and so can not teach the design and production aspects of transmedia fully, but I try to tap the full range of creative talent in the class to see how far we can push their thinking, using a model I developed at MIT where I taught an interactive design class from the late and much missed Sande Scordos from Sony Imageworks.

Transmedia Entertainment

CTSC 482

Tuesdays 10:00 am-1:50 pm

We now live in a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager's bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit "synergies" between different parts of the medium system and "maximize touch-points" with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and Wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

Each class session will introduce a concept central to our understanding of transmedia entertainment that we will explore through a combination of lectures, screenings, and conversations with industry insiders who are applying these concepts through their own creative practices. The readings for this class are organized into required readings, which every student should read in order for us to have a shared basis for discussion, and recommended readings, which are intended to be resources for the group project as they dig deeper into the course concepts. My recommendation is that the members of the group divide these readings between them and make sure that the core concepts be in the shared pool of knowledge for each team.

In this course, we will be exploring the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling through:

Critically examining commercial and grassroots texts that contribute to larger media franchises (mobisodes and webisodes, comics, games).
Developing a theoretical framework for understanding how storytelling works in this new environment with a particular emphasis upon issues of world building, cultural attractors, and cultural activators.
Tracing the historical context from which modern transmedia practices emerged, including consideration of the contributions of such key figures as P.T. Barnum, L. Frank Baum, Feuillade, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, Walt Disney, George Lucas, DC and Marvel Comics, and Joss Whedon.
Exploring what transmedia approaches contribute to such key genres as science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero, suspense, soap opera, teen and reality television.
Listening to cutting-edge thinkers from the media industry talk about the challenges and opportunities that transmedia entertainment offers, walking through cases of contemporary projects that have deployed cross-platform strategies.
Putting these ideas into action through working with a team of fellow students to develop and pitch transmedia strategies around an existing media property.

Required Book:

Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and How We Tell Stories (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011)

Recommended Book:

Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (New York: Chamberlain Brothers, 2005)

All additional readings will be provided through the Blackboard site for the class.

Grading and Assignments:

Commercial Extension Paper 20 percent

Grassroots Extension Paper 20 percent

Final Project - Franchise Development Project 40 percent

Class Forums 20 percent

In order to fully understand how transmedia entertainment works, students will be expected to immerse themselves into at least one major media franchise for the duration of the term. You should consume as many different instantiations (official and unofficial) of this franchise as you can and try to get an understanding of what each part contributes to the series as a whole.

COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PAPER: For the first paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining one commercially produced media extension (comic, website, game, mobisode, amusement park attraction, etc.). You should try to address such issues as its relationship to the story world, its strategies for expanding the narrative, its deployment of the distinctive properties of its platform, its targeted audience, and its cultural attractors/activators. The paper will be evaluated on its demonstrated grasp of core concepts from the class, its original research, and its analysis of how the artifact relates to specific trends impacting the entertainment industry. Where possible, link your analysis to the course materials, including readings, lecture notes, and speaker comments. Please email a short paragraph describing your project to Prof. Jenkins and Shawna by September 27th. (Due Oct. 4) (20 Percent)

GRASSROOTS EXTENSION PAPER: For the second paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining a fan-made extension (fan fiction, discussion list, video, etc.) and try to understand where the audience has sought to attach themselves to the franchise, what they add to the story world, how they respond to or route around the invitational strategies of the series, and how they reshape our understanding of the characters, plot or world of the original franchise. The paper will be evaluated on its demonstrated grasp of core concepts from the class, its original research, and its analysis of how the artifact relates to specific trends impacting the entertainment industry. Where possible, link your analysis to the course materials, including readings, lecture notes, and speaker comments. Please email a short paragraph describing your project to Prof. Jenkins and Shawna by October 25th. (Due Nov. 1) (20 Percent)

FINAL PROJECT - FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: Students will be organized into teams, which for the purpose of this exercise will function as transmedia companies. You should select a media property (a film, television series, comic book, novel, etc.) that you feel has the potential to become a successful transmedia franchise. In most cases, you will be looking for a property that has not yet added media extensions, though you could also look at a property that you feel has been mishandled in the past. You should have identified and agreed on a property no later than Sept. 13th. By the end of the term, your team will be "pitching" this property. The pitch should include a briefing book that describes:

1) the core defining properties of the media property

2) a description of the intended audience(s) and what we know of its potential interests

3) a discussion of the specific plans for each media platform you are going to deploy

4) an overall description for how you will seek to integrate the different media platforms to create a coherent world

5) parallel examples of other properties which have deployed the strategies being described

For a potential model for what such a book might look like, see the transmedia bible template from Screen Australia, available here: http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/filmmaking/digital_resources.aspx. Or visit: http://zenfilms.typepad.com/zen_films/2010/06/transmedia-workflow.html. If you use either as a model, include only those segments of their Bible templates which make sense for your particular property and approach.

The pitch itself will be a group presentation, followed by questions from our panel of judges, who will be drawn from across the entertainment industry. The length and format of the presentation will be announced as the term progresses to reflect the number of students actually involved in the process and thus the number of participating teams. The presentation should give us a "taste" of what the property is like as well as to lay out some of the key elements that are identified in the briefing book. Each team will need to determine what are the most salient features to cover in their pitches as well as what information they want to hold in reserve to address the judge's questions. Each member of the team will be expected to develop expertise around a specific media platform as well as to contribute to the over-all strategies for spreading the property across media systems. The group will select its own team leader who will be responsible for contacts with the instructor and will coordinate the presentation. The team leader will be asked to provide feedback on what each team member contributed to the effort, while team members will be asked to provide an evaluation of how the team leader performed. Team Members will check in on Week Ten and Week Fourteen to review their progress on the assignment. The instructor may request short written updates throughout the term to insure that the team is moving in the right direction. (40 percent)

CLASS FORUM/PARTICIPATION: For each class session, students will be asked to contribute a substantive question or comment via the class forum on BlackBoard. Comments should reflect an understanding of the readings for that day as well as an attempt to formulate an issue that we can explore with the visiting speakers. Students will also be evaluated based on regular attendance and class participation. (20 Percent)

TUESDAY, AUGUST 23rd

Transmedia Storytelling 101

Required Readings:

● Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 22, 2007

● Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

● Nick DeMartino, "Why Transmedia Is Catching On Now," Future of Film Blog, Parts 1, 2, 3.

Recommended Readings:

● Geoffrey Long, Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, Master's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007

● P. David Marshall, "The New Intertextual Commodity" in Dan Harries (ed.) The New Media Book (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 69-81.

Speaker: Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner Entertainment

Jeff Gomez is the world's leading producer of transmedia entertainment properties. He is an expert at incubating new entertainment franchises, strategic planning and production for cross-platform implementation. As CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, Jeff leverages intellectual properties into global franchises that successfully navigate an array of media channels. Jeff has worked on such blockbuster universes as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, Microsoft's Halo and James Cameron's Avatar. He sits on the board of the Producers Guild of America East, as well as on the PGA New Media Council. A Latino, raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Jeff earned degrees in Film Studies and Communication Arts & Sciences at Queens College, CUNY.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 30th

A Brief History of Transmedia

Required Reading:

● J.P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), pp. 61 - 79.

● Frank Rose, "How to Build a World That Doesn't Fall Apart," Art of Immersion, pp. 289- 320.

Recommended Readings:

● Neil Harris, "The Operational Aesthetic," Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 61-89.

● Carolyn Handler Miller, "Using a Transmedia Approach," Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2006), pp. 149-164.

Speaker: Alexander Seropian, Disney Interactive

Alexander Seropian is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Core Games for Disney Interactive Media Group. He is responsible for building interactive franchises with major brands such as Mickey Mouse, Pixar and Marvel. Prior to his position at Disney, Alex founded Wideload Games, an independent game developer that utilized an external development model similar to film production. Wideload Games produced award-winning titles such as Stubbs the Zombie. In 2009, the studio was acquired by Disney Interactive Media Group. Alex began his career in videogames in 1991 as the founder of Bungie Studios. Under his guidance, Bungie created some of the most celebrated game franchises in the industry, including Marathon, Myth, Oni, and Halo. Alex also serves as the Game Designer in Residence for DePaul University's College of Digital Media.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6th

High Concept and the Franchise System

Required Reading:

● Justin Wyatt, "Critical Redefinition: The Concept of High Concept" High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 1-22.

● Jonathan Gray, "Learning to Use the Force: Star Wars Toys and Their Films," Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), pp. 177-187.

● Christy Dena, "Chapter 2: Art, Commerce, Media and Environments in Transmedia Practice," from Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environment, pp. 26-55.

● Frank Rose, "Deeper," The Art of Immersion, pp.47-76.

Back to School Special: Syllabus for Science Fiction AS Media Theory

August 17, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

As I've done in previous terms, I am sharing here the syllabus for my graduate seminar this fall. The focus is on science fiction AS media theory: i.e. we are looking primarily at science fiction texts (mostly literary) as ways of thinking through the implications of media change and we are looking at media theories for the implicit utopian or dystopian claims they make and for the ways they have drawn on metaphors from science fiction. I have taught science fiction as literature before -- at MIT -- but this represents a new approach for me in terms of how I engage with SF texts in the classroom. Science Fiction as Media Theory

This class explores the ways that science fiction--sometimes known as speculative fiction--has historically functioned as a form of vernacular theory about media technologies, practices, and institutions. As recent writings about "design fictions" illustrate, these speculations have in turn inspired the developers and of new technologies as well as those who create content for such platforms, helping to frame our expectations about the nature of media change. And, increasingly, media theorists--raised in a culture where science fiction has been a pervasive influence--are drawing on its metaphors as they speculate about virtual worlds, cyborg feminism, post-humanism, and afro-futurism, among a range of other topics.

This seminar will explore the multiple intersections between science fiction and media theory, reading literary and filmic fictions as theoretical speculations and classic and contemporary theory as forms of science fiction. The scope of the course ranges from technological Utopian writers from the early 20th century to contemporary imaginings of digital futures and steampunk pasts. Not simply a course on science fiction as a genre, this seminar will invite us to explore what kinds of cultural work science fiction performs and how it has contributed to larger debates about communication and culture.

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

describe the historic relationship between speculative fiction and media theory
explain key movements in science fiction, such as technological utopianism, cyberpunk, steampunk, and discuss their relationship to larger theories of media change.
trace the roots of contemporary media theories of cyborg feminism, afrofuturism, and trans/post-humanism, back through science fiction films and literature
develop their own critical account of how ideas about media and technology have been shaped by the discourses associated with science fiction.

Required Books:

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers

Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End

Nalo Hopkinson and Upphinder Mehan (eds.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy

Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

All other readings can be found on the class Blackboard site.

Assignments:

1. Blackboard Posts: Each week, students will post a reaction to the readings via the class blackboard site. The reaction might be a comment, a question, a provocation, and often will be a complex mixture of all of the above. It can be informal and need not be more than a few paragraphs, but it should show the student's thinking process in response to the topics and materials being encountered that week. This is the primary mechanism by which I will be monitoring your mastery of the core concepts of the class. You need not respond to every reading each week, but there should be signs there of close reading and critical engagement. (30 percent)

2. Media Analysis Paper: Applying the concepts of science fiction as a "design platform" that we will encounter in the first class session, students will choose a film, television series, or game which they feel offers a particularly vivid embodiment of a science fiction concept and provide an analysis which considers the thinking behind this representation of future media or technology, the ways this concept gets deployed through the story and the values which become associated with it, and how this concept may be deployed as a springboard for creative thinking about the development of future media tools, platforms, or processes. Along the way, students might consider the differences between embodying these concepts in an audio-visual media as opposed to the ways they might be dealt with in a literary text. The result should be a short but impactful essay (roughly 5-7 pages). (20 percent)

3. Theory Analysis Paper: A key theme in our discussions has been the idea that science fiction functions much like theory to speculate about the implications of current social, economic, political, cultural, or technological practices and to envision potential outcomes of current trends. In this paper, students will reverse their lens and examine theory as a form of speculative fiction. Students will select a work of media theory and discuss what they see as its vision for the future (whether implicit or explicit). What does it have to say about the nature of media change? Does it see people as moving towards a utopian or dystopian future? What, if any, explicit use does it make of metaphors drawn from science fiction as it constructs its vision for the future? What kinds of response does it seek from its readers to the problems or potentials that it has identified? Students shall produce a short, impactful essay (5-7 pages) which demonstrates close reading of the theoretical text and an ability to push analysis beyond what's explicitly on the page. (20 Percent)

4. Final Paper: Students, in consultation with the professor, will develop a distinctive project which emerges from the intersection between their research interests and the course content. The result can either be a creative project or a paper, though either should show the ability to construct an argument and mobilize evidence in support of their core claims and should show a grasp of the basic conceptual framework of the course. Students will be asked to give a short class presentation, sharing their project and its implications with their classmates, as part of the process of developing and refining their ideas. (30 Percent)

Wednesday, August 24th

Week 1: Science Fiction as Design Fiction

Readings:

* Brian David Johnson, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction (Morgan and Claypool, 2011)

* Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report," Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 227-264.

The students will watch Minority Report prior to the first class session.

Guest Speaker: John Underkoffler, technical advisor to Minority Report; Brian David Johnson, author of Science Fiction Prototyping

Rec. for Further Reading:

Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, "'Resistance is Futile:' Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing," forthcoming.
Bruce Sterling, "Design Fiction," Interactions, May-June 2009.
Mark Pesce, "Magic Mirror: Science Fiction as a Software Development Platform," Media in Transition conference, 1999.
David Stork, "The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001," Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

Wednesday, August 31st

Week Two: Technological Utopianism

Howard P. Segal, "The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism" and "American Visions of Technological Utopia," Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 10-44.
Sina Nafai, "Underworld: An Interview with Rosalind Williams," Cabinet, Summer 2008, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/najafi.php.
Edward Bellamy, Excerpt from Looking Backward, Chapter 1-12, pp. 3-72.
Katharine Burdekin, excerpt from Proud Man.

Wednesday, September 7th

Week Three The Origins of Science Fiction

Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsbeck Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 100-135
John W. Campbell, "Twilight;" (40-63) Lester del Rey, "Helen O'Loy;" (62-73) and Theodore Sturgeon, "Microscopic God," (115-142) in Robert Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, (New York, NY: Orb Books, 2005).
Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (pp. 35-48); Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (pp. 49-64); Nobert Wiener, "Men, Machines, and the World About" (pp. 65-72), in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (ed.),The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Recommended for Further Reading:

John Huntington, "The Myth of Genius: The Fantasy of Apolitical Power" (pp. 44-59) and "An Economy of Reason: The Motives of the Technocratic Hero" (pp. 69-79) in Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

Wednesday, September 14th

Week Four: Postwar Dystopias

Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communications, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action," (pp. 18-30) and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry Reconsidered" (pp.31-37) in Paul Marris and Sue Thornham (ed.), Media Studies: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One. http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 1-44, 117-131
Ray Bradbury, Fairenheit 451.

Wednesday, September 21st

Week Five The Space Merchants and American Advertising

Vance Packard, excerpt from The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Ig, 2007), pp. 31-64.
Jules Henry, "Advertising as a Philosophical System," Culture Against Man (New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 45-99.
Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (New York: St. Martins, 1958)
Frederik Pohl, "Tunnel Under the World" (pp.1-34) and "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus" (pp.62-85), The Best of Frederik Pohl (New York: Sidgewick and Johnson, 1977)
Henry Kuttner, "The Twonky," The Best of Henry Kutner (New York: Ballantine, 1975), pp.167-189.

Wednesday, September 28th (Henry out of town)

Week Six Cordwainer Smith and Psychological Warfare

Paul M.A. Linebarger, excerpt from Psychological Warfare (xxx), pp. 43-92.
Cordwainer Smith, "Scanners Live in Vain" (pp.65-95); "The Dead Lady of Clown Town"(pp. 223-286); "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (pp.401-417) "A Planet Named Shayol," (pp. 419-448); "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," (pp.xx) The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (Boston: Boston Science Fiction Association, 1993)

Wednesday, October 5th

Week Seven Altered States

Alvin Toffler, "Diversity" from Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 283-322.
Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name"(pp.57-78) and "The Crisis in Women's Identity" (pp.123-136) The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001).
James Tiptree Jr., "The Women Men Don't See," (pp.255-279) and John Varley, "Lollipop and Tar Baby," (pp. 357-374) in Brian Atteby and Ursula K. Le Guin (eds.) The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 255-279.
Octavia Butler, "Blood Child," Blood Child and Other Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp.3-30.
Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe" in Pamela Sargent (ed.) The New Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 100-119.
Kate Wilhelm, "Baby, You Were Great," in Pamela Sargent (ed.) Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 139-158.

Wednesday, October 12th

Week Eight Cyberpunk

Bruce Sterling, "Preface;" James Patrick Kelly, "Solstice;" (pp. 66-104) Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, "Mozart in Mirrorshades;" (pp. 223-239) and John Shirley, "Freezone;" (pp. 139- 177) in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Ace Books, 1988).
William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic," Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1986), pp.1-22.
Samuel R. Delaney, "Some Real Mothers: An Interview with Samuel R. Delaney," in Silent Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 164-185.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., "Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism," in Larry McCaffrey (ed.) Storming the Reality Studio: A Case Book of Cyberpunk and Post-Modern Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 182-193.

Wednesday, October 19th

Week Nine Cyborg Feminism

Anne Balsamo, "Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture," in Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (eds.), Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 347-368.
All of Balsamo's online articles can be found here
Anne Balsamo, "Feminism for the Incurably Informed," Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 133-156.
Veronica Hollinger, "Something Like a Fiction: Speculative Intersections of Sexuality and Technology" in Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (eds.), Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction, (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 140-160.
C.L. Moore, "No Woman Born," Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 261-300.
Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers (Orion, 2000).

Recommended Reading:

Donna Harroway, "Cyborgs at Large," in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds.) Technoculture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1-20.

Guest Speaker: Anne Balsamo, USC

Wednesday, October 26th

Week Ten The Space Merchants Revisited

Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, "The Consumer as Explorer" (pp. 68-80) and "The Consumer as Rebel" (pp. 137-151), in The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (New York: Tor, 2003).
George Saunders, "Civil War Land In Bad Decline," Civil War Land In Bad Decline (Riverhead, 1997), pp. 3-24.
Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, And Gomorrah," Aye, and Gomorrah: Stories, pp.91-101.

Wednesday, November 2nd

Week Eleven Posthumanism and Transhumanism

Jussi Parikka, "Insects in the Age of Technology," in Jussi Parikka (ed.), Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. ix-xxxv.
N. Katherine Hayles, "Towards Embodied Virtuality," in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1-24.
Ray Kurzweil, "The Six Epochs,"(pp.7-34) and "Eich bin ein Singularitarian," (pp. 369-390) The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (London, England: Penguin, 2006), pp. 7-34.
Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End (New York: Tor, 2007)

Wednesday, November 9th

Week Twelve Afrofuturism and the Global Imagination

"What is Afro-Futurism?: An Interview with artist/educator D. Denenge Akpem," Post-Black, March 2010, http://postblackthebook.blogspot.com/2010/03/afro-futurism-interview-with.html.
Catherine Rameriz, "Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin," Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33(1), Spring 2008, pp. 185-194. http://americanstudies.ucsc.edu/csramirez/Afrofuturism.pdf
Andrea Hairston, "Girots of the Galaxy;" Larissa Lai, "Rachel;" Vandana Singh, "Delhi;" Tamai Kobayashi, "Panopte's Eye;" Karin Lowachee, "The Forgotten Ones;" Greg Van Eekhout, "Native Aliens;" Celu Amberstone, "Refugees;" devorah major, "Trade Winds;" and Carole McDonnel, "Lingua Franca," from Nalo Hopkinson and Upphinder Mehan (eds.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004).

