'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part One)

In honor of J.K. Rowling's birthday, I will begin the week by running a two part series about Harry Potter fandom in Russia, written by Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad), where she is completing her doctorate. It is perhaps fitting that the last time I saw Ksenia, we were both waiting in line together at the MIT COOP bookstore around midnight, waiting for the clerks to pass us our eagerly awaited copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. When I got my copy, I wandered off into the night in a daze and forgot to say goodbye. My wife and I took our his and hers copies back to Senior Haus with us and climbed into the hammock we have in our backyard, reading by flashlight as late into the night as we could muster, and then waking up at the first daylight to push on through. Our son was nice enough to bring us meals so we could shut out the entire world and just immerse ourselves into Rowling's world. And I am happy to say that we finished the books before the day was over.

Upon returning to Russia, Ksenia has sent me a long awaited series of blog posts describing what she calls Russian Language Harry Potter fandom. It's a fascinating account of what cultural theorists like to call glocalization -- suggesting that while Harry Potter is read around the world, local conditions of production and reception, including in this case especially issues around copyright and translation, shape how it gets read and in what contexts. Ksenia's first installment takes us through the history of Lord of the Rings fandom in her country which in many ways set the stage for what happened with the Potter books and then discusses the centrality of translation to sustaining and energizing the fan culture. (Of course, it helps that Ksenia's primary research background is in translation studies.) Next time, we will get deeper into fan fiction and other forms of fan cultural production in Russia.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom

by Ksenia Prassolova

The first thing that should be said about Russian fandom is that it exists. It may come as a surprising and as a somewhat baffling statement, but not many people within English-language fandom realize that fandom is an international phenomenon, and even those who do understand the international part would still cling to the "exotic" image of Russia that doesn't really go together with something as native to the Western grassroots culture as fandom. Truth is, however, that ever since the Iron Curtain fell Russia has been doing its damnedest to catch up with the West: legally, politically, and culturally; new values were both imposed from the top and picked up eagerly by the young people who didn't exactly want to associate themselves with the Soviet past and had no romantic recollections of it.

Because both the concept of fandom and its practices were borrowed as is, what we now know as 'Russian fandom' is not, on a general level, that different from its American counterpart. Demographically, we share the same patterns: people of both sexes and of all ages discuss canon, those who are involved in writing fan fiction are mostly female (according to anecdotal accounts), and those who write slash are almost exclusively female. Most discussions and creative work used to concentrate on several sites and forums, but with mass migration to blogs Russians moved to livejournal.com and diary.ru (a Russian blogging facility). In fact, in Russia we rarely even call our fandom 'Russian', we call it 'Russian-language', because this implies that fandom is a universal concept that merely varies to a larger or lesser degree from one national 'incarnation' to another. Harry Potter fan fiction posted on hogwartsnet.ru is very similar to that posted on fanfiction.net - genres, clichés, slash and all; fanart is scarce, but fanvids created by Russians are pretty similar those created in the West; we do have ship wars just like everybody else and just like everybody else we were eager to find out whether Snape was good or evil.

I would be very far from truthful, though, if I said that there were absolutely no differences between the way fandom works in Russia and the way it works in the English-language community, borrowed concept or no. The differences are firmly in place and are due to a combination of historic, linguistic and cultural factors. In this post I will try to concentrate on the most notable of them. I will be mostly talking about the Harry Potter fandom, since this is the one I have first-hand knowledge of, yet one has to start somewhere, and in 'our' beginning there was Tolkien. The beginning, however, didn't happen until 1975.

Tolkien Apocrypha

Fandom-wise, Lord of the Rings was for Russians what Star Trek was for Americans. It also happened much later, and the gap between the emergence of canon and appearance of consolidated fannish activity around this canon was much wider in case of Lord of the Rings in Russia. This canon that started them all entered the Soviet scene gradually and in a most fascinating way. The first Russian translation of Lord of the Ringswas started in 1975 by A. Gruzberg, a linguist from Perm, and appeared in 1978; the entire trilogy was written by hand and was only available to friends and acquaintances of the translator. Later on it was transported to Leningrad, where it was published in Samizdat in 1981 (source). The first attempt at official translation followed shortly - in 1982 - and was comprised of two books, The Hobbit and The Fellowship, translated by by V. Muravjev and A.Kistjakovsky. This translation was abandoned, and the official Russian version of the trilogy was only published as late as 1990. By the time it happened the trilogy had already acquired a fair number of followers (those responsible for the non-official translations, for one) who would engage in a variety of fannish activities: from song and poetry writing to live action role playing games, which became extremely popular among the fans. In fact, the Hobbit Games of the beginning 1990-s were so well known that 'being fannish' is still associated with role-playing and Lord of the Rings in certain circles of fandom.

There are many reasons for Lord of the Rings to have become popular when it did in the Soviet Union and - later - the new Russian Federation. It was the only source of its kind available to Russians at that time: while the Soviet readers had enjoyed the long and rich tradition of science-fiction and gathered around what was known as KLFs (Clubs of Science-Fiction Readers), the genre of fantasy was relatively new. With it came new feelings and new attitude to the source text: I am not saying that the possibility of escapism was the only reason Tolkien's work became popular with Russian readers, but the bread lines of the late 80-s and early 90-s definitely were part of the equation. Apart from role-playing games, the fans of Tolkien would write verses and songs, learn Elven languages, and write what they called 'apocrypha': fan fiction that fell under the category of alternative history or alternative universe. By that time fan fiction had already been widely known abroad, and Western fandom started the colonization of the Internet, but international cross-fandom communication was scarce, and the name for this practice was re-invented rather than borrowed. The term 'fan fiction' has later been re-introduced into the Russian fandom, and there is now a lot of confusion as to whether 'apocrypha' are, in fact, fan fiction or fall into some specific category of fan writing. The debate continues, and no definite conclusion has been reached.

"Art Belongs to People"

An even more interesting question arises when we examine how those apocrypha/fan fiction works were distributed or, really, published before the Internet came along. Again, let us consider the history: the oft-cited quote of Vladimir Lenin's, "Art Belongs to People" pretty much determined the attitude to common cultural property in the Soviet Union. Communism in general (in its part where private property was dismissed) and that 'art belongs to people' motto in particular, became a convenient excuse for translating and/or re-writing ideologically safe yet culturally important content from the West. Two most notable examples of re-writing original content under the new name were Volkov's Wizard of the Emerald City trilogy, based on the Wizard of Oz, and Alexei Tolstoy's Buratino, based on Pinocchio (both published in 1936).

The interesting thing about the two was that although original creators were credited in the books and the tales were more translations than re-writes, their covers still bore those Russian authors' names. Many Russian kids, me included, first learned that there had been some Western original only long after reading the stories themselves, or never learned at all. In other, not as dire, cases the translators would get if not all, but at least as much credit as original creators. Thus, with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Russians would distinguish between 'Zakhoder's Alice', 'Nabokov's Anya' and 'Carroll's Alice in Wonderland', the latter being a common referral to a bunch of academic translations.

This mindset, in which culture was considered a common good for everybody to benefit from, held fast and strong even after the Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention 1793. Moreover, the 70-s and the 80-s brought the flourishing of 'Samizdat' - a non-official publishing and distribution network reserved for rare and censored literary and research content. Samizdat took many forms, from almost professional copying and binding to photographing pages and distributing the resulting pictures. Although Samizdat was a full-bodied publishing and distribution network for the underground, it was mostly used to deal with 'serious', 'original' content. Thus, while fans were able to write and share stories between themselves, they were - for the most part - unable to turn their individual networks into fanzine production because they simply didn't have the access to the necessary equipment. When the 90-s came, and suddenly the market was flooded with start-ups looking for profit, it was only logical that some fans sought to bring fan fiction to the printing press. Profit was, of course, as much of a consideration for those fans as the lack of an adequate fannish distribution network. By that time, the laws had been changed (and the new legislation had been adopted - almost verbatim - from the West), yet the values stayed, so the new publishing houses didn't think twice when presented with an opportunity to publish work based on popular sources.

The first fan fiction published in post-Soviet Russia was a collection of Sherlock Holmes inspired stories from the Novossibirsk society of Conan Doyle fans. This precedent, the lack of fannish distribution network, and a certain disregard for the new law lead to the appearance of a far more curious publication: Nick Perumov's Ring of Darkness - a novel-length fan fic set in the Lord of the Rings universe. Here is what Nick himself has to say on the process of publication:

"On October 16, 1991 , the contract on my book was signed with "Kavkazskaya biblioteka" publishing house. Royalties for my book amounted to a huge for that time sum of 75000 rubles, calculated according to the norms of Writers' Union . Many times I was asked one and the same question, how it could be possible for an unknown writer to be published without any connexions in the publishing house; be published in the period of total collapse and food cards. Now, ten years later I can't give the proper answer. I guess that such a phantastic affairs was possible due to the chaos and disturbance of early 1990s. Another favourable moment was in 1996, it was the First boom of the Russian fantastics. Anyways, "The Ring of Darkness" then caled "Pescending of Darkness" was published in "Kavkazskaya biblioteka". How it could have happend is another pair of shoes. " ( source)

It is interesting that while the content of Perumov's published fan fic is still a subject of fierce debate among Tolkien fans and followers, the legality of the publication is rarely questioned, and, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no legal action against Mr. Perumov or his publishing house(s); moreover, his Tolkien-based novels are still popular and are re-printed on a regular basis. The initial 1993 publication set another precedent, and other Lord of the Rings fan fiction shortly followed after The Ring of Darkness, most notable of them, of course, is Black Book of Arda - a Silmarillion-inspired alternative universe that tells the story of Arda from the point of view of its Evil.

As of the end of 1990-s Russian fans migrated to the Internet en masse. Shortly after that we finally caught up with Harry Potter, and then it was about translation all over again.

Potter Comes to Russia

First published in Britain in 1997, Harry Potter only appeared in Russian in 2000: Maria Spivak founded the 'Harry Potter Research Institute' (formerly located at www.harrypotter.ru) and posted the Russian translations of books one and two; Pauline started the 'People's Translation Project' and her team came up with their version of book one; and, finally, ROSMAN publishing house hired Igor Oransky to create the official version of the first book in Russian. Of all three translations, it was the official that was the sloppiest in its quality and latest in its arrival: by the time it was published fandom had already finished reading Spivak's rendition of Chamber of Secrets. Thus, two things happened in 2000: ROSMAN had lost the moment forever, and translation games began.

ROSMAN could not account for the relative unpopularity of Harry Potter in Russia (compared to the Potter-craze that took over the world, the success of this book in our country was modest at best) and kept changing translators: Oransky was dismissed after book one, and Marina Litvinova, a well-known Shakespearian scholar and a professional translator herself, was hired to work on books two through four. Of the three volumes she had translated, only The Prisoner of Azkaban did not receive annual mock award for the worst translation (Chamber of Secrets) or the worst editing job (Goblet of Fire). After it became known that Litvinova had not translated book four, but instead turned it into a seminar for her students (effectively letting her students translate it for her), a scandal broke out and ROSMAN was forced to change translators yet again. This time, Viktor Golyshev, Vladimir Bobkov, Leonid Motylev - all famous for their work as translators of sci-fi classics - were asked to do the job. They did a fine enough rendition of book five, but didn't linger for book six: to translate Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, ROSMAN invited Sergey Ilyin, who was best known for his fantastic work with Nabokov's texts and Maya Lakhuti - a very talented translator of children's literature. Again, this team did a good job and a decent translation, but by that time it had already been six books too late.

The People's Translation Project

In the meantime, fandom was eagerly looking for flaws in official versions and engaging in translation projects of their own. Inspired by Maria Spivak, the 'People's Translation Project', high regard for translators in our country and the nagging 'I can do that, too' feeling, fans started to create both individual (Fleur, Yuri Machkasov) and collective (Snitch, The Phoenix Team, Harry-Hermione.net, HP Christmas Forum) translation projects, and by the time Half-blood Prince was released in Russia in December 2005, there had already been nine (sic!) independent translations on the Web, some of them completed not a week after the July 16 release of the English version. When the final Harry Potter book leaked five days before the official release, a new translation project made it their goal to have the initial job done by July 21.They succeded, which sets a curious record: an amateur translation appears before official translators' names are announced. This is a new project, too, the one that has not been working on any of the previous Potter installments. We already know of at least four projects that are continuing their work, and of two projects that have just started with book seven, and it is safe to assume there will be more of them. Understandably, amateur translation is a widely discussed phenomenon, and two main questions arise in all discussions: that of legality and that of quality.

Under the provisions of article 19 (p.2) of Federal Copyright Law, translation is 'fair use' as long as it is done for educational purposes and the length - or amount - of the translation suits the immediate educational need. That is, I can use Harry Potter in classroom during my 'Theory and Practice of Translation' class, but I am not supposed to have my students translate the entire series. One can, however, justify translating the entire book for the purpose of self-education: in fact, I know of at least three individuals who did translate books five and six to learn English better, and succeeded. While you can, arguably, translate books one through seven and get away with it, you can not share the result of your work. As of 2003, representatives of J.K.Rowling have been sending out C&D letters to various translation-related sites, which always resulted in the removal of translations from public view. At this point, however, sending C&D letters is like trying to stop an avalanche: the amateur translation projects multiply against all odds. For a number of reasons (the poor quality of the official translation; its late arrival; the translation tradition in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; a growing number of Russians with a fair command of foreign languages; etc.), translation has become one of the games fandom plays: it is now as integral part of what we do as fans as fan fiction, fan art, filking or creating fanvids. In fact, once the name of the project, 'people's translation' is now a name of the practice that spread across fandoms: it applies to any fan translation project, in which not one, but several individuals are doing a fast collaborative translation and editing work. Normally, there would be 10 to 20 people working on a translation, the same people would then beta-read and edit each other's work, then a draft version would be compiled, which goes to the final editing and proof-reading performed by one or two individuals - usually those who are in charge of the project. It is their job to ensure smooth communication on the forum, to find substitutes if one or more of the translators have dropped out, and to mediate conflicts; and whether the team produces quality results depends on the leader.

People engage in amateur translation for various reasons: some want to improve their English, some want to improve the overall quality of the Russian Potterverse, some find that translation is a good way to participate in fandom. Whatever the reason, the issue of the quality of the result is quite important. The thing that is important to understand here is that not all amateur translation is done by amateurs. Many of the fan translators I know are also professional translators in their non-fannish lives, so they, at least, know what they are doing. As shown by Oransky and Litvinova, it is not always that a professional translator will produce good results: one also needs dedication and fascination with the source, and fans do tend to have those aplenty, so when it does come down to amateurs doing the job, their lack of skill or knowledge is often compensated by extensive teamwork, networking and overflowing enthusiasm. The results vary from 'extremely unreadable' or 'unfinished' to 'way better than the official', and each non-English-reading fan often finds themselves supporting this or that amateur translation. The choice has to be made, for instance, when writing fan fiction - because names are translated differently - or when just discussing the source text: it is considered traditional in our fandom to stick with one or the other translation and defend it against the opponents when the time comes. Nowadays there is a growing number of people who prefer reading the original and are able to do that, but some of them, too, fall into temptation and either side with one project or start their own.

Most of those translation projects exist online and do not overstep the boundaries of fandom. To date, there are only two exceptions from this general rule: a translation of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, made by the Snitch project, which was stolen from the translators, printed in Latvia and sold in Belarus a couple of months before the official Russian release; and a fan-made Russian version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, printed, bound and distributed in Israel. The appearance of the latter is especially curious if one takes into account the fact that neither of Rowling's Comic Relief books has been translated officially: the only two existing versions available to Russian-language readers come from the People's Translation project and that unknown Israeli source. The pictures below show the comparison of the spread and cover of the fake (top) and real (bottom) editions of Half-blood Prince.

Reconsidering the AFI's 100 Films: The Missing Half of the Equation

Many of you probably watched the American Film Institute's special several weeks ago during which they celebrated a hundred great American films. (Never mind that several of the films were by any definition I came up with actually British productions -- a mistake which the organization got called upon the last time they constructed such a list -- suggesting that if it is in the English language, Hollywood will lay claim to it and if it isn't, it has no business being part of the American film scene!) The list included many films which most of us would agree belong up there with the greats -- including some personal favorites of mine, such as Citizen Kane, Casablanca, It's A Wonderful Life, Gone With the Wind, and The Godfather, to cite just a few from the top levels of the list. Yet, several groups have raised significant questions about what's missing from this -- any film made by a female director.

Before you argue that women simply didn't direct any of the best 100 films made in this country, you might consider that the final selection was made for a ballot of 400 titles out of which the American Film Institute included only four films directed by women (Penny Marshall's Big, Amy Heckering's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation). As Mediascape's

Erin Hill and Brian Hu ask, "Does that mean that women are inferior directors? Hardly. Does that mean that women have been kept out of the director's chair? Yes and no." Hill and Hu helped to poll a group of several dozen film scholars and filmmakers to see if they could come up with a list of 100 great American films directed by women, hoping that such a list would help us to better understand the roles women directors have played across the history of the American cinema.

As they have done so, the first accommodation they needed to make was to extend the AFI's focus on feature-length mainstream fiction films to include a much broader range of genres and formats, reflecting the reality that women have historically been forced to work on the margins of the mainstream industry but have made innovative contributions to independent, experimental and documentary film production, for example. Even where we consider feature length fictional films, women have most often operated on the margins -- working on B-films (as in the case of Ida Lupino) or exploitation films (as in the case of Stephanie Rothman). Only as we get to the most recent films on the list do we get to large budget Hollywood productions (and that's why all three of the films which the AFI included by female directors have come out in the last two decades.) Here's a subset of the films which they identified (listed in chronological order):

* MABEL'S BUSY DAY (Mabel Normand, 1914)

* THE BLOT (Lois Weber, 1921)

* DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

* MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943)

* OUTRAGE (Ida Lupino, 1950)

* THE COOL WORLD (Shirley Clarke, 1964)

* BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (Doris Wishman, 1965)

* A NEW LEAF (Elaine May, 1971)

* TERMINAL ISLAND (Stephanie Rothman, 1973)

* HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

* NEWS FROM HOME (Chantal Ackerman, 1977)

* GIRLFRIENDS (Claudia Weill, 1978)

* THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (Penelope Spheeris, 1981)

* DESERT HEARTS (Donna Deitch, 1985)

* DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (Susan Seidelman, 1985)

* WORKING GIRLS (Lizzie Borden, 1986)

* NEAR DARK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

* SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989)

* A PLACE CALLED LOVELY (Sadie Benning, 1991)

* DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (Julie Dash, 1991)

* LITTLE MAN TATE (Jodie Foster, 1991)

* MISSISSIPPI MASALA (Mira Nair, 1991)

* A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (Penny Marshall, 1992)

* MI VIDA LOCA (Allison Anders, 1993)

* GO FISH (Rose Troche, 1994)

* CLUELESS (Amy Heckerling, 1995)

* WATERMELON WOMAN (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

* PRIVATE PARTS (Betty Thomas, 1997)

* FRIDA (Julie Taymor, 2002)

* AMERICAN SPLENDOR (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2003)

* MONSTER (Patty Jenkins, 2003)

* SHERRYBABY (Laurie Collyer, 2006)

* MARIE ANTOINETTE (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

You can see the rest of the list here. Several other patterns emerge: the list of women filmmakers also includes a much higher number of filmmakers of color and openly queer filmmakers than the list the American Film Institute produced for mass market consumption. (The AFI list, after all, is part of a special promotion designed to encourage people to rent and buy dvds of the selected films and only films currently available in dvd format are eligible for consideration. Many of these films, especially the earlier ones, have not yet gone into this kind of broader distribution.) Roughly a quarter of the selected films have been made since 1999, suggesting just how recently women have been able to exert a powerful and consistent presence in mainstream and independent cinema.

As someone who has written about Stephanie Rothman (The Velvet Vampire, Terminal Island, Working Girls), for example, in an essay included in my new book, The Wow Climax, I found her inclusion on the list raised some provocative questions for me. Here's how I sum up what's interesting about Rothman's work:

Rothman's politics are nowhere more utopian than when they deal with the erotic material that is at the heart of the exploitation film and this may explain why she chose to continue to work within these genres, even when she gained control over the mode of production at Dimension Pictures, the studio she co-founded with her writer-producer husband Charles Swartz. Rothman's engagement with the exploitation genres was a tactical one; she agrees to follow certain formulas and produce certain images, in order to gain access to systems of production, distribution, and exhibition. Working within the popular cinema, she will reach a broader audience than a political avant-garde filmmaker; Terminal Island can be found at my local Blockbuster, while Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames can not. The exploitation cinema demands that she work with certain exploitable elements, yet she finds ways to redefine those images to speak to alternative pleasures and politics. At the same time, the exploitation cinema holds progressive potentials, facilitating stories with strong female protagonists, stories of exploitation and resistance, victimization and empowerment. Rothman borrows these stories from Roger Corman and from the broader generic history of New World and she seeks to render these stories meaningful to women. She does not fully control the promotion and reception of her films; she can not fully prevent those images and stories from being used in a reactionary fashion. Yet, for these very reasons, their radical potential takes on new importance. The people who go to see Born in Flames probably already have a solid commitment to feminism; the people who go to see Terminal Island probably do not. If most of her feminist politics falls on deaf ears, some of it probably gets heard, and in being heard, creates an opening for change where none existed before.

The vexing complexities of this situation may account for why Pam Cook's persistent attempts to claim Rothman for feminism have not had the impact of her similar arguments on behalf of Dorothy Arzner. Arzner's oppositional and marginal position as a lesbian woman operating within the classical Hollywood system could be taken for granted. Arzner's radical difference, her disruption of the codes of classical cinema and her exposure of the mechanisms of female spectacle, can be read against a shared understanding of the classical Hollywood cinema as allowing only limited space for female expression. Rothman's "counter-cinema," on the other hand, occurs against the backdrop of a producer (Corman) and studio (New World) already associated with leftist politics and within genres already seen as outside dominant film practice. The exploitation cinema, paradoxically, displayed the most reactionary and patriarchal tendencies of the commercial cinema and at the same time, an already partially realized radical potential. Rothman can be seen, then, as working both within and in opposition to the exploitation film, a complex set of "negotiations" which allow no simple labeling of her films. Her cinema is "partially corrupt." This is its curse and that is its power.

Can we then reduce this "complex set of negotiations" between genre, studio, audience, and filmmaker to the standards of classic entertainment which define our expectations about what belongs on a list of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time? I am not certain.

The AFI list calls out for beloved films, yet it is hard to say that Rothman's work is beloved even among those of us who are its most enthusiastic supporters. She didn't seek to be loved; she sought to challenge and disrupt the conventions of the genres within which she worked.

The AFI List calls out for polished work but Rothman was given neither the time or the budget to achieve polished work: her exploitation films are ragged, bearing the marks of the painful compromises which shaped their production.

The AFI list calls out for accomplished works, but Rothman's films often have to be judged based on their potentials because she wasn't allowed to fully achieve what she set out to accomplish.

The AFI list prioritizes certain genres which are seen as prestigious and important but Rothman was never got to work in those genres.

The AFI list calls for films which had a wide impact on American culture but Rothman's films never received the distribution and promotion they would need to have a wide impact. The same can be said for many of the other filmmakers on this list.

All of this may sound like special pleading in the context of our usual list-making activities -- and perhaps it is -- but it is also a reflection of the struggles women filmmakers have faced in order to gain access to the means of production and distribution their male counterparts have taken for granted. All of these lists probably need to read alongside a copy of Joanna Russ's "How to Suppress Women's Writing," which spells out the diverse reasons critics have deployed to argue that women's creative work doesn't measure up to the standards of literary excellence which define the canon. But before you dismiss those critics, give yourself a gut check to see how you reacted to some of the films listed above. That immediate response -- "they don't belong here" -- suggests the need to reassess the criteria we deploy to evaluate "great films" and whether those "standards" are appropriate for accounting for the full range of interesting and important work in the history of the American cinema.

Another list was prepared by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, attempting to identify films by male and female directors that they felt should have been included on the AFI ballot. Their list is much more mainstream than the one prepared by Mediascape, seeking films by women filmmakers which would hold up under the same criteria as those which put the male directors on the original AFI list. If the Mediascape list has circulated almost entirely within an academic film context, the Alliance list has succeeded in getting national media attention, directing much needed interest onto the place of female directors in the history of American cinema. Both list raise questions that need to be considered if we are going to put the AFI List in its full context.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part Two): Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington

Sam Ford: I know that a lot of the people following this debate might not be that interested in soaps in particular, but I am interested in the differences in discussing fan culture when it shifts from being a conversation primarily about fan fiction, which many of the back-and-forths have so far. How do we measure creativity in relation to fan communities? My understanding is that most people would agree that fan fiction only retains its full meaning and resonance within the community that it is produced in, and the social specificity of creative output is no different in the soap opera fan communities we have been discussing, but the output is often much different--criticism, debate, parody, discussion, continuity-maintenance, historical perspective...these are very creative processes that seem to be the prevalent forms of fan output for soap opera fandom. To move toward your discussion of sports and media fans, I think the question you pose is one relevant to this series as a whole and one which various contributors have touched on in one way or another. Are we looking at the difference in male and female fan responses or in the responses of scholarship on fans, or can you really separate the two? As you imply in your question, there is some difficulty in separating the two, and perhaps the body of academic work on soap opera fandom, television fandom, fan fiction communities, sports fandom, and so on are shaped greatly by the gendered perspectives, and the respective genders, of those who have been most prevalent in those fields. It is important to realize this may be the case, while not making that the totalizing explanation for differences in sports fandom and sports fan studies, when compared to media fandom.

My work on pro wrestling goes between the two, in that it is sports entertainment, a blending of media fandom and sports fandom, and a blending between male-gendered sports and female-gendered soap opera. In wrestling, I have found that there at least seems to be a significant amount of fan fiction compared to soaps, even though the WWE likewise has five hours of weekly television content, perhaps because wrestling does provide a lot of negative capability, to steal a term from Geoff Long's posts two weeks ago, for fans to fill in, because it does not provide the off-stage relationships among characters and/or their portrayers. As Sue Clerc has written about, wrestling fan fiction plays an interesting blend between concentrating on the characters and the "real people" who play their parts, just as wrestling blurs those distinctions itself.

Of course, it's important to note that the fan fiction of wrestling is a very largely driven by females, while male fan expression in online fan community form has often

manifested itself in a blend of role-playing and fantasy sports in which wrestling fans enter fantasy leagues and role-play various wrestlers to compete with one another. These e-mail federations, or fantasy leagues, involve quite a bit of creativity, but it manifests itself much differently than in the off- screen relationships so often portrayed in the more explicit fan fiction. These, of course, are very gendered responses to the program, and there is very little formal overlap between the two wrestling fan fiction communities.

You raise some interesting questions about celebrity in relation to sports as well. I don't particularly know that "celebrification" is necessarily gendered female, although there is often more talk of "role models" when it comes to male celebrity. But I do think that you are right that the particular pleasures or draws of sports may be seen as different. In the wrestling world, John Cena would be a particularly good example.

Because some more traditional fans view him as lacking the technical skills of some

other wrestling stars, he is actively disliked be a particular portion of the crowd, his

"haters." To another very large portion of the audience, often identified as primarily female adults and younger fans, he is greatly loved and admired, and the theory has

often been an emphasis on skill among the active adult male fan base and an emphasis on star image and charisma among female fans, children, and more casual wrestling fans. I'm not saying it breaks that easily into those binaries, but it is intriguing in relation to the question you pose.

C. Lee Harrington: One of the dimensions of creativity often left out of discussions is fan fantasies -- here I mean those that take place only in the confines of one's brain, not shared with others via discussion, fiction, debate, research interview, etc. We all know fantasizing exists but unless it manifests itself in some

representational form visible to others we tend to overlook it (in recent research particularly).

Most studies of fandom tend to rely on at least some form of visible expression. I wonder sometimes about the (in)accessibility of fans who experience and express their fandom only to their own selves......and I'm one of those people, mostly. I'd rather watch my favorite TV programs alone than with others, I don't talk about them online and rarely with friends (though our office staff and faculty have regular Wed morning discussions about Dancing with the Stars and American Idol, perhaps my proudest accomplishment as department chair), and I don't participate in most other creative activities that tend to be the hallmarks of fandom. I wonder if my own research design approach would capture me as a fan :-) Auto- ethnography, anyone...?

To go back to the gender question, yes, the gender of scholars vs. gender of fans vs. gendered nature of texts etc. raise all sorts of complicated questions, and the discussions these past few weeks have been really illuminating. I guess I was thinking with celebrification (in the context of sport) that once we're down the road of transforming athletes into stars, we somehow move them from the world of sport to the world of celebrity, a gendered shift in many people's eyes.

I'm remembering the Olympics a few rounds back (I'm forgetting the year) when the network (NBC?) for the first time did "behind the scenes" of athletes' lives to draw in female viewership. Novel at the time but it's obviously become standard because it altered demos exactly how producers wanted. Not hard to speculate how Emmitt Smith's appearance (and well-deserved win!) on Dancing altered his public perception and fan base. Obviously some of our readers out there know much more about celebrification in the sport context than I do.....

