Pimp My Show!

The title says it all. We are already a few months into the Fall 2006 television season -- some of the new series have already come and gone, others have started to develop solid fan followings. I wanted to invite my loyal readers to share with us which new shows have really caught your fancy and why. (Of course, it's always fun to hear which new shows have bored or disgusted you, too.) It's been a while since we've had a really good conversation going with the readers of this blog so I am hoping you will rise to the occasion and share with us what you think have been the most interesting new shows this season. And of course, since I've got lots of international readers, don't presume we are just talking about American shows. I'd love to hear about amazing shows out there in other countries which are generating fan interest.

To get the ball rolling, I dug out some notes I sent to the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium this summer, before any of the shows had actually reached the air. I tried to predict which new shows would be "most fan friendly." It's interesting to see how well I did.

First, let's define "fan friendly." By fan friendly, I mean programs that attract strong, committed and highly visible followings as manifested in such activities as fan fiction writing, convention discussions, and online forums. Such programs may or may not enjoy ratings success by traditional standards. So, the CSI franchise consistently ranks in the top tier of the Nielsen ratings but doesn't generate anywhere near as much interest within the fan communities as a lower rated show such as Veronica Mars. Indeed, historically, fan favorite shows enjoyed a marginal position on the schedule, having strong niche appeal but struggling to stay on the air. That's why there have been so many letter writing campaigns through the years to keep their favorite shows on the air. It is only in recent years where cult shows like Lost also happen to be ratings leaders that the line between the two has started to blur.

Yet, even if fan favorites are not top ratings earners, they serve other vital interests for networks -- as I suggest in Convergence Culture. They are "must see" TV at a time when appointment viewing is in decline. They tend to rank higher in terms of paid downloads or digital video recording than many shows that do better in the ratings. And early research suggests that people watching their favorite shows are more engaged with the advertising as well as the content. They are also more willing to seek out further information about the series, resulting in more touch points and a greater receptiveness to convergence-based strategies. And for lower ranked and cable networks, a strong niche audience may make or break a program.

For my current purposes, I am really talking about two different but sometimes interrelated fan communities: one mostly female and focused around the production and consumption of fan fiction and the second, mixed gender and focused on online speculation and discussion. Keep in mind that there are other possible fan communities - sports fans, soap fans, music fans, etc. who will have their own criteria and interests.

So, what kinds of shows are most apt to attract strong fan followings?

Fan Friendly Programs:

1. Focus heavily on characters and character relationships. In some cases, fans will pull secondary characters from the margins of a series if they are not interested in the central protagonists. In particular, they are looking for the following:

--Strong emotional bonds - especially partnership, mentorship, and romance (probably in that order if you are talking about the female fan writing community)

-- Strong focus on the formation of alternative or utopian communities (again, this is especially true with the fanzine community).

-- Intelligent characters who use their brains to solve problems

-- Outside characters or characters with strong internal conflicts.

--Strong, competent, and active female characters

We can understand each of these traits as in some ways reflecting how fans see themselves and their social network. Fans see themselves as intelligent, strong, independent, socially committed, and nonconventional and they are drawn to characters who share those characteristics. They contrast themselves to what they call "mundane" viewers. These traits also reflect the genres that have emerged in fan fiction. Given the presence of a strong fan tradition about male partners becoming lovers, for example, there is a tendency for fans to be attracted towards shows that have strong partnership themes. So, a show like House meets all or most of these criteria including intelligent protagonists, a focus on friendship, romance, and mentorship, a strong sense of community, etc.

2. Focus on genre entertainment. While many fans watch realist or quality dramas (such as The West Wing) or sitcoms, these programs rarely cross over into their activities as fans. They do not generate the same level of discussion online or at cons nor do they inspire the same amount of fan fiction. Historically, organized fandom started in response to science fiction but with each new series that fits the other criteria but does not fall into the science fiction genre, the tastes of this community has broadened. So, at the moment, fan favorites can include crime dramas (Prison Break), mystery (Veronica Mars), adventure (Lost), science fiction (Battlestar: Galactica), historical drama (Rome), westerns (Deadwood), Buddy shows (Entourage), medical shows (House), etc.

3. Provides a strong sense of continuity. Even before there were fully elaborated story arcs on television, fans were inclined to read the episodes as if they formed some larger continuity. Series which rely heavily on continuity tap the collective memory of the fan community and allow them to show the kinds of mastery that comes from systematically watching a particular series. The management of continuity in turn becomes a favorite activity in online fan discussions.

4. Contain secrets or problems to be solved. Take this back to a distinction I make in my book, Convergence Culture between attractors (that is, shows that draw together like minded individuals) and activators (shows that give the fan community something to do - some roles and goals they can pursue together in relation to the content). The power of a show like Lost is that it is continually opening up new secrets, posing new mysteries, and creating new opportunities for fans to pool knowledge (see the much-discussed example of the map this season). This also accounts for how reality television programs such as Survivor, Big Brother, or American Idol find their way into the emerging fan cannon - because they offer either plenty of room for speculation between episodes or explicit opportunities for evaluation and participation.

5. Often have strong pedigrees. Shows by creators of previous fan shows (such as Abrams or Whedon) can more or less insure that their fan bases will turn out and give a first look at any new series they produced. Since part of the challenge is to produce a series that will be an attractor, this is a huge advantage going in. Despite the focus on characters within fan aesthetics, the same has not always proven to be true for actors. While there are fans for specific actors who will follow them from series to series, fans of a character may or may not be interested in something else from the same performer.

These are traits we can judge from advanced information about a series. There are other elements that are harder to read. It is not enough that a show operate within a well defined genre; it has to respect those genre conventions and satisfy the audience demands that draw them to the genre. It is not enough that characters be compelling on paper but there's an element of chemistry that emerges as these characters are embodied by specific performers that can make or break a series.

What happens when we apply these criteria to the series announced for this fall.

First, most shows do not stand a chance of reaching this kind of committed fan viewer because they do not meet most if not all of these criteria. By my count, there are 14 shows that have the potential to be fan friendly. A surprisingly high number are explicitly comparing themselves to Lost, hoping to become mass-cult successes.

What's striking in looking at the fall lineup is that networks have gotten the idea of continuity and serialization almost too well. Many of the series are designed to last a season or even half a season. They have plots or gimmicks that are going to be compelling in short bursts but will be hard to sustain over time. Some may go the route of 24, generating a new plot for each new season. Some will be canceled before each the first story arc runs its course. And some will make the mistake of avoiding resolution and thus drawing out a plotline well past its likely audience interest. If American television operated like British television, say, where you have a firm commitment for x number of episodes going in and then a series ends, whether or not it develops strong ratings, then we would know how to calibrate expectations about these series. But, many of them are artistic time bombs which may take off strong and then blow up in the networks' faces as they move into season 2. Of course in a world where the vast majority of shows never make a second season, this may not be a total disaster....

If I had to pick the most likely fan favorite of the lot, I would go with Heroes, followed by Vanished, Six Degrees, Jericho and Runaways. Studio 60 is the wild card in all of this - It will certainly be watched by a large number of fans but will it motivate fanish activities. (Either way, Studio 60 is probably the new show that is going to be most eagerly awaited in my household.)

Of these shows, at this point, Heroes and Studio 60 are the only ones that are still on my Tivo. How about you?

On Blogs, Lost, and Jag Studies...

For those of you interested in the blogosophere (and I have to assume you are or you wouldn't be reading this blog), there are some fascinating statistics to be found on Technorati's State of the Blogosphere report. Technorati is now tracking 57 Million blogs -- with a growth of 100,000 new blogs added each day throughout the last quarter. The number of blogs doubles every five to seven months.

They publish an interesting chart which shows the peak moments in blog posting and their relationship to specific news events. On the one hand, this chart suggests how vital politics is to what motivates people to post and on the other, it suggests that the increased number of bloggers means that each major political event is likely to generate more traffic and discussion than the last. We can speculate whether all of this reaction to news is likely to be divisive as some critics have argued, leaving us more likely to read each new development through an ever narrower and more self righteous ideological frame or likely to enable real discussion and community building as others have argued because we have a greater understanding of how politics impacts the everyday lives of a diverse array of people.

Blogs remain a highly decentralized mode of expression, even though some blogs (topped by Endgadget and Boing Boing) are beginning to compete directly with the websites offered by the major media companies in terms of traffic. Only three blogs make it to the top fifty most trafficked news sites while another nine make it into the second 50 most trafficked sites.

The egotist in me was interested in their classification of blogs as influential based on the number of other blogs which link to them. By these criteria, Confessions of an Aca/Fan, which I launched in June, has already made its way into "the very high authority group," thanks no doubt to the number of "thought leaders" and fellow bloggers who read this site, since our readership numbers are a good deal lower than many of the other blogs to make it to this status. You are an elite, dear readers, and you work hard to spread the word about some of the information posted here. For this, I thank you very very much.

Another Aca/Fan Takes Up Blogging

One of these new bloggers is none other than Jason Mittell, a regular reader and commentator here, an academic friend who teaches at Middlebury College and went to my Alma madder, UW-Madison and who is one of the academic advisors to the Convergence Culture Consortium. Mittell wrote Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture and is now working on a new book on complexity of American television. Here's a link to an essay Mittell published recently which touches on many shows that are much beloved in the aca/fan community. I have added Mittell's new blog, JustTV, to my blogroll and I suspect many of you will want to add it to their rss feeds.