Wednesday, November 16th

Week Thirteen Steampunk and Retrofuturism

Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (New York: St. Martin's, 2010)
Rebecca Onion, "Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice," Neo-Victorian Studies 1(1), Autumn, 2008, pp. 138-163.
Henry Jenkins, "'The Tomorrow That Never Was': Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter," in Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling (eds.), Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence,(New York, NY: Continuum, 2010), pp. 63-83.

Wednesday, November 30th

Week Fourteen Student Presentations

August 15, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Roberta Pearson and Alexis Lothian (Part Two)

August 15, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Roberta Pearson: You and I differ so radically with regard to what constitutes our acafandom that it's difficult for me to respond to the substance of your post (not having had experience of the kind of fandom in which you're involved). I'm going to use what you say to continue to meditate on what we might mean by acafan and whether it's a useful label. It's interesting that you, like many others, have the urge to self-confession. You say that the overlap of fandom and academia in your life has everything to do with personal ethics, particularly through the feminist science fiction convention where you serve as an advocate of transformative fan works. You also say that you're not at the moment a fan of a particular text but rather as I suggested in my original post a fan of fandom. I'm glad that you're 'self-confessing' this way and also glad that other people here have given into the urge, since it may be these self-confessions that help us to refine the acafan label.

In terms of the matrix of acafandom that I began to develop above, you'd be a non-tenured, transformational fan of fandom, and now I would add with a strong stake in this identity. I'd be a tenured, affirmational fan of particular texts without a particularly strong stake in this identity, except for my continuing connections with Sherlockian friends and my decade long attempt to write my book about Star Trek as television. I think the identity issue might be a key differentiator not only amongst fans but amongst acafans as well. Being an empiricist at heart (although not a raw positivist) I'm tempted to put together a little questionaire for everyone participating in this site to see if we can come up with an acafandom matrix. .

Alexis Lothian: I feel strange about the "fan of fandom" label, although it clearly applies to me. The awkwardness comes from the flexibility of the term 'fan' I discussed in my provocation, I think. I'm a transformational fan of fandom too; I certainly wouldn't want to affirm everything that is included under that term, although I would want to call attention to the hierarchy of values operating in what I would and would not be willing to affirm.

Perhaps the origin of those terms "transformational" and "affirmational" fandom (at least as I understand it) can help make sense of where I stand. They are terms that come from fandom, coined initially by obsession_inc and then taken up by Skud+ response to the feminist convention WisCon, which is the one I've been talking about my involvement in. When I talk about acafandom, I'm talking at least partly about acknowledging and doing justice to my own thinking's debt to fannish theorists and artists outside the academia machine who have given me terms and ideas that help me theorize just as much as the dense analyses and critical explorations of literary and cultural studies do.

I appreciate that you called attention to the "tenured / non tenured" strand in our aca/fannish matrix. Both as someone on the bottom end of that particular greasy pole, a graduate student on the cusp of finishing her PhD and entering the job market, and as someone who is invested in unpacking hierarchies of status and privilege, I think a lot about the materialities underpinning what we can and can't say about our fandom, our academia.

On the question of tastemaking that you brought up, for me, it goes without saying that Star Trek has as much place in scholarship as Shakespeare, and I see the Shakespeare scholar's celebration of genius as fannish in just about the same way as the Star Trek geek's idealization of 'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination.' As a scholar, delving into texts for their own sake is less what interests me than the work texts can do in the context of readers and cultures (though I love close textual analysis for what it can uncover and engage in it both in fannish and in academic situations). I would like to think that both Star Trek and Shakespeare fandom can show us important things about what Shakespeare and Trek can be, can create in and for their viewers.

I often work with texts that few members of academic communities are familiar with, whether because they are little-read historical works (let me just pause in this space to recommend Katharine Burdekin's 1937 feminist dystopia Swastika Night) or because they circulate outside of mainstream literary communities.

I do embrace the capacity to be a tastemaker that academia gives me to some extent in that it allows me to share these amazing works with other people: I've been able to put together several vidshows for student audiences to explain the way transformative fan communities have developed a set of literacies and artistic practices for digital video remix. I'm alert to the issues Kristina Busse has often raised, in terms of the ways scholars may be creating a canon that isn't representative of fan creators' work as a whole and may indeed go against the way fans want to be represented. But I aim to be quite clear that when I show fanworks, my aim is generally not to show what fandom is (I am grateful to scholars like Tisha Turk for doing the work of explicating fan videos' rhetorical functioning so that I can focus on my own interests without needing to do that to the same extent) but rather to show what fans' transformative artistic practices can do.

Roberta Pearson: I know the original definitions of affirmational versus transformational fandom as developed by obsession (if we can call her this for short) although don't know how the concepts have been developed by Skud so need to go look at that. While I find the distinctions useful, I reject the value judgements inherent in them. As I said in my essay for Kristina and Louisa that I mentioned above, I think that celebrating the latter and intimating that the former are too closely linked with producers returns us to the early days of fan studies when we celebrated semiotic geurrillas and ignored other aspects of fandom. But if the distinction is between fans who engage in interpretation and evaluation of a loved textual object and those who transform that object in some way, without one being seen as superior to the other, than I'm happy to use it not only for fans but for acafans.

I really find this whole fan of fandom thing fascinating since it's something I've just 'discovered' while writing that essay I keep referring to. I had thought that fans always had to be anchored to particular texts and that indeed 'texts' produced fans (who might then of course go on to produce other texts). This is getting us a bit far from the acafan debate, although perhaps not if we return to my point that we need to theorise fandom before theorising acafandom.

Re your statement about fannish theorists and artists who help you theorise as much as any academic, this seems quite close to people studying contemporary art -- as least as I understand it! I have a colleague who works on contemporary Chinese art. He says that many of the artists have imbibed some critical theory from the academy and are now reworking it in their art works. And he's very interested in the junction between critical theory and critical practice. So this kind of work might be very close to what you and other acafans are doing when working with fan artists. Again, this suggests that we might broaden the term acafan to many humanist disciplines.

RE academic power and privilege, of course even those at the top of the greasy pole can't entirely escape our fannish affiliations. Many colleagues in various depts have teased me about Star Trek -- associating me, of course, with the most stereotyped fans of all, the Trekkies. But as long as I'm publishing on the topic they're happy because of the national system of research evaluation that we have in the UK. I imagine that a fannish identity might be harder for an ambitious young acafan to disclose in publications or more particularly at job interviews. But that might be more of a problem in the States. Here in the UK, I don't think it's such a big deal, but then again I think the US academy is generally more obsessed with identity issues than the UK one.

Alexis Lothian: Skud doesn't alter obsession_inc's concepts of affirmational and transformational fandom so much as lay them out in a matrix of examples--it might fit nicely with your interest in the empirical! I think that a value judgment does sometimes seem very present in how those terms are used by those who engage in transformational fandom, but a line in Skud's post suggests that the intention is much as you have been using them: she writes that ""affirmational" and "transformational" are things you can be both of, either at different times or simultaneously, without disappearing in a puff of illogic." I think that, if we made your questionnaire (an idea I rather love), we would find that many people appeared simultaneously in several different places on the matrix.

I completely agree that the way I am talking about fans and fanworks is the way many scholars engage with practising artists. In fact, in October of this year I am taking part in a panel at the Los Angeles Queer Studies conference with three other young queer scholars, in which we will all be presenting work on queer digital artistic self-fashioning and talking about projects with regard to which we are both scholars and creators. The work that I will be talking about just happens to be fan production.

As for the UK/US difference in academic structures, I have experience of both and think you're probably correct regarding identity, but I suspect the differences within each country are at least as wide as the transatlantic gap. And I'll have to get back to you regarding the fate of the ambitious young acafan in a couple of years...

Alexis Lothian is completing her dissertation in the English department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on queer time, speculative fiction, and fan communities' transformative modes of digital analysis and critique. She is a founding member of the editorial team for Transformative Works and Cultures and has presented and published on science fiction literature and film and on fan video, including contributions to dossiers in Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura (forthcoming). Her website is http://queergeektheory.org.

Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Head of the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. She has written about Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Batman and other cultural icons. She has written some Sherlockian scholarship and even produced a Trek fanfic or two for private circulation, but considers herself primarily an 'affirmational' fan whose academic interests are more in the industry than in fandom.

August 14, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Roberta Pearson and Alexis Lothian (Part One)

August 14, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Roberta Pearson: I'm looking forward to Alexis' 'provocation' since our preliminary exchanges indicate that we're ideal partners, coming at the issue of aca-fannishness from very different perspectives. In fact, it's the perspective and position of the various posters that I want to address first.

The very title of Henry's blog together with this debate have so far led most participants to confessions concerning the kinds of acafans they are or are not and why. As Anne Kustritz pointed out, though, there's a danger here. "The aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding...." And as Henry said, "my bet is that each participant has reasons to feel somewhat inside and somewhat outside the "core" of the community being represented." So far we've had discussions of myriad fandoms, including skating and Radiohead, with many people positioning themselves somewhat outside the core of the fan communities with which they affiliate. We've also had people positioning themselves outside a presumed core of acafans, which implicitly (and not so implicitly in some cases) means an active involvement in a fan community or at least a stake in transformational as opposed to affirmational fandom. I'd like to suggest that we can't begin to theorise the concept of acafan unless we first return to our theorisations of fan.

Harrington says, "I am also, I suspect, a different kind of fan that most participants in this blog series. I'm definitely an "as-is" (not transformative) fan and for the most part my fandom is experienced privately not publicly." Campbell says that when reading some fan studies, he has the "distinct impression that if I don't don a Star Trek uniform, attend Sci-Fi conventions, invest a significant amount of my time memorizing minutia surrounding each episode and reading fan fiction, then I cannot claim to be a Star Trek fan. Apparently, enjoying the series, collecting some Star Trek memorabilia, and discussing the series with friends who also enjoy the show is not enough to be a "fan.""

And now time for a bit of personal confession and positioning. I certainly consider myself a fan, particularly with my core fandoms of Trek and Sherlock Holmes. Re the former, I've written a couple of fanfics, just to see how it was done, but the first and only time I went to a con, the sight of people dressed in Starfleet uniforms struck me as either risible or horrifying. Re the latter, I've written Sherlockian scholarship, was for a period in my life actively involved in the Sherlockian community and still count some members of that community among my dearest and oldest friends. But with Harrington I'm much more an affirmational than a transformative fan and experience most of my fandom in private; thus by some accounts I'm probably not a fan despite my self-declaration as such. Here we have two possible dimensions of fandom: affirmational versus transformational and private versus public (or perhaps text versus community).

In a recent essay that I wrote for Kristina Busse's and Louisa Stein's collection on the BBC Sherlock, I suggested another dimension, distinguishing between those who are fans of a specific text/cultural icon and those who are fans of fandom itself, the shared protocols of fandom on sites such as LiveJournal permitting fans to move easily from one fandom to another. The relationship of these various kinds of fans to texts, to the industries that produce them and to fan communities are distinctly different and worthy of exploration. And until we do this we cannot begin to distinguish among the different kinds of aca-fans.

And of course once we've charted the fan bit of the term, we must also chart the aca bit, defining the individual's relationship to the academy. We can then differentiate for example, between a non-tenure track transformational fan of fandom and a tenured affirmational fan of particular texts or cultural icons (the category into which I would put myself), along with the factors of power and privilege that come with these distinctions.

Continuing with self-positioning, I have to confess (and among this crowd it feels very much like a confession, although one I've made before and in print) that I'm a fan of lots of high culture, ranging from Shakespeare to Bach. I would argue that many in the humanities who engage in "serious scholarship" around these cultural icons are also fans. As Henry says here, "as writers like Jolie Jensen noted, this mixture of passion and knowledge was what qualified one to speak about classical music, serious literature, or high art, but because of the legacy of critical studies, being passionate about popular culture was seen as being duped by the culture Industries." Here's the classic Bourdieu-ian binary: passionate engagement with popular culture and distanced appreciation of high culture.

Yet as I have argued elsewhere, those who love Bach or Shakespeare are just as passionate as those who love skating or Radio Head, and this extends to those who engage in "serious scholarship." Above I've suggested refining the concept of the aca-fan; here I suggest broadening it to include those within the humanities who research particular texts or icons. Anyone who has been in the company of Shakespeareans for example, recognizes the easy familiarity and in-group conversation of the fan, as people reference various plays and characters. Why should those of us who (also) study popular culture and engage in much the same activities, feel inferior to acafans of high culture?

These high culture acafans have always felt fully confident in their judgments as authorized tastemakers, fully confident that is until the culture wars that enshrined relativism and challenged academic authority. As someone who began her academic career amidst this furore and fully imbibed the concept of cultural relativism, I've never felt confident in imposing my own tastes upon my students nor in unproblematically declaring that something I like is 'good'.

My initial training as a social scientist, which involved the notions of objectivity that others have referenced here, probably also made it harder for me to engage either in aesthetic analysis or aesthetic judgments. From my preliminary exchanges with Francesca Coppa, originally scheduled to be my partner in this debate, I have the impression that the younger generation of academics feels much less reticent about this and happy to grab the tastemaking power that comes with an academic position. And even I am now happier to declare something "good," or at least to interrogate the factors that might make something "good," as my co-author and I are doing in a chapter of our book about Star Trek and Television. But does being an acafan always mean that one loves the object that one studies?

And yet another confession - as well as being a fan of texts I'm a fan of the industries that produce them. This industry fandom was practically forced upon me as a fan of Star Trek during its first airing, as news of low ratings and imminent cancellation continually circulated. In order to understand this, my adolescent self had to acquire some grasp of network operations, even if only through the not so reliable medium of TV Guide. Now that production studies has emerged as the dominant paradigm within television studies, I return to worries about objectivity and what it means to study the beloved object and to have access to those who produce it. Can we/should we maintain a critical distance?

I said above that when I first saw someone in Starfleet uniform at a con, I hovered between horror and laughter. The next time I saw someone in Starfleet uniform, was on the Paramount studio lot during the filming of Star Trek Nemesis. When Brent Spiner and Marina Sirtis appeared fully decked out in their characters' costumes, scholarly objectivity disappeared in a haze of excitement: I was for a moment completely fan without a trace of aca, indeed, living the fan's perfect daydream. But loving something doesn't mean always being affirmational: affirmational fans are perfectly capable of insightful criticism.

And fans of course are themselves often insightful industry analysts, for the same reasons that I was forced to be as an adolescent; they want to know what brings their beloved object into being and how long it might survive. I think it's important that fans, academics and aca-fans all have some knowledge of the industries that produce the texts that generate the majority of fandoms. Therefore, I disagree with Kristina when she says, "As a fan I don't want to engage directly with actors/writers/directors, and as an academic, I don't care about that side either. I know it's an important area, and I'm very happy that we have good and smart people explaining and representing fandom, but to me fandom is mostly about what we as fans do." However, I do think that acafans who do production studies do need to engage in constant self-reflexivity about their relationships to industry and to producers.

Alexis Lothian:

I couldn't agree more with Roberta that we need to theorize what it is we mean when we talk about being a "fan" as well as an "acafan." Without that, we find ourselves talking at cross purposes--though, of course, it's the very overdetermination of both those terms that keeps them alive and interesting. That said, it is difficult to engage in this conversation without giving in to a certain urge to self-disclosure. Especially because the way I experience the overlap of academia and fandom in my own life has everything to do with personal ethics, with the contexts and standpoints that shape my participation in knowledge production.

For me, fandom is less an identity than a location, a set of networks and connections within which I'm situated. My participation in fan culture mostly means being accountable to a community that I became part of through my love for science fiction and my interest in transformative works and fan video, but it's been sustained--and friendships formed--more through discussions of feminism, race, queer sex, and capitalism than through exploration of a source text. In fact, I find it difficult to name anything that I am intensively a fan *of* at the moment. Other than to say that I'm a fan of critical fanworks that engage transformatively with the hegemonic politics of the culture industry, which is possibly partly a way of seeking excuses for the extent of the pleasures I take in the aforementioned hegemonic products.

Being a fan is difficult, as Jack Halberstam says in this debate. The things you love betray you and other people just don't understand. In fact, my own movement away from more object-oriented fandom can probably be traced to the intensity of my disappointment with the end of Battlestar: Galactica, around which I participated in an exciting whirl of collaborative fanwork-making, drawing out queer and antihumanist and other critical interpretations through transformative works. The show's last half-season (and here I do speak as frustrated fan!) made a mockery of everything that excited my collaborators and I, and even though the fanworks the group created maintained the queer worldmaking we'd been doing around the show in ways I think are fascinating and important, I've been less inclined to give myself over to a fannish passion since.

Instead I have been working to celebrate and expand critical forms of fandom through the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, where I've been part of a group bringing transformational fanworks into the heart of a convention traditionally focused on literary science fiction with a feminist focus (the kind that tends, alas, not to sell very well or to get mainstream marketing). The convention is not an academic conference, but it shares very many concerns with my academic home of queer studies: thinking critically about politics and pleasure, discovering and creating and building on ways of living, thinking, loving that are outside the mainstream. It owes at least as much to activism (often online activism but certainly not restricted to that) as to the fandom it's ostensibly organized around. As with anything one is a fan of, I have plenty of frustrations relating to WisCon, but it wouldn't be inaccurate to say I'm a fan of this particular fan community. It's also true that I could occupy the position I do with respect to the WisCon community without necessarily calling myself a fan--to think of myself as a fan marks me as more personally invested, names the position the feminist sf world plays not just in my professional but also in my personal life.

In going to WisCon as a fan, even a fan who has been afforded professional opportunities through it, I tend not to go as an academic. I don't study fans or fannishness as such, though I have written about fanworks and will continue to do so. It's more that my participation in fandom has shaped the way I engage with scholarship. My academic work is about what speculative fiction and other forms of artistic speculation can do to create alternative ways of being, different ways of living and thinking futures and worlds. Being part of feminist sf and transformative works fandom lets me see how other people are also thinking about these things. I don't want only to study fans or to use fans' ideas to make sense of texts, although those are certainly dynamics that I engage in. I tend to prefer to think about fandom, as about as a set of communities where people are engaging in cultural production, intellectual exchange and concrete worldmaking that participates in the same project as the one I'm working on. Fandom has become central to my intellectual life because of the specific things that happen in the fannish world I live in: the art that gets made, the people who connect, the ways in which normative relationships between pleasures, politics, capital, genders, and sexes get played with and reimagined.

I say "intellectual life" rather than "academic life" with some care. I take seriously Matt Hills's injunction in the classic Fan Cultures that academics should bear in mind our tendency to valorise the modes of fannish participation that look most like the particular class based institutional worlds that we inhabit, and certainly convention-based US sf fan culture looks sometimes disturbingly similar to the academic conference and publication circuit. But the differences between fandom and academia are profound, and I get very uncomfortable when they are eroded from either side.

Fandom's structures come about through play, sometimes through desires to make the world a better or more equitable or more entertaining place. Academia's an industry, and academics working on objects they love or with communities they are a part of don't get to opt out of the more problematic parts of knowledge production--such as measuring their output for the assessment of research's quality and impact. If I use my connections to fandom for that purpose, I think it's vital for me to offer something to fandom itself as well. I could call that research ethics, but as a scholar of literature and cultural production without a substantial background in the social sciences or in critical anthropological literature, I'm happier calling it acafannish manners.

I hope these meditations make it clear why I tend to embrace the term acafan, and how I've been able to leverage that term to account for the ethical considerations that are important to me. Other terms might fit as well; Halberstam talks in In a Queer Time and Place about the subcultural archivist who is also a participant, and that also describes how I see my work.