Sam Ford: Lee, I know you share my hope our back- and-forth has been useful for those involved in the discussion this summer and those following the discussion. Since soap opera fandom, sports fandom, and pro wrestling fandom are quite different than many of the fan activities and genres that have been discussed here in the past few weeks, I at least hope that we have emphasized that there is some great work on fandom in the body of work on soap operas and pro wrestling, and that there is a whole other world of sports fandom out there that speak to many of these issues and that would be of great interest.

When the precursor to this series started after the Media in Transition conference and through Kristina Busse's site, we started discussing how my own focus on soap opera

fandom provided a much different perspective on many of the media-related questions posed in this discussion about fandom. I have taken a Convergence Culture approach to what is primarily a female genre, soap opera, which would seem to some a male bent on a female fandom. However, as your work pointed out over a decade ago, a producer/consumer perspective is quite different in the fan world of soaps. While it is quite true that fans often set themselves against TPTB in soaps for not respecting a show's history, this relationship also manifests itself in relation to soap opera's marginality, just as pro wrestling fandom does. Even as producers and consumers bicker about one another from time-to-time, they may very well be the first to defend the others to outsiders. That produces that "family reunion" atmosphere and that much different dynamic.

Soaps also have a larger proportion of female creators in executive and high creative position to correspond with the large female fan base, so gendered discussions of producers and consumers and the power dynamics of their interaction is quite different than in a variety of fandoms in which examining interpersonal relationships in greater detail is reading against the text. Further, the volume of soaps text mitigates the need for fan fiction to fill in the gaps, so fan creativity manifests itself in so many other ways.

Sports and pro wrestling provide the other side of this coin, but as Henry's work points out, wrestling marries a predominantly male fan base and cast to a feminine serialized drama form. And I think it's important to realize that there are a significant portion of soap opera fans who are male, just as there are a large portion of female wrestling fans. These surplus audiences, in the eyes of those worried about target demographics, are still important parts of the fan community and must be included in these discussions, rather than stereotyping the audience as somehow monolithic.

I know that this conversation exists in some ways as an outlier to a fanboy/fangirl discussion, but I hope that will be its strength rather than its weakness. Lee, I know that you are headed out for travels, so we'll end the conversation at this point, and I'll continue the conversation through the comments on Henry's blog and in LiveJournal.

Lee will be joining us in the comments section when she returns from her travels later this month.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part One): Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington

C. Lee Harrington: Hi everyone. This has been an interesting set of discussions thus far -- Sam and I are happy to contribute. We'll follow the general norm by beginning with introductions. I've been engaged in audience/fan studies since the early 1990s, with most of my work co-authored with Denise Bielby. Our interest in fan studies grew out of our long term soap opera-watching habit. I don't remember how long Denise has been watching, but I started watching soaps in the late 1970s and have been an enthusiastic follower ever since (mostly ABC soaps, with some years watching DOOL).

When I was in grad school at UCSB in the late 1980s (Denise is on the faculty there), we went to a General Hospital fan club luncheon, were fascinated by the entire experience, and decided to study the soap fan culture. Our book Soap Fans was published a few years after Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon- Smith's Enterprising Women, among other important work of the late 80s/early 90s, which heavily influenced the way I thought about audience/fans.

We wrote the book in the pre-widespread-Internet-use era (some soap fans were on BBSs but not many), and soap fandom has changed a lot since then (as you write about, Sam). Since Soap Fans, I've done work on the Bianca coming-out storyline on All My Children and have recently worked on aspects of global fandom (with Denise and Kim Schimmel), among other projects. Inspired by Chris Scodari's work, I've also become interested in gerontological issues in soap operas, though my project is in the very early stages.

I have to say that Denise and I are of the generation of scholars who did NOT identify ourselves as soap fans in our work....I think we may have mentioned our own love of soaps to people we interviewed for our various projects (memory is hazy) but I don't think we've ever declared our own fandom in print (memory is hazy here as well, unfortunately). In part this is simply a generational issue, as Henry and others have written/spoken about, in part (for me at least) it's how I construct my own fan identity (as private, rather than publicly experienced/expressed). Denise and I DO have a picture of ourselves in our book though we don't identify who we are in the caption (it amused us at the time, I recall, though it seems less amusing now for some reason).

I also have to say, as Sean Griffin mentioned several weeks ago, that I have not personally encountered the gender issues that launched this discussion series. I'm not quite sure why....maybe because most of my work is based on soap opera, maybe because the gender neutrality of my name leads lots of people to assume I'm male rather than female (a gender issue in its own right, obviously, and one I've dealt with all my life), maybe because I keep a very low profile at conferences and am a miserable networker, so don't end up engaged in some of the firestorms of academia.

Sam Ford: I'm honored to be contributing to this conversation with Lee, who was among the scholars whose work I encountered regularly while working on my Master's thesis. I am a 2007 graduate of the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT, and I think my personal background is important in positioning me in this discussion of fan studies, since I have a much shorter duration as a fan studies scholar.

I graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree and four intersecting majors--English, mass communication, communication studies, and news/editorial journalism-- and a minor in film studies, in three separate departments (Department of English, Department of Communication, and School of Journalism and Broadcasting). As part of my undergraduate honors thesis, I was interested in tackling my own personal interest in professional wrestling as a self-professed fan through each of the three lenses that had been presented to me in these three departments.

My final project was primarily a collection of three essays on pro wrestling, each written through an advisor in a different department, and each with a different citation style and theoretical lens. One was a textual analysis of masculinity in relation to pro wrestling character/performer Mick Foley; another was an industry analysis of World Wrestling Entertainment and how the company diversified its output through multiple media platforms; and the third was a primarily qualitative ethnography of pro wrestling fans, gathered from interview 50 fans at five live wrestling events of various sizes. Each of those projects have been in various stages of publication during my time at MIT, since I came straight from undergraduate to graduate school.

When I came here, I decided to tackle another of my "lovemarks," so to speak, and the other side of perhaps the same gendered coin: soap operas. As those who follow the blog I run for the Convergence Culture Consortium or my guest posts here on Henry's blog in the past, I've found a variety of correlations between soap opera fandom and pro wrestling fandom, and the place of both in relation to both fan studies and questions of cultural taste.

I first encountered the CMS program here at MIT and Henry Jenkins' work through his essays on pro wrestling, which introduced me to Textual Poachers and the fan studies perspective from there. Henry served as a member of my thesis committee, and Convergence Culture was admittedly the major inspiration for my Master's thesis on the soap opera As the World Turns and soap opera fans, along with Nancy Baym's Tune In, Log On.

I have chosen in all my work to make my own fandom an explicit part of my writing, but that very much has to do with generational differences and the work that came before me. I struggled for a long time myself with notions of an "objective" and detached academic voice and my own need for expressing my fandom and my personal motivations for these studies. However, to be fair, Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise do admit to your own fandom in the introduction, even if it does not become infused in your writing as a whole.

Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise write, "Soaps are at the absolute bottom of the television hierarchy, lumped with game shows and professional wrestling in terms of their perceived moral worth" (5). You also write that you have not personally encountered the gender issues being raised in discussion here. I hope we will address these two issues, which I feel are quite related in greater detail, because I find that studies of pro wrestling fandom (and there are quite a few) and of soaps fandom have existed outside of the "mainstream" of fan studies research, and perhaps the gendered focus of both have colored their place in the history of fan studies.

Wrestling is at an interesting place between sports fan studies and media fandom, while being a male scholar studying soap opera fan communities has been illuminating. Of course, it's a farce that there is not a sizable female audience for pro wrestling, as well as a significant portion of male soap opera fans, but they are both quite gendered in terms of industry focus and the predominant fan base.

Finally, you mention your own lack of experience with many of the gender issues in fan studies that launched this series. I feel much the same way. Perhaps it's because I spent a significant portion of the past two years working within and looking at a predominantly female fan community and an industry in which women hold a number of key industry positions.

But I was fascinated, as I delved into these discussion of fan fiction and fan communities versus user-generated content and producer/consumer interaction that, in some ways, studying producer/ consumer interaction was considered by many to be a male perspective on fandom, as opposed to fan activities that are further removed from the commercial contexts of media production. Lee, I know that your book with Denise focuses on soap fans and their relationship with the industry and soap texts in a largely pre-Internet world, so I was curious about your thoughts on the gendered-ness of commercial and non-commercial examples of fan expression within fan studies.

C. Lee Harrington: Ah, so Denise and I *do* mention our fandom in the introduction of our book -- good! I guess I could have walked four steps and plucked the book off the bookshelves, but....thanks Sam. I think you're absolutely correct that studies of pro wrestling fandom and soap fandom have existed outside the mainstream of fan studies, and their gendered focus is an interesting question.

I've been intrigued by the various debates in recent fan studies about whether (or to what extent) genre continues to matter. I understand and agree that the fan experience (subjectively at least) can transcend the fan object but I also think genre still matters in shaping fandom. Twenty years into researching soaps, I'm still fascinated by how unique they are as texts (which you write about, Sam) and the kind of challenges that uniqueness presents both to the industry and to scholars (not to mention to fans).

To get to your question in a roundabout way, one of the unique aspects of open-ended serials is the relentless flow of the text, and I think soap fan expression has been constrained by that. The types of activities Henry and Camille and others were writing about in early 1990s -- fanfic, fan art etc. -- simply were not being practiced by soap fans. There was just no need. A new episode of the text was coming every day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. There was less need to "fill in the gaps," so to speak, so fans were engaging in other types of expression -- private fantasizing, gossiping with friends, reading mags, etc. The industry is in trouble in part because of this relentlessness.....Making time for a new episode every day (day after day etc.) is exhausting for people, even longterm fans like me. You do a

wonderful job with this topic in your thesis....The point being that in the early 1990s at least, soap fans' expressions had more to do with genre than gender (not to say the genre isn't gendered, of course). Has that changed, do you think?

I also wanted to comment on your observation that many in fan studies consider studying producer/consumer interaction to be a male perspective on fandom. One of the things Denise and I were fascinated by at the first GH fan club luncheon we went to was the level of intimacy between actors and fans -- some of it contrived, but not all of it.

I had just finished reading Josh Gamson's book on celebrity culture in which he uses a metaphor of the "hunt," which seemed entirely appropriate to the entertainment realm he was writing about and wholly inappropriate to the soap realm, where decades spent acting on soaps and decades spent watching the same soap lends to a different relationship between the production team and fans/audiences (with actors being in a weird middle realm). Producers have a different type of engagement with longterm Guiding Light viewers than they do with Lost viewers.....Perhaps the presumed gendered-ness of studying production/consumption relations is based on presumptions about the producer/consumer relationship, which might also be shaped by genre (gendered though it is)....?

And having typed this, I'm not entirely sure I addressed the question you actually asked.....

Sam Ford: Lee, I think the frequency and duration of soap opera texts certainly alters the fan experience significantly. Several of these debates about fan studies have centered on fan fiction in one form or another, but as you point out, fan fiction is not one of the predominant forms of expression within soap opera fandom. That's not to say that soap opera fan fiction does not exist at all, but most of the creative output of the fan community is centered on criticism, alternate storyline suggestions, parodies, speculation, nostalgia for prior storylines, contextualizing current events based on the collective memory of the fandom, etc. These are all creative activities, to be sure, but they predominate soaps fandom much more than fan fiction.

I think you may be right that genre has quite a lot to do with this, and primarily the frequency of the text. With 250 new hour-long episodes per year (for every soap other than The Bold and the Beautiful), there are much fewer holes to be filled into the text. Plus, while a lot of fan fiction served to humanize or explore the interpersonal relationships that were not the main focuses of many of the primetime shows that drew the most fan fiction, soap operas are explicitly about these relationships among an ensemble cast.

There are still gaps to be filled in, however, and soap operas are such immersive texts that they actively invite fans to do so, since they are what Robert C. Allen calls overcoded narratives. Since there are so many characters and parts of town fleshed out over the course of decades, but no explicit connections are made as to the geography of the town in many cases, fan activity and creativity often comes through group speculation about the fictional world rather than fan fiction or fan art. Fans make a collective effort in online forums to construct, maintain, and critique the writers' job of the most important aspect of soap opera storytelling to many fans--continuity. With such a massive text, the collective discussion of continuity takes up a significant portion of the creative energy of the fandom, much as they do in comic books and other immersive story worlds, to use a term from my thesis work.

You raise an interesting point regarding the producer/consumer relationship both in your book and in your response here, Lee. Perhaps because soaps are considered niche in terms of cultural taste, it helps shape this sense of camaraderie among fans and producers. That's not to say that soaps fans are not often quite critical of "the powers that be," or "the idiots in charge," and this aspect has probably become more pronounced and explicit now that the Internet facilitates discussions of the creative powers among a large group of fans who are more aware than ever not just of the on-air talent but the creative shifts behind-the-scenes.

Still, I have been to fan events in recent years and still agree that there is this sense of respect and familiarity between actors and fans at soaps events that does extend beyond that celebrity craze. Perhaps this is most true with actors, in that the actors on most soaps have been the constants, and fans are more connected to the actors portraying the roles, and the characters, than they are to the particular creative team, since many in the fan community may have been watching the show longer than anyone on the creative team has been involved with the program.

Thus, longtime characters, and their portrayers, share a veteran status with the show that even most of the creative staff does not have in many of these cases. And that probably explains why soap fans spend so much time guarding the continuity of their shows because of a perceived personal ownership of the text based, in part, on their own seniority in following and knowing the text.

But, speaking of these differences between gender and genre, I know that you have been spending a significant amount of time recently comparing media fandom studies with sports fan studies. Do you suppose many of the differences in sports fan studies to be based more on genre--"real" versus fictional, a higher level of cultural respect vis-a-vis soap opera fandom for sports, etc.--or on gender, since sports fandom has traditionally been considered predominantly male, in comparison to soaps fandom being traditionally considered primarily female?

C. Lee Harrington: Sam, I'm glad you brought up Allen's book -- it's such a fabulous exploration of both the literary and industrial aspects of soaps and seems under-cited in soap audience/ fan research these days. His observation that soap narratives are over-coded, and non-watchers assumptions that they're vastly under-coded, is one of the most interesting aspects of the genre, I think. It's always been difficult to explain to non-watchers how utterly complicated soap texts are, and because longstanding stylistic and production codes can make them appear simplistically plot-driven, their complexity often goes unrecognized. I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!! I really like your term immersive story

worlds in this context, by the way.

I agree with you that it's primarily actors and fans in concert who protect the continuity and integrity of the characters and communities, since production, directing writing teams change so rapidly.....I wanted to add that one of the interesting intimacies in the world of soaps (compared to other entertainment realms) is the place of academic critique within it. I have been surprised at times how welcoming the soap press is to academic commentary on storylines and issues. In part this helps legitimize the industry, of course, but to continue the metaphor of the family reunion which Denise and I used in our book, it allows academics (especially those sympathetic to the genre) to have a seat at the table.

In terms of your question re: sport/media fans, are we talking about the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fan studies or the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fandom? Or both? I have to say at the outset that I am NOT a sport fan scholar so anything I say here is my educated guess....and hopefully we have some readers here who can help us think this through (my recent work is very much from a media-not- sport perspective). Certainly in the West at least, sport fandom is historically male but contemporary fandom even of traditionally masculine sports no longer is, necessarily. Doesn't the NFL say that close to 50% of its fans are female? And I wonder what the gender breakdown is for fans of NASCAR vs. fans for indivdual NASCAR drivers.....? Maybe this is not so much about genre OR gender, per se, but about the increasing celebrification of sport stars....? Is celebrification generally understood as a feminine process (not in any essential way, of course)....?

MORE TO COME

Don't forget to check out the Live Journal site for active discussion of the contents of this post.

Catching Up on Fan Culture...

Converging Worlds

I have been hearing rumors for a while that Convergence Culture is being picked up and read by some of the Powers That Be (i.e. the producers and writers of cult television shows). This certainly seems to be the case on Heroes, according to this recent interview which Wonderland ran with Jesse Alexander, the Exec Producer of Alias, Lost and Heroes:

So you manage how the Heroes property moves through other mediums?

Yes, it was always seen as a transmedia property from day one. I read Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: you should read that if you haven't. To take a brand into the transmedia landscape.. a teevee show through the transmedia landscape, especially a serialized show like Heroes, well, we use a lot of techniques that are very germane to the way that videogames are made.

The writing of Heroes is done by 10-12 people, we come up with the stories together, and we write every episode together. That's an ensemble narrative,. One person can write a story for Peter over multiple episodes, and keep the consistency. What this allows us to do is to keep the whole team totally up to date and vested with the whole show, it harvests the hivemind focus, to deliver a quality narrative. We do rapid prototyping, we iterate on it.. It's that constant iteration and rewriting that gets things done.

The interview as a whole is worth reading. Alexander returns several times to the topic of transmedia entertainment and what it means in the context of a convergence culture:

Everyone knows I talk about convergence.. [...] These big media companies are looking for new ways to exploit their properties. ARGs. Comics. I'm lucky enough to be part of some shows where we worked on these things, and there's convergence with creators of TV and movies.. you have to understand how you can exploit your IP in all those spaces, in a way that's authentic to your IP and won't damage it.

With Heroes, we connect all the things we do with the brand, it's connected to the show. The comic book is part of the canon of the show, it has value. That's why we need the huge team, there has to be enough people to generate that content.

We've done .. It's difficult to call what we do in Heroes an ARG. Is it transmedia television? We're using ARG components.. and that's something that we look to expand in the future. With these large media companies, they desperately want to do this, to exploit this entertainment, and they're still trying to find the structure to actualize that....

Alexander also manages to name check Steven Johnson's work on complexity and Jane McGonigal's work on ARGS and collective intelligence.

Regular readers know that I have been on the Heroes bandwagon since last summer -- having caught an advance peek at the series pilot before it reached the air. Pulling this post together, drew me back to that original piece which read Heroes as closer to an indie comic in its tone and structure than to the mainstream superhero comics that have shaped most other television and big screen stories in the genre. I offered some hints about where I thought the series might be going:

These characters embody forms of longing and desperation that one rarely sees on television - if for no other reason than that the problems they face are unlikely to be solved by a bite from a radioactive spider or a burst of Gamma rays, let alone by mouthwash or toothpaste. And there are moments here which remind me of films like Crash or Grand Canyon, where people from very different backgrounds cross through each others lives and sometimes have unintended consequences. As the series proceeds, I have no doubt that these lives, seeming so separate at the outset, will become more and more intertwined. In the short term, though, viewers can enjoy looking for subtle -- and not so subtle -- hints of connections between them.

Its somewhat bitter aftertaste links the series more closely with Brian Woods' Demo than to most mainstream superhero comics. The characters here seem drawn earthward - more like suicidal jumpers - rather than skyward. None of them yet knows how to leap over tall buildings with a single bound and we are left with the sense that they are going to have to struggle to bring their emerging powers under their control and to make sense of their impact on their self perceptions. As with Demo, these characters aren't going to run right out and buy fancy new superhero duds anytime soon and it is not yet clear that any of them is ready to take on great responsibilities when they are barely able to solve their own inner demons.

Around the edges, there are hints of dark secrets, perhaps a government conspiracy, perhaps bad guys who are going to track down those with powers and force them to make a choice about where they stand, but the first episode allows the protagonists to wallow in their various emotional responses to the discovery that they are not like mortal men. This is a series which will provide lots of fodder for internet speculation and decipherment within the fan communities that it is apt to inspire.

Throughout the year, I have admired the ways that the series has dispersed back story through imaginatively structured episodes and through the use of web comics as a platform of transmedia entertainment. And I was pleased that themes I saw in the characters from the pilot really took root and defined their interactions, including the prolonged focus on what it means to discover your powers and to define your "mission." So, I am personally very pleased to see Alexander describe my book as helping to shape his thinking on these issues.

"Wiki-Media"

I am always excited to see other academics who do important work in media or cultural studies get hit with the blogging bug. A case in point: Robert Kozinets. Kozinets is a marketing professor currently at ork University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto. Kozinets has done some of the ground-breaking work on brand communities and their relationship to fan communities. I served on his dissertation committee years ago -- his project centered around consumption and production within Star Trek fan culture. I rediscovered his work while doing research for Convergence Culture and his ideas informed my discussion of American Idol. More recently, Kozinets joined our Convergence Culture Consortium team and I was able to showcase his work on Star Trek fan cinema at the Society for Cinema Studies conference last spring.

If you don't know his work, you should check out his blog. He's hit on several topics of relevance to my readers so far, including several posts which share his insights into the history of Star Trek fandom and Star Trek fan cinema, which he reads through the lens of more recent concepts such as "brand hijacking" (Alex Wipperfürth), Lead Users (Eric Von Hipple) and Wikinomics (Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams). He shares an interesting excerpt from an anthology he has co-edited, Consumer Tribes, one which uses wikipedia to develop an analogy for thinking about fan movie-makers:

Star Trek has gone native or, better, it has gone wiki-it is now "wikimedia." Fans add to Star Trek and correct one another just like Wikipedia encyclopedia contributors add to the famously expansive universe of the online encyclopedia. By the term "wikimedia" I mean to describe a distinct media content form that has, either deliberately or unintentionally, gone open source and begun spawning new content through the efforts of non-profit, do-it-yourself, collaborative media creators acting outside of the structure of corporate, institutional organization or sanction. The existence and notioning of wikimedia has major implications for our understanding of contemporary consumer culture....

Kozinet's use of the concept of Wiki-Media seems relevant given the recent discussion here of "Wiki-Fic" as a way of thinking about the interface between fan fiction and transmedia storytelling.

Other posts to date have dealt with Philip K. Dick and Burning Man. Kozinet's blog will be worth following as he explores the social dimensions of brands and branded entertainment.

I am going to be taking the rest of the week off: there's no new gender and fan studies content this week and I am going to be enjoying the 4th with my family.

The Pleasure of Pirates and What It Tells Us About World Building in Branded Entertainment

As a rule, one should never trust the opinion of an established film critic about a movie with a number after its title -- and one should multiply the level of distrust for each number over 2. The whole concept of franchise entertainment seems to bring out the worst high culture assumptions in the bulk of American film critics (and beyond the United States, it's pretty much hopeless). Franchises are understood exclusively in terms of their economic function within the Hollywood entertainment supersystem, as if Hollywood made any movies that didn't make economic sense. Franchises are seen as aesthetic abominations and critics show little interest in exploring what kinds of new experiences might be enabled by seriality. And critics respond to sequels with extraordinary conservativeness, assuming that all the film can possibly do is to reproduce as closely as possible the pleasures offered by the first film, rather than imagining the expanded canvas which is possible by allowing people to work within yet transform the generic expectations created by earlier works. To be fair, a high percentage of franchise films are formulaic exercises which have little or no aesthetic rationale. But this is not true of all sequels and this doesn't fully account for the function sequels play within the new media landscape. For a good discussion of some of these issues, check out a recent conversation at David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's blog which featured Stew Fyfe; Doug Gomery; Jason Mittell; Michael Newman; Paul Ramaeker; and Jim Udden.

To be fair, most sequels are more susceptible to the word of mouth response than to reviews per se, because most fans of popular entertainment have learned not to trust critics on such topics.

All of this comes to mind as I reflect on the critical drubbing recently received by the new Pirates film: Pirates of the Caribbean: At the World's End. Check out the website Rotten Tomatoes which links to dozens of on-line reviews of the film, almost all of which are negative, almost all of which tapped the same theme:

1. The film is too complicated and demands too much from its consumers. We want summer movies to be big, loud, and dumb.

2. The film doesn't offer enough screen time to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow character, who seems to be the only reason they believe patrons would be interested in a film of this kind.

3. The film doesn't have a simple, straight forward plot trajectory but instead moves through a series of set pieces and digressions, most of which showcase secondary characters (i..e. anyone other than Jack Sparrow.)

This summary captures the substance, though not the tone of these reviews, which seem to be a critical referendum on what writers like Jason Mittell and Steven Johnson have described as the increasing complexity of contemporary popular culture. Consider a few examples, drawn more or less at random, for several dozen similar reviews featured at the site:

With so many loose ends to tie up, At World's End is so insanely plot-heavy that it requires scene after scene of exposition, and the whole thing sinks simply under the weight of the story. A complicated narrative isn't necessarily a bad thing - that is, if the exposition provides something new, perhaps a fresh direction for the characters that we've all come to love, but even with so many plot points being juggled at once, there just aren't enough clever twists or cool new elements in AWE to justify the 30 tons of story the audience has to slog through....Except for a few great FX moments, At World's End is practically ALL exposition, and fans are going to grow tired of the unnecessarily complicated story since there's not nearly enough action to keep them entertained for almost three hours....The creators of At World's End were so intent on basing their bleak storyline on the end of the pirate era that they forgot that the movie needs to be, first and foremost, a ride. The whole stupid Pirates of the Caribbean concept is based on a ride, remember? One out of ten fans of the Pirates franchise may truly care about the complicated soap opera of a story at the heart of At World's End, but the other nine just want to see something funny and fast-paced, and they're the ones who are going to be most let down.--Brian Tallerico, UnderGround Online

But even if I wanted to spoil things, I couldn't. This movie is too darned hard to follow. There's so much stuff happening, sometimes all at once, that it's hard to keep track of who's on whose ship, who's selling out whom and even who's getting killed, where and how. And it won't matter whether you've seen the first two Pirates movies or not. You'll still be confused. --Gene Seymour, Newsday

Unlike, say, Shrek the Third, which works perfectly fine as a mediocre stand-alone sequel, At World's End relies heavily on viewers' knowledge of the previous film, Dead Man's Chest. Seems fair enough, given how many moviegoers were willing to pony up for that one. Still, all the curses, vendettas, double-crosses, reconciliations, trinkets, negotiations and sea monsters longing to be human again gave me severe tired head before the two-hour mark. Summer blockbusters may have many goals, but tired head should not be among them....So yeah, At World's End has some fun stuff. If only it weren't so stuffed to the gills with moving parts. -Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

One longs for more scenes featuring Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's indelible and beloved character in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (* 1/2 out of four), and less of everything else in this bloated, overwrought and convoluted three-hour misfire.--Claudia Puig, USA Today

What I really craved was not more action or reversals of fortune, but a magic compass like the one that gets stolen and stolen again ad nauseam in the movie, one that always points the beholder to the thing he desires the most. In this case, it could have been a story map or just the peacefulness of the brig....Don't misunderstand. I like my action movies complicated, but At World's End is less a complexity than it is a high seas bazaar with everyone and everything vying for attention. Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

At the World's End certainly gets no credit for its ambitions here, no recognition for placing new kinds of conceptual demands on its spectators, and no praise for its craftmanship. Rather, it is being forced back into the box where critics place any and all popular entertainment. The perception that summer movies are mindless and motivated purely by commercial considerations is being forced onto this film; At the World's End is being whacked for every step it takes outside of the confines of a totally classically constructed film.

The problem is that At the World's End is not a classically constructed film. Well, don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that at a certain level of abstraction, David and Kristin would be able to demonstrate that it follows the modified structure of acts they see as the hold over of classical narrative technique on contemporary cinema; there's no question that the characters have goals, that there are causal connections between their actions, or that the film follows intensified continuity styles of editing. But, in many ways, the film's heart is not in telling a classical linear story. This film wants to explore a world and much of its complexity emerges from the fact that we have been able to accumulate and master more information about that world through the first two films. I saw At the World's End shortly before I left on my European adventures and was blown away by its attention to detail and its respect for the intelligence of fans. This is one of the best summer movies that I have seen in a long long time and a powerful illustration of the ways that convergence culture is reshaping how franchise entertainment operates.

In Convergence Culture, I explain that Hollywood has moved from a primary focus on stories as the generators of film pitches to a focus on characters that will sustain sequels to a focus on worlds that can be played out across multiple media platforms. This shift accommodates a much more active spectator who wants to watch favorite movies again and again, making new discoveries each time, and who enjoys gathering online and comparing notes within a larger knowledge culture. In the book, I use The Matrix as an extreme example of this tendency towards transmedia entertainment and towards films focused more on world building than on character or plot. The Matrix, in some ways, demanded more of spectators than they were prepared to give, stretching its material across films, animations, comics, and games, while providing little redundancy across the various platforms. The Matrix sequels fell into the blindspot of most critics who remain bound to a single medium and were not prepared to accept games or comics or animation as contributing to the same meta-text.

At the World's End adopts a somewhat more conservative strategy -- keeping everything within the three films (more or less) but insuring that the later films in the series achieve a density of information which would not have been possible in the first title in the franchise. The critic's preoccupation with Depp's Jack Sparrow suggests that they have missed a step in the evolution of the media franchise -- stuck back at the moment when sequels depended on the appeal of a single well-defined character.