The blog is only a few weeks old. So far, for my money, the most interesting post has dealt with the midseason finale of Lost. It is written from the perspective of a hardcore fan of the series as well as someone who is closely examining the growing complexity of American television:

One of Lost's strengths thus far has been a mastery of final acts, both of season and episode. Throughout season 2, fans complained that many episodes were 40 minutes of boring set-up for a great final 3-minute sequence. I was always fine with that, as I recognized that those set-ups were usually needed to deliver the final moments, and they served to deepen character and plot arcs in often subtle ways. And Lost has delivered in the season finales both years, albeit in different ways. Season 1 ended with some frustrating suspense, peering down the hatch, but the capture of Walt was an immensely satisfying twist. Season 2's finale was simply perfect, answering tons of questions about Desmond & the hatch, while opening a great number of mysteries to keep us pondering all summer (cue Giant Foot).

Now Lost is going with a split-season model, delivering a 6-episode mini-season this fall before going on hiatus until February. Last night's episode, "I Do," seemed poised to deliver on wrapping up many of the issues raised this season, and creating enough momentum to sustain interest for three months. It failed at both tasks. What was wrapped up? The only thing I can see is the resolution of the Kate/Sawyer/Jack love triangle - Kate & Sawyer are the couple, as Kate doesn't do taco night (and Jack's all about taco night). For some fans, this is huge, but I'm not a "shipper," nor do I think that's the main draw for the majority of Lost viewers. We got nothing about the motivations, history, or plans of The Others (as a friend of mine says, they seem omnipotent simply for omnipotence sake), no clues into Desmond's transformation or any other insights into the Swan's implosion, and no better sense of the numerous dangling clues (giant foot, Eyepatch Man, Mrs. Klugh, Alex, Penny's listening station, DHARMA/Hanso/numbers, Walt, Libby, shall I continue?).

What about narrative momentum? The cliffhanger seemed more out of 24 than Lost (which is not praise on my blog) - Jack holding Ben's kidney hostage, Kate trying to escape from mini-island peril, Sawyer at gunpoint. None of these developments are surprising, and the suspense is pretty low as well, as we know all three characters will survive this, and probably Ben will too. Lost's strength has been not in generating "what will happen?" suspense like typical thrillers, but creating "why are things happening?" intrigue. We know why Ben wants surgery, we know why Jack wants to save himself and Kate, we know why Kate & Sawyer want to get it on in a cage. I won't spend 3 months wondering what will happen to these characters, but I'm still pondering many "whys." The only dangling mystery we were given was Locke's revelation on Eko's Jesus Stick - but it's a clue with no payoff and no immediate resonance. I'm sure it'll matter in February, but who cares until then. [Plus as an added gripe, Kate's flashback completely wasted the glorious Nathan Fillion, only making me want to watch Firefly/em> again.]

More generally, Mittell has been responding to journalistic discussions which have suggested that there may be a backlash afoot against serialization and complexity this season as reflected by the lack of audience interest in many of the new dramas. Here's some of what Mittell has to say about The Nine, a series about which I am still trying to make up my mind:

While there's much I like about the show - strong cast, high production values, engaging characters, and a clever idea - something has bothered me from the beginning of the show. For those who haven't watched it, the concept is that nine people are held hostage in a bank robbery, and the show traces the after-effects of the event on their lives and relationships. The show's storytelling gimmick is that the 52 hours of the hostage situation is not revealed directly to the audience - each episode fills in a bit more of the events at the beginning of the show, and through flashbacks that characters have throughout the rest of the episode.

This storytelling device is clearly inspired from Lost, where flashbacks reveal a character's back-story that illuminate their "current" situation on the island, as well as other programs that have used flashbacks & flash-forward (temporal manipulations called anachrony in the narratology jargon) in creative ways, like Jack & Bobby and Boomtown. But my problem with The Nine is that there is no clear motivation either for withholding the events in the bank from the audience, or the way in which they are revealed. In fact, the viewers seem to be the only ones who don't know what has happened inside the bank -- whereas in other programs using temporal complexity, a character's discovery process or the act of retelling to another character motivates narrative revelations. More than any other show using such innovative storytelling strategies, The Nine seems to use its devices only as an externally-imposed gimmick without a clear motivation emerging from the story world itself.

For my money, Mittell is one of the best writers about contemporary television, one who regularly combines astute perspectives on the industrial context as well as a solid understanding of the formal construction of individual series and specific episodes. He watches television closely and isn't afraid to tell us what he thinks matters there.

Developing a Taste for JAG

Mittell was one of the many interesting people who I got to interact with at the recent Flow conference which was hosted by the University of Texas-Austin. I often mention Flow here because I see it as an important experiment in making academic criticism of television and new media more accessible to a general audience. Many of you might be interested to check out some of the short position papers issued by the conference participants around a range of topics.

Mittell participated on a session, for example, which centers around issues of taste and opened up a far reaching discussion of the role of evaluation in contemporary television studies. One of the most provocative statements came from my long time friend, Greg Smith, who currently teaches at Georgia State University, and who is finishing up a book on Ally McBeal. Smith asked conference participants to reflect on what does and doesn't receive academic attention and how this is bound up with academia as a particular taste culture. He ended up framing what became known as the "JAG question.":

TV studies, like all subcultures, was born out of a particular set of historical relations to the larger culture, and so we emerged out of film studies (by way of cultural studies) by tending to distance ourselves from the sometimes elite interests of our "parent discipline." From this pioneering work we gained a particular understanding of the popular as potentially unruly, a Rabelaisian source of energy that propels texts/viewers across social space. While we have grown to nuance our understanding of the politics of texts, this particular understanding of the popular still colors the choices we tend to make in examining texts. The more clearly a TV text fits this concept of the popular, the more likely we are to study it. I'll pick on Buffy here (a show I love) because its rise as one of the most explored texts in academic television studies has much to do the fact that it fits this specific notion of the popular. Its irreverent play with social categories, its sense of the grotesque as populist metaphor, its ardent following among an interpretive community: all these things place Buffy squarely within the center of our notion of the popular.

We need to recognize that this particular understanding of the popular is a value of our academic subculture, one that leads us to privilege certain text/viewer relations over others. In contrast, where is the analysis of JAG, a popular show that flew under the critical radar for 10 seasons? This has something to do with JAG's creators being less visible and less adept than Joss Whedon, but I also suspect that this is because JAG does not fit our primary notion of the popular. JAG is far too square to be interesting to television studies.

And thus the blind spot that I call "hipness." I initially considered discussing this distinction in terms of a preference toward the lowbrow and against the middlebrow, but the terms lowbrow/middlebrow feel too much like properties of the text to me. I prefer the term "hip" (and its opposite, "square") because it more clearly places the interpretive community into the mix. A text is hip or square to a particular community, and what's hip to one subculture may not be hip to another. And so Star Trek may be considered unhip by broader society while being the granddaddy of hip for TV studies. But what of texts that are squarer and yet immensely popular by the standards of broad viewership? Where's the field of Raymond studies? My suspicion is that (in spite of - or perhaps because of -- the fact that everybody loves him), Raymond studies would just not be as much fun (another taste category).

About this point in the discussion, Will Brooker, a British scholar who has written books on Alice in Wonderland, Batman, and Bladerunner (themselves hip or fannish shows), stood up and jokingly accused me of being responsible of misdirecting the entire field down the Aca/fan path, suggesting that every young academic is now a fan writing about the object of their own fandom. I am not sure I am ready to take the blame or the responsibility for this redirection of the field. But if I am responsible, let me suggest that to me, being an aca/fan involves being honest about one's relationship to their object of study and not necessarily simply writing about television shows one loves. For me, you don't really begin to understand the nature of popular culture unless one can engage with the emotional impact it has on the viewer and as such, we can not write about it without examining more closely our own emotional investments.

One of my first television studies teachers said to her class that they should always study television programs they hated because that was the only way to get enough emotional distance from them to examine them critically. I have always resisted that impulse to see hate as somehow objective or objectivity as the preferred stance for writing about television. It has never been a requirement that a Shakespeare scholar hate their object of study for example in a way that it used to be routine for television scholars to express their disdain for the medium.

Part of the problem may simply be that there is so little real ideological and cultural diversity within television studies per se. I would argue that our inability as a field to write intelligently about shows like JAG has something to do with our sense of cultural isolation from those people who live in Red States. One challenge may be to broaden our object of study. An even bigger challenge may be to expand who studies television and what kinds of perspectives are welcome at our conference. Very few folks at the Flow conference rose to defend JAG as a worthy object of study. My bet though is that there are people out there reading this blog who regularly watch JAG. Indeed, it was one of my late father's favorite programs and I found watching the program with him helped me to understand how his generation saw the world.

Taking the You Out of YouTube?

YouTube, along with Second Life, Flickr, Wikipedia, and MySpace, has emerged as one of the key reference points in contemporary digital culture -- emblematic of the move towards what people are calling web 2.0. As Newsweek aptly put it last year, web 2.0 is "putting the we into the web." Elsewhere, I have argued that web 2.0 is fan culture writ large, fan culture without the stigma. Nobody is telling these guys to move out of their parent's basement -- though some of them have started multimillion dollar companies out of their parent's basements. What separates these companies from the dotcoms which fueled web 1.0 is the emphasis upon participation, social networking, collective intelligence, call it what you want. What distinguishes them is that their content arises bottom up from the community of users.