There are plenty of places where my scholarship and my fandom do not overlap, and I think I need that space in order to maintain both rigor in my academic work and pleasure in my fandom. But in the spaces between, acafandom is a helpful shorthand for my affective, ethical, critical, and personal negotiations. Working within queer studies and having lots of connections to critical ethnic studies scholarship, I've seen plenty of examples of the way this kind of insider/outsider position plays out for scholars who study communities of which they are members--particularly communities that are excluded and oppressed. Fandom is not an oppressed community, although there are plenty of people and groups within it who are structurally oppressed in various ways. But it is often marginal, overlaps with other marginal groups and practices (especially when it comes to sex and sexuality, I have found) and it can still be unfairly exploited.

I've recently had the opportunity to experience the acafannish situation from the opposite side, as it were. A friend of mine, who I know through fannish circles and who is a postgraduate student, recently wrote a paper about vidding. She wanted to interview a vidder and asked me, and I've now had the opportunity to read my own opinions about fannish meaning-making as stated by a research informant rather than from the pedestal of scholarly publication. Her piece is excellent and I learned a lot from the way she was analyzing my responses; I suppose this must be an experience with which any academic who is also an artist or cultural producer will be familiar. Yet it was still a strange and vulnerable feeling, one that may well affect the way my academic and fannish projects intersect in future.

August 11, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Karen Tongson, Jayna Brown, and Geraldine Bloustein (Part Two)

August 11, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Karen Tongson: What strikes me when I view our opening remarks collectively, is that each of us has such a different orientation to the concept of "cultural studies." I think I work from a Williamsian genealogy (still very much influenced by literary studies), whereas Jayna invokes the Frankfurt School, and Gerry speaks from the vantage point of Anthropology. These positions clearly have an impact on how we each respond to the notion of "fandom" itself: whether we embrace, disavow, or express some ambivalence to being a fan, let alone an "acafan."

The capaciousness of the term "fan" (at least for those of us not squarely situated within "fan studies") reminds me of how the term "queer" used to circulate in the early-to-mid-90s: as irritant and stimulant, as identification and practice, as discipline and unruliness. We, as a trio, are are quite loose with our associations to the terms "fan" and "acafan." My rather casual embrace of the term "acafan," I think, has as much to do with seeing it as an adjacent and complementary practice to the other fields in which my work is more readily situated. It's descriptive of another dimension to my work in queer cultural studies. Do you two feel the same way about the "adjacency" or additive power in the terms "fandom" and "acafandom?"

I was especially struck by the moment in Jayna's piece when she declared her identification as "a fan," not in relation to a broader set of cultural objects, but of her nephew's attachment to Gaga and other pop iconoclasts. Jayna forges a fandom once removed, and practiced through mediation. Instead of thinking this as a disavowal of, or distancing from what "true fandom" and commitment might mean, I am drawn to the possibilities it opens for creating a prismatic approach to affective, intellectual attachments.

I also see something of this in Gerry's relationship to her research "subjects," who are her collaborators, as much as they are figures of inquiry and "knowledge acquisition."

Each of us also seem to find and wind our way into this adjacency or proximity with fandom through music, in particular. In what ways does music, as the object, and as form, bear some impact (or not) on the practice of "acafandom?"

Jayna Brown:

Karen has asked us in her response to consider the ways we may think of acafandom or fandom as additive or adjacent to the fields we work in. Acafandom, if I am using it in the correct way, would seem adjacent in the sense that the skills I learn and develop in my intellectual life are my way of embracing the music and film and literature that I feel passionate about. These skills open up the 'texts,' to reveal the shape and texture of my passions. But these skills also help shape what I find interest in, what I am drawn to, or become the object of affection themselves. What strikes me about all three of our opening remarks is just this: the dialogic relationship between our topics and our intellectual training.

Karen also asks a very important question, regarding the ways music impacts the practice of acafandom. Perhaps one of the ways it does so is to require that we become part of, or engage with a mixture of communities. Karen's remembrances bring me back to my undergraduate years in England, reading the Brontës and Kristeva during the day and dancing to house music and northern soul in the club all night (yes, I am feeling nostalgic today!).

Music could also challenge what we think of as 'aca' in the first place, broaden our sense of what that means. If 'aca' implies study of and incorporation of influences, so might fandom, as with the 'homework' I see my nephew doing into music and cultural movements of the past. The way, as Karen says, Scritti Politti introduced her to Kant is the same way Lady Gaga has introduced my nephew to Dada, Andy Warhol and German Cabaret. This is the same way The Clash's Sandinista album (my favorite!) got me to find out what dictatorship was and about US cold war policies in Central and South America.

I share with Gerry an appreciation of the ways music blurs the lines between creator and audience; at least the types of music I am drawn to are participatory, collective. Music also impacts the practice of acafandom in that it makes us search for a way to think about the non linguistic, what happens, as Paul Gilroy puts it, at lower frequencies, in different registers.

Gerry Bloustein:

I think Karen's initial questions about the additive or adjacent nature of acafandom to our own areas pf interest and research are pertinent. On reflection, like Jayna, I realise that my engagement and in fact my immersion with particular areas of popular culture and especially with music does continue to both shape and develop my intellectual pursuits and networks as well as underpin my attraction and love of the activities. So work and play interweave and mesh (how lucky are we acafans!).

Interestingly, one of the young musicians and entreperneurs (one my collaborators with whom I have been working closely for about 10 years!) articulated this dialogic relationship, which Jayne described. He now runs a grassroots and thriving retail hip hop business, including an event management business which supports his own music making and his experiential community and networks. He told me sternly one day in response to a question I asked him about how he saw the blending of his art and commerce, 'Everyone wants to make money from things they love doing, so why shouldn't I?'

If you think about the ways in which we as academic fans also make our living through activities we love and from the worlds in which we are embedded, it is a similar story.

And as far as music is concerned yes I think it does underpin so much of what we love and enjoy whatever the subject of our desires and attractions. I was/ am very much an acafan of Joss Whedon's work (love the writing, the humour, the characterisations) and so loved the clever use of music throughout all of his creations. It is an area that I still am anxious to explore - the role of affect (I think I said this earlier) which is so powerful and can often articulate the unspoken / unspeakable and even the ineffable through music. Any other takers?

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Riverside. Her book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern was published by Duke University Press in 2008 and has won awards. Her current projects focus on utopias and race in speculative fiction and global pop music and black women and postpunk music in Britain.

Geraldine Bloustien is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Hawke Research Centre, Division of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of South Australia (UniSA). She has published extensively and internationally in the areas of cultural identities, youth cultures and on the complexity of effectively using participatory visual ethnography. Her book publications include Girl Making: A Cross Cultural Ethnography of Growing Up Female (Berghahn 2003), Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity (Ashgate 2008) and Youth, Music and Creative Cultures: Playing for life (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2011).. Her recent research explores the intersections of community media, music, health and Web 2.0 technologies.

August 10, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Karen Tongson, Jayna Brown, and Geraldine Bloustien (Part One)

August 10, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Earworms, Touchstones, Inversions Karen Tongson

I've got a reason, girl, and it's Immanuel Kant's--and I like it

-Scritti Politti, "Boom! There She Was"

I'm convinced the only reason I ever cracked open a copy of Kant's Critique of Judgment--the "Great Books" edition--is that Green Gartside, the helium-voiced frontman of the 80s British pop band, Scritti Politti, suggestively whispered this remark through my Walkman when I was 13 years old. I hadn't even realized then that several years prior, Scritti Politti also recorded a single called "Jacques Derrida," in which the andro-voiced Green declares: "I'm in love with Zhack Derr-eee-dah/Read a page and I know what I need to/Take apart my baby's heart..."

I open with Scritti Politti not simply to provide some texture to the pop music fandom that manifests in my work, but also because, in many respects, Scritti Politti's irreverent and cheeky approach to intellectual life offered a nascent template for what evolved into my own improvisational practice of acafandom from middle school onwards. Rather than learning to take apart "my baby's heart," I was offered the tools to understand my own through books, music and media-in-the-making.

Though I'd like to think my intellectual curiosity was ignited by more than the dreamy, synth-laden British pop that scooted across the pond all the way into Riverside, California's chain record stores (vast and enticing to a kid recently immigrated from the Philippines), so much of what I've devoted my life to reading, analyzing, writing about, and indeed loving, has been informed by snippets of New Romantic, post-punk songs that name-check everyone from Voltaire to Keats and Yeats. It seems no accident, then, that I began graduate school as a Romanticist, before transitioning into Victorian studies, and finally (though I'd like to hope intellectual incarnations are never "final") into contemporary queer cultural studies. The latter became a means to make sense of the circuits of affect and encounter that made my intellectual and textual promiscuity possible. The concept of textual promiscuity (which I wrote about in my dissertation on Victorian non-fiction prose), would seem to run counter to certain notions of fandom that, some may argue, overlap with institutional desires for specialization: the sense of "loyalty and devotion" to an object or set of objects and subjects that constitute expertise in a particular genre, era or area.

And yet, I'd like my contribution to our broader conversation about acafandom to rethink the value of errant desires: wayward passions eliciting accusations on a lifetime of schoolyards, from junior high to the university, that one is a "wannabe." An even baser version of a dilettante. (Case in point: though I was known for being a "Duranie" in the seventh grade, a musically tribalized "metal boy" called me a "wannabe," because I expressed a fondness for Ozzie Osborne's "Bark at the Moon" video).

The figure who ultimately inspired me to consider "textual promiscuity" more seriously was, strangely enough, the eminent Victorian (and arguably, Britain's first "cultural studies" scholar), Matthew Arnold. In "The Study of Poetry," Arnold suggests we store lines of poetry in our memory and use them as "touchstones" to assess the potential "greatness" of other works. The type of critical evaluation encouraged by the touchstone is one of comparative efficiency. Arnold's touchstones are what we might now call earworms: catchy expressions and memorable snippets of text that "lodge" themselves in the mind (to use Arnold's phrasing). These unforgettable lines not only have a good hook, but they've been preordained for excellence depending on who has produced them.

According to Arnold, touchstones come from the "great masters" (casually assembled by Arnold himself) and are thus, worthy of comparative application. Strikingly, a resemblance between the touchstone and the object under scrutiny is not a prerequisite for excellence. In fact, dissimilarity and incongruity are among the benefits of juxtaposition afforded by this handy evaluative tool that the critic carries with her in her intellectual kit. Arnold's touchstones are actually quite random and subjective--his own special set of "fanboy faves." A passing survey of Arnold's touchstones in "The Study of Poetry" takes us through sources as predictable as Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, but he also extols lesser-known figures like Brunetto Latini and Christian of Troyes.

The genealogy ascribed to Arnold's method for measuring poetic works by comparing them to "expressions of the great masters" is often construed as an elitist one for obvious reasons. Arnold himself sought to dignify English poetry by employing touchstones from classical and continental poetry as standards. And yet the very notion of "lines stuck in the head" has always, for me, carried the potential of something more reparative (to invoke Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on a practice of reading that contains within it a spirit of intellectual and affective compromise).

Quite obviously, my tendency to use random song lyrics and other earworms from a migrant musical past as the foundation for my own critical labors, especially in my first book, Relocations, bears some resemblance to the touchstone in "The Study of Poetry," albeit in the crassest sense. Or maybe we should just accept the fact that touchstones have always been conceptually crass; have always had to do with the vicissitudes of affective attachment, and the cultural contexts that make these attachments congeal in ways both problematic and un. It's a simple point, I realize, that has been repeated (perhaps some may say ad nauseum) within the frameworks of cultural studies, queer studies, feminist studies, critical ethnic studies and other intellectual orientations that have openly parried with the personal. Nevertheless, I think it bears repeating, so that we may reconsider the materials that might comprise the "fannish" archive: one more expansive and historically rangy than we allow ourselves to imagine.

When I taught my first course on fan studies as an English graduate student, I focused not only on the contemporary materials more readily associated with "fan cultures," but also asked my students to reconsider Ruskin's writings on Turner, Nietzsche's writings on Wagner, and Thomas Carlyle's "Heroes" lectures as fannish texts. Though some may argue such comparisons produce anachronisms (despite the fact that the etymology for "fan" affords such reconsiderations), I believed it was crucial then, and remains crucial now, that we take a longer view on critical enthusiasms.

Though trained within a discipline that Arnoldian concepts like the touchstone and "critical disinterestedness" made possible, I'd like to imagine my own work, and the work performed by others who identify with the practices of aca-fandom, as a mutation of this and other disciplinary lineages. The traffic needn't always be scaled vertically between high and low, but rather imagined sideways (to invoke Katherine Bond Stockton's work), askew, and even inverted: the kinds of inversion that lead to Kant via Scritti Politti, or to The Smiths via a precocious passion for Keats, Yeats and Wilde.

Monster Paws Up! Loving the Stuff You Love

Jayna Brown

I've never thought of myself as a fan. In fact, I always thought of fandom as the inability to think creatively for the self, as being centrally about consumption. Despite my focus on popular culture in my work, when I thought of fans my thinking became strangely Frankfurt School. Surely, that kind of blind fervor was about the commodification of affective response, the symptom of a modernity that created dependency on the cultural industry for permission to have any emotion or passions. Making pleasure dependent on purchase was canalizing creativity.

Yet the worlds that interest me and make me passionate in my own work are those very worlds at the nexus of commodification and 'organic' collective creativity, and what is fascinating to me is how impossible and unnecessary it is to draw the line between the two in the ephemeral, tricky world of popular music and dance. My training in cultural studies taught me to ask certain questions of expressive forms. What is politically at stake? How is it reflective of the specific historical conjuncture in which it was produced? These questions, for me, are a way of 'loving' the stuff I love--1930's musicals, chorus girls, Detroit Techno, Chicago House, Missy Elliott and beyond.

But the center of all this activity for me has been the disco, the club, where the concept of audience and producer blur, where participation is what makes the moment happen and anonymity is charismatic. It is about the space that the collective creates together and fills with an ecstatic state of possibility. Where the body is claimed outside of the wage relation, outside of the demands of work, for another kind of labor. "You better work!" was a phrase from the floor in my time.

Participating in this forum is a fantastic way for me to examine my own investments, and the shifting ground of what shakes me up. It may sound cliché, but I am now inspired by the movements of the next generation now rising up to claim the dance floor. Now, I am heavily invested in watching my fourteen-year-old nephew grow up. From infancy he has been a true performer, with an acute sense of fashion and pose. Over the years I have seen him create some of the wildest costumes: complete with heels, headgear and wigs, choreographing entire shows. He is one of a new generation giving meaning to the term 'gender non conformity' which makes the term drag queen, or cross dresser, entirely insufficient. He quite consciously blurs the lines, is fluid in his presentation, aware of the performativity of all gender assignment. Ahead of his years, he also insists on a fluidity of sexual preference.

What I also admire in him is his precocious use of influences, as he consciously draws on movements and artists. At three it was Hello Kitty and Powerpuff Girls; at eight it was Japanese anime and Tim Burton; now, at almost fifteen, drawing on David Bowie, the Runaways and Andy Warhol, he is destined for great things. And he can do cartwheels in seven-inch heels!

I am a fan.

And he, in turn, has turned into a great, even professional fan of Lady Gaga. "There is a difference between monsters and little monsters," he tells me. "Monsters are like me, we've been fans for a long time." I was at first dismayed to hear this, thinking it surely meant he was sublimating his own creative impulse into worship and mimicry. When I asked him, "isn't being a fan just about copying your idols?" "No!" he replied, and then patiently explained it to me. "It is a culture, a movement," he said.

I think she is the first artist to come up with a name for her fans. I think that gave them an identity. But they are not copying her. They are expressing themselves. Her message is that we always have the power to rebirth ourselves. She feeds off our ideas and we feed off hers. We call her mother monster. I admire her because she writes all her own music, co-produces and sings live. I do dance to her songs, and use her choreography, but one of the reasons I copy her is that I am just starting out and most people start out copying others in cover bands and stuff. She is just a stepping-stone in my development. I know there will be others. But no other artist has made me cry, or feel so good about myself.

So now I can see my nephew, monster paws up in eight-inch heeled orange boots, harnessing his own cultural moment and letting it feed him as he develops. If Gaga sets the precedent for an openness to avant garde as well as hyper pop art and the places they intersect, I actually can't think of a better influence on a young gender non conforming performance artist like my nephew.

As cultural critics we often spend time raising awareness and alarm over the ways in which art and popular culture have participated in producing regimes of oppression. So what I take acafan studies to mean for me is the chance to develop a language to talk about the kinds of cultural formations where we catch a glimpse of a life of pleasure and ease, where we find and feel, as the utopian critic Ernst Bloch would have it, traces of anticipatory illumination. These traces he argues, can be found in the most commercial, "vestigial and contaminated" of sources--lipstick, fashion, advertisements all can harness dreamscapes, even, to quote Tom Moylan, "recoverable traces of radical longing." I still balk a bit at this idea, when faced with talentless fetish symbols produced in Hollywood, until I remember it is what people do with such products that matters. Here, there are worlds of possibility.

Geraldine (Gerry) Bloustien:

I don't feel the term acafan really resonated with me as something particularly different from what I have always done and considered as a researcher. My sense of an intersectional identity which incorporates both my European / Jewish migrant cultural background (arriving as a female adult in Australia) together with my education and training as an educator and then as an Anthropologist has made me always very aware and sensitive to occupying / embodying several worlds and cultures all at the same time.

Being aware of this complex layering of identities - as lived, performed, constructed, and embodied - does indeed shape what I see and what I study. I always thought that one's cultural background and experiences are the key to what people felt inclined, or even urged to investigate.

This was certainly true in my case. Moving from a culture (in the UK) where I felt physically, psychologically and emotionally 'at home' to a world where suddenly I was identified and addressed as coming from somewhere else, brought about a severe case of culture shock. I quickly learnt to perform and be both simultaneously within and without two cultures and became fascinated by the ways in which all cultures express and respond to this sense of belonging and longing and I found this resonated with my experience as a fan - in particular genres of music and particularly TV programs that I became obsessed with (yes I can be an obsessive fan!).

For example, I have always loved the very physical way people engage with music. That was my first experience of acafandom, some 20 or more years ago, I think, seeing my own response to music in others and wanting to explore this further. I also wanted to tease out the ways in which the lines between consumer, user and creator were blurred in so much of what I saw, recognised, identified with in my engagement with popular culture - including the way I also enjoyed, immersed myself and wanted to share and discuss my enjoyment in, and knowledge of, my particular 'scenes' of popular culture.

I think I have always been more interested in the idea of fandom, though - people rather than the various texts and that is because I am (again as an Anthropologist) motivated primarily by the phenomenon and multiplicity of lived experiences.

As an academic (an acafan?) it also led me to look for a type of methodology that encouraged and facilitated participation and reciprocity; I wasn't looking for critical distance! I wanted to find a way of discussing my findings through a multi-vocal, dialogic, emotive narrative and was very impressed and influenced by Michael Taussig (1993) and Marcus and Fischer (1996) in approach and style. This also meant that I wanted to ensure that the non-academics of my study were collaborators, co-researchers and not just respondents.

Of course, increasingly this means we (non academics and academics) are sharing a language, a way of talking about our common interests and shared passions. I think that researching and writing about an area in which one is passionately engaged means one cannot stand outside and look in. You are already inside the culture, the experiential community, a participant observer, and an embedded member of the culture or the scene that one is studying. Everyday life, leisure, work friendship groups blur all the time (Wow! Especially with social networking sites like Facebook, now that I come to think about it. Then issues of privacy and boundaries do become an issue).

Does such an approach and such a field of scholarship get in the way of the critical distance expected of serious scholarship? Hmm! I don't believe so because firstly, I don't believe it is possible to be completely critically distant. Secondly, I believe that what one is actually studying is the meeting of cultures. The area of research is never static and it is not immune from our involvement as both fans and researchers within it.