Don't get me wrong -- Sparrow is a great character and Depp's is a masterful performance. Without Sparrow, the first film might never have achieved its broad appeal -- which is a strange thing to say about a character as queer, eccentric, and self-reflexive about this one. And yes, for my money, there's not enough of Depp in the third film -- which is funny to say given how there are several sequences here when Depp plays all the parts. But, from the start, the Pirates films have succeeded on the basis of an extraordinary ensemble cast of some of the best and/or most engaging performers in contemporary cinema (Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Stellan Skarsgard, Naomie Harris) and for the third film, we can add brief but memorable performances by Yun-Fat Chow and Keith Richards and a much wider array of character actors who are given one or two solid moments each to shine. We've met these characters over time, a few introduced in each of the first two films, and now the directors are able to bring them together, play them opposite each other, in a shifting set of alliances and conflicts. All of this keeps the film in constant motion and gives us an emotional hook for almost every shot.

Then, consider the build up of running gags that surround the various pirates (and their pets) on board the Black Pearl and consider the ways that the use of very distinctive but recognizable encrustations on the various crew members of the Flying Dutchman allows us to recognize and recall these minor characters each time they appear on screen.

And then consider the ways that the device of the Pirate's Council allows the film to hint at a globally diverse array of different pirate cultures -- Chinese pirates, South Asian pirates, Eastern European pirates, Spanish Pirates, French Pirates, etc. -- which can be evoked quickly shot by shot as we move through the film. I found myself intrigued by the suggestion that pirates, who take to the open seas rather than staying closer to land and following trade routes, establish a different set of contact zones than the nations with which they are embattled, and by the hint of the multicultural composition of Pirate crews (even discounting the somewhat politically correct impulses of representation and inclusiveness that shaped this particular representation of the process.)

Or consider the rich atmosphere created by the film's detailed reconstruction of 19th century Singapore which depends on a range of details that may or may not register consciously for many viewers but which suggests a specific historical and cultural context much larger than the actions of the film.

The principal figures are given story arcs which tie together plot strands from the earlier film and each is given at least one, perhaps more, moments of transition and revelation. The secondary characters rely heavily on what my former student Geoffrey Long likes to describe as negative capability -- they are well enough defined that we can imagine who they are, what they want, and why they are doing what they are doing, but much remains for the audience to flesh out from their own imaginations. The Pirates Council in particular invites us to draw together what we know from other sources while suggesting that the world of this franchise is much larger and diverse than anything we suspected so far. So much gets conveyed here through aspects of make-up, costume design, and art direction which evokes a whole complex culture behind characters who may never be given names and who may appear in only a few shots or scenes.

The film, in other words, throws a lot of stuff at us and expects us to catch it. The critics dropped the ball but the film plays fair -- there's a there there, a rationale or reason behind every element, and the parts add up to a satisfying whole if we connect all of the pieces. For someone really engaged in watching this film, the result is epistemaphilia, a mad rush of information being brought together and being clicked into the right mental category. I had this experience even though I saw Dead Man's Chest almost a year ago. I can only imagine the pleasures that await us when we watch all three films back to back in a DVD marathon or all of the telling details I will pick up on during a second or third viewing -- and that's part of the point. The modes by which we consume these films have shifted. Most films don't warrant a first look, let alone a second viewing, but for those films that do satisfy and engage us, a much higher percentage of the audience is engaged in what might once have seemed like cult viewing practices. Once we find a franchise which floats our boats, we will settle in for an extended relationships and we want to explore all of the hidden nooks and crannies. We want to know everything we can possibly know about this world and contemporary franchise films are designed to accommodate our interests.

In this case, one consequence is a heavy reliance on reaction shots, as we read what unfolds through the eyes of a range of different characters and feel sympathy for their various and contradictory points of view. In this regard, At the World's End follows closely what others have written about television soap opera -- the reaction is as important as the action -- though in this case, we may be seeing and trying to take in the reactions of three or four different characters within a single shot.

Another consequence is the development of objects which encapsulate relationships, conflicts, histories, and emotional investments. Again, this is the stock of film melodrama where lover's tokens may carry a lot of the affective weight of the story. But here, because there are so many different characters and subplots, we have a proliferation of meaningful objects (compasses, rings, "pieces of eight," flags, ships, treasure chests, hearts, ships, etc.) which carry different kinds of meaning and power and much of the action consists of the deployment and exchange of these objects between various characters.

A third aspect of the film would seem to borrow heavily from ensemble dramas on television -- each scene might bring together more than one character and more than one subplot with the result that the film moves forward through a series of intersections and interruptions of its plot developments. Plots cross each other: a choice which seems to bring resolution to one plotline opens up new complications for another; a decision which makes sense from one perspective seems enigmatic from another; and the reader must be alert to all of these different levels of development, must think about what the scene means for each character and each plot if they are going to get full pleasure from the story. What may seem like a digression at first may accrue significance as the film goes along -- consider how a series of localized gags and set pieces involving ropes, say, may take shape as the film progresses into a particular understanding of Jack's improvised and yet carefully calculated way of moving through the world.

But, then again, we can watch the movie as a series of set pieces, enjoying individual gags, or just taking pleasure in watching people blow shit up, and because there is so much going on here, we will generally have a good time. Like the first Matrix and unlike its sequels, the film is visceral enough that one can enjoy it on a surface level.

The problem is that people have some difficult moving between the two -- if they suddenly realize that the film is much more complex and layered than they anticipated, they may start to flounder and ultimately drown, which seems to be what happened to a high percentage of the film critics. They went into the film expecting a certain kind of experience; they hadn't successfully learned how to take pleasure from its world-building; they don't want to dig into the film more deeply after the fact, comparing notes online with other viewers, because their trade demands constant movement to the next film and a focus on their own private, individualized thoughts.

Watch a film with a group of critics and it is a rather chilly experience, each trying to suppress signs of their emotional response for fear of tipping their hands to their competition. They don't laugh at comedy; they don't cry at melodrama; and they don't know how to engage in fannish conversation around film franchises, which means that their professional conduct cuts them off from the shared emotional pleasures that are so much a part of how popular culture works its magic on us. For that reason, I trust film critics far more when they are writing about art films which demand distanced contemplation than popular films which desire an immediate emotional reaction.

All of this is to say that the critics were not inaccurate in their description of At the World's End: it is a complex, some would argue overly complex, blend of different story elements; it is pulling us in many different directions at once; it isn't focused around a single protagonist. Where we disagree is in our emotional experience and aesthetic evaluation of the features of the film. These are the reasons why At the World's End is my favorite entry in the Pirates series and are scarcely reasons to pan the finished film.

We might contrast At the World's End with Spider-Man 3, a film which I didn't enjoy very much. While at the World's End constructs a world with many points of entry and many different intersections between its large cast of characters, Spider-Man 3 fumbles a much smaller number of subplots, because they all need to be focused through the clogged pipeline of a single protagonist. We are constantly feeling the thwacking fist of coincidence and contrivance pushing us out of any immediate experience of the film. Each of the subplots follows the basic narrative structure of the contemporary yet still classical Hollywood film. It has to go through the same formulaic steps, more or less in the same sequence, more or less in parallel, which collapses the difference between The Sandman, Hobgoblin, and Venom, as characters who originated in comics during different eras and for different purposes. The film has many moments I could enjoy on their own terms but it keeps tripping over its own two feet and when a film of this size and scale lands wrong, it lands with an awesome thud.

I loved the first two films in the Spider-Man series but the third entry left me totally cold -- in part because it hasn't been able or willing to make this transition between character-centered and world-centered story, doing neither particularly well. In the case of the Pirates films, though, each new entry gave me more of what I wanted from the franchise, could start with an assumption of greater mastery and investment on the part of the spectator, and could push deeper into the complex world building that I have come to expect from transmedia entertainment at its very best.

End of rant. I will now return you to your regularly scheduled summer entertainment. Critics, you can turn off your minds again. Just don't expect me to shut down mine.

What Makes Japan So Cool?: An Interview with Ian Condry

From time to time, I have shared with my readers some of the podcasts being generated by the Cool Japan Project, a joint research effort at MIT and Harvard, focused on understanding more fully Japanese popular culture -- especially anime and manga but also the culture around popular music and toys/collectibles. The project is sponsored by the MIT Japan Program, Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT Comparative Media Studies. Today, I thought I would introduce you to the man behind the Cool Japan Project -- one of the coolest guys I know at MIT, my colleague Ian Condry. I had the good fortune to go on a tour of the Japanese media industry a few years ago along with Condry and it certainly opened my eyes to the richness and complexity of what's going on in that part of the world. Now a junior faculty member in the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures program who is affiliated with CMS, Condry was trained as an anthropologist and so his research into Japanese popular culture is shaped by extensive field work at sites of both production and consumption. His first major book, Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization came out earlier this year and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to better understand contemporary hip hop music, the globalization process, or the links between Japanese and American popular culture. He is now hard at work on a second book project, Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Culture, which has taken him behind the scenes into some of the key studios producing contemporary anime and has brought key players in that space to MIT to speak as part of the Cool Japan program. In this interview, he talks both about Japanese hip hop and about the process which has brought anime and manga to the attention of American consumers.

If American youth are drawn to Japanese popular culture, your book explores the opposite phenomenon -- hip hop culture in Japan. Why were the Japanese drawn initially to this form of American popular culture?

Hip-hop music and breakdance were mind-blowing to youth audiences worldwide when both appeared overseas in the early eighties. The sound was so different (where's the band? why isn't he singing?) that it drew many people who had grown tired of rock and roll. So too with breakdance which had a competitive energy that was impossible to miss. Both offered the promise of liberation into an uncharted realm. The dynamics have changed, now that hip-hop is bona-fide pop music, but the transformative impact was unmistakable. Interestingly, the first audiences in Japan didn't understand what was going one, but they saw it was something different, and that sparked curiosity that kept growing. The early days of transformative early cultures are a mysterious and wonderful thing.

In your book Hip-Hop Japan, you suggest that the Japanese use this musical form to explore their own themes. What kinds of topics does hip hop address in the Japanese context?

Some of the most interesting recent rap songs in Japan are addressing America's misguided "war on terror," and the complicity of the Japanese media and the national government. The group King Giddra, for example, has a song called "911," which uses images of Hiroshima's ground zero after the bombing as a way of rethinking ground zero New York. The group Rhymester raps about America's hypocrisy in always telling Japan to "follow the path of peace" but then starts bombing Baghdad. By the same token, they see the Japanese government as little more than "yellow Uncle Sam."

Many rap artists are addressing other aspects of Japan's changing society, from women trying to find a place in a patriarchal society, to rappers questioning the failure of the economy, to criticism of the pornography industry, youth violence, and drug abuse. There is plenty of Japanese rap that tends to light and poppy, or even pseudo-gangsta and tough, but there are also some of the most striking alternative voices in Japan appearing in Japanese hip-hop music.

Can you describe something of the research process that went into this book? How

were you able to get such access to the Japanese hip hop world?

Fieldwork is an amazing thing. Going to the nightclubs week after week, month after month, over a year and a half (1995-97), formed the basis of my research. There I met the musicians, record company reps, magazine writers, organizers, and all manner of fans, from the deep b-boys and b-girls, with their hair and clothes just so, to the "first-time checking out a club" kids. It was clearly the interaction among these groups that built the hip-hop scene, from the largely underground scene it was then, to the expanding underground and mainstream elements that have developed today.

Hip-hop clubs in Japan are active from midnight to 5 a.m., with the live show happening around 2am, well after the trains have stopped running for the night. That means everyone is stuck at the club to the first trains around dawn. This turned out to be a boon for fieldwork. By 3am, most of the people had told all the jokes and stories and gossip they had to tell to their friends already, and many people were willing to come up and find out what this gaijin (foreigner) with a notepad was doing there.

Access to the hip-hop in Japan kept developing over the years following during periodic trips to Tokyo once or twice a year. Over time, I got to know some of the artists more personally. Watching their careers change and develop over almost the 10 year span of the book's research meant that I could see the struggles of artists coping with a quixotic pop world, where youthfulness is highly valued.

Something curious must be going on with race as an African-American music form gets taken up in an Asian culture where there are relatively few black people. What do you see as the racial politics of Japanese hip hop?

Race is very important for understanding hip-hop in Japan. Young Japanese (and many white Americans, too, I would add) are drawn to the "blackness" of hip-hop, most visibly in the clothing styles, hair styles, but also in a widening sensibility towards a particular musical style, born of verbal dexterity and polyrhythmic nuance, as well as the creativity involved in sampling and remixing.

The images of African-Americans in Japan tend to reinforce stereotypes, and hip-hop can be viewed as one of vehicles for these stereotypes. But at the same time, the fans who get more deeply into the music and culture are forced to deal with questions of race, questions of where Japanese fit into the matrix of white and black, questions of how Japanese racial nationalism still influences the ways resident Koreans, Ainu, and Okinawans have been treated historically, and how they are treated today. In these ways, the impact of hip-hop on racial attitudes has been complex, at times contradictory, but, I believe, generally among hip-hop fans, moving in some right directions.

Your next project has you examining anime and manga more directly. What can you tell us about this new project?

My new book project is called Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Popular Culture. I'm interested in "the making of" anime culture as an entire global circuit of media production. I spent the summer of 2006 in several Tokyo animation studios, primarily Gonzo and Aniplex, but also with visits to Ghibli, Sunrise, Aniplex, Studio 4 Degrees C. and others. I observed the collaborative creativity that goes into anime production, how they divide the process - characters, premise, worldview - and how the ideas about creativity become enacted, actually made real, through the daily practices of making anime, frame-by-frame.

To me, Japanese anime provides an important, non-Western case study of the ways media goes global, both by speaking across cultural boundaries while retaining a kind of cultural difference (have you ever seen so many giant robots or transforming schoolgirls?). Anime's connection to the world of Japanese comic books, woodblock prints and ancient picture scrolls is often deemed sufficient to prove a kind of cultural particularity, but at the same time, the development of Japan's anime industry was closely linked to American comics, Disney and other pioneering cartoon creators.

I also explore the ways anime fans, first in Japan and then overseas, have been integral to the expansion of anime culture. Too often we are told to "follow the money" when we analyze media production, but what I see is that the money follows the creativity of artists who are able to capture audiences, and, at the same time, audiences can rescue lost gems in ways that many entertainment companies seem not yet to recognize. By looking at the case of Japanese anime, I believe we can come to a deeper understanding of national differences and global synergies, the evolving worlds of media, digital technology, and the ways artists, fans, and businesses interact.

How has this growing interest in "Japan Cool" impacted the study of Japanese

language and culture in the United States?

The idea of "cool Japan" really took off with the publication of journalist Douglas McGray's 2002 article "Japan's Gross National Cool" in Foreign Policy magazine. He argued that Japan had become a "cultural superpower," despite a decade-long recession that began in the early nineties. It has also changed the attitudes of American's interested in Japan

In the eighties, when I began studying Japanese language in college, my classmates tended to be Economics majors who planned to make a killing in international trade. They wanted to know how to bow and hand over business cards, but seldom seemed interested in Japanese history or culture Today, the majority, though not all, students of Japanese language and culture are drawn to Japan because of their experience with anime and manga. They are more interested in the culture, history, religion, and educational system of Japan. To me, it's a much more interesting group, more broad-minded, socially aware, and intellectually curious.

Some Japanese policy makers view the overseas interest in manga and anime as a vehicle for "soft power," political scientist Joseph Nye's term for political power that follows from the attractiveness of a nation's culture and ideals. I think the effect is in fact different. Manga doesn't convey "power" so much as it provides an entryway to a larger world, but one that is clearly conflicted and contradictory. The real power of popular culture is make stereotypes seems less compelling, and to force us to ask more complex questions about cultural differences.

Why do you think anime and manga have succeeded here while Jpop has largely

failed to generate the same level of interest?

I give American anime fans a lot of credit for driving the interest in anime through devoted, unpaid efforts to make the media available. In the eighties, they used VCRs, and today it's fansubs online through sites like www.animesuki.com.

Manga in Japan are such a powerful media because of the intense competition among manga artists. The largest weekly magazines carry about 15 serialized stories. Each week the publishers received about 3000 postcards, which list three most interesting and three dullest stories. A few weeks' of poor grades, and dull stories get cut. The manga stories that have survived for years are the ones that have maintained their edge. The fact that it is easy to read manga for free in convenience stores or borrowed from friends also means that fans are exposed to a lot of different manga and thereby become more sophisticated judges as well.

I think record companies in Japan haven't made much effort to break into the US market in part because US prices are about half that of Japan's, so they feel they won't make money. From the American perspective, Japanese CDs are simply too expensive, running about double the price of US albums. Both sides of the equation limit the flow.

Reading the UpFronts: A Conversation with Media Analysts Stacey Lynn Schulman and Alex Chisholm

Last week, I previewed a CMS course description for the fall 2007 semester, Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the fall 2007 Television Ecosystem. As a follow-up, Alex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman, the course instructors, started a dialog around some of the dominant issues in the television marketplace as they create the syllabus. Much of the discussion here follows upon the recent upfronts, an annual event during which each of the networks announce their plans for the coming television season. Their perspectives illustrate both the urgency of change and the breadth of historical perspective these two will bring to students at MIT this fall. Characterizing the State of Primetime Television Performance

AC: This year's television season was, at best, lackluster. Despite some really great promise, especially with the arrival of many new and expanded extension strategies, there wasn't much to get excited about. Viewers either tuned in or didn't show up at all -- there didn't seem to be much of other networks catching the "run off" when a proven or presumed hit didn't deliver. Even juggernaut hit American Idol ended the season down in year-to-year ratings despite a strong early showing. Ratings that used to guarantee a show would be cancelled (anywhere between 4.0 and 6.0) are now regarded as highly respectable (the CW seems to be sustaining a business with shows averaging 0.5-2.0). At face value it seems that the sky is falling...

Meanwhile, with DVRs, online extensions, iTunes downloads, and advertiser-supported streaming video at network sites, we're seeing a significant shift in how people consume television content. While actual numbers aren't available because they're proprietary,

I believe that during the Tuesday and Wednesday following the broadcast of the Heroes series finale, NBC set a network record for the total number of page hits and video streams it served. Heroes was arguably the biggest new hit of the season.

SLS: The current season's performance is actually part trend, part business-as-usual. Keep in mind that new season successes are few and far between -- very few shows make it past the 4th quarter (October - December) and even fewer are picked up for the next season. Each year around this time I present the new season to advertisers and make the same point -- networks are in first place this year with ratings that would have left

them in third place just a year before ... and what constitutes a "hit" is relative to the network (i.e. CW). This trend is unavoidable in a fragmented entertainment market where the average home receives 102 channels. So, these observations have been fairly standard in TV analysis over the past 15 years. In the past, the industry has blamed cable as both thief and benefactor of disenfranchised network TV viewers. What is different about this past season, as Alex correctly points out, are new challenges facing programmers in a universe of time- shifting and on-demand viewership. Nielsen reported in April that DVR penetration had reached nearly 18% of the TV population and networks began full-force efforts to provide multiple viewing windows on air (in repeats) or online (on demand) throughout the season. Subsequently, the "live" TV audience for many established hits appear to be waning - and new shows are being

sampled, but in totally new ways. Unfortunately, without good cross-media metrics, we still can't tell whether the online (or alternative view) audience is the same or different from the TV audience ... and if their viewing once or multiple times. Here the question of actual audience size comes down to an old metric of reach and frequency ... how much of your audience is unique or unduplicated? And which environment is better for advertising - one in which you CAN skip the ads or one in which you CAN'T?

Look at how HBO's long-awaited final season of The Sopranos has declined every week from its premiere. The network wants to explain it away by the multiple windows they're

providing throughout the week to catch the show (on air)... but one has to wonder whether the bloom is far off the rose when there is significant audience erosion on the first original airing each week -- clearly not a water- cooler event!

Programming and Scheduling Strategies in a New Media World

AC: Last year was my first chance to attend all of the network upfronts. As a "newbie," I found the whole experience to be fairly entertaining and very much like what I've seen at other "pitch fests" such as the old E3Expo, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Macworld. It was a challenge to focus on what was "new" and what was "business as usual" (or "business in crisis"). I remember being excited by the amount of time NBC had spent on their digital strategies and then was disappointed to see that presentation slammed so badly in various media and financial reports through the rest of the week. What did I know? Given the way that last year's television upfront presentations were pitched -- new shows, mid-season replacements, lots of promos that started as early as last May -- and the reality of what happened during the year, I started to seriously question how much longer the traditional "season" of September to May is going to endure.

Two years ago, Prison Break was introduced in the late summer and has gone on to do very well. Last summer, The Closer became the highest premiering cable show ever in June. This year, ABC didn't premiere one of its midseason replacements, The Traveler until May. NBC pulled the plug on several shows within three weeks of premiere this year, while ABC was criticized by angry fans of both Desperate Housewives and Lost for the long periods between the airing of original shows, which were held to artificially inflate sweeps periods. Even Heroes, which has been a breakout, still could not give NBC a full victory on Monday nights when Nielsen data was analyzed; it helped NBC win the night during the fall and early winter, but it's not been able to bolster the network's programming through the spring, where it repeatedly lost the night to ABC (Dancing With the Stars) and Fox (24 and Prison Break).

SLS: In Gail Berman's last year as the head of entertainment for FOX television, she unveiled a progressive plan to move out of the traditional season and develop year-round

programming. That year, the FOX presentation stood out among others as the most confusing and complicated schedule ever presented. Not only was the industry confused, but so was the audience. The experiment failed miserably and Gail left to helm Paramount before the season was completed. Regardless, I applauded the effort, having proven through audience research that cable gained significantly in periods where the broadcast networks aired more repeats of established series. Sweeps stunts have been diminishing over the years - and this is an issue we will cover at some length in the course. The existence of sweeps is largely to gauge and set ad rates for individual stations in markets where there is not continuous measurement. Complicated network affiliate agreements that involve station compensation by the networks are at risk - and one might argue that digital viewing windows for content strain the relationship even further. While stations - owned or affiliated - pour millions into upgraded station equipment for HD transmission, their back-end is less and less secure...

The issue here is thus a good economic exploration of the business on multiple fronts. It costs a lot of money to produce television series, particularly fictional (although non-fiction costs are significant for series like, Survivor). It's not possible to produce the same quality of content every week of the year.. and networks depend on repeat windows to actually break-even on the cost of producing shows. When the FCC repealed the Financial Interest in Syndication Rules in the early 90's (which led to the expansion of the FOX network and the launch of the WB and UPN networks among other things), most believed that networks would take financial interest in the series they picked up for the schedule - and would thus benefit financially in the lucrative syndication marketplace. While we do have a much greater portion of the schedule owned by the networks (an increase from 20 - 60+% over the past 15 years), the declining trend of success and new digital distribution streams have significantly limited the syndication windfall. Three years ago, John Wells pre-empted the network in canceling his own series after only a handful of episodes, knowing full well that the cost of production would never be re-gained because the network would soon shut them down and there would be no pot of gold in syndication. And while the promise of digital distribution is tempting, no one has figured out how to properly monetize it and keep digital rights issues in check at the same time.

AC: My sense is that the traditional "tent-pole" programming strategies of creating an entire evening for a particular audience or demographic target have eroded dramatically in the past few years. It's hard to sit down and commit to one network's slate of shows. During the research we did around American Idol a few years ago, when I observed a single family week after week during the winter and spring, it was interesting to note that the minute the show ended, the kids were chased from the family room so the parents could settle in for 24, which was then in its second season, I think. The parents didn't necessarily watch American Idol with the kids, but rather entered the room 15 minutes before the transition to prepare the kids for the "chase." During our regular "design squad" research groups with about 65 teens for a "news for education" project this winter and spring, only a handful reported that they watched any television at all -- most surfed for entertainment content online, especially YouTube.

SLS: The bonds created by good audience flow are definitely diminishing, and yet, when we look at audience viewing clusters, we typically find that the shows which hold

together the strongest are those which fall on the same night on the same network. These bonds confound our common sense further because their linkages are stronger than linkages of genre. So there is a significant population of couch potatoes out there who settle into a night of TV, on basically the same channel. I believe that this is a phenomenon that may be explained by both generational and lifestyle gaps. A frequent urge in the media community is to want to study the habits of teenagers and young adults in order to forecast the eventual behavior of the population. While I agree that younger folks grow up in different circumstances and bring new expectations to experiences with technology (how long do I have to wait for x?), the life factors - children, job pressures, physical exhaustion, etc... provide a balancing factor (of how much we don't know) to the technological glee of earlier behaviors. Also, one of the hardest things to do in evaluating programming is to remove yourself from the audience and consider the overall complexion of the nation ... it may not be appealing to you the analyst, but it really plays in Peoria... It's the same with new technologies ... rapid adoption in some sectors doesn't always balance out laggard adoption rates in others...

On Changing TV Business Models...

AC: This year's upfront presentations were reportedly lean and mean, suggesting that all networks learned some lessons after last year's bloated and extended pitch fests. I didn't attend any but followed events and announcements on blogs and through popular and

industry media while I was traveling. Both TV Week and Variety reported that many in the industry thought the length and pitches were just right, a good compromise between total glitz and eliminating the upfront presentations altogether. The general observation is that television executives, long considered immune to criticism of excessive glitz in the business world, are now having to tighten their belts and be held more accountable for the businesses they steward; it seems the message that television executives need to respond to shareholders not just studio and network chiefs, has gotten through (General Electric, for example, constantly needs to "qualify" earnings per share limits given NBC Universal's performance; and, last year saw Viacom split CBS from its cable operations).

SLS: While certainly longer than this year's pitches, last year's bloated pitch-fests were actually shorter than years past... when I first began in the business each network presented for three-four hours a piece... and some of them were still doing that as of

last year. The debate around the upfront presentations is actually just the easiest target to hit first. What the industry really wants to debate is whether there should be an upfront marketplace AT ALL. Some marketers like J&J have taken strong positions to step out of the market, opting instead to negotiate throughout the year in the scatter market. Others are tried and true believers in the power of television. What becomes interesting is how we define "television" and whether marketers are best served with upfront dollar commitments to take advantage of new bells and whistles ... or not...

AC: The ouster of Kevin Reilly as head of NBC Entertainment over the Memorial Day weekend is perhaps the most immediate sign of how turbulent things have become at the "longtime-first-place-now-fourth- place" network as executives scramble to optimize development and business models. Reilly was released less than two weeks after the upfronts at a time when he should be one of the biggest champions of the new season's schedule and potential. Ben Silverman, owner of the company that produces The Office and The Biggest Loser for NBC, will replace Reilly, a sign that NBC is committed to following through on a strategy to create slates of reality programming across the board for the 8:00-9:00 p.m. and focus on high- quality dramatic/comedy program for 9:00-11:00 p.m. - Jeff Zucker outlined this strategy in October 2006, even before he rose to CEO. This strategy is having a ripple effect across the networks.

Indeed, only Fox touted a new comedy this year as a big chip in its line up ( Back toYou with Kelsey Grammar and Patricia Heaton); the rest of the networks buried anything new as replacement fare and actually cancelled most of the 30-minute sitcoms that

premiered and failed to impress this past season. What implications do business realities have on the development of new creative content? I'd love to do some case studies on how economics have long been part of the "culture machine," from Shakespeare's work at The Globe to Dickens's publication of stories in serial form in Victorian papers. I want to show that this business influence doesn't so much create a crisis of creativity but forces artists to, well, be more "creative," that it's not simply a matter of producing "art for art's sake" in many instances.

SLS: The ups and downs of entertainment executives is just part of the cycle... most don't last more than than 2-3 years (better than CMOs of late, but not by much). Ben's

appointment is interesting having grown up out of the talent agency business in London and making his mark by successfully importing formats to the US. This is a 33 1/3 proposition -- sometimes it really works (American/Pop Idol), sometimes it works marginally (The Office / Ugly Betty - critically acclaimed, but not a MASS audience

vehicle or time-period winner) and other times it disappoints (Big Brother - never as big as European success, Coupling -- ugh, remember that?). It will be interesting to see Ben in a true development role that isn't about harvesting success across the pond, but

is steeped in real scheduling and programming needs... Zucker's strategy wasn't exactly played out in the schedule that was announced, either... The creativity case studies are an excellent idea on Alex's part .. particularly in recent times relative to the FinSyn Repeal and the jockeying for schedule slots among Independent and Established producers. As networks demanded financial interest in order to get picked up, more independent voices emerged because established ones wouldn't play. Only the most celebrated producers and show-runners could make demands over the last 15 years creating a marketplace of hi and lo- end talent exposure with very little middle...

On Capitalizing on Fan Forums

AC: Finally, another interesting development this year was the acquisition of Television Without Pity by Bravo, an NBC Universal cable network. It will be interesting to see if the neutrality and honesty -- the brutality we've come to know and love -- of the site will be retained as NBC "absorbs" it into the machine. I'm concerned, especially since we've seen other really cool sites wither as they are consumed by their conglomerate owners. Still, it will be great to see what the Aggregated Television Fan Site 2.0 looks like when the next "buzz" site pops up as the answer to what TWOP used to be.

SLS: Totally agree. Lame way for Bravo to capitalize on the fan movement without putting the work in to create it organically for themselves... but a great asset if NBC leaves it alone and mines it for insight, but I doubt they'll go that route...