One by one, these insurgent companies are being absorbed into the surviving digital giants (as has happened through Yahoo's purchase of Flickr or more recently, Google's purchase of YouTube) or by old media companies (as in Rupert Murdock's takeover of MySpace). With each new buyout, there is renewed speculation about what happens to the "we" --what becomes of the communities that made these activities and services so attractive in the first place.

Today, I wanted to share two really interesting responses to the buyout of YouTube and what they might mean for the future of participatory culture

The first comes from John McMurria, a professor from DePaul University, who is doing some of the best contemporary writing on media policy. McMurria is one of a number of young and established scholars who writes regularly for Flow, a academic webzine about television and new media that is part of a larger effort to tap the power of new media to reinvent what scholarship looks like.

In the past, McMurria has written interesting pieces about some of the pressing issues facing the Federal Communications Commission, including the nature of indecency, the impact of convergence, and the concept of a la carte programming. In his most recent post, he takes on YouTube.

His essay starts with this vivid description of how the YouTube community responded to the news:

Between the millionaire founders who promised their continued allegiance to "the community" and the cultural commentators who lamented the loss of an idealized space outside the global totality of commercial culture were the millions of YouTube users who responded to the Google acquisition. In the five days after the YouTube founders uploaded their announcement video, users played the video 1,837,554 times, posted 6,989 written comments and uploaded 84 video responses to it. The comments ranged from those who worshiped the YouTube creators for their vision and entrepreneurship to those who feared that Google and commercialization would destroy YouTube. Users called the founders "filthy rich dorks," asked to borrow money, and demanded they should get a piece of the pie -- as user PrinceofGraves put it, "I'm still broke and miserable -- so this is less than meaningless to me." Others debated whether Google was evil or not, admonished the founders for illegally profiting from copyrighted material, and worried that advertisements would inundate the site. The video responses were equally varied. But unlike cultural critics who imagined YouTube as outside commercial popular culture, many used popular cultural references and icons to craft their commentaries, including a video of Darth Vader flipping them off.

This is an issue I raised here a few weeks ago. At the heart of the Web 2.0 movement is this idea that there is real value created by tapping the shared wisdom of grassroots communities, composed mostly of fans, hobbyists, and other amateur media makers. I have often celebrated these efforts as helping to pave the way for a more participatory culture -- one that will be more diverse and innovative because it expands the range of content we can access. Yet, as I suggested here a few weeks ago, there is a nagging question -- if these grassroots efforts are generating value (and in fact, wealth) and their creative power is being tapped by major corporations, at what point should they start receiving a share of revenue for their work?

We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people's intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience's intellectual property for free? Do we understand their profits primarily as a tax to support the infrastructure that enables their distribution?

I am still struggling with where I stand on this issue but as McMurria notes, the purchase of Google for such astronomical sums of money certainly ups the ante for those of us who are grappling with this issue. (David Edery has taken up the debate held here with Joel Greenberg and written some further thoughts on this issue which are worth reading.)

As McMurria's thoughtful essay continues, he examines more deeply the claims made about YouTube as a community and whether it really is enabling the democratic participation and cultural diversity we are claiming for it. What interests me about YouTube is the ways it creates an "impure" culture, one that brings together very different kinds of cultural production into a shared space:

1. YouTube functions as a meeting place for different subcultures, fan communities, and other forms of participatory culture, enabling the crosspollination of formal practices, themes, and ideas. I see this crosspollination as likely to accelerate the speed with which cultural innovations get picked up and deployed at other social sites.

2. YouTube participants are monitoring mass media and rescuing content that deserves greater attention than it has received -- see here the circulation of Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, Stephen Colbert's Washington Press Club talk, or some of Keith Oberman's commentary on the Bush administration and the war, all of which were seen by many more people on YouTube than on television.

3. Grassroots content circulating on YouTube is being pushed upward through a combination of old and new media into greater and greater public visibility -- the movement from blogs to A List blogs (Boing Boing) to major web publications (Salon, Slate) to niche television (Daily Show, Letterman) to mainstream television (The Early Show) to advertising. This is such a powerful illustration of how convergence culture works.

4. YouTube is forcing major media companies to opt in or out of participatory culture -- with companies like MTV Networks enabling certain content to circulate through this channel or several major Japanese media companies deciding to yank their anime-related content off last week.

In each case, YouTube is a powerful illustration of the interplay between different forms of cultural production which Yochai Benkler discusses as Network Culture.

But, McMuria reminds us that while YouTube is relatively open to all kinds of grassroots participation, it does not necessarily deal with them all in an even handed manner. He writes:

A glance at the top 100 rated, viewed and disused videos, and most subscribed channels reveals far less racial diversity than broadcast network television. Most were US uploads with some non-US sports and Japanese popular culture...While Google's acquisition of YouTube and its deals with old media corporations including CBS, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, NBC Universal and Warner Music Group have meant that, in the words of one active video maker, "the Wild West feel of YouTube is already slipping away," we might also recognize that just as the democratic frontier myth of America's Wild West has obfuscated the exploitations upon which the nation was born, the mythic idealizations of electronic frontiers such as YouTube also obfuscate the ways in which video culture has reproduced, or at least has failed to excite a concerted challenge to, the inequalities that persist in our American culture. Perhaps we might think about the difference between what it means to be a YouTube community and what it would take to use the YouTube video sharing technologies to help expand the movement for racial and economic justice.

This brings us back to the issue of the Participation Gap. Who gets to participate? What factors leave some groups more comfortable participating than others? And if they do participate, what factors shape how their contributions get valued or responded to by other members of their community? I am still touched by some of the things Jane McGonigal wrote about the misogynistic discourse that confronted LonelyGirl15 :

Each lonelygirl has roughly 1000-4000 comments, and the level of hate, mean-spiritendess, crudeness and often downright misogeny of the majority of them is impossible to ignore. I want to be very careful that we don't fetishize the participation aspects of this experience that was had by a very few who may have intelligently, passionately and seriously investigated and responded to the texts and the media objects, with the mainstream experience of and participation in this project.

How might this "mob rule" influence how comfortable certain groups are in posting their work in this forum? I am reminded of the research that shows that basically only middle and upper class people go to museums and other public institutions, even when they open their doors for free, because the barriers are not exclusively economic but speak to issues of cultural entitlement.

I am not certain that McMuria's methodology here -- looking at the highest ranking videos -- is the best way of determining what constitutes participation in the era of YouTube. After all, this amounts to using a broadcast paradigm -- how many eyeballs -- to measure success in a medium which is marked by audience fragmentation and niche culture. Perhaps there are some subcultures that attract majority interests and others that serve their own community here. Of course, should this be a case, then it would also raise questions about the value of diversity -- whether it should be assessed in terms of its impact upon the subcultures that generate this amateur content or in terms of its ability to crossover and speak to a broader range of publics. The very nature of YouTube -- its scope and scale -- makes a real assessment of its cultural diversity a daunting task but McMuria's essay certainly leads me to want to dig deeper into this question.

The second response comes from Comparative Media Studies graduate student Geoffrey Long and was written as part of the newsletter we share with the members of our Convergence Culture Consortium. Long came to CMS as an experienced designer and storyteller, someone who is deeply interested in the ways that technological change will impact the ways we produce, share, and consume stories. I first heard from Long when he responded to an essay I wrote for Technology Review about transmedia storytelling and we engaged with an extended and stimulating e-mail correspondence before he applied to our graduate program. Long is now hard at work (or at least is supposed to be hard at work) on a thesis which deals with Jim Henson's film projects (from The Dark Crystal to Mirrormask) as examples of transmedia entertainment and promises to be groundbreaking research. Here, though, he takes up the question of exactly what Google is buying when it purchases YouTube and explores more generally the value(s) associated with web 2.0 companies.

GOOGTUBE: TV 2.0, OR BUBBLE 2.0?

By: Geoffrey Long

That does it. I am the bane of the technology industry.

I am not a superstitious kind of guy. If I spill some salt I don't toss a pinch over my shoulder, I love black cats, and I have no great problem walking under ladders (unless there's someone on top of it dropping a can of paint). However, when I first read about Google buying YouTube, I literally groaned out loud. I spent the first dotcom boom (Web 1.0?) earning my bachelor's degree at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, cramming in tutorials on web design between doses of Joyce and Falkner. Some of my friends dropped out of school to go work in the industry, and I followed their adventures with a mixture of envy and silent superiority. Sure, I thought to myself, they're driving around in their shiny red New Beetles now, but I can go play once have my degree. I was so excited when I graduated, standing there with my newly-minted degree clutched in my hand, eyes bright and confident the offers would start rolling in. I was so proud to be a member of the class of 2000.

Yeah. We all know how that turned out. Now a second wave of high- tech excitement is sweeping over the media, I'm able to see the end of my time at MIT without a telescope, and I'm plagued with a crazy sense of deja vu. Sure, some lessons have been learned --strange how none of the new media darlings officially end in ".com"! -- but when you read about a deal as massive as Google buying YouTube, it's hard to fight off that feeling of "Here we go again." 1.65 billion dollars! If there was such a thing as a million-dollar bill, Google would have just forked over a whole suitcase full of them. How in the world can Google justify spending that kind of money, which is reportedly 1% of their entire market cap?

The deja vu is strong, but there are more differences at play here than it seems. In truth, there may be a very real place for GoogTube, and there's a chance -- a chance! -- that Google just walked away with a bargain. Let's explore some of these reasons, using as our guide some new possible advertising slogans for the emerging GoogTube network.