I am, however, constantly struggling to explain and justify my approach, methodologies and even my particular interests in a field of study to colleagues from other disciplines (sometimes while in the middle of collaborative research! Assumptions sometimes become unravelled in the field). I faced this in my recent project and book (Youth, Music and Creative cultures: Playing for Life 2011) and spent sometime discussing this and writing about it there.

So being an acafan for me goes beyond how I see myself now as engaged in areas of scholarship and leisure communities. I suspect the provocations outlined in this task actually underpin most areas of scholarship for most people but they are issues that are often not acknowledged or made overt. This leads me to start thinking again about the second provocation - the question of Acafan as a concept. I think the acafan concept owes much to earlier debates about the nature of "subjective criticism" and also subjective writing; it has been influenced by 'the poetic turn' in Anthropology too. It has given the scholar 'permission' and legitimacy to be engaged with areas that she loves, especially in areas of popular culture, many of which still seem to be deemed 'low brow', trivial and inconsequential.

That leads me to one other aspect before I stop for breath. The particular fields in which I am engaged as a fan do not seem to be considered equal. I have no difficulty being recognised within my own or other institutions, or obtain funding etc. for my research into popular music or film. But my work on (and love of) Buffy or other popular TV programs or my work in 3D virtual worlds, is a totally another matter. So for example, despite there being over 50 different disciplines world wide that have used ideas in the Buffyverse, my research and writing in this field is trivialised and I find in this work I often am expected to defend my own fascination with, involvement in, and the rigour of, the scholarship in this field through established (maybe even inappropriate?) hierarchies of literature.

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

August 09, 2011

Imagine Better: "Open at the Close"

August 09, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

As many readers will know, my Civicpaths team at USC is studying the Harry Potter Alliance as a key example of what we call "fan activism," seeking to better understand how the group helps young people who are culturally engaged become more politically aware and active. A few weeks ago, Neta Kligler Vilenchik, a PhD student working on this project, attended Leakycon where the HPA's Andrew Slack announced a new outgrowth of his efforts. Below is her report from the field. Imagine Better: "Open at the Close"

by Neta Kligler Vilenchik

I open at the close.jpg

Fan art by ShadowKunoiciAsh

In Deathly Hallows, the last book of the Harry Potter series, the phrase "I open at the close" is inscribed onto a golden snitch, a key part of Dumbledore's inheritance to Harry. Not knowing throughout the book how to open this mysterious object, Harry [spoiler alert!] finally realizes that it will open only when he is about to face his own death.

Given this quite sinister plot connection, it is perhaps surprising that "open at the close" came to be the unofficial theme of LeakyCon 2011, this year's Harry Potter fan convention. At LeakyCon, the phrase held several meanings. "Open at the close" was the name of the event in which conference attendees could, for the second time, enter the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal's Island of Adventure for a special night-time celebration, when the park would open -- only for the fans - as it closes for all other guests (see Henry's accounts from last year's "Night of a Thousand Wizards").

But "open at the close" was also used in a wider sense. As both mainstream media and popular conversations wondered what will happen to the Harry Potter phenomena as the last of the movies was released, for the fans gathered in the conference halls this question carried deep personal meaning. As fans were breathlessly preparing towards their special fan screening of Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (6 hours before the official midnight release!), many talked about 'the end of an era'. "I can't believe there will be no more midnight screenings", fans said to each other, mirroring - perhaps more palely--many of the sensations that have been voiced before, as the last of the books had come out.

If those fans from a few years back consoled themselves that they still had the movies to look forward to, the fandom now has latched onto Pottermore, J.K. Rowling's new online project, as the new lifeline. As Henry has discussed a few weeks ago, Pottermore is not free of potential controversy, and yet at LeakyCon, it was embraced by fans as a source supplying more valuable canonic information around Harry Potter, and was hailed as the pathway for a new generation of fans to enter the series. The sequenced order in which the digital versions of the Harry Potter books will come out was already exciting fans as an opportunity to have more countdowns on fan websites, and fans were eagerly awaiting the possibility of being the first to join the new site.

The phrase "open at the close" thus served, at least metaphorically, for the fans to assure each other that this is not really the end of an era. Instead, it is the beginning of a new phase for Harry Potter fandom, one that will rely more heavily on fan production and fan creativity to keep the fire burning, and, in addition, one that excitedly looks forward towards Pottermore.

Yet "open at the close" was also used at LeakyCon in another context: as part of the press conference launching the new organization "Imagine Better", which was described as "the future of the Harry Potter Alliance". Regular readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the Harry Potter Alliance, a key case study for our USC-based research team Civic Paths, which explores continuities between participatory culture and young people's engagement within civic life. The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has played an important role in shaping our understanding of how such processes may function. Creating metaphors between the Harry Potter narratives and real-life issues, as well as tapping into the structures of Harry Potter fandom, the HPA has succeeded in reaching over 100,000 young people, encouraging them to channel their love of the text and their connection to other fans around them towards civic-minded action in the real world. More on our work about the HPA can be read here and here.

The HPA was also what had led me to LeakyCon--my first experience at a fan conference. For almost two years now, I have been following the HPA as part of our Civic Paths research, interviewing members about their experiences with the organization and attending their public events. LeakyCon, as a mecca for Harry Potter fans, garnered an impressive presence of HPA members as well--the organization boasted 37 volunteer members in brand new staff T-shirts, and an impressive repertoire of HPA programming, including hands-on sessions like "how to open an HPA chapter" and "all about the crisis climate horcrux".

When examining the HPA as a civic organization, however, getting to know the Harry Potter fan community is a key component. The assertion that the organization's success thrives on the energies of the fandom, which had been expressed in many interviews before, could not be clearer than at LeakyCon.

HPA Members.jpg

There are good reasons to try to understand the "magic formula" behind the HPA. In addition to the organization's tangible achievements (raising $123,000 for Haiti in two weeks, donating 87,000 books to local and international communities, collecting 15,000 signatures on a petition for fair trade chocolate, achieving first place at the Chase Community Giving Competition to receive a $250,000 grant), it has received national media coverage as well as academic interest. The idea behind the launch of the new organization "Imagine Better" is to take the approach that has proven successful for the HPA - connecting fans around story worlds they love to create real world change - and to apply that to collaborations with other fandoms.

This is a segment from the press release at LeakyCon, at which Andrew Slack, founder of the HPA, officially launches Imagine Better:[embed video: ]

Strategically timed, the HPA chose the release date of Deathly Hallows 2 to launch Imagine Better. An activist in heart, as well as a man of symbols, Andrew Slack reminded audiences that July 14 is the date of Bastille Day, while the Imagine Better website was--also symbolically--launched on the 4th of July. From a more pragmatic point of view, the launch date secured some interest from mainstream and niche media outlets, who were looking for Harry Potter-related stories to cover around the movie release.

The idea behind Imagine Better, however, has been looming in the head of Andrew Slack for several years now. In fact, as Slack revealed at LeakyCon, this had been his original idea when he envisioned linking narratives with activism: "taking a bottom-up approach to love to stories and the art, and connecting it to the world". In contrast to the strong links that the HPA has made so far to a specific canon, as well as their embeddedness within a specific fan community, Imagine Better seeks to tap into the shared ground of all kinds of fans, aggregating their respective energies towards shared social action.

Leading towards this new organization were almost 2 years of research conducted by young HPA members. The volunteer "fandom team" received the task of searching and cataloguing other fandoms online, as well as identifying potential contact points within these fandoms. This legwork has enabled Imagine Better to list over 20 fan communities in its list of collaborators, including fan communities around popular books, shows and movies, as well as you-tube celebrities and young adult authors.

This list, however, is still open-ended. At Leakycon, conference attendees had the chance to imagine Imagine Better together with its founders. In a break-out session devoted to the new organization, 35 LeakyCon attendees brainstormed possible fandoms they would want to collaborate with. In addition to the usual suspects, this brainstorming brought up surprising directions such as Sparklife, a community of regular users of Sparknotes. The group then focused on three fan communities: Glee, Hunger Games, and Doctor Who, and made a list of real-world issues that could be raised in conjunction with these texts. They then broke out into small groups, discussing potential campaigns the HPA could hold in conjunction with these other fan communities. The group discussing possible collaborations with 'Gleeks' (fans of Glee) thought of campaigns ranging from issues of LGBTQ rights and bullying to fighting ableism (discrimination towards persons with physical disability).

Collaboration with other fan communities is a natural step for many HPA members. In our conversations with members we often hear long lists of texts they are passionate about, starting with Harry Potter, but moving on to a variety of genres and media (recurrent favorites are Doctor Who, the Hunger Games, Star Trek and more. The relationship with Twilight is a bit more contested). Many HPA members also identify as 'nerdfighters' - followers of the vlogbrothers John and Hank Green.

In Textual Poachers, Henry builds on De Certeau's notion of readers as nomads to describe fans as being similarly nomadic: "always in movement, 'not here or there', not constrained by permanent property ownership but rather constantly advancing upon another text, appropriating new materials". Imagine Better seems to build on this idea of fan as nomads, whose passion may be directed towards any greatly told story, rather than towards a particular narrative. Moreover, it builds on the shared characteristics, and potentially shared identity, that fans (of different texts) may have with each other.

Slack expresses this when he announces at the press conference that Imagine Better is going "to start with the most popular piece of fiction in human history and to go beyond that because, who here loves stories beyond Harry Potter? We all do. And we're going to continue to love Harry Potter and continue to love other stories and continue to love being engaged as heroes in the story of our world. This is our launch, as we open at the close." Here, "open at the close" takes on added meaning. It may refer to the end of the canon, but it is also preparation towards a possible decline, or at least decrease, of Harry Potter fandom.

Yet at LeakyCon - the gathering of hardcore Harry Potter fans, let's not forget - this statement receives a slightly reserved reaction. As fans are spending the whole convention assuring each other that the fandom is alive and kicking, not everyone seems ready to quickly shed off the 'HP' part of the HPA, and stick only with the 'Alliance'. While Imagine Better is aiming to speak to the shared identity of "fans", or to the fan as nomad, many in the room may align themselves more as "fans of [Harry Potter]" (see John Edward Campbell's recent discussion of this notion).

For them, their mode of engagement may be seen not as a fixed identity, but rather a relationship towards a particular text. Part of this may stem from the fact that to many, Harry Potter is a first experience within fandom, that hasn't necessarily (or perhaps, not yet) crossed into a more generalized fan identity.

It seems that the HPA is aware of this potential tension, as the launch of Imagine Better happens parallel to continuing action of the HPA, and not as a new organization replacing it, as was previously suggested to us in our conversations with staff members. An important part in this decision may have been fan perceptions climbing bottom-up: With most of its staff being volunteer members and with its vast variety of participatory forums, the HPA as an organization has extremely close contact with its member base. The general consensus within Harry Potter fandom that it is alive and kicking, thank you very much (strongly aided by the announcement of Pottermore), may have been a contributing factor to launch Imagine Better as an additional venture, rather than a replacement of the HPA.

As Slack reminded us at LeakyCon, few people - within the fandom and outside of it - had believed that the HPA would succeed as a civic organization. But it has. Imagine Better now takes on the next leap. Its attempt to apply a similar formula to other fan communities offers us a fascinating test case on the intersections between fandom and civic engagement. We are excitedly following it as it "opens at the close".

Neta Kligler Vilenchik is a third year doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.Neta graduated Summa Cum Laude from Tel Aviv University, studying communication and political science, and received her MA in communication, summa Cum Laude, from the University of Haifa in 2009. Neta's research revolves around young people's involvement in civic action through participatory culture practices, an interest she has been pursuing as part of the Civic Paths research team under the guidance of Prof. Henry Jenkins.

She is also part of an effort to develop a measure examining people's active construction of communication ecologies in pursuit of different goals, within the Metamorphosis team under the guidance of Prof. Sandra Ball-Rokeach. Finally, Neta is fascinated by the relations between individual and collective memories as they relate to the media, as well as in memory's role in shaping national identity. Her work takes an innovative approach to the study of collective memory, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the role of media memory in shaping collective memories.

July 31, 2011

Transmedia 202: Further Reflections

July 31, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

The above video was shot by Scott Walker during one of my presentations at San Diego Comic-Con, during which I spoke about some of the controversy which has surrounded the definition of transmedia over the past six months or so. I've largely stayed out of these conversations, though you can find a very good summary of the debates here.

I've been focusing on other projects and also I've been more interested in the shapes these discussions take than seeking to intervene in them directly, but over the summer, in a range of venues, I've been pushing and proding at my own definitions to see if I can capture some of my own shifting understandings of transmedia, especially as I am preparing to teach a revamped transmedia entertainment class at USC. Today, I am going to try to put some of this still evolving thinking into writing in hopes that it helps others sort through these issues.

Much of this is covered in the above video so if you process things better in audio-visual than in print, you have your options. I've heard some gossip that Jenkins was going to issue a "new definition" of "transmedia": this is no where near as dramatic an overhaul as that, just some clarifications and reflections about definitions. This definition still covers, more or less, what I mean by transmedia storytelling:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

So, consider what follows Transmedia 202, to compliment my earlier Transmedia 101 post.

Given the sheer range of people who have embraced (latched onto?) transmedia, we should not be surprised that:

different groups of people are defining a still emerging concept differently for different purposes for different audiences in different contexts
some of those who talk about transmedia are less immersed in the previous writings and thinkings as we might wish and thus can bring a certain degree of fog
some groups are strongly motivated to expand or blur the scope of the category for self promotional and self advancement purposes.

So, let's start at the top with convergence, which in Convergence Culture, I describe as a paradigm for thinking about the current moment of media change, one which is defined through the layering, diversification, and interconnectivity of media. Convergence contrasts with the Digital Revolution model which assumed old media would be displaced by new media. Aspects of this convergence model are shaping decisions of media producers, advertisers, technologists, consumers, and policy-makers, and thus convergence has many different aspects and consequences.

Transmedia, used by itself, simply means "across media." Transmedia, at this level, is one way of talking about convergence as a set of cultural practices. Keep in mind that Marsha Kinder in Playing with Power wrote about "transmedia intertextuality", while I was one of the first to popularize the term, transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling describes one logic for thinking about the flow of content across media. We might also think about transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism, and transmedia spectacle, as other logics. The same text might fit within multiple logics. So, for example, we could imagine Glee as a transmedia narrative in which we follow the characters and situations across media, but more often, Glee's transmedia strategies emphasize transmedia performance, with the songs moving through YouTube, iTunes, live performances, etc., which we read against each other to make sense of the larger Glee phenomenon.

So, there are some people who think that transmedia is simply a form of branding: I would rather argue that branding is one thing you can do with transmedia, but when I speak about transmedia storytelling, that is not the central focus of my interest. I am focusing on emergent forms of storytelling which tap into the flow of content across media and the networking of fan response.

Some people have argued that transmedia is simply another name for franchising. Franchising is a corporate structure for media production which has a long history and throughout much of that history, there has been an attempt to move icons and brands across media channels, but not necessarily an attempt to extend the story in ways which expanded its scope and meaning. Most previous media franchises were based on reproduction and redundancy, but transmedia represents a structure based on the further development of the storyworld through each new medium. For a good guide to the history and practices of franchising, watch for the forthcoming book by Derek Johnson, who has been doing extensive thinking on this topic.

Much of franchising has been based on licensing arrangements which make it hard for media producers to add or change anything beyond what is already in the primary text or the mother ship. True transmedia storytelling is apt to emerge through structures which encourage co-creation and collaboration, but as Johnson notes, the more a media producer moves in this direction, the greater the challenges of coordination and consistency become.

I have sometimes talked about a distinction between adaptation and extension as fundamental to understanding these shifts. Basically, an adaptation takes the same story from one medium and retells it in another. An extension seeks to add something to the existing story as it moves from one medium to another. Christy Dena has challenged making such a cut-and-dried distinction. Adaptations may be highly literal or deeply transformative. Any adaptation represents an interpretation of the work in question and not simply a reproduction, so all adaptions to some degree add to the range of meanings attached to a story. And as Dena notes, the shifts between media mean that we have new experiences and learn new things. To translate Harry Potter from a book to a movie series means thinking through much more deeply what Hogwarts looks like and thus the art director/production designer has significantly expanded and extended the story in the process. It might be better to think of adaptation and extension as part of a continuum in which both poles are only theoretical possibilities and most of the action takes place somewhere in the middle.

What the adaptation-extension distinction was intended to address was additive comprehension, a term borrowed from game designer Neil Young, to refer to the degree that each new text adds to our understanding of the story as a whole. So, the Falling Skies graphic novel is a prequel which tells us about the disappearance of the middle brother and thus helps to provide insights into the motives of the characters on the Turner television series. In this case, additive comprehension takes the form of back story, but the same graphic novel also helps us to better understand the organization of the resistance movement, which we can see as part of a world-building process. Most transmedia content serves one or more of the following functions:

Offers backstory
Maps the World
Offers us other character's perspectives on the action
Deepens audience engagement.

I have been troubled by writers who want to reduce transmedia to the idea of multiple media platforms without digging more deeply into the logical relations between those media extensions. So, if you are a guild, it matters deeply that you have a definition which determines how many media are deployed, but for me, as a scholar, that is not the key issue that concerns me. As we think about defining transmedia, then, we need to come back to the relations between media and not simply count the number of the media platforms. So, again, let's imagine a continuum of possibilities.

We might start with the notion of seriality. Seriality would imply the unfolding of a story over time, typically through a process of chunking (creating meaningful bits of the story) and dispersal (breaking the story into interconnected installments). Central to this process is the creation of a story hook or cliffhanger which motivates the consumer to come back for more of the same story. Historically, seriality occurs within the same text.

So, we've seen American television evolve over time between highly episodic structures (more or less self-contained) to much more heavily serialized structures. Most shows, though, combine elements of the episodic (a procedural plot which can be wrapped up in a single episode) and the serial (an evolving character relationship, an unfolding mythology, a larger plot within which the individual episodes work as chapters.) The shift towards seriality on American television plays a large role in preparing audiences for transmedia storytelling. Most transmedia stories are highly serial in structure, but not all serials are transmedia. So, Bones, say, is a partially serialized drama which, for the most part, remains within a single medium.

But we can think of examples where there is a movement across texts or across textual structures within the same medium. I describe this in terms of "radical intertextuality." So, for example, the DC and Marvel universes create dozens of titles which are seen as inter-related. Characters move between them. Plots unfold across them. Periodically, they may have events which straddle multiple book titles, and part of the pleasure of something like Marvel Civil Wars is that we see the same event from the point of view of multiple characters, who may have conflicting perspectives on what is happening. Similarly, Battlestar Galactica unfolds across multiple television series, mini-series, and stand-alone movies. If Battlestar remained in a single medium, television, then it would be another example of radical intertextuality. But, because Battlestar extends this process to include webisodes and comics, which are understood as part of the same continuity, then we call it a transmedia story.

So, let's call this next level Multimodality -- a term coined by Gunther Kress to talk about how educational design taps the affordances of different instructional media, but applied by Christy Dena to talk about transmedia narrative. The key point here is that different media involve different kinds of representation -- so what Green Lantern looks like differs from a comic book, a live action movie, a game, or an animated television series. Each medium has different kinds of affordances -- the game facilitates different ways of interacting with the content than a book or a feature film. A story that plays out across different media adopts different modalities. A franchise can be multimodal without being transmedia -- most of those which repeat the same basic story elements in every media fall into this category. For me, a work needs to combine radical intertextuality and multimodality for the purposes of additive comprehension to be a transmedia story. That's why shortening transmedia to "a story across multiple media" distorts the discussion.