Our Course

AC: Stacey and I have worked together, along with Henry and others at MIT and in New

York and Los Angeles, to explore new ways to evaluate audience engagement with media content. It's been a great partnership because we bring some very complementary perspectives to bear on both the quantitative and qualitative research methods needed to better analyze what's happening in the market. We're creating a course syllabus and lab experience that will, we hope, immerse students in the fall 2007 television season in a unique way, celebrating the great new content to come to market, critically evaluating what's not working, and exploring the business issues of the successes and failures as they emerge in real time. Hope to see some folks in the fall. If you're not able to take the course at MIT, we may open our Facebook group to a larger set of networks for people to engage in our online conversations. As they say, please stay tuned!

SLS: Having spent so many years in the television business, it's hard to take a step back and have an "outsider looking in" perspective. The only way to do that is to explore the landscape with great thinkers like Alex and Henry -- or get out of your market altogether and observe how other cultures do it. This course is going to give a strong foundation in the metrics and processes that make the US TV market work today while simultaneously inviting students to challenge what has developed as business-as-usual - all with the tapestry of the network TV fall season to draw from. We hope you'll be a part of it!

If you have comments on the above dialogue or questions for Stacey or Alex, you can

e-mail them directly to or .

==========================================================

Stacey Lynn Schulman is CEO, Chief Insight Officer of Hi: Human Insight, a media consultancy practice that specializes in unearthing insights that drive better connections between consumers and content. A recognized expert in fan culture behavior, Ms. Schulman was the president of The Interpublic Group of Co.'s fully-dedicated Consumer Experience Practice through January 2007. The practice advised marketers on how to effectively connect with consumers in the evolving media landscape, conducting proprietary research across the wide array of business sectors that reflected Interpublic's client roster. Insights led marketers to better understand the essence of the consumer experience in three distinct areas - brands, media technologies and content. Clients benefited from insight on emerging trends as well as customized advice on how to communicate with the consumer of the future.

Prior to her appointment at Interpublic, Stacey served as executive vice president, director of global research integration for Initiative, a media agency within the Interpublic family. Stacey was a key member of the global research team and applied her broad research skills to a wide array of critical research issues, with an emphasis on understanding consumer media behavior. She joined Initiative in August 2001 when TN Media merged with Initiative. Stacey played an integral role in Initiative's exclusive research partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which resulted in breakthrough research on a number of key industry issues, including consumer behavior, interactivity and media convergence.

Before joining TN Media in 1997, Stacey conducted television and print research for D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) while concurrently earning her master's in media studies from New York University. Stacey began her career at Katz Communications after completing her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. At Katz, she conducted programming and local market research before moving on to spend several years at CBS.

Stacey is a former president of the Radio and Television Research Council (RTRC) and is a member of the Media Rating Council (MRC). Widely respected in the industry, she is routinely quoted in trade and consumer media outlets, and regularly appears on CNN, CNBC and FOX News Channel to discuss media trends. Stacey was honored in 2005 as a "Wonder Woman" in the cable industry by Multichannel News, one of the cable industry's most prestigious awards. In 2005 and 2003 she was named the most quoted executive in the industry by Advertising Age in the publication's annual "Media Talk" survey. In 2004, she was inducted into the American Advertising Federation (AAF) Advertising Hall of Achievement, the industry's premier award for outstanding advertising professionals under age 40. Stacey was the first research professional to be inducted into the Hall of Achievement in the AAF's history. Also in 2004, Stacey was named "Media All Star" in the research category by Mediaweek. In 2003, she was honored as a "Media Maven" by Advertising Age. In that same year, Stacey was profiled in Crain's New York Business as part of the prestigious "40 Under 40 - New York's Rising Stars" feature.

Stacey maintains an alternate career as a studio vocalist lending her voice to various projects in the New York City area. She resides in Harlem.

Alex Chisholm is founder of [ICE]^3 Studios, a media research and development consultancy that creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties, and is currently developing several projects with NBC News, NBC Olympics-Beijing 2008, and The Children's Hospital Trust. As Co-Director of the Education Arcade at MIT, Chisholm manages a variety of "games in education" projects, coordinates university-industry partnerships, and produces MIT's Games in Education conferences.

Previously, he organized the NBC Olympics Presents the Visa Championships-Torino 2006,

an "Olympics for the rest of us" experience that ran alongside NBC's coverage from Italy. As part of his ongoing work with MIT Comparative Media Studies and as a contributor to The Expression Lab, a research partnership with Interpublic Group's Consumer Experience Practice, Chisholm co- authored the third in a series of papers on the "expression," a new research model to better define consumer engagement with content across today's multiple media channels; this work was presented in Shanghai at ESOMAR's Wordwide Multi-Media Measurement Conference and was awarded Best Paper honors (June 2006).

Over the past seven years, he has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Interpublic Group, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, Children's Hospital Boston, and the MacArthur Foundation. While Director of External Relations and Special Projects for MIT Comparative Media Studies between 1999-2003, Chisholm oversaw creative development efforts and research with the Royal Shakespeare Company, producing a computer game concept inspired by The Tempest, and managed research with Initiative Media around American Idol; as part of this work, he co-authored the first two papers on the "expression," which were presented at the ESOMAR/ARF Audience Measurement Conferences in 2002 (Cannes, France) and 2003 (Los Angeles, California).

Chisholm is the author and producer of Earthen Vessels, an independent storytelling project that emerges from a novel, film, and web site. He is currently working with

Sarah Smith, author of Chasing Shakespeares, to adapt her novel to the stage. Chisholm earned his B.S. in General Studies from Cornell University.

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media (Part Two)

Yesterday, we ran the first part of an essay written by Sloan MBA candidate Eleanor Baird about the current fate and future branding of network television. Baird's work calls attention to shifts in the ways that networks measure their audiences, shifts which are going to be played out in dramatic ways as the networks launch their new season this fall. A team of MIT students -- graduate and undergraduate -- will be monitoring closely the week by week fluctuations in viewership figures and the ways that the networks are adjusting their programming strategies and branding practices in response. Here's the description of the course, which would be open to students from MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, thanks to our various exchange programs. I hope to report on some of their findings here throughout the term.

Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the Fall 2007 Television Ecosystem

Alex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman

As creative development and business models change for television and cable networks making the transition from broadcasting to a mass market to immersing viewers in content across digital platforms, new opportunities to engage audiences in more meaningful ways are emerging as quickly as the underlying businesses that support production and distribution are outgrowing traditional valuation metrics and advertising currencies. There is a significant disconnect between what we know and can price versus what we're learning and where businesses are headed in the years to come.

Using the Fall 2007 television season as a basis for discussion and exploration, this seminar and lab course are designed to introduce students to the research metrics and business issues associated with broadcast and cable television, as well is with a variety of digital content extensions across web, mobile, and other platforms, all intended to create additional revenue streams while engaging audiences. In the lab, students will apply their learning to an analysis and revenue forecasting exercise for the television season as it unfolds in real time. The goal of the course will be to enable students to explore new ways of thinking quantitatively as we attempt to bridge the gap that currently exists between the known and unknown.

Our aim will be to begin the course with summaries of the networks' annual "upfront" presentations and programming strategies, immersing students in the creative and strategic pitches of the four major networks and explaining the corresponding business/programming rationale behind the new fall TV season. Then, in subsequent weeks, students will be introduced and become fluent in the mechanics and intricacies of rating points, Nielsen ratings, and other data to help understand the programming and business (e.g., marketing, advertising pricing inventories, sweeps strategies and case students, etc.) of the season as it progresses through the fall. Students will also be introduced to emerging strategies and tools to analyze "buzz" and other online behaviors -- such as online video viewing, iTunes purchases, etc. -- that now enable networks to better understand the "total" audience for their shows. While the course will focus on quantitative research methods and analysis, connections will be made to some new qualitative strategies and methods. Guest speakers from the major television networks, production companies, and advertising agencies will complement seminar discussions and readings.

As part of the weekly lab, students will work in teams representing the major television networks to "forecast" what the networks might and should do to revise their programming strategies and re-price their advertising inventories over the course of the fall season. The lab is supplemented by an online discussion/wiki where student teams will collaborate and collect data.

Stacey Lynn Schulman is CEO, Chief Insight Officer of Hi: Human Insight, a media consultancy practice that specializes in unearthing insights that drive better connections between consumers and content. Through January 2007, Ms. Schulman was the president of The Interpublic Group of Co.'s fully-dedicated Consumer Experience Practice, which advised marketers on how to effectively connect with consumers in the evolving media landscape. Widely respected in the industry, she is an award-winning professional who is routinely quoted in trade and consumer media outlets, including appearances on CNN, CNBC and FOX News Channel to discuss media trends.

Alex Chisholm is founder of [ICE]^3 Studios, a media research and development consultancy that creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties, and is currently developing several projects with NBC News, NBC Olympics-Beijing 2008, and The Children's Hospital Trust. Over the past seven years, he has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Interpublic Group, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, Children's Hospital Boston, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Now for Part Two of Baird's essay:

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media

by Eleanor Baird

Digital downstream

Even if audiences are not planning to sit in front of a network television affiliate for hours on end, networks hope, as they probably always have, that the consumer will be at least be engaged with the some of the content and keep coming back for more. The interactive, on-demand nature of the Internet seems to make it a natural medium for audience engagement for a consumer who could access the content from a wide variety of channels at a variety of times. Network executives and programmers hope that enhanced and more interactive experiences through the "ancillary channel" of the Internet will increase retention, engagement and, time spent viewing the show and related content and ultimately, revenue going back to the original program source. With a network branded site, this strategy is another opportunity to have consumers interact with the meta brand

Caldwell argues that television styled itself a "pull" medium, while bidding to make the Internet a "viable 'push' medium" . The relationship between television and Internet may seem natural and complimentary in this way, but it is problematic in others, requiring the interaction of content created by a few and consumed by many to adapt to a medium where greater participation in consumption and production of the content and flow are the norm. Moreover, this relationship has implications for a network trying to maintain a clear brand identity in an environment where users expect to be able to repurpose content in ways that the producers may never have intended. In contrast to television, this medium gives the network far less control of the image of both the sub-brand (the content) but also the meta brand, then context in which the sub-brand is experienced (the network).

So, although consumption of digital content may engage the viewer more, there is no guarantee, given the nature of the technology and the norms surrounding it, that the engagement will be with the network brand, the show's sub-brand, a combination of the two, or other factors entirely. That said, a recent study suggest that, if presented through a number of media channels, network affiliation awareness seems to grow stronger, echoing multiple studies on marketing messages and consumer retention.

Although there is certainly potential for branding and revenue generation online, interactivity is not the silver bullet that will save the networks from a consumer standpoint either. Various companies have tried to launch costly interactive television initiatives since the 1970s, all of which failed because they overestimated the audience interest in the service.

The public's interest in interactivity does not seem to be much better for network websites. Even though the vast majority of homes have a television and Internet penetration in U.S. households is quite high, there are estimates that as little as 5% of broadcast networks' viewers actually watch streaming video, in contrast to the 15% of cable channel viewers who do. A recent study of cable network website users found that they enjoyed using the website, but did not see it as the "Internet brand of the network" or as a "functional alternative to television". In fact, the usage of the cable television websites was heavily dependent on if they had been mentioned on air - a factor that accounted for about two thirds of visitors - and, not surprisingly, the popularity of a cable network's website mirrors the popularity of the network's broadcasts.

This raises the question of the utility of focusing branding efforts on these channels at all. If the users are highly engaged "content junkies" who usually learn about the site through watching television anyway, is network brand development online a worthwhile area to explore?

Re-run or Pitch: Anything new?

One could argue that the current challenges facing the networks are nothing new. Viewership and ratings of network television have been in decline since the introduction of cable television channels and the VCR; network primetime share of the TV audience Network prime time viewing shares have dropped from over 90% in 1979 to about 50% in 1998, the same year the four networks' season rating slipped to 36%. The growing ubiquity of advertising in everyday western life and the issues that raises first drew comment in the mid-1800s, and many of the "new" advertising ideas, from the single sponsor to the commercial-program integration were used in TV's earlier days. Hand wringing about the propensity of consumers to skip advertisements on television began as early as the 1950s and 1960s when articles appeared in the popular press on how to "zap" commercials with a remote.

Going with the flow

If we take the opposite view, that these changes are significant and, as some have argued, we are living in a "post-network" or possibly even "post-television" era , where traditional channels will become obsolete and consumers will be left to their own devices in selecting the content they want to view. Although sensational and interesting to contemplate, these scenarios would not be consistent with the evolution of media where, as Henry Jenkins argues, "once a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within a larger system of communication options". This outlook would also be inconsistent with the current and historical behaviors of "mass" audiences who have been known to vary widely in their adoption of new technology and consumption habits, as we have seen.

If the latter case is true, how can television, and more specifically the networks, adapt to a brave new world that includes not only cable, and DVRs but digital distribution channels and an audience that wants more and more control over what it watches and when. If content is indeed king, where do broadcast networks fit in, and how do they keep their advertisers happy and revenue streams flowing?

The answer seems to be in stealthy advertising and broad diversification. John Caldwell argues that television is going through a rhetorical shift that directly reflects the industrial context and reality in which producers and distributors now find themselves. Productions are "content", not "programs", that media companies are now "repurpose[ing] and "migrating" to "platform[s]". As Sumner Redstone, Chairman of Viacom, a media conglomerate explained the company's philosophy in 2004: "What advertisers buy is platforms to get their brand promoted, and we've got four platforms for them [broadcast TV, cable TV, billboards, and radio]...[w]e're everywhere, because in this day and age you have to be where the advertisers need to be."

Unfortunately for the broadcast networks, the shocks of industry deregulation in the 1980s allowed "emerging media conglomerate were reaping the benefits of vertical integration in the cable landscape, but the broadcast networks were precluded from doing the same thing." When regulations changed again in the mid-1990s, a there was a "phase of frenzied merger and acquisitions activity characterized by an unprecedented commitment to vertical integration and 'synergy'" for broadcast networks, including extensive re-branding campaigns when the quality and familiarity message did not seem to help get an audience.

The new multi-platform, on-demand universe of repurposed channels and content disrupts Raymond William's concept that flow, sequences of items in a programming lineup, is a defining characteristic of television as a medium. Without the ability to control flow, broadcast networks - lacking the strong viewer identification and brand strength common to cable - seem to be in danger of loosing relevance as a medium or distribution channel and moving further and further into content production and promotion of engagement with a stable of content sub-brands.

Much has been written about brand extension and dilution. Most relevant for networks, however, are the risks and benefits associated with having a strong meta brand. Consumers like consistency and predictability. The more consistent, predictable and good a sub-brand, the more it would benefit from a strong meta-brand, and vice versa. If the meta-brand is weak, there is much more latitude to experiment, but no chance to benefit from a strong meta brand and market reputation for a certain competency or style. One 1993 study found that "when a firm systematically introduces brand extensions consistent with a broader, more superordinate product category, it not only modifies the brand's core business definition but also enhances the brand's ability to accommodated more and diverse extensions." Therefore, a strong network brand could actually help a broadcaster expand and diversify its offerings and protect it from some of the risk associated with new shows in an inherently risky industry.

As we have seen, advertising revenue and audiences have fallen, despite the desire to consume network television programming. New technologies for circumventing the push towards traditional network television "appointment viewing" are clearly causing some loss of revenue. However, even though lost revenue from piracy and illegal downloads online is difficult to estimate, these new technologies do not seem to have as great an impact on the networks as the advent of cable, still their main competitor, or industry consolidation in the 1990s.

If this is indeed the case, this moment in time may be a key opportunity for networks to establish themselves as meta brands and ensure that viewers identify with the channel and the product before cultural practice aligns itself more with the available technology.

Hustle and Flow - Network branding analysis

As the stage has now been set, and the larger issues in network branding addressed, this part of the paper will be devoted to an analysis of branding practices of the four U.S. networks from the mid-nineties until the 2007 upfront presentations.

Essentially, there are two models of network branding in use by these four players: the flow, or push, method and the hustle, or pull, method.

The first method of network branding, used by ABC, and NBC and FOX to a lesser extent, is what I would call the flow model. It relies on the traditional channel, the broadcast network to push content to the viewer, but uses a branded online presence as a secondary opportunity to engage the viewer in the content, but with the ongoing presence of the network brand in the virtual space. This approach is not about holding back content, but retaining control over how it is accessed by users outside of the television medium.

TV Week reports that ABC and NBC have worked aggressively to drive visits to their branded websites, largely by providing high volumes of content quickly in a single place. From September 2006 through February 2007, ABC.com and NBC.com were almost tied in first place with about 9 million unique visitors each per month, trailed by CBS.com with 5.5 and Fox.com with just 3.7 million, according to Nielsen Net Ratings. NBC and FOX have announced that they will collaborate to launch a yet unnamed content delivery site this year.

Where the three networks diverge is in their emphasis on event programming versus branding campaigns to encourage "appointment viewing". For example, FOX has relied on long-running programs American Idol to fuel some of its rating power. A true event program, Idol has been able to command huge premiums on advertising time for six seasons. FOX has released its content gradually relative to competitors, and has fewer 'high concept" programs like Heroes or Lost, which tend to drive online ratings by virtue of their complex story lines and serial narratives that prompt viewers to seek out information outside of their regular TV viewing time. FOX is the top ranked network in the lucrative 18-49 demographic, with a brand that has been described by one executive in as "noisy, inventive, [and] talk[s] with viewers not at them", which "transferred into Fox's new on-air look, characterized by bold type, kinetic footage and distinctive color palette."

ABC and NBC have also both created flow-based marketing campaigns to brand their content on television.

Perhaps the more well known was NBC's "Must-See TV" campaign that made the network's Thursday "clearly the most watched and most profitable night in network television during the 10-year use of the line". It was flow-based because it promoted a sequence of shows rather than a single piece of content as a weekly event. This enabled the network to leverage its own meta brand and program in a rerun and sometimes new or weaker shows with the support of proven hits.

Nancy San Martin also argued that the line-up had an internal logic, that "naturalizes and reinforces a traditional narrative order- providing a readily discernible beginning, middle and end" and thus encouraged viewers to stay tuned for the entire programming set. In the midst of the "Must-See-TV" era, the network launched the NBC-2000 campaign to bring errant affiliates, and their viewers, into the fold by presenting the organization as one big family. Although the network is lagging in the ratings, Mike Pilot, President of Ad Sales, recently said in an interview that "[y]ou have to believe in our heritage [brand] and that programming success is cyclical and we'll get back to a great place", adding that the Thursday night slot was (still) the one they would focus on. The network, perhaps to hedge against its aforementioned DVR woes, has invested in both TiVo and ReplayTV.

ABC has employed a similar logic to promoting its whole lineup, although it takes a much broader, less time-dependent approach and uses themes that are more abstract and popular music to create a meta brand. The "Yellow" campaign to promote the network's entire fall lineup several years ago, using the color, a set of clever taglines and a popular coldplay song to promote itself, the channel, as a sense of irony and ultimately a fun destination rather than just a position on the dial. This season, the network has been promoting their lineup under the title "One", using a Mary J. Blige song by the same name in spots, this time emphasizing "[t]he idea...that our shows bring people together, so the network brings people together." Mentions were made in the press of ABC's core demographics in articles about the 2007 upfront presentations, with one writer at Variety referring to them as "the most upscale-skewing of all broadcasters" and a writer for the LA Times blog referring to ABC's colorful and female skewing brand .

If the "flow" approach employed by ABC, NBC and FOX is a push strategy that involves a branded digital content experience, a branded look and feel and an emphasis on events or flow programming, the "hustle" approach of CBS is almost the opposite. Unlike the other three networks, CBS has not had a recent clear brand-building campaign for its flow on the air or huge content successes. What is interesting about CBS, and why I called this the "hustle" model, is that it has been relatively aggressive in shopping out its content using a much more scattershot approach and without the anchoring site employed by ABC and NBC.

Whereas ABC and NBC have very strongly network branded sites to distribute its content for free online, CBS has taken a much different, two pronged approach more geared to distributing pieces of content along the lines of Bernard Miége's publishing model of cultural production, not Williams' concept of flow.

CBS does manage a content site where full episodes can be viewed free, but the site, Innertube, makes only passing reference to the network. The conundrum was well-described by brandchannel.com: " [w]hile the official Innertube URL is filed under the CBS brand (cbs.com/innertube) rather than its own URL (like cbsinnertube.com), the rest of the site experience actually promotes Innertube as the primary brand, with the CBS parent brand having more of a secondary role." Meanwhile, CBS recently announced a series of agreements to distribute its programming online with portals like MSN and AOL; it was also the first network to sign with the Internet TV site Joost, and is in talks with the NBC-FOX content distribution site. This scope would give CBS more internet distribution partners than any other major media company , yet the exact benefits of this strategy are still unclear, beyond its content becoming a semi-ubiquitous feature of legal video viewing sites.

CBS also garnered a great deal of attention at this year's upfront presentation from bloggers in particular when it announced that the complexly-plotted show Jericho was to be replaced with a reality program called 40 Kids. Although the network was almost universally maligned for taking this step, given its limited web presence as a content provider online, it may not be able to support a more complexly plotted show like this and fully engage the audience. CBS' model seems to be about producing content that is good for television but with limited potential for brand extension online (like CSI) , and capitalizing on it relatively quickly with on air ad revenues and multiple deals with third party content sites.

Conclusion: Three questions revisited

At the beginning of this essay, I posed three questions: is the primary role for a broadcast network as a content producer or advertising aggregation channel, if the consumer's relationship to the content is stronger than their relationship to the channel, and if a network can be branded, how can it be done successfully. I would like to conclude by attempting to answer each of these.

On the first question, a network can (and they are) both, but fundamentally a network is a communication mechanism, a mass medium. Advertising aggregation is the motor that runs both the production and broadcasting machines. Even if media is now "mass-less", the networks are the closest thing we now have to a common media experience across the United States, and maintaining that broad, general reach is its raison d'etre. Perhaps it is not the content but the selection and programming of content that networks can market and sell to advertisers.

On the second question, I would argue that consumers currently have a stronger relationship overall with network content than the network channel, but it does not have to be that way. I would point to the BBC, PBS, CityTv in Canada, and the Discovery Channel as examples of networks (albeit some on cable) that have managed to create a distinctive relationship with the people that watch them through advocacy, higher perceived quality, local involvement, and/or merchandizing and retail.

Both of these questions lead, of course into the final question: can and should a network be branded and if so, how? Based on the research, I believe that the first two parts of the answer are yes it can and yes it should. Developing a clear identity and meta-brand has several important advantages in today's market. It helps define the audience for advertisers, which helps bring in revenue, as well as setting the stage for developing a set of clear marketing messages to draw those viewers to a variety of media properties where they can engage with both the network meta brand and the content sub-brand. It also helps set the stage for loyal viewership that will bear with the network while it experiments with the occasional incongruent sub-brand to look for new revenue opportunities. True, the networks need to stay national, but that is not to say that they could not pursue a certain niche with broad appeal, somewhat like FOX's emphasis on reality programming.

The final question of how, is somewhat more difficult to answer. I would argue that, in the case of television networks, DVRs and content online are important considerations but that the vast majority of people gravitate back, or can be convinced to gravitate back to, live broadcast TV. True, the Nielsen ratings can be changed, but less ambiguity will help to capture more advertisers. The live broadcast TV "product" should be the core of any successful TV branding, not content or websites. In my mind, the flow strategy still works best; television is a live, audio and visual community experience that the web or DVR cannot duplicate, and networks offer familiarity and editorial know-how in the clutter of the "mass media" - even if it is not so "mass" anymore.

References

______. "ABC's Benson Pushes 'One' Campaign". Broadcasting & Cable. 12 June 2006, pp. 2, 24.

Arthur, Kate. "ABC's Fall Schedule". LATimes.com Show Tracker. 15 May 2007. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2007/05/abc_fall_schedu.html#more. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

Atkinson, Claire. "Industry Fixates on Plummeting Live Audience". Advertising Age. 11 May 2007. http://adage.com/upfront07/article?article_id=116583. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

Atkinson, Claire. "NBC Ad Chief Eyes 'Crisper Thinking' at Net". Advertising Age. 14 May 2007. http://adage.com/upfront07/article?article_id=116580&search_phrase=%2Bcommercial+%2Bratings. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

Barnes, Brooks. "CBS's Web Reach to Grow". Wall Street Journal. April 12, 2007, p.B2. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117634761565767278.html?mod=mm_media_marketing_hs_left, last accessed 22 May 2007.

Becker, Anne. "Digital Impasse". Broadcasting & Cable, 28 August 2006. pp. 8

_______. "The Brand Builders - Supplement". Broadcast & Cable. 2 June 2003, pp. 12A-22A.

Bianco, Anthony. "The Vanishing Mass Market". BusinessWeek Online. July 12, 2004, p. 1-6. http://www.multicastmedia.com/pressreleases/News20040712a.aspx, Last accessed19 May 2007.

Boddy, William. "Interactive Television and Advertising Form in Contemporary U.S. Television". Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. pp. 113-132.

Caldwell, John. "Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration". Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. p. 41-74.

de Mesa, Alycia. "CBS Innertube: Stay Tuned". brandchannel.com, 5 March 2007, http://www.brandchannel.com/features_webwatch.asp?ww_id=319. Last accessed 23 May 2007.

Fernandez, Maria Elena. "It's all in the family on TV this fall". LATimes.com Show Tracker. 17 May 2007. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2007/05/its_all_in_the_.html#more

. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

Gripsrud, Jostein. "Broadcast Television: The Chances of its Survival in the Digital Age". Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds. Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. p. 210-223.

Ha, Louisa; Chan-Olmsted, Sylvia M. "Cross-Media Use in Electronic Media: The Role of Cable Television Web Sites in Cable Television Network Branding and Viewership". Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 48 No. 4, 2004, pp. 620-645.

Hampp, Andrew. "Networks Cut to Chase, Curry Favor With Buyers". Advertising Age. 21 May 2007. http://adage.com/upfront07/article?article_id=116804. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

Hibberd, James. "Oh, Inverted Web World". TV Week. 2 April 2007. http://www.tvweek.com/article.cms?articleId=31757. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

Holt, Jennifer, "Vertical Vision: Deregulation, Industrial Economy and Prime-time Design". Jancovich, Marc and Lyons, James, eds. Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2003. pp.11-31.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Kissell, Rick. "Fox, CBS win season". Variety. 22 May 2007. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117965620.html?categoryid=14&cs=1. Last accessed 23 May 2007.

Kompare, Derek. "Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television". Television & New Media. Vol 7, No. 4, November 2006, p. 335-360.

Lin, Carolyn A.; Atkin, David J. and Abelman, Robert. "The Influence of Network Branding on Audience Affinity for Network Television". Journal of Advertising Research. Vol. 42, No. 3, May-June 2002. pp. 19-32.

Milberg, Sandra J.; Park, C. Whan; McCarthy, Michael S. "Managing Negative Feedback Effects Associated with Brand Extensions: The Impact of Alternative Branding Strategies." Journal of Consumer Psychology. Volume 6, No 2, 1997. p. 119-140.

San Martin, Nancy, "'Must See TV': Programming Identity on NBC Thursdays." Jancovich, Marc and Lyons, James, eds. Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2003. pp.32-47.

Uricchio, William. "Television's Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow". Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. p. 163-182.

Vlessing, Etan. "Report: Web TV won't challenge b'cast for some time", The Hollywood Reporter. 3 April 2007. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003566471. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

A native of Toronto, Canada, Eleanor Baird is entering her second year as an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before coming to Boston, Eleanor worked in media relations, consulting, and strategic planning in the public and private sectors. She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Political Science and

History. This summer, Eleanor will be an intern with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Media Strategies department in Washington, DC.

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media(Part One)

In the June 1 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jensen asks the provocative question, "Are you killing TV?" The article starts with a discussion of how Heroes returned from a seven week hiatus to find that they had lost roughly 20 percent of their viewership, a jaw-breaking drop of 2.6 million viewers, from its September debut to its final few episodes of the season. Many other popular and cult series have experienced similar drops this season, including Jericho (as a result, the show was canceled), The Sopranos, Lost, The Shield, Desperate Housewives, and 24. The magazine offers a range of theories about why the networks are experiencing such dramatic drops in viewership including:

The competition of American Idol which whips out pretty much all other competition.

Creatively uneven seasons, which resulted in mis-steps and lulls in the dramatic pacing of some key series.

The shift towards daylight savings time three weeks earlier this year.

A loss of interest and attention due to the extended hiatuses (an experiment in having continuous blocks of programming followed by periods of downtime). The result of this factor has been the fact that Heroes is actually producing a second spin-off series, Heroes: Origins, which will be a placeholder or miniseries during the downtime between episodes of the original series.

Shifts in the mechanisms by which fans access television series, ranging from timeshifting to downloads and waiting for the boxed sets. EW reports that 1.7 million viwers of Heroes do not watch it during its regularly scheduled time and an additional 2 million viewers watch Lost on DVR within seven days of its original airing. These numbers do not include those watching legal or illegal downloads of the series. About a third of the viewers of Lost don't watch during the regular series but catch up with it on DVD exclusively. Major shifts are occurring in how networks measure their audiences in response to these shifts in when and how we are accessing their content but in the short term, these shifts may leave some cult shows vulnerable.