GOOGTUBE. BECAUSE SOMETIMES HUMANS ARE STILL BETTER THAN MACHINES.

It's possible to see the YouTube acquisition as a kludge, a stopgap solution until Google can get its own video search services up and running. There aren't a lot of places where humans are still steadily beating the machines hands-down, but the deceptively complex process of video search is one of them. So far Google's mighty machines are unable to sweep through a video clip and recognize that this mess of pixels is actually a picture of two frat boys dropping a roll of Mentos into a 2-liter of Diet Coke. Show the same mess of pixels to a human being, though, and they can start to classify the clip using taxonomy tags such as "Mentos" and "Diet Coke". Show it to more than one human and you start to accumulate looser tags, such as "chemistry", "explosion", and "morons". Part of the joy of YouTube is typing in a search parameter and just seeing what turns up.

GOOGTUBE. NOT JUST MENTOS AND DIET COKE!

A second reason for the purchase can be seen as the value of YouTube as a brand. For all the more that YouTube is trumpeted as a pillar of user-generated content, my recent attempt to find independent animation clips on the site was thwarted by an avalanche of pirated Naruto clips. Both YouTube and Google know that this is dangerous territory. (If you kick over some leaves, you can still find little bits of Napster littering the ground.) However, Google has the prowess to turn this liability into an asset -- something that YouTube has already demonstrated as a possible path to profitability through their recent contract with CBS.

Everyone knows that what music was to Web 1.0, video is to Web 2.0 -- and the media companies are all bound and determined to not let Apple run away with the market again. This is good and bad. While it's laudable that no one company should exert that much control over a developing media form (or at least a developing media delivery mechanism), the problem with TV on the Internet is that it's insanely difficult to find all the shows you want to watch. Apple's iTunes Store provides a one-stop shop for music -- if you want a particular album, it's almost a sure bet that you can find it there. Video, however, does not yet have such a reliable clearinghouse. Apple is getting close, but it still has a number of companies to get on board, and its new movie download service is having trouble signing other studios due to heavy pressure from retail competitors such as Target and Wal-Mart. Microsoft has a huge one-two punch in the works in the form of its Zune handheld coupled with its [name] online video service, but if there's going to be a third "network" giant emerging in this space (a CBS to Apple's NBC and Microsoft's ABC), GoogTube is likely to be it. Google has the clout to close deals that YouTube alone might not be able to swing, and -- perhaps more importantly -- it has a proven model for how to monetize on what is otherwise free content.

GOOGTUBE. ADWORDS FOR TV.

I used to edit an online 'zine, so I can tell you how much of a revelation Google's AdWords system happened to be. By analyzing the content on the page to dynamically deliver relevant ads, Google changed the game. Now, apply the same reasoning to a system that dynamically inserts targeted ads into video clips instead of text ads into websites. Google on its own couldn't do this -- but coupled with YouTube's existing community of happy little folksonomy taggers, implementing such a system becomes a walk in the park.

What's likely to happen is that certain clips or shows are uploaded by the content producers with certain "seed" keywords that tell the Google system which ads to dynamically insert into the clip. As more people watch it and add their own tags, though, the selection of ads appropriate to the clip narrows to become more relevant. Another option, which is even more exciting, is the possibility that GoogTube will serve up the Holy Grail in targeted advertising: ads dynamically inserted into the clip based on the preferences and demographic data that each user has already provided in their user profiles.

GOOGTUBE. BRIDGING THE USER-GENERATED CONTENT GAP SINCE 2006.

Personally, if YouTube had to be sold I'm glad it was Google that signed the check and not Microsoft. This is because Google has already displayed a cunning willingness to work with the blogosphere in their AdWords program -- which I'm hoping will extend to a willingness to work with the independent content creation market. Google already has the perceived corporate culture of supporting grassroots -- or "user-generated" -- media, whereas if it had been Microsoft attempting to implement these kinds of programs, the general air would have been one of fear and corporate ownership. Dealing with Google, despite its massive size and scope, still feels like dealing with an "indie", approachable company, versus Microsoft's vast and horrifying monolith. Content creators are therefore likely to approach Google for advertising partnerships in ways that Microsoft could only dream about. Google could connect smaller advertisers with independent content creators, tapping into advertising niche markets such as book publishers, comic shops, conventions, local musicians, local bars, and so on - the same advertisers who use the textual AdWords system.

On the flip side of that, Google also has enough clout to strike deals with major advertisers. This means that YouTube could serve as the missing link between major advertising companies and independent content producers. Google could theoretically create a middleman program that matches up indie creators with major advertisers to fund different stages of development for new properties, based on the success of those creators' previous small projects, or solely on the need of content for niche markets. The C3 group has been chattering amongst ourselves for months about how a big company like Target or Wal-Mart could finance an entire season of a show like ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT or FIREFLY which has a passionate following but not enough numbers to warrant a precious slot on prime-time TV -- but GoogTube has no such time constraints. If Google steps in as both delivery service and an advertising go-between, GoogTube could become a future home for all kinds of niche shows delivered to very specific, passionate, influential and extremely valuable eyeballs -- extending both existing franchises and new projects from existing or emerging content creators.

1.65 BILLION CHANNELS AND NOTHING ON?

These are only some of the ways that Google can possibly justify its purchase of

YouTube. There are others, of course, and the blogosphere is on fire this week with

people arguing both sides of the debate. As someone who enjoys both video delivered

over the Internet and creating content myself, I'm excited to see how this whole thing

shakes out. Sure, there are also 1.65 billion ways in which this could just be a signal

of the Web 2.0 boom imploding even faster than the first one -- but much like the first

time around, lessons are being learned and the field is changing in ways that will be

felt for years. Even if GoogTube tanks, there are dozens of companies springing up to

explore this new frontier. Here are just a few of them, and how they're selling

themselves.

- BRIGHTCOVE. "Brightcove is an Internet TV service."

- VEOH. "Internet TV is the next step in delivering video to consumers everywhere, providing millions of channels of programming for viewers and millions of channels of capacity for broadcasters."

- SMALLCARROT. "Small Carrot delivers user generated movies for small screens."

- FIREANT. "FireAnt delivers a rich media experience through a simple to use, unified viewer that lets you watch all types of content without having to worry about which format it is (QuickTime, Windows Media, Real, Flash, MP3 and more)."

- DABBLE. "Dabble's mission is to help you find and collect videos from all over the web, no matter where they are hosted."

- VIMEO. "Vimeo is for sharing video clips that you've created. It's very easy to use, and filled with interesting people."

- DAILYMOTION. "Dailymotion is about finding new ways to see and show the world."

- GROUPER. "Grouper is the best place on the web to WATCH, SHARE and CREATE video."

- PODTECH. "PodTech Network is a growing network of audio and video podcasts for influencers and leaders in the global technology and media industries."

- PODSHOW. "Welcome to PodShow, where you get to choose what you listen to and when and where you listen to it."

- RADIOTAIL. "RadioTail's podcast ad network, advanced metrics and dynamic ad serving technology ensures that advertising in podcasts will reach the right audience and deliver a great return on investment".

- BLOGBURST. "BlogBurst is a syndication service that places your blog content on top-tier online destinations. You get visibility, audience reach and increased traffic, while publishers get a wide range of new coverage to broaden their reach and increase page views."

- SOCIALROOTS. "SocialRoots is a social media agency connecting media creators with new audiences and opportunities."

- BLOGADS. "We're the blog advertising specialists." www.blogads.com

- FRUITCAST. "You love publishing your podcast, but did you know you could make some pretty good money from it as well?"

- THE DECK. "The premier advertising network for reaching web and design professionals,

The Deck serves up millions of page views each month and is uniquely configured to

connect the right marketers to a targeted, influential audience."

-ODEO. "Odeo is a creative way to record and share audio - and it's free." www.odeo.com

So would I spend $1.65 billion on YouTube? I don't envy the execs who had to make those decisions. If they pull it off, GoogTube will deliver years of entertainment (and billions of dollars in revenue) from a hat trick of content creators, advertisers, and consumers. If they don't pull it off, it'll be entertaining to watch them crash and see who rises to take their place. One way or the other, there will definitely be something on.

When Transmedia Goes Wrong: Studio 60 and DeFaker

Through the work of our Convergence Culture Consortium, CMS faculty and students have been monitoring ongoing experiments in transmedia storytelling, trying to help our client companies to better understand when entertainment producers are creating something valuable for their consumers and when they are antagonizing them. In a recent newsletter, CMS student Ivan Askwith wrote about Studio 60 on Sunset Strip's failed attempt to build a fictional blog set in the world of the series -- an experiment which was shut down in only a few days time. I asked Ivan if I could share this post with the readers of my blog. I am reminded here of the long-standing complaint from fans that official websites are often less satisfying than fan-generated sites: for one thing, they tend to be relatively static, built once and rarely updated, even on shows that have fairly dynamic character development or elaborate and unfolding story arcs. Kurt Lancaster made some of these points contrasting the official and fan websites for Babylon 5 in his book about the series, for example. For another, those who produce official content often do not pay attention to the details which matter most to fans. Janet Murray and I wrote an essay some years ago (published in Greg Smith's On a Silver Platter) which compared the kinds of details included in the early cd-roms about Star Trek with those which cropped up most often in fanzine stories. We found that the official materials supported some kinds of fan interests (those of male technologically inclined fans) and not others (those of women fanzine writers interested in the relationships between the characters.)