So far, nothing here implies that particular media need to be involved for something to become transmedia. One can construct a high end transmedia system (a major blockbuster movie or network television show and its extensions) and one can construct a low end transmedia system (a low budget and/or independent film, a comic book or web series as the spring board for something which might include live performance or oral storytelling...) Some have tried to argue that games are a key component of transmedia, but I do not want to prioritize digital media extensions over other kinds of media practices.

For this reason, it is possible to find historical antecedents for transmedia which predate the rise of networked computing and interactive entertainment. I am not preoccupied with the "newness" of transmedia. The current push for transmedia has emerged from shifts in production practices (shaped by media concentration, in some cases) or reception practices (the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media), but it has also come from the emergence of new aesthetic understandings of how popular texts work (shaped in part by the rise of geeks and fans to positions of power within the entertainment industries).

The options available to a transmedia producer today are different from those available some decades ago, but we can still point to historical antecedents which were experimenting with notions of world building and mythology-modeled story structures in ways that include both radical intertextuality and multimodality. In that way, you can say that L. Frank Baum (in his focus on world building across media), Walt Disney (in his focus on transmedia branding) and J.R.R. Tolkien (with his experiments in radical intertextuality) each prefigure transmedia practices.

Similarly, I've argued that Obama is as much a transmedia character as Obi Wan is. I do not mean by this simply that our everyday lives are conducted across multiple media platforms, though this is true. I also mean that we tend to connect those dispersed pieces of information together to form a story, that the story we construct depends on which media extensions we draw upon (Fox News vs. The Huffingston Post), and that there are architects who seek to coordinate and construct the range of meanings which get attached to that story. In that sense, the Obama story, as constructed by his campaign, includes both radical intertextuality and multimodality.

When I wrote Convergence Culture, I focused the transmedia discussion around The Matrix, while including a side bar which discussed The Beast as an Alternate Reality Game. I understood that ARGs had something to do with transmedia, but my use of the sidebar structure allowed me to dodge the tougher question of whether ARGs are transmedia, and that's where some of the most heated debates in recent years has occurred.

The Hollywood based model of transmedia assumes a story told or a world explored across not simply multiple media but multiple texts, which can be sold to audiences separately and which represent multiple touch points with the brand. (Note, for my definition, it really doesn't matter if the texts form a single narrative or multiple stories set in the same world, since in practice, most transmedia includes multiple plot lines which can be dispersed in different ways across the installments.) The ARG model, however, assumes that multiple media can contribute to a single entertainment experience. So, we are more likely to talk about The Beast, I Love Bees, or The Lost Experience as completed texts in their own right (as well as in all three cases as part of larger entertainment franchises). Different groups have different stakes in drawing lines distinguishing or integrating these two models. It is important to understand what they are each trying to accomplish, but I am less invested in defining in or out one model or the other. I just think this is a space which deserves closer conceptual work than it has received so far. Both could meet my emphasis on radical intertextuality and multimodality and both can deliver on the promises of additive comprehension.

Another debate worth monitoring here has to do with issues of audience participation in the development of a transmedia property. These debates break down into two sets of issues. The first has to do with the differences I draw in Convergence Culture between interactivity and participation. For me, interactivity has to do with the properties of the technology and participation has to do with the properties of the culture. Obviously, in practice, both may come into play in the same text. So, for example, a computer game stresses interactivity and thus preprogramed entertainment experiences. Fan culture is high on participation, where fans take the resources offered by a text and push it in a range of directions which are neither preprogrammed nor authorized by the producers.

When people claim that interactivity is a core element of a transmedia experience, I want to make sure we are using the term in the same way. We can imagine a range of different relations which fans might have to a transmedia property. On one end would be the hunting and gathering practices of finding the dispersed pieces of information and figuring out how they all fit together to form a meaningful whole. On the other end, we might have playing through a level of a game, working past obstacles, killing bosses, and gathering objects. But we might also think about various forms of fan performance -- from fan fiction to cosplay -- which are more participatory and open ended and less dependent on the design choices of the transmedia producers.

A second set of issues has to do with continuity vs. multiplicity. Most discussions of transmedia place a high emphasis on continuity -- assuming that transmedia requires a high level of coordination and creative control and that all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative or world. This is a practice which is hard enough to achieve across the multiple divisions of the same production team and it becomes hard for fans to contribute directly to the development of a narrative which places high emphasis on continuity. Indeed, many projects which claim to tap "user-generated content" do so in ways which protect the "integrity" of the continuity at the expense of enabling multiple perspectives and more open-ended participation. They make the author or some designated agent an arbiter of what counts within the canon. On the other hand, there are forms of commercially produced transmedia which really celebrate the multiplicity which emerges from seeing the same characters and stories told in radically different ways. This focus on multiplicity leaves open a space for us to see fan-produced media as part of a larger transmedia process, even if we then want to try to sort through how different elements get marked as official canon or fan alternatives.

Sorry this has gotten so complicated, but I think part of the problem is that many people are looking for simple formulas and a one-size-fits-all definition, trying to delimit what transmedia is. But, we are still in a period of experimentation and innovation. New models are emerging through production practices and critical debates, and we need to be open to a broad array of variations of what transmedia means in relation to different projects. I wrote in Convergence Culture that convergence practices, for the foreseeable future, will amount to "kludges," jerry-rigged attempts to connect different media together, as we all figure out what's going on and what works well.

There is no transmedia formula. Transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers. The more we expand the definition, the richer the range of options available to us can be. It doesn't mean we expand transmedia to the point that anything and everything counts, but it means we need a definition sophisticated enough to deal with a range of very different examples. What I want to exclude from this definition is "business as usual" projects which are not exploring the expanded potential of transmedia, but are simply slapping a transmedia label on the same old franchising practices we've seen for decades.

As a way to promote more conversation, please send me your questions, critiques, and other responses to hjenkins@usc.edu, and I will try to respond in a future post.

July 27, 2011

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Christine Bacareza Balance, Jack Halberstam, and Sarah Banet-Weiser (Part Two)

July 27, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Jack: Christine, I really enjoyed your piece - the compact way you account for the colonial context within which popular culture is absorbed, reviled and then transformed by those very people whom colonialism has reduced to the status of mimics. I also appreciate your effort to refuse the sharp distinction between fan and critic, poetry and prose, song and soundscape. In relation to your observations on "fandom" and "fanaticism," I would love to hear you say more about excess, about over the top performances that go beyond the reproduction of the same. I also have struggled with that Sedgwickian notion of "reparative" and I wonder how you are using it. I love her take on the paranoid form of reasoning that dominates academic style but I never really believed in the reparative as an alternative...

Sarah: Jack, Christine, I'm also interested in this notion of excess--both in fan activities as well as in constructions of other subjectivities, including gender, race, sexuality. I struggle with how to articulate this in my own work, because accounting for excess (or spaces of ambivalence) is tricky yet vital, as this is where performances of identity, as you say, can go beyond the reproduction of the same. Excess allows us to imagine new spaces of possibility and transformation. . .

Christine: In response to Jack's post and query and, in allegiance with her opening anecdote, I too have endured such distracting and annoying concert-going experiences (too many to name, in fact). The most recent example: this past June, I attended Janelle Monae and Bruno Mars' concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre--the only Los Angeles stop on their national "Hooligans in Wonderland" tour--both as a critic (currently writing a review of their performance) and a fan (of both artists). Armed with the critical analytics--histories of labor and musical performance as re-cited in each artist's performance (Monae and chitlin circuits, Mars and Hawai'i's tourist economies-- that were going to frame my review of the show, I was first slightly peeved by the audience's (mainly teenage girls and boys and their parents) lukewarm reception of Monae and then fully irritated about two songs into Mars' set. In a similar fashion to Jack's Radiohead experience, my seatmate decided to not just sing but, instead, scream the chorus to his hit single, "Billionaire," sans irony or self-reflexivity. Needless to say, I had to switch seats in order not to inflict fan-on-fan, audience member-on-audience member violence. Indeed, the "fantasy and impossibility" embedded in fandom and being an academic is what makes such a scene difficult. But I try (after physically distancing myself), in such situations, to curb the critical desire to position myself as an omniscient or holier-than-thou audience member, for, it is precisely this stance--one generated and performed by collectors and critics in other settings--which forecloses any possibility of dialogue or conversation.

The "reparative" here becomes a call to stand alongside other fans, rather than above them, no matter how difficult it might be. It signals a type of ethical relationship. For me, the genre of performance--with its qualities of immediacy, ephemerality, improvisation, and liveness--is particularly generative in cultivating what Alexandra Vazquez (by way of Barbara Johnson) identifies as moments of "surprise"--on stage, in the classroom, on the written page, and in everyday life. These days, in my own work, I am finding the analytic of surprise--something unexpected that can incite various affective responses (fear, astonishment, wonder, and even violence)--to be more generative than "excess," especially when (again) the subjects, objects, and performances I am most interested are being generated by a historical relationship (U.S. empire in the Philippines) otherwise deemed "invisible" in mainstream U.S. popular culture.

I also appreciate Sarah's comments regarding "the fan as self-brand." Needless to say, none other than this past weekend's Comicon gathering brings to the forefront the ways that, as Sarah notes, the "fan is positioned and validated as a kind of product within a circuit of commodity exchange." With the increasing presence of mainstream popular entertainment industries (such as films, television, video games) at this long-standing fan-centered event, it becomes quite obvious that Hollywood is present to capitalize on its fans--consumer-participants whose a) identities are themselves "products" of particular forms of consumption and b) fandom does the work of publicizing upcoming new releases (mainly, through social networking outlets such as Twitter and Facebook but also by wearing t-shirts featuring their favorite comic book characters or films). At the same time, by dressing up as characters from particular franchises (this year's favorites: Black Swan, Harry Potter, and the tried-and-true standby, Star Wars), teenage and adult Comicon attendees inhabit and bring to life these particular pop cultural products. Fueled by a "desire for visibility," I witnessed firsthand how these "dressed up" attendees actually extend and are part of the "long tail" of mainstream franchises in a manner similar to amusement parks, as parents photographed their children posed next to other attendees dressed like Tinker Bell or Wolverine.

But, again, rather than merely maintaining some type of critical arm's length from the slew of (mainly) teenagers dressed up as characters and huddled together on the convention center floors, I allowed myself to hearken back to my own adolescent yesteryears, to the theatre competitions and showcases that colored my high school weekends. Where and how can we draw the line between dressing up like Lady Macbeth as opposed to Xena the Warrior Princess, Huckelberry Finn instead of Luke Skywalker, Stanley Kowalski rather than an Avatar? I believe that any attempt to draw lines of difference between such examples of "dressing up" recapitulates the age-old divide between "high" and "low" cultures while it prohibits the potential meanings made by both these performers and their audiences.

Jack: Sarah, I think your notion of the fan as brand and as a distribution point for the circulation of popular culture actually dialogues with my worry that the fan becomes a "celebrity subject" in training - in other words, we consume to learn how to produce well and then produce well in order to facilitate more production. At the same time that I am compelled by these critiques of fandom and the sense of fandom as a economic relay point, I still do want to hold on to some kind of resistant notion of fandom, one where the branding changes the meaning of self, consumption, branding, capital in the process of participating in it.

Sarah: Jack--yes! Your idea/worry about "celebrity subject" in training is truly in conversation with my worry about fan as brand (and self-branding in general). But I also hear both you and Christine about holding on to a concept of the fan as a resistant notion, or a resistant subject, or just in terms of the surprise of meaning Christine gestures toward when talking about dressing up and performing as an adolescent (and I appreciate the notion of surprise over excess). For me, the trick is to hold on to both of these notions simultaneously (fandom as economic relay point, and fandom as potentially resistant), without resorting to a commercial v. non-commercial binary. Which is why I think, Jack, that your last statement, about those moments where branding changes the self, consumption, capital in the process of participating within branding, is vital for me in thinking about how meaning circulates in advanced capitalism. how do we utilize the logic of branding for progressive (and I'm not talking about socially responsible corporations here) or resistant ways? Again, I'm not talking about culture jamming or detournement (though both certainly can have their uses in terms of resistance), but making and remaking brands and fans within new parameters of meaning and signification--that is, how branding can surprise you.

Jack: Christine - well, exactly, one wants to stand or sit alongside the annoying fan from an ethical point of view but in actual, material reality, one wants to get as far away as possible!! So, that is exactly why I mistrust the reparative - it is a gesture of the ethical, a way of knowing the right thing to do but it clashes with the instinctive gesture of, in this case, recoil and disconnection. Moments of surprise are similarly wonderful pedagogical opportunities but hard to come by in an age of self-branding, self-marketing and commercial child manipulation! The only cultural productions that have really been continuously surprising to me in recent years have been animated films for children, which I discuss extensively in The Queer Art of Failure, which manage to address the child viewer in non condescending and often non-normative ways...and then of course, the surprise and wonder of the animated landscape gives way to the banality of the tie-in action figure served up with the kid's happy meal a few hours later. How do we extend the momentary surprise so that it has more affective intensity than the desire for the figure, the dress-up or the happy meal? Sarah - can you give us an example of when branding can surprise?

Sarah: Yes, well, that is the question, isn't it? I love your question of how we can extend the momentary surprise so that creative and potentially resistant cultural forms don't end up like happy meals. I don't have the answer, but one interesting example might be the recent branding of Wikileaks (the Wall St. Journal covered this in February of this year), where Julian Assange's organization began selling t-shirts, etc that said things like "Free Assange!" and "the truth is not treason." The profit generated by the t-shirts supposedly went to Assange's legal fund, or to the maintenance of the site, or somewhere (and of course, the "somewhere" is always the question--the company that made the Wikileaks t-shirts also made Spice Girls t-shirts). To brand something like Wikileaks and its subversive potential is simultaneously a bit of a surprise and entirely predictable. And I'm not sure if it has "more affective intensity than the desire for the figure;" there's got to be a Julian Assange action figure out there for sale somewhere. I'm thinking, though, that this kind of move within branding represents a sort of bending or distorting of commodity exchange, that could possibly lead to different sorts of affective openings. . .

Christine Bacareza Balance is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies (UC Irvine). Her research & teaching interests include: Filipino/Filipino American studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, and In Media Res (online). One-ninth of the Polynesian power pop band The Jack Lords Orchestra, she is currently writing a book on popular music and performance in Filipino America.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children's cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007). Her current book project, Authentic TM: Political Possibility in a Brand Culture (New York University Press, forthcoming) examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. A co-edited book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee, is under contract with New York University Press (forthcoming 2011).

Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam's last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam just finished a book titled The Queer Art of Failure due out 2011 from Duke University Press.

If you have comments on this post, join our mirror discussion at:

http://acafanconvo.dreamwidth.org/2990.html

July 26, 2011

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Christine Bacareza Balance, Jack Halberstam, and Sarah Banet-Weiser

July 26, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Christine Bacareza Balance

fan (n.): a person enthusiastic about a specified sport, pastime, or performer; devotee

fanatic (Latin, "of a temple"): unreasonably enthusiastic, overly zealous; a person whose extreme zeal, piety, etc. goes beyond what is reasonable.

I begin with these two brief definitions of "fan" and "fanatic"--from which the first term is typically derived--because they touch upon some of the topics I am interested in, both in my research and everyday life. As someone whose early scholarly training came by way of U.S. ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, my research today focuses on the labor (productive, consumptive, affective) of making music within Filipino America--a soundscape created by the historical relationship (imperial, postcolonial, neocolonial) between the U.S. and Philippines. It is an intimate yet oft-forgotten relationship and, thus, is charged with the racial/cultural invisibility of Filipinos within a U.S. racial imaginary. In other words, what is Filipino culture in the eyes of the U.S.?

Nothing but a merely mimetic nation, as evidenced by its most notable cover performers--Arnel Pineda, Charice Pempengco, and the hordes of cover bands playing in a global tourist circuit, the spectacular choreography of its prison inmates set to a Michael Jackson beat, and a deadly penchant for singing "My Way" on a karaoke machine.

Here, then, in a U.S. popular imaginary, Filipinos are fanatics--people who go beyond what is "reasonable"--when it comes to their relationship to their former colonizer's popular culture. It is a type of affective charge that simultaneously places them outside of a certain modernity (and therefore, post-modernity, as well) seemingly located in a logic of culture industries--TV, film, popular music--the same industries which render them "invisible" (or, more likely, collapse them within a limited idea of "Asian-ness" as evidenced in the common occurrence of Filipino stars "playing" characters of other Asian races--Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, but never Filipino) within a landscape of U.S. racialization.

Instead, as Apl de Ap of the Black Eyed Peas--one of the most "visible yet invisible" Filipino Americans in U.S. popular music today--notes, these and other Asian Americans remain a "quiet storm" of music producers, songwriters, and simply undercover agents (note one of pop's biggest stars today--Bruno Mars--is often noted for his Puerto Rican ancestry, Hawaiian upbringing but rarely, if ever, his Filipino heritage).

Along with this, however, I also sense a common belief within fan studies (and perhaps the term "aca-fan" specifically) that there can and does remain a divide between fans and performers--as if never the twain shall meet. Though my research has most definitely led me to examples of participatory culture--specifically, through the interactive communication technology (ICT) and everyday performance event of karaoke singing as well as the "viral aesthetics" evidenced in the recent emergence of Asian American performers on YouTube, from my interviews with and personal experiences interacting with musicians, events organizers/producers, club owners and DJs from Manila to the San Francisco Bay, I have witnessed the various forms of fan-dom these musical producers themselves inhabit.

Here, they are not only devoted the U.S. or European popular musics but, most especially, OPM (original Pilipino music)--from the 1950s up until today. In turn, my complicated relationship to this larger soundscape of OPM--as scholar, fan, and colleague--I believe, is not a rare incident. There a number of other popular music studies scholars in the U.S. and beyond who maintain a place in each of these (as well as other) categories of identification.

In the end, I am currently most interested in the styles of writing about musical cultures and sonic phenomena--in other words, the various ways that we, as critics, can attempt to write performatively--understanding our roles in the process of making meaning of culture--and, in the terms set by the late Eve Sedgwick, reparatively. Since many of the artists I choose to write about are generally people I have maintained an close relationship with--as a friend or fan or collaborator, the question of writing in a style legible to them is always there.

But, I believe that we should always be striving to be much more than just "legible" or "transparent" in our critical writing. Instead, we should, as Daphne Brooks once aptly stated, try to make the music sing in our writing. Or, as Josh Kun has shown us, we should imagine music creating places, bringing together worlds through both performance and listening. And, with their keen interest in the relationship between words and sound, Fred Moten and Alexandra Vazquez's work always remind me, it's not only that we try to capture the essence of music but, instead, that we travel inside of music's poetry and allow it to show us other ways of seeing, hearing, and being.

Jack Halberstam

It is hard to be a fan sometimes: a few scenarios come to mind - I am at a Radiohead show circa 2004, miles from the stage and while I am trying to be absorbed by the live performance, I am deeply distracted by a young woman sitting on her boyfriend's shoulders next to me and singing "Everything in its riiiight place" in the same tone that she may have been singing "give me what you want, what you really, really want" just a few years earlier while swinging her blond hair back and forth and whooping "oh yeah" in between little bursts of lyrics. I remember feeling really irritated, thinking to myself, well if she is a Radiohead fan, am I?

Or, a few years before that, probably the same year that Ms. Thing was screaming to the Spice Girls, I was going to drag king shows in NYC, heading out late at night to take in the queer night life scene of downtown New York. But instead of entering into dens of subcultural intimacy, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with gawkers, the beautiful people who were following a buzz and lining up now to take in the freak show before moving on to the next hot subcultural site.

And before that it was going to punk shows and pogo-ing alongside scary skinheads who may not have been attracted to the Clash, the Jam, the Slits, X-Ray Spex for the same reasons that I was.