This debate about the viewership of cult television programs is part of a larger discussion about the fate of the networks in an era where methods of content distribution and access are shifting dramatically. Eleanor C. Baird, a Sloan MBA student, took my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods this term. She wrote a very solid analysis of the future of network television for the course, one which mixes modes of analysis common to business schools with those we teach through our media studies classes.

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media

by Eleanor C. Baird

No matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise, the big four U.S. broadcast networks are, at their core, a mass medium that fits awkwardly into our newly democratic and participatory media ecosystem. Their marketing strategy follows the widely outmoded "push" model of consumer promotions and advertising to draw viewers. Even as they become increasingly integrated into the media industry's value chain, broadcasters are challenged by new cultural norms of consumption and engagement that are combining with technological change to create a "perfect storm", an environment where they are creating more value, but scrambling to capture it.

What is happening? It is not that people are not watching network television or becoming engaged with the content anymore. New ways of consuming television content are challenging the old revenue generation models. Consumers are turning to DVDs, DVR, and digital alternatives on the web to fit more television viewing into their lives. Advertisers, enticed by the prospect of more affluent and targeted audiences on cable and online, are beginning to spend their budgets on content sponsorship along the long tail. Broadcast networks are consequently in the strange position of having a strong collection of sub-brands - the individual programs - under a relatively weak primary brand - the network itself.

TV and the big four may not be going anywhere for now, but the future is becoming less and less certain.

In this essay, I will explore how broadcast networks can respond to this changing and converging media environment by promoting themselves as distinct brands of television. To do so, I will address three questions. The first question is one of focus, if the primary role for a broadcast network in this environment is content production or advertising aggregation channel. The second question is one of consumer loyalties and identification, if the consumer's relationship to the content is stronger than their relationship to the channel through which they receive it. The third question is, can a channel such as a network be branded, and how can that be done successfully.

In order to answer these questions, I will begin by defining the broadcast networks and then analyze the major issues at play for them today - advertisers and audiences, content, channels, metrics, and digital distribution. Then, using Raymond Williams' concept of flow, as well as the writing of John Caldwell as a framework, I will address the macro issues of the role of the medium and the impact of branding, and then proceed to an analysis of the strategies of the four networks. The paper will conclude with some preliminary answers to the three questions based on my analysis.

What is a network?

Networks can refer to cable and broadcast channels, however, in this paper, the term is used to refer to the four major U.S. broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. These four properties are linked by their intended mass appeal and accessibility, their advertising-based revenue model, "push" programming and promotion, center-affiliate operational model and reliance on the network-mediated model of content delivery, based on a set flow of programming. Another key commonality is their lack of a clear and consistent brand identity, in contrast to many of the more popular cable networks - including CNN, A&E, MTV, Discovery Channel - which have very clear value propositions.

With what I am calling the network-mediated flow model, there is an implicit contract between the consumer and the network to provide some editorial control over the content, to choose which programs to broadcast, when, and in what order to provide a unified viewing experience. This experience can stem from engagement with the brand, but also with a need for a completely passive viewing experience, something that sets this medium apart from the Internet, which is intrinsically interactive. Networks, with a relatively wide variety of programs airing on a particular night, are uniquely suited to appeal to those habitual and/or passive viewers.

Another defining feature of the network is that it uses a "hub-and-spoke" model of distribution; most content developed and chosen at the center then distributed by local affiliates. Although the interaction in the consumer's mind between the identity of the affiliate and the larger network are not heavily studied, keeping strong affiliates in major markets is a key priority for networks to secure viewers. A recent study also found that there was no evidence that a more media-rich environment weakened the branding of a network affiliate to the parent, meaning that the common use of new media did not affect the television stations association to the network.

Yet another shared characteristic among the networks is their strong reliance on metrics, particularly some form of the Nielsen ratings, to entice advertisers to purchase time on air.

Audiences and Advertisers - No more "monolithic blocks of eyeballs"

Audience attrition is not a new problem for the broadcast networks, but it is still worrying for net executives, advertisers, and media buyers. Five percent of the share of the lucrative adult 18-49 demographic has slipped away from the broadcast networks in the last year (from 15. to 14.3). FOX leads the broadcast networks in ratings for this demographic with just fewer than 5 million viewers, ahead of ABC and CBS. NBC is by far the weakest in this demographic, with just under three million viewers.

At the same time, ad-supported cable's share of advertising spend grew by 3% and continued to garner a higher rating (from 15.5 to 15.9). As early as 2004, Nielsen Media reported that cable owned a 52% share of the market in contrast to broadcast's 44%.

In other words, there is a discernable trend away from mass media advertising. Part of the problem is that advertisers are seeking out more specific demographics, diverting advertising budgets to more specialized and targeted media channels. According to Eric Schmitt of Forrester Research, "[m]onolithic blocks of eyeballs are gone...in their place is a perpetually shifting mosaic of audience micro-segments that forces marketers to play an endless game of audience hide-and-seek."

From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, advertisers spent more than $10B a year on cable advertising, which has drained an estimated $1B a year from network prime time. Looking forward, a recent study projects the trend to continue, with ad revenues growing more than 13% per year for "narrowcast" media and only three and a half percent per year for the mass media from 2003 to 2010. The same study estimates that, by 2010, marketers will spend 41% more on cable and nearly 18% more on Internet advertising than on network TV ads.

At the same time, advertisers are demanding more flexible and non-traditional options from networks in order to get their messages across in the era of TiVo and free content online. Options sought from the networks include a range of embedded devices, including onscreen banner ads, product placement, single-sponsor infomercials, entertainment programming, and virtual product placement to achieve product "presence" in the content, not just "placement". In the new terrain of interactive television, the players also are optimistic for making up some lost advertising revenue through e-commerce applications that enable viewers to buy products that, in the vein of The Truman Show, are featured in the television show, reducing the need for traditional 30-second spots.

Content, Channel and Keeping Score

VCRs and cable television began to appear in American households in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, networks have faced the disturbing realities of both competitive channels for advertising and opportunities for consumers to effectively remove and view TV texts from the channel altogether alongside opportunities to make money by selling content as a stand-alone product. Taken together, these developments set the stage for weaker identification with networks and the TV flow and stronger identification with self-directed content consumption that paved the way for TV on DVD and digital distribution.

Content ownership is part of the story; the more content the networks own, the more tempting the prospects of finding alternate ways of connecting viewers directly to content. Relaxation of the so-called fin-syn laws in the mid-1990s also led to a number of content deals between the conglomerates (AOL Time Warner-NBC, Disney-ABC, Fox, Viacom-CBS) and competing studios to capture as much value as possible. In 1995, networks owned the first-run and syndication rights for an average of 40% of their schedules, by 2000, 6 major networks owned or co-owned more than 50% of their new shows, while 3 had stake in more than 75% of them. This trend seems to have remained constant; for the 2007 season, the four broadcast networks, at least 42% of the new programs are produced in house or with a partner (see Appendix A).

In writing about the changing role of television and convergence, John Caldwell argues that the "real issue" has been syndication revenue, from cable in the 1980s and Internet in the 1990s, and that shows have consequently been designed with re-release in syndication in mind. Syndication is a lucrative way for producers to keep revenue flowing from older properties over time, similar to DVD, but still within the context of the television viewing experience.

TV is taken out of television with an affordable technology complimented by changing consumer expectations and viewing patterns. Digital video recorders (DVRs) like TiVo are becoming increasingly popular, and bringing a new and interesting twist to the question of network branding by splitting of content and channel. The frustrating issue for broadcast networks is that people with DVRs watch more of their programming, building a strong or at least passing affiliation with the sub-brands of individual shows, but they skip advertising. Research reported in BusinessWeek showed that DVR owners watch 20-30% more television, but bypass 70% of the advertising. NBC currently has two of the top five shows in the Nielsen rating "live-plus-seven" group of 18 to 49 year olds, the group that either watches the program live on television or uses a PVR to record and watch it within seven days of the broadcast. However, if live broadcast viewers only are included, the NBC shows barely make the top ten. Convincing advertisers to look beyond the traditional ratings is an upward struggle for any network, especially when those ratings are in decline across the board.

How big an issue is DVR adoption and use? One network executive estimated that time shifting viewers are resulting in lost revenue of as much as $600 million a year for a single broadcast network, or about $2.4 billion for all of them. On the plus side for the networks, these devices do enable some tracking of post-broadcast viewing, unlike playback using a VCR, which was almost impossible to measure. Adoption of DVRs has already lagged expectations reported in 2004 , however estimates for percentage of American households with a DVR by 2010 ranges from about half to about a third, up from only 16% in 2006.

Finally, taking the spilt of content and context even further, producers have also chosen to repackage television content completely distinctly from the format of television itself. Writing about the advent of television programming becoming commonly available on DVD, beginning with the X-Files in 2000, Derek Kompare argues that divorcing the content from the advertising enabled the content to "'transcend' television" and become a "multilayered textual experience" distinct from the medium. Although this generates revenue for the networks, it does little to strengthen their brand or capitalize on the strength of one show's sub-brand to promote another, potentially increasing profits.

A native of Toronto, Canada, Eleanor Baird is entering her second year as an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before coming to Boston, Eleanor worked in media relations, consulting, and strategic planning in the public and private sectors. She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Political Science and

History. This summer, Eleanor will be an intern with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Media Strategies department in Washington, DC.

Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of FanLib

You say "User-Generated Content." We say "Fan Culture."

Let's call the whole thing off!

The differences between the ways corporations and fans understand the value of grassroots creativity has never been clearer than the battle lines which have been drawn this weekend over a new venture called FanLib.

FanLib -- "Where the Stories Continue"

I first learned about FanLib's latest plans about a week ago when Convergence Culture Consortium analyst Ivan Askwith reported on their efforts in our blog:

FanLib.com launched as hub for "fan fiction" writers. The idea is to provide a home for creators of one of the first "user generated" genres, fan stories written using popular movie and TV characters and storylines. Members can upload stories, embed promos and build communities around their favorite shows. FanLib, founded by Titanic producer Jon Landau, Jon Moonves and former Yahoo CMO Anil Singh, is also currently sponsoring the Ghost Whisperer Fan Finale Challenge on the site asking fans to write their own conclusion to the show's two-part finale.

Ivan concluded his post with some concerns about whether fans were going to eagerly embrace such a project:

Since fan fiction seems to be one of the last traditional forms of fan creativity that hasn't been widely coopted and encouraged (within specific, copyright-friendly parameters) by the entertainment industry...My offhand guess would be that fan fiction, unlike mashup videos, tribute songs, and so on, are harder to 'control', and leave a lot more room for individual fans to take characters, or narratives, in directions that producers and executives aren't comfortable with.

FanLib started promisingly enough, courting the producers of programs like The L Word and The Ghost Whisperer, and getting them to run official fan fiction contests. Fans would be able to write in these universes, safe in the knowledge that they would not receive Cease and Desist letters. They even worked with a book publisher to try to put together an anthology of amateur romance fiction.

But, FanLib didn't emerge bottom-up from the fan culture itself. It wasn't run by people who knew the world of fan fiction from the inside out. It was a business, pure and simple, run by a board of directors which was entirely composed of men. This last point is especially relevant when you consider that the overwhelming percentage of people who write fan fiction are women -- even if there has been some increase of male writers as fandom has gone on line. To give you a sense of scale, there were more than 700 people who attended the Harry Potter fan convention I wrote about yesterday -- most of them readers, many of them writers of fanfic set in J.K. Rowling's world. By my count, there weren't more than 20 men in the group. That's about 18 more men than would have been there if this was a fan fiction oriented convention 16 years ago when I wrote Textual Poachers! To suggest how out of touch with this community they were, their original ads featured the transformation of fandom from a 90 pound weakling to a more robust and muscular form, leaving many women to wonder if this implied a move towards a more masculine conception of the practice. The company later did produce a female spokesperson who expressed confusion about why gender was an issue here in the first place.

Historical Background

Keep in mind there's a history here of previous attempts by companies -- some affiliated with the production companies, some not -- to create a commercial space for the promotion of fan culture. Most of them have ended badly for the fans.

Consider, for example, this story in Salon in 2000 which describes a company called Fandom.com ("by fans, for fans") which asserted a claim to have trademarked the word, "fandom," and then tried to use its corporate control of the concept to try to shut down any amateurs who wanted to share their public via the web. Salon reported on a cease and desist letter that Fandom.com had sent out to a fan named Carol Burrell. As Salon reported at the time:

Fandom.com serves as an umbrella site for numerous "fandomains" -- formerly independent Web sites dedicated to popular, merchandise-friendly topics such as Star Wars, The X-Files and Lord of the Rings that now run under the Fandom.com banner. Each site contains the same structure and design, and there's a large copyright disclaimer placed at the bottom of every page....

The initial premise of Fandom.com was straightforward: to protect individual fan site owners from studio censorship (and sell a lot of nifty merchandise and advertising in the process) ....Fandom.com seemed to make sense -- by joining together the little guys, it would create an institution that could defend itself from the heavy hitters. But Fandom.com's letter to Burrell appeared to indicate something entirely different. Fandom.com was accusing Burrell of trademark violation -- a fact that was ironic on at least two levels. First: Fandom.com may not even own a trademark for the word "fandom." Second: A company whose individual sites flourished by pushing copyright laws to the legal limit was now turning around and itself playing the role of intellectual property bully.

Which leads to the question currently raging in the fan community: Who will protect the fans from Fandom?

Or consider another such effort which Lucasfilm created to "protect" Star Wars fans, one which was described in more detail in Convergence Culture:

In 2000, Lucasfilm offered Star Wars fans free Web space and unique content for their sites, but only under the condition that whatever they created would become the studio's intellectual property. As the official notice launching this new "Homestead," explained, "To encourage the on-going excitement, creativity, and interaction of our dedicated fans in the online Star Wars community, Lucas Online is pleased to offer for the first time an official home for fans to celebrate their love of Star Wars on the World Wide Web." Historically, fan fiction had proven to be a point of entry into commercial publication for at least some amateurs, who were able to sell their novels to the professional book series centering around the various franchises. If Lucasfilm, Ltd. claimed to own such rights, they could publish them without compensation and they could also remove them without permission or warning.

Elizabeth Durack was one of the more outspoken leaders of an campaign urging her fellow Star Wars fans not to participate in these new arrangements: "That's the genius of Lucasfilm's offering fans web space -- it lets them both look amazingly generous and be even more controlling than before....Lucasfilm doesn't hate fans, and they don't hate fan websites. They can indeed see how they benefit from the free publicity they represent -- and who doesn't like being adored? This move underscores that as much as anything. But they're also scared, and that makes them hurt the people who love them."

As far as long-time fans were concerned, the announcement that FanLib was going to create a commercial portal to support the publication of fan fiction was read as more of the same. Under the circumstances, there was going to be healthy skepticism within the fan writing community no matter how the company approached them, but so far, the company has approached the fans in all of the wrong ways.

What Went Wrong

There's an excellent summary of the issues surrounding this venture written by a fan. I don't want to repeat all of the details here. But here's how Icarussancalian summarizes the company's initial pitch to the fan community:

The founders of FanLib.com saw no reason they couldn't cash in on the internet traffic. Formerly from Google, Chris Williams, the CEO and co-founder of FanLib, has an impressive resume. FanLib has corporate backing and $3 million of venture capital invested into the site.

"My colleagues and I want it to be the ultimate place for talented writers like you," Naomi of FanLib wrote to fan fiction writers. "In case you're wondering, FanLib's not new to fan fiction. Since 2001, they've been producing really cool web events with people like CBS, Showtime and HarperCollins to bring fan creativity into the big leagues."

FanLib did their homework. "We scouted for serious fan fiction authors on various sites and invited only a few hundred based on their writing and impact in the community," co-founder David Williams says, and fans agree that their search focused on popular writers. What's a "serious" fan fiction writer? A serious fan fiction writer could have anywhere from 30 to 100 stories, with upwards of 700 regular readers subscribed to their blogs or LiveJournal accounts. Currently, fan fiction writers do their own marketing through networking with other fans, posting in blogs, fan-run archives, and various fan fiction communities targeted to their readers.

Unfortunately, FanLib did little more than ask the writers to hand over the product.

FanLib's creators immediately ran into trouble with fans critical of FanLib's plans to turn profits on their freely provided fan fiction with no compensation to the authors, beyond t-shirts and prizes. Fan fiction writers were also unhappy at a clause where FanLib owned the rights to any fiction they posted...

This post also notes that FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel for all legal actions that might be taken against them by any production companies that felt that fan fiction was in violation of their intellectual property rights. Fans were going to take all of the risks; the company was going to make all of the profits, all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives. (Taken at face value, the company was trying to "cherry pick" the top writers from the amateur realm. At worst, they were imposing their own aesthetic judgments on the community without any real regard for existing norms and hierarchies.)

To add insult to injury, the company surrounded itself with self congratulatory rhetoric about taking fan fiction into the "major leagues," which showed little grasp of why fans might prefer to operate in the more liberated zone of what Catherine Tossenberger, an aca-fan who spoke at Phoenix Rising this weekend, calls the "unpublishable." Or the producers talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream." This is a debate which has long surrounded fan fiction. Some seek to legitimize it by arguing that it is a stepping stone or training ground for professional writers as if commercialization of creative expression was the highest possible step an author could take. Others -- myself among them -- have argued that fan fiction should be valued within the terms of the community which produces and reads it, that a fan writer who only writes for other fans may still be making a rich contribution to our culture which demands our respect.

FanLib had done its homework by the standards of the VC world: they had identified a potential market; they had developed a business plan; they had even identified potential contributors to the site; they had developed a board of directors. They simply hadn't really listen to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction.

Fan Fury

Well, if they hadn't listened to fans before, they were starting to hear from them by this past weekend. Fans were rallying where-ever fans gathered, constructing arguments, deconstructing the company's FAQ, proposing alternative models for how this might be done right, writing letters to the managers, and trying to hold them accountable for their actions. You can get some sense of the intensity of their arguments by checking out some of the many posts found at Metafandom, a site where fans gather to discuss the politics and poetics of fan culture or as they would put it, just "wank."

As one reads these fan voices, one hears some of their deep ambivalence about the ways that the corporate embrace of "user-generated content" may be endangering the grassroots culture they have created for themselves. Here, for example, is almostnever:

This is the reason I have been involved recently in arguments about whether our community should accept the monetization of fan fiction. Because I think it's coming whether we accept it or not, and I'd rather it was fan-creators getting the benefit of the $$$, not some cutthroat entrepreneur who doesn't care about our community except as a market niche.

I don't think FanLib is the one that's going to change things, but I do see change coming. There's a lot of happytalk in the entertainment industry about the money to be made by bringing your audience in under your corporate wing, the better to do market research, sell to them, and make $$ from their conversations about your product.

But if, say, Paramount brings Star Trek fan fiction in-house, it wouldn't be smart for them to allow competition from fan-run archives and sites. If Star Trek fans' only choice was to post to a site like FanLib or get a C&D, then things could get lonely for Trek fans, if only from people dropping out of fandom or going underground to avoid the hassles.

These comments suggest two debates which are currently brewing in fandom:

1. the issue of whether amateur creators should be compensated for the work they contribute to for-profit sites like YouTube. This is an issue I've raised here before and won't discuss in depth now.

2. the concern that as companies construct a zone of tolerance over certain forms of fan activities, they will use them to police more aggressively those fan activities that they find offensive or potentially damaging to their brand. Fans have long asserted their rights to construct and share fantasies that may not be consistent with the ideological norms of media companies. In an argument which parallels debates in the queer community, they argue that as long as some of their fantasies are being policed, none of them have the freedom of expression which drew them into fan culture in the first place.

Angiepen, another fan, walked through a detailed critique of the site's terms of service, showing both the ways that they over-reached in asserting their rights to control and edit what fans produced and how they might threaten the uneasy zone of tolerance which surrounds fan fiction as far as at least some of the Powers That Be (the media companies and their executives) are concerned.

Almost everyone I meet in the media industry imagines we are moving towards a more participatory culture but the dispute surrounds the terms of participation. More and more media producers are adopting what I call the "collaborationist" model -- embracing fan creativity as a way of enhancing engagement with their properties. Others have adopted a stance of benign neglect -- willing to turn a blind eye to the proliferation of fan fiction online as long as people aren't making money from it.

As fans note, however, FanLib's efforts to commercialize fan fiction represented the worst case scenario: a highly publicized, for profit venture which left fan fiction writers even more exposed than they have before. Fans have long noted that there is no case law to determine what if any fan fiction constitutes fair use. They realize, however, that the "wrong case" could easily bring about the wrong kind of legal judgement on this entire space. Some, like AngiePen, went even further:

You know, this is probably just me being paranoid here but since the TOS prohibits any posting of material which violates someone else's copyright, they could in theory have set up this site to draw in as many fanfic writers as possible with the intention of turning around and smacking all of them for copyright violation, whether that means direct prosecution of people who are writing fics based on properties whose owners are represented on the FanLib board, or sending notification with names and e-mails and copies of stories to the copyright holders who are not associated with the site. I'm just saying.

How Not to Handle a Controversy

And so the debate continues. As icarusancalion notes in her summary, the company only made things worse for itself by responding to the criticism in ways which fans considered haphazard and patronizing and then trying to erase previous posts once they came under fire. For example, when fans systematically critiqued the FAQ for the site, the FAQ disappeared from public view, one hopes so that it could be reconsidered and rewritten but potentially to simply hide the history of the company's less than friendly interactions with fans. She quotes FanLib executive Chris William's post to the community as an example:

"hey everyone, I'm Chris one of the founders of FanLib. it's really late and i have been working on the site all day. I'm exhausted but i just realized what was going on here and all of the commentsts are making me sick. we're a small company with 10 emplyees who work 16 hours a day to try and make a great website. we're real people! with feelings and everything! we have been working on this and dreaming about it for a long time and you are just here to shit on it without giving us a chance. i care deeply about what you think but this is crazy. we're good people here and you make us sound like we're an evil corporation or the govt. sending your kids to war or something. we really are all about celebrating fan fiction and fan fiction readers and writers. im sorry this is so short and please excuse the fact that i am cutting and pasting this across a bunch of ljs but i gotta get some sleep."

Those of you in the media business will understand the frustration expressed in this post but it also can come across as sounding like the student who wants a good grade because they worked really hard on the assignment and not because of the results. Williams ignores the fact that a significant number of the fans involved in this dispute had worked for a decade or more, some for many decades, to generate a community around fan fiction and that's precisely why they didn't want outsiders moving in and trying to turn it into a revenue stream for their companies.

Alternative Models

As the conversation continued, fans began to come up with their own proposals for ways that they could achieve the value of this venture -- a central hub for fan fiction -- while keeping the cultural production under the control of the fan community itself. Here's part of one such proposal for "an archive of our own" by astolat which is starting to get some real traction among the fans I've spoken with the past few days:

We need a central archive of our own, something like animemusicvideos.org. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people's IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it.

I think the necessary features would include:

* run BY fanfic readers FOR fanfic readers

* with no ads and solely donation-supported

* with a simple and highly searchable interface and browsable quicksearch pages

* allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult -- with a registration process for reading adult-rated stories where once you register, you don't have to keep clicking through warnings every time you want to read

* allowing the poster to control her stories (ie, upload, delete, edit, tagging)

* allowing users to leave comments with the poster able to delete and ban particular users/IPs but not edit comment content (ie, lj style)

* code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories

* giving explicit credit to the original creators while clearly disclaiming any official status

It's not hard to see the contrast between what these fans want and what the company is offering them. Given the speed with which this debate has grown and the skills held collectively within the fan community, I wouldn't be surprised to see such a site emerge from this fray.

What's Wrong with the "User-Generated Content" Model?

I have focused here on the fan's side of the story. It is worth keeping in mind that there may be, almost certainly is, a considerable gap between the ways that FanLib's directors see their venture and the ways that it is being perceived within the fan community. If FanLib is smart, they will take seriously these complaints which come from people who are at the center of the existing fan communities and will be trying to rework their plans to respond to this feedback. It is not clear to me that they can avoid some fundamental problems in the ways that their business plan intersects with the grassroots communities which they claim they want to serve and which some fans fear they want to exploit.

I hope that other groups entering the space of what the industry likes to call "user-generated content" study this story closely and learn from FanLib's mistakes and missteps. Perception matters. Community relations are make or break. You can't serve a community if you don't understand their existing practices and their long-standing traditions.

Let's start with the concept of "user-generated content." The industry tends to see these users in isolation -- as individuals who want to express themselves, rather than as part of pre-existing communities with their own traditions of participatory culture. FanLib's rhetoric seems to be caught between these two conceptions of the "user," talking about fan traditions but dealing with fans as isolated individuals and not respecting the community as a whole.

Second, the industry tends to think of "content" as something which can be commodified and thus isolated from the social relations which surrounds its production and circulation. Yet, fan culture stresses the ways that this material emerges from a social network of fans who have their own aesthetics, politics, and genre expectations. And for many fans, the noncommercial nature of fan culture is one of its most important characteristics. These stories are a labor of love; they operate in a gift economy and are given freely to other fans who share their passion for these characters. Being free of the commercial constraints that surround the source texts, they gain new freedom to explore themes or experiment with structures and styles that could not be part of the "mainstream" versions of these worlds.

Of course, there are already a large number of fans who are deciding to participate in the FanLib site, for whom its services do seem to represent what the corporate world would call "added value," and we probably need to develop a better understanding of why they are making that choice. I don't mean my discussion here to suggest that fandoms speak with one voice on this or any other matter. I only want to suggest that FanLib is bucking long-standing convictions within the fan community when it seeks to move fan fiction into the commercial realm.

A Public Invitation

That said, I would welcome response from the executives at FanLib. I would love to conduct an interview with them on this site in which they actually responded to the fan criticisms of their ventures. So, Chris Williams, if you or anyone else at FanLib is reading this, get in touch.

Update: Chris Williams has accepted my invitation to be interviewed in the blog. We are still working out the details. In the meantime, I wanted to solicit from my readers questions you would like to see addressed in such an exchange. My goal is to allow him to tell his side of the story and to speak to the concerns which fans have raised. Either send me your questions via the comments section here or via e-mail at henry3@mit.edu. Thanks. As always, my spam filter can be a little wonky so if you are getting error messages, send your questions directly to me.

Everybody Loves Harry?

The following comments are reflections upon a really intense and delightful weekend spent at Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter Conference held in New Orleans. Thanks to my hosts and to all of the other fans I met at the conference. I am sure that I will be having further reflections on what I learned this weekend in future posts.

Harry Potter in the Mainstream

Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans, I was interviewed on camera by a producer for Dateline. Among the many questions he asked me was whether we would ever see something like the Harry Potter phenomenon again in our lifetime. The question was relatively banal but for some reason, it caught me off guard, as I realized that according to many theories, we shouldn't be seeing anything like the Harry Potter phenomenon now. Harry Potter is a massive mass market success at a time when all of our conversations are focusing on the fragmentation of the media marketplace and the nichification of media production. There has been so much talk about the loss of common culture, about the ways that we are all moving towards specialized media, about the end of event based consumption, and so forth. Yet very little of it has reflected on the ways that Harry Potter has bucked all of these trends.

I got into my taxi from the airport and had the usual conversation you have with a taxi driver in a convention city. He asked where I came from and why I was in town -- as if following a script -- and then asked me what kind of conference I was attending. But when I told him I was going to a Harry Potter conference, his eyes brightened up, his voice grew more intense, and he told me how very very much he was waiting for the final novel to come out this summer. I checked into the hotel and went across the street for some late lunch and played out more or less the same conversation with the waitress. When she saw I had a conference program, she brought several of her friends around -- including some from the kitchen -- who wanted to flip through the program, who wanted to sneak across the street and attend a session or two, who wondered aloud who I thought might be killed in the final installment and whether or not Snape was an evil person. Some of them had stories of the lengths they had gone to celebrate their affection for and affiliation with these books. These folks weren't simply the readers of a best-selling book series; they had all of the passion and at least some of the expertise one associates with the most hardcore fans of any other media property, only they had no direct affiliation with any kind of fan culture or community.

I tried explaining this to the television producer, worried that the final documentary, when it airs later this summer, will fall prey to the usual stereotypes of crazed and obsessive fans, totally outside of the cultural mainstream. But statistically speaking, the people who are not fans of Harry Potter are outside of the mainstream. According to Wikipedia, the six books have so far sold 377 Million copies and been translated into more than 63 different languages. Harry Potter will be widely recognized by people all over the world, including many who have not read the books but watched the movies or simply read a newspaper over the past decade.

A fair number of those Muggles are very aware that the new novel is coming out in a matter of weeks and many of them will race out to the stores or put in an advanced order so that they will be sure to get a copy the moment it becomes available. More than 500,000 pre-orders had been placed at last count and those numbers are continuing to grow everyday. One can't help recall the stories of the mobs that swamped the docks awaiting the latest shipment of Dickens serials from London. And a fair number of them also know that the new film is coming out this summer and plan to wait in long lines to see it on opening day. Each of the films claims a place on the list of the top 20 money-earners of all time. All of this is part of the Harry Potter phenomenon which suggests the mainstream nature of its success. The conference brought together some of the people responsible for that mass market success including Electronic Arts' Danny Bilson who has helped to supervise the Harry Potter games.