Those official sites which have broken out of this trap -- such as Dawson's Desktop, which I discuss in Convergence Culture -- have been real labors of love, often created by tapping the fan community for potential collaborators in their production.

Of course, those of us who have regularly watched Aaron Sorkin's series through the year know that his characters wage a running battle against online fan communities: Josh Lyman ran into trouble with a discussion list on The West Wing and we've already heard the characters opine negatively about bloggers on Studio 60. So, the conflict Askwith describes here seems almost inevitable.

Online Content Experiments: The Fate of Defaker

By: Ivan Askwith

In May, speaking before an audience of advertisers and television executives, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker declared, "No longer is content just for the television screen!" This might as well have been the official slogan of this year's upfront week, where many network executives spent more time promoting their new online strategies than previewing their new on-air programming. In their coverage of the event, the New York Times reported that "analysts are calling this upfront week a watershed because the networks are significantly expanding their presence in the new media, whether through Webisodes, video downloads, podcasts or mini-series created for cellphones." (Elliott, 5/16/06)

Of course, the upfront announcements themselves weren't much of a watershed -- they simply articulated, for the benefit of the press, a trend that has been accelerating over the past two years: the television industry's growing awareness of the importance of compelling online content. Over the past year, almost all of the major networks have made arrangements to distribute their broadcast content online. Now that the core programming content is online, however, the more interesting (and dangerous) step begins: networks must begin to understand their audiences well enough to provide meaningful online-only content.

I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss an notable online experiment: Defaker, an "in narrative" blog that NBC launched to promote their much-anticipated Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Defaker went live shortly after Studio 60's premiere on the evening of September 18. Designed to look almost identical to Defamer, a popular Hollywood gossip site, Defaker

presented itself as a source for "insider, behind-the-scenes information" for fans of Studio 60's fictional show-within-a-show.

In theory, this isn't a bad idea: a show like Studio 60, which focuses on backstage

relationships and network politics, would actually lend itself beautifully to an irreverent gossip blog. A site like Defaker could be used to generate audience investment in the show, reporting "rumors" that provide resolution on throw-away moments seen in previous episodes and foreshadow the action of future episodes. Fictional "interviews" or "news articles" could provide details and anecdotes that flesh out the show's characters, elaborate the events that led up to the show, hint at future guest stars, and more. This, in turn, could deepen a viewer's engagement with the show -- readers of Defaker would become "local experts," capable of reporting to casual viewers on the significance and implications of the (in-narrative) online rumors. Did I say Defaker wasn't a bad idea? I take it back: Defaker has the potential to be a

brilliant idea.

In practice, however, Defaker turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Rather than delivering on its claim to offer an "insider's" perspective on the show, the site's first entry was nothing more than a mediocre recap of the events that took place on the show, and a series of HD screen captures presented as "behind-the- scenes photos." (As several visitors pointed out, the recap got some details wrong.) The writers also seeded the entry with a handful of meaningless, enthusiastic "in character" comments, from fictional fans, to set the tone. The design logic behind the site was clear: Defaker didn't need to offer any new content to viewers, because the gimmick of presenting the old content in character was so clever. Fans of the show would love it, right?

Wrong. The attacks began within minutes.

A sample of the feedback:

-

"This is lame, you can't even get stills from the set? You had to use screengrabs?"

- "Whoever they hired to write this horrible blog didn't even understand the show."

- "This site is awful. An ounce of effort could have made it all right."

- "You must be kidding. This is the worst fake I've ever read.

- "The show is OK but this writing is a mess and the whole thing's a turn-off! BOO!"

- "This blog is sh*t."

Some visitors went so far as to declare that they had enjoyed the show, but shared the sentiments of one commenter who declared that "out of protest against this ridiculous, lazy and unoriginal marketing attempt, I'm going to boycott the show."

So, where did Defaker go wrong?

Well, as one of the most astute commenters pointed out, Defaker "is a laughably bad attempt at viral marketing. Not since the Flinstones rappin' about Fruity Pebbles has a major corporation so completely misunderstood the phenomenon they're trying to cash in on." Despite the apparent assumptions of the show's promoters, a show cannot simply go online and expect fans to be impressed -- it has to offer visitors something new, and create opportunities for engagement that the show alone can't offer.

Many of the posts were proactive, offering clear advice to help improve the project.

One viewer wrote:

"if you want to make a fake blog like this, don't just give us a summary of a show we already saw, with lame screen shots right from the show... give us stuff NOT on the show we just got finished watching, and make it worth our while to come back."

Another was even more articulate, pointing out that:

"this blog isn't giving us any new perspective on the show. It's just rehashing everything we already saw on the show. Take a page from HBO, their blog for Big Love wasn't much to write home about but they posted a blog from one of their character's point of view. It gave some insight on her character which wasn't portrayed in the show. You could do a blog from [a PA's] point of view. Now that would be something worth reading."

So what lessons are we supposed to take away from this?

1) Know who you're developing online content for, and design it accordingly.

In the case of Defaker, NBC failed to recognize that the most likely audience for the blog would be the viewers who were most invested in the show -- and as such, the viewers who would be the most knowledgeable and critical.

2) Online content should add something new to the experience.

Successful online content -- as so many commenters pointed out -- has to offer the audience something new. It's tempting to see this as a hassle, since it requires additional time, effort and thought. Instead, I think we need to understand it as an opportunity: online content gives us the ability to expand and deepen the narrative world depicted on television, which in turn allows viewers to immerse themselves far more completely in the show and the characters. Online content extensions should help transform a show from passive viewing into an immersive experience.

3) Listen to what your audience is telling you.

The comments posted to Defaker, harsh as they were, offered direct, articulate advice that the blog's author(s) could have followed to improve the site. Instead, however, they chose to post a second (and final) entry, which included this tragically misguided response:

"To my detractors... who think that this is 'viral marketing bull' for NBS, viral marketing (I just looked up what this means on Wikipedia!) only works if people with nothing better to do jabber on about the thing in question, so apparently, the more you talk, the more I grow stronger.... insert evil laughter here."

...which leads us to a fourth important lesson...

4) Don't ever insult your audience or try to tell them they're wrong.

The response posted above simply blows my mind: the writer is not only dismissing the(admittedly harsh) criticism from the site's visitors, but insinuating that the show's most invested viewers have "nothing better to do [than] jabber" about the show. This response all but dares the viewer to stop watching the show. If someone didn't lose their job for posting = this, I'd be surprised; in any event, the blog was taken offline the day after this entry was posted.

---

One final detail worth noting: while Defaker illustrates precisely what not to do when developing online television extensions, Studio 60 has had more success with a second blog, launched at the same time.

On this "official" non-fiction behind-the-scenes blog, writer- director duo Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme have been posting interesting (if short) responses to viewer-submitted questions, as well as occasional entries hinting at their own thoughts on the evolution of the show. Eschewing the half-baked gimmick of Defaker, the official Studio 60 blog re-affirms that the best online offerings don't need to be clever; they simply need to add something new, and help transform television watching into an engaging experience.

From a "Must Culture" to a "Can Culture": Legos and Lead Users

Joel Greenberg from the Austin-based GSD&M advertising firm is one of the fascinating people I am collaborating with on the Convergence Culture Consortium. Greenberg is a true believer in the collaborationist model I describe in my book and discussed here a while back. He's been putting together a series of podcasts called Friends Talking which interview some of the key thinkers in and out of industry on topics such as viral marketing, user-generated content, and community-based innovation. Greenberg brings in guests like The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Got Game's John Beck, Linden Lab's Philip Rosendale, and others, sits down with them for a substantive conversation about cutting edge issues, and then runs the entire conversation via his podcast . In the most recent installment, Greenberg focuses attention on the concept of lead users and applies it to examine the development of the new Lego Mindstorms NXT product which is being released in time for Christmas. Lead user innovation is a term most closely associated with my MIT colleague, Eric Von Hippel, who wrote a book, Democratizing Innovation, which should be better known among media scholars than it has been. Von Hippel's focus is innovation in manufacturing -- how companies are tapping insights from their consumers to produce more effective products -- but what he says has many implications for the kinds of fan communities that emerge around popular culture. Indeed, I learned of Von Hippel's work -- not through hallway conversations at MIT but because Robert Kozinets combined Von Hippel's work in management science and my work in fan studies to talk about consumerism around Star Trek in his dissertation.

Basically, Von Hippel is arguing that companies need to identify what he is calling Lead Users -- these are both early adopters (in the sense that they are quick to purchase new products) and early adapters (in the sense that they often hack the products to retrofit them for their specialized needs.) By dealing with these communities and understanding how they appropriate and remake products, these companies can accelerate the design process, anticipating uses and desired features before the product even hits the mass market.

Inspired by an article in Wired, Greenberg sought out contact with some of the executives at Lego who are working on the new Mindstorms products. (Many will recall that the original insights that generated the Mindstorm series came from MIT Media Lab professor Seymour Papert, though adapted to the needs of the mass market. These tool kits which allow kids to do simple programming and build and control their own robots have been embraced in schools around the world.) When it came time to create the next product in the Mindstorm series, Lego pulled together some of the most innovative users of its products and incorporated them fully in the design process.