Fandom is full of jeopardy and heartbreak, it is a jagged experience that confirms you and shatters you and often in the same location. It summons a sense of community but also calls forth snobbish and elitist modes of differentiation (why was I SO put out by the blond girl at the Radiohead concert? What made me SO sure that I and not she was the proper kind of Radiohead fan?). When we study fandom or bring our fannish commitments into our academic work, perhaps we are just trying to smooth out the rough edges of an experience that never quite delivers on what it promises - that precisely cannot deliver on that promise if only because fantasy and impossibility are the fuel upon which fandom thrives, burns and, ultimately, crashes.

I have succumbed to the siren calls of certain forms of fandom--punk, drag, gaga--and I will be called to plenty more in the future but I am now more wary and cautious of fandom than in my younger days. I am interested in thinking about forms of fandom that not only flirt with ecstatic pleasure but that also turn quickly to hostility and even violence when disappointed - think All About Eve, think about the killing of John Lennon or Selena. I would love to talk about fandom in an age of ubiquitous and mundane celebrity - if subjectivity, more and more, runs through the territory of everyday celebrity (everyone is a celebrity in their own mind), then what is fandom? A tutelage mode? A training in celebrity subjectivities? In academia and in the realm of popular culture, I think it is time to think about breaking with fidelity, devotion, discipleship (and other quasi-religious modes of practice) in favor of what I call "low theory" in my new book, what Foucault names as subjugated knowledge and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harny call "fugitive knowing."

Fandom does encompass many of these modes already, but lets be clear that fandom can both reproduce the norm or neutralize all that opposes it. Fandom entails risk, danger, complicity and explosive possibilities; it's hard to be a fan.

Sarah Banet-Weiser

I appreciate how Christine begins her post with two definitions of "fan" and "fanatic;" I am, I must confess, a person who often harbors unfair assumptions about the blurring of the two categories. This partly comes from the fact that I never really consider myself a "real" fan--certainly I'm a fan of popular culture in a broad sense, but I've never gone beyond the typical audience subject position to vote on contestants, to write fan fiction, to comment on a fan site (okay, once I voted on American Idol, but just for Adam Lambert).

So I've felt at times a certain (ir)rational distance when thinking about fans who position themselves in more active ways in relation to cultural texts, and am certainly guilty of occasionally merging the two definitions Christine offered, so that fans were often de facto fanatics in my mind.

Christine powerfully reminds us, though, that the merging between the fan and the fanatic is often complex and multi-layered, and certainly fans and fan activity do not circulate in culture in the same ways, across all boundaries. Fandom, as Christine points out, is often racialized, so that particular fans are seen as fanatics due to their racialization, their "irrational" or "cultural" bodies, such as the Filipino musicians Christine writes about.

Jack also reminds us that what fandom is isn't always clear, and it can be many things at once. Fandom can entail risk and challenge, but it can also--and often does--reproduce the norm.

What I want to do in this post is to draw on this multivalent notion of fandom, and invoke yet another iteration: the fan as self-brand. I would say that all fans and fan activities are situated within a commercial context, though again, this means different things for different fans. That is, while the cultural and commercial economy is surely a framing or shaping context, it is not always a deterministic one. The fact that fans, texts, and fandom take place and are often enabled by a broad milieu of consumption does not mean that fans and their activities do not have cultural, political, and social meaning.

However, the commercial context of much fandom and fan activities also animates other processes by which the "fan" is positioned and validated as a kind of product within a circuit of commodity exchange. The practice of self-branding is an increasingly normative practice in US culture, where "building a brand" seems to more and more be the logical go-to strategy for marketing our personal and professional identities. There often seems to be a relationship between self-branding and actively constructing oneself as a particular fan.

That is, I'm troubled by the ways in which there seems to be an increasing collapse between business brand strategy and personal identity construction in digital spaces--and it seems that in this collapse, it becomes harder (at least for me) to always discern what it means to be a "fan." Digital media, and the ways in which users are interactive within this space, offer flexibility for fans to not only produce their own media, but also facilitate strategies of self-branding.

Part of being a fan means contributing to the distribution and publicity of popular texts, especially if fan production is posted on-line. While this is not necessarily a negative thing, it does have a heightened significance in an economic context where the individual is privileged as a commodity, and where cultural and social life is increasingly organized and experienced through the terms and conditions of business models. This means that cultural values, such as morals and personal standards, can be harnessed and re-shaped within these same business conditions, so that building a brand becomes almost like a moral obligation to oneself.

In particular, I'm interested in the ways digital media and media production authorize the practice of self-branding for girls and young women, often in the name of self-empowerment, on social network sites, such as Youtube and Facebook. The practice of individuals becoming what Nikolas Rose calls "the enterprising self" has implications for women within the 21st century, where "putting oneself out there" and the quest for visibility is an ever more normative practice for young women.

So I suppose my contribution to this discussion is to ask the question: what happens when the fan becomes a kind of product? Or when the discourse of fandom and fan activities is not so much about individual tastes and desires, or belonging to a community, but is rather about fans laboring in the name of both the self-brand and a company brand? As Jack said, it is hard to be a fan.

Christine Bacareza Balance is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies (UC Irvine). Her research & teaching interests include: Filipino/Filipino American studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, and In Media Res (online). One-ninth of the Polynesian power pop band The Jack Lords Orchestra, she is currently writing a book on popular music and performance in Filipino America.

Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam's last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam just finished a book titled The Queer Art of Failure due out 2011 from Duke University Press.

July 18, 2011

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part One)

July 18, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Shortly after I arrived at USC, Brian David Johnson from Intel came to the office to interview me for a book he was developing on the future of screens and entertainment. I was giddy from having taught the first session of my Transmedia Entertainment class, and we had a great exchange about the relations between consumers and technology and how it might impact our future relations to television and other entertainment media.

The interview was included in Johnson's book, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices We Love, which was released last year. Johnson's book combines interviews with key thinkers about media's future from both academia and industry with his own reflections on recent technological developments being developed at labs and what their long term implications may be.

After years of teaching at MIT, I am often skeptical of work on media which starts from a technologist's perspective since they rarely factor in the social and cultural dimensions of media. Johnson is a notable exception -- a deep thinker who groks the interface between technology and culture, who may work for industry but also understands the consumer perspective on why we love television and what we want to get out of watching our favorite series. So, I recommend his book to anyone who wants to expand their thinking and learn about the visions of screen futures which are driving technological development at Intel and a range of other companies.

Johnson was nice enough to sign on to let me reverse the microphone, so to speak, and do an interview for this blog. Over the next few installments, Johnson will share some of his current thinking. Here, he talks about television in relation to such trends as ubiquitous computing and social media, and shares some of the factors which drove him to produce this book.

Here's Johnson's official bio which should give you a clearer sense of where he is coming from:

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.

You begin the book with Isaac Asimov's warning that predicting the future is a "hopeless, thankless task." Given this, what do you hope to accomplish with this book?

I love that quote! I have tremendous respect for Asimov not only as a science fiction writer and a thinker but also as a person who brought science and conversations about science into the mainstream. When I was writing Screen Future I actually had two books always within reach. The first was Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law - his collection of lectures and the second was a collection of Asimov essays The Planet that Wasn't. Asimov was such a good writer, easy to understand and quite funny - that people had no problem reading about the intricacies of planetary motion or the theoretical planet of Vulcan. Both Feynman and Asimov were passionate communicators and conversationalists. Feynman was known as the great explainer, while Asimov was the great popularize of science.

Getting people to have conversations about science is certainly important. But I think getting people to have conversations about the future is even more critical. The future is not a fixed point in time that we are all hurdling towards. The future is not set. The future is made every day by the actions of people. The of the most significant ways that we can all affect the future is to have conversations about it. We need to ask ourselves: What kind of future do we want to live in? What kind of future do we NOT want to live in? Having these conversations, when they are based on sound science can have a real affect on where we are going. Science fiction can do this - I believe science fiction gives us the language so that we can have this conversation about the future. But nonfiction can do the same thing. Both Feynman and Asimov knew this. The ultimate goal of Screen Future and the future casting work I do is to have conversations about the future.

Ultimately what I want to accomplish with the book is twofold:

First we are in an incredibly interesting time when it comes to technology and storytelling. For quite a while now we're been talking about telling stories, meaningful stories across multiple mediums, platforms and technologies. I don't have to tell you this Henry - you've done some of the best writing in this area. But I think something changed in 2010 and I really recognized it when I was walking around the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2011. Wondering the floor of that massive show, looking at all these different connected devices and screens it became really obvious to me that we had passed a kind of technological tipping point. What I mean by that is that for years most of the reasons why we've not really been able to take this screen future mainstream or distributed widely was because of technological limitations - the processors were to slow, there wasn't descent broadband connections, heck there really wasn't a robust Internet - things like that. But ultimately that's all changed.

We've really reached that tipping point where we have the processing power, battery life, storage, connectivity and human interfaces (small form factors, touch screens, etc) to be able to delivery people the entertainment and communication experience they want. And businesses have the ability to bring out not just one device - it's not just Apple or Sony or Samsung - it's a entire robust and sometimes zany collection of device manufactures that are bringing all kind of wonderful devices and screens and form factors to market. It's not a technological problem anymore getting across these experiences.

I think where we are now is smack in the middle of a new set of challenges which are very different in nature but just as important. Right now I think we are seeing the gathering of a business tipping point and an experience tipping point. Now forgive me for overusing the tipping point metaphor here but I think it applies. Right now we're watching some really interesting developments around the business of entertainment and computing. People a really beginning to explore what it means for their businesses to deliver these experiences. It has repercussions all over the world, in union negotiations, government regulations, mergers, long term strategic plans...anything that is touched by entertainment and computing industries. And what' most exciting is that we a right in the middle of it - it's happening right now.

I wanted to explore this in Screen Future. There's a lot of culture, history, technology and economics in the book to give us some background on this - but when the book gets really good is when we start having discussions about where things might go, how businesses might change and what are the underlying factors to this change. Since the book has been out and I've been on the book tour I've had some really interesting and well informed discussions and sometimes arguments about the business of storytelling and the business of delivery those stories to people using technology.

The second goal for writing Screen Future is a little more broad. As you know I travel around the world talking to people about the future and I'm always struck with how passionate, interested and engaged people are when they talk about their visions for the future. I wanted the book to be a place to gather together a wide range of research and opinions and offer up a vision for where we might be going. My process of future casting really isn't about prediction at all. Asimov was right THAT is a thankless task. Future casting is a little more pragmatic - I use things like social and computer science, global trends and conversations with experts and visionaries to construct a grounded vision for where we are headed. Then we use this vision to talk about what's good and bad about that vision - like I said before. But ultimately we're using this future casting to develop visions that we can build. In the book I wanted to capture the future casting process with all of its disparate inputs and show what a vision for 2015 might look like. Then use it as a way to have conversations with people about the future that they wanted and the future they were worried about

You describe yourself as a "Consumer Experience Architect." What does this entail? What kinds of expertise and insight shape your models of the consumer experience? What factors are shifting the consumer experience of television? Are the changes being driven by shifts in technology, in business practice, or in social and cultural expectations?

I'm going to give the answer that I give to my engineering colleagues. But I have to warn you that they hate this answer. So I kind of like giving it to them. The answer to your question is....yes. The answer is yes. All of the above. The changes in consumers experience with TV are due to all of the factors you mentioned. Let's look at each one and see if we don't uncover some more.

Let's start with "shifts in technology". Because I work in an engineering company this is the easiest to tackle. I've watched the evolution of TV technology first hand for more than twenty years now. In the early 1990s I worked on interactive TV deployments in Europe and Scandinavia. Now to give you an idea of the types of things I worked on I should tell you about one of our most successful projects. It was a huge success and we thought it really showed the way forward for "interactive TV". But thinking about it today in 2011 the sad truth is that it really illustrates the technical limitations of TV before recent improvements.

The project was done for British Airways. They were looking to sell vacation packages to Spain at the time. A big problem for them was lead generation, actually finding the right people who would be interested in the vacation package. Now the vacations they were selling weren't super expensive but they also weren't budget vacations either. They were right in the middle. So what BA wanted to do was use an interactive TV application to find the right people to market to.

To do this they produced a really slick commercial. I think it was about 5 minutes long. At the end of the advertisement the viewer was prompted to press a button on their remote control to request a glossy brochure for more information.

We launched the test in Cardiff Whales and it was a huge success as a pilot. We thought we were geniuses. The back end was pretty complicated. To actually make the thing work you had to send the request via the back channel on the set top box. It then had to interface with the head end, pull the subscribers address and information then send that information to the fulfillment center so that they could mail out the glossy brochure of beautiful beaches and smiling people. For BA it was great because they were gathering prequalified leads for their vacation packages, only sending the costly brochure to people who were interested. For many this type of lead generation is the holy grail of advertising. You actually get your potential customers to ask you for advertising materials.

Like I said it was a success and we thought we were geniuses ushering in the future of interactivity on TV. How pathetic is that? Press a button and get a brochure...that was the staggering brilliance of interactive design. A button that sends you a piece of paper mail!

Now I'm not trying to trivialize how difficult it was to pull off this project. It was actually kind of hard but I think it really illustrates the technical and infrastructure limitations of TV systems in the past.

Flash forward 20 years and look how far we have come technically. We all know the Internet really changed everything from a media and storytelling standpoint. But behind the scenes and inside the TV a lot of little and large changes have really turned the TV itself into a computational device. Two decades ago the TV technically look pretty close to the old RCA sets that used to bring I Love Lucy into American living rooms. Today TVs look more like computers and smart phones.

I guess that's really the big shift and one of the main points of my book. Today technically speaking TVs and PCs and smart phones and any connected device is just that; a screen that can connect to the Internet and give people the entertainment and communications they want. It's just a screen not a specific device. When you look at it this way the conversation is less about the TV or PC or whatever and more about the form factor, the size of the screen and they way it fits into your life; the way all the different screens you own fit into your life

That's a huge shift! I'm a TV guy and recasting the TV and entertainment experience like this is worlds away from where we were 20 years ago. Much of this shift has been started and brought about by the technological advances to both TVs and PCs; which really I just think about as computational devices across the board.

This isn't a completely linear story by any means but for the moment let's pretend it is. So, after all they technological advances, the introduction and popularization of the Internet, the reduction in the cost of computational power to consumers and the expansion of meaningful broadband networks then it really got interesting. Well let me restate that...what got interesting is what people did with all of these changes. (Here's a tiny aside: I wrote all of my notes for our conversation on my smart phone as I flew from London or LA or Mumbai - even how we compose and were has evolved!)

Few people have chronicled and explored these cultural shifts more fully than you Henry - so I'm not going to bore you with my poor summary of your work of which I am a huge fan. But let's just say people got involved in their entrainment. They got involved in making it, finding it, talking about it and did it on their schedule and to better fit their preferences not the preferences of the companies and corporation that were producing, distributing and advertising with this content

Now the entertainment industry isn't stupid. We often forget that these large companies are made up of many passionate intelligent people who mainly want to make the best stories possible on whatever medium they choose.

So around 2007 the media and technology industry really began to change and intermingle. A lot of writers cite the 2007 consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas as the turning point where all industries realized the fact that the future of TV and the future of entertainment was digital or a mix of traditional delivery mingled with the Internet. This was massive realization for these large global companies.

This really brought about and is continuing to bring about the business practice changes you asked about. And it's really these changes that we are witnessing and will continue to watch for the next few years. This is something I really came upon while working on my book. From a technological stand point we are there. When it comes to having technical capabilities to deliver the entertainment experience the majority of people want we have the engineering done. We might even be a little ahead. This of course will change but for today most of the technical hurdles have been solved.

We are now witnessing the business changes as they adapt to these technological advancements as they mix with expanded consumer expectations and habits. I find this fascinating! All you need to do is pick up The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Variety and even Entertainment Weekly and underneath many of the articles you will see the influences of these changes.

And the changes will come. They have to come. People want them. Now I'm not saying TV is going away or even that big budget entertainment is going away. That's not going to happen either. The main reason for that is that people love it. People don't want it to go away. They will still pay for it. But their habits and expectation for where they get it, how they get it and how they can participate with it are changing. The entertainment industry will adapt to this just as it has done the past. As I see it this is an exciting time full with a lot of juicy stories and incredible opportunity.

July 01, 2011

Now Available: Transmedia Hollywood 2 Videos

July 01, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Due to technical difficulties, we've been delayed in sharing with you the videos from our April Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, jointly sponsored by the cinema schools at USC and UCLA, and hosted this year at UCLA. We hope to be back next April at USC with a whole new line up of speakers and topics, which we are just now starting to plan. In the meantime, check out some of these sessions, which should give the ever expanding Transmedia community plenty to chew on this summer. As for myself, I'm flying down to Rio, even as we speak.

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Denise Mann Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC. (Some of my comments here got me into trouble at the time and I hope to post something here soon which explores the issue I raise here about the role of radical intertextuality within the same medium.)

Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Henry Jenkins Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play": Designing Virtual Worlds--From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond

Hollywood has come a long way since Walt Disney, circa 1955, invited families to come out and play in the first cross-platform, totally merchandised sandbox -- Disneyland. Cut to today and most entertainment corporations are still focused on creating intellectual properties to exploit across all divisions of the Company. However, as the studios and networks move away from the concrete spaces of movie and TV screens and start to embrace the seemingly limitless "virtual spaces" of the Web as well as the real-world spaces of theme parks, museums, and comic book conventions, the demands on creative personnel and their studio counterparts have expanded exponentially.

Rather than rely on old-fashioned merchandising and licensing departments to oversee vendors, which too often results in uninspired computer games, novelizations, and label T-shirts, several studios have brought these activities in-house, creating divisions like Disney Imagineering and Disney Interactive to oversee the design and implementation of these vast, virtual worlds. In other instances, studios are turning to a new generation of independent producers -- aka "transmedia producers" -- charged with creating vast, interlocking brand extensions that make use of a never-ending cycle of technological future shock and Web 2.0 capabilities.

The results of these partnerships have been a number of extraordinarily inventive, interactive, and immersive experiences that create a "you are there" effect. These include the King Kong 360 3D theme park ride, which incorporates the sight, smell, and thunderous footsteps of the iconic gorilla as he appears to toss the audience's tram car into a pit. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have joined forces to create the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a new $200 million-plus attraction at the Islands of Adventure in Florida. Today's panel focuses on the unique challenges associated with turning traditional media franchises into 3D interactive worlds, inviting you to come out 2 play in the studios' virtual sandboxes.

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists:

Scott Bukatman, Associate Professor, Stanford University (Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century)
Rick Carter, Production Designer (Avatar, Sucker Punch, War of the Worlds)
Dylan Cole, Art Designer (Avatar, Alice in Wonderland)
Thierry Coup, SVP, Universal Creative, Wizarding World of Harry Potter, King Kong 3D
Craig Hanna, Chief Creative Officer, Thinkwell Design (Wizarding World of Harry Potter-opening; Ski Dubai)
Angela Ndalianis, Associate Professor /Head, Cinema Studies, University of Melbourne (Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment)
Bruce Vaughn, Chief Creative Executive, Disney Imagineering (elecTronica, Toy Story Mania)

TH2 Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Panel 2: "We're Looking For Characters": Designing Personalities Who Play Across Platforms

How is our notion of what constitutes a good character changing as more and more decisions get made on the basis of a transmedia logic? Does it matter that James Bond originated in a book, Spider-Man in comics, Luke Skywalker on screen, and Homer Simpson on television, if each of these figures is going to eventually appear across a range of media platforms? Do designers and writers conceive of characters differently when they know that they need to be recognizable in a variety of media? Why does transmedia often require a shift in focus as the protagonist aboard the "mothership" often moves off stage as extensions foreground the perspective and actions of once secondary figures? How might we understand the process by which people on reality television series get packaged as characters who can drive audience identification and interest or by which performers get reframed as characters as they enter into the popular imagination? Why have so few characters from games attracted a broader following while characters from comics seem to be gaining growing popularity even among those who have never read their graphic adventures?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists:

Francesca Coppa, Director, Film Studies/Associate Professor, Muhlenberg College; Member of the Board of Directors, Organization for Transformative Works
Geoffrey Long, Program Manager, Entertainment Platforms, Microsoft
Alisa Perren, Associate Professor, Georgia State University (co-ed., Media Industries)
Kelly Souders, Writer/Executive Producer (Smallville)

TH2 Panel 2: "We're Looking for Characters" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Game On!: Intelligent Designs or Fan Aggregators?