Harry Potter as Niche Media

But in many other ways, the success of Harry Potter demonstrates the power of niche media. Start from the fact that this is a children's book, after all, and a fantasy, two genres which historically have attracted only niche readerships. Scholastic surely wouldn't have predicted this level of popular interest when it chose to publish the original novel. By traditional industry talk, much of Harry Potter's success came from so-called "surplus consumers" -- that is, consumers who fall outside of its target demographic. Traditionally, much of fan culture involves these kinds of surplus consumers -- female fans of male-targeted action adventure series, adult consumers of children's media, western consumers of Japanese popular culture, and so forth. Indeed, it is this attraction to works that are in some ways mismatched to our needs that encourages fans to rework and rewrite them.

At the same time, passion for the Harry Potter books has emerged as a generational marker, with many of those who attending the conference first becoming active within fan culture in their early teens. Some older fans have criticized my discussion of Harry Potter fandom in Convergence Culture for not giving them their due. I certainly would never imply that Harry Potter only attracts young fans -- indeed, much of the early coverage of the fan culture was fascinated by the fact that so many adults were becoming a fan of a children's franchise -- but I also think that the young age of so many of the participants in this global fan culture is a striking feature. I am used to going to fan cons where my wife and I are well within the average age bracket and here, the participants were much closer to my son's age.

Fan culture historically prides itself as being outside the mainstream. Catherine Tosenberger, a newly minted academic who specializes in the study of children's literature and whose dissertation dealt with erotic writing set in the Harry Potter realm, deployed the term, "unpublishable" in her discussion of fan fiction this weekend. She wanted to argue that much of fan fiction was "unpublishable" not in the negative sense that it is not worthy of being published but in the affirmative sense that it breaks the rules that set limits on what kinds of stories can be told within a commercially produced text: it experiments with new themes, it pushes the relationships in new directions, it adopts new forms, it embraces its own aesthetic, and it addresses audiences not considered commercially viable. In that sense, fan fiction represents the ultimate niche product -- one which emerges from a subculture, even if that subculture is now producing and circulating fan fiction on a scale which would have been unimaginable to those of us who first starting writing academic work on fan fiction almost two decades ago. The internet has increased the scale and expanded the distribution of fan produced content. Reading and writing fan fiction may not yet be a "mainstream" activity but it is starting to push the limits of our conception of what constitutes niche success. (By the way, one hallmark of this and other Harry Potter conventions is the healthy mixture of academic and fan experts, often on the same panel, and the eagerness with which fans soak up academic analysis of their culture and of the books.)

Wizard Rock?

Suzanne Scott, a Ph.D. candidate from the Critical Studies program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, shared her analysis of a decisively more niche practice -- "wizard rock" -- which she read in relation to earlier Do-It-Yourself music movements and to subcultural theories more generally. Wizard Rock is a form of music which takes its themes and inspiration from J.K. Rowling's novels; it may take many different forms, musically, including hard rock, new wave and punk, folk, and Emo. Much of it has a satirical edge but one born of a deep affection for the material.

As Scott notes, we might see wizard rock as a fandom specific outgrowth of the much older practice of filk music within the science fiction and media fan world. Filk is a word that emerged from a typo in a fan convention program that turned "folk music" into "filk music," but it caught the fancy of many fans and took on a life of its own. Filk defined itself initially as folk music about the future (as compared to traditional folk which is often about the past) and later as folk music about mass culture content more generally.

When I wrote about Filk in Textual Poachers, I was describing a form of music which was most often performed live and was largely shaped by communal sing-alongs. In the 1980s, though, we were starting to see the emergence of some filk performers and composers who were developing a kind of celebrity within fan culture: there were small scale companies that produced and distributed their taps, primarily in con dealer's rooms or via the mails. Not surprisingly, these companies made the transition from tape to cd, once it became possible to produce and distribute such recordings at relatively low costs. I was pleased to see some of these filk songs show up on Napster and the other torrents and more recently, some of the classic filk songs started to appear at the Apple iMusic store so that fans of filk could download them onto their iPods. Wizard rock artists have been quick to realize the values of MySpace as a distribution channels, deploying social networks to spread their reputations to more and more of the Harry Potter fans worldwide. Some in the audience suggested that there were now more than 300 Wizard Rock groups with their own MySpace pages.

A number of the leading Wizard Rock bands -- Draco and the Malfoys, The Parselmouths, The Remus Lupins, and the Whomping Willows -- performed at a special Friday night concert in a classic Storyville nightclub along Bourbon Street. Not all of them were "good" by traditional industry standards -- they might approach the level of "unrecordable" to build on Tosenberger's apt concept -- but a sizable segment of the audience had memorized their song lyrics and were singing along and they were doing a healthy trade in t-shirts and cds.

By almost any definition, wizard rock is a niche media form, though as Scott suggested, it is not clear whether we want to read it as a resistant subculture in any traditional sense of the word. Their tendency to personify the "evil" characters from the books and to tell the story from their perspectives suggests a play with moral inversion which has long been part of fan culture and songs with titles like "Voldemort Can't Stop the Rock" build on the ways rock music has long cast itself as an oppositional practice. Many of the groups do adopt an anti-censorship stance which grows out of the long struggles to defend the books themselves whose place in the classroom and in libraries have consistently been challenged by cultural conservatives, as I document in Convergence Culture.

Ships that Pass in the Night

In another sense, Harry Potter fandom is composed of a series of niche audiences, each interpreting the books on their own terms. We see this for example in the intense battles which have sometimes surrounded the various "ships" (relationships) in the novels. Fans may often draw sharp battle lines between those who believe Harry should end up with Ginny or with Hermione, not to mention those who would root for Draco or Snape or ... Fan fiction websites may be divided according to the preferred relationships, though there are some general sites such as FictionAlley which runs fic of all denominations. J.K. Rowling herself stepped into the fray around the release of the last book when she suggested in an interview with The Leaky Cauldron, a leading Harry Potter news-site, that Harry and Ginny had been the "obvious" pairing from the start and many hurt fans of Harry/Hermione fiction wrote her angry letters. Fans talk about the OTP (One True Pairing), though many fans remain open to a good story told about any possible relationship in the books. There are subgenres of fan fiction, especially those which surround Harry Potter erotica, which may also sharply divide the fandom into smaller and smaller niche publics. (The less said about some of those feuds here, the better.)

In the past, it would not be hard to imagine each of these fan cultures taking shape and continuing to operate with little or no awareness of each other's existence -- a series of localized reading practices or small interpretive communities. But the world of the internet has pushed them into contact with each other and the organizers of conferences like this one have to think carefully about how to create a harmonious balance between fans with very different aesthetic and moral sensibilities. One of the most heavily attended events of the weekend was a debate about the moral character of Snape which pit fans with fundamentally different theological commitments against each other. As I spoke to some fans afterwards, they had converted to the other side based on what they saw as sound and unassailable arguments.

On the other hand, we could also argue that it was the web that made some of the smaller niches within Harry Potter fandom possible in the first place -- fans of less likely pairings or more obscure subgenres of fan fiction would not have found each other without access to the kinds of social networking tools available today and would not have sustained their work without access to LiveJournal and discussion forums. During my comments on the plenary panel, I reminded the audience of the state of fan culture in the 1980s when discussions of television shows took place at cons or through letterzines (zines which assembled letters of comments and distributed them every three or four months). We were once excited to read what a few other people thought of that television show we watched months before. Now, the web allows instant response and prolonged interactions with fans scattered around the world. Ideas emerge, get elaborated upon, get debated, even become widely accepted in a matter of days. And the rhythm of the Harry Potter books' publication allows new orthodoxies to set in and be overturned many times while everyone is waiting for the next book in the series to appear.

Harry Potter and the Media Revolution

Harry Potter fans have been early adopters and adapters of new media technology in their efforts to connect with each other. It was announced at the conference that one of the long standing Harry Potter fan groups was launching its own island on Second Life where fans could gather to discuss or enact aspects of the books. Several different groups were producing podcasts at this event. I was, for example, asked to perform the part of Dumbledore in Spellcast's radio theater production of The Three Trials of Severus Snape which was being recorded at the convention. These podcasters have close relations with Warner Brothers and Scholastic and some of them are sponsored by Borders, the book chain which has made a major investment in Harry Potter fan culture. Borders also sponsored the field Quidditch competition, another suggestion that Harry Potter straddles between mass and niche media. Indeed, fans cite Rowling's implicit and sometimes explicit support for her fan culture as one of the factors that has paved the way for the enormous explosion of grassroots creativity the series has inspired. This is a case of the perfect storm where an engaging and immersive text and a welcoming author has met a new generation of fans eager to exploit the emerging new media platforms that have become so much a part of their lives.

And there were signs to be seen that these fans are starting to recognize their potential power as political force. On my plenary panel, we spent some time discussing the Defense Against Dark Arts movement, a fan effort to stand up to Warner Brothers when they sent Cease and Desist orders to Harry Potter fan websites worldwide. As I explain in Convergence Culture, this may have been the first successful movement of fans to challenge the rather blanket copyright assertions of the major media producers and they were successful at getting the studio to stop and reassess its response to fan culture.

Indeed, when I speak to media executives today, they cite two examples of franchises which helped to alter their understanding of fan culture -- Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. (It is striking, of course, that mainstream journalists tend to stress the Lord of the Rings story, which keeps alive the myth of the powerful Fan Boy, and not the Harry Potter story, which would require them to pay much more attention to Fan Girls as a cultural and political force.)

Around the edges of this con, there were signs that at least some fans wanted to move beyond this victory to embrace a larger target. I sat on a panel which helped to explain to fans the stakes in the current debates around net neutrality and the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act; I also attended several panels where fan/lawyers were proposing reforms to current copyright legislation which would provide greater protection for grassroots creative expression. A team of fan vidders were taking to the streets of New Orleans to do interviews and produce a documentary designed to raise awareness of what still needs to be done to help the city recover from Katrina. Everywhere you turned there were debates about sexual politics, with fans that had been reading and writing slash (homoerotic fan fiction) finding themselves more and more involved in debates affecting the rights of sexual minorities.

Many fans just wanted to have a good time this weekend but others were arguing that they should exploit their skills as media producers and distributors and take advantage of their massive numbers to make a difference in society. One could argue that this vision of fandom as a political movement might reflect the ideological construction of the books themselves, which encourage us to stand up for what we believe in, to question authority, and to take strength in our own communities. It would be interesting, indeed, if the Harry Potter books turned out to have shaped the political beliefs of the next generation, much as they have shaped their cultural imaginations. I told the reporter that it was no accident that the success of the Harry Potter books has occurred primarily in a Post-9/11 world and that it has paralleled the success of Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. Both books encourage us to see our lives in a larger context, to seek out and pursue a larger purpose than our own self interests.

So, can all of this happen again? Yes, but then it depends upon what level of the phenomenon we are talking about: the Harry Potter, which represents perhaps one of the last gasps of the old mass culture, or the Harry Potter, which represents the emergence of new forms of niche culture.

Playing with Stereotypes in Wresling and Animation: An Interview with Nick Sammond (Part Two)

Yesterday I ran the first part of an interview with media scholar Nicholas Sammond about the cultural politics of professional wrestling. In today's installment, we extend our discussion to deal with his new project -- a book in progress dealing with the connections between black-faced ministrels and the American animation tradition. For those interested in what he has to say below about Disney, you might want to check out his first book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, 2005). Tell us a bit more about your new project which deals with animation and race. How can we understand cartoons as bound up with the history of racial stereotypes in American culture?

The new project is one that looks at the beginnings of American animation in the early 20th century, and how those beginnings are bound up with another American performance tradition that some would like to forget--blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was a tradition that stretched back to at least the early 19th century, in which white men covered their faces and hands with black makeup, put on curly-headed wigs, and acted as if they were African Americans. This was not complimentary: the African Americans they portrayed were stupid and lazy, the usual stereotypes of the poor, stupid Southern Negro, the watermelon-eating, chicken stealing, singing and dancing plantation stereotype. Spike Lee made a whole movie--Bamboozled--about this stereotype.

Now, if you look at some of our most famous cartoon characters--such as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse--you'll see that they have characteristics that the minstrel had: white gloves, wide eyes and a huge painted-on mouth, and a complete lack of respect for authority. (This was truer of early Mickey of the late 1920s and early 1930s than it was of later Mickey.)

What I am interested in is why those qualities of the minstrel were first used in creating trademark characters, and why, even after some of those explicit racial stereotypes became unacceptable to us, those markers of minstrelsy continued. It's important to make a distinction here, though. In the 1930s and 1940s in particular, there were some really racist stereotypes used in animation,particularly in relation to jazz music, which was called "jungle music" by some folks.

So, there were a whole range of associations of blackness with the jungle, with the plantation, with being primitive and close to nature, that had operated in blackface minstrelsy, but also showed up in other racist stereotypes. What interests me is that while those racist stereotypes eventually became widely unacceptable, and even though blackface minstrelsy became an unacceptable performance form, the idea of the minstrel continued in cartoon characters. And you can see it continuing long after in cartoons such as Animaniacs and the feature Space Jams, to name a couple.

But even though I see what I call "vestigial minstrels" like Bugs or Mickey as different from racist caricatures such as those I mentioned above, there is a connection. The minstrel character has always been part of a system of what Eric Lott has called "love and theft," or what Stuart Hall has called the "ambivalence of stereotype." Even though the act of a white man imitating a black man is both offensive and oppressive, and always was, there is an element of desire and envy built into it that we have to look at squarely.

What I am looking at, trying to understand as an historical phenomenon, is how the figure behind the minstrel--basically a slave or ex-slave--could be something that a white man, either a minstrel or an animator, could envy. And the very short answer to that is, I think, that they didn't envy the incredible oppression of the African Americans, but the modes of resistance to that oppression that they represented. And, references to the jungle and the plantation were about a fantasy of African Americans as being closer to nature than white people (just like "white men can't jump/dance..."), closer to the jungle or the cotton field.

Minstrelsy as a performance form became widespread and popular as the United States industrialized, and workers who were white or becoming white were moving from agricultural and craft labor to brutal, routinized industrial labor. The minstrel, who was performed as lazy, shiftless, and slyly resistant to work of any kind, was a fantasy of escape from the rigors of that new economy. Something similar is true for animation, which in the first couple of decades of the 20th century shifted from a artisanal and craft model to an industrial model of production (Donald Crafton has described this history beautifully). So, the minstrel figure--itself a dehumanizing stereotype--represents resistance to dehumanizing regimes of labor.

Now, that's obscene and wrong, but if we don't examine it closely, then it's a part of our history that we refuse to examine fully. An example of that might be Ted Turner's decision, a long time ago, to remove those racist Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons from circulation, to spare us the pain of looking at what our culture has produced. He made that decision when the mode of distribution was VHS. But now, with DVDs that contain commentaries and other interactive features, I think it might be possible to re-release them in a critical edition, to begin to confront that piece of our history in a constructive fashion.

Is this legacy something that still haunts contemporary animation? Is it possible to represent race in cartoons, which after all depend on high levels of stylization and simplification, without falling back on this vocabulary of racial stereotypes?

First off, I think this legacy still haunts many parts of our culture. Look at the recent Don Imus event. What was it that made McGuirk and him go after successful young black women, to refer to them as "nappy-headed hos"? Here were some women who were actually fulfilling the American dream: through hard work, determination, and talent, they were making a mark. I think it's reasonable to ask whether the attack on them was because that dream is still primarily conceived of as white property.

But more than that: we have to look at the reaction, too. Imus had been saying grossly inappropriate things for years, and a lot of quite famous people had played along with him. Suddenly, he's a sacrificial lamb for a set of social ills of which he is a symptom, not a cause. (The critic Gary Yonge said something very much like this in The Nation recently.) But if we treat him as a cause and not a symptom, then we don't have to look at endemic strains of racism built into the institutions of American society. What those guys did was offensive and wrong, and I have no problem with them being punished for it. But it's free speech that CBS and MSNBC had been making a lot of money off of for years, and if you don't look at that--at the profitability of racial (and gender and sexual) hostility and the willingness of large corporations to cash in on it--then you're really missing the larger picture.

So, to get back to animation. I think it's possible to produce animation that minimizes or avoids stereotypes. But that's not the same thing as producing those seven-minute stories (or Disney features) we call cartoons. There, I think you do get stereotyping because, as you point out, there is a visual economy that the stereotype provides. But this then raises a couple of issues.

First, what is the story story in which those images are deployed? We should ask whether it is possible to deploy stereotypes in stories that simultaneously challenge them. I think that might be possible, but it's very tricky. Consider, for instance, Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin. He believed that he was really trying to produce a hip, culturally progressive redeployment of stereotypes, in this case the Brer Rabbit stories (with Barry White starring, and apparently Bakshi has talked with Wu Tang Clan about a sequel). But the film met with controversy when it was released, and there was no consensus as to whether it was racist, or whether it challenged racial stereotypes through its story.

This brings us to the second point: what the stereotypes accomplish very much depends on what sort of skills we as viewers bring to seeing those stories, and what sort of space is available for discussing them after we've seen them. When Coonskin was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, a fierce debate apparently broke out. That's good. And the Committee on Racial Equality condemned it, while the NAACP very cautiously endorsed it as a satire. That's good: it leads to more discussion about the meaning and potential of stereotypes. So, for me, the question is not so much whether we can make cartoons without resorting to stereotypes, but whether we can use stereotypes in a productive fashion.

But this also brings me to an interesting issue of race and the production of animation. Many of us know that The Simpsons, for instance, has been produced in South Korea for years. A lot of TV animation, which has a very tight turnaround schedule, has been produced in South Korea. What I didn't realize till recently, though, is that a lot of production is moving to North Korea, Malaysia, and China, where labor is even cheaper. So, there is an issue of race and animation that has to do with the politics of its production as well as its politics of reception.

Animation as a profession is very much caught up in struggles over the exportation of labor that other industries in the U.S. are engaged in. I'm not making a nativist argument about American labor here. But I am saying that issues of race and labor in animation aren't limited to its images. When we consider the choices and direction the industry is taking--for instance, if we engage in a debate about drawn versus computer-generated animation--part of what we have to bear in mind is that, besides being issues of aesthetics, these are issues of industrial labor, too. And, as I've suggested, in some cases there is a relationship between the two.

What did you think of the news that Disney would be producing an African-American "Princess" in a future feature film set in New Orleans? As someone who has written about the history of Disney's construction of American childhood, what can you tell us about how such a project might fit within Disney's long term vision of American society? What challenges does Disney face if it wants to create a credible representation of African-American identity that doesn't fall back on the Minstrel stereotypes that shaped its previous minority characters?

You know, there's something funny here. I was reading around about this movie, The Frog Princess, and one of the articles on it, in a Baltimore newspaper, quoted the director of an all-girls school as saying that maybe the movie would allow young girls to ask, "Can I be like this Disney character?" That is, a princess. Which would suit Disney just fine, because the company has a huge line of princess-related goods and services to sell. Now, I imagine that what the director of the school meant was something like, "Wouldn't it be great if African American girls could dream of being princesses, too?" Or, "Wouldn't it be great if white girls imagined themselves as African American princesses?" Underneath that is a desire for girls to see themselves as powerful and capable, and to live in a color-blind society.

But woven into those ideas is Disney's skill at tapping into powerful social expectations and anxieties to sell its products. That is Disney's long-term vision of American society: as a market for its products. And one of the greatest anxieties that many people share in a highly competitive capitalist society is whether they and their children (if they have children) will be able to secure a good living for themselves--that they will have economic and social security.

You can read those concerns being circulated and laid at Disney's feet in the comments of the school director. Somehow, regardless of other economic, social, and institutional circumstances, seeing this film could be empowering for a little girl. Why? How?

Will the film feed into minstrel traditions? Given that it is set in New Orleans in the 1920s, and is supposed to be about jazz, I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Minstrelsy was built on the idea of white "researchers" going to the south to witness real black behavior on the plantation. Cartoon shorts like Tin Pan Alley Cats or Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs played on stereotypes of the 1930s and 40s that referred to jazz as "jungle music." According to the most current info, the film's villain is a voodoo priest (named "Dr. Duvalier"...as in Papa or Baby Doc?) and another character is a jazz singing alligator (straight out of the swamp?) named Louis, so the minstrel possibilities seem rich.

I don't think that means that Disney has racist intent. I think the company is playing on the contradictory desires of its viewing public. The American middle class--regardless of race--wants to believe that we live in a color-blind society in which anyone can get ahead if they try hard enough. If stereotypes are used in perpetuating this fantasy, this sort of thinking goes, the positive message of self-realization will outweigh any misconceptions...and after all they're only animated characters.

This would be a good example of the point that Spike Lee was trying to make in Bamboozled: in a society that thinks in racist terms without realizing it is doing so, it is impossible not to make popular art that perpetuates stereotypes.

Bringing this full circle, how would you compare the role which stereotypes (racial or otherwise) play in animation and in professional wrestling?

There were two ideas (among others) in your book on vaudeville, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, that I really liked: affective immediacy and an economy of signs. Affective immediacy is the idea that to be successful, bits in vaudeville had to hit you in the gut: they had to make you laugh, cry, gasp...right away. An economy of signs is simply the concept that in a format where you only have a couple of minutes to do your thing, you have to have ideas, signs, that read really clearly, quickly.

The cartoon short is about 7 minutes. A wrestling match is over fairly quickly, too. Both depend on stereotypes to have that punch, and to be legible. If one of those stereotypes causes pain, we ought to have a forum in which we can address that in a meaningful fashion. The problem is, we have forums for addressing stereotypes--online spaces and places, editorial pages--but not necessarily in a meaningful fashion. What we don't have is a political space in which we can call out the hurt behind the stereotype--the economic and social injuries that make stereotypes sting--and obtain real redress.

What animation and wrestling both permit is a chance to really feel stereotypes. What they also share is a space that is like the real world, that exists parallel to it, but is not the same as the real world. Potentially, and at their best, they become spaces in which ideas duke it out, and we have fun participating in the process.

Playing with Stereotypes in Wresling and Animation: An Interview with Nicholas Samond (Part One)

The topic of stereotypes have long been central to work in media literacy. School children are often taught that stereotypes are unambiguously bad and that we should strive for more "realistic" or "authentic" representations. Yet, there are many problems with this formulation, as Richard Dyer pointed out to us years and years ago, starting with the fact that it doesn't address the reasons why popular art so often relies on stereotypes, it doesn't really acknowledge the degree to which our pursuit of more respectible images may itself result simply in the construction of new and improved stereotypes, and it doesn't acknowledge the many ways that artists -- high and popular -- play with stereotypes to heighten the public's awareness of their constructed nature. Today and tomorrow, I will be talking with media historian Nicholas Sammond about the place of stereotypes in popular culture, primarily read through the lens of two of his favorite topics -- professional wrestling and American animation. I reached out to Sammond in part because of the interest here in wrestling in the wake of visits from Jim Ross and Mick Foley this term but also because of work that Project nml is doing on animation for its exemplar library. I am also trying to convince Nick that he should take up blogging as an outlet for his itch to do more as a public intellectual.

Here's a little background on Nick:

Nicholas Sammond is Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, 2005), received the 2006 Katherine Singer Kovacs award from SCMS. He is also the editor of Steel Chair to the Head: the Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Duke University Press, 2005) and articles in such journals as Continuum, Television Quarterly, and Camera Obscura. Babes in Tomorrowland is a history of 20th century American childhood and its relation to popular media about and for children. Sammond's current work, tentatively titled "Biting the Invisible Hand," examines the place of blackface minstrelsy in the origins of American commercial animation.

One of the guest speakers who came to Sam Ford's class, Lee Benaka, said that he faced great skepticism in the publishing world as to whether any market at all would exist for a book looking seriously at pro wrestling, since it was presumed that wrestling fans and academic audiences were incompatible. Did you face any of this skepticism at any point during the process of putting this book together?

Yes and no. My publisher, Duke University Press, was very supportive of the book, even though they knew it would be tough to create a book that is both academically rigorous and accessible to a general audience. Wrestling fans are looking for smart work done on the topic, but I think they rightly mistrust material that seems pedantic or unnecessarily complicated. At the same time, academic power structures expect material that is complicated and pedantic (in the sense of teaching its readers about a topic).

So, it's hard to meet both goals. As the editor, I tried to address this by having some articles that would appeal to academics who wanted a more theoretical or analytical approach, and others for academics and fans who wanted a smart read on wrestling without the theoretical lingo. Reading the reviews of the book, it seems that some readers were satisfied with this approach and some weren't.

Interestingly, though, reviewers on wrestling web pages who critiqued the book for being too jargony were still sympathetic and supportive of it as a whole project, even if they felt there were parts of it that they felt alienated by. I think it points out an interesting problem in talking about pro wrestling. It has a very smart and engaged community of fans who also value the ethic of straightforward speech and action that are hallmarks of wrestling.

But they (we?) also appreciate the category of the smart mark, the person who doesn't care whether what they see is "real" as much as they do that it is genuine. The difference is, I think, that a genuine performance is sincere in its appreciation of the audience, even if it is playing with the boundary of what's performed and what's actually happening.

I hope that my book, even when it gets academic, is genuine in that sense of the word. Every essay, regardless of who it was addressing, was meant to treat pro wrestling seriously as a complex cultural form, and not to treat it as a symptom of social disorder or as unimportant. Everyone who wrote for the book did so because we appreciate wrestling.

Professional wrestling, as a populist phenomenon, is not easy to pin down in terms of its politics. The WWE in particular seems to rail against socially conservative censors as it also pokes fun at activist liberal detractors as well. At the same time, wrestling plays both with and against cultural stereotypes. How does wrestling's complicated politics explain its place in American culture?

First off, I have to say something about terms. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" are complicated. A few hundred years ago, they meant pretty much the opposite of what they do today. Liberals believed in free markets and a minimum of government interference (as much as there was a government in many places), while conservatives felt that the government had a vested interest in regulating civic and economic life. Now, those terms have become inverted. But more than that, at their worst, they've become meaningless shells, epithets that people use to insult each other without necessarily really thinking through what they are saying.

Populism has the potential to be a very progressive movement for the empowerment of working people to find a common ground on which to build a better society--as in the progressive politics of Fighting Bob LaFollette and the Grange Party--or it can be mixed with what seems more like potentially fascist demagoguery, as in the populism of the Kingfish, Huey Long. But what is good about populism is a belief in economic equality and fairness, and a recognition that working people are just fine as they are, as opposed to being inferiors who will only have social value if they become rich.

This sort of positive populism has been pushed to the margins in favor of a celebration of the privileges of the wealthy and the super-wealthy by the two ruling parties in American politics. George Bush, himself an heir to a tradition of wealth, power and corruption that dates back several generations, has feigned a populist attitude by learning to mispronounce a few words, wear cowboy boots, and swagger. He and the people he works for produce a sham populism that pretends that any of us can become rich and powerful if "the liberals" would only get out of the way and let us--while making sure that the rich don't actually have to compete on a level playing field with the rest of us, or perhaps more appropriately, while making sure that we feel more inclined to compete with each other over the scraps they leave than to work together for our mutual benefit.

But it's not just the Republicans who are engaged in this type of behavior. In the last election, the Democrats regained control of congress because of the popularity of people like Jim Webb, who talks the same sort of populism. John Edwards also plays that game: he's one of a number of multi-millionaires in politics (and some of the richest are actually Democrats) who claim to care about working people, but whose policies, when you look at them, don't do that much more than those of the Republicans. So, we get to choose between one empty performance and another.

I guess what I'm saying is that there is actually a vital populist tradition in the United States, one that is deeply invested in issues of equity and of respect for difference, that has gotten watered down in our current political climate. I think that the WWE, and the WCW before it, and many of the territorial operations back in the day, played with that sense of populism. If it sometimes trades in noxious stereotypes, and I think it does from time to time, that may be because the terms of populism that are available to us today have been so watered down.

Or, maybe the way to understand it is to say that because so many of us are being deprived of real politcal and economic partipation today--with more and more wealth and power going to fewer and fewer people--that the sting of what is politically incorrect in WWE performances is greater and more real. If we all have a stake in each other's well-being, and a respect for our differences, then jokes about those differences are not as damaging as they are when race, gender, class, and sexual identity are used as a means of keeping us apart from and hostile to each other.

What makes the WWE so interesting and important in this regard, I think, is that it is one of the few venues on television where people mention class and economic inequality in significant ways. You have workers rising up and getting in the face of their bosses, expressing not only their hostility to being oppressed, but also a certain solidarity that transcends differences (primarily of race, not so much of gender or sexuality), and I find that really refreshing. It's certainly not perfect.

At the end of the day, Vince is still on top, and in the offscreen world he's a billionaire (or almost one), and I honestly don't know why anyone needs that kind of money in a world where people are starving. (Even in a world where people aren't starving, I can't understand why someone would need that kind of money....) The most recent Wrestlemania is a good example of the potentials and problems of the populism of the WWE. Between the Donald raining cash on the audience in the leadup to it, and Battle of the Billionaires being waged by minions (but the resulting shaving being suffered by McMahon), you have a performance of struggles between the powerful, and a literalization of how workers are used by their bosses, which still manages to reinforce a social order with a few at the top and many below. But at least--at least--it allows us to witness the performance of conflicts that remain absolutely taboo in most other forms of popular entertainment in the U.S.