Attending a national conference and robotics competition in Austin, Greenberg was able to interview Soren Lund, the man Lego put in charge of the initiative and Ray Almgren, one of National Instruments' VP's who had worked closely with Lego to adapt their Labview software as the programming environment for Mindstorms. Lund speaks about the value of linking the "must culture" of a major corporation with the "can culture" which is emerging from the hobbyist and lead users within the networked community surrounding their products:

In a company, and this goes for pretty much every company, you have a must culture. That means, if I am your boss, I can tell you I want you to do this and that and maybe you are not really into it or maybe you have other priorities but as your boss, I can say you must do this. And if you say No, you're fired, right? Any company culture is a must culture, a must organization. You must do what I tell you to do. You can put it in a nicer way but that's how it works. With a community, it is a can organization. They can decide to do something. They can decide not to. You can't say to the guys in the community -- now you must help us in doing this and now you must.. Guess what, I'm out of here. I can't fire you because you are not part of the company. So, that is what is so valuable because they can keep pushing. They don't come up with what they think the average user needs or wants. They say as a member of the community what they want. I want it to do this. I want it to do that. I don't care about the rest. It's me. So you get honest and candid feedback from these guys focused only on what they are looking for and how it can be the best tool they can ever have. And they keep pushing. We've had interviews where we say thank you for the input on that topic but we must move on and the community has said no. We want this and they keep pushing....

For these guys, it has nothing to do with money. Their passion is building Mindstorms robots out of Lego bricks, programming them, hacking them, all of that stuff. so this is their favorite Hobby. For them, it doesn't get any better. Suddenly I can influence the product I like to work with. I may have my little fingers there on some of the development....then of course afterwards there is recognition among peers in the community.

What Lund has to say about Lego echoes what I report in Convergence Culture about the games industries. Will Wright, for example, told me that the game companies are now essentially competing to see which one can attract and sustain the most creative community since user-based innovation is the key to keeping a games franchise fresh and interesting over the long haul.

This is still so different from the relationship most television production units have with their fans, yet if they had more regular contact with their fans, they might learn to anticipate audience tastes and interests, producing episodes which better reflected the themes and characters that drive the community's passions towards a particular series. For example, in the mid-1980s, my work on fan cultures was showing me that fans were pushing hard for a more serialized approach to television narrative: they were reading even the most episodic series in terms of story arcs and program history. My work on Twin Peaks fans was showing that online communities would support much greater narrative complexity than current television was offering. And my work on fan video producers was showing that people wanted simple tools which would allow them to sample and remix television content as well as platforms by which they could share what they produced with the general public. It has taken a while for the rest of the viewing audience to catch up with where the fan community was at more than fifteen years ago but fan culture in the late 1980s looks very much like the television culture of today. What we are now calling Web 2.0 is simply fan culture without the stigma.

That said, the interview keeps circling back around what is the real sticking point in the conversation about lead user innovation: if consumers are helping to generate the intellectual property and helping to market the product, shouldn't they receive some economic return on their participation? Lund says No -- that this would fundamentally change their relationship to the company, turning everything back to work for hire and returning it to the "must culture" that shapes corporate life. Yet, skeptics might note that user-generated content taken to its logical extreme would result in cutbacks in the creative labor market as experienced professionals are displaced by grassroots volunteers. Lund is correct to depict lead users as having a strong desire to influence the decisions made by the companies that make the products they use and admire -- whether physical products like programmable bricks or cultural products like television shows. At the moment, they are grateful that people will simply listen to them and take their ideas seriously, especially given the history of not just neglect but open hostility to these grassroots communities. Yet, at what point, does this collaboration become exploitation? This is a core question all of us need to think through as we move towards a more collaborative and participatory culture.

Announcing: The Futures of Entertainment Conference

The Comparative Media Studies Program is proud to announce an exciting forthcoming conference, The Futures of Entertainment, to be held at MIT on Nov. 17 and 18. The event is designed to bring together leading thinkers from across the entertainment industry to speak about core issues around media convergence, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content, and participatory culture. Speakers confirmed so far include The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Flickr's Caterina Fake, DC Comic's Paul Levitz, Warner Brother's Diane Nelson, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, social networking researcher danah boyd, television scholar Jason Mittell, and many others, including representatives from MTV, Cartoon Network, Bioware, and other leading companies in this space. The event is free and open to the public but we ask that you preregister since seating will be limited. The event is being hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's a more detailed description of the themes for the scheduled panels:

Television Futures

New distribution methods, new revenue strategies and changing modes of audience engagement are transforming how television works. Off- and post-broadcast markets make 'old' television valuable as a continuing source of income and suggest new ways to reach viewers. Digital video recorders threaten the 30-second commercial but offer the possibility of more detailed information about audience members. Some television producers may reach out to consumers directly rather than going through the networks and networks are using online distribution to generate buzz about new shows before they reach the air. Creative responses to these challenges are re-writing how we understand what was once just the box in the corner.

User-Generated Content

Media culture is becoming more participatory, rewriting the relations between media producers and consumers. New tools and distribution platforms, a changing cultural ethos, and innovative corporate approaches to user-generated content are turning viewers into active participants. Innovation may occur at the grassroots level yet influence decisions made within corporate media. Yet, are media companies ready for the grassroots creativity they are unleashing? What challenges does greater user-participation pose to both producers and audiences? What corporate policies enable or retard the growth of user-generated content?

Transmedia Properties

The cultural logic of convergence lends itself to a flow of narratives, characters, and worlds across media platforms. Moving beyond older models based on liscensed ancillary products, transmedia extensions are now seen as expanding the opportunities for storytelling, enabling new kinds of entertainment experiences, building up secondary characters or backstory. Transmedia extension may also create alternative openings for different market segments and enable more extensive contact with brands. The great potential of transmediation is to deepen audience engagement, but this requires greater awareness of the specific benefits of working within different platforms. How are media companies organizing the development of transmedia properties? How are storytellers taking advantage of the "expanded canvas" such an approach offers? How do transmedia strategies impact the new integration between brands and entertainment properties? What new expectations do transmedia properties place on consumers?

Fan Cultures

Once seen as marginal or niche consumers, Fan communities look more 'mainstream' than ever before. Some have argued that the practices of web 2.0 are really those of fan culture without the stigma. Courted, encouraged, engaged and acknowledged, fans are more and more frequently being recognized as trendsetters, viral marketers, and grassroots intermediaries. Fan affinity is being seized as a form of grassroots marketing, representing the bleeding edge of brand and property commitment. The sophistication of fan-created products rivals the professional products they honor, sometimes keeping defunct properties alive long after their shelf life might otherwise have expired. How is the increasing importance of fan behavior re-writing the media landscape? What kinds of accountability should media companies have to their most committed consumers? What kinds of value do fans create through their activities? What are the sources of tension that still exist between media producers, advertisers, and fans?

Not the Real World Anymore

Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms for thought experiments -- some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice. Much more than simulacra of Real Life or a 3D version of text-based Internet communities, online worlds represent new sites for considering questions of community and connectivity. Marked by user- creativity, online worlds balance, sometimes precariously, the rights of users with the rights of sponsoring organizations. As we move closer to the cyberpunk vision of a wholly parallel 'metaverse', questions of power, community, and property are coming to the fore.

More information is forthcoming but for some provisional information and to register for the event, check out this website. I hope to see many readers of the blog at this event which promises a front line perspective on many of the trends I discuss in the books.

Picking Over Pilots

Let's take a moment today to think about the shifting status of the pilot episode on American television -- a worthy topic in the midst of the rolling out of a battery of new television shows across the various networks. In the past, the pilot served very specific functions within the behind-the-scenes decision-making at the networks. We might think of the pilot as functioning in television the way that a character sheet functions in comics or animation: it seeks to define the core characters and central premise of the series but it also does so by pushing them into their most extreme versions. The characters in pilots are often over-defined to the point of being reduced to stereotypes as the producers try to show who these people are, how they relate to each other, and what functions they serve in terms of the plot.

Compounding this problem is the degree to which performers have not yet fully jelled with their characters -- in many cases, they may have just received news that they were assigned these roles and been rushed into production on short notice. They are trying desperately to prove they can act so they can hold onto these parts. In the past, it was not at all unusual to recast key roles after the pilot was shot and before the series reached the air. In any case, we know that character on television is generated as much by choices made by the performer on set as they take up the roles as written and make them their own and typically it takes a few episode for the rough edges to give way to more fully human characters. (Of course, the opposite can also happen and a compelling character in the pilot can be smoothed out or compromised through the production process.)

Radical shifts in the conception of the series may occur after the pilot has been shot (see, for example, the case of classic Star Trek where Spock was a highly emotional character in the pilot and Number One, a character cut after the pilot, represented the voice of cold rationality). The pilot was almost never a particularly strong episode from the point of view of the audience but producers and network executives knew how to read pilots, or thought they did, and used them as tools to make decisions about the show's fate. It would not be rare for the pilot to get shuffled into rotation later in the run of the series (again, Star Trek is the classic example here where the original pilot got reframed and turned into a two part episode -- a flashback -- later in the run of the series). There was a clear separation between the pilot and the first episode.

And all of this took place behind closed doors. Network executives saw lots of pilots; they knew more or less which ones turned into good shows down the line and they knew what were the symptomatic rough spots experienced by most pilots. They might be anxious about innovation and shut down shows which took them in new directions; many of those shows are more likely to be embraced by at least cult audiences than network executives, but for most series, they knew what they were looking at when they saw a pilot.

