danah boyd, Mimi Ito, and I have embarked on an interesting project for Polity. Through a series of dialogues, we’re hoping to produce a book that interrogates our different thoughts regarding participatory culture. The goal is to unpack our differences and agreements and identify some of the challenges that we see going forward. We began our dialogue a few weeks ago and had a serious brain jam where we interrogated our own assumptions, values, and stakes in doing the research that we each do and thinking about the project of participatory culture more generally. For the next three weeks, we’re going to individually reflect before coming back to begin another wave of deep dialoguing in the hopes that the output might be something that others (?you?) might be interested in reading.
And here’s where we’re hoping that some of our fans and critics might be willing to provoke us to think more deeply.
What questions do you have regarding participatory culture that you would hope that we would address?
What criticisms of our work would you like to offer for us to reflect on?
What do you think that we fail to address in our work that you wish we would consider?
For those who are less familiar with this concept, my white paper for the MacArthur Foundation described a “participatory culture” as one:
With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
Where members believe that their contributions matter
Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
This often gets understood through the lens of “Web2.0″ or “user-generated content,” but this is broadly about the ways in which a networked society rich with media enables new forms of interaction and engagement. Some of the topics that we are considering covering include “new media literacies,” “participation gap” and the digital divide, the privatization of culture, and networked political engagement. And, needless to say, a lot of our discussion will center on young people’s activities and the kinds of learning and social practices that take place. So what do *you* want us to talk about?
danah kicked off a discussion around the project last week on her blog, so you can go there to see what others are already thinking, or I am very happy to receive your comments and suggestions here, especially as my tech support people just moved this blog to a new platform and we are eager to see how well the new response functions are working.
A new report,The Civic Tripod for Mobile and Games: Activism, Art and Learning, was published a few weeks ago through the International Journal of Media and Learning. It was written by three PhD candidates, Susana Ruiz, Benjamin Stokes, and Jeff Watson, whom I've worked with closely since I came to USC three years ago. Susana and Jeff are both game designers who are completing their work through the USC Cinema School's iMAP program, while Ben is doing his PhD in Communications through USC's Annenberg School. Watson completed his PhD this past summer.
Here is the way they describe what their report tries to accomplish:
The "big picture" for mobile and locative games has been hard to see, and hard to articulate. One cause is that the examples are rarely woven together across disciplines. Second, theory has too often been absent or heavy-handed. Something in-between is needed. This is especially true for more deeply social designs, which are too often reduced to case studies especially in fields like education, the arts, and civic innovation. We argue that this fragmentation of isolated examples is undermining our ability to think big, design holistically, and evaluate broadly.
For this report, we ambitiously seek to curate a set of conceptually important mobile projects, and to connect them with a light weave of theory from three distinct traditions of practice. Specifically, this report outlines the emerging field of mobile and pervasive games along the dimensions of (1) civic learning, (2) performance/art, and (3) social change. Focusing on real projects from the field, we aim to reveal key opportunities and constraints on the mobile frontier for civic games.
We argue that this three-legged "tripod" is increasingly necessary to articulate how mobile game projects are succeeding (and failing). In the past, designs have been analyzed separately by the siloed domains of art, learning, and social action. Each silo remains a useful lens, but combining the lenses is increasingly necessary for mobile media.
Mobile media is different because it ties into the physical space of our neighborhoods, with longstanding relationships and neighborhood dramas. On the streets in front of our homes, most of us already know if there are potholes, and whether socio-economic segregation is getting worse or better. But we may need the vision of art to imagine alternate futures. Art on our streets resists abstraction, and raises immediate questions of civics, prompting us to ask, "what can we do about this?" And taking action points back to learning, since the neighborhood solution is so often to empower ourselves, which necessitates learning who we are, determining what assets and power we have, and learning the skills of collective action to push for change.
Clearly the tripod legs are not just connected -- they overlap. In fact, we argue that games are pushing for further blur between art, activism and learning. Games are a form of media that do less to structure facts, and more to structure and shape the player's experience and identity. Learning is inherent in games, since their engagement depends on providing challenges that are just barely possible. (To use the language of Vygotsky, we might say that games are only fun when they scaffold the experience to keep the player within their zone of proximal development.) When games are tied to physical space, their action ties to learning about our own neighborhoods -- how to move through them, and to change them. The art of such games is often the physical world itself, with better sounds and graphics than any screen! And the digital side of games draws in the civic, if only because it is so easy to link to more information on how to take action, or how to learn more. In other words, the experiential nature of games pulls mobile experiences on civics into being a mix of art and learning.
The report is a wonderful example of multidisciplinary scholarship with each student embodying one of the legs of their "tripod" and developing their ideas in conversation with the others. They have used a nonlinear format to allow readers to trace multiple paths through the diverse case study examples and interviews with media producers (including Mary Flanagan, Katie London, Colleen Macklin, and many others) they have assembled.
Yet, they also are creating multiple points of synthesis where their insights come together and produce understandings that none of them individually would be able to reach. Outside this innovative framework and presentation, some of these games might be understood through a lens of avant garde art practice, others through the lens of education or activism, but we would be unlikely to see the connections between them. I strongly recommend this report to anyone who wants to better understand the potentials of mobile games for facilitating new forms of civic learning and expressive practice.
As I continue to catch up on events which occurred while I was out of the country, I want to direct my readers to the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on "fan activism" which I co-edited with Sangita Shreshtova and the members of our Civic Paths research team. The initial call for papers appeared on this blog several years ago and thanks to your help, we were able to pull together an exceptional range of articles, representing many different forms of fan activism from around the world. The issue is now online and has already started to generate a fair amount of attention, but I wanted to make sure my regular blog readers had a chance to see what we produced. As you will see, many of my talks across Europe drew on this material, and our team is continuing to do work around this topic with the goal of producing a book length study of new forms of cultural activism in the not-too-distant future.
Below, I share the introduction to the special issue I wrote with Shreshtova. It should give you some sense of the range of materials we have assembled here. You are strongly encouraged to go to the online journal itself to read any or all of the essays described here.
Up, Up and Away! The Power and Potential of Fan Activism
by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shreshtova
[Fandom] is built on psychological mechanisms that are relevant to political involvement: these are concerned with the realm of fantasy and imagination on the one hand, and with emotional processes on the other...The remaining question then becomes whether and how politics can borrow from the elements of popular culture that produce these intense audience investments, so that citizenship becomes entertaining.
--Liesbeth van Zoonen, Entertaining the Citizen
Scratch an activist and you're apt to find a fan. It's no mystery why: fandom provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according to different norms, laws, and structures than those we experience in our "real" lives. Fandom also necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans with whom to share interests, develop networks and institutions, and create a common culture. This ability to imagine alternatives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism.
--Steven Duncombe, "Imagining No-Place"
In 2011, American political leaders and activists were surprisingly concerned with an 80-plus-year-old popular culture icon: Superman. When presidential candidate Rick Perry was asked by a 9-year-old child during a campaign stop which superhero he would want to be, the tough-talking Texan chose the man from Krypton, because "Superman came to save the United States!" (Well 2011). At almost that same moment, conservative commentators were up in arms because in an alternative universe DC comics story, Superman denounced his American citizenship to embrace a more global perspective: "I'm tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy. 'Truth, Justice, and the American way!'--It's not enough any more." Right-wing rage was expressed by one FoxNews.com reader: "This is absolutely sickening. We are now down to destroying all American Icons. How are we going to survive as a Nation?" (Appelo 2011). Such responses suggest a widespread recognition that popular mythologies may provide the frames through which the public makes sense of its national identity.
Meanwhile, immigrant rights activists were questioning when Superman ever became an American citizen or whether he even possessed a green card, given that he entered the country without permission and, we must presume, without documentation, a refugee from a society in turmoil who has sought to hide his origins and identity from outside scrutiny ever since.
Hari Kondabolu, a South Asian comedian, recorded a video entitled "Superman as Immigrant Rights Activist," distributed through Colorlines , asking why no one ever tried to deport Superman for "stealing jobs" and suggesting that other immigrants might wear glasses, like Clark Kent does, to mask their identities. Photographer Dulce Pinzon produced a powerful set of images depicting a range of (mostly Marvel) superheroes performing the jobs often done by undocumented workers. As Thomas Andrae (1987; see also Engle 1987) has noted, at the time of his origins in the late Depression era, Superman adopted an explicitly political stance ("the champion of the oppressed") rather than the more vaguely civic orientation of subsequent decades. As Matt Yockey demonstrates in regard to Wonder Woman in this issue, superheroes have long functioned as mythological figures or rhetorical devices for debates around identity politics. Even DC Comics has described Superman as "the ultimate immigrant" (Perry 2011).
Arely Zimmerman (forthcoming), a postdoc with the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project (part of USC's Civic Paths Project), interviewed 25 undocumented youth activists involved in the campaign to pass the Dream Act. She was struck by how often superheroes cropped up in her exchanges. One respondent described the experience of discovering other undocumented youth online as like "finding other X-Men." Another compared their campaign, which involved youth from many different backgrounds, to the Justice League. A third suggested that posting a video on YouTube in which he proclaimed himself "proud" and "undocumented" had parallels to the parallels to the experience of Spider-Man, who had removed his mask on national television during Marvel's Civil Wars story line. A graphic created for an online recruitment campaign used the image of Wolverine to suggest what kind of hero youth volunteers might aspire to become.
On the one hand, we might read these various deployments of the superheroes as illustrating the trends Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) describes: groups promoting social change are tapping the affective and imaginative properties of popular culture to inspire a more intense connection with their supporters. In this issue, Jonathan Gray shows similar appropriations of images from Star Wars and a range of other popular media franchises during labor rights protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Gray argues that such images (which have also been widely associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement) proliferate because popular culture, especially blockbuster franchises, constitutes a common reference point (shared between fans and more casual consumers) within an otherwise diverse and fragmented coalition of protestors and observers. Gray stresses the morale and community-building work performed through the remixing of popular culture for those gathered in an icy Wisconsin winter to express their support for collective bargaining. Zimmerman (forthcoming) also suggests that the Dream activists' use of pop culture references might be understood as part of a larger strategy to signal their assimilation into American culture. Given how much contemporary speech of all kinds is full of snarky pop culture references, it is not surprising that such references are also reshaping our political rhetoric, especially as campaigns seek to speak to young people who have famously felt excluded from traditional campaigns and have often been turned off by inside-the-beltway language. Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes to Washington!
Yet as the epigraph from Duncombe (this issue) suggests, such popular culture references also reflect the lived experiences of activists who also are fans, whether understood in the casual sense of someone who feels a strong emotional connection to a particular narrative or in the more active sense of someone who has participated in a fan community or engaged in transformative practices. Civil rights leaders in the 1960s deployed biblical allusions because part of what they shared were meaningful experiences within black church congregations. Zimmerman's Dream activists referenced superheroes because reading and discussing comics was part of their everyday lives as young people, because these references helped them think through their struggles, because they offer such vivid embodiments of heroic conflicts and deep commitments. Unlike Perry, who had only a faint recollection of Superman's mythology and acknowledged that he was no longer actively reading comics, these allusions to superhero comics were apt rather than opportunistic, grounded in a deep appreciation of who these characters are and how their stories have evolved over time. That is, they show the kinds of mastery we associate with fans. Here, we see what Duncombe describes as the fan within the activist.
However, we can push the idea of fan activism one step farther: by now, the capacity of fan communities to quickly mobilize in reaction to a casting decision or a threat of cancellation has been well established, going back to the now-legendary letter-writing campaign in the 1960s that kept Star Trek on the air. Fan groups have also had a long history of lending their support to the favorite causes of popular performers and producers, or more generally working in support of charity. Some slash fans, for example, have been motivated to march in gay rights parades, raise money for AIDS research and awareness, or, more recently, work in support of marriage equality. Fans have rallied to challenge attempts to regulate the Internet, restrict their deployment of intellectual property, or censor their content. For example, in this issue, Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski trace the responses of Japanese otaku, involved in the creation of dôjinshi (underground comics), to metropolitan Tokyo ordinance Bill 156, which they perceived as an attempt to curtain their artistic freedom.
More recent efforts (such as Racebending, the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, the Nerdfighters) deploy these same strategies and tactics to support campaigns for social justice and human rights, inspiring their supporters to move from engagement within participatory culture to involvement in political life. Fan activism of the kinds we've known about for years models many effective approaches for using social media to create awareness and mobilize supporters--tactics now being adopted by even traditional charities and activist organizations as they adapt to a networked society.
All of this suggests the urgent need for scholars to explore more fully the many different potential relationships between fandom and political life, since fan studies as a research paradigm has something vital to contribute to larger considerations of the relationship between participatory culture and civic engagement. Fan studies has long depicted fandom as a site of ideological and cultural resistance to the heteronormative and patriarchal values often shaping mass media. Such work is and remains highly valuable as we seek to understand the place of fandom in contemporary culture, but our focus here pushes beyond abstract notions of cultural resistance to focus on specific ways that fan culture has affected debates around law and public policy. Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts.
Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement.
Political participation and fan activism
This issue's two editors are part of the Civic Paths Project research group, housed in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California. This group has partnered with the Spencer and MacArthur foundations to try to document new forms of political participation that are affecting the lives of young people. Our work is part of a larger research network that is trying to develop a model for understanding what is being called participatory politics. Through our internal discussions, we had begun to identify the concept of fan activism as central to addressing larger questions about what might motivate young people, who are often described as apathetic, to join civic and political organizations. We had located a core body of scholarship, such as the work of van Zoonen (2005), which examined how the playful, affective, and fantasy aspects of fandom were starting to inform political discourse, or the work of Earl and Kimport (2009), which discussed fan online campaigns as part of a larger exploration of what networked politics might look like, or the work of Daniel Dayan (2005), which debated the similarities and differences between audiences and publics. We had already identified some powerful examples of how fan-based groups had helped support civic learning and had developed resources and practices that could quickly mobilize supporters behind emergencies, charities, or human rights campaigns.
We knew that there must be many more examples out there. Still, after we released the call for papers, we were blown away by the range of submissions we received from all over the world, describing other examples of fan activism in practice, debating why calls for fan participation sometimes yield spectacular results and other times fall flat, contesting the borders of fan activism, speculating about its contributions to the public sphere, and making important distinctions between top-down celebrity-run models and bottom-up participatory ones. As you will see, this issue is overflowing with cutting-edge work that takes fans seriously as political agents and that draws on a range of different theories of citizenship and democracy to explain what happens when fans act as citizens. Examples here encompass a wide variety of fandoms--Harry Potter, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Colbert Report, comic books, pop music, and Bollywood.
Essays in this issue
The Civic Paths team is well represented here, with a cluster of three essays offering multiple and complimentary frames for discussing fan activism, and two other contributors (Ritesh Mehta and Alex Leavitt) are active group members. Taking a deep dive into the existing literature around cultural and political participation, Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova provide an overview of core debates surrounding fan activism, including the diverse forms that participation may take, the tension between resistance and participation as competing models, the value of affect and content worlds, and the criteria by which we might measure such campaigns' success and sustainability. They argue that the study of fan activists may make a significant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about citizenship and political engagement.
Henry Jenkins maps the history of fan-based activism, providing a context for understanding the Harry Potter Alliance, perhaps the most highly visible of the new generation of fan activist groups. Jenkins defines fan activism as "forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture" (¶1.8). By exploring the concept of "cultural acupuncture," a phrase coined by HPA's founder, Andrew Slack, Jenkins explores how fannish borrowings from J. K. Rowling's fictions inspire and inform the group's diverse interventions (from an initial focus on human rights and genocide in Darfur to more recent campaigns pushing Warner Bros. to tie their chocolate contracts to fair trade principles).
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama share some of the results of Civic Path's extensive fieldwork, interviewing young participants from the Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children, the latter a San Diego-based human rights organization that deploys various forms of participatory culture to motivate high school and college students to become more aware of how Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has kidnapped and conscripted child soldiers. Tracing the trajectories by which these young people become more deeply involved in these efforts, the authors suggest the importance of shared media experiences, rich content worlds, and a desire to help in changing how young people see themselves as political agents. From an initial focus on fan activism, the Civic Paths project has expanded the scope of its research to consider the participatory culture practices associated with Dream Act activism, the efforts of college-aged libertarians, the work of the Nerd Fighters and Imagine Better, and the political and cultural activities of Muslim American youth, each offering models for understanding the cultural and political factors affecting the lives of contemporary American young people.
Ashley Hinck extends this special issue's consideration of the Harry Potter Alliance, drawing on core concepts from the literature of social movements and the public sphere. Focusing primarily on their campaign around Darfur, she argues that the HPA taps into the world of Hogwarts to construct what Hinck calls a "public engagement keystone," defined here as a "touchpoint, worldview, or philosophy that makes other people, actions, and institutions intelligible" (¶4.6). The fact that Harry Potter is so widely read, known, and loved not only by hard-core fans but by many who are not part of fandom makes it a useful resource for bridging the two, helping to revitalize public discourse around human rights concerns in Africa. Lili Wilkinson also explores the value of content worlds from popular culture in facilitating new kinds of political interactions, in this case through an application of Foucault's notion of heterotopia to understanding the links between John Green's young adult novel Paper Towns and his involvement in the Nerdfighters, an informal network of young people who use social media and video blogging to "reduce world suck." Though coming from different theoretical backgrounds, Kligler-Vilenchik et al., Hinck, and Wilkinson all converge around the importance of reimaging the world through shared fantasies.
Another central strand running through the discussion has to do with the differences between efforts of celebrities (authors such as John Green, pop stars such as Hong Kong's Ho Denise Wan See, cult television actors such as Gillian Anderson, filmmakers such as Kevin Smith, television show runners such as Joss Whedon, and comedians such as Stephen Colbert) to mobilize their fans around their pet causes and more grassroots efforts by fans to draw resources from popular culture to help fuel their own efforts at social change. A group like Nerdfighters straddles the line between the two--they are partially a response to the ongoing cultural productions of the brothers John and Hank Green (as Wilkinson suggests) but also a much more open-ended, participatory space, where anyone who wants to claim the nerdfighter identity can produce media and rally support behind his or her own ideas about what might constitute a better society. Lucy Bennett offers a critical review of the literature surrounding celebrity-based activism, exploring how such causes often take off because of the sense of intimacy the stars create with their following. Bethan Jones challenges a tradition of research that has tended to pathologize the parasocial relations between media fans and celebrities by describing the ways that X-Files cast member Gillian Anderson was able to inspire her fans to raise money for various charities. Tanya R. Cochran examines the efforts of Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Angel, Dollhouse) to use his blog to increase awareness about sexual violence against women. Cochran sees Whedon's promotion of feminism as consistent with the focus on strong female characters across his television series, reinforcing the themes that draw fans to his properties in the first place.
The idea that the personality of celebrities, as much as the themes of popular fictions, may shape what issues fan activists embrace (and in this case, which issues generate little or no response) is further explored in Tom Phillips's exploration of the failed attempt by Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma) at stimulating fans to write letters to Southwest Airlines when the filmmaker was removed from his flight because he was viewed as "too fat to fly." Although the incident sparked online conversations around "corporate practice, body image, and consumer rights" (¶0.1), Smith's fans were not able to cohere around a strategy for exerting pressure on the airline. Cheuk Yi Lin explores why a sexually ambiguous pop star in Hong Kong has offered fans new language and images to represent their own erotic identities, but her queer fans have not coalesced into institutional politics around the rights of sexual minorities. Any urge toward more overtly political responses are dampened both by the cultural traditions of Hong Kong and by the institutional structures surrounding the fandom.
Although the first wave of research has stressed the potentials for fan activism, such practices are still relatively rare, with most forms of fandom stopping at the level of creative expression and not translating into collective action. For this reason, studies such as those by Phillips and Lin, which help us to understand the constraints on fan activism, may prove as useful in the long term as those studies which document successful models for translating fan investments into social change. Further challenging a utopian view of fan activism, Sun Jung explores antifandom around the K-Pop star Tablo, showing how some fan discourse may incorporate intense nationalism and even racism, even as other groups actively and productively challenge these discourses.
Contributing to van Zoonen's notion of the entertained citizen, several articles engage the direct connection between the political sphere (as traditionally defined) and participatory cultures. Andreas Jungherr investigates the German federal elections in 2009, arguing that citizen use of new media platforms and practices challenges the candidates' top-down communication practices. Contrasting design and deployment of such strategies across the German political spectrum, Jungherr finds that the participatory possibilities of emerging political practices vary depending on ideology. Jungherr concludes that the more liberal German Social Democrats (SPD) were more successful in designing an online environment that supported grassroots participation than the German conservative party (CDU). In the United States, The Colbert Report, a satirical late-night television program featuring Stephen Colbert, a character who is a parody of conservative media personalities, further blurs the lines between politics and entertainment. Marcus Schulzke shows how the program encouraged audiences to remix content and otherwise manipulate the words and images of political figures in ways that foster critical media literacies. By now, the idea that young Americans are as apt to learn about the political system through such news-comedy programs as from traditional journalism has become commonplace, while the program producers have sought to link creative expression and political participation to what it means to be a fan of their shows.
The simultaneously transnational and local dimensions of fan activism are another strand that runs through this issue. With examples of fan activism that include South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Australia, and India, the essays in this issue expand the transnational dimensions of fan activism. These examples highlight some of the similarities between various instances and discussions of fan activism (including the role of communities and content worlds, catalyzing moments, and challenges to sustained mobilization), but we are also acutely sensitive to the local dimensions and specifications of these mobilizations. In sharp contrast to the United States, where we are constantly working to establish participatory culture links to the political sphere, Aswin Punathambekar aptly observes that the connection between participatory culture and politics is "not news to anyone in India." Punathambekar goes even further, observing that the struggle in India is to, in fact, demonstrate the "ordinariness of participatory culture." Complementing this observation, and using a public protest inspired by the a Bollywood film to demonstrate his argument, Ritesh Mehta proposes "flash activism" as a crucial element of India's civil society.