Once relegated to the margins of society, today's media fans are often considered the "advance guard" that studio and network marketers eagerly pursue at Comi-Con and elsewhere to help launch virtual word-of-mouth campaigns around a favorite film, TV series, computer game, or comic book. Since tech-savvy fans are often the first to access Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Second Life in search of a like-minded community, it was only a matter of time before corporate marketers followed suit. After all, these social networking sites provide media companies with powerful tools to manage fans and commit them to crowd-sourcing activities on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Two corporate leaders--Warner Bros. and Disney -- have entered the fray, pursuing disparate routes to monetize the game industry, each targeting a different type of consumer. While WB is investing in grittier, visually-arresting, adult-oriented, console games like Batman Arkham Asylum, Disney is banking on interactive entertainment like Club Penguin's online playground built for kids and family members. Hard-core gamers worry that the kid-and family-friendly Disney approach will neuter the video game industry; however, the unasked question is whether these interactive playgrounds linked to corporate IP are training next-generation consumers to bridge the gap between entertainment and promotions.

A similar revolution is taking place in the post-network television industry as creators form alliances with network marketers in an effort to reach out to engaged fans. Many of the cutting-edge creative team at Smallville forged this path in the wilderness, creating innovative on-line campaigns that they later took to Heroes. Fans avidly pursue TV creators who incorporate an arsenal of visual design elements derived from films, comic books, games, web-series, and theme park rides in the series proper and in the online worlds. Experimenting with ways to reinvent an aging medium and buoyed by a WGA strike that assigned derivative content to showrunners, the question remains whether these creators won the battle but lost the war as more and more network dot.coms have asserted control over the online interactive entertainment space. Do web-series like Dr. Horrible and The Guild represent the next frontier for enterprising creators or can creative personnel learn to play within the confines of the corporate playground?

We will ask creators from both industries -- gaming and television--to explain their philosophy about the intended and unintended outcomes of their interactive properties and immersive entertainment experiences. Marketers clearly love it when fans become willing billboards for the brand by wearing logo T-shirts, deciphering glyphs, or joining mysterious organizations such as Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Fairies, Elves, and Trolls, and then sharing clues, codes, and supporting content across a virtual community. These and other intriguing questions will be posed to the creative individuals responsible for designing many of these imaginative and engaging transmedia worlds.

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists:

Steven DeKnight (Spartacus, Smallville, Buffy, Angel)
Jeph Loeb, EVP/Head of TV, Marvel Entertainment (Heroes, Smallville)
Craig Relyea, SVP, Global Marketing, Disney Interactive (Epic Mickey, Toy Story3-The Game)
Avi Santo, Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University (co-creator of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television)
Matt Wolf, Double 2.0, ARG/Game Designer (Bourne Conspiracy, Hellboy II ARG, The Fallen ARG)

TH2 Panel 3: "Game On!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

"It's About Time!" Structuring Transmedia Narratives

The rules for how to structure a Hollywood movie were established more than a century ago and even then, were inspired by ideas from earlier media -- the four-act structure of theater, the hero's quest in mythology. Yet, audiences and creators alike are still trying to make sense of how to fit together the chunks of a transmedia narrative. Industry insiders use terms such as mythology or saga to describe stories which may expand across many different epochs, involve many generations of characters, expand across many different corners of the fictional world, and explore a range of different goals and missions.

We might think of such stories as hyper-serials, in so far as serials involved the chunking and dispersal of narrative information into compelling units. The old style serials on film and television expanded in time; these new style serials also expand across media platforms. So, how do the creators of these stories handle challenges of exposition and plot development, managing the audience's attention so that they have the pieces they need to put together the puzzle? What principles do they use to indicate which chunks of a franchise are connected to each other and which represent different moments in the imaginary history they are recounting? Do certain genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- embrace this expansive understanding of story time, while others seem to require something closer to the Aristotelian unities of time and space?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists:

Caitlin Burns, Transmedia Producer, Starlight Runner Entertainment
Abigail De Kosnik, Assistant Professor, UC, Berkeley (Co-Ed., The Survival of the Soap Opera: Strategies for a New Media Era; Illegitimate Media: Minority Discourse and the Censorship of Digital Remix)
Jane Espenson, Writer/Executive Producer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica)
John Platt, Co-Executive (Big Brother, The Surreal Life)
Tracey Robertson, CEO and Co-founder, Hoodlum
Lance Weiler, Founder, Wordbook Project

TH2 Panel 4: "It's About Time!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

June 24, 2011

Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters...

June 24, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Yesterday, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame announced a bold new online venture called Pottermore which has sent shock waves through multiple communities which I follow closely and I've had more than a few people already ask me to weigh in on my initial thoughts about what's taking place. Keep in mind that, as Will Rogers used to say, all I know is what I read in the newspaper. I have no knowledge of what's taking place here other than what's already in the press and what I can speculate about from my knowledge of the announcement's fit within a range of trends impacting social media, transmedia entertainment, Web 2.0, and fan culture. Here's the video of Rowling's announcement, which you should watch, if you haven't already, so the rest of this makes sense.

Now, let's consider what this announcement means from several perspectives.

Pottermore as Transmedia Storytelling: This may be the most highly visible transmedia project to date -- after all, Harry Potter is as big a media franchise as we are likely to see anytime soon. I've blogged before about the paradoxical nature of Harry Potter fandom:

Harry Potter is a massive mass market success at a time when all of our conversations are focusing on the fragmentation of the media marketplace and the nichification of media production. There has been so much talk about the loss of common culture, about the ways that we are all moving towards specialized media, about the end of event based consumption, and so forth. Yet very little of it has reflected on the ways that Harry Potter has bucked all of these trends....But in many other ways, the success of Harry Potter demonstrates the power of niche media. Start from the fact that this is a children's book, after all, and a fantasy, two genres which historically have attracted only niche readerships. Scholastic surely wouldn't have predicted this level of popular interest when it chose to publish the original novel. By traditional industry talk, much of Harry Potter's success came from so-called "surplus consumers" -- that is, consumers who fall outside of its target demographic. Traditionally, much of fan culture involves these kinds of surplus consumers -- female fans of male-targeted action adventure series, adult consumers of children's media, western consumers of Japanese popular culture, and so forth. Indeed, it is this attraction to works that are in some ways mismatched to our needs that encourages fans to rework and rewrite them.

Relatively little of the official Harry Potter media produced to date has been transmedia in the sense that I use the term -- as an extension of the information we have available about the world rather than as a replication of the story from one medium to another. I've been suggesting lately that we might identify transmedia projects through the combination of two factors - radical intertextuality (that is, the complex interweaving of texts through the exchange of story-related information) and multimodality (that is, the mixing of different media and their affordances in the unfolding of the story). Pottermore works at both levels.

On the one hand, Rowling is making a commitment to provide fans with a large chunk of additional information about the world of Harry Potter, nuggets which, as she puts it, she's been "hoarding" during the writing process. We might think of this as a more interactive version of the kinds of "further stories" or notes on the mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien's estate has been slowly feeding Lord of the Rings fans in the decades since the author's death. Some estimates suggest that she's already got 100,000 words of new material which is going to be inserted into the interstices of the original novels -- that's more or less the length of a typical book (not as much as a Harry Potter book, but still) -- and she's hinted that there may be more where this comes from. During the Harry Potter lexicon case, it came out that she had been planning to publish her own encyclopedia which would expand our knowledge of her fictional universe. It is not clear whether this will supplement or replace that original conception.

By far, this is the aspect of the announcement which has caught fire with fans, especially those who have been worried that the intensity of the fandom will fade once the last film is released into the theaters. Trust me, there's been lots of mashing of teeth about this. No one thinks that Harry Potter fandom will go away completely -- we've seen many fandoms long outlast the production of new material -- but there is apt to be less intensity and visibility once the final film hits the theater. For these fans, Pottermore is a game changer. Here, for example, is some of how HPANA, one online Harry Potter fansite, responded to the news:

"Does this announcement and the looming launch of Pottermore hold enough weight to keep together a fandom that is showing signs of deterioration? To me, Pottermore will act as an integral part of the fandom for the next few years. Yes, years. If Jo were to have announced a print encyclopedia, the immediate impact would have been greater. But because of the interactive nature of Pottermore, and the fact that each novel's storyline will be released months apart (Sorcerer's Stone in October, Chamber of Secrets in early 2012), the Pottermore storyline may not conclude for at least two years - extending active fandom discovery until the end of 2013 at the earliest....What does this mean? The Harry Potter fandom is on the verge of embarking on a new, monumental journey, something which has never occurred and probably will never happen again, as Rowling has been famously private about her writings in the past. Pottermore will be truly a one-of-a-kind experience where fans will have the opportunity to dictate what they want to see come out of it, both from Jo and fellow fans....I believe the whole fandom discovering brand new canon together is the most important aspect of Pottermore. The ingenious sorting, play-along aspects and digital store with the first ever Harry Potter e-books? That's merely icing on an already delicious cake."

Those are high hopes for the author to meet.

On the other, there is the promise of multimodality represented by what's been described as interactive "moments" introduced around the books -- including a sorting hat process and a wand shop -- which allow fans new ways of interacting with the story. For literary critic Lev Grossman, who has been a key enthusiast for the books, this aspect of transmedia causes him to pause:

When publishers mix reading with other media, the way Pottermore does (or the way that The 39 Clues, another Scholastic creation, does), I find it confusing. Every time I see more of the Potterverse realized in other media, as video or audio or even still images, it undoes the work I did by reading about it. It takes away from the marvelous, handmade Potterverse I've got going on in my head and replaces it with something prefabricated.

Those of us who are more enthusiastic about transmedia see it differently: we see these materials as expanding our knowledge and deepening our experience of the story (at least in so far as they are done well and everything about Potter has been done well) by allowing each medium to do what it can do best. There's been lots of talk about whether there has been a killer demonstration of the potential of transmedia -- this may well become that killer demo, for better or for worse, and I for one am going to be watching closely to see what happens next.

Pottermore as eBook: The Wall Street Journal has read the Pottermore story through the lens of ebook publishing and the future of authorship, and it's a pretty significant story from that perspective also. Here's part of what they speculate:

While her publishers and major online book retailers will continue to sell her physical books, Ms. Rowling has reserved for herself the digital editions, the fastest-growing segment in the book world. The move could inspire other authors, large and small, to pronounce themselves independent agents in hopes of tapping more lucrative paydays. Ms. Rowling refused for years to release her books in electronic format, retaining the digital rights for herself. While most other authors have already handed over their digital rights to their publishers--most recently, John Grisham--Ms. Rowling's deal could prompt them to self-publish when their deals come up for renewal or demand higher royalty rates than the 25% of net sales that most publishers offer today on digital editions. Some may even choose to forgo all traditional means of book publishing and set up their own bookstores, reaping 100% of everything they sell.

I am following the world of epublishing closely these days, thanks to my affiliation with the Annenberg Innovation Lab which is launching its own epublishing division. Few authors at this point can exert such power over their own publications and few have the ability to set new terms of professional compensation. Read through this lens, it may be a comparable to when George Lucas took a smaller salary on Star Wars in return to a percentage of the revenue from ancillary products, a decision which helped paved the way for Star Wars as a ur-text for transmedia storytellers and entertainers.

Rowling recognizes that it is not enough to offer a digital offset of the books via Kindle but that ebook publishing represents its own kind of event, which enables her to further expand the reader's experience through new content and new ways of interacting with the material. Her continued involvement with the social network of her fans moves the ebook from a product to a process - not a one time thing, but something which can draw back people who have already read the seven books and watched the eight films to have a new set of relationships with the story. So, again, the announcement is big news.

Pottermore as fan relations: This is where things start to get a little more complicated. I've been mapping this fandom for years and there are many different kinds of Harry Potter fans who have different expectations and different relationship to the material. So, as critics such as Suzanne Scott and Julie Levine Russo have noted, transmedia practices tend to priviledge some kinds of fans over others, constructing model fans and thus seeking to set the terms of how fans relate to the material.

This has become increasingly true for Rowling, who has shown many signs that she wants to continue to shape and control how fans respond to her work well after she finished writing it. We can see this in the epilogue to the last novel, which seems to pointlessly map out futures for all of her characters, including shaping the "ships" (relationships) between them, in what amounts to spraying her territory. Many fans would have preferred a text which was more open ended on that level and allows them more freedom to speculate beyond the ending. She decided to "out" Dumbledore not through the books but via her own discourse around the books. She tried to shut down the Harry Potter Lexicon. So, it is abundantly clear that she likes some of her fans more than others and that any effort to facilitate fan interactions also represents an attempt to bring fandom more under her control.

Two key phrases stood out for me in the announcement: "digital generation" and "safe," both of which require some glossing here. Harry Potter has attracted a very strong adult readership, many of whom would not conventionally fall into the digital generation. Even among those who come from the digital generation, many of those who grew up reading the books, are now young adults, even in some cases, parents on their own. And then, there are the children readers who were the targeted audience for the books. The most active fans, as noted above, are often a "surplus audience," and may well not be children. This doesn't matter when the book can be purchased at a range of different locations, read in a variety of contexts, but if you try to bring that readership together online, then the tensions are apt to become more of an issue.

That's where the term, "safe," is a red flag. In this case, it can mean two things -- first, a space where you can read the stories without encountering any of that dratted "pornography" that some (many actually) of the adult fans have been producing. I remember talking to Warner executives when I was working on Convergence Culture who kept saying they wanted to distinguish between the "fans" and the "pornographers," and I couldn't bear to tell them that most of the erotica is produced by the fans and is part of what it means to them to be a fan. So, "safe" in those terms means censored, regulated, or policed. So, the promise is that "You," "Us," will help shape the future of the franchise but only in terms specified by Rowling and by the companies involved in overseeing this site.

Here enters a second potential meaning of the word, "safe," which is that the site will comply with the Children Online Privacy Protection Act (or its British equivalent) which sets restrictions on the exchange of personal information, especially by minors. (For a useful discussion of how the desire to protect children may also restrict their ability to meaingfully participate, check out this recent post by Anne Collier.) So, does this mean that Pottermore will become the literary equivalent of Club Penguin, social media without the potential for off-line social interactions, and how does this fit within the larger framework of social relations upon which Harry Potter fandom, like all other fandoms, depends.

Moving beyond the word, "safe," there's the potential that this follows the logic of Web 2.0 more generally which seeks to capture and commodify participatory culture. There are multiple concerns here, which I need to know more to be able to address. While the language of the video hints at a more open-ended structure of participation, wherein fans share their thoughts, speculations, and creative works with each other, the only features specifically described constitute preprogramed interactivity -- such as the Sorting Hat -- which sets the terms of our engagement with the storyworld. I might note that Harry Potter fandom has been among the most innovative in helping fans make the transition to the era of social networks -- having developed their own platforms and practices since the book was first published -- including several very sophisticated versions of the Sorting Hat. Which house you identify is deeply personal to Harry Potter fans. I strongly identify with my affiliation with Ravenclaw, so why should I cede to Rowling and Sony the right to decide which house is mine! So, in this case, Rowling is offering fans what they already have on their own terms and using the release of information as a bribe to pull them into her walled garden. (Keep in mind that the information is going to get spoiled and leaked the moment it is posted.)

If, on the other hand, she does allow for more creative and participatory engagement of the material on the site, that opens other questions already hotly debated along the borders between Web 2.0 and Participatory Culture. Abigail DeKosnik, for example, has described the bargain fans often are forced to make -- ceding all rights to their own intellectual property in return for the promise, easily revoked, of corporations not suing them for their efforts. Others have described this in terms of issues of fan or free labor -- people are doing creative work for free which benefits corporations without getting any revenue in return. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to describe this as a modern form of "sharecropping." This is a complicated issue and we have a lot to say about it in my forthcoming Spreadable Media book.

I am not prejudging the terms that Rowling and Sony are offering here. I am just saying that the platform as described raises these questions and we need more information before we can really weigh whether Rowling is treating her fans fairly here. She's been surprisingly supportive of fan culture in the past, but on a selective basis, which does not give us much guarantee on how this one is going to shape out. The devil is going to be in the details here and those are going to be rolled out over the next few months.

Could Rowling's "gift" to her fans turn out to be a Trojan Horse? Hell yes, but it may also open the door for some other creative opportunities along the lines discussed in the earlier sections of this post.

June 15, 2011

Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part Two (Anne Kustritz, Louisa Stein, and Sam Ford)

June 15, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

In this second installment, the participants engage in back and forth conversation intended to extend upon the ideas contained in their opening statements. Louisa Stein: Anne and Sam, I'm struck by the harmony in our three separately written pieces. We all seem to recognize the perceived dangers or negative connotations of the term acafan, and yet feel a value in holding on to the term because of its potential as a self-reflexive signpost, a bridge between interconnected disciplines or subject positions, and even perhaps a politicized position.

One question I have is from where this perception emerges that acafan is an essentialized standpoint or identity connected to identity politics? All of our three responses here indicate that that none of us relate to the term acafan in this way, though we are all wary of these associations. Why and where does this negative perception of acafan as a divisive concept take root and how can we counter this narrative? Or is this perception an unavoidable part of the project of acafan work?

Anne Kustritiz:My concern stems from the universalizing tendency behind the aca-fan construct, when one might be tempted to lose sight of aca-fan as a discursive marker and act as though it identifies some kind of shared experience. Several times in the past (and perhaps in this discussion's future as well) I've seen dismissals of the aca-fan concept because it fails to account for that individual's lived experience, often either because of a mismatch in object (i.e. what kind of fans), discipline, or method. If fandom only refers to participation in active face-to-face communities, many of our colleagues would not qualify. If aca-fan relates only to those who directly interact with fans during the course of their studies, likewise many may see the concept as irrelevant. Partly, this may result from the preponderance of aca-fen from community-oriented fandom who use and reflect on the label, which sometimes makes it seem as though the concept only applies to them (not necessarily by ideology or design, but by sheer numbers).

Particularly for those engaged in literary analysis, aca-fan terminology may seem like an unwelcome imposition of social sciences concerns, and it could be useful to consider how reflections on the researcher's identity might still offer enrichment for those who see themselves pursuing primarily archival or textual work.

For me, identifying as an aca-fan certainly incorporates a political stance because of my object, method, and disciplinary position: for example, identifying with and as my work identifies me as queer, and copy-left, among other things (which is not to say all slash participants identify as such, but these are strong associations). However, aca-fan describes only one aspect of my fan, scholarly, and other identities and experiences, and it would not mark other scholars in the same way (an aca-fan doing textual analysis of wrestling fans' twitter accounts would find that telling academic colleagues about personal interest in wrestling and telling wrestling fans about discourse analysis have very different stakes and consequences than my positionality).