Now, let's consider the functions that pilots play in contemporary television, where much of what used to go on behind the scenes now takes place in public view, and where audience participation and anticipation of series is becoming more the norm. We can start with the sheer number of pilots in circulation and public access this summer compared to previous television series. Some shows -- Studio 60 on Sunset Strip and Kidnapped -- are circulating above-ground via a special arrangement with Netflix; others could be downloaded off of the network's own home pages. Still others -- Heroes for example -- circulated unofficially through bittorrent (though in such cases, it is not clear the networks are exactly heartbroken that they have escaped their control as long as they build up buzz for new series).

And increasingly pilots for shows that have not been picked up -- think Global Frequency and Nobody's Watching -- make it into digital distribution as well and can become rallying points for audience activism with varying degrees of success. Some are even predicting a world where pilots will be distributed to audiences first over the web and those which get strong support there will be sold to the networks -- more precisely, the audiences they attract will be sold to the networks in return for money to produce more episodes. One can certainly also imagine a world where niche media properties will go directly into digital or dvd distribution and be supported by their subscribers.

The pilot faces new demands in such scenarios. The pilot now becomes the public's first introduction to the characters and their situations. And the public has less experience looking at the stereotypes and broad performances found in most pilots and knowing how to anticipate what will happen when the writers and actors have brought these characters more fully under their control. Bury the pilot midseason and people will think it was an off episode. Lead with it and they will think the series sucks.

And this new context where we have so many shows thrown at us is pretty unforgiving. I know there are any number of shows this season which are lucky to get a first glance from me. I watched pilot episodes for Men in Trees, The Class, and Standoff and trust me, I don't plan to give these series a second look, even though I know full well that some of the elements which annoyed me there may get resolved when the writers and actors develop more comfort with their roles. There are some pilots which knock the ball out of the park in terms of grabbing the public attention and never letting them go. For me, the pilot of Lost will remain the high bar mark for a long time to come -- it hooked me within five minutes and never give me a moment to rethink that decision -- and Studio 60 on Sunset Strip may do the best job this season in terms of introducing the characters and premise in an engaging way -- a mixture of biting satire, nuanced characterization, kickass writing, and performers who are strong enough that they instantly fall into a grove with each other (and even here, fans are expressing concern about Amanda Peet's performance.)

A little bit further down the food chain are the pilots for Heroes and for Jericho -- both shows I definitely plan to watch but which had uneven pilots. Jericho suffered from the problem of having too broadly defined characters but there was one really compelling sequence involving a school bus full of endangered children which suggests to me that the series may know how to balance out its elements and get down to real drama.

Heroes suggests yet another risk which pilots face at the present time -- they no longer have to introduce three or four major characters in the first episode. In an era of ensemble dramas, they have to introduce dozens of characters, help us learn enough about them that we know who they are and how they are connected to each other. Heroes and Six Degrees both spend their entire first episodes introducing their large cast of characters and provide almost no information about plot developments: we know who these people are but we don't know where the series is going. In the case of Heroes, I cared enough that I will certainly watch again -- and indeed, as I wrote earlier this summer, I have high hopes for this series. In the case of Six Degrees, I don't think the pilot gave me enough that felt fresh or distinctive to get me to tune in next week, given the high volume of good alternatives that seem to be emerging this season. Some of this no doubt has to do with my high threshold for superhero stories and my low threshold for coincidence.

In this context, it is easy for a pilot to do something unforgivable and just turn you off from the series altogether. For me, Smith hit that low mark when it had a supposedly sympathetic character kill several people in cold blood because they made fun of him. To me, this fundamentally violated the deal I make when I watch heist stories -- that I will enjoy stepping outside the law as long as it is harmless fun. I like heist stories because they feature intelligent and charming mavericks who plan carefully, minimize risks to human life, and do daring stunts: I don't watch it to see thugs and psychopaths, though I may well tolerate such characters on The Sopranos, The Wire, or The Shield, which set me up for very different kinds of emotional experiences.

Part of what inspired me to put these ideas down was a quote from critic Robert Bianco in USA Today last week about the pilot for Kidnapped:

You can easily imagine yourself settling in with Kidnapped for six, eight, maybe even 13 episodes. But 22? Sorry, no. And that, in the end, is the strange bind this season's run of one-story serials have created for themselves: they force you to decide upfront whether you want to wait a year for the answer to the question posed by the pilot. Every TV show, obviously, hopes to hook you on a weekly basis, but these shows are asking, not just for a week-to-week choice, but for an immediate season-long commitment. To make that kind of demand on an audience, you had better be incredibly compelling from the get-go. 24 was. Kidnapped isn't.

I've reached somewhat different conclusions about Kidnapped, which I saw earlier this summer, and plan to give a few more episodes to find its footing. But I get Bianco's point: it was one thing to try an episode of an episodic series, then try another to see if the series was starting to jell, and indeed, to wait a few weeks and try again based on word of mouth. It's another to have to make a decision right away which complex ensemble-cast serial drama you want to watch, knowing that the full experience will come to those of us who sign up for discussion lists, check websites, work through the secrets and puzzles together, and so forth. (And of course, it is precisely this tendency towards serialization which puts added pressure on the pilot to also be a compelling first episode. You can no longer shuffle the pieces as easily and bury a bad pilot in the middle of the season.)

The only thing which makes this scenario viable at all is the prospect that we can download episodes and catch up later if one of these things turns out to be better than our first glance and word of mouth starts to build around it. That's why rerun on demand is going to become even more central to the way television works in the years to come.

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

I am always fascinated when some bit of bottom-up generated "content" starts to get momentum and gain greater public visibility. This past few weeks, I have been observing a ground-swell of interest in a Star Trek fan video set to Nine Inch Nails's "Closer." Many of you will have already seen this video. It has already been featured by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, by Susie Bright, and by Salon's VideoDog among others. As someone who has done work in the past on Star Trek fans, I have received multiple pointers to this video from friends all over the world. Many of the people who sent it to me and certainly many of the bloggers who have pointed to it seem to have little or no awareness that there is a much larger tradition of fan-made videos or that the video makers, T. Jonsey and Killa have produced a larger body of work that circulates within the fanvid community. As artists, they are known for their sophisticated techniques and intelligent use of appropriated materials as well as for their diversity of approaches to their subject matter.

It is the nature of YouTube that the work which appears there could come from almost anywhere and that it is often consumed outside of its originating content: YouTube is the place right now where work travels from one grassroots community or subculture to another. There are real advantages to such a site since it results in cross-influences and more innovation, experimentation, and diversity, yet there are also losses to this process of decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption.

Technical Innovation and Grassroots Media

Given that I have been following the development of fan-made music videos for more than fifteen years now, I thought it might be helpful if I spelled out some of what I saw when I looked at this particular segment. Through the years, I have watched dozens of hours of these videos, produced within a broad range of fandoms. In fact, my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, published in 1992, already contains a full chapter tracing the aesthetics and production practices surrounding fan music videos.

At the time I wrote that chapter, fan music videos were made using two vcrs and patch cords. The only real way for most participants to edit the material was through transferring from one machine to the other. The biggest challenges artists faced were rollback and rainbow lines. Making videos under these conditions took a great deal of preplanning and an even greater amount of patience. The best video artists were perfectionists who would redo their projects many times to insure the smoothest transitions. The typical video could take six to eight hours to produce and more elaborate ones might take a great deal longer. Despite these technical limitations, some of the top video makers produced many hours of these videos which they would show primarily at fan conventions. There was some limited distribution -- they would personally copy the videos one by one for people who asked really nicely. They actively discouraged recopying of their material to pass to others because it would further degrade the quality of their work but of course, a good deal of underground trading of this content took place. Digital production tools have allowed for greater formal complexity and visual sophistication, including layering of images through lap dissolves, superimposition, multiple frame shots, and other digital manipulations, subtle manipulations of speed, lip-syncing of words and images and other forms of "mickeymousing," and so forth.

Fifteen years ago, I was presenting the work of these video makers at places like Interval Computing and the MIT Media Lab arguing that we should be paying attention to what these amateur media makers were doing when it was hard, nearly impossible, to accomplish so that we might predict affordances that should be built into the next generation of media tools. Today, we are seeing amateur media makers everywhere. Sites like YouTube have emerged to support their work and there is a public interested in seeing amateur-made work almost without regard to its origins or genre.

The Aesthetics of Fan Music Videos

I wonder if this particular song video would have generated the buzz that it has if it was not set to the music of Nine Inch Nails. The urban cool and the rough-hewn images of this video contrast sharply with people's expectations about the aesthetics of Star Trek fan art. In popular mythology, Trekkers are geeks, not rockers. The earliest fan music videos might have reconfirmed those stereotypes: the most commonly used songs were slow-paced and sappy, pop not rock, though artists explained this was in part because of the difficulty of doing rapid edits using the tools that they have had at their disposal. As these fans have embraced new digital tools, the overall pace of fan made videos has quickened. This, and the emergence of a younger generation of fans with taste for alternative music, has broadened the choice of songs. We are seeing many more hard-edged songs find their way into fan culture.

For the book, I interviewed a pioneering video artist, identified in Textual Poachers as MVD. MVD described her videos as "half-and-half things," neither "a Reader's Digest of the shows we love" nor "fancy pictures to entertain the eye while we listen to our favorite music." She explained:

Images pull out the words, emphasize the words, just as the words emphasize the pictures. If I've done a good job with a video, I can portray an emotion and I can hold that emotion throughout the song. I can bring a new level of depth to that emotion through my images and I can make you think about the program in a different way.