Now, some critics would describe this as nothing more than "bread and circuses," a distraction in the style of the Roman emperors in which the masses are mollified with spectacles put on by the elites, which keeps those masses from rising up against the powers that be. Paying to see the shaving of Vince's head (or going into it hoping to see the Donald's head shaved) takes the place of rising up and laying claim to his fortune (something which has been performed on WWE programming over the years). In this critique, witnessing the seeming debasement of the powerful keeps us from actually seizing their power.

While I think there's some truth in that critique, I also think it misses a larger point. Wrestlemania, if not the whole WWE franchise, is a facet of that larger debased populism I mentioned. It's of the same fabric as George Bush's aw-shucks act, or the Democratic Party's belief that if they can find a few more Jim Webbs they can lose their elite image. To me, the solution isn't to ask that the WWE clean up its act, but that we all work toward a more meaningful and useful political populism in our daily lives, and let entertainment be entertainment (while always demanding more of it).

That means pointing out that much of what our government does today is itself entertainment, not politics. If pro wrestling is "sports entertainment," then the struggles we witness in Washington are "politics entertainment." The struggles between the Republicans and Democrats for control of the government are a form of entertainment. The efforts of the "liberal media" to expose the petty indiscretions of individual politicians without really critiquing the larger political system are a form of entertainment. What we need, I think, is to create a populism that allows us to see past that cheap entertainment to what our real interests are.

As WWE increases its international business, and as its international popularity rivals or even surpasses its domestic popularity, how does that change the way the company looks at cultural stereotypes and "ethnic" characters?

I don't see that big a difference. What international audiences are buying is the "American" version. Just as hardcore fans in the U.S. have appreciated what is great about the Japanese scene, for instance, or fans of high flying have appreciated about lucha libre. The WWE management is smart enough to know that. They know that they have a clearly recognizable brand, one that works well, and they're sticking to it. What you see is what we've always seen with professional wrestling, even before Vince eliminated the competition: stereotypes become a way of condensing the passions that surround national and international events, of reducing those events to emotional emblems. What interests me about this is to see what shape the international fan community takes as we head into a truly global market.

We both share an interest in the roots of wrestling in 19th and early 20th century forms of popular performance.(See "Never Trust a Snake" in The Wow Climax for my take on this topic.) What aspects of this performance tradition do you see shaping contemporary wrestling?

Is it that they shaped contemporary wrestling, or are coming out of a common background? What I mean by that is, we all--and I include myself in this--try to see ourselves as modern by imagining history as quaint and outdated. One of the things that is really interesting about wrestling, to me, is that it represents a living performance tradition that has survived for over a hundred years (depending on what you include in the category "wrestling"). Of course, the technology that wrestling promoters use has changed drastically, and as Larry DeGaris points out in my book, the end of the territory system and the rise of the WWE monopoly have changed some of the fundamental work/performance practices of wrestling.

But there's also a lot of continuity with the past. Professional wrestling continues a tradition of what scholars and pundits have called "lowbrow" and illegitimate performance. It finds its tensions in inappropriate topics like race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and expresses them without the tidy resolution of the social order that you get on broadcast TV, or in most Hollywood movies. There is a lot that still offends me in WWE products. There are racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes that make me cringe, and I'd feel really sad if there are people out there in the fan community who take those representations to be real or ideal--representing the way the world is or should be.

But honestly, I think it is better than the alternative, which is the tidy middle-class, liberal (and here I mean "liberal" in the social sense, which includes a lot of so-called conservatives who fear ideas that embody conflict, and an idea of social life that suppresses difference) scenario in which you suppress the raw anger and desire that fuels those stereotypes, basically telling people not to think and feel what they think and feel rather than creating a space in which people can express their most fundamental understandings and misunderstandings about the way the world is without fear of being labeled as wholly corrupt.

It's the difference between being told that your thoughts are wrong and being told that you are wrong for having those thoughts. The first allows you to admit to having made a mistake; the second describes you as a mistake, which leaves you nowhere to go.

To me wrestling is part of a history in which people get to have that space to be messy and wrong, and to perhaps be convinced that their ideas (not their selves) are wrong, but in a spirit of laughter and play that brings us together rather than pulls us apart.

And the great and interesting thing is, a lot of those supposedly past forms aren't completely gone. There are neo-vaudevillians and neo-burlesque performers. There's a roller-derby revival. There are neo-circuses with freak and geek shows that find ways to empower their workers. And there are some great local pro wrestling venues that happen in lodge halls and flea market parking lots that are rowdy and messy and all over the place in their politics and their ideas.

The WWE may set the tone for the industry, but it's not the only game in town.

And what is interesting about this, I think, is that it is both contemporary and historical at the same time. The stereotypes of race, and gender, and sexual difference that marked the end of the 19th century aren't the ones we have now. We have new stereotypes to deal with.

What I think we need to develop is new ways of thinking about what those stereotypes mean. I think most people assume that stereotypes are bad, and false, and need to be eliminated--that we need to live in a world without stereotypes, where we all see each other exactly as we are. I don't know about you, but I don't know exactly what/who I am.

What makes stereotypes harmful is how they are used in systems of social power to oppress people. What is great about the stuff that you and I study is that we get to see instances in history in which people took the same stereotypes that people in power used to harm them and wove them into performances that celebrated difference and expressions of cultural uniqueness, both as what was great and also as what was sometimes quite silly. That's the history I think we need to see ourselves as still living in.

Immersive Story Worlds (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two-part excerpt from Sam Ford's thesis, focused around the concept of Immersive Story Worlds. The thrust of his thesis deals with issues of fan relations, brand integration, audience building, and transmedia storytelling in the realm of contemporary soap opera. But this passage compares soaps systematically with two other forms of expansive entertainment -- superhero comics and professional wrestling. Immersive Story Worlds

by Sam Ford

Multiple Creators

All three examples of immersive story worlds provided here are too large for any one creator to accomplish. Each of these worlds have passed through many creative hands over the years, with no one creator necessarily being THE defining vision of what this world means. In each case, there is a sense of the narrative world having a life of its own and being bigger than any particular creative regime. The fact that all three of these narrative worlds have stood the test of time is evidenced in the way they have weathered passing off from one creative hand to the other. Although Stan Lee is often credited with being a defining force in the initial creation of the modern Marvel Universe, along with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and others, many writers, artists, and editors have helped shape the trajectory of these characters through the following decades. Not only have various creative regimes had control of an individual series over the years, there are creative teams working on each title within the Marvel Universe at any one time, meaning that--although Marvel as a content producer has centralized control over the official narrative universe of its characters, there is still a decentralized process of creating the Marvel Universe and fleshing out all its corners, developed through the many creative forces who have passed through the company over what is now almost 50 years.

Soap operas may have a defining creator, such as Irna Phillips and Bill Bell and Agnes Nixon, and the creative vision of each of these people have often helped define the long-term feel for many of these shows. However, the number of writers that work on a show at any one time, from the creative influence of the executive producer to the overall stories of the head writer(s) to the way that is broken down into scenes and dialogue, demonstrates the hundreds of creators who have had an influence on soaps stories through the years. Consider how much impact the thousands of actors who have appeared on these shows have had as well, in addition to directors and other creative forces, and there is certainly no clear "author" of any of these soap opera texts. Even if fans have particular writing teams that they have preferred over others or certain periods of a show that they consider "golden eras," there is no single writer that can be seen as the single defining source of a show, especially once it has been on the air for decades.

As for pro wrestling, the fact that wrestling narratives often spilled over from territory to territory and that wrestlers who retain the copyright to their own characters would jump from one show to the other ensures that, in addition to the constant shifting of creative forces within the bookers of any particular wrestling organization, there was also a meta text that fans would follow which branched across every wrestling show in the country. In the regional days of wrestling, fans would follow characters as they moved across the country, being written by a variety of creative forces along the way. Now that the WWE is the major show left in wrestling, there are three WWE divisions, each with their own head writer; and there are still alternative wrestling promotions that often take characters who leave the WWE, like TNA wrestling on Spike TV. In addition, the wrestlers themselves are traditionally known for developing many of their own attributes, and the performance of the audience affects every show as well (and audiences often stray from the intent of the people who scripted the reactions they are "supposed" to have on live shows). It's hard to identify who "creates" the final product of any particular wrestling show, much less the ongoing narratives of the various characters.

Long-Term Continuity

Although fans in all three genres would likely sometimes debate that creators care enough about this category of immersive story worlds, there is at least some semblance of long-term continuity in developing these worlds. This is what sets the long-term development of iconic characters apart from these continued story worlds, in that these story worlds are only created if there is some idea of prior stories being relevant to the next one rather than a series of adventures that seem completely removed from the next. Continuity is the way writers are often graded in all three genres. Generally, creators in each genre both praise the creative potential gained by such extensive back stories and also complain about the restraints that history places on their creative abilities when fans are watching their current content closely with how it measures up to the history of characters and stories. For fans, though, since they know these story worlds were around long before the current creative team came along and believe that they will continue to be around long after they are gone, continuity is often considered the most important aspect of the product, and they see it as their job to uphold it through amassing their collective intelligence.

Soap operas--because they are the most blatantly serial of the three-- is where continuity often matters most. Certain aspects of the genre have been accepted as defying continuity. For instance, when the actor portraying a central character leaves the show, recasts are sometimes accepted as necessary evils. Also, fans accept what has been called the Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome (SORAS). Often, younger characters are SORASed when there is an actor switch, advancing their age by a couple of years. When a character leaves town to go to college, they sometimes return a few years older than they should be non-soap opera aging standards. For instance, Tom Hughes may have been born in 1961, but he somehow ended up in Vietnam before the end of the war. Various viewers combined their collective intelligence to construct both when characters first appeared or were born on the show and also their apparent current age, comparing this to the age of the actor playing the role, and particularly how the various numbers often do not add up.

Aside from these deviations, however, soap fans expect writers to research the histories of these characters and to write current storylines according to that history. Writers are most often graded with their ability to write characters consistently, both within their own duration with the show and consistent with the long-term history of the show. If characters appear in a scene who have had a long history with each other that the current writers seem ignorant of or if a long-time family member no longer on the show seems to be forgotten by the current writing team, veteran fans are vocal about what they feel is poorly researched writing. Conversely, if writers make subtle references to important stories in a character's past--as long as those comments are relevant to the current story and do not get in the way of contemporary fans' enjoyment of the story--writers are generally praised for having shown some degree of mastery of the text.

Soaps writers are often haunted by this legacy and the fact that the fans collectively have much stronger knowledge of the product than they do. In a Winter 2006 interview with Soaps In Depth, As the World Turns head writer Jean Passanante complained about the impossible learning curve involved with trying to write characters. Not surprisingly, bashed her for having been with the show for years and still not seeming to be able to dedicate the time to learn the history as well as she should. Since these fans are amassing their collective intelligence to understand the continuity of the show for free based solely on their own interest in the narrative, they hold the people who are paid to be the gatekeepers for the story world to higher standards.

Pro wrestling has been most notoriously lax in its use of continuity, especially with turning characters from good to bad and often having rivals one year be partners the next. However, fans still have long- term memories and try to make sense of the narrative, even when writers drop the ball. The WWE writers do sometimes make veryeffective use of history, however, especially in creating iconic moments at events that are then drawn upon again and again. The art of slowly building a feud, beginning with subtle hints and then arguments and then a major clash, with several plot twists along the way, is the way legendary characters and matches are created in wrestling, and they are most often successful when the writers have the strongest grasp on maintaining continuity with the characters and the feud.

Comic books have to maintain a somewhat slippery use of continuity. Because the characters cannot age with real time and must somehow be contemporary while also maintaining a degree of timelessness, there have been plenty of contradictions along the way. Particularly because comics are not tied to actors like the pro wrestling and soap opera worlds, there is more opportunities to create alternate universes and several versions of the Marvel Universe being produced simultaneously, for instance, so that there are multiple continuities from the Marvel creative team.

Fans are often known for trying to police continuity, and Marvel's interactive section of their comics was often known for rewarding readers when they catch continuity slips from the creative team and attempted to come up with their own explanations of how that seemingly discordant event somehow makes sense in the larger Marvel Universe narrative. Marvel writers sometimes tried to emphasize continuity by making random references to old issues, but the best use of continuity comes when writers demonstrate a mastery of the history of the universe and make reference to prior events when they are germane to the current story. Prolific contemporary Marvel creator Brian Michael Bendis considers maintaining the continuity of the universe both a blessing and a curse, giving him headaches but providing a wealth of inspiration from the past of each character.

Character Backlog

All three story worlds have many more characters in their histories than can be featured at any one time, yet fan activities often surround understanding and cataloguing the wealth of characters in the universe. Each character backlog is indexed and managed in much different ways and for divergent purposes, however. The soap opera universe is full of character histories, the majority of which are not currently featured on the shows. As shows have been on the air for decades, some characters drop completely out of relevance for the contemporary product, although fans interested in the history of a particular show might be interested in finding out the importance of that character in years past. However, many of the soaps characters not currently on a show are directly relevant to storylines that are still ongoing. Often, brothers and sisters, children, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, ex-husbands and wives, of current characters are no longer on the shows but must be acknowledged in current storylines. For fans, this means that the current official product they are watching on television is only a small part of the whole story world, and there is always the potential for characters who have not been killed (and sometimes even those who have) to return to the show or at least to be mentioned from time-to-time. In other words, the fictional world of Oakdale or Springfield or Genoa City or Salem or Llanview is much bigger than the town itself and its current inhabitants, and fans have that broader view in mind when they question what these various characters would think about storylines or if they will return to the show for the wedding of a relative.

Wrestling's character backlog is more complicated in its relevance, as competitors only have so many years in which they can perform at their physical prime. Legends in wrestling are often still used, either for nostalgia's sake or else as supporting players in the characters of the modern product (whether as commentators or managers or officials who play a part in the current drama, or as returning recurring characters from time-to-time). In wrestling, former competitors are built up as legends and often drawn upon for comparisons with modern stars or to evoke the history of the narrative. The nostalgia for this backlog of characters helps fuel publications, DVD releases, and the WWE 24/7 On Demand product, for instance, which airs "classic" matches featuring these various legends who may now be members of the WWE Hall of Fame.

The Marvel and DC universes likely have the most expansive character lists of all, and returning characters in these worlds are much more fluid, since these characters are not tied to portrayers. Any super hero or villain from the vast reserve of the history of each universe can be drawn upon at any time, and some of the best work of contemporary creators have been in restoring the validity of lesser- known characters from the past through current storylines, such as with Bendis' Alias or the Marvel Black Panther series, or DC's 52, in which a several relatively minor DC characters become the featured cast. As Henry Jenkins writes in Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, this modern revisiting of neglected characters from a comic universe's history in an alternate or contemporary text can reconceptualize characters "to up their 'coolness' factor," while still playing off the knowledge fans have of those characters in the long-standing narrative.

Contemporary Ties to a Deep History

As I have alluded to several times in the previous sections, the art of an immersive story world often lies in tying events from the rich pasts of these narrative universes into the contemporary product. Bringing up relevant back story and tying it into the current plights of featured characters highlight what many fans consider the art of creation within immersive story worlds. Particularly in the soap opera world, fans both simultaneously praise good use of history on the writers' part and, perhaps more often, use their communal knowledge of history to drive their collective creativity. The fans watch the story unfold each day and then go online to create an historical perspective on a character's action that day, both to rate the writers' use of continuity and also to help flesh out and unpack meanings they see hidden in the text based on knowledge of the characters' past, or else point out the contradictions in characters' current actions or statements based on their histories.

For instance, when the characters of Mike and Katie Kasnoff broke up on As the World Turns in November 2006, Mike was indignant that Katie had slept with her ex-husband. Many fans sided with Mike in the fight, pointing out the many times Katie had acted this way in past relationships. Conversely, other fans pointed out Mike's hypocrisy, based on the fact that he reunited with Katie while still married to Jennifer, thus making his moralistic tirade about fidelity somewhat ironic, since the most recent version of his and Katie's relationship began with an infidelity. In December 2006, when ATWT's Craig Montgomery had been shot in the chest and was lying in a hospital bed, telling everyone around him how Dusty Donovan was a terrible human being because he had shot Craig in cold blood and how Craig would never do something so vicious, veteran fans could alert more recent viewers to the fact that Craig had actually shot a man a few years ago in a crime that he was never punished for nor even suspected by the majority of people in town. While the show never gave any blatant evidence of the hypocrisy of either man's claim, the viewers were able to fill in the pieces for each other based on the seemingly endless wealth of material.

What sets immersive story worlds apart, what makes them immersive indeed, is that the well of backstory is so deep that no one person can masterfully plumb its depths. Veteran fans may serve as memories, but no one of them can fill in all the pieces of the puzzle. Web sites that provide back stories, or books that attempt to summarize major plot developments over the years, would be impossible for one person to internalize and--even if one could-- still only provides a summary and not the rich details of each character and plot. These three worlds are set apart because there can be no expert who can quote almost every comic book or episode or pay-per-view. Not even a Rainman-style memory could recite every villain Spider-Man has faced in order, much less all of the developments of the Marvel universe, nor could they rattle off the results of every episode of Monday Night RAW for the past decade.

In the wrestling world, fans are equally as obsessed with filling in backstory, not necessarily always to be directly relevant to the current feuds but to draw comparisons between a feud or match of contemporary competitors with their predecessors. Wrestling fans have major web projects such as Kayfabe Memories, newsletters like" Wrestling as We Liked It, and a wealth of books from wrestling historians, wrestling journalists, and a growing number of memoirs from wrestling legends, all of whom provide a small piece of the puzzle of the history of the meta pro wrestling text, even if many are unreliable narrators. This act of preservation and navigating wrestling's deep history has been important to fans both because promoters for so long did very little of it and also because many of the major matches in wrestling history are no longer available for viewing, since arena shows were not often taped and the weekly television shows in most territories were not considered valuable at the time and often taped over with the next week's show.

In comic books, the huge archives drive much more than professional collectors and sales of graphic novels. The backstory fleshes out the histories of characters and their nuances, as well as relationships with supporting characters. There is a feeling that the subtle secrets to a character's history may be hidden in the pages of the archives and that understanding the present requires a reader's own willingness to dig into the past. In newer projects like the Ultimates universe or other Marvel or DC Universes that provide alternatives to the main universe, there is also a need to read the narratives from the main universe in order to compare the parallel stories. For instance, Bendis' recreation of many of the important Spider-Man plots over the years is a much richer experience for those who have already read and are intimately familiar with the original, thus meaning that Marvel and DC have an even deeper wealth of content if fans want to be able to understand alternative universes within the Marvel and DC worlds to their fullest extent. Of course, even if a fan were to collect every extant issue available in digital or tangible form, there would be no way to internalize that amount of material, even for the most ardent fan.

Permanence

Some of the categories listed above may also apply to some novel series, primetime television shows, online worlds, or other narrative universes. However, what these three share that perhaps no other particular media product does is a feeling of permanence. With the amount of time these narrative universes have lasted so far, there is a feeling of fans that these media properties will long outlive the current creative forces in charge of their gatekeeping, that the product will continue to have an audience long after the current fan base is gone, even. This sets these three worlds apart from any other narrative universe I can think of, where a decade is often considered an amazingly long run for a television show and four or five movies is considered a feat for a movie franchise. Since these worlds have been around for decades, it is important to emphasize--as P. David Marshall does in The New Media Book when writing about a related phenomenon of "the intertextual commodity"--that this concept has been around for some time and is perhaps just more overt in today's convergence culture.

Some worlds--like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter--will likely live on in varying degrees either through descendant series that bear little resemblance to their past with hiatuses in between or else through fan fiction and fan videos, but soap operas, pro wrestling, and the Marvel and DC universes are the only immersive story worlds which have been running for decades now, without any hiatus, and with the continuous output being solely at the hands of the official rights holders to the narrative world.

Many comic book characters have produced thousands of issues by now, with some characters having three or four dedicated titles to their individual story within the Marvel and DC universe, not counting the alternate universes like the ultimate title runs a character may be involved in as well. While fans know that there may be switches in creative forces or major changes in the stories of characters or even certain characters who wax and wane in prominence, there is a semblance that the current narrative world will continue and that the fans' lifetime investment in reading the comics will continue to be rewarded with no risk of sunk cost in a story world that eventually comes to an end. While some have speculated that the Ultimate story world may eventually replace the old Marvel narrative universe, the two worlds are running side-by-side at this point, and fans will only become fully invested in the Ultimates universe if and when they feel that the wealth of material in that world so far surpasses the confusing original Marvel world that they are willing to make a switch. At this point, though, both worlds are continuing to gain a deeper reserve every month, as fans immerse themselves in both.

The entire conception of pro wrestling seems odd, a con game that fans know is a ruse yet watch both for its narrative potential and its athletic exhibition. The fact that this version of professional wrestling is at least a century old now, though, gives fans the feeling that, even if a current promoter goes under, pro wrestling will live on. Since pro wrestling's history is tied to actual athletes and careers, there is no one company that can control wrestling history, and fans feel that pro wrestling as a performance art will remain a staple of American and international culture for centuries to come. That feeling of permanence drives much of the obsession with archiving and preserving "wrestling history."

Soap operas are often called "worlds without end." Now that some shows have been on television every day for more than 50 years, fans often feel that there is or at least should be a permanent niche for these shows. In recent years, with slowly declining ratings, some fans realize that may not be the case. They blame what they see as incompetent marketers and lazy creative regimes as ruining many shows, and they worry about rumors for cancellation for various shows. Still, even amidst a looming concern that the network could pull the plug, fans consume the daily text as if there is no chance for this to happening, talking often about the future as well as the past and seeing these narrative worlds of One Life to Live or The Young and the Restless as a permanent part of their lives.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the Marvel or DC universe would still be alive and well a century from now. There is an increasing fear that Procter and Gamble Productions or Corday or Bell or a variety of others will decide to pull the plugs within a few years, much less decades. And what's to keep wrestling from going the way of roller derby or various public carnival events that--once a staple of popular culture--is either no longer a part of our culture at all or else an historicized form of popular art? Nevertheless, the fans, performers, and producers of these shows have participated in these worlds for so long that a looming end does not haunt them in the same way that the producers of a primetime television series must be thinking about a semi-distant ending shortly after they have begun.

Master's candidate Sam Ford is originally from a small town named McHenry, Ky, located in the suburbs of the twin cities, Beaver Dam and Hartford, in the Home of Bluegrass Music, Ohio County. A weekly columnist for The Ohio County Times-News, Ford writes a column entitled "From Beaver Dam to Boston." His undergraduate work at Western Kentucky University led to four majors in English (writing), news/editorial journalism, mass communications, and communication studies, as well as a minor in film studies. His research interests include American television, rural journalism, professional wrestling, and soap opera.

Ford has published research on pro wrestling and is conducting his Master's thesis on transmedia storytelling and producer/fan interaction surrounding the soap opera As the World Turns. In addition, he is a licensed professional wrestling manager and performs for Universal Championship Wrestling in Kentucky. He is a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and is co-teaching a course on pro wrestling in Spring 2007. He lives in Boston, MA, with his wife Amanda and his two Pekingese, Brando and Sissy.

Immersive Story Worlds (Part One)

It's thesis time at the Comparative Media Studies Program -- always a period of great pride and intense stress for me, since I end up serving on an overwhelming number of committees and have the joy of watching my students complete projects which drew them to MIT two years ago. Over the next few weeks, for both reasons, I am going to be sharing with you some of the highlights of the work produced by these students. Doing so allows me to showcase some really exceptional students and it also allows me to shift a little of my focus away from maintaining the blog and onto my day job reviewing student work. Today and tomorrow, I am running an extended excerpt from Sam Ford's thesis, "As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture." Some selections of this thesis have already appeared in my blog when Sam took over as guest host while I was traveling to Poland last fall. Ford has been the key person who maintains the Convergence Culture Consortium blog over the past two years, helping him to establish his own reputation as an important commentator on industry trends. He also taught our course this term on professional wrestling which we discussed in the blog a week or so back. Here, he draws on three of his interests -- soaps, wrestling, and superhero comics -- to extend on the concept of an immersive story world. You will see here as well some of the legacy of my assignment getting students to think about ways to draw more deeply on their own personal experiences as a source for their theoretical projects.

Immersive Story Worlds

by Sam Ford

My History with Immersive Story Worlds

Growing up an only child with a stay-at-home mom, I spent my childhood days engrossed in what I have come to call immersive story worlds. In truth, I began my relationship with popular culture with no more than an antenna connection and a collection of toys. For me, it was G.I. Joe. I have never fancied being a military man and really do not remember too many playground days spent pretending to be a soldier, but the world of G.I. Joe fascinated me nonetheless. The dozens of characters I found for $2.97 apiece at Wal-Mart drove my interest in the alternate military reality these characters inhabited. Every toy included a biography of that character on the back, which I clipped and kept--in alphabetical order no less. I ended up with a group of friends who also collected and kept up with the world of G.I. Joe.

My love for G.I. Joe soon spilled over into the Marvel G.I. Joe comic books, where these characters came to life. I read those comics until the covers fell off, hoping to learn everything I could about each character and apply that knowledge to the games I played as well. I soon became engaged with the whole Marvel comic book universe, and I spent most of my $10 weekly allowance following the weekly or monthly adventures of Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hulk, and a slew of other colorful characters. Yet again, I found contemporaries at school who shared my interest in comic books. They wanted to be comic book artists, and I wanted to be a comics writer, so we set about to create a comic book universe of our own.

At the same time, I was becoming familiar with another immersive story world, that of the superstars of the World Wrestling Federation, now known as WWE. My cousins had long told me the legends of Hulk Hogan and "Macho Man" Randy Savage and The Ultimate Warrior, but I didn't know where to tune in to glimpse into this universe from a syndication window. However, my parents' decision to get a VCR opened me up to a slew of videotapes my cousins mailed to me and the growing collection of wrestling shows available at the local rental shops and convenience stores. Finally, I even convinced my neighbors to let me come over and start watching the Monday night wrestling shows since they had cable television. The Marvel superhero universe and the World Wrestling Federation were my media fascinations, and they both fit into this category I now write about as immersive story worlds, a concept I will flesh out in the next couple of posts.

Enter As the World Turns

There was another immersive story world that I had been involved with as well, one that I was not completely cognizant of being a fan of at first. It was what my grandmother always referred to as "the story" and probably the narrative in which I first came to know a slew of familiar faces, an immersive story world that predated my interest in G.I. Joes, super heroes, or professional wrestling. That narrative was Procter & Gamble Productions' As the World Turns (ATWT), a daily daytime serial drama that has been on the air since 1956. For as long as I can remember, ATWT was a part of my weekday afternoon, and the familiar faces of the Hughes family, joined by the evil James Stenbeck, the scheming Dr. John Dixon, the incomparable Lucinda Walsh, the down-to-earth Snyders, the lively Lisa Grimaldi, and a host of other characters were regular parts of my childhood.

I may not have realized that I was immersed in the fictional world of Oakdale, Illinois, until I started wondering what was happening to those characters when the school year began and I was no longer home in the afternoons. By the mid-1990s, I convinced my mom to record the show so I could watch it when I came home from elementary school every day. In fact, I was a somewhat closeted soap opera viewer all the way through most of high school. By my junior year, though, I had started a night job after school and lost contact with the residents of Oakdale.

By the end of my senior year of high school, I was married. My distance from ATWT didn't last, though, and my wife and I were dedicated viewers of the soap opera again a couple of years into college. With so many familiar faces and back stories to remember, it was hard not to get pulled back into the narrative and eventually join fan communities to find out what had happened in the world of ATWT while I had been away. My continued interest in this show is closely connected to the social relationships I built around it. The conversations I would join with my mother and grandmother about "the story" have continued over dinner every night with my wife. In the process, I have come to understand soap viewing as a social activity, which helped tremendously in understanding and becoming a part of the fan community built around ATWT.

Perhaps just as importantly, I have come to understand soap operas as primarily powered by character-driven storytelling. The strength of this genre lies in relationships, including the relationships characters have with one another, the relationships between these characters and the fans, and the relationships fans build around these texts. Soap operas are hindered by plot-driven storytelling because the permanent nature of the soap opera, with no off-season and 250 original hours of programming each year, emphasizes slow storytelling that examines the emotion and nuances of events rather than just "what happens." Comic books and pro wrestling are personality and character-driven genres as well, and good storytelling is consistently determined by the fan base of each genre as those in which the relationships among characters (and the performances of the actors or artists depicting those characters) are logical, well-written, and fleshed out.

These three narrative types--the daytime serial drama, the pro wrestling world, and the DC and Marvel universes--share a set of similarities I have grouped under this category of immersive story worlds. By this term, I mean that these properties have a serial storytelling structure, multiple creative forces which author various parts of the story, a sense of long-term continuity, a deep character backlog, contemporary ties to the media property's complex history, and a sense of permanence. I will examine each of these aspects over the next few pages.