Kony 2012
The power and challenges of activism through fanlike engagement with content worlds came into sharp focus with Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign, an effort to increase public awareness of the human rights violations and genocide conducted by a Ugandan warlord. At the time of writing, the 30-minute Kony 2012 film released at 12 PM on March 5, 2012, has topped 76 million views on YouTube to become one of the most viewed and fastest-spreading videos in YouTube history. In The Daily Show's coverage of Kony 2012 on March 12, 2012, host Jon Stewart sets up the popularity of the film by saying, "This guy Kony is probably dropping some sick beats." The show cuts to an excerpt from Kony 2012 in which Jason Russell's voice describes the war crimes committed by the LRA set to images of what we gather are victims of those atrocities. We now cut back to a shocked Jon Stewart who goes on to exclaim, "So a thirty-minute video on child soldiers has gone viral--how popular can this thing be? I am sure it's not teenage girl sings song about day of the week hot." The show cuts to mainstream news media coverage of Kony 2012 focused on its extraordinary reach.
Given this almost overwhelming visibility, the film--and with it Invisible Children as an organization--was the subject of sharp debate. In the following days, IC's financials, their activities in Uganda, and their support of military action to "bring Joseph Kony to justice" were examined, debated, and critiqued ad nauseam in news media, through discussion forums, and on IC's own public Facebook page. The importance of these issues notwithstanding, these debates have by and large failed to recognize why the IC has been so incredibly spreadable (to borrow Henry Jenkins's term). Yes, the film is very well edited, and yes, its message, "make Kony famous," is compelling. But as Henry Jenkins (2012) points out, the success of the Kony 2012 YouTube campaign owes much to the fanlike support IC has built around its films over its past eight years of existence. In asking their supporters to reach out to a range of celebrities and policy makers who have a high level of visibility through social media, the organization also tapped into the desire of fans to see their favorites take a stand on issues that matter to them. With Kony 2012, IC activated this supporter base, which then willingly, strategically, and enthusiastically tweeted, posted, and then reposted the film to set its phenomenal spread in motion. They supported it with such fervor that they surpassed IC's goal of getting 500,000 views by the end of 2012 within a few hours.
IC and its supporters were caught off guard by the barrage of criticism levied at Kony 2012. Some, such as Ethan Zuckerman (2012), have suggested that the rapid spread of the video was a consequence of its simplification of complex political issues, wondering how online networks might be deployed to further complicate and nuance the frames that it proposes. As Civic Paths researcher Lana Swartz (2012) suggests, IC focused more on having their media be spreadable (widely circulated) rather than drillable (open to deeper investigation). For example, before Kony 2012, few IC supporters were encouraged to actively seek out more information about the Lord's Revolutionary Army, the militia that Kony heads. Instead, they were generally content with carefully replicating the accurate but somewhat simplistic narrative they received through IC's media. Fans of many media franchises have sought to drill deeper into their content worlds, trying to encapsulate everything that was known about what happened on the island in Lost or expanding the story line through fan fiction writing projects. In this way, fandom's search for hidden depths in seemingly simple texts offers an alternative model for how a group like IC might achieve the more nuanced framing Zuckerman sought and might give their rank-and-file members greater skills at parsing competing truth claims made about what is happening on the ground in Uganda.
In our call for submissions, we set out to understand how the imaginative practices supported by fandom, at times facilitated by digital media, may inform civic and political mobilization and how we may rethink our understanding of engagement in the civic and political spheres through the lens of fandom. The articles included in this issue not only exceed these objectives, but they also point to the extreme timeliness of this endeavor. From undocumented superheroes to humanitarian assistance in the name of Harry Potter, fandom clearly has a lot to teach us about activism in the age of social media and participatory culture.
5. Acknowledgments
Based at the University of Southern California, the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project (MAPP) is part of Civic Paths Project. The project gratefully acknowledges support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) and the Spencer Foundation.
We thank the authors in this issue, whose original work makes TWC possible; the peer reviewers, who freely provide their time and expertise; the editorial team members, whose engagement with and solicitation of material is so valuable; and the production team members, who transform rough manuscripts into publishable documents.
The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in an editorial capacity: Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova (guest editors); Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Anne Kustritz, Patricia Nelson, and Suzanne Scott (Symposium); and Louisa Stein (Review).
The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in a production capacity: Rrain Prior (production editor); Beth Friedman, Shoshanna Green, and Mara Greengrass (copyeditors); Wendy Carr, Kristen Murphy, and sunusn (layout); and Kallista Angeloff, Amanda Georgeanne Michaels, Carmen Montopoli, and Vickie West (proofreaders).
TWC thanks the journal project's Organization for Transformative Works board liaison, Francesca Coppa. OTW provides financial support and server space to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.
TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 10: Katherine Chen, Bertha Chin, Matthew Costello, Ashley Hinck, Ian Hunter, Alex Jenkins, Jeffrey Jones, Rachael Joo, Deborah Kaplan, Flourish Klink, Michael Koulikov, Bingchun Meng, Christopher Moreman, Nele Noppe, Amy Shuman, Fred Turner, Emily Wills, and Ethan Zuckerman.
Note
1. These quotes are excerpted from interviews carried out by Arely Zimmerman for the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics Project between December 2010 and July 2011. Institutional review board approval was secured for this research.
Works cited
Andrae, Thomas. 1987. "From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of Superman," in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, edited by Donald Lazare. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Appelo, Tom. 2011. "Superman Renounces US Citizenship, as Warners, DC Comics Bids for Global Audiences." Hollywood Reporter, April 28.
Dayan, Daniel. 2005. "Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics, Audiences and Publics." In Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, edited by Sonia Livingstone, 43-76. London: Intellect.
Earl, Jennifer, and Katrina Kimport. 2009. "Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online." Sociological Theory 27:220-43. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01346.x.
Engle, Gary. 1987. "What Makes Superman So Darned American?" In Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend, edited by Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle. Cleveland, OH: Octavia.
Jenkins, Henry. 2012. "Contextualizing #Kony2012: Invisible Children, Spreadable Media, and Transmedia Activism." Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 12. http://henryjenkins.org/2012/03/contextualizing_kony2012_invis.html.
Zimmerman, Arely. Forthcoming. DREAM Case Project Report. Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Zuckerman, Ethan. 2012. "Unpacking Kony 2012." My Heart's in Accra, March 8.
Sometimes it's easy, sometime's its hard.
We've had ongoing success in building a community around the Future of Entertainment Consortium's west coast event, Transmedia Hollywood, which is jointly produced each year through a collaboration between University of Southern California and University of California-Los Angeles (or as they would put it, University of California-Los Angeles and University of Southern California). But, this year's conference seemed to be under some kind of black cloud. We never have had so much difficulty lining up speakers, so much last minute shuffling of presenters. On top of that, the event will be known as the year without Henry, since I ended up in the hospital on the eve of the event, ended up missing most of the day as I fought my way through the bureaucracy to get released. And, then, we faced epic delays getting the videos out to the world.
Well, the videos are finally here and, despite the struggles, we are still very proud of what we were able to produce -- the speakers are, as always, lively and thought provoking, a rich mix of academics and folks from many different sectors of the entertainment industry, and the content remains timely, capturing some of the key transitions shaping the entertainment industry today and bringing an ever stronger transnational focus to the mix, as we are connecting more and more with folks creating transmedia content around the world.
With the growth of transmedia and creative industries/production studies focused classes at universities around the world, we hope these videos will prove to be important resources for use in the classroom or to assist researchers who would not otherwise have access to insider perspectives within the media industries.
Above all, enjoy! And if you find something interesting, help us spread the word.
Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations
As transmedia models become more central to the ways that the entertainment industry operates, the result has been some dramatic shifts within production culture, shifts in the ways labor gets organized, in how productions get financed and distributed, in the relations between media industries, and in the locations from which creative decisions are being made.
This year's Transmedia, Hollywood examines the ways that transmedia approaches are forcing the media industry to reconsider old production logics and practices, paving the way for new kinds of creative output. Our hope is to capture these transitions by bringing together established players from mainstream media industries and independent producers trying new routes to the market. We also hope to bring a global perspective to the conversation, looking closely at the ways transmedia operates in a range of different creative economies and how these different imperatives result in different understandings of what transmedia can contribute to the storytelling process - for traditional Hollywood, the global media industries, and for all the independent media-makers who are taking up the challenge to reinvent traditional media-making for a "connected" audience of collaborators.
Many of Hollywood's entrenched business and creative practices remain deeply mired in the past, weighed down by rigid hierarchies, interlocking bureaucracies, and institutionalized gatekeepers (e.g. the corporate executives, agents, managers, and lawyers). In this volatile moment of crisis and opportunity, as Hollywood shifts from an analog to a digital industry, one which embraces collaboration, collectivity, and compelling uses of social media, a number of powerful independent voices have emerged. These include high-profile transmedia production companies such as Jeff Gomez's Starlight Runner Entertainment as well as less well-funded and well-staffed solo artists who are coming together virtually from various locations across the globe. What these top-down and bottom-up developments have in common is a desire to buck tradition and to help invent the future of entertainment. One of the issues we hope to address today is the social, cultural, and industrial impact of these new forms of international collaboration and mixtures of old and new work cultures.
Another topic is the future of independent film. Will creative commons replace copyright? Will crowdsourcing replace the antiquated foreign sales model? Will the guilds be able to protect the rights of digital laborers who work for peanuts? What about audiences who work for free? Given that most people today spend the bulk of their leisure time online, why aren't independent artists going online and connecting with their community before committing their hard-earned dollars on a speculative project designed for the smallest group of people imaginable - those that frequent art-house theaters?
Fearing obsolescence in the near future, many of Hollywood's traditional studios and networks are looking increasingly to outsiders - often from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue - to teach these old dogs some new tricks. Many current studio and network executives are overseeing in-house agencies, whose names - Sony Interactive Imageworks, NBC Digital, and Disney Interactive Media Group - are meant to describe their cutting-edge activities and differentiate themselves from Hollywood's old guard.
Creating media in the digital age is "nice work if you can get it," according to labor scholar Andrew Ross in a recent book of the same name. Frequently situated in park-like "campuses," many of these new, experimental companies and divisions are hiring large numbers of next generation workers, offering them attractive amenities ranging from coffee bars to well-prepared organic food to basketball courts. However, even though these perks help to humanize the workplace, several labor scholars (e.g. Andrew Ross, Mark Deuze, Rosalind Gill) see them as glittering distractions, obscuring a looming problem on the horizon - a new workforce of "temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants."
While the analog model still dominates in Hollywood, the digital hand-writing is on the wall; therefore, the labor guilds, lawyers, and agent/managers must intervene to find ways to restore the eroding power/leverage of creators. In addition, shouldn't the guilds be mindful of the new generation of digital laborers working inside these in-house agencies? What about the creative talent that emerges from Madison Avenue ad agencies like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, makers of the Asylum 626 first-person horror experience for Doritos; or Grey's Advertising, makers of the Behind the Still collective campaign for Canon? Google has not only put the networks' 30-second ad to shame using Adword, but its Creative Labs has taken marketing to new aesthetic heights with its breathtaking Johnny Cash [collective] Project. Furthermore, Google's evocative Parisian Love campaign reminds us just how intimately intertwined our real and virtual lives have become.
Shouldn't Hollywood take note that many of its most powerful writers, directors, and producers are starting to embrace transmedia in direct and meaningful ways by inviting artists from the worlds of comic books, gaming, and web design to collaborate? These collaborations enhance the storytelling and aesthetic worlds tenfold, enriching "worlds" as diverse as The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and cable's The Walking Dead. Hopefully, this conference will leave all of us with a broader understanding of what it means to be a media maker today - by revealing new and expansive ways for artists to collaborate with Hollywood media managers, audiences, advertisers, members of the tech culture, and with one another.
Once the dominant player in the content industry, Hollywood today is having to look as far away as Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue for collaborators in the 2.0 space.
Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA
Panelists:
Nick Childs, Executive Creative Director, Fleishman Hillard
Jennifer Holt, co-Director, Media Industries Project, UCSB
Lee Hunter, Global Head of Marketing, YouTube
Jordan Levin, CEO, Generate
In countries with strong state support for media production, alternative forms of transmedia are taking shape. How has transmedia fit within the effort of nation-states to promote and expand their creative economies?
Moderator: Laurie Baird, Strategic Consultant - Media and Entertainment at Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology.
Panelists:
Jesse Albert, Producer & Consultant in Film, Television, Digital Media, Live Events & Branded Content
Morgan Bouchet, Vice-President, Transmedia and Social Media, Content Division, Orange
Christy Dena, Director, Universe Creation 101
Sara DIamond, President, Ontario College of Art and Design University
Mauricio Mota, Chief Storytelling Officer, Co-founder of The Alchemists
A new generation of media makers are taking art out of the rarefied world of crumbling art-house theaters, museums, and galleries and putting it back in the hands of the masses, creating immersive, interactive, and collaborative works of transmedia entertainment, made for and by the people who enjoy it most.
Ted Hope, Producer/Partner/Founder, Double Hope Films
Sheila C. Murphy, Associate Professor, University of Michigan
By many accounts, the comics industry is failing. Yet, comics have never played a more central role in the entertainment industry, seeding more and more film and television franchises. What advantages does audience-tested content bring to other media? What do the producers owe to those die-hard fans as they translate comic book mythology to screen? And why have so many TV series expanded their narrative through graphic novels in recent years?
Moderator: Geoffrey Long, Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios.
Panelists:
Katherine Keller, Culture Vultures Editrix at Sequential Tart
Joe LeFavi, Quixotic Transmedia
Mike Richardson, President, Dark Horse Comics
Mark Verheiden, Writer (Falling Skies, Heroes)
Mary Vogt, Costume Designer (Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Men In Black)
For those of you who live on the East Coast, here's the latest news from Sam Ford, who is hard at work planning the next Futures of Entertainment conference:
We have just announced that FoE6 will be Friday, Nov. 9, and Saturday, Nov. 10, in the Wong Auditorium at MIT. Panels will tackle subjects such as the the ethics and politics of curation, corporate listening and empathy, "the shiny new object syndrome," new distribution models in a digital age, and rethinking copyright. We will also look specifically at innovations in storytelling and sports, in video games, in public media, and in civic media.
Information on the tentative schedule, as well as registration, is available here.
I first met Beth Coleman when she spoke at the first Race in Digital Spaces conference, one of two joint events hosted, curiously enough, between MIT and USC in 2001-2002. I wrote at the time, "
Cyberspace has been represented as a race-blind environment, yet we don't shed our racial identities or escape racism just because we go on line...The concept of 'digital divide,' however, is inadequate to describe a moment when minority use of digital technologies is dramatically increasing. The time has come to focus on the success stories, to identify examples of work that has increased minority access to information technologies and visibility in digital spaces."
Coleman was there as an academic speaker on one of our plenary panel and in her guise as Dj Singe from Soundlab Cultural Alchemy, she performed alongside DJ Spooky and others. This helped to cement in my mind the image of Coleman as a gifted theorist/scholar, artist/performer, and activist, who was going to help teach us to think in new ways about digital experiences and identities.
Flash forward to the present moment. I brought Coleman to MIT to be a colleague in the Comparative Media Studies Program where she taught for many years. She's continued to do cutting edge work not only in sound design but also in transmedia and locative media experiences. And she's just come out with a hot new book, Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, which is making people's heads explode.
You may think you know all about avatars and virtual worlds: this was what we were talking about with great anticipation five or six years ago, and what has fallen from grace once everyone got past the buzz about Second Life. But, Coleman is turning this concept on its head, getting us to think about what she calls "x reality" which lies at the intersection between our digital and physical identities, thinking of our new social media as themselves places where we construct and deploy avatars, and thinking about new forms of information and entertainment which are going to be part of our fused identities in the not so distant future. I had watched the book develop over time, but nevertheless was surprised and intrigued by some of the reframing of its core concerns which had taken place in the past few years. It's a short book but it packs a wallop, as I think will be suggested by this interview.
Reading Clay Shirkey's introduction, I am reminded of our three way exchange about the future of Second Life which was conducted via our blogs. You and I were far more optomistic than Shirkey about the long-term impact of this early virtual world. What are your thoughts reflecting on the issues of that debate with 20-20 hindsight?
In a nutshell, Clay was right. Second Life was too hard to use and too
essentially dorky in its "sexy avatar" ethos to achieve and sustain a broad
popular interest. Although it aspired to be a kind of Facebook, where people
would use it as hub for information, it was not that for multiple reasons. That said, Henry, I think that you and I got the spirit of the thing right. We were both pointing to the aspirational uses of the site, where people as represented by their avatars strove to create often utopian spaces. I am suggesting that those utopian space (even when they come in rather dystopic forms like my virtual cannibal) present actual events in
peoples' lives that they use, often, as a point of leverage to transform themselves. And that is what I argue in the book. Sure, Second Life was a powerful chapter in the innovation of graphic networked engagement. But the big change in network engagement is what I am calling X-Reality: the sense that all our worlds, spanning the simulated to the bodily, are working toward a greater sense of an avatar existence. In short, we are neither "virtual" or "real" but rather these networked creatures whose technologically mediated exchanges directly impact our worldly experience. The #occupy movement, the Arab Spring, even Obama's election campaign make it achingly clear that we are now occupying X-spaces in a way that we were not at the turn of the century or in the 1990s. I think Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) got their own message wrong. If they were creating a cyber-escape from reality, then they did not realize what
century they were working in.
Given what we now know about Second Life, what do you see as the likely future of virtual worlds?
We will only see more graphically rich interactive spaces. In my definition of virtual worlds, I include Facebook and other kinds of social sites where we create by text, image, and sound the image of ourselves--the avatars as it were--that we use as our public faces. This type of "virtual" representation is not new. In the book, I talk about the concept of "persona" in ancient Rome, where one's reputation as citizen was based on how one crafted a public face.This crafting of a public face is happening at a global scale today with the support of social network platforms. In this sense, the virtual worlds of our
network persona are now a part of daily life. And the scale at which we engage
this type of virtual world is immense.
In terms of the traditional, more narrow definition of a virtual world as a walled garden of text or graphic space....well, small, distinct user communities will always populate these platforms. But for the real future of the virtual world, we have to think about the value of shared, real-time visualization tools applied to the pressing issues of the day. Mapping radiation levels in Japan, crisis mapping across Kenya...these are recent historical events that illustrate the value of shared real-time graphical/informational tools. It is
no longer a virtual world. It's a networked one.
A key concept running through the book is that of "x-reality." What do you mean by this term and how does this approach differ from some older ways of talking about online experience?
At base, I use the term X-reality to signal that we are no longer role-playing online, trying out identities as it has been proposed, but, rather, that we have harnessed the power of online networks to build the world we would like to see. That it is a real world we are building is clear; that this real world includes all kinds of technological mediation is also clear. In this sense, X-Reality is a break from prior theories of online engagement.
Historically, and here I am thinking of Sherry Turkle and Julian Dibbells' seminal work in the 1990s exploring online communities (but we find the same perspective in the cyberpunk of William Gibson, the technofuturism of Wired, and the libertarian hacker ethos of the code writers and legal activists of the "free" Internet), cyberspace was a space away from the rest of the world. It was a place of adventure, play, and marvelous experimentation for the few who learned how to engage in that technologically compelling and difficult space.
So it is a moment of legend, where hackers were cowboys and everything was up for grabs as long as you left the body and any ideas of embodied experience out of it. Now, some twenty years after launch of the World Wide Web as the popular (and graphical) adoption of the Internet, we see a different world. In my estimation, it is an X-reality world. I mean by this idea of X-reality that we, as networked subjects, as people who engage in mediated communication of many sorts all the time, live our daily lives somewhere between what had been the virtual and what had been the real. In other words, when you send me a text message or follow me on Twitter, you are using all manner of real-time mediation without even worrying about the fact that we are reaching each other in what might reasonably described as "cyberspace." As with the telephone and other real-time media technologies we have incorporated into our lives, we have reached a point with online networks where the distinction between the virtual of mediation and the real of embodied experience mash up into each other. In other words, increasingly we understand our world to be a porous one where the events of online exchange influence the events of the physical world. We are neither virtual nor real but a mix of theses states. And this is what I am calling X-Reality. One of the things I am grateful for is that we do not see a strong first world-versus-emerging world bias here. This is not about reliving the PC revolution of North America and Central Europe of the 1990s. The shift to X-Reality is a global one.
Another core concept here is that of the Avatar which you descirbe as a "figure of transition." How are you defining avatar in this book? What roles do avatar play in social and mobile media as opposed to in virtual worlds?
As I discussed a bit above, I think that we all engage in deep avatar play, regardless of the platforms we use. So, for example, in a classic virtual world, you will have a little figure running around a graphical or textual world that represents you, one way or another. But the space for greatest cultural shift around avatars has not so much been virtual or game worlds but the pervasive use of social media. We are everyday using mediated forms to represent us as proxies. Avatars are figures of transition in the sense that we have already arrived at a moment where it is normal to have your Twitter persona or your Facebook page convey important information about who you are. Essentially, I think James Cameron got it right with his vision of science fiction jungle utopia. In the film Avatar, the avatars were figures of transitions, conduits to a fuller self for the protagonist Jake Sully. In our everyday experience of avatars we may not be blue, giant, or quite as magical, but we are increasingly recognizing the power of our connectivity and how we might transform ourselves. The transition I see is the shift from an idea of role-playing online to the instantiation of avatars as ambassadors--the networked presence that precedes or augments the face-to-face encounter.
Professor Beth Coleman believes in the power of storytelling to transform the world. She works with new technology and art to create transmedia forms of engagement. She is the director of City as Platform, Amsterdam, a Faculty Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, as well as a professor at the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam. From 2005-2011, Coleman was an assistant professor of comparative media studies at MIT. As an artist, she has a history of international exhibition including venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Musée d'Art moderne Paris. She is the co-founder of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, an internationally acclaimed multimedia performance platform. As the newly appointed co-director of the Critical Media Lab and a professor of English Literature and Languages at the University of Waterloo, Ontario Canada, she continues to work internationally with collaborators in through Africa, Europe, and Asia. Her book Hello Avatar is published by the MIT Press.