MVD suggested that the best fan videos could produce "layers of meaning," being accessible at first glance to anyone with a casual familiarity with the program, offering a deeper experience to anyone who knew the program well, and a still deeper experience to someone who has been part of the fan community's discussions around the show or read through the fan fiction surrounding a particular set of character relationships. MVD drew a distinction between convention videos, designed to be watched publicly in a general audience, and living room videos, designed to be watched in an intimate space by a group of friends who are already deeply immersed in the lore of a particular fan culture:

They can't take the complex ones in a large group. They get hyper. They aren't concentrating that deeply. They want to all laugh together or they want to share their feelings. So it's got to be obvious enough that the people around them will share those emotions....The living room video is designed to be so complicated that you'd better know everything about the show or it isn't going to make much sense. These videos are for a very small in-group that already understands what you are trying to say. It's like fan writing. You don't have to build up this entire world. You can rely on certain information.

MVD, at the time, could not have imagined what it might mean to watch a fan-made music video totally outside of the cultural context which fandom provided -- to come across it on YouTube or Boing Boing and not have any access to the conversations which shaped these particular appropriations. For one thing, "Closer" is apt to be understood within fandom as a "constructed reality" video -- that is, it creates a new story by linking together shots from the original series as opposed to using those shots simply to interpret or provide an alternative emotional perspective on events already depicted in the aired episodes. Such "constructed reality" works are extremely rare because they are so difficult to do well.

Such works certainly interpret the original series but not in a sense that would be recognized by most Literature teachers. They are not simply trying to recover what the original producers meant. They are trying to entertain hypotheticals, address what if questions, and propose alternative realities. Part of the pleasure of fan made media is seeing the same situations through multiple points of view, reading the same characters in radically different ways. The same artist might offer multiple constructions of the characters and their relationships across different works -- simply to keep alive this play with different readings.

As one fan quoted in my new book, Convergence Culture, explains,

What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It's like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer's reality bouncing off another's and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation. A lot of people would argue that we're not creative because we build on someone else's universe rather than coming up with our own. However, I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or cold-blooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation. We have given ourselves license to do whatever we want and it's very liberating.

"Closer," like other fanvids, was constructed as part of a conversation which the fan artists were having with the original text, with its authors, with other fans, and with themselves, whereas the video as seen outside of this context seems singular and unique. Or conversely, the video is read symptomatically -- as speaking for all Star Trek fans when in fact, it borrows in some ways and breaks in others from the norms of this community.

Recurring Images

MVD was one of a number of pioneering video makers who took on the responsibility to pass their skills onto other women interested in working in the medium. She would host slumber parties at her house in Western Massachusetts where women would bring their vcrs and tapes and learn from each other. As I suggest in Convergence Culture, a lot of fan culture looks like folk culture processes applied to mass media content and these gathering have the feel of traditional quilting bees.

Through this process, the community started to distill the hundreds of hours of episodes around a series like Star Trek into recurring shots which carried a greater deal of emotional resonance and meaning to members of the community. These shots get used again and again, combined in new ways, mixed with different songs and lyrics, taking on different connotations and associations. The best of them remained highly potent. When I first watched the "Closer" video, I was struck by what a high percentage of the shots used there were part of the vocabulary of fan music video producers of fifteen years ago. Don't believe me -- check out the photographs from MVD's "I Needed You" which I reproduced on pages 240-243 of Textual Poachers. Almost all of them appear in "Closer."

Slash This

One reason that so many of these shots reappear is that they evoke a particular interpretation of the original material. Keep in mind that in many cases, these videos are watched by people who are also reading fan fiction and thus have come to understand the relationship between Kirk and Spock within the terms of the fan subgenre known as Slash. I was struck by how many bloggers referenced slash in relation to this video -- the term is now known, but not widely understood, by many outside of the fan community itself. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (which collects my previously published essays on participatory culture), I include "The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," a collection of brief theoretical and critical statements about slash as a genre made by slash fan readers and writers which help to explain the persistence and popularity of this cultural practice.

For the moment, let's say that slash is a form of fan-generated romance which centers on the relationship between two same sex (most often male) characters appropriated from the realm of popular fiction. Kirk and Spock were probably the original slash couple but slash did not become slash until the idea of same sex relations moved from Kirk and Spock to a whole range of other pairings. Before that, it was simply K/S with the slash standing in for a sexual relationship. K&S would have referred to a passionate but asexual friendship between the same characters. The people who write and read slash are mostly women -- women of varied sexual orientations and interests -- who see their work as bringing to the surface emotional dynamics that were masked in the original material.

Think about all of the times that Kirk would woo some blue-skinned woman and then abandon her again, insisting that his obligations to his ship and his crew would outweigh his personal romantic interests. Then consider what happens again and again across the series and the films whenever Spock is put at risk. Kirk will sacrifice his ship, his crew, his rank, everything he has, to get Spock back. There's no question that his emotional commitment to Spock is the most important relationship in his life, even if the two men rarely speak directly about what that friendship means to them.

One of the most powerful moments in all of Star Trek comes in The Wrath of Khan when Spock finally puts into words his friendship for Kirk and gives his life to save the Enterprise. This scene seems key to understanding the emotional dynamics of slash, as I suggested in the Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers essay mentioned earlier:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. Almost everyone who watches that scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.

Slash is a form of erotic writing, which differs from traditional male-targeted pornography, because it is more interested in the emotional rather than the physical lives of its characters. Readers and writers get off imagining the characters having sex in part because they see sex as enabling a form of intimacy between these men which is denied them on the program and denied most men within our culture. The construction of slash depends on reading certain looks and gestures exchanged amongst the characters as showing some hidden emotional truths and so song videos are often presented as visual evidence in support of a slash hypothesis about the series. Fans can point to the screen and say that you can see it in their eyes, these men really care about each other.

How Far to Pon Farr?

The opening title to "Closer" asks "What if they hadn't made it to Vulcan on time." This title references a specific tradition of pon farr stories. Pon Farr is the Vulcan mating season which occurs every seven years and is deeply disabilitating (can drive people insane or kill them if they do not make it back to their home planet and mate.) This concept emerged in the Classic ST episode, "Amok Time," written by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Many of the earliest K/S stories used pon farr as a device to push Kirk and Spock into bed with each other. Kirk surely would overcome his inhibitions about gay sex if doing so would allow him to save his friend's life. As slash became more widely accepted, there have been far fewer pon farr stories; the characters are no longer seen as requiring extreme situations to get them in bed together. So, in adopting this pon farr frame, "Closer" pays tribute to the foremothers of slash.

Pon Farr stories often contain suggestions of sexual violence -- as does "Closer" -- themes which remain highly controversial inside fan circles. I am certain that the images of sexual violence here (specifically drawn from the use of the Vulcan Mind Meld in the original series accompanied by lyrics about "violation," "desecration" and "penetration") account for why some viewers outside of fandom found this particular video disquieting. This video is disquieting to many fans because of its strong suggestion of rape.

Ose and More Ose

One striking feature of "Closer" is its angsty tone -- created in part by the choice of soundtrack, in part by the ragged and grainy reproduction of the images, and in part by the selection of images which stress the emotional distance rather than closeness of the protagonists. Fans have a term, "ose," that captures this emotional quality: it comes from the expression "ose and more ose" (i.e. morose).

A number of writers have suggested that they expected to laugh and were instead moved or disturbed by what they saw in this video. Fan music videos adopt a range of different tones -- some do indeed welcome the uncomfortable laughter when one first starts to reread these images outside of their original heterosexual inflections and start to appreciate the pleasure of appropriating these shots for alternative interpretations. Others affectionately poke fun at the protagonists, choosing their most foolish or clumsy moments or choosing images that look especially suggestive out of context. (T. Jonesy and Killa have produced a number of other Classic Trek vids which adopt these more comic and playful tones.) Others play it more seriously, teaching us to respect the emotional truths they find through their recontextualizing of these images. For me, "Closer" has a kind of emotional distance -- despite all of the angst -- that sets it apart from many other fan-made videos. Ironically, it is perhaps this emotional distance which has allowed many who are not Trek fans to embrace the aesthetics of this particular work. Many slash vids are hot -- this one is cool.

Porn Again?

Another striking feature of "Closer" is the insertion of porn shots amidst the footage taken from the original series. I have certainly seen this (relatively uncommon) practice among some fan music video makers but historically, such explicit videos did not circulate outside the fan community, so it was striking to see this practice out in public view. This is perhaps illustrative of what has happened as slash and fan vids have entered a networked culture. New people have been drawn to the form at a rate that strips the ability of the community to inculcate them into their norms. Old taboos are being shattered right and left often in highly public ways that would distress older fans who felt they had reasons for avoiding such public scrutiny.

Another striking aspect of "Closer" is that it is being circulated as publicly as it is. Several years ago, I sparked some controversy in the Star Wars fan cinema world when I argued that the rules of the official competition hosted by Atom films were gender-biased because they recognized forms of media production -- parody and documentary -- most closely associated with male fans and excluded outright those forms -- most notably music video -- most closely associated with female fans. Many of those angry by these statements asserted that they had never seen any films made by female Star Wars fans and that they were certain such works did not exist. I saw that as validation of my argument because I had seen a large number of music videos produced by female Star Wars fans which had not been able to get into public distribution. Those who