This thesis concentrates particularly on the immersive story world of As the World Turns and its current status in a shifting media landscape. My interest in this soap opera text is heavily tied to my fascination with this type of immersive story world in general, in which one can never truly "master" the material. Immersive story worlds provide a space particularly rich for interaction between a text and a vibrant fan community that critiques, energizes, maintains, and fills in the gaps of that official canon. Further, as Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture, the "extension, synergy, and franchising (that) are pushing media industries to embrace convergence" have long been a part of these narrative worlds in one fashion or another, so that these marginalized texts have a lot to offer for informing other media producers. These worlds are unusually ripe for transmedia content, user-generated content, and a wealth of online fan forums. However, they also generate a distinct niche fan environment that is both energized by and suffers from being considered somewhat fringe, even as each has long been a massive cultural phenomenon. In order to understand exactly what is meant by immersive story worlds, however, it is important to examine each characteristic of this categorization.

Seriality

All three types of worlds within this category share a strong sense of seriality. While soap operas have best taken advantage of seriality and have made that never-ending unfolding of drama part of their very definition, they are often tied together with telenovelas and other forms of melodrama which do not have the same type of long- term seriality that soaps have. Soap operas can master storylines that unfold over weeks, months, or even years in a way few other texts can. For instance, there is a

long-running feud on As the World Turns between characters Kim Hughes and Susan Stewart that began after Dr. Stewart slept with Kim's husband Bob--back in 1990. That plot point often creeps up in current storylines and will not be forgotten in the show's history. Similarly, in 2006, the explosively popular Luke and Laura supercouple from General Hospital in the 1970s were reunited for a short time in storylines, drawing on 25 years of history for the couple, still portrayed by the same actors.

Over time, seriality has become a conscious part of creating immersive story worlds, and strong utilization of quality serial storytelling was not a requirement of any of these media forms in their infancy but rather the way in which creators constructed these worlds over time. For instance, according to Bradford W. Wright in Comic Book Nation, Marvel deserves much credit for creating a loosely cohesive narrative universe. Many comic book stories before that time were each standalone tales, with the characters returned to a static point at the end of each issue, from which the next story would drive from as well. Even after the creation of the Marvel Universe, creators often failed to capitalized on the potential for seriality, and most monthly installments were isolated stories. However, t Marvel titles featured an increasing number of crossovers and ongoing storylines, not just in the battle between good and evil but in the personal lives of the characters as well--work relationships, romantic entanglements, and supporting family members whose personal dramas were as compelling at times as the main narrative.

One can see how important seriality is particularly in the Ultimates Marvel universe that has become popular in recent years. At the beginning of the decade, Marvel decided to relaunch the stories of several of its characters in contemporary times, telling familiar stories of the origins of Marvel staples like Spider-Man while being able to map out a more coherent continuity. Now that the Ultimate Spider-Man title has passed its centennial issue, the new universe is building its own continuity and makes particularly good use of seriality, with the personal lives of the characters of each title run often much more important in the long-term than the hero's battle with super-villains or else interwoven so completely between the various parallel plots that the continuity from issue to issue is much more developed than the comic book series in previous decades.

The rise of the graphic novel relates closely to these changes. The strength of the Marvel universe is that it has created a more viable archiving system than that of pro wrestling or soap operas, which are still struggling with ways to make previous content readily available for viewers. The popularity of the graphic novel has given fans an easy way to collect and archive their favorite comic book runs, and the format of the graphic novel--grouping together multiple issues from a comic book run--encourages writers to work even harder at developing serial storytelling from issue-to-issue.

Pro wrestling has long used seriality in booking various wrestling feuds. Television shows were used to create storylines to make people want to go to the arenas and pay for a ticket to see the matches that were set up from television interviews and angles. Often, a contested ending between two wrestlers at one show made fans want to return to the arena next month to see the rematch and the drama continue between two competitors. For instance, at Madison Square Garden in 1981, then WWE Champion Bob Backlund was defending his title against a grappler named Greg "The Hammer" Valentine. During the melee, the referee was accidentally hit and knocked to the mat, groggy. The referee saw that Backlund had his challenger pinned and counted the three. Because he still had not recovered from his own fall, the referee did not distinguish which wrestler had the other pinned (both men were wearing the same color tights), so when Valentine started celebrating as if he had been the one who had scored the pin instead of being the one who was down for the count, the referee handed him the championship belt. Backlund, of course, contested the finish, and the decision was made to have a rematch for the held up title when the WWE returned to Madison Square Garden the next month. In this case, there was both a standalone storyline on that particular card and also an ongoing story that fans would return to see from one month to the next.

However, the WWE and other wrestling organizations have developed the serial format of wrestling over the years much further, especially as the television product became more important in itself rather than just driving fans to watch the wrestlers perform in person. The writers discovered that they way to get fans to tune in from one week to the next and purchase the culminating pay-per-view events was to build ongoing feuds in serial fashion, with the each episode always pointing toward the next and each pay-per-view not only producing the climax for some feuds but creating ongoing chapters in others or creating new storylines that would play out in the coming months.

Slash Me, Mash Me, Spread Me...

A while back, I mentioned that Jonathon Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and Men and Cartoons, had poached a passage from Textual Poachers in an article he wrote for Harpers about copyright and creativity. Since Lethem, along with Michael Chabon ( The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), has emerged as one of the poet laureates of fanboy lit, I was delighted to discover that my work on fan culture had made it onto his radar screen. But it just keeps getting better. Annalee Newitz was interviewing Lethem for Wired and asked him directly about his relationship to Textual Poachers, as she reports in her blog:

Lethem, always a fan of art that exists in a copyright gray area, is eager to encourage fanfic writers of all stripes. He admires Henry Jenkins' seminal book about fanfic, Textual Poachers, and champions the creative appropriation of pop culture icons. "Fanfic is a beautiful allegory of appropriation," he said. "But that doesn't mean the exact gesture is the most aesthetically promising one." Translation: Fanfic rules because it tweaks copyright law, but it's not always good art. Maybe Lethem just hasn't read some of the fantastic Harry Potter fanfic that's out there?

Moreover, Lethem has laid down a challenge to the fan writing community, which I am happy to help publicize here:

The award-winning nerd novelist revealed that he'd love to be in a slash fiction story. Whom would he want to be paired with? "I want to be surprised! I want to see ones I wouldn't think of!" he enthused, eyes wide with anticipation -- or possibly fear. Lethem believes he's been "slashed" only once, paired with fellow geek novelist Michael Chabon in a "sublimated homoerotic comic by Patricia Storms that was just an inch away from being Kirk and Spock."

Lethem may well be the first celebrity in my memory who has publicly campaigned to be the subject of a slash story. I can certainly think of plenty of examples where stars and writers not to be subjected to the slash treatment. (Personally, I am rooting to see Lethem climb into bed with The Goatman, the aptly-named character from one of his short stories, but then what do I know...)

I became aware of the Lethem effort to encourage people to slash him about the same time that I learned about the latest efforts of Steven Colbert to encourage his own brand of grassroots creativity. As his website at Comedy Central explains:

For Your Editing Pleasure

It all started when House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel told freshmen Democratic congressmen not to appear on the Colbert Report. The complaint? That Stephen gets final cut on interviews. So in the interest of playing fair, Stephen has decided to put it all out there for you. And by "it," we mean footage of an interview with Stephen that you can edit any way you like.

Download the footage at www.colbertnation.com. The knife is in your hands, Americans. Wield it wisely.

So, at a time when other producers are sending out cease and desist notices to shut down mashups of their content, Colbert is encouraging you to re-edit and recontextualize incriminating statements from his show (and believe me, what made the sketch so funny when it first aired was the whole series of potential meanings behind seemingly innocent statements once he planted the idea in your head.) Of course, none of this has stopped Viacom from trying to get Colbert Show segments removed from YouTube in what is surely a classic example of a media company speaking out of both sides of its mouth at once.

And all of this recalls the contest launched awhile back by A Ok Go, the pop group which has risen to fame primarily on the basis of some pretty compelling videos distributed on YouTube. The group used YouTube to launch a contest to have their fans do their own version of their "A Million Ways" video, again encouraging their fans to have their way with them.

Of course, not everyone gets a clue. For several months now, I've been hearing about a short-lived Veronica Mars preview competition launched by the production company: fans were to make their own shorts promoting the series but one small catch, for copyright reasons, they weren't allowed to use any actual footage from the show. Supposedly, the competition died a quick death when very few people submitted videos, feeling justly frustrated by the mixed messages involved in that particular set of rules.

So, we now have celebrities from literature, television, and pop music who want us to slash them, mash them, but above all, spread them. Indeed, we can see each of the above as reflecting the sensibilities of a generation of popular artists who have grown up in an era of cult media and participatory culture. They know what fan creativity can accomplish and they want to be part of the game rather than sitting on the sidelines.

At the same time, we can see this as reflecting the growing appreciation within the media industry of what often gets called "viral marketing": that is, they recognize the buzz that comes when grassroots intermediaries embrace a property and pass it along to their friends. C3 research associate Joshua Green and I have begun exploring what we call "spreadable media." Our core argument is that we are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. In a world of spreadable media, we are going to see more and more media producers openly embrace fan practices, encouraging us to take media in our own hands, and do our part to insure the long term viability of media we like.

Indeed, our new mantra is that if it doesn't spread, it's dead.

Behind the Scenes: Super Deluxe

"We're Super Deluxe. And by God, We're going to make you laugh." -- taken from the Super Deluxe webpage. Super Deluxe is a new comedy site launched by Turner Broadcasting in January of this year. The site promises a mix of original professional content with community tools which will allow people to share amateur produced videos. It might be seen as one of the first of what are likely to be a series of attempts by major media producers to create their own YouTube like sites which combine authorized commercial content with fan generated materials. In this case, the site is targeting comedy as a genre that is likely to support both commercial and amateur produced material of high quality -- with their understanding of comedy including a fair amount of animation as well.

As the press release announcing the service explained:

Original programming will range from short films and sketches to episodic series and more. In addition to being available online, SUPER DELUXE content will be available via cable VOD, wireless devices and personal media players.

Programming is just the beginning, however. SUPER DELUXE's community tools will allow fans to interact with artists and each other, adding an extra dimension of value for the consumer. Through these tools, fans can express their own unique sense of humor and interact with artists and others by creating their own profiles, uploading their own videos, rating and sharing content, making comments, sending messages and more. Fans can even join or create groups with other artists and users to share and discuss their favorite humorous topics, comedians or anything else that strikes their interest.

The featured content on the site at the moment is quirky, original, and engaging. Consider, for example, a range of shorts featuring somewhat fractured versions of American presidents, contemporary and historical (with the idea of failed presidents a strangely recurring theme across much of the content produced so far).

The Professor Brothers - Substitute (Brad Neely) depicts what happens when a professor trusts his American history class to a friend who warns him that he will absolutely make a mess of things and then proceeds to make these words a self fulfilling prophecy.

"Don't Recognize Me" depicts U.S. Grant, riding across the countryside on his motorcycle, hoping to meet some folks who don't know he was once a less than spectacularly successful president.

"President's Day," produced by the fine folks at Fark, shows us what happens when a bunch of the guys -- all former presidents -- help Lincoln celebrate his birthday at the local bowling alley. Along for the ride are Taft and Polk, who are perhaps not the A List of former presidents, but they know how to show a guy a good time.

W's World (Kyle Boyd) features George Bush and his side kicks, Condy "Brown" Rice and a pot-smoking baby elephant, as they seek to deploy the same principles to the oil lands in Alaska that have proven so successful in Iraq.

These videos give you a sample of the range of commercially produced content being showcased on the site.

James DiStefano and Erlene Zierke, two of the young masterminds behind Super Deluxe, agreed to answer some of my questions about the site. (I should disclose that Turner is a member of our Convergence Culture Consortium). In what follows, they discuss the nature of their site and its relationship to user generated content and the fan culture that is growing up around certain forms of comedy. Some people have described the site as an alternative to YouTube except that YouTube is a general interest site where-as Super Deluxe focuses on a specific genre of entertainment. That's where I decided to start the interview.

What do you see as the advantages of specialization over generalization?

The clearest advantage is the ability to create and maintain a brand. Sites that generalize lack a voice or a distinct feel. During our design phase, many of our potential users said they only went to these sites when guided by a link shared through email or IM. Many users cited a difficulty in separating the wheat from the chaff in such a large library of clips.

Early in the project, we decided to focus specifically on a certain type of comedy, and we decided to stay true to Turner's roots in aggregating and branding libraries of content by soliciting artists to produce material for us. We wanted to retain that open spirit embodied in the video-sharing sites, but we wanted to give our community something to talk about. Like this kind of content? Stay - we have a good sized and growing library to share.

Super Deluxe (http://www.superdeluxe.com/) is different in many ways because of this specialization. The artists producing content for Super Deluxe also give this site a distinct perspective. Our editorial staff does a great job of infusing the site with a voice, a feel, on a daily basis. We pick a mixture of Turner-produced content and user-contributed content every time we update the site, and this gives Super Deluxe a perspective on things that other sites lack. We're much more 'record label' than 'record store.'

And why this particular specialization?

Comedy is a genre that bends nicely to the constraints of the online medium. Short clips seem to work best on the Internet for a variety of reasons. If users don't like the video size, video quality, or content, they have the ability to move away to any other destination in the time it takes to click a mouse or search Google. With comedy, you can grab someone's attention in the first 10 to 15 seconds and have a pretty good shot of keeping them for the duration of a video. In other genres, it is difficult to establish compelling characters or interesting plot lines in the short amount of time we have to grab someone's attention.

What developments in the area of comedy are feeding into the development of Super Deluxe? Where is your content coming from? What trends in the culture are you tapping?

The culture we embrace places a premium on pursuit and discovery - it's part of an important ritual around this type of content on the Web. People trade funny videos, photos, comics and stories all the time. At launch, we emphasized the portability of online comedic content by including multiple tools to share and embed our video.

We're catering to the 'openness' of our audience's expectations and tastes. We encourage our artists by not imposing strict restrictions or lengthy approval processes; this approach lends itself to experimentation. In doing so, we've built a library of original and exclusive content unlike many other video sites. That's been an essential part of attracting interest in this space.

On Super Deluxe, it isn't necessary for our sensibilities to have broad appeal; we don't have to create a sitcom that appeals to the juicy part of the bell curve in order to gain an audience. A Super Deluxe viewer can construct their own path through the network, watch what they want, participate how they want, and discard what doesn't interest them.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that there is only a thin line that separates jokes and insults. How do you imagine Super Deluxe negotiating that line? Are there going to be occasions where you need to censor potentially offensive content? Are you giving the community ways to police itself?

We've already encountered these issues in the short period of time since launch. We've had situations where we've removed inappropriate content - videos that crossed the line from joke to insult (and, honestly, some videos went past insult and straight to offensive). It's not hard to see what fits with our ideals and what doesn't. Our editorial system allows us to promote like-minded content producers while still giving individuals the opportunity to define their idea of what's funny to them.

There is a flagging mechanism on Super Deluxe for our community to use. We review each flagged submission and decide whether it meets our standards or to to take it down. We retain an open dialog between us and our community. They help us police and message us or flag where appropriate. Our community helps Super Deluxe decide who we are and what we stand for. This level of openness helps us define the grey area, the thin line. Our sensibilities are strong but our policies are flexible.

Are you giving individuals ways to find content that reflects their own value systems?

We are. If we don't find something particularly amusing, well planned/executed, or indicative of the culture we have created within Super Deluxe, we don't promote it on any of our editorial pages; however, we still give the user several other outlets to publicize his/her creation. Our members can share their creation with their friends, embed it elsewhere for all to see, or direct people to subscribe to his/her RSS feed. While we may not find it particularly funny, there may be some users who will appreciate it.

There is starting to be a backlash against what some critics are calling the "cult of the amateur," arguing that mediocre content made by inexperienced producers is starting to push out professionally produced content made within systems of quality control because amateur content costs less to produce and distribute. How would you respond to this criticism?

When it comes to user-generated content, the medium is in the phase of experimentation. Every creative medium goes through a similar phase in order to establish norms around what's considered 'good' content. I couldn't cast out the "cult of the amateur" as invalid while it progresses through this phase. The distinction between user-generated video and independent film-making is only separated by a few degrees - not residing on opposite sides of the circle.

Recorded music is a medium that has professional, independent, and amateur productions co-existing in the same marketplace. Why couldn't Web-based video?

Can you give us a sense of the scale at which amateur content is coming into Super Deluxe at this point? What criteria are you using to decide which content to foreground on the site? What kinds of amateur content has impressed you the most so far?

Given that we're just finishing our 'soft launch' of Super Deluxe (a period with little or no promotion or marketing), we're extremely pleased with our level of viewership, of registration, and with our community participation. Our next phase is to roll out more original, exclusive content and expand the possible ways our community participates and interacts on Super Deluxe.

On Super Deluxe, when it comes to user-contributed content, we have a phrase that guides our vision: "created, not recorded." There's a huge difference between capturing a 'stupid pet trick' and writing/editing a script to produce a finished video. And while we accept submissions that encompass the former, we promote videos that encapsulate the latter.

We pick amateur content to promote based on a number of criteria. Does it fit with our voice, our theme? Will our users find it interesting? Does it have a shelf-life, or potential for future development? And, most importantly: as representatives of culture in this online world, do we find it funny or entertaining?

Cube is one video that met all these complex criteria. We love this video, and it got a great reaction from our community.

"Squirrel vs Marshmallows" is another one that really gets us excited about our users. It's well planned out and well executed, and I can't get the song out of my head every time I watch the video. It's a perfect example of what we're looking to promote on Super Deluxe.

Your blog has created a category called "Worst Damn Thing." Explain. Do you think the pleasure of user-generated content involves laughing with or laughing at?

We encourage our audience to upload the content that reflects them and their sense of 'the funny.' Some of it, though, tends to be more on the side of 'recorded' rather than 'created.' One particular piece uploaded to Super Deluxe was more appropriate for a standard video-sharing site than for an editorially-driven site like Super Deluxe. So we decided to give our audience a clear signal as to the kind of user contributions we'd promote while also having a little fun with it. We try to retain our sense of humor, both as creators of culture and as lovers of the genre.

We don't intend for "Worst Damn Thing" to stifle creativity; the designation is intended to help raise the bar for what user-generated content can be, in an effort to move the medium from experimentation to independent creation.

When Piracy Becomes Promotion Revisted...

Last fall, Reason magazine reprinted the "When Piracy Becomes Promotion" section from Convergence Culture, foregrounding the ways that the arguably illegal practices of fan subbing have helped to build the American market for anime. More recently, I received a tip from reader David Mankins about the ways that the commercial marketing for the anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, sought to explicitly tap into the fansubbing circuit. Haruhi had been a huge success in Japan and had generated growing interest in the American Otaku community through its circulation in fansubbed versions. Wikipedia offers this history of the international reception of the series:

DVD sales in Japan have been strong with 70,000 and 90,000 units sold of the first two DVDs respectively as of August 2006. A 2006 online poll of Japan's top 100 favourite animated television series of all time, conducted by TV Asahi, placed the series in fourth place. The series has also become somewhat of an internet phenomenon in both Japan and English-speaking countries thanks to the distribution of English language fansubs, and over 2000 clips of the series and user-created parodies and homages were posted to video sharing websites such as YouTube. The popularity of these clips (and those of other popular Japanese series) lead the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) to request that YouTube remove clips protected under copyright.

Rather than ignore this history, the company releasing the anime series officially in the United States openly courted anime fans, urging those who have loved the fan sub version to support the commercial releases.

Here's an account of the campaign published last December on The Anime Almanac:

Buzz was generating through out all off last week as a mysterious website popped onto the internets with promises of the popular anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, being licensed in the US. The website only claimed that "The World as we know it will end" that Friday. But for those looking around, one could find hidden messages to decrypt written in the website's source code. The popular website AnimeOnDVD.com also played along with the highlight of the letters SOS written on their news posts. The hype was big, and many started to speculate who was behind the mystery....

Bandai's idea behind the ASOS Brigade is to reach out to everyone who has already become fans of the series through watching the fansubs. They have created their own amateur-style home movies and are posting them on the internet. They have also created a Myspace page and encourage fans.

The movie is done "for fans by fans" style, and they really know their target audience. The movie interlaces Japanese and English dialog with a Korean-Americain, former Pink Ranger Patricia Ja Lee, playing the lead role, and two Japanese actresses playing her sidekicks. Lee even admits in the film that the Japanese actresses are only meant to appeal to the otaku fanboys. This is a very suitable attitude for the character she portrays, and is even more entertaining when we, the otaku-fanboy audience, realize how true it is.

But the video also dives into other aspects of the online anime community that we weren't expecting from a company like Bandai. Internet catch-phrases like "O Rly?" and "No Wai!" are used through out the video, which are only used by visitors of such otaku-influenced websites like 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Also, after fans complained over Lee's choice to translate a word to "psychic" over the word "esper", a new subtitled version of the video included the fan-prefered word written under the original recording...

Many people feel that Haruhi will never sell well in the US because most of the fans have already seen the show through illegal methods. This campaign is an attempt to target the fansub community into actually supporting the series financially when the opportunity is available to them. The movie ends with special thanks to "All fansubs lovers who buy the official DVDs and who help support more creative works," and specifically gives no thanks to "downloaders/bootlegers who never buy the official DVDs." This is a very bold statement, but I completely understand where they are coming from.

This case suggest just how central the fan network is to the release strategies of anime publishers. Rather than trying to shut down the fans, the company is recognizing the ways that fans have appreciated the value of the series, helping to familiarize at least American otaku to the content, and encouraging them to put their money behind a cultural product that they have already enjoyed in an underground form. I will be curious to see how this turns out and would welcome any insights from readers of this blog who are more involved in anime than I am.

For anime and manga fans in the Boston area, I wanted to share details of the forthcoming Cool Japan conference being hosted by Ian Condry, a faculty member in the Foreign Languages and Literature section at MIT and an active contributor to the Comparative Media Studies Program. Here are some of the highlights of the event (taken from the press release). Events will be split between MIT and Harvard, reflecting the joint affiliation of the "Cool Japan" Project:

Wednesday, February 28

Anime Screening & Director's Talk: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

7pm, MIT Room 32-123 (enter at 32 Vassar St.)

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda will screen and discuss his feature film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shôjo, 2006, Kadokawa/ Madhouse), which was awarded Best Animation by the Media Arts Festival 2007.

Thursday, March 1

Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization Book Launch and Dialogue with Author Ian Condry. 4-5:30pm, MIT Room 4-237 (enter at 77 Massachusetts Ave.)

MIT Associate Professor Ian Condry will discuss his recently published book with comments from local hip-hop scholars Thomas DeFrantz (MIT Associate Professor) and Murray Forman (Northeastern) and dialogue with audience.

Miss Monday in Concert. Tokyo hip-hop artist and local hip-hop sensations Akrobatik and Danielle Scott. Tickets: $8 Adv./$10 Door (18+). 9pm (doors open at 8:30pm), The Middle East, Upstairs (472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge).

Friday, March 2

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." Harvard CGIS (South, Room 020 Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge).

"Visual" with Susan Napier (Tufts/ U Texas), author of Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle; Roland Kelts (U Tokyo), author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Invaded the US; and Adam Kern (Harvard), author of Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and Kibyoshi in Edo Japan. 1pm.

"Design" with Marcos Novac (University of California, Santa Barbara), artist, transarchitect, and designer; Kostas Terzidis (Harvard), author of Algorhithmic Architecture; and Larry Kubota (GLOCOM), filmmaker, Black Current Productions. 3pm.

Afro Samurai Screening and Discussion with Manga Artist Takashi Okazaki. Screening of one 25-minute episode from the new five-part animated series produced in Japan and starring Samuel L. Jackson. Discussion follows with Afro Samurai manga artist Takashi Okazaki, who drew the original cult comic that launched the project. 7pm, Gund

Hall Piper Auditorium (Harvard, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge). WARNING:

Mature content, not suitable for children.

Saturday, March 3

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." MIT Stata Center Room 32-124 (32 Vassar St.).

"Culture" with Laura Miller (Loyola), author of Beauty Up: Exploring Japanese Beauty Aesthetics; Christine Yano (U Hawaii), author of Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and Nation in Japanese Popular Song; Ian Condry (MIT/Harvard), author of Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and Paths of Cultural Globalization. 1pm.

"Politics" with David Leheny (U Wisconsin), author of Think Global Fear Local: Sex, Violence, Anxiety in Contemporary Japan; Theodore J. Gilman (Harvard), author of No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and US; and Ueno Toshiya (Wako U), author of Urban Tribal Studies: A Sociology of Club and Party Cultures. 3pm.

For those of you who are not in the neighborhood, you may have to make due with Anime Pulse's extensive coverage of the previous Cool Japan conference. Here's hoping they provide a similar record of this event.

The Future of Television (Circa 1999)

Bill Densmore of Clickshare recently shared with me the text of an e-mail I had sent him in May 1999 describing what I saw as one scenario for the future of digital culture. I decided I wanted to share it with you to spark a conversation about how far we have gone towards realizing some of the key elements of this scenario as well as how far we have yet to go on other fronts. (the reference points to The X-Files and My So-Called Life give you some sense of the time when this was written.) I was responding to an essay he had written about micropayments and the struggle to insure the diversity of digital culture. Everything from here is part of the original text:

My own research has centrally concerned the ways that popular audiences consume and create value from the resources provided them by the mass media. As I suggested yesterday, I don't find the lowest common denominator model helpful for thinking about the success of most popular entertainment. Rather, I see the popular audience composed of a coalition of different

audience interests who may share certain programs, films, stories in common but who get fundamentally different things from them and who interact with them in different ways. The most creative producers understand this now, while the broadcasting paradigm helps to mask the degree of diversity and fragmentation of the contemporary media audience. It is clearer when we go on line and survey the range of web sites constructed around a particular series or parse through the flame wars on fan discussion lists which occur when radically different reading publics are brought together.

A second focus of my research concerns what I call "cultural convergence," which refers to the social and cultural changes in how we relate to media content in our everyday life that help prepare the way and establish the market viability of technological convergence. When we try to understand what is happening in our culture, we see two things: a growing desire to participate

more fully in our media culture -- not just as passive consumers but active transformers of media content -- and a growing tendency to tighten corporate control over intellectual property law. This is resulting in a crackdown on fan web sites, MP3 files, etc. and thus a closing off of the cultural participation encouraged by the web.

Now, here's what I imagine occurring when we add something like your clickshare to the mix -- along with dramatic improvements in the delivery technology for digital media:

1)All television content becomes available via some form of webtv, including past episodes. If I want to join a series midprogress, I can go back and watch earlier episodes for a reasonable rate with micropayments as the means of exchange between me and the television producers.

2)Television series will be annotated to link back to relevant back story information. If I am watching X FILES and there is reference made to Muldar's sister and her disappearance, I can be offered the chance to see those earlier scenes, again at a modest price. This will enable even more elaborate form of serialization and backstories in American television, a tendency that has grown in the two decades since the introduction of the VCR.

3) Fan websites will play an important role in the cultural economy, if they are allowed to function not unlike the Amazon Associates program. Fan sites will comment on or annotate the aired episodes, thus establishing reasons why various kinds of viewers might want to see them for the first time or watch them again. They can link back to the producer's sites where the

episodes can be downloaded for a viewing fee and the producers will in turn provide an incentive to the fans for creating sites which essentially help market their products. At the same time, fans should be allowed freedom to discuss, comment, and appropriate the material in any way they want since doing so helps to establish niche market value for the content.

4)Certain series may debut on network and then move rather rapidly to the web where their continued support will come from viewers paying to watch them. This will be attractive in cases -- such as MY SO-CALLED LIFE -- where a series attracts an intense following in a definable demographic group but does not register a broad-enough viewership to be powerful according to the Nelson Ratings measurement. The ability to collect payments on a per view basis for a broad audience will enable continued production of such series assuming price scale can be resolved.

5)New networks may emerge which reflect under-served segments of the population that are geographically dispersed and therefore couldn't be addressed by existing broadcast and cable structures. Examples might include various language groups that constitute immigrant populations or the gay and lesbian community. Here, original programming is produced and made available for a modest pay-per-view fee.

6)International circulation of media product is facilitated. We can imagine viewer-supported networks emerging for British/Australian comedy or Japanese Anime for example, which will enable these products fair access to the American market. It will be possible to access television without regard to its original point of origin. Again, this depends on some structure that allows us to pay for what we watch at a modest enough scale to make this attractive to the average viewer on a regular basis.

The micropayment structure would seem to offer the best basis for this model, which leads us step by step towards a more diverse media culture that more fully reflects the range of viewer taste and interest. It will create new basis for profits for the entertainment industry while also enabling more popular access to media content. What is needed is a structure which can lower the per unit cost (and thus broaden the potential base of viewership), can be collected quickly and efficiently, and can be distributed to a range of different media producers as opposed to create narrow gateway companies that will once again determine what we can and cannot see based on broadcast models of the mass audience.