Last fall, I was asked by a USC dorm which was planning a field trip to Los Angeles' NuArt Cinema to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show if I might share some reflections with them to stimulate thought and discussion about the experience. As someone who had been a Rocky Horror fan in the 1970s, I approached this task with some bemusement, but I also saw it as a chance to think a bit more deeply about the "cult film experience" as it has evolved over time. Here's what I shared with those students:
From Wikipedia:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the 1975 film adaptation of the British rock musical stageplay, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, written by Richard O'Brien. The film is a parody of B-movie, science fiction and horror films of the late 1940s through early 1970s. Director Jim Sharman collaborated on the screenplay with O'Brien, who wrote both the book and lyrics for the stage. The film introduces Tim Curry and features Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick along with cast members from the original Kings Road production presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1973.
Still in limited release 36 years after its premiere, it has the longest-running theatrical release in film history. It gained notoriety as a midnight movie in 1977 when audiences began participating with the film in theatres. Rocky Horror is the first film from a major Hollywood studio to be in the midnight movie market. The motion picture has a large international cult following and is one of the most well known and financially successful midnight movies of all time. In 2005, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you have the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience almost 40 years after it all began.
What Constitutes a Cult Movie?: Film scholar Timothy Corrigan writes, "Cult movies are always after a fashion foreign films: the images are especially exotic; the viewer uniquely touristic; and with that relationship viewers get to go places, see things, and manipulate customs in a way that no indigeneous member of that culture or mainstream filmgoer normally could." So, what is it about Rocky Horror Picture Show which has engendered this kind of response? If this is a touristic experience, then where does it invite us to travel, what world does it open for us?
Manufactured or Discovered: A key debate among people who have studied cult movies is whether cult movies can be designed and manufactured to inspire this kind of devoted response or whether they must be found and cultivated by their audience. People have made both arguments about Rocky Horror. The original stage production already passed out sheets instructing the audience on how to dance the Time Warp, and thus clearly invited our participation. But, it is the audience participation which has sustained interest in this property over time, even as other contemporary "Midnight Movies" have long ago faded into the background. So, what properties of the film and of the audience participation inspire such passion?
From Cult Movies to Cult Television -- Some have argued that Rocky Horror represents the last gasp of a public film culture -- that is, the values of movie-going as a shared culture experience. Which contemporary films become events in anywhere close to the same way that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is? Most contemporary cult movies have emerged as such because people watched them on television or DVD. Today, television shows are more apt to become cult objects than movies, and the experience is more likely to be an online experience.
Rocky Horror as Ritual -- When the "Midnight Movies" emerged, they were often discussed anthropologically in terms of the collective performance of rituals. So, there are certain gestures, lines, and actions which are performed and reperformed, taking on special meaning and significance to those who repeat them week after week. What role might popular rituals perform in an increasingly secular society? Are there other examples you know of popular rituals of this kind?
Rocky Horror as Spectacle: When it began, the argument was that Rocky Horror was like traditional carnival -- a space where there was no division between performers and audiences. Over time, though, has it become more like a spectacle, where certain people -- now semi-professional -- perform their parts every week for the amusement of others who come once or twice to watch. Do you feel fully a part of the Rocky Horror experience?
Transgression and Tradition: This movie/experience celebrates transgression. For the first generation who went to the film, it was all about the shock appeal -- the sense that our parents would not go to see a movie featuring a singing transvestite. But, now that this event has been going on for almost four decades, the odds are that many of you have parents who saw this film as an undergraduate. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, today, is almost a historical re-enactment, one deeply immersed in a sense of tradition. And what counted as transgressive in the 1970s may seem much more familiar in the 21st century. So, does the film still maintain its transgressiveness under these circumstances and if so, how?
Room for Improvization?: Many of the practices now associated with Rocky Horror emerged through practices of improvization, as different audience members added their own contributions to the mix. Yet, these practices are increasingly codified. What space remains for spontaneous audience response?
Local and Global: Rocky Horror is a global media phenomenon, yet it is also one which gets performed locally -- tied to specific theaters and specific communities in specific cities. What aspects of the NuArt performance of Rocky Horror seem specific to Los Angeles? What signs if any do you see of the global dimensions of this tradition?
Are You A Virgin?: A classic ritual at many Rocky Horror screenings is to identify those in the audience who are seeing the film for the first time. In the 1970s, it was possible to come to the movie knowing very little about what to expect. But, as RockyHorror references have spread across the culture (for example, Glee did a special Rocky Horror themed episode last year), does anyone really enter the theater without some preconceptions about what they are going to experience? And if not, then what are the consequence of this pre-knowledge?
edited by Prof. Henry Jenkins, Prof. William Uricchio and Daniel Pereira
How to Ride a Lion:
A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism
by
Geoffrey Long
Futures of Entertainment Fellow
Alumni Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3)
Author's Note: Since this paper was originally authored in 2010, I've been delighted to discover an increasing amount of transmedia critics. Whose analysis of transmedia projects do you most enjoy? Please let us know in the comments! -GL)
PART 2 of 3
3. What Role Might Transmedia Criticism and Reviews Play?
If, as suggested in the last section, what is needed is an ecosystem that includes both transmedia criticism and transmedia reviews, then we need to explore both halves. First, what value can transmedia criticism and transmedia critics provide to the industry? Second, what value can transmedia reviews and reviewers provide to the public?
3.1. Educating the Industry: Transmedia Criticism and Critics
As David Bloom suggested in his 2010 Transmedia /Hollywood recap, transmedia criticism could provide some answers to the very real concerns of the entertainment industry - not just "What is transmedia?" or "Why should I invest in a transmedia project?", but "What does real, measurable success for a transmedia project look like?" Transmedia criticism may not have all the answers - as noted, we desperately need better systems for transmedia 'ratings' and other metrics - but it may provide a jumping-off point for some qualitative analyses while we're waiting for the quantitative ones to catch up.
Most beneficial, perhaps, is the role that such criticism can play in the shaping of a language of transmedia experiences, through the discovery of a set of standard best practices. By understanding these best practices - by speaking the language - creators and their sponsors can improve their chances of creating successful transmedia experiences. Once such an 'open' language is developed, individual implementations of, and strategic differentiations from, those best practices can result in highly profitable products and even new competitive advantages.
In their seminal text The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson describe the importance of standardization in the very early years of the cinema. Rather than reinventing the wheel with every film, Hollywood began to adopt standard techniques, formats, and practices that could be reused effectively in each production - which in turn led to a set of norms against which excellence could be judged:
Industrial standardization included uniformity in nomenclature and dimensions, simplification in types, sizes and grades, and safety provisions and rules of practice. Such standardization facilitated mass production. Standardization also included specifications, methods of testing quality, and ratings under specific conditions. The latter set of elements in standardization have another connotation: a criterion, norm, degree or level of excellence. Both the movement toward uniformity and attainment of excellence coexisted in the trend. The standardization process must be thought of not as an inevitable progression towards dull, mediocre products (although many may be that for reasons of aesthetic differences or economy in materials and workmanship), but instead, particularly in competitive cases, as an attempt to achieve a precision-tooled, quality object. Once established, the standard becomes a goal to be attained.[9]
Such desirable characteristics included "narrative dominance and clarity, verisimilitude, continuity, stars and spectacle". Those of us in the transmedia space should be feeling a slight tingling of recognition at this point. Such a key set of standard, recurring elements in transmedia is already beginning to emerge, as outlined in Henry Jenkins' keynote talk at C3's Futures of Entertainment 4 conference, "Revenge of the Origami Unicorn." Jenkins outlined seven principles of transmedia storytelling: spreadability vs. drillability, continuity vs. multiplicity, immersion vs. extractability, worldbuilding, seriality, subjectivity, and performance.[10] Jenkins' observed principles emerged from his close analysis of multiple transmedia experiences, including The Matrix, the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, Tori Amos' Comic Book Tattoo project, the success of Susan Boyle, American Idol and so on. Such close readings provide the raw fodder for his high-level observations, which are then shared with the public and the industry alike through books, articles, lectures or blog posts. The same kind of standards-from-observation practices from theorists and critics like Jenkins was at play during the early days of cinema. Again, Bordwell et.al.:
Mechanisms for standardization included ones somewhat connected to the industry - trade publications and critics and 'how-to' books - and ones external to the industry - college courses, newspaper reviewing, theoretical writing, and museum exhibitions. Undoubtedly there are others, but these will suggest how standards were available to influence the company's and worker's conception of how the motion picture ought to look and sound. While these mechanisms presented themselves as educational and informative, they were also prescriptive. A how-to-write-a-movie-script book advised not only how it was done but how it ought to be done to insure a sale. In the case of reviewers or theorists, the references to established standards in other arts (theater, literature, painting, design, music, still photography) perpetuated ideological/signifying practices - although, of course, in mediated form.[11]
Bordwell points out that trade papers in the entertainment field (such as the New York Dramatic Mirror, Show World, the New York Clipper, Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, The Nickelodeon and, of course, Variety) served as an important channel for these theorists and critics to influence their audiences. One such important influential was Epes Winthrop Sargent, a columnist for Moving Picture World:
Sargent began as a critic for music, theater and vaudeville in the 1890s and had been a scenario editor and press agent for Lubin before he arrived at the Moving Picture World in 1911. At that point he began a series of columns, the "Technique of the photoplay," which included formats of scenarios and film production information primarily aimed at the freelance writer and the manufacturers' scenario departments. Those columns appeared in book form in 1912 and in an extensively revised edition in 1913. Although other handbooks of film practice preceded his, Sargent's work became a classic in a field that from that point on rapidly expanded.[12]
Bordwell goes on to quote an article of Sargent's from December of 1909 as a sample of such prescriptive writing, generated from Sargent's observation of emerging best practices in the form and, amusingly, what sounds an awful lot like comparative media studies:
The stories must have situations plainly visible, a clearly drafted story, and, with it, an opportunity for artistic interpretation. Dramatically, a motion picture story must be more intense in its situations than the spoken drama. It is often dragged into inconsistency but this is pardonable if the story is sufficiently strong to warrant it. The point of situation cannot be too strongly emphasized.
...We are told by our masters in short story writing and in drama writing that we must have one theme and one theme only. Too many characters will spoil the spell that grips us when we have but two or three people to watch. We are told to avoid rambling into green hedges off the roadside and to grip the attention of the audience from the very start. The complications should start immediately and the developments come with the proper regard for sequence.
...The period of action in a motion picture play is not restricted although it is best to follow the arrangement as depicted in the vaudeville drama. A single episode or incident which might occur within the length of time it takes to run the film is better than dragging the tale through twenty or thirty years. Too many notes and subtitles interrupt the story and detract from the interest.
...A motion picture play should be consistent and the nearer to real life we get the more is the picture appreciated. Complications which are too easily cleared up make the story unsatisfying, smacking of unreality, thus destroying the illusion that, as the producer faithfully endeavors to portray, the scene is not one of acting, but that we have an inside view of the comedy or tragedy of a real life. Let your stories, though they be strong in plot, be convincing, the situations not merely possible but probable. The producer will then have no trouble in making his actors appear to be real.[13]
If Jenkins chose to do so, he could write a trade column or a book specifically on how to apply his seven principles to transmedia storytelling, replicating the role of Sargent to this newly-emerging field. Close reading and analysis reveals learnable lessons, as any artist will attest; all authors, filmmakers, video game designers and other creative professionals spend years soaking up as much high-quality work in their medium as possible and tearing it apart to see what makes it tick.
Theorists and critics do the same, but they then write up their analyses and share it with others. In doing so, they begin to create a shared language with which to discuss these emerging best practices, which then becomes a linguistic shorthand for particular approaches and tactics, which then in turn becomes a shared lens for understanding how these things work. This is where terms like first person point of view, suspension of disbelief, unreliable narrator and so on come from - and, once those observations and tactics are internalized, they become accepted as tools by a wider creative audience. Once these concepts become tools, they become more commonly used in the creation of future experiences, thus reinforcing the acceptance of the concepts. Criticism becomes influential through dispersion, acceptance and implementation.
Jenkins' ideas are already becoming widely accepted in the industry and his terms are becoming the terminology for this emerging space. The problem is we need much more of this type of work, and we need it quickly. Increase the number of really insightful, clearly-spoken and practically-minded theorist-critics and we accelerate the rate at which we come to understand what transmedia is really capable of. Again, to paraphrase Kochalka, "Transmedia criticism is a means we have of making sense of this new medium, focusing to make it clearer."
The value in adopting the best practices that emerge through such transmedia criticism in order to increase a transmedia experience's chances for success is apparent. However, there's another key reason why an ecosystem of transmedia criticism would be incredibly useful to practitioners: the creation of strategic differentiation. In other words, to see where to zig when everyone else has chosen to zag. As Bordwell writes:
The emphasis on uniformity does not mean that a standard will not change in small ways. New technology, new products and new models are continually put forth as alternative standards for the field. One analyst of standardization wrote: 'An innovation is successful only when it has become a new standard.' That process is dynamic, with multiple practices creating the change. In fact, for the film industry, changing its product was an economic necessity. In the entertainment field, innovations in standards are also prized qualities. The economic reason is that the promotion of the difference between products is a competitive method and encourages repeated consumption. The phrase differentiation of the product is used to describe the practice in which the firm stresses how its goods or services differ from other ones.[14]
Much the same thing can be said for observing best practices in transmedia storytelling. By observing emerging norms for the medium particularly adventuresome, innovative storytellers can choose to do things differently in hopes of achieving strategic differentiation. Revisit Jenkins' list of principles and imagine how they might be flipped on their heads in a narrative experience, resulting in a new and engaging type of transmedia story. As more transmedia criticism emerges, more crazy "what-if" ideas will be sparked, and even more experimental experiences will appear on the market. Those that work spectacularly well - think 3-D in James Cameron's Avatar - will become more broadly adopted, pushing the cycle of significant differentiation into another iteration, and the medium will continue to grow as a result.
Between a shared language for transmedia experience design, a collection of best practices that will increase a transmedia experience's chances of success, and a seedbed for accelerated strategic differentiation, the value of transmedia criticism to practitioners seems clear. However, transmedia experiences without audiences remain difficult to justify. This is where transmedia reviews come into play.
3.2. Educating the Public: Transmedia Reviews and Reviewers
...The way I experience and think about comics has a lot to do with the fact that I really enjoy them. I like figuring out how that pleasure works and describing it to other people so that they can enjoy them too, or at least enjoy them more fully than they would otherwise. And what I like (and want to pass along) about a particular comic can be the pleasure of pure spectacle, or of ingenious design, or of kinetic flow, or of characters' psychological depth, or of a story that's funny or engaging, or any number of other things. (Wolk 21-22)
Massive entertainment franchises - think long-running soap operas or comic books - frequently get a bad rap for being huge, intimidating monsters. Try picking up a random issue of X-Men or turning on a random episode of As The World Turns and figure out what's going on. It's important not to ignore the word 'complex' in 'complex narratives' or 'complex entertainment', and even more important to remember that transmedia entertainment serves as an exponential multiplier to that complexity. Yes, a transmedia franchise that spans comics, television, films and games can have each of its components serve as a gateway into the entire franchise for "native" fans of those particular media, but an Everest like Star Wars or Halo is a massive undertaking looming on a newcomer's horizon. Such franchises aren't just increasingly complex; they're also increasingly time-consuming and increasingly expensive. You think it's difficult deciding which movie is worth your twenty bucks and two hours on Friday night?
As of this writing, buying the canonical Buffyverse on Amazon will set you back over $400, and take weeks to consume. One can only imagine what it would cost in both time and money to experience every film, book, comic, video game, TV show and piece of ancillary merchandise that makes up Star Wars.
This is where a transmedia critic can play sherpa: a really good (there's that word again) transmedia critic can give an interested fan-in-the-making maps to these daunting territories, even suggesting which paths they should take depending on their personal interests. Are they fans of Luke Skywalker? Watch the original movies, read these books, play those games. Fans of space battles? Watch these TV episodes, read these different books, play these other games. A single transmedia critic can't create personalized recommendations for everybody, but that's why we need an entire thriving community of transmedia critics sharing their opinions and providing maps like these.
The people who currently play these roles are the die-hard fans on fan websites, the people who live and breathe these franchises. Unfortunately, they're frequently not the best ambassadors to the series. We need the John Clutes, the Pauline Kaels, the Gene Siskels and Roger Eberts, the people who can analyze and report back on multiple franchises to convince hesitant audiences that these heights really are navigable, that the best experiences really are worth the labor, and that, alas, some of the peaks are actually best avoided. Having multiple transmedia critics, and having those critics establish themselves as experts with distinct tastes across franchises instead of fanboys for particular franchises, will help make such massive, complex entertainments less intimidating - and thus more enticing to mass audiences. And if we're serious about moving transmedia entertainment more and more towards the mainstream, this has got to happen.
Unfortunately, the viability of transmedia reviews - and, for that matter, transmedia criticism - suffers from the same Everest-level challenge. In a June 1, 2010 post to her blog called "A Criticism on the Lack of Criticism", transmedia designer Brooke Thompson puts her finger on one of the biggest problems facing transmedia criticism - scale:
There are a number of challenges to writing critiques on projects, not the least of which is their complexity and length. It's difficult to be critical once you've invested so much time and energy into a project - whether you've designed it or experienced it. Being critical seems harsh and, well, it might make you wonder if you've wasted a bunch of your time and who wants to think that? This is one reason why we may never have a Roger Ebert or Ben Croshaw - the commitment required to fully experience a transmedia project, especially one as complex as an ARG, is far greater than the commitment required for films and video games (or books or music or or or). To make transmedia critique a commitment on that level is difficult and, well, would require far more time than would be profitable. Which makes it a pursuit of passion or, perhaps, an academic exercise. Yet both of these color the criticism, that's not necessarily bad, but in collaborative transmedia that ignores the "other side of the curtain."
In the Comics Journal article "A Call for Higher Criticism" I cited earlier, Paul Levitz suggests that comics critics consider each issue in the context of the larger body of work, that "the time and effort we now devote to carving up a story should be devoted to carving up the universe in which the story exists" (44). This resonates with transmedia reviews, because, as Thompson points out, current reviews of transmedia franchises are usually limited to individual components - so a review of the latest Star Wars video game, instead of a review of Star Wars as an entire franchise.
Thompson hits the nail on the head when she writes, "the commitment required to fully experience a transmedia project... makes it a pursuit of passion or, perhaps, an academic exercise." Being able to review Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, or any of these other transmedia super-franchises at the franchise level requires thousands of hours to consume it, let alone analyze it and write intelligently about one's findings. In a way, each of these super-franchises is in effect a lifestyle brand - and therein lies both a primary trouble with transmedia reviews, and why they're so important. Imagine you're trying to decide whether to engage with the Star Wars franchise for the first time. The sheer size of the franchise at this point is epic and must loom large in the eye of the potential audience member - again, an Everest on the horizon. This is why Marvel keeps launching new X-Men titles, reboots and alternate versions, attempting to give people an "accessible" version of the X-Men franchise. As Sam Ford writes frequently on the challenges facing new audiences to soap operas, longevity and drillability can be simultaneously a franchise's greatest strength and greatest liability.
Further, there's a chicken-and-egg issue at hand with massive franchises and geekiness: are geeky people attracted to excessively drillable subjects, or does excessive drilling make one geeky? It's just as easy to become a sports geek as it is to become a comic book geek. The catch is that sometimes those people who are the most familiar with the topic, the ones who have done the most drilling, are also those who are the least valuable as the topic's advocates.
From the outside looking in, there must clearly something interesting about Star Wars, soap operas, the Chicago Cubs, quantum physics, the Civil War, and so on, because so many people are so passionately interested in these topics. An outsider may want to engage with the complex topic enough to enjoy it without becoming "that guy", at least until their interest reaches a sufficient level that they crest the tipping point and mastery of the topic becomes acutely desirable. In a way, transmedia reviews, or transmedia criticism for the masses,[15] should be the equivalent of a 101-level course - sufficient to introduce a lay audience to the highlights of a topic, loaded with directions on where to go next for further drilling, and so on. The trouble is that we need, as Thompson points out, a Roger Ebert of transmedia reviews providing a reliable viewpoint to bear on a new franchise every week, which is the equivalent of a rockstar professor teaching an entire Philosophy 101 course one week, a Political Science 101 course the next week, and a History 101 course the week after that.
As Jenkins has pondered for years, there's a strange line to consider between fandom and scholarship - one needs a certain amount of fandom to motivate the epic amount of drilling required to become an expert in a subject, yet one must also remain sufficiently detached to retain an objective perspective. An Ebert who gave a huge thumbs-up to everything he reviewed wouldn't be a very good critic, he'd just be a guy who never shut up about all the things of which he was a fan. A truly valuable transmedia reviewer/critic must be able to engage with multiple massive transmedia franchises and have enough dedication to consume, analyze and report on each of them on a regular basis, even those he or she doesn't like.
Of all the responses to Paul Levitz' call for higher criticism published by The Comics Journal, my favorite is one by Richard Howell and Carol Kalish. Their response contains a brilliant concise definition of what comics criticism should be, which can easily be applied to transmedia criticism as well:
We feel, however, that comic books share their major objectives with other mass media, [and] can and should be judged by similar standards. To wit: Capability - a familiarity with, and craftsmanship-like utilization of, the medium's techniques, be they visual or verbal elements; Communication - a conscious and responsible manipulation of these technical elements in such a way as to transmit at least the bare storytelling elements (plot, characterization, and theme) to a responsive reader; and Commitment - the perception required to invest the product with a moral focus which can both enlighten and entertain and the dedication needed to broaden the craft repertoire of the medium.
Comic book critics must be prepared to both refine these standards to make them more appropriate measures of comic book products and to apply these rigorous, objective standards with perception and understanding to the industry. Only then can comics criticism assume its rightful position as both guide and guardian of the continual evolution of the comics medium.
This quote points to yet another complication: the issue of what is actually being criticized. If one believes that what is to be criticized is that which makes the franchise transmedia - the unique affordances and characteristics of transmedia as a medium, its aesthetics and mechanics - then a familiarity with just transmedia is clearly sufficient. However, a more idealistic but vastly more daunting approach is to truly and knowledgably criticize each component of the franchise as an example of its own medium. This is the same challenge staring down any transmedia artist, and illustrates the same gut-wrenching truth: something as complex as a piece of transmedia storytelling or transmedia criticism is only as strong as its weakest link.
Any time you have a combination of disciplines brought together into an art form, every element has to succeed for the work as a whole to function properly. A comic book that has beautiful art but is shoddily written will be tossed aside; a TV show that is brilliantly written but horribly acted will get zapped away. Clearly some particularly excellent elements can make up for some weaker ones - the cinematography in The Last Samurai helps make up for Tom Cruise being, well, Tom Cruise - but overall it's how the entire thing hangs together that determines the overall valuation of the whole.
Under this logic, an ideal transmedia critic must be able to criticize the six films of Star Wars as a film critic, The Clone Wars as a TV critic, the Timothy Zahn Heir to the Empire novels as a book critic, the Force Unleashed games as a game critic, Dark Horse's Star Wars: Legacy comics as a comic critic, and so on. This may seem harsh, but it's important to remember that just as each component of a transmedia franchise serves as an entry point into the franchise as a whole, it must also serve as an ambassador to the "native" audiences of each medium.
Think of it as the Transitive Quality of Crap: if a Star Wars comic is a crappy comic, comic readers for whom that comic is their first point of contact with the franchise will likely assume that a similar low quality permeates the entire franchise, and thus assume that the games are crappy, the TV shows are crappy, the film is crappy, and the franchise overall is just one big steaming pile.[16]
I have seen some astonishingly lousy transmedia extensions that were clearly approved by people unfamiliar with that extension's medium - countless tie-in games, comics and novels spring to mind - and/or by people who assume that the value of the franchise's license is sufficient to overcome a lousy experience. This isn't the case, and this is why video games based on film licenses are widely derided in the games industry: a video game based on a film is assumed to have blown most of its budget obtaining the license, was rushed to market to make a "day and date" simultaneous release with the film (and had its production started much, much later than that of the film, despite the fact that video games can sometimes take even longer than films to produce), was creatively crippled by strict oversight by the licensor, and so on.
So here's the problem: a transmedia author needs to be well-versed in each medium being deployed in their franchise, so they know when something is sub-par and can fix that weakest link. A transmedia critic needs to be able to evaluate each component of the franchise so if there is a weakest link, they can point it out as something to be avoided - but still point out that the rest of the franchise shouldn't be missed. For example, one of the best exceptions to the "lousy film tie-in" rule is The Chronicles of Riddick. Both Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick are Vin Diesel sci-fi movies with abysmal scores on Metacritic, but the tie-in game Escape from Butcher Bay has fantastic scores on Metacritic.
A transmedia critic looking at the franchise as a whole must be well-versed enough to be able to say what the films did poorly, what the game did well, what the connections are between the films and the game and how well those connections are crafted, and whether or not an audience must sit through the films in order to enjoy the game. There's enough of a Venn diagram overlap between gamers and sci-fi nerds for game critics to be able to report that the game is better than the movies because they probably saw the movies, but it'd be almost unthinkable for film critics to say, "The films are awful, but the game is excellent - skip the films and play the game." And yet that's precisely what an ideal transmedia critic would be expected to do.
Being well-versed in just one medium does not qualify you to criticize another, for the same reason that gamers find Roger Ebert writing criticisms of video games dubious. A transmedia critic must have a rich, nuanced understanding of multiple media in order to speak authoritatively to audiences across media - to be respected by film buffs when reporting on film components, by comic fans when reporting on comic books, by the literati when reporting on films and by foodies when reporting on food. In a way, the ideal transmedia critic is a return to the Renaissance Man style of critic that drove the first waves of literary criticism in 18th-century England. The question is whether or not such breadth is even remotely feasible on the 21st-century Internet.
(Next: Conclusions and Next Steps)
Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and author exploring transmedia experiences and emerging entertainment platforms at Microsoft. Geoffrey received his Master's degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he served as a media analyst for the Convergence Culture Consortium and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Through his work with the Convergence Culture Consortium, Geoffrey authored "How to Ride a Lion: A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism" and "Moving Stories: Aesthetics and Production in Mobile Media". His personal site is at geoffreylong.com, he can be reached at glong@geoffreylong.com, and he can be found on Twitter as @geoffreylong.
[15] I'm resisting 'transmedia advocacy' because I believe that term should be reserved for advocacy done across media; see Lina Srivastava's excellent work on transmedia activism for more on this.
a non-profit organization that mobilizes the Harry Potter fan community
toward civic action, using metaphors from the popular narratives. In
comparing the two organizations, we found that while the Harry Potter
Alliance built on an existing fan community and harnessed a pre-existing
content world (a powerful narrative that strongly resonates with
members) toward its civic goals, Invisible Children began with a
goal--ending the use of child soldiers in the civil war in Uganda--and
built a content world around it.
Invisible
Children has been creating documentary films since 2004, when they
released their first, and for many viewers most powerful, film, Invisible Children: The Rough Cut:
For an analysis of IC's transmedia storytelling practices see the Invisible Children Working Paper written by fellow Civic Paths member Lana Swartz.
The Rough Cut documents IC founders Jason, Bobby and Lauren's trip to Uganda, where they first learned about the war with the LRA and the existence of child soldiers. In members' narratives, this movie is attributed with an almost magical effect in transforming their worldview:
"They
showed me the film and I remember being so floored like, 'I cannot
believe that this is going on' and 'why have I never heard about this.' I
remember something in me shifted that night." (Ruth, IC intern)
The
main strength of the movie to most IC members is the feeling of
identification with the protagonists--the three filmmakers and future IC
founders, young people not much older than themselves, who go out to
Uganda, encounter a social issue and launch a movement:
"The
movie is just very raw, and it's, even though they were older than me
they were kids, and you see these kids just go, they see something, they
run into a problem and they're like, OK, now we have to fix this
problem." (Beth, IC intern)
In this respect, the Kony 2012 movie represents a significant shift in point of view and style. If Rough Cut presented
the founders as naïve but good-intentioned film students accidentally
stumbling onto a war, Kony 2012 shows Jason as a leader of a viable
movement and, predominantly, as a father. When he teaches his 5 year old
son about Joseph Kony being "the bad guy", it's not clear with whom
young viewers most identify - with the 30 something old dad, or with the
innocent but earnest 5 year-old.
While
Kony 2012 was released online, previous IC movies were mostly
distributed through "screenings": 1.5-2 hour long events, taking place
in high schools, colleges and churches. In screenings, IC roadies, who
are volunteer staff members, show the movie, and accompany it with an
introduction and Q&A sessions. Some screenings also include young
Ugandan, recipients of IC scholarships in Uganda, who come to the U.S.
for a short period of time to tell their own story in screenings. After
screenings, audiences were encouraged to donate to Invisible Children,
buy its merchandise, as well as become more involved with its local
clubs.
This
distribution model, of course, reached a negligible audience when
compared with Kony 2012. At the same time, the live interaction with the
roadies enabled Invisible Children to create a different experience
than that possible when watching Kony 2012 online. By supplementing the
movies with live interaction with the roadies, Invisible Children could
supplement the information given in the movies (e.g., explain the
current state of affairs in Uganda), answer audience's questions (e.g.,
how are donations used) as well as create contacts between roadies and
IC supporters, which were later maintained online. This model, while
reaching much smaller audiences, enabled IC to create a more nuanced and
informed message, and thus counter some (though not all) of the
criticisms it is now encountering.
Accusations of Slacktivism, or, can watching a 30 minute movie make you a social activist?
image source: http://jeffzelaya.com/
Part
of the critique around the Kony 2012 campaign is that it promotes
Slacktivism: a genre of social action that is easy (done with a click of
the mouse), comfortable, and thus meaningless. One of the memes that's
been circulating around Kony 2012 presents this critique. This critique
already ignores some of the more active forms of participation that are
planned as part of the Kony 2012 campaign, such as the "cover the night"
events planned for April 20th 2012, in which participants are called to
cover their local cities with posters of Joseph Kony. Countless notices
have already sprung up for such local events on Facebook (though,
arguably, the goal of getting the world to know who Joseph Kony is, has
pretty much been achieved).
Beyond
that, however, talking to members of Invisible Children shows how
previous IC movies indeed played important roles in helping young people
become socially active, though not always in clear, immediate ways.
Beth's story is one example of this. When we interviewed her, Beth was
an IC intern, in charge of updating their website with news on the war
in Uganda. Beth claimed that she used to be an apathetic, selfish kid
(though her family had always been involved in aid in Africa). She
happened to watch The Rough Cut
at a church, where it was shown by a youth pastor. Beth described
watching the movie as a formative moment, an embarking on a journey of
engagement in activism: "I guess it affects everybody differently. For
me there was no way I could do anything else. I couldn't go get a white
collar job [...] I don't even remember what other selfish tracks I was
on." The movie opened her eyes to the world of non-profits, and she
began researching them online. She became engaged with the student
organization STAND, and is now their local president. Through her work
with STAND she reconnected with IC. In the interview, she claimed that
she now sees no other alternative for herself but being involved in
activism: "That life to me just seems like the kind of life everyone
should live, a life where you're not doing something only for yourself,
whatever you're doing is putting something back into the world".
Beth's
story exemplifies an element we heard in many IC members' re-tellings: a
narrative of self-transformation. In this narrative structure, IC
members often describe their 'former selves', before joining IC, in
contrast to who they are today. Beth describes her former self as
apathetic and selfish, in many ways echoing prevalent stereotypes about
disengaged youth. In her narrative, watching the Rough Cut represented
a life-changing turning point. Her commitment to social engagement,
then, seemed to be created at that moment of realization, "understanding
that there's more to life than the mall" (Beth). These
narratives of members are extremely powerful, though they may not be
the full picture of what's going on. Digging down deeper reveals that
many IC members (though not all) had been previously socialized to
altruistic values and practices. For example, while Beth understates the
significance of her parents' involvement in aid in Africa to her own
activist desire, research shows that parental modeling is a key variable
predicting youth civic engagement. Yet the movie served as an important
catalyst to civic action, one that allowed Beth to feel that she
shifted from selfish child to civic actor. Moreover, we found that
seeing IC movies was part of a larger process through which young people
could become socially involved. Even
when young people want to create social change, finding ways to get
meaningfully involved, particularly in world affairs, is described by
many members as a challenge. Many "traditional" non-profits, like the
Peace Corps, offer limited possibilities for youth (under 18), and often
require extensive voluntary commitments. Other organizations may offer
young people ways to become involved, but are perceived as old-fashioned
and out-dated, "charities run by middle-aged women"
(Edie, IC intern). A key strength of IC, and one that Kony 2012
exhibits as well, is the way it offers young people actionable steps,
concrete channels to express a pre-existing activist desire:
"I
had been trying to find ways that I could get into volunteering or
working to become part of a more global community. I saw the screening
and they were in the process of trying to get the bill passed and they
were encouraging us to talk to senators to hold a meeting, a cool way
that you guys can make a big change, and so I got really involved from
there." (Tina, IC roadie)
While signing an online pledge or purchasing a $30 action kit (which are now completely sold out) may be seen as meaningless steps, for young people they can be perceived as significant first steps in taking civic action, giving them a sense of agency and empowerment that often sparks further action, as Beth's story shows. "White man's burden?" Nuancing the message One
of the accusations against Kony 2012 has accompanied Invisible Children
from its start: the accusation of presenting "poor Ugandan children"
who "need to be rescued" by white Americans. Invisible Children as an
organization has grappled with this accusation and over the years made
many attempts to nuance their message. One of the leadership's key
statements is that their relationship with the Ugandans is one of
friendship and mutual learning, not only one-directional aid. This
message is in fact one that was very peripheral to Kony 2012, but it is
strongly echoed in the narratives of members we talked to. IC members
repeatedly expressed shared affiliations with the people of Uganda whom
they have never met.
"Even
though I haven't met anyone from Uganda, I feel like they're kind of my
extended friends now. I care about them not just a far off, 'Oh, I want
everybody to be okay' but I really feel somewhat connected." (Dave, IC
intern)
Janelle, an IC intern, is one of few IC members who have visited Uganda. She similarly speaks of a mutual relationship:
"It was such an eye opening experience. You put faces to the people
you're helping, it's not just helping others but building friendships
and exchanging. It was definitely what [the Ugandans] were giving, they
were giving to us as well, learning from their culture." (Janelle, IC
intern)
It
is still early to tell which relationships toward Ugandans Kony 2012
may invoke in its viewers. In trying to create a movie that people will
be compelled to share, Invisible Children may have sidetracked their
previous commitment to a nuanced representation of their relationship
with the Ugandans. Yet when young people participate in conversations
online about whether or not Kony 2012 is a representation of White Man's
Burden, they may be creating such nuanced understanding themselves in
active ways that may be particularly effective. In this manner, the
movie may again be seen as one aspect of a wider experience through
which young people gain awareness of a problem they previously did not
know about, become more informed about it, but are also mobilized in
concrete and empowering ways.
The message young people are getting (again)
Beyond the specific discussion around Kony 2012, we have, as scholars, a wider agenda. Part
of the criticism that Invisible Children is receiving is a normative
and ideological one: it is about what social action needs to look like,
who may participate in it, and what it should entail. Bluntly read, what
some of critics are arguing is that social advocacy, particularly
around world affairs, should be left to experts: to politicians, to
"serious" NGOs, to erudites. Young people--and this includes both the
film's 30 something-old creators, and its mostly 20 and under
viewers--are told that this isn't a world for them. It is too
complicated, too hard, too serious. These are the same messages young
people are getting about politics: If you don't know exactly what you're
talking about, you'd better not talk at all.
A
lot of the criticism of Invisible Children and Kony 2012 can be read as
a protecting of boundaries and barriers. Who is and who is not allowed
to speak; what is the right way to speak; and what should that sound
like. There are many ways to take social action, and there are many
other organizations out there that probably do many things better than
Invisible Children. They have more nuanced messages, they offer more
detailed information, they spend more of their budget on direct aid
programs. IC is accused of spending too much money on filmmaking and
"marketing". Yet this statistic is seen in a different light if we
consider fostering youth engagement as a central role of what Invisible
Children does, as the Fourth Estate youth leadership event implies. When
was the last time so many young people were so engaged around any
social issue, let alone a war in Africa?
IC belongs to a new genre of civic organization, one that plays with and challengesaccepted
definitions of social action and what it should look and feel like.
Over the past days, many critics have again and again articulated what
IC is doing wrong. But in speaking to young people, it is obviously
doing something right.
Many
critiques of Invisible Children and of Kony 2012 may point to real
improvement areas for the organization, and IC will have to meaningfully
grapple with these critiques over time. But in addition to pointing out
important problems, non-profit organizations, politicians and scholars
should also ask, how is Invisible Children able to resonate so stronglywith
young people? How does it mobilize and get them involved? We suggest
that the answer to these questions can be found not only in their
film-making but also among IC's young viewers, supporters and members,
who want to speak up - but they need to be spoken to and invited to
participate first. Invisible Children is asking them to participate. Are
which provided official responses that argued against key critiques
levelled at their campaign - for instance, regarding IC's NGO
credibility and transparency and IC's position in relation to human
rights based criticisms of the Ugandan government. IC also attempted to
deflect attacks on what some critics have seen as IC's "white savior"
rhetoric by highlighting "that
over 95% of IC's leadership and staff on the ground are Ugandans on the
forefront of program design and implementation." They also addressed
the related controversy regarding the photo of the
founders posing with guns from 2008, with co-founder Jason Russell
stating "that photo was a bad idea. We were young and we got caught up
in the moment."
Overall,
IC appears to have been both caught off-guard as well as feeling
exhilarated and energized by the spread of the campaign so far. In a video posted on March 8th, Jason Russell thanked IC's supporters for the incredible success of the campaign's spread.
called the movement a revolution that will change the world and told
his audience: "I need you to know something. I am here representing you - your voice. This is a collective. It's a We. And this story transcends borders. It is not about politics. It is not about
the economy. This is about human beings - human beings waking up to the
potential and the power that they have. That's what KONY 2012 is about
and it's just the beginning - because we are starting something which
cannot be stopped." IC has also announced that it is translating the
Kony 2012 video into as many languages as possible.
Since
IC published its response to critics, the attention towards Kony 2012
has only increased, with tallies at time of writing (end of day, March
11th) showing around 91 million views in total for the original YouTube
and Vimeo versions (these figures do not count other versions that may
be in circulation, including non-English language editions that may
already have been released). Commentary critiquing and praising IC's
Kony 2012 campaign continues to evolve and expand.
A little under a week ago, the San Diego-based human rights group, Invisible Children, posted its Kony 2012 video through YouTube and encouraged its base of supporters to help spread the word. By midafternoon Sunday, the Youtube video had been watched more than 71 million times and the hashtag #Kony2012 has been a trending topic on Twitter throughout much of this time.
Invisible Children's goal was to make Joseph Kony a household name, not to celebrate his accomplishments, but rather to call him out so that pressure mounts world wide to hold this Ugandan guerilla leader, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, responsible for his acts of child abduction and genocide. According to estimates in a 2006 report produced for UNICEF Uganda by Jeannie Annan, Christopher Blattman and Roger Horton, the LRA since its beginnings has abducted and forced at least 66,000 youths (aged 14-30 years old; the traditional Acholi definition of youth) to fight and/or carry out other roles for them for various lengths of time (many never to return); with the UN estimating 22,000 to 25,000 children being abducted during this period. The LRA has also contributed to the internal displacement of nearly two million people, as well as untold thousands of deaths in its region since its rebellion began in 1986.
Invisible Children has been surprisingly successful in this social media-based campaign to call attention to issues in Africa which have long been neglected by mainstream media and which remained little known to most American citizens. The Kony 2012 campaign has drawn extensive coverage from traditional journalists and sparked heated debates across the blogosphere, with many experts on African politics weighing in to complicate or challenge the film's narrative of what is occurring on the ground in Uganda and its recommendations about what appropriate responses to Kony might look like. Alongside these discussions of African policy and politics, the video has also sparked heated debates about the nature and value of online activism.
For a basic narrative describing the release of the video and its immediate reception, see this blog post by Rhea Richot and Zhan Lee,
For a data base of materials, including both the original video and a range of different responses and critiques, see this archive which Zhan Li has assembled on Storify.
The Civic Paths Project
Much of this coverage has dealt with the video as a piece of content which suddenly went "viral" -- but in fact, the Civic Paths research group at the University of Southern California has had Invisible Children on its radar for almost three years. Our primary focus has been on the strategies behind the organization's success at recruiting, training, and mobilizing young activists in the United States. This research has been funded, in part, by the Spencer Foundation as part of their larger initiative to identify new forms of civic learning and is linked to our group's participation in the Youth and Participatory Politics research team, which has been recruited and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, though neither foundation is responsible for this series of blog posts.
As part of this research, we conducted in depth interviews with more than 30 young people who have become involved in IC's efforts, spent time at the organization's headquarters, audited their media output and strategies, and otherwise, sought to better understand why this group has been so successful at what it does.
The Kony 2012 video did not "go viral"; rather, its circulation depended on the hundreds of thousands of young people who already felt connected to the organization and to this cause through their participation in school based clubs and grassroots campaigns over almost a decade. These young people were among the first to receive the video, pass it along through their social networks to their friends and classmates, and thus, start a process which ultimately got the attention of millions around the world. Many of them have already given time, money, and other resources to this cause. Awareness of Kony 2012 remains highest among teens and young adults, suggesting how central these same groups were to circulating the video from the start.
Given the sudden visibility of the organization's most recent efforts, we felt as a research group that it was important to share some of the core insights from this research through this and the Civic Paths blog. We have little to contribute to the debates about what would be the best policy response to the problems which Invisible Children is calling to the public's attention, but we do feel, as communications scholars, that our work might shed some light into how the current effort fits within IC's larger history of using social media and participatory culture tactics to empower young people to see themselves as active political agents who can make a difference in the world.
Invisible Children: Storytelling-Based Activism
CIvic Paths was started as a project to better understand the links between participatory culture and civic engagement, specifically looking for examples of successful campaigns, organizations, or networks which had helped young people become more involved in campaigns for social justice and political change. During our initial phase, many team members shared groups that they were already researching. Melissa A. Brough brought Invisible Children to our team's attention; she had just completed a study of the visual culture and rhetoric shaping some of the group's earliest efforts, which has since become a chapter in the recently published book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in NeoLiberal Times, which was edited by Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, for New York University Press. Here are some excerpts from her article:
Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Lauren Poole founded Invisible Children in 2004 as recent University of Southern California graduates, after completing their documentary film Invisible Children: Rough Cut. Only four years later, IC had ninety staff running development programs in Uganda and thirty US staff who, significantly, were almost exclusively under the age of thirty. In 2005 they raised more than $300,000; by 2008 the revenue growth reached over $10 million. At the time of this writing 2,098 U.S. school clubs were registered to support IC projects in eleven Ugandan schools. And as is increasingly popular in the commercial sector, IC utilizes user-generated content from its supporters to help collectively envision and market its mission, through Web 2.0 sites like Myspace, YouTube and Facebook....
Creative storytellling through visual media is at the core of the organization's dual mission to be 'both an innovative media-based organization' (i.e. a production company) and a humanitarian/development nongovernmental organization. Approximately 50 percent of its programming budget is therefore spent on media and event production, largely in the US with the stated goal of bringing 'awareness to the situation and promoting international support of the peace process taking place.' IC refers to these production activities as the 'Movement' component of the organization (as opposed to its direct aid and development work), which uses stories and images to connect to and mobilize US youth to support its project in Uganda. This in turn produces content for more stories, creating a circular process of humanitarian media production....
In IC's media, emphasis is placed on the American donor/activist as much as, if not more than, IC's beneficiaries. Invisible Children's videos unapologetically embrace the opportunity for personal growth offered by entrepreneurial participation in the humanitarian adventure. IC sends the winners of high school fundraising competitions, organized through an online social networking site, to Uganda to visit the schools and camps of internally displaced communities that their funds support....
Brough's essay goes on to discuss and critique the group's use of discourses of humanitarian aid as a means of mutual self-empowerment, its use of participatory spectacle, and its deployment of networked communication tactics, with a focus on the first few waves of media which the group produced. She concludes:
Invisible Children's media are bold, beautiful, and captivating the minds of tens of thousands of American youth. They are creating a space for idealism that works within the context of postmodernism and neoliberalism, which is precisely its promise and its peril. Radically reconfiguring humanitarianism will likely require the innovative vision of youth, from both the global North and South.
Brough's work can help to address several aspects of the current controversy, starting with the concern raised by some about what a high percentage of the IC's revenues get spent in North America rather than on the ground in Africa. Such critiques neglect the central role which movement building and civic learning play in IC's model for social change. At times, this focus on increasing young America's social awareness and political voice has come to be as important to their efforts as their specific goals of bring about change in Africa. We can debate the merits of this choice, but it needs to be understood as part of the larger picture of what the group has been doing.
Youth As Political Agents
Brough's essay also suggests that the steps which the group takes to give youth a sense of their own voice and power as political agents, what she describes in terms of "discourses of personal growth," may be problematic when read in relation to the historical relationship between the Global North and South, furthering discourses of dependency which disempower people in developing African nations, even as they give greater agency to those who already possess a high degree of privlidge. This critique has resurfaced often in more recent responses to Kony 2012.
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, another member of the Civic Paths research team, has developed a blog post which shares what we learned through our interviews with Invisible Children's young activists, specifically focusing on the impact which their participation in these campaigns have had on their own developing civic and political consciousness. This blog post is based on an essay she wrote with Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama for the Special "Fan Activism" issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which will appear in June 2012.
Kligler-Vilenchik argues that the focus of the campaign on youth participation is one of the themes which has largely been lost in critical responses by African experts to the video campaign, as has the idea that the video was intended as part of a larger transmedia strategy to create multiple points of contact with its core messages and themes. You can read her reflections here.
Transmedia Mobilization
Lana Swartz, another member of the Civic Paths research team, has conducted an extensive overview of the media strategies deployed by Invisible children, resulting in a working paper written last year which describes the group's efforts in relation to my frameworks for thinking about transmedia storytelling. She argues:
The "Movement," as Invisible Children calls its US-facing work, includes visually-arresting films, spectacular event-oriented campaigns, provocative graphic t-shirts and other apparel, music mixes, print media, blogs and more. To be a member of Invisible Children means to be a viewer, participant, wearer, reader, listener, commenter of and in the various activities, many mediated, that make up the Movement. It is a massive, open-ended, evolving documentary "story" unfurling across an expanding number of media forms.
Swartz and other members of the Civic Paths team briefed key leaders of the Invisible Children staff on these findings last summer; they were receptive to these insights and have made some efforts to improve their practice as a consequence, though, in some ways, her findings predict some of the current controversies surrounding the Kony 2012 video. While many are encountering Invisible Children for the first time thanks to the widespread circulation of this new video, the video itself may best be understood as part of this much wider array of new media tactics and practices.
It is important to understand the transmedia nature of Invisible Children. Swartz writes:
Jenkins (2007) defines transmedia storytelling as a process in which "integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience," and, "ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story." It involves an emphasis on "world building" rather than plot or character-driven narratives, multiple points of entry for differently engaged audiences, co-creation and collaboration across various professional and fan sites of production, and collective intelligence, as audiences become "hunters and gatherers," collecting and sharing information across media. Transmedia storytelling is not just about new media, although it often makes thorough use of it. In fact, in order to best understand the concept, it helps to have an expansive notion of the word "media" as any channel through which new meaning or information is added to the larger story-- be it a piece of clothing, an action figure, or a live in-person performance.
By just looking at one piece-- the Kony 2012 documentary, for example-- it is quite easy to miss the full complexity of group. However, it may be difficult for a newcomer to access the "rest of the story" as most of their web presence has been drafted into the Kony 2012 push and some of their earlier work seems to have been removed from the web.
Spreadability and Drillability
The rest of the paper uses elements of transmedia storytelling to understand the Invisible children in more detail. An important element is the section on Spreadability and Drillability:
Spreadability, the focus of Jenkins et al's (forthcoming, 2013) book, refers to the extent to which media can be engaged with and shared in a way that increases its economic value and social worth. They contrast spreadability to distribution, a model in which "movement of media content is heavily--or totally--controlled by the commercial interests that produce and sell it." Spreadability, instead, is "an emerging hybrid model of circulation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways." Mittell (2009) offers "drillability" as a corrective but complementary characteristic. He writes, "Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities." By putting the two terms in conversation with each other, Jenkins (2009) suggests that transmedia storytelling will likely have both properties working dynamically to engage audiences.
In transmedia storytelling mobilization, both spreadability and drillability can refer to the way the movement structures access to information about the cause and the organization itself. The extent to which the group "raises awareness" is largely dependent on how spreadable their message is. Drillability, on the other hand, describes the learning opportunities that exist beyond initial contact with the message. Both features are necessary for newcomers to become advocates of the cause.
Invisible Children makes information about itself and its work in central Africa very easy to share while at the same time allowing groups and individuals to personalize its meaning, amplifying spreadability. One way it does this is through fairly open content distribution. Although screenings where roadies show Invisible Children films to school and church audiences play a big role in the Movement, DVDs of the 9 major films are available for purchase and have, at various times, also been available for free, streaming online or on YouTube. Each purchase of the Rough Cut comes with two DVDs, one to keep and one to share. Invisible Children does not explicitly use Creative Commons licensing, but it does practice and encourage the free exchange of its materials, stating on the FAQs section of its website:
We at IC make every effort to spread the word about the plight of those in northern Uganda, and we realize that having access to Invisible Children: Rough Cut is vital to helping this movement grow. As we pass the torch to you, we ask you use the documentary and Invisible Children logo responsibly--only to raise awareness and benefit Invisible Children, Inc.
and:
We want everyone to have FREE access to Invisible Children: Rough Cut. Be creative and make your screening unique. The only thing we insist is that you don't charge for admission.
Similarly, Invisible Children takes pains to enable its staff, volunteers, roadies, and other representatives to give accurate information about central Africa and its work there. One intern was careful to correct herself when she said, "war torn," replacing it with, "impacted by war." Roadies in particular cite being equipped with information that would allow to them to speak confidently in any crowd as a particularly valuable part of their training. This information is often dispersed in short, quotable chunks, making it easier to spread in a way that seems particularly effective for the college and high school aged audiences who may have little, if any, prior exposure to the history of central Africa.
Providing drillable wells of knowledge does not seem to be as much of a priority for Invisible Children. Its blog does feature, at least monthly, a "Peace and Conflict Update" on current events in central Africa, but the official description of the history of the war in northern Uganda, a main tab on its website, is less than 1,200 words long, and this information tends to be repeated rather than augmented across media.
In some circumstances, inadequate drillability can undermine Invisible Children's otherwise powerful transmedia story. This is true, for example, when a critic, claiming to be Ugandan, makes comments in multiple Invisible Children blog posts suggesting that Jolly Okot, now the director of Invisible Children's direct aid programs and featured heavily in many of the films, has compromising political ties to the Ugandan government and the LRA. A curious Invisible Children supporter, wanting to drill deeper into these claims, is thwarted from enacting questions across media because the link to the profiles of the Uganda-based staff is broken and has been "Coming Soon" for many months. Because Invisible Children is more focused on enabling spreadability than drillability, it relinquishes opportunities to more thoroughly and credibly describe the good work it is no doubt doing.
This lack of intentional drillability is further exacerbated by cultural and technological asymmetries between the way the Ugandan and American representatives of Invisible Children share data about themselves in unofficial ways across the Internet. For example, even for the most savvy transmedia navigators, finding any information online one way or the other about Jolly Okot's actual political history is very difficult. However, simply by clicking through a series of links or performing a quick search, any interested party can find a personal blog in which a high-ranking member of the American Invisible Children staff makes a joke that, especially in a low-context medium, might be seen as racially insensitive. The lack of drillable information about the leaders in Uganda and the excess of it about those in America equally undermine the credibility of the organization.
This tension between spreadable and drillable communication practices may well be at the heart of the current debate around Invisible Children. Few can debate the group's success at spreading its content and in the process, sparking many more conversations about what's happening in Uganda than would have occured otherwise. Yet, many have argued that the lack of depth in the group's presentation of the issues can come across as naive and misguided.
Provocation and Process
In a very thoughtful blog post, Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow member of the MacArthur Youth and Participatory Politics research hub, shares his own critiques of what Invisible Children has and has not achieved in its current campaign, opening up questions which should be addressed by those of us who see spreadability as a productive model for thinking about new forms of political activism:
The campaign Invisible Children is running is so compelling because it offers an extremely simple narrative: Kony is a uniquely bad actor, a horrific human being, whose capture will end suffering for the people of Northern Uganda. If each of us does our part, influences powerful people, the world's most powerful military force will take action and Kony will be captured....
The problem, of course, is that this narrative is too simple. The theory of change it advocates is unlikely to work, and it's unclear if the goal of eliminating Kony should still be a top priority in stabilizing and rebuilding northern Uganda. By offering support to Museveni, the campaign may end up strengthening a leader with a terrible track record.
A more complex narrative of northern Uganda would look at the odd, codependent relationship between Museveni and Kony, Uganda's systematic failure to protect the Acholi people of northern Uganda. It would look at the numerous community efforts, often led by women, to mediate conflicts and increase stability. It would focus on the efforts to rebuild the economy of northern Uganda, and would recognize the economic consequences of portraying northern Uganda as a war zone. It would feature projects like Women of Kireka, working to build economic independence for women displaced from their homes in Northern Uganda.
Such a narrative would be lots harder to share, much harder to get to "go viral".
I'm starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?
One way out of this bind is to see the Kony 2012 video not as a stand-alone text, but rather as one element of a much more diverse set of communication practices, as, going back to Swartz, one extension of a larger transmedia mobilization. A while ago, I suggested that Occupy might be better understood as a "provocation," an attempt to shift the discursive frame and spark new conversations, than as a movement, which is pursuing a single cause. At first glance, Invisible Children might seem to be doing the opposite -- too narrowly defining its cause so that it can be easily grasped by -- and potentially achieved through the efforts of -- its young supporters.
Yet, in practice, the effect has been the same. People are talking about Kony, including many who had remained silent and unaware before. The blunt force of the video has created a space where more nuanced readings of the situation are being produced, circulated, read, and debated. Some of the other bloggers might see themselves as correcting the "damages" the group has caused through its simplification, but blog posts such as Zuckerman's can also be seen as continuing the discursive process which the release of the video set into motion.
Zuckerman offers a similar perspective in his blog post's conclusion:
As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we're learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign's value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children's campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response?
We might think about this process through a lens of "monitorial citizenship" -- groups like Invisible Children help to identify and focus public attention onto urgent problems, initiating a process where-by a range of grassroots groups and experts work together to create richer and more nuanced frames for understanding the problem and identifying solutions.
But this raises the question of whether despite our capacity for networked circulation, we have developed collectively the skills we would need for this kind of deliberative process. We do not know how much these other critiques are able to ride the coat tails of the rapidly circulating video, to what degree young people are inspired by the debate to think more critically about the frames they deploy in thinking about injustices in Africa or America's place in the world.
Ideally, part of Invisible Children's commitment to civic learning would include the fostering of critical media literacy, including the capacity to test and appraise the group's own claims and its own media practices. Ideally, Invisible Children itself would be ready to respond to the controversy with much more information which can support the efforts of their movement to promote human rights in Africa. In practice, they seem to have placed a much higher investment in spreading the basic message than in giving the young citizens they have mobilized a chance to drill deeper and learn more about these issues.
As Invisible Children's critics seek to correct what they see as the simplifications and misrepresentations of the video, we can also hope they will do so in ways which respect the commitment of Invisible Children's young activists, in ways which support their efforts to find their footing as political agents and make a difference in the world. There is a risk that a more complex and nuanced narrative may also be a disempowering one, one which, as so often happens, convince citizens -- young and old -- that they have nothing to contribute and that these matters are best left in the hands of experts.
Contributors:
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik is a Doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She works with Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito on the Media, Activism, Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, as part of the Youth & Participatory Politics (YPP) Network, where she is investigating connections and continuities between youth's involvement in participatory cultures and new media and their civic engagement. The case studies she works on focus more specifically on organizations and groups that build on networks and communities of fandom, online and off-line, with the aim of encouraging and sustaining young people's involvement in civic life. Neta is currently working on her Doctoral thesis, which revolves around alternative citizenship models and their potential for youth civic engagement. She holds an M.A. in Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.
Zhan Li holds a B.A. in Social & Political Sciences and a M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (Trinity) as well as a S.M. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. For his Ph.D. in Organizational Communication, he is specializing in researching the future of scenario planning, a widely used strategic foresight method. Previous thesis topics have included the World Bank's promotion of Knowledge Management and Economics in the 1990s, and the U.S. Army video game America's Army during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Most recently working as a global media investment banking analyst for HSBC in New York City (with a special focus on India and China), Zhan has also been employed as a researcher at Sony (Los Angeles), the Microsoft Games-To-Teach lab at MIT (Cambridge, MA), the London Business School's Future Media Program and UBS Warburg (London). At Annenberg, Zhan manages the Annenberg Scenario Lab, which focuses on online media innovation in scenario planning techniques for a variety of organizations. His dissertation will focus on the development of online techniques for participatory scenario planning and futures that are informed by organizational communication and new media theory.
Melissa Brough is a Doctoral Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, and a 2010-2011 Fulbright grantee to Colombia. She works in the fields of communication for social change, participatory media, visual and new media cultures, and social movements. She has collaborated with youth and community media projects including Mobile Voices , FilmAid International , Listen Up! and the Chiapas Media Project . She received her B.A. in Development Studies and Modern Culture & Media from Brown University.
Most of Lana Swartz's work is on money (and other regimes of value) as techno-social practice. At Annenberg, she has worked on the CivicPaths research collaborative and the new Media, Economics, and Entrepreneurship working group. In 2009, she completed a masters in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis was on "fake" luxury fashion. There, she also worked on a teachers' strategy guide and an unconference on cultural geography and new media literacies. As part of TeachForAmerica, she taught high school English in Houston, TX.
Rhea Vichot graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Comparative Media Studies in 2004. She attended New York University and attained a Masters in Cinema Studies as well as a Graduate Certificate in Culture and Media in 2006. In 2009, Rhea received a Masters in Digital Media from Georgia Institute of Technology. At Annenberg, Rhea has conducted continuing research on Anonymous, along with other online countercultures and their relationships to learning, cultural practices, and political and civic engagement. Her current research interests include global popular culture, online and fan communities, and media criticism. In particular, she is interested in subaltern groups that have been historically linked with either 'hacker' culture or 'deviant' subcultures. In addition, she is interested in critical analysis of media, specifically games, both as a medium of commercial art as well as an object for cultural production by designers and players.
USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism
Present:
Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations
April 6, 2012, USC
Conference Overview:
As transmedia models become more central to the ways that the entertainment industry operates, the result has been some dramatic shifts within production culture, shifts in the ways labor gets organized, in how productions get financed and distributed, in the relations between media industries, and in the locations from which creative decisions are being made. This year's Transmedia Hollywood examines the ways that transmedia approaches are forcing the media industry to reconsider old production logics and practices, paving the way for new kinds of creative output. Our hope is to capture these transitions by bringing together established players from mainstream media industries and independent producers trying new routes to the market. We also hope to bring a global perspective to the conversation, looking closely at the ways transmedia operates in a range of different kinds of creative economies and how these different imperatives result in different understandings of what transmedia can contribute to the storytelling process--for traditional Hollywood, the global media industries, and for all the independent media-makers who are taking up the challenge to reinvent traditional media-making for a "connected" audience of collaborators.
Many of Hollywood's entrenched business and creative practices remain deeply mired in the past, weighed down by rigid hierarchies, interlocking bureaucracies, and institutionalized gatekeepers (e.g. the corporate executives, agents, managers, and lawyers). In this volatile moment of crisis and opportunity, as Hollywood shifts from an analog to a digital industry, one which embraces collaboration, collectivity, and compelling uses of social media, a number of powerful independent voices have emerged. These include high-profile transmedia production companies such as Jeff Gomez's Starlight Runner Entertainment as well as less well-funded and well-staffed solo artists who are coming together virtually from various locations across the globe. What these top-down and bottom-up developments have in common is a desire to buck tradition and to help invent the future of entertainment. One of the issues we hope to address today is the social, cultural, and industrial impact of these new forms of international collaboration and mixtures of old and new work cultures.
Another topic that will be addressed is the future of independent film. Will creative commons replace copyright? Will crowdsourcing replace the antiquated foreign sales model? Will the guilds be able to protect the rights of digital laborers who work for peanuts? What about audiences who work for free? Given that most people today spend the bulk of their leisure time online, why aren't independent artists going online and connecting with their community before committing their hard-earned dollars on a speculative project designed for the smallest group of people imaginable--those that frequent art-house theaters?
Fearing obsolescence in the near future, many of Hollywood's traditional studios and networks are looking increasingly to outsiders--often from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue--to teach these old dogs some new tricks. Many current studio and network executives are overseeing in-house agencies, whose names--Sony Interactive Imageworks, NBC Digital, and Disney Interactive Media Group--are meant to describe their cutting-edge activities and differentiate themselves from Hollywood's old guard. Creating media in the digital age is "nice work if you can get it," according to labor scholar Andrew Ross in a recent book of the same name. Frequently situated in park-like "campuses," many of these new, experimental companies and divisions are hiring large numbers of next generation workers, offering them attractive amenities ranging from coffee bars to well-prepared organic food to basketball courts. However, even though these perks help to humanize the workplace, several labor scholars (e.g. Andrew Ross, Mark Deuze, Rosalind Gill) see them as glittering distractions, obscuring a looming problem on the horizon--a new workforce of "temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants."
While the analog model still dominates in Hollywood, the digital hand-writing is on the wall; therefore, the labor guilds, lawyers, and agent/managers must intervene to find ways to restore the eroding power/leverage of creators. In addition, shouldn't the guilds be mindful of the new generation of digital laborers working inside these in-house agencies? What about the creative talent that emerges from Madison Avenue ad agencies like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, makers of the Asylum 626 first-person horror experience for Doritos; or Grey's Advertising, makers of the "Behind the Still" collective campaign for Canon? Google has not only put the networks' 30-second ad to shame using Adword, but its Creative Labs has taken marketing to new aesthetic heights with its breathtaking Johnny Cash [collective] Project. Furthermore, Google's evocative Parisian Love campaign reminds us just how intimately intertwined our real and virtual lives have become.
Shouldn't Hollywood take note that many of its most powerful writers, directors, and producers are starting to embrace transmedia in direct and meaningful ways by inviting artists from the worlds of comic books, gaming, and web design to collaborate? These collaborations enhance the storytelling and aesthetic worlds tenfold, enriching "worlds" as diverse as The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and cable's The Walking Dead. Hopefully, this conference will leave all of us with a broader understanding of what it means to be a media maker today--by revealing new and expansive ways for artists to collaborate with Hollywood media managers, audiences, advertisers, members of the tech culture, and with one another.
This panel seeks to capture the unruly, still unfolding, wild wild west moment of cultural-industrial conversion taking place in both virtual and real-world workplaces as Hollywood looks for top-down solutions to engaging with consumers where they live--online. Once the dominant players in the content industry, Hollywood today is having to look as far away as Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue for collaborators in the 2.0 space. Many in Hollywood are trying to bridge the gap between the old and new ways of doing business, describing their operations as "Silicon Valley startups within a big media company." Disney is buying out the founders of social experiments like Club Penguin, Togetherville, and Playdom in order to reinvent their family business for the connected generation. In each instance, Hollywood's old guard is having to rely on a new generation of entrepreneurs from the tech and geek communities to teach them how to navigate the 21st century.
Break: 11:15-11:30
Panel Two (11:30-1:30): "Creative Economies: Commercial vs. State-Based Models"
Henry Jenkins, moderator
In the United States, transmedia production has been often coupled with issues of promotion and branding, because of the ways that production is funded in a Hollywood studio or network television models. But, around the world, in countries where there is strong state support for media production, alternative forms of transmedia are taking shape, which are governed by different imperatives (cultural, educational, artistic). How has transmedia fit within the effort of nation-states to promote and expand their creative economies? What can commercial media producers learn from these alternative models and approaches? How might these developments further expand our understanding of what transmedia is and what it can contribute to the language of storytelling? What are the advantages and disadvantages of creating transmedia content under these different kinds of creative economies?
Lunch (1:30-2:30)
Panel Three (2:30-4:30): "Working on the Margins--Who Pays for Transformative Works of Art?" Denise Mann, moderator
The independent film industry isn't working any longer--so says powerful indie producer Ted Hope, who now advocates for using transmedia entertainment models that allow media-makers to engage directly with fans, and in the process, rethink old production, marketing, and distribution patterns that no longer make sense in the 21st century. A new generation of media-makers, actors, writers, directors, and producers are taking concrete steps to reinvent bottom-up entertainment for the contemporary, connected, tech-savvy audience. For some independent-minded creators, the best way to connect with today's self-aware audience is by creating a self-mocking, self-reflexive web series like The Guild or Dr. Horrible. For others, the best way to engage with the audience is by creating collective works of art via star-driven companies like hitRECord or Funny or Die. The impulse behind each of these works of collective intelligence is to take art out of the rarified world of crumbling art-house theaters, museums, and galleries and put it back into the hands of the masses-- creating an immersive, interactive, and collective works of transmedia entertainment, made by and for the people who enjoy it most.
Break (4:30-4:45)
Panel 4 (4:45-6:45): "Creative Intersections: How Comics Fit into the Transmedia Ecology"
Henry Jenkins, moderator
By many accounts, the comics industry in the United States struggles to survive, with mainstream titles facing declining readerships, despite some growth in the sales of independent graphic novels through bookstores. Yet, the comics industry has never played a more central role in the entertainment industry as a whole, with comics seeding more and more film and television franchises, and with comics performing important functions within larger transmedia projects. So, how can we understand the paradoxical status of the comics industry? In what ways are these other media outlets helping to subsize the production of printed comics? What kinds of advantages does content audience-tested through comics bring to other media industries? Why have so many television series sought to extend their narratives through graphic novels in recent years? As comics are brought to the screen, what do the producers owe to the fans of the original material as opposed to new viewers who may have little to no awareness of the series' origins in comics? What lessons might transmedia producers learn from the larger history of extended universes and intertexuality within comics?
Moderators:
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or editor of 15 books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) and with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Media and Value in a Networked Culture (Fall, 2012).
Denise Mann
Denise Mann is Associate Professor and Head of the Producers Program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Her most recent book is Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minnesota, 2008). Previously, Mann co-edited Private Screenings: Television & the Female Consumer (Minnesota, 1992) and has published articles on television and consumer culture in a range of journals. Mann served as an associate editor on Camera Obscura, a journal of feminism and film theory, for six years.
Speakers include:
Ivan Askwith
Ivan Askwith is Senior Director of Digital Media at Lucasfilm, where he oversees strategic and creative direction for the wide range of online, mobile, social and cross-platform initiatives that make up the digital presence of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and the company's other properties. Previously, he was the Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship.
Morgan Bouchet
Morgan Bouchet is Transmedia and Social Media Vice President of the Content Division of Orange and is Director of the Orange Transmedia Lab . Orange is a brand of France Telecom, the main telecommunications company in France (and one of the world's largest). Bouchet joined France Telecom in 2000, developing content experiences and Vod products before moving to transmedia and social media. Prior to France Telecom, Bouchet was manager of the New Media division of FKGB, a French entertainment marketing company.
Angela Chen Caplan
Angela Cheng Caplan is the President and CEO of Cheng Caplan Company, Inc., a boutique literary/talent management and production company based in Los Angeles, California, representing Academy Award nominated filmmakers, best-selling book authors, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and world famous comic book creators such as Brian Wood
Katerina Cizek
Director Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning documentary-maker working across many media platforms. Cizek directs the National Film Board of Canada's Highrise series on residential skyscrapers. For five years, she was the National Film Board of Canada's Filmmaker-in-Residence at an inner-city hospital, in a many-media project that won a 2008 Webby Award, a Banff Award, and a Canadian New Media Award.
Sara Diamond
Sara Diamond is the President of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University, Canada's "university of the imagination." Prior to her presidency at OCAD University, Dr. Diamond was the Artistic Director of Media and Visual Art and Director of Research at the Banff Centre, where in 1995 she created the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) and led it for 10 years. Dr. Diamond holds a PhD in computer science and degrees in new media theory and practice, social history, and communications from the United Kingdom and Canada.
Christy Dena
Dr. Christy Dena is the director of Universe Creation 101, an organization that creates and consults cross-media narrative development. As a transmedia analyst, she collaborated with colleagues Tim Kring, Nokia and The company P on Conspiracy for Good, a Digital Emmy-nominated alternate reality experience (2011 Digital Emmy-nominated alternate reality experience. Another recent project includes curating and co-organizing Transmedia Victoria, an industry conference and workshop for the Australia Council of the Arts. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, a postgraduate diploma in Creative Writing from University of Melbourne, and a B.A. in Visual and Performing Arts from Monash University.
Nick De Martino
Nick De Martino is a media and technology consultant and was Senior Vice President of Media and Technology at the American Film Institute for 20 years before retiring in 2010. Under his direction, AFI and Apple Computer developed the first training lab for Hollywood filmmakers, the beginning of many collaborations with high-powered technology companies (that also included Adobe, Intel, and IBM, among others). The Los Angeles Business Journal named De Martino a leader in technology twice, and in 2006, the Hollywood Reporter and the Producer's Guild of America's New Media Council ranked De Martino #3 in the "Digital 50" which recognizes digital innovaters.
Jennifer Holt
Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She specializes in the areas of media industry studies, film and television history, and media policy. Her current research looks at regulation and policy in the era of digitization and convergence. She is the co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Blackwell, 2009) and author of Empires of Entertainment (Rutgers UP, 2011), which examines deregulation and media conglomeration from 1980-1996. She is also the Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center's Media Industries Project.
Ted Hope
Ted Hope has produced Academy-Award nominated independent films such as 21 Grams (2003), The Savages (2007), and In The Bedroom (2001). Three of his entries to the Sundance Film Festival have won the Grand Jury Prize: American Splendor (2003), The Brothers McMullen (1995), and What Happened Was.. (1994). In the early 1990s, he co-founded Good Machine, an independent film production and distribution company that went to become Focus Features. Currently, Hope works from his New York-based indie production house, This Is That, which he co-founded in 2002. He is the recipient of the 2009 Vision Award from the LA Filmmakers' Alliance as well as the Woodstock Film Festival's Honorary Trailblazer Award.
Gareth Kay
Gareth Kay is Chief Strategy Officer of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an ad agency based in San Francisco. He joined GS&P as the Director of Digital Strategy in 2009. Prior to joining GS&P, Kay was Head of Planning at Modernista!, where he oversaw the strategic direction of all accounts including Cadillac, HUMMER, Napster and (RED). Gareth began his career in the UK and worked at TBWA, dfgw and Lowe. Gareth serves on the boards of Boulder Digital Works and the VCU Brandcenter, and sits on the Google Creative Leadership Council.
Katherine Keller
Katherine Keller is a "Founding Tart" and the current Culture Vultures
Editrix at Sequential Tart. She is married to Ralph Mathieu, owner of
the Eisner nominated Alternate Reality Comics. (Yes, she married her
neighborhood comic shop owner.) In her day job she works at the Lied
Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is passionate about
comics, pop culture, fandom, and open access publishing.
Joe LeFavi
Joe LeFavi, is a transmedia producer and brand strategist who launched consultancy Quixotic Transmedia in 2010. His company provided the transmedia strategy for Immortals (2011), Relativity Media's highest grossing film. He has also collaborated with I am Rogue, Lionsgate and Crest Animation. In addition, his company has published motion comics for Platinum's Cowboys & Aliens, numerous titles for Archaia such as Immortals and Johnny Recon, and over 100+ titles for The Jim Henson Company, which includes their line of Archaia graphic novels.
Jordan Levin
Jordan Levin is founding partner and CEO of Generate, a management and cross-platform production company in Los Angeles. Levin is best known for co-founding the WB, where he where he helped develop a distinctive brand of young-skewing shows (Dawson's Creek, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and served as the youngest-ever network CEO.
Sheila C. Murphy
Shelia C. Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan. Murphy is also the author of How Television Invented New Media (Rutgers UP, 2011). She received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Rochester and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine. From teletubbies to cybernetics, television to "convergence," net.art and hacking, her interest lies in visual discourse of and cultural rhetoric about how, why, when and where we use computers and incorporate them into our everyday life.
Jose Padhila
Jose Padhila is a Brazilian filmmaker and producer. His credits include Bus 174, Elite Squad, and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, a trilogy that explores corruption and brutality in Brazil. Elite Squad won the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008, one of Padhila's many filmmaking awards. Upcoming films include Robocop, Words with Gods and Rio, eu te amo.
Mike Richardson
Mike Richardson is the current president of Dark Horse Comics, a comics publishing company he founded in 1986, as well as the president of Dark Horse Entertainment, which has developed and produced numerous projects for film and television based on Dark Horse or other licensed properties. Dark Horse publishes many licensed comics, including comics based on Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Aliens, Predator, Mass Effect, and Conan; the company also publishes creator owned comics such as Frank Miller's Sin City and 300, Mike Mignola's Hellboy, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, Paul Chadwick's Concrete, and Michael Chabon's The Escapist.
Mark Verheiden
Mark Verheiden is a writer for comics, movies, and television. He is a co-executive producer for the television series Falling Skies for DreamWorks Television and the TNT Network. Verheiden was also a writer and consulting producer for Heroes and a a writer and co-executive producer on the television series Battlestar Galactica. Verheiden's introduction into writing comics came in June 1987, when he penned The American, which was published by Dark Horse Comics. Verheiden has written many series for Dark Horse based on both the Aliens and Predator series of films.
Mary Vogt
Mary Vogt is a costume designer who has been Emmy-nominated for her work on Pushing Daisies (2008). She was the costume designer for the Men in Black movies, Batman Returns (1992), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and the 2010 Tamil (South Asian) science fiction blockbuster, Endhiran (Robot).
The USC School of Cinematic Arts is located at 900 W. 34th St., Los Angeles, CA 90007. Parking passes are available for Parking Structure D (PSD) for $8.00 at Entrance Gate #4, located off Jefferson Blvd. at Royal Street (east of Hoover Street). The School of Cinematic Arts is down 34th Street (heading away from Figueroa) from the Parking Structure. To view a map of the Parking Structures and Entrance Gates, visit http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/
Conference Pass (includes admission to all panels and reception)
As more and more colleges and universities are teaching courses in transmedia enertainment, crossmedia design, and convergence culture, Transmedia Hollywood wants to invite people interested in exchanging resources or trading experiences to gather for a special "birds of a feather" meeting at the Annenberg Innovation Lab on the eve of the conference -- April 5 -- at 7 pm. If you want to come, drop me a note at hjenkins@usc.edu
Becky, you looked at Harry Potter fan culture as part of your involvement in the Digital Youth Project. What insights did you gain there about fandom as a site of informal learning and how did they feed into this current project about Harry Potter in schools?
The research I did with Potter fans for the Digital Youth Project focused on understanding interest-driven participation and was primarily concerned with media makers--podcasters, fan fiction writers, artists, and so on. Key to the way we on the Digital Youth Project understood interest-driven participation was an element of independence from school curricula or conventional status hierarchies; the practices we examined were things that young people seemed to pick up on their own rather than embarking on them as part of a class project or because of shared interests with friends from school or their neighborhoods. (Of course, we found that interests rarely develop completely independently. There is usually a person/persons or shared experience that kick-starts interest-driven participation.)
Working with fans was an amazing experience and extremely helpful for understanding learning in "informal" sites. I put "informal" in quotes here because one of the most interesting things I found working with fans was just how much organization, dedication, and expertise go into fans' practices. The rules and hierarchies of fandom are different from those that dominate school or the paid workforce--in general, more inclusive, less concerned with traditional markers of status (like age), and a bit more flexible--but I they certainly have a structure and logic to them. Some of the teens I interviewed in my research spent as much time producing podcasts, maintaining websites, or writing as they would if it were a full-time job. Others balanced Potter activities with others at school, such as working on the yearbook or school newspaper, mixing and matching the practices and skills involved in each activity to create their own style of production.
My fandom research fed into Teaching Harry Potter in a number of ways. Most importantly, it's how Cathy and I met and became colleagues and friends! (We just happened to sit next to each other at the closing feast at E7--a Potter camp for families we describe in the book--and, as they say, the rest is history.) Beyond that, having seen numerous, diverse examples of rich learning and motivation for participation emerging around the Potter series helped me better understand and describe what was (and what could be) happening in schools. As readers will see in our chapters on technology and "imagining more," we believe that learners (regardless of the setting) have specific needs and rights that can be addressed through thoughtful, careful resourcing and approaches to teaching and learning. Further, we believe that civic participation and a commitment to social justice are essential to meaningful learning and participation--something we learned from our friends at the Harry Potter Alliance and various Wizard Rockers. (More on that in a minute.)
One of the challenges I faced in shifting my focus to the school based research was not setting up a dichotomy of interest-driven fan practices versus what was happening in classrooms. Certainly, the students in Andrew, Allegra, and Sandra's classrooms had a different kind of shared reading experience than did many of the fans I worked with, one that was not independent from school but rather prompted and scaffolded by their teachers and shared with their classmates through specific assignments and classroom activities. This doesn't mean that it was inferior to what the fans were doing--just different. As we worked on Teaching Harry Potter, I think I came to a better understanding of how powerful school experiences can be for introducing and supporting interests on one hand--and just how treacherous it can be for teachers and students alike if schools do not allow for experiences that can lead to exploring deep interests.
You close the book by imagining what a more perfect school structure would look like and what it would mean in the lives of the kids you studied. Can you share some of that vision?
We use the image of the Mirror of Erised--the powerful magical mirror that allows one to see his/her deepest desires--to frame our discussion of what public education could (and should) look like. Although multiple reveals from the Mirror are not canon, we take four glimpses into the mirror to see the following things:
Expert teachers engaged as leaders and trusted professionals: as the featured teachers' stories reflect, opportunities to exercise agency, make decisions about curriculum, and be creative in one's teaching are not always available to teachers. In our ideal vision of schooling, this situation would be different and teachers would be not only allowed to teach in the ways they feel are best for their students, but encouraged and supported in doing so.
Universal access to technology and new media learning tools: in the book, we described some of the ways that schools use educational media and technology as similar to using the Polyjuice Potion--using technology to disguise bad pedagogy, resulting in those technologies being used in insignificant and spurious ways. Instead of continuing to "Polyjuice" technology and new media, we'd like to see schools learn how to adopt and integrate them in ways that support robust, student-driven learning.
Emphasis on Experiential, Student- Driven Learning: We want to see students and teachers working side-by-side on projects that matter to them. As we mentioned earlier, there is a strong social justice component to the Potter series that has been picked up by various groups within the fandom, the Harry Potter Alliance in particular. The HPA is a great example of experiential learning, as its campaigns focus on getting young people out into the world to enact change. While we recognize that not every student nor every teacher will have the same commitment to social justice, we value the notion of experiential learning--whether that is in relation to world events or mathematics--and wish for more equitable access to such experiences.
Authentic Tasks as the Central Form of Student--and Teacher--Assessment: in our final look in the Mirror, we see one outcome of the above-mentioned emphasis on experiential learning--an educational system that does not rely on standardized assessment and scripted curriculums. Instead, both teachers and students are assessed in ways that are sensitive to their particular needs and that encourage confidence in future practice.
These four elements are certainly not the only positive changes we can imagine for schools, but they represent a significant start. They also represent a turn toward a more caring, trusting, and loving educational system. After all, it is the power of love, not magic, that is the most important lesson Harry has taught us.
Catherine Belcher works with LA's Promise, a nonprofit organization focused on improving schools and empowering neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. She currently serves as the Director of Teaching and Learning at West Adams Preparatory High School. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where her work focused on Latino educational history and language access. She then served as a new teacher supervisor at St. Joe's University in Philadelphia and as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. A lifelong educator, Catherine taught social studies at both the secondary and middle school levels, and has served as a mentor, lead teacher, and curriculum designer. She has presented on the use of Harry Potter in educational spaces at several conferences, including Enlightening 2007, Azkatraz (2009), Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). Catherine lives in LA with her husband and 11 year old daughter, a Potter aficionado in her own right who proudly displays the Ravenclaw banner in her room, although some days she joins her mom in the Gryffindor common room so they can talk books and dare each other to try eating the grey Bertie Botts Beans.
Becky Herr-Stephenson is a media researcher focused on teaching and learning with popular culture and technology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 2008. She has been a part of several organizations and projects aimed at informing and inciting innovation in education, including the Digital Media and Learning Hub within the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Currently, she is working as a Research Associate with the Annenberg Innovation Lab through a partnership between USC and the Cooney Center. She is a co-author (with Mizuko Ito and others) of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009, MIT Press). Becky has presented papers on Harry Potter and youth culture at a number of conferences, most recently, Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). She lives in Los Angeles and is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her first child, who she hopes will be sorted into Ravenclaw (not Slytherin).
One of your teachers faced pushed back from students that the Harry Potter series were books for white kids. Perhaps many readers are thinking the same thing. Yet your title stresses their value for the "multicultural classroom." So, what do the books offer for children of color? How does this approach to "multiculturalism" differ from approaches which seek to match students with writers from the same ethnic and racial background?
In the book, we talk about what we mean by "multicultural" education (all the students and teachers in Teaching Harry Potter are of color and therefore bicultural, meaning they negotiate their home and school cultures on a daily basis) and what we believe, and have seen, the Potter books contribute to the educational process within these settings. The first thing we question is the idea that the "whiteness" of the books negates their use in multicultural classrooms. The nature of the books themselves - their complexity and Rowling's willingness to take on difficult and contemporary issues such as racism, genocide, classism, and difference - make them uniquely valuable, and each of the three teachers illustrate this to great effect in their accounts.
We discuss three features that make the Potter books central to the teachers in our book: Harry's status as a "newcomer" to the Wizarding world - to which Sandra's largely immigrant students relate, a normalization of difference - utilized to great effect by Allegra with her special education students, and the opportunity for multiple interpretations of the text - particularly useful for Andrew's students, but employed by all three teachers. Again, teacher capacity and quality are paramount here. We're looking beyond a base reading of the text; the quality of the approach, interaction and reading experience makes all the difference. One can certainly read Harry Potter simply as a book about white kids in an English boarding school. None of the Teaching Harry Potter teachers took that route - which one might call the dark and easy path. Instead, they challenged their students to use Harry Potter to help them tackle difficult social topics and academic exercises, and to do this with the belief that there was definitely something in Harry's story they could use to help them grow as learners and people.
It's also important to note that we firmly believe in access to literature from multiple arenas; classics and books reflecting a diversity of authors, including those matching the students' background, are vitally important for young readers. But access to a particularly valuable popular work like Harry Potter is important because of its accessibility and all it has to offer. On another level, it is also important because so many white, middle to upper middle class kids DO have ample access to Potter and other popular series at home and at school. In many ways, building students' reading confidence, helping them discover that yes, they too can tackle a book of this length or "that style," whether they end up feeling it is ultimately for them or not, is the most valuable accomplishment.
What's striking about the teacher stories running through the book is the degree to which each adopted their instruction to the particular needs of their students, finding the Harry Potter books to be a highly flexible resource in that regard. How does this customization and remixing process differ from the standard ways that schools are thinking about curriculum in this age of No Child Left Behind?
Finding space for customizing/remixing curriculum was one of the biggest challenges the teachers in our book faced. By not following the standardized curriculum, they were doing something subversive--and, as their stories reflect, they often had trouble getting support from administration and colleagues. Despite the challenges they faced, however, each of the teachers featured in the book did a beautiful job of adapting Potter for their classrooms. Whether we are talking about Sandra, who read the book in Spanish with her ELL students, Allegra, who used the audio books to support her special education students' particular needs for reading support, or Andrew, who approached the book as an accessible gateway to challenging AP content, it is clear in each teacher's story that the needs of her/his students were primary influences on the decisions made around reading the books. In talking with the participating teachers, it seems that the rich stories in the Potter books provided unique opportunities for discussion, analysis, and connection with students' lives. Moreover, just the experience of reading an entire popular book together--as opposed to the excerpts and readers associated with the standardized curriculum--appears to have offered opportunities for deep, meaningful learning.
This kind of responsive teaching is radically different from the standardized curricula commonly found in schools, not because teachers prefer standardization (although some certainly must), but because standardization is thought to be more efficient and its results more easily measurable. As we discuss in more detail in the book, most current policy initiatives reward efficiency and demand accountability--and neither reward nor require responsiveness, flexibility, or creativity. All of this adds up to a demoralizing and frustrating culture for teaching in which teachers' expertise is put to the side in favor of standardized content and methods. Fortunately, the teachers featured in Teaching Harry Potter pushed back hard against these negative forces, instead focusing on how they could provide meaningful learning opportunities for all of their students, even when reading Potter meant working around (and/or subverting) the prescribed reading curriculum--and taking considerable criticism from colleagues and supervisors for doing so.
While each teacher had his/her own approaches to customizing the reading/learning experience, Allegra's story stands out as particularly salient to the topic of adaptation/remixing. A creative and dedicated teacher, Allegra wanted to support her students' developing reading skills and practices and felt that multimedia tools like the series' audio books could supplement the instruction and assistance she could provide for students one-on-one as well as to the class as a whole. As they worked through the first Potter book, Allegra's students moved fluidly between the printed text and multimedia by reading along with the audio books. The highly-engaging audio books provided students with a model for fluent reading as well as created a situation in which students could focus more attention on listening to and comprehending the story rather than struggling to decode every word themselves.
Allegra's story also stands out in relation to adaptation because Allegra was working with special education students. As discussed in Allegra's chapter, Harry Potter is a great book series for use in special education for a number of reasons, a key one being the prominence of "difference" as a theme in the series. All Hogwarts students are special in that they have magical abilities; some (like Neville) require more support for learning than others (like Hermione), and others (like Harry) seem to benefit from an alternative, customized curriculum. As Allegra notes in her chapter, seeing varied, positive representations of difference was beneficial to her students.
Harry Potter's status in the literary canon is still being debated and many teachers may see it as "mere popular culture" and not sufficiently literary to bring into school. Given the choices they face in schools with a diminishing focus on reading in any form, what's the case for why we should teach Harry Potter and not say Animal Farm?
Why not both? Granted, the limitations you speak of do exist and districts, schools and teachers must make increasingly difficult decisions about what to include, there are creative ways to include popular books in the curriculum. Andrew, who is the high school AP English teacher in our book, never actually reads complete Potter books with his students. Instead, he uses key excerpts from both the books and the movies to support teaching particular literary aspects. In using these regularly, his students gain a sense of the stories and many end up reading the books on their own. Sandra does read one book a year with her students, but it takes a great deal of planning to make it work, including framing her rationale for using the books. The key for all three of the teachers in our book is a set of very clear goals for their students around using Harry Potter. They don't just read Harry Potter because it's fun or the teachers like the books.
Each teacher uses the texts or movies to teach specific points in the curriculum, encourage habits of mind, or build stamina around reading. All three share the goal of building their students' confidence as readers; because Harry is accessible and also smartly written (it links to so many literary traditions, for example) each teacher uses it to catch his/her students by surprise - eventually each class realizes they've engaged the story, understand it, can connect it to other stories and text, and can discuss its merits and/or weaknesses, in many cases using high level academic language, as in the case of Andrew's AP English class. His students would certainly be primed to critically examine Animal Farm, for example. They hold a "literary confidence" not necessarily present previous to discussing/analyzing Potter.
The debate around including popular texts in school curriculum will certainly remain a constant, especially since debates around which "classics" to include in English courses seems never ending. But there is certainly a current wave of coolness around reading - prompted by Potter and sustained by such series as The Hunger Games - that if recognized, harnessed, and used could serve to help students connect to the "classic" texts that have actually influenced a great deal of popular works.
How do we measure the success of these teachers' attempts to use Harry Potter to engage with their students? And why do you think that school systems are so slow to recognize and reward this kind of success?
Measuring teacher success - successful teaching - is probably the biggest educational debate right now. The growth over time data we talked about above is one example of how teachers are increasingly measured by one of the few types of hard data that are produced by teachers and schools en masse. Otherwise, the criteria for "success" becomes more objective and therefore difficult to define and evaluate in large numbers. In the book, we include a list of 9 "shared commonalities" - characteristics the Teaching Harry Potter teachers hold in common that we believe serve as the basis for (and evidence of) their success. One of these does include standardized test scores, but that serves more as one criteria, not the central identifiable aspect of the teachers' success. To our mind, these commonalities are identifiable and clearly contribute to student success. However, we spent time talking with the teachers, getting to know their philosophy and role in their respective schools. It took time to identify the roots of their success, something schools and districts don't have a lot of to work with.
We also hold a particular view of what it means to be a successful teacher. For example, we believe popular culture and media are valuable in school and consider wise and appropriate use of them with students a mark of great teaching. Many would disagree, however. We could spend a long time arguing our point, which we've done, actually, and still not have any kind of consensus on the issue, let alone on how to measure what using popular culture successfully would look like. This is one of the major obstacles faced by each of the teachers in our book, they had to constantly justify their use of Harry Potter books and media and in some cases were actually allowed to use the books because of their successful testing records. So, in the end reading Harry Potter with one's students became the reward for the kind of "success" that could be easily and "objectively" measured - and that's where school districts and policy makers live right now.
Catherine Belcher works with LA's Promise, a nonprofit organization focused on improving schools and empowering neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. She currently serves as the Director of Teaching and Learning at West Adams Preparatory High School. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where her work focused on Latino educational history and language access. She then served as a new teacher supervisor at St. Joe's University in Philadelphia and as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. A lifelong educator, Catherine taught social studies at both the secondary and middle school levels, and has served as a mentor, lead teacher, and curriculum designer. She has presented on the use of Harry Potter in educational spaces at several conferences, including Enlightening 2007, Azkatraz (2009), Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). Catherine lives in LA with her husband and 11 year old daughter, a Potter aficionado in her own right who proudly displays the Ravenclaw banner in her room, although some days she joins her mom in the Gryffindor common room so they can talk books and dare each other to try eating the grey Bertie Botts Beans.
Becky Herr-Stephenson is a media researcher focused on teaching and learning with popular culture and technology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 2008. She has been a part of several organizations and projects aimed at informing and inciting innovation in education, including the Digital Media and Learning Hub within the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Currently, she is working as a Research Associate with the Annenberg Innovation Lab through a partnership between USC and the Cooney Center. She is a co-author (with Mizuko Ito and others) of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009, MIT Press). Becky has presented papers on Harry Potter and youth culture at a number of conferences, most recently, Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). She lives in Los Angeles and is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her first child, who she hopes will be sorted into Ravenclaw (not Slytherin).
Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr- Shepardson's Teaching Harry Potter: The Power of Imagination in the Multicultural Classroom is quite simply one of the most powerful and engaging books I've read about American education in a long time, and I strongly recommend it to the full range of people who read this blog -- those who are fans, those who are teachers, and those who care about the future of learning.
Teaching Harry Potter tells a powerful story about the current state of American education, one which contrasts the enthusiasm many young people and educators feel towards J.K. Rowling's remarkable book series and the constraints which No Child Left Behind-era policies have imposed on how reading gets taught in the classroom. Reading this book produced powerful emotional responses--an enormous respect for the teachers described here who are battling to engage with their students in meaningful and timely ways and despair over some of the obstacles they must overcome in doing so. There's much to be optimistic here in the ways these teachers care deeply enough about their students to take intellectual and professional risks and much that is disheartening about the ways that the system crushes opportunities that all recognize are valuable but which do not fit within the formal "standards."
The two writers move back and forth between a nuanced reading of J.K. Rowling's books which considers how they represent the value of education, detailed accounts of what teachers have been doing with the books as they adapt them for a range of multicultural classes, and big picture considerations of educational policy and pedagogical practice. You can learn more about this book and its authors on Teaching Harry Potter's official website and on the authors' blog.
The following is the first installment of a three part interview with the writers, during which they use Harry Potter to pose some powerful critiques of what's working and what's not in contemporary American education.
Let's start with the question that frames your introduction -- Why Harry Potter? What does this book series help us to understand about the contemporary state of American education?
We chose to use Harry Potter to explore American education because of the powerful things the series has to say about teaching and learning. Even though the magical school system in the Potter books more closely resembles British schools (and, one might say, a particular, nostalgic view of British schools) than the American public schools we discuss in our book, we saw important parallels between how issues such as childhood and adolescence, power (both political and personal), knowledge, literacy, and even media and technology were discussed in the books and how they are discussed in contemporary education. For example, teachers we have worked with have often discussed the challenge of balancing students' informational needs with the school district's desire for "safety" (which can mean anything from approved book lists to highly-restrictive firewalls on school networks); a similar theme is evident in Harry's interactions with Dumbledore and other Hogwarts faculty who struggled with questions about how and when to share information with Harry and his classmates.
The Potter series also reminds us of the importance of looking carefully and closely at situations--as things are not always what they seem to be at first glance--and of the importance of listening to alternative narratives. Both of these things seem particularly salient in relation to the state of contemporary American education, which, when viewed as a whole, seems very much like a lost cause. Looking closer, however, it is apparent that there are great and creative teachers, committed administrators, communities dedicated to supporting their schools, and students who, when given the resources they need, do extraordinary things. It is unfortunate that these stories are so often drowned out by discussions of standardized policy and procedure, as they are important reminders of what is possible. The exclusion of the Harry Potter books themselves, or the "strangeness" of including them in school reading lists, speaks to this as well. The assumption that they are simple children's books belies so much of their meaning and potential.
Further, we love the spirit of learning in Harry Potter: students taking ownership over their own learning and teaching one another; reading books from the restricted section of the library; finding secret passageways to Hogsmeade. Hogwarts students seem to have a sense of autonomy, adventurousness, and wonderment that we wish for all students.
A few pages into the book, you have already framed it as a defense of teachers. Why do teachers need defending? Why do they deserve defending?
Teachers, great teachers, definitely need defending in today's climate. We realize that not all teachers are created equal, and that there is a great need to improve teacher preparation, hiring policies, evaluation, and retention in public schools, particularly in large, urban school districts. However in the book, we talk about how the current climate around accountability, measuring teacher quality by test scores, and the role of teacher unions in protecting ineffective teachers has created a situation where the voices and needs of high quality teachers are being drowned out. Can we really afford that? We felt it vital to draw attention to the work of passionate, highly skilled teachers, to make the counter argument that they exist and are indeed out there - and that they are innovative and current in their approach. We also thought it important to highlight the tensions these teachers deal with in trying to continue their work and grow as creative professionals under the current political climate.
We also believe it is important to discuss the fact that there is more than one way to talk about good teaching. Most of the public discussion today centers on measuring teachers in some manner, usually through their students' test scores, which in many ways make sense since those are the one set of hard, "objective" measures available. Scores also provide a quick and easy answer. But good teaching is about much more than test scores - as is evidenced by Sandra, Andrew and Allegra. We are straightforward about the fact that their students do indeed test well, but we don't focus on that particular aspect of their work. What becomes clear in these three teachers' accounts is that they do much more than test preparation in their classrooms. They work - and often struggle - with making their pedagogy more nuanced and layered as they strive to offer a richer experience for their students. It is also important to note that they work with urban, and/or high poverty students of color, who are more often "test-prepped" and remediated than their suburban counterparts. Do teachers such as these, who believe in their students and work against the grain to offer them a rich literary experience deserve defending? Yes, most definitely. The task is figuring out how to balance that need within a system that currently throws all teachers into the same pot, regardless of their track record with students.
Harry Potter is a series of books about education. What insights might teachers take for their own pedagogical practice from studying the various teachers and administrators depicted in the book?
One of the most important insights teachers might take from the characterizations of teachers and administrators in the books is an understanding of how students perceive them. The Hogwarts faculty members are, by and large, portrayed as archetypes: Minerva McGonagall (stern and confident), Severus Snape (bitter and cruel), Remus Lupin (caring expert), Gilderoy Lockhart (inexperienced and self-absorbed), Albus Dumbledore (wise sage), and so on. Because readers only learn about the teachers through Harry's experiences with them, we spend much of the series not knowing much about them, their backgrounds, or their motivations. Teachers in the series--like many teachers in American schools--knew much more about their students than vice versa. While we're certainly not advocating that teachers give up all rights to privacy, we do think that it's important to be aware of the fact that most students navigate schools with a very incomplete picture of who their teachers are as people--and that this lack of information can serve as an impediment to connecting with teachers, even those who are very skilled and willing to act as caring mentors.
For the teachers we profile in Teaching Harry Potter, the Potter books provided a way to share a bit of themselves with their students by sharing a piece of media about which they were passionate. Now, not all of the featured teachers were die-hard Potter fans (though several definitely would describe themselves that way), but all enjoyed the books, identified their value for their students, and went to great lengths to share the books in their classrooms. Their dedication to brokering access to the books for their students and to creating engaging reading experiences that recognized students' different needs and desires is admirable.
Another thing that teachers might take from the Potter series is the value it places on experiential education--that is, teaching and learning that is grounded in students' real lives, that gets them up, out of their seats, and interacting with one another as well as with people outside of the classroom. Take, for example, Professor Lupin's lesson on defeating Dementors with the Riddikulous spell--this exercise challenged students to use magic that was extremely relevant to their lives at that moment and, although the lesson itself was loud, rambunctious, and risky, it was also highly effective in teaching students a spell they could immediately apply outside of the classroom.
Moves toward standardization of curriculum are generally moves away from experiential learning, as experiential learning needs to be connected to specific contexts, moments in students' lives and in the schooling process. It takes a great deal of creativity and bravery for teachers to privilege this kind of learning in the classroom, especially in the current educational climate in the U.S.
Catherine Belcher works with LA's Promise, a nonprofit organization focused on improving schools and empowering neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. She currently serves as the Director of Teaching and Learning at West Adams Preparatory High School. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where her work focused on Latino educational history and language access. She then served as a new teacher supervisor at St. Joe's University in Philadelphia and as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. A lifelong educator, Catherine taught social studies at both the secondary and middle school levels, and has served as a mentor, lead teacher, and curriculum designer. She has presented on the use of Harry Potter in educational spaces at several conferences, including Enlightening 2007, Azkatraz (2009), Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). Catherine lives in LA with her husband and 11 year old daughter, a Potter aficionado in her own right who proudly displays the Ravenclaw banner in her room, although some days she joins her mom in the Gryffindor common room so they can talk books and dare each other to try eating the grey Bertie Botts Beans.
Becky Herr-Stephenson is a media researcher focused on teaching and learning with popular culture and technology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 2008. She has been a part of several organizations and projects aimed at informing and inciting innovation in education, including the Digital Media and Learning Hub within the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Currently, she is working as a Research Associate with the Annenberg Innovation Lab through a partnership between USC and the Cooney Center. She is a co-author (with Mizuko Ito and others) of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009, MIT Press). Becky has presented papers on Harry Potter and youth culture at a number of conferences, most recently, Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). She lives in Los Angeles and is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her first child, who she hopes will be sorted into Ravenclaw (not Slytherin).
As you note, images of India in the west are often shaped by the legacy of orientalism. In what ways does the western response to Bollywood dance perpetuate rather than challenge orientalism?
To me the themes of nostalgia and orientalism have emerged as a bit of a paradoxical relationship in the case of Bollywood dance. On one hand, Indian dance has functioned, among other things, as a lesson in Indianness for first, second and even third generation Indian dance. Though less rigid in its adherence to protocols and certainly more hybrid in content, Bollywood dance has also approximated this function for Indian-American youth. The West's growing interest in Indian dance both complicated and perpetuates these desires for Indianness as both are shaped by a particular imagined India. Both the nostalgic and orientalized gaze tend towards opulent and recognizably Indian movements, gestures and costumes. But unlike the nostalgic gaze, the foreign interest in India, particularly the one in continental Europe, sometime borders on a slightly condescending fascination with kitsch. To me, this labeling of Bollywood with kitsch and the slightly condescending (though perhaps well intentioned) interest that this generates is where the legacies of Orientalism are perpetuated through Bollywood dance. As I write in my book, I see Bollywood dance as unintentional kitsch.
Though very different in intention, Bollywood dance driven by nostalgia and Bollywood dance informed by orientalism can at times look very similar as they both tend to highlight a idealized kind of Indianness. That said, there are differences in the nuances of how these motivations for Bollywood dance manifest. These nuances, however, may only be intelligible to a very small percentage of audience-members.
In India, there seems to be a perception that Bollywood dance is too much influenced by western music and dance cultures, where-as in the United States, it is often read in relation to the politics of multiculturalism. What is it about the dances themselves which invite such radically different interpretations?
The simple answer to this question would be to say that, given the large number of Hindi films produced every year and the global reach of the industry, we should not be surprised that there are conflicting definitions of what Bollywood dance means and does. There is certainly some truth in this especially when we consider that the various narrative contexts of the song-and-dance sequences. Conservative heroines need to move in ways that are appropriate to their convictions. Worldly heroes need to demonstrate this through their globally informed dance style. Narratives demand that Bollywood dance incorporate many cultures and styles. Live Bollywood dancers can then just pick and choose the movement content that best suits their needs and preferences.
There is, however, a more complex answer that builds on this inherent narrative diversity. I believe that it is really the hybrid mixing of dance styles and cultures, which defined Hindi film song-and-dances since early days of cinema, that lies at the heart of Bollywood dance. This mixing also supports the various at times conflicting definitions of Bollywood dance. The hybridity of movement contained within Bollywood dances in turn allows people to pick and choose the elements that most reflect their personal preference and aspirations. This is why Bollywood dance can mean different things to different people in different contexts. The specific meanings associated with the genre of Bollywood dance can thus become extremely localized while at the same time remaining connected to the Hindi cinema's international trends and flows.
As you note, one constant in the Bollywood cinema has been that the songs "have always been embedded in the narratives in Hindi films." Yet, another constant, surely, is that the songs (and the dances, as you note) also circulate outside the film. What do you see as the relationship between these two different contexts? As you trace the way Hindi film music and dance circulates beyond the film itself, what aspects of the narrative significance remains and what gets redefined? What roles do the narrative context play in shaping the choices different dance schools make about which numbers are appropriate for their students to perform?
Yes, Bollywood song-and-dance sequences live outside films as much as they live in them. Hindi film songs (and the accompanying videos) are often released months before the actual film to help promote the film. The recent case of the surprise hit "Kolaveri Di" is an exceptional example of how effective this strategy can be. Notably, Kolaveri Di, did not actually contain any choreographed dance. The song spread quickly through the internet, garnering more than 37 million views in advance of the release of the Tamil language film 3 that it was composed for:
A portion of the many people who saw the song on Youtube.com (or one of its many response "avatars") surely made plans to actually see the film when it is released in 2012.
Similarly, there are many instances when a song-and-dance sequence endures even as the popularity of the film that contained it fades away. The "Choli Ke Peeche" (What is behind the blouse?) song-and-dance sequence from the film Khalnayak (1993) is a perfect example of this.
That said, there are many layers of meaning within a song-and-dance sequence. Audiences who have seen the film that contained the sequence are more able to interpret the nuances in a song-and-dance that refer directly to the plot. If they are very familiar with Hindi films, they may even be able to pick up on some inter-textual references that connect that particular film and dance to other earlier cinematic works. Inter-textual references to other films, subplots and even real-life events outside the film's narrative are quite common in Hindi films. Audiences familiar with neither the film nor the references that it contains are left to their own devices in interpreting a song-and-dance sequence that circulates outside the film.
Both the narrative and extra-narrative circulation of song-and-dance sequences have implications for Bollywood dance. Dance instructors need to be aware of the possible meanings that may be associated with any given Hindi film song before they teach it to their students. This seems to be particularly true to Bollywood instructors outside India where the appropriateness is a key consideration in choosing songs.
Given some of the cultural sensitive issues you discuss, and given the uncertain cultural status of Bollywood itself among intellectuals, what has been the reception of your book so far in India and Nepal?
In a stark departure from the scorn it used to receive, Bollywood has gained prominence in academic and other intellectual circles in India in recent years. There is even talk that it is now hip to study Bollywood! In that sense, I am happy to note that my book has been released at a good time and the overall positive response I have received so far confirms it. A few valid minor quibbles aside, the reviews of my book in both Nepal and India have been overwhelmingly positive. I have also been quite surprised with how much attention my book has garnered given the saturated book market in India. I have even been featured in Marie Claire! Flatteringly, the Sunday Indian said my is "a fine blend of in depth research, humour, and astute cultural sensitivity." So far, the reviewers have also generally voiced a general agreement with the points I put forward in Is It All About Hips? In Nepal, a positive review of my book in the Nepali Times (a prominent Nepali weekly) elicited an interesting exchange in the comments section with some commenters suggesting that I was "another Nepali turned Indian" and that "Bollywood makes for some cheap and easy popularity." Paradoxically, these comments actually confirmed my observations about Nepalis national identity and troubled relationship to India. As the Marie Claire (December 2011) feature on the book states: "Whether you love 'em or hate them, the world cannot resist Bollywood."
You can find out more about Sangita Shresthova's work on Bollywood and dance at: www.bollynatyam.com.
Sangita Shresthova: A Czech/Nepali scholar, filmmaker, dancer and media scholar, Sangita's work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), AIGA Boston/ATE Massaging Media Conference (Boston), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), and Akademi's Frame by Frame (London, UK). She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures and earned a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on Hindi film dance. Sangita is also founder of Bollynatyam (www.bollynatyam.com). She currently works with Professor Henry Jenkins on questions related to participatory culture, new media, and civic engagement.
Sangita Shreshtova, a 2003 Alumni of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, recently published an informative and engaging new book, Is It All About the Hips?: Around the World With Bollywood Dance, which explores some important questions at the intersections of transnational media, participatory culture, and film performance. She writes with the experienced eye of someone who is herself a gifted dancer and choreographer and with the theoretical sophistication of someone who has gone through several top academic programs.
This engaging ethnography explores the ways Bollywood dance is moving off the screen and into the everyday lives of fans all over the planet, through attentive close studies of what performance means in a range of different local contexts (from London and Los Angeles to Kathmandu). Shreshthova knows from her own work as an organizer of the Prague Bollywood Film Festival that these films, their music, and their dance cultures, are traveling not only to places where there is a strong South Asian diasporic community but also into places which have had limited history of contact with India before. This is part of the fascination of our current moment where popular culture is being circulated across traditional borders in ways which produce unexpected consequences.
I have been lucky enough to have worked with Shreshtova, first as my graduate student at MIT and now as the research director on the CivicPaths project here at USC, so it is a source of great pride and pleasure to be able to share with you this interview. Here, she shares both her own journey to write this book and some core insights about the transnational contexts within which contemporary popular and participatory culture operates.
In your acknowledgements, you describe Bollywood dance as "a messy, yet appealing, reflection on my own scattered cultural identity." What aspects of your autobiography did you draw upon in shaping this book? Is there something about Bollywood entertainment which speaks especially to the diasporic experience?
While my book is based in ethnographic and academic research, there are certainly some autobiographical elements that informed its final shape. For one, my initial encounters with Hindi films are interwoven with my own cultural struggles to define my Czech-Nepali mixed race identity growing up in Kathmandu. It was during this time that I was first drawn to the hybrid content of Hindi film song-and-dance sequences. Much later, I was once again drawn to Hindi films as a homesick undergraduate student at Princeton University. At that time, I was so grateful to the Indian students who shared their Bollywood audio and video collections with me. The songs and images became an accessible way for me to feel connected to a familiar culture in ways that somehow eased the profound isolation that dominated my initial years in the United States. Watching the films also connected me with other students in similar situations.
Films like Pardes (1997) really catered to diasporic nostalgia. Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardes_(film)
When I returned to the study of Bollywood as a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, I, of course, drew on these early experiences with Bollywood. I then combined my research with my training in dance and media.
So yes, to me, Bollywood films, in general, are very well suited to the diasporic experience. For one, they provide accessible familiar content that can be shared in the community. To me, the hybrid nature of the films themselves is also particularly well suited to the fragmented identities that emerge out of particular diasporic experiences. And, Bollywood dance specifically is an eloquent commentary on the juxtaposition of the global flow of media enabled by media technologies and the physical experience of these images on a local level. This is why I am particularly cautious about the nostalgic urge to treat Bollywood film content as representative of Indian (and at times even explicitly Hindu) culture. To me the richness of Bollywood (dance) is its portable mixing of cultural content that enables multiple (related) meanings to emerge in multiple locations.
You describe Bollywood dance as "a participatory culture based in Hindi film fandom." What forms does the participation take? How is it linked to other forms of fan practice which surround these films?
There are many practices associated with Hindi film (and more recently Bollywood) fandom, including keeping up with current trends within the industry, organizing screenings, creating art inspired by films and actors, and following references to other films and actors within a given narrative. To me, the shared memory of films is really central to Bollywood fandom. This pleasure may further be encouraged when audiences make watching Hindi films a group activity - to be shared with relatives and friends.
As one of the organizers of the Prague Bollywood Festival, I had the opportunity to witness and encounter many Bollywood fans. (image source: www.bollywood.cz)
In many ways, Bollywood dance grew out of these shared pleasures. Put simply audiences wanted to experience the films first-hand. The also wanted to share these pleasures with others through performance. In this context, thresh-hold to participation in Bollywood dance was very low and took place in the privacy of people's homes or at community gatherings. Anyone could participate. By emulating particular movements from films, dancers could summon up the shared memories of those films. They would also teach movements to each other and invite others to join in as best they could. In many ways, Bollywood dance movements became a shared language of Bollywood film fandom. To me, this is what makes Bollywood dance a participatory culture.
In some ways, current trends towards a more "professional" Bollywood dance as live performance are now changing these practices. There is, however, no indication that the Bollywood dance as fandom is about to fade any time soon.
You are describing a phenomenon throughout the South Asian diaspora where Bollywood dance classes are growing in popularity, sometimes at the expense of more classical Indian dance. What factors have contributed to this growth? What do you see as some of the consequences?
The relationship between Bollywood dance and the Indian classical dance world is quite controversial and has been for some time. For the sake of clarity, I will situate my answer within the United States and limit my observations to this context. The growing popularity of Bollywood dance and its frequent positioning as representative of Indian dance has indeed caused much concern among Indian classical dancers in the United States. While I am not sure about the actual enrollment numbers, there is a general sense that Bollywood dance is gaining in popularity at the expense of Indian classical dance and many classical dance teachers have expressed their distress at this trend. Often this distress also is tinted with a slight disdain for Bollywood dance, which classical dance teachers tend to see as a less refined, dislocated and even crass from entertainment. There is also a sense that Bollywood dance is in some ways riding on the coat tails of the hard work that many Indian dancers have done to establish and raise awareness about Indian dance outside India. The popularity of Bollywood dance is also a source of concern for those advocating the preservation of specific (conservative) elements of Indian culture in the lives of Indian-American youth who may otherwise only feel a very tenuous connection to Indian culture.
Students of Bollywood dance often feel that Bollywood dance is much more accessible, malleable, learnable, and fun than Indian classical dance. As source material, song-and-dance sequences from Hindi films are today quite readily accessed through sites like Youtube.com. Students can quickly adapt movements to suit their skill level. They may be in a position to show off their moves to their friends quite quickly as well. In contrast, music to classical Indian dances is often a closely guarded and will only be shared once a teacher deems the student is ready to make a public appearance. There are very few or no compromises made to accommodate student's skill level. They have to master set dances. It may take years before an Indian classical dance student actually has a dance to show and even longer before he/she is ready to perform in public.
Reflecting on these realities, several Bollywood and Indian classical dance teachers have been searching for new ways to address this situation. More and more often, Bollywood dance teachers and dancers make a very active effort to integrate Indian classical elements (and at times actual full classes) in their teaching. They often also actively encourage that their students study classical Indian dance. On the other hand, Indian classical dance teachers make efforts to add Bollywood (or as they prefer to call it Hindi Film dance) components into their repertoire. Drawing on the Indian classical dance Kathak, Anjani Ambegaotkar has choreographed an ode to Hindi film dance in "Made in Mumbai", and Made in Mumbai II.
Sangita Shresthova is Czech/Nepali scholar, filmmaker, dancer andmedia scholar, Sangita's work has been presented in academic andcreative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin),AIGA Boston/ATE Massaging Media Conference (Boston), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival(Seoul), the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), and Akademi's Frameby Frame (London, UK). She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department ofWorld Arts and Cultures and earned a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on Hindi filmdance. Sangita is also founder of Bollynatyam (www.bollynatyam.com).She currently works with Professor Henry Jenkins on questions relatedto participatory culture, new media, and civic engagement.
This wednesday, Wikipedia, Reddit, and a range of other high profile on-line sites will go black in protest of SOPA and PIPA, legislation currently being considered by the U.S. Congress, which will impose regulations on net practices in the name of exerting greater control over "piracy." For those of us who have been involved in the digital world for a long time, this protest recalls another key moment in the history of the web when key sites went black in 1996 in protest of the Communications Decency Act, which would have similarly regulated the content and practices of the online world, in this case in the name of "protecting children" from obscenity. We should be cautious about the deployment of morally fraught terms like "piracy" and "decency" in framing public policies, since the stakes in these regulatory struggles are always more complex than such black and white language might indicate. Both are often deployed in ways that place the participatory ethos and free expression of the web at risk.
One can argue that the broadcast media has already largely "gone black" over SOPA -- since they have shown a remarkable unwillingness to discuss this important media policy issue on the air, or at least had refused to do so prior to the statement the Obama administration issued this past week coming out in opposition to SOPA but defining alternative ways that they might confront the war on "piracy." (I recall having a CNN executive some years ago tell my class that they did not cover the Federal Communications Act because they did not think the public would be interested, a unique definition of the "public interest" if ever I heard one. Thankfully, my students were not buying this explanation, which is more than the public got in terms of the willingness of news media to cover issues where their own corporate interests are at stake.)
Under such circumstances, those us in the blogosphere have a special obligation to help educate the public about matters that commercial media thinks is "over our heads" (or more accurately, "behind our backs.") So, I was delighted when Alex Leavitt, a PHD candidate in Communications at USC, offered to share his reflections on SOPA and especially on the online communities efforts to rally in opposition to it. Leavitt worked with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and now is part of the Civic Paths Research Group I run here at USC.
Internet Blackout: SOPA, Reddit, and Networked (Political) Publics
by Alex Leavitt
If you don't have time to read this article in full, the easiest way to skim information about this topic is to visit http://americancensorship.org/.
In the past year, we've dealt with various novel political moments around the world that have been enabled or augmented with networked technology, from Anonymous' global "hacktivist" incidents to the numerous protests in the Middle East, topped off of course with the vibrant grassroots protests of the Occupy movement. Over the last few months, we've also seen another interesting case study taking place in American politics: rampant opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, dubbed as "the most important bill in Congress you may have never heard of" by Chris Hayes of MSNBC.com.
Watch Chris Hayes' interview for a good introduction to the debate around SOPA.
SOPA, a bill currently making its way through the House of Representatives (along with its sibling PIPA, the Protect IP Act, currently in the Senate) has faced weeks of protest from Internet companies and users alike. Why? Well, on Google Plus, Sergey Brin -- cofounder of Google -- likened the potential effects of SOPA to the Internet censorship practiced in China, Iran, Libya, and Tunisia. Basically, to protect against international copyright infringement, SOPA allows the US to combat websites (such as file lockers or foreign link aggregators) that illegally distribute or even link to American-made media by blocking access to them. Theoretically, the bill has dangerous implications for websites that rely on user-generated content, from YouTube to 4chan. Many have already written about the worries that SOPA and PIPA cause, such as Alex Howard's excellent, in-depth piece over at O'Reilly Radar. For more information on the bills, visit OpenCongress's webpages, where you can see summaries of the legislation, which companies support and oppose them, and round-ups of by mainstream and blogged news: SOPA + PIPA. The bills are one more step in a long line of anti-piracy legislation, such as 2010's Combatting online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).
Within the first few weeks since SOPA was introduced, http://fightforthefuture.org/ introduced the hyperbolic http://freebieber.org/ to illustrate the fears ordinary Internet users should have in relation to the legislation. In essence, SOPA would radically undermine many of the fan practices that Henry and others have analyzed on this blog. Fight for the Future also released the following video (which was my first media exposure to SOPA):
However, for the most part, criticism -- or even basic coverage -- of SOPA remained an online phenomenon. While there have been a few online articles written on CNN and a couple other networks, the mainstream news coverage of the bills remain fairly nonexistent, reports MediaMatters, likely due to the fact that the television networks largely support the bill. The Colbert Report featured apair of short segments on SOPA in early December.
The Internet, though, largely worked around that problem.
In his book, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, UCLA anthropologist Chris Kelty describes free software programmer-activists as a recursive public. Drawing from Michael Warner's concept of "publics and counterpublics" from Habermas's "public sphere," Kelty illustrates these programmers as a group that is addressed by copyright and code, and who work to make, maintain, and modify their technological networks and code as well as the discourse with which they engage as a public. This "circularity is essential to the phenomenon."
Especially over the past two months, we've seen an exceptional effort on the part of online companies to engage users with the political process to oppose SOPA. For instance, on 16 November 2011, Tumblr blacked out every image, video, and word on each user's dashboard, linking at the top of the page to http://www.tumblr.com/protect-the-net, where users could call their local representative.
The effort set of thousands of shared posts and hundreds of hours of calls.
While other companies attempted similar experiments (like Scribd on 21 December), Internet leaders joined together to spread word and inform Congress (such as with this letter from Facebook, Google, and Twitter on 15 November, and later this letter by many others on 14 December) and even political opponents of SOPA reached out on social media, like when Senator Ron Wyden asked people to sign their names at so he could read the list at a filibuster. Otherexperts eventually spoke up too.
But perhaps the most intriguing political effort occurred within one specific online community: Reddit.com.
Reddit, founded in 2005, is a social news and discussion website where users submit and vote on content. According to Alexa.com, Reddit is currently the 53rd most-visited site in the United States. Due to its increasing popularity, Reddit's slogan is "the front page of the internet" -- pertinent, because when a link hits the front page of Reddit, it can lend hundreds of thousands of page views. Though members at times highlight the site's immaturity and incivility, its vibrant community -- combined with the hypervisibility of the front page, has particularly thrived over the past couple of years, especially in terms of political participation and charity. Co-founded Alexis Ohanian gave a TEDtalk about Reddit's dedication to strange things online and when that translates into a sort of political participation:
Humorously, every activist-related post on the official Reddit blog is tagged with "do it for splashy.
In terms of more prominent political activism, Reddit's community -- particularly it's subreddit, /r/politics, and the emergent subreddit /r/SOPA -- has unified around opposing SOPA, in line with the free-speech, utopian personality that pervades the site. For instance, a couple posts on /r/politics and r/technology that reached the front page [1, 2] helped bring rapid visibility to Senator Wyden's filibuster initiative.
A more effective protest occurred in the form of a website boycott. GoDaddy, the domain register, was discovered to be a supporter of SOPA. After some discussion on Reddit, one r/politics thread reached the front page: GoDaddy supports SOPA, I'm transferring 51 domains & suggesting a move your domain day. Visibility of SOPA-related content was aided by a new subreddit, r/sopa, to which a global sidebar linked from the Reddit homepage. Less than 24 hours after the boycott started (even though, by numbers, it was deemed hardly successful), and with two more /r/politics threads that reached the front page [1, 2], GoDaddy reversed their stance and dropped support for SOPA.
Most notably, Alexis Ohanian recently announced on the Reddit blog that the entire site would voluntarily shut down on Wednesday 18 January 2012 for twelve hours, from 8am-8pm EST. Replacing the front page will be "a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action." This blacking out of Reddit coincides with a series of cybersecurity experts' testimonies in Congress, at which Ohanian will be representing and speaking.
In reaction to SOPA (and PIPA, to which the opposition is now growing, since the SOPA vote has now been shelved), a vigorous public emerged across the web and united around discourse about the bills, particularly on Reddit.com. But to return to Kelty: is this a recursive public? Do the political users of Reddit have enough power and agency to maintain and modify their public?
I believe this question gets at a deeper question of ontology: what does political participation mean in a 1) networked, and 2) editable age? For instance, some users are able to promote their skills for discourse -- eg., My friend and I wrote an application to boycott SOPA. Scan product barcodes and see if they're made by a SOPA supporter. Enjoy. -- but in certain cases, participation in technological systems becomes participation in a recursive public because that participation helps modify the system. In the case of Reddit, participation can become political when content reaches extreme visibility. And this is particularly important when we reconsider that the mass media has barely covered SOPA as a topic: due to this conflict, participation on a network platform like Reddit becomes an inherently political action.
And out of these seemingly-innocuous actions emerge more political moves. In reaction to the black out, other websites have agreed to join the effort, such as BoingBoing.net. Perhaps the decision with the most impact came on Monday, when Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia -- which receives up to 25 million visitors per day at the English-language portal -- would also shut down, but this time for a full 24 hours, after a lengthy discussion on Wales' personal Wikipedia page. Wales responded to the announcement on Twitter by saying, "I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday."
In a recent New York Times article, Reddit's political actions were noted. "'It's encouraging that we got this far against the odds, but it's far from over,' said Erik Martin, the general manager of Reddit.com, a social news site that has generated some of the loudest criticism of the bills. 'We're all still pretty scared that this might pass in one form or another. It's not a battle between Hollywood and tech, its people who get the Internet and those who don't." Of course, Reddit isn't the only platform that is part of this important recursive public, just as Twitter wasn't the saving grace of the Arab Spring or the Iranian Revolution. The efforts of hundreds of activists around the country have contributed immensely to the anti-SOPA effort. But keep in mind that Reddit has reached a pinnacle of political participation in the last few months, and I have a feeling that -- like YouTube in the 2008 presidential elections -- Reddit may be the site to watch in 2012.
Alex Leavitt is a PhD student at USC Annenberg, where he studies digital culture and networked technology. Recently, his work has focused on creative participation in immense online networks, examining global participatory phenomenon like Hatsune Miku and Minecraft. You can reach him on Twitter @alexleavitt or via email at aleavitt@usc.edu; to read more about his research, visit alexleavitt.com.
This is the final installment in a four part series, written by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shreshtova from the USC Civic Paths Project, concerning the young activists who are supporting the Dream Act. This research was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and is part of the work of the Youth and Participatory Politics Network.
New Media and Movements
Dreamer youth have
also used new media to grow their movement on a national scale.Between 2009-2010,
youth organized many protest, including sit-ins at Congressional offices,
hunger strikes, marches, and symbolic graduations. They used new media to
exponentially amplify their voices through sophisticated and strategic use of live
streams, blogs, user generated video portals and social media like Facebook and
Twitter. For example, in June 2009, the founders of Dreamactivist.org, and United We Dream,
organized 500 youth to participate in the National
of DREAMs," the youth documented and mobilized support
for their their walk through blogging, Facebook, YouTube, and twitter. Along
their journey, they gathered 30,000 signatures to bring to President Obama.
Watch the trail of dreams video here:
Despite all these efforts, the DREAM Act has yet
to pass, and undocumented youth continue to be deported. In the face of this
continuing crisis, the youth have used a combination of direct action and media
activism to highlight (and render visible) detentions and deportations, which
have generally received little public attention (Kohli 2011). They have staged rallies and sit-ins at detention centers, ICE offices, and
have even targeted banks that invest in private prisons to directly confront
the institutions invested in the immigrant detention and deportation system (Foley 2011). Grass roots new media messaging campaigns have been crucial to these action as
youth use Facebook, Twitter, and microblogging to share the stories of, and
garner support for, those detained and fighting deportation.
Stories like these are transmitted through many overlapping social media
networks connecting campus organizations, community groups, sympathetic media
and allies, providing links to petitions and online donations.
Nancy Meza is a key
media strategist for the END our Pain campaign. At DREAMing Out Loud!
she discussed the importance of
combining both new media and traditional media strategies to shape the movement
messaging.To Nancy, social
media is a space where "we can 'freely' express ourselves, push our messaging
forward... in terms of Twitter and Facebook."At the same time, Nancy stressed the need to complement new
and more traditional media as she continued: "Our organization doesn't even own
a camera...With whatever resources we have...I have a blackberry on a month to
month plan...So I think for us, it's really been about how we use traditional
media and how we mix it in".New
media has allowed for youth to shape their message in a more democratic and
participatory fashion. They are, however, increasingly conscious of the need to
be strategic about its use. For example, Nancy explained that a lot of effort
goes into coming up with a Twitter hashtag for an event. Is it accurate? Is it catchy? Will it
travel? Often, Twitter is a good way to catch the attention of more traditional
media, she explained. To her, the key is arriving at the happy medium between
locally constructed messaging and coordinating a coherent frame that can
translate to major media outlets.
Concluding
Thoughts:
At the heart of the event were the stories that
the panelists shared and accounts of how stories inspired activism.Pocho
1, a internationally recognized photographer, recalled how
photography shaped his activism and his reformation from a gang member to a
social activist: "I started telling stories...I wanted to tell their story...I
started hanging out with artists...I picked up a camera...I went crazy with
it...shoot it everyday... tell people's stories". Now Pocho 1 documents the Dream
movement, using his camera and social media as a form of social commentary and
social activism.
source: http://www.pocho1.com/#!
DREAMing
Out Loud! provided many insights into how young people
use new media to participate and mobilize in their communities. In many ways, the
event highlighted the great democratizing potential that new media has,
especially when it can be used to provide a platform to amplify the voices of
youth who are marginalized from the mainstream political process.
References
Behary, Samya. "Students
storm Capitol Hill for National Dream Act Graduation Day," Immigration Impact, June 25, 2009.
Berestein, Leslie Rojas. "A High-Profile Challenge to the White House New Deportation Guidelines," MultiAmerican, September 21, 2011, multiamerican.scpr.org/2011/09/a-high-profile-challenge-to-the-white-houses-new-deportation-policy.
DREAM Activist, "DREAM for
America: National DREAM Act Graduation Day - June 23, 2009," press release, June 21, 2009
Foley, Elise. "Immigrants to Wells Fargo: Stop investing in For-Profit Detention," The Huffington Post, October 17, 2011.
Kohli, Aarti Peter l. Markowitz, and Lisa Chavez, "Secure Communities by the Numbers:
An Analysis of Demographics and Due process," Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute
on Law and Social Policy Research Report, October, 2011.
Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.
Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.
says, "that never stops you, you're so passionate...I need to draw this stuff".
See Julio's video "Wall of Dreams" here:
Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.
Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.
From time to time, I have show-cased here the work of my Civic Paths Research Team. This is a group of more than a dozen USC graduate students, faculty, staff, and post-docs, who meet each week to research the intersection between participatory culture and political participation. You can check out our blog here. The team is associated with a larger network on Youth and Participatory Politics which has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and headed by Joe Kahne from Mills College. We are in the process of doing interviews, media audits, and field work focused on innovative movements and networks which have been effective at using new media and participatory practices to get young people involved in the political process. Over the next few installments, I am going to be showcasing one of those case studies, focused around the efforts of undocumented youth and their allies to rally support around various versions of the Dream Act, which would extend education and citizenship rights. This report was written by Arely Zimmerman, the post-doc who has been primarily responsible for overseeing this case, and Sangita Shresthova, the research director for the Civic Paths Project.
Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight For Education, Immigrant Rights, and Justice Through Media and Art
by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shresthova
In a dimly lit room, a young man peers into the camera and adjusts the viewfinder to check his image. He then looks directly into the camera and states "My name is _____, and I am undocumented." His migration story resonates with hundreds of others who then upload their own stories to YouTube. Elsewhere, Livestream carries the feed of a youth-led civil disobedience to thousands across the country. Statements of support for the protest soon appear on blogs, Twitter, and other social media....
On
November 2, 2011 the Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) project hosted a
represented different local, regional and national youth organizations as well
as different experiences using new media.
(photo: Civic
Paths)
The forum followed two
significant events impacting current debates around the Dream movement.In September 2011,
representing at least a small victory, the state passed a bill known as the California Dream Act -- undocumented youth in the state could obtain some financial aid to
attend college.However, without
any change on the federal level, undocumented youth still cannot work legally
upon graduation. Thus, while the legislation extends state financial aid to undocumented
students, immigrant youth continue to be deported at alarming rates.
Nationally, more undocumented immigrants have been deported under the Obama
administration than under any previous administrations.
Less than a month after the California Dream
Act was passed, on October 12, 2011, five undocumented youth, wearing graduation caps, staged a
sit-in at the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in downtown Los
Angeles to urge
the Obama administration to stop deporting undocumented youth (Rojas 2011). The sit-in was launched by the
allies demanding an immediate moratorium on deportations of youth eligible for the Dream
Act.
Watch the Ustream of that protest here:
Armed with camera phones, the Dream activists
broadcast their action on Ustream, which was followed by 4,000 people.Nancy Meza, one of the panelists, was
one of the protestors arrested at the sit-in.She notes that new media was crucial to the activists'
ability to raise awareness around this event. Confirming the effectiveness of
this new media strategy, the activists were soon invited to a conference call
with key officials of the Obama administration.
The use of new media has played a key role in mobilizing undocumented
youth across the country, connecting local and regional youth organizations,
scaling local movements to the national level, and contesting elite-driven
messaging on immigration policy.
Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.
Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.
danah boyd, Mimi Ito, and I have embarked on an interesting project for Polity. Through a series of dialogues, we’re hoping to produce a book that interrogates our different thoughts regarding participatory culture. The goal is to unpack our differences and agreements and identify some of the challenges that we see going forward. We began our dialogue a few weeks ago and had a serious brain jam where we interrogated our own assumptions, values, and stakes in doing the research that we each do and thinking about the project of participatory culture more generally. For the next three weeks, we’re going to individually reflect before coming back to begin another wave of deep dialoguing in the hopes that the output might be something that others (?you?) might be interested in reading.