Even the suggestion that the term "aca-fan" always offers a relevant and contradictory identification to some extent implies a false universal. In cultural anthropology, for instance, the relevant term would be native anthropology, which does not offer a new or challenging intervention into existing disciplinary practice, but rather adds to an established field of study. Film scholars who also make films or passionately follow film similarly go without notice. However, even in both of these instances, their positionality also shifts if one begins to term them "fans" of urban youth culture, Portuguese jazz bar culture, Hitchcock, or horror. While the experience and passion may remain the same whether we are scholars, buffs, aficionados, or fans, the social positioning alters significantly, thus opening the possibility for solidarity (often with class implications) through fan identification.

Sam Ford: In Soap Fans in 1995, Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby made compelling points about the necessary balance between private and social fandom. I agree with Anne that, just as fan studies has often privileged the fan community over private consumption practices, the term "acafan" has come to hold particular meaning to participants in a community. The implications that being an acafan might have for those doing textual analysis, for instance, is strong.

I primarily study (and am a fan of) areas of entertainment whose cultural value is often missed by anyone who would not consider themselves a fairly ardent "fan" of the genre in question: soap operas and pro wrestling. From the "outside," both are often considered of no artistic merit, and the trouble that fans of either genre find is that even explaining the artistry of the genre or what makes for "good" vs. "bad" wrestling or "quality soap opera storytelling" is lost on someone outside the genre.

I remember in particular, after the cancellation of As the World Turns, being interviewed by a television critic for a prominent publication about the death of long-running soap operas. I was explaining what was unique about the soap opera storytelling model and what might be lost as daytime soaps go off the air. In the interview, she could detect from my passion and the depth of my knowledge that I did more than "study" soap fans or write "about" the genre: the "fan" side of my "acafan" was showing through. I could instantly tell that her radar went up. As she detected that I liked what she saw as lowbrow and lower-grade programming, she began to completely dismiss all that I had to say. After I finished, she said, "I've watched soap operas before, and I didn't see any of what you saw."

My point was exactly that: that the language of soap opera and the ability to see what DEFINES "good storytelling" and high quality texts within the soap opera genre can only be seen by someone who understands the genre deeply enough to know its lexicon. And, similarly, for soaps, I've written before about the fact that doing textual analysis for that genre (with 260 new episodes a year, for decades) is so complex that it's hard for those who aren't intimately familiar for the genre to follow and not see it as totally ridiculous.

All this is to say that, for textual analysis in genres like these, being an acafan provides a great wealth of experience and understanding of a genre that those who aren't dedicated viewers just wouldn't have. So I certainly believe that we too often, in using the term "acafan," privilege the social side of "fan" without thinking about the "aca" part.

And part of what we are questioning here, I suppose, is whether "acafan" becomes a label for a scholar's relative position to an object of study; a mode of engagement with particular methodologies and approaches; or a label for a distinct kind of scholar or a sub-field of work under "fan studies." Sometimes, there seems to be slippage across these uses.

Louisa Stein: Anne, I want to focus in on a very valuable point in your response that I'd like us to unpack further. You wrote: "Even the suggestion that the term 'aca-fan' always offers a relevant and contradictory identification to some extent implies a false universal."

This strikes me as very significant; I didn't mean to imply that there's always a contradiction between the academic and fan positions, but rather that they always exist in relation to each other, but what that relation is is in constant motion, and for me personally my acafan positioning pushes me to constantly probe at that relationship, to expore whether it is one of solidarity or conflict or more likely a mix and match of contradictory and aligned values.

So for example in going to Vividcon, or in my approach to vidding more generally, I come with a strange mesh of aesthetic values as a film scholar who has studied both mainstream and experimental film and as (perhaps resultingly) a fan who appreciates both highly polished vids by the most acclaimed vidders within fandom and vids that circulate in other spheres on youtube and don't adhere to the same vidding value sets. So to me the one universal that the acafan position brings with it is the need for a constant self reflexivity in regards to considering one's relation to one's object. Maybe that's why acafandom for me can encompass personal fans, anti-fans, community fans, and everything in between.

And this connects with your final comment, Sam, which I think also gets right to the heart of things. You write that "part of what we are questioning here, I suppose, is whether 'acafan' becomes a label for a scholar's relative position to an object of study; a mode of engagement with particular methodologies and approaches; or a label for a distinct kind of scholar or a sub-field of work under 'fan studies.' Sometimes, there seems to be slippage across these uses."

Yes, and yes, and I think that perhaps the problem comes in when that slippage goes unnoticed--or rather, where we move from slippage (which could be productive if it is recognized as such) and conflation. When these three elements become conflated or equated, we do have a vast narrowing of what one might understand as acafan, a narrowing that could easily become quite alienating. So how do we (or can we) rescue the term acafan to mean all three of these elements (among others) in tandem and multiplicity, rather than as a overly-simplified unified front?

Anne Kustritz: I agree that allowing for a variety of life experiences and disciplinary approaches to populate the aca-fan concept is the primary challenge. Partly, this may require that a case be made for what self-reflexivity has to offer, in tandem with the importation or creation of methods for critically evaluating aca-fan self-reflexivity, because as with any mode of writing, some authors will offer more nuanced, sophisticated, and productive analyses than others.

In the first case, this blog conversation will hopefully amplify the diversity of experiences and approaches taken by aca-fen, which will hopefully allow for all of us to be in broader conversation with the field as a whole. In the second instance, the aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding and evaluating how scholars employ self-reflexivity to separate justifications of the aca-fan concept from the success with which it is employed in various pieces.

Perhaps this addresses Sam's concern about the relatively unexamined "aca" end of things. As I've mentioned, because of my background in cultural anthropology, I tend to draw upon that literature for its specialization in analyzing the researcher-participant relationship, but it would likely behoove us to collectively build a literature of our own specifically on the process of scholarly analysis for aca-fan works. Thus, perhaps instead of questioning whether one ought to be an aca-fan, which as a question of identity and identification seems problematic to police, and instead move toward creating principles for thinking through aca-fan works. Which aspects of an aca-fan text make it more or less successful or useful?

Sam Ford:I think both of your suggestions are key here and get back to one of my concerns of what would be lost if the ideas surrounding "aca-fan" were to be lost: a space for academics from a wide range of traditional disciplines to come together to share work that both study fans/fan communities in a way that shows respect, nuance, and an acknowledgment of autonomy for those fans--and a space that allows for the intersection of academics and fans to converse with one another on high-level concepts surrounding the reception and socialization of texts that draw high levels of engagements from their viewers/listeners/readers/players.

There has been compelling work in the past few years to, for instance, look at the intersections (or lack thereof) in work about sports fandom and media fandom. I think we should always strive to continue expanding the inclusivity of fan studies, and part of that requires--to Anne's point--drawing together collections of methodologies, "best practices," etc., of what constitutes using an "aca-fan" methodology or including an "aca-fan" positioning of one's own relationship to a work. This doesn't necessarily require too much formalization--treating fan studies as a discipline all its own in ways that puts too much rigidity for an area study which I believe is all the richer because it crosses disciplinary bounds. But I think it does require being able to present grad students, undergrads, fans, and young scholars with ideas of what constitutes an "acafan" mode of engagement.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

Anne Kustritz will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Amsterdam in Media Studies as of fall 2011, after teaching in Women and Gender Studies at the College at Brockport, SUNY. Her work focuses on slash fan fiction, internet ethnography, and queer reproductive politics. Her articles include "Slashing the Romance Narrative" and "Postmodern Eugenics" (forthcoming), and she sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. Anne is a fan of Michele Foucault, baking, fruit forward red wines, Ani DiFranco, hatha yoga, sustainable agriculture, Ruth Behar, international travel, and fan creative works, among many other things.

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom Strategic Communications, an affiliate with both the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment group. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company. Sam is co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (NYU Press, forthcoming) and is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures. You can find Louisa on twitter here and on wordpress here..

June 13, 2011

Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part One (Anne Kustritz, Louisa Stein, and Sam Ford)

June 13, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

This is the first installment of our summer-long discussion of "Acafandom and Beyond." Many readers ask me what "Acafan" means in the title of this blog. This conversation will be a chance to dig deeper into this concept and explore its relationship to more general concerns of the place of subjectivity and self-reflexivity in cultural critique. In the first segment of each week, we will be reading opening statements from the three invited participants. Anne Kustritz: My interest in aca-fan identity derives from two main concerns. First, I envision the aca-fan construct as the demarcation of a site of cultural and political struggle and an opportunity for solidarity; yet it often seems to be represented as a coherent or even essentialized standpoint or identity (and identity politics). Secondly, the issues I imagine as most central to theorization of aca-fan identity have also been elucidated significantly in the works of post-structuralist, post-modern, feminist, queer, post-colonial, and native ethnography/ethnology, and those conversations would significantly enrich our dialogue.

It seems to me that arguments about or discussions of aca-fan identity often work at cross-purposes because they reveal the lack of a shared object and method: that is, the material incoherency/heterogeneity of both the "fan" and the "studies" of fan studies; basic disagreement about the organization and definition of these terms means that scholars (and fans) discussing aca-fan identity lack a shared vocabulary. The stakes involved in embracing, repudiating, or entirely avoiding the aca-fan construct remain localized within particular geographical and institutional spaces. Thus, the conversation looks almost entirely different depending upon which fans one studies, using which methods. For example, in my own work I've tried to make a distinction between "creative" and "as is" fans who either treat the canon as open to fan transformation, or a closed system to be interpreted and commented upon but not altered. In past aca-fan discussions I've also come to see the critical importance of studying enculturated versus unincorporated fans as a locus of disagreement, i.e. those fans who participate in communities and define themselves through that participation, and those who act within a less fixed network, or none at all.

Both of these distinctions as well as numerous others repeatedly unseat our attempts to determine who is a fan, and thus what may be gained or lost by identifying as such. Subsequently, the methods one uses to study "their" type of fans also structures beliefs about the aca-fan concept, particularly between those who see fans as primarily a textual phenomena and those who see fans as a primarily socio-cultural phenomena, as well as those who balance the two perspectives. Even then, significant disagreement still persists over whether fans primarily pose artistic, psychological, cultural, legal, or political questions. Our investments in who defines a fan, how they should be studied, and why we study fans all become ventriloquized in discussions about the value and nature of aca-fan identification. In other words, a little self-reflexivity about our thoughts on self-reflexivity might be in order.

Secondly, our discussion of aca-fan identity occurs in the wake of two decades of debate in cultural anthropology about the trials and tribulations of studying a group to which one belongs, as well as over a century of thought on the unique political, ethical, and psychological implications of studying people. While it may seem strange to turn to anthropology, especially to those who study unincorporated, "as is" fans, it would behoove us to take these conversations into account and allow them to enrich our dialogue. We need not invent this wheel. Just as a sample, post-structuralist anthropology, particularly the works of James Clifford, warn against allowing our observations of some behavior of one group of people to construct a coherent, ahistorical, or essencialized notion of "culture" - or "fans." Rather, it is through the act of naming and narrating both our participants and ourselves as fans that these scattered activities seem homogenous and inherently meaningful.

Ruth Behar's work, thought by many to mark the beginning of cultural anthropology's self-reflexive turn, deeply probes the layers of hierarchy and difference at play when the life story of a researcher comes into contact with the on-going life stories of her group of interest. She notes that while self-narratives of the heroic, self-determined researcher feel reassuring, it is more honest and affords deeper human connections with participants and readers to acknowledge our fallibility and partiality while engaging in what she terms "vulnerable observation."

Similarly, many critical ethnographers, including Gelya Frank, Gayle Rubin, and Kamala Visweswaran, argue that doing work within our own communities does not resolve the inherited colonial and class based baggage inherent in "studying down," but rather often intensifies them because one begins to study the very system of hierarchy within which one's own life remains entangled.

Scholars like Julie Taylor who use ethnographic methods at the disciplinary margins challenge us to reconceptualize the value of academic work by refusing to mystify its necessary partiality, limitations, and personal/somatic origins, instead celebrating the inescapable fact that academic work comes from unique subjectivities. Thus Taylor describes her work as "her tango," and makes the specific enunciation (rather than inherent nature) of Argentine tango danced by herself and her participants as inflected by the widespread terror of the dirty war and the gendered terror of sexual abuse the very focus and strengths of her study. In general, critical cultural anthropologists, ethnographers, and ethnologists offer a long literature problematizing the culture concept, probing the construction of researchers' identities both "in the field," and at home, as well as while doing "homework," and imagining a type of scholarship not based on the false empiricisms of absolute, essential, or ahistorical knowledge.

Therefore, I find it important to start by stating that I study enculturated, creative fans using an interdisciplinary array of mixed methods including critical theory and ethnography. My feelings about the aca-fan concept are thereby conditioned by my training in both cultural studies and critical cultural anthropology. I am wary of allowing the aca-fan construction to imply any homogeneity of culture or identity construction among either fans or academics, and instead find it most useful as the description of a site of struggle between the dominant constructions of each, pointing toward many disciplines' remaining investments in "objectivity," and the social stereotype of "the fan" as masculine yet emasculated, overly emotional yet analytic and socially inept, educated yet enraptured with the detritus of the popular.

Although I emphasize the heterogeneity of experience and investment among the group and my own idiosyncratic place therein, I identify as a slash fan and an aca-fan because these are labels of solidarity for me. Like queer, these offer an opportunity to claim and stand with a set of socially marked investments in sex, sociality, research practice, and classed cultural tastes.

Louisa Stein This August I will be going to my first fan convention. It's a very specific fan con, not one that is focused on any particular series, but rather a con that brings together practitioners and appreciators of the practice of fan remix video known as vidding. The con is called Vividcon, and for three days fans and vidders gather to screen vids, discuss vids, assess vids, critique vids, and dance to vids.

Vividcon represents a turning point for me, as does the writing of this piece. I have always found negotiating my fan and academic personae to be a fraught process. As a result I have steered away from directly sharing my fannish narratives or experiences in academic contexts and vice versa. Indeed, for a long time I maintained not one or two but four online journaling spaces, including an academic blog, a fannish journal, a personal journal, and an acafannish journal. In recent years I've begun to question whether this level of split personality management might be the healthiest thing, and so I've worked to bring together these different dimensions of my cultural participation.

Vividcon will be the first embodied experiential union of these two sets of perspective, both of which I claim as mine. Not that I'm going to go in waving academic credentials--indeed, I am as worried about negative fan response to the "aca" part as I am about academics to the "fan" part (a worry that is perhaps exaggerated, as I am certainly not the only academic attending the conference, and there is in fact a workshop being held on academic work on vidding).

But regardless of my own uneasiness, if I'm going to Vividcon, I am going as myself, and that means as a fan, a vidder, and an academic, in no particular order. These positions may seem distinct and contradictory, but when I poke at them I find they are not; I produce both as an academic and as a vidder, but in one case I create with words alone, the other with music and image. And crucially, in both cases I engage in dialogue with others who similarly care about thinking in sustained ways about media, media culture, and media reception.

The term "acafan" in all its messiness suggests an unexpected and in many cases uneasy (and from some perspectives, unwanted) combination. The aca side conveys notions of academic knowledge--knowledge of and by the academy--knowledge hashed out in peer reviewed journals and modes of thought schooled in classrooms and conferences, sustained, rigorous, tested knowledge. The fan side brings (overtly) to the table investment, fantasy, unabashed emotion, focus and devotion, abashed emotion, consumer willingness, consumer un-willingness, consumer anger, mainstream engagement with popular culture, non-mainstream engagement in popular culture, de-centered authorship, online peer culture, visible female authorship, queer engagement.

My dual allegiance to both sides has forced me to realize from the start that this uneasy synthesis of perspectives is part of my position as a media scholar and as a media lover and as a fan. In the end I believe this dynamic of productive tension or uneveness isn't relevant only to people who identify as fans and academics, but to academics who study culture more broadly.

Maybe acafan is an imperfect and now loaded term, but any term that gets at this dual, conflicted union will accumulate baggage because of the nature of the concept, and this one has a specific history and history of scholarship that I would be loathe to erase in an attempt to get away from problems that are, from another perspective, core strengths, contradictions and all.

The concept and term "acafan" do not in themselves offer an answer: far from it. Rather they lead us always to key questions: how do I balance investment and critical analysis, how do we usefully acknowledge our particular positioning in relation to a given text or community, and what insights come from a given situated position (be it casual observer, lurker, personal fan, fan-creator, community participant, antifan)? I (and I am sure I am not alone in this) face these questions as part of an ongoing process, and the questions change along with the community contexts, media texts, and my investment. Thus to me "acafan" is not a category of scholar or a defined community, nor even a fixed position, but rather a descriptor of an ongoing, ever shifting critical and personal process.

Sam Ford: Over the past few years, the term "acafan" has been picked up for a variety of uses. For academics, it's been a way to discuss a particular type of fan studies. By that, I mean pieces more qualitative in nature, more informed by in-depth knowledge of a particular fan culture because it's been written by someone who is a member of that community, and which often use an inductive sort of logic, focusing on the rich details of a particular fan community and then looking at what that case might tell us about fan practices at large.

It's also become a way to be more up-front about one's own complicity in what he is writing about (as Anne discusses), encouraging academics to both admit the limitations their "embeddedness" causes but also to be able to draw from the knowledge they have as a participant of some sort in a particular fandom or as a self-professed "fan" of a media property.

But, of course, both "academic" and "fan" are loaded terms. There's plenty of anti-fandom in academic culture (as Louisa alludes to), which the "acafan" has been a construct to rail against. And there's plenty of anti-egghead feelings in fan culture, both conceptual (not seeing the value in "overanalyzing" or questioning the "privileged"/heightened position an academic is perceived to be taking on) and based on real experience (for any of us who have ever ran into an "acafan" who believes their fannish opinion "superior" because they are "not just a fan but also an academic.")

As fan communities face members who see their positions as enlightened because of their "superior" knowledge--and as academic conferences, programs, and journals are flooded with people who see fan studies as a justification to make a living writing about their hobby without worrying so much about any critical intervention or generating compelling insights--it's perhaps no surprise that the term has "grown" to the point that people are now questioning whether its use has been stretched past usefulness.

Hence, we have this series over the summer here on Henry's blog: what I hope will be a helpful intervention to figure out what can't be lost about the position, methodology, and type of writing/discussion implied by the "acafan" construct while hopefully helping weed out ways that the term has come to be used in counterproductive ways.

While I don't have deep investment in whether the actual term "acafan" is retained, I do have reservations about what could be lost in abandoning the term. As Anne points out, there is a lack of boundaries in fan studies that is both freeing (being able to draw from multiple disciplines/methodologies and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration) and constraining (a lack of shared vocabulary, etc.) But, even as we celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of fan studies, I think it's crucial to think about all the areas of what might be considered "fan studies" which our field has not intersected with: sports studies and music/folklore studies, for instance, both of which are areas where many of the academics writing in these areas likely have deep personal/social investments in their objects of study. The "acafan" construct still might act as a means through which we can connect many academics who "fan studies" as a "field" has not yet intersected with.

Even more fundamentally, I fear a dismissal of "acafandom" outright might miss opportunities for collaboration, conversation and debate between fan studies academics and fan communities members who deeply invested in larger discussions about fandom, the politics of affinity communities, etc. I feel that the idea of "acafandom" have come to represent spaces of collaboration where academics studying fandom can learn from fans and vice versa, and I've participated in a variety of conversations, online and in-person, that have been strengthened by collaborative discussion between those who study fandom professionally and those who primarily approach fandom through "vernacular theory" (to borrow Thomas McLaughlin's term).

As someone with a deep investment in "applied humanities" (to use a popular term from my alma mater, MIT), I long to see an academia more inclusive of a diverse range of "non-academic" opinions, just as I long to see the insights of media studies academics reach audiences outside journal readership and media studies conference attendees. For me, acafandom has represented sites for such collaboration, and I feel that fan studies loses significant ground if we accidentally raze spaces for interdisciplinary and academic/fan dialogue in reconsidering our use of the term.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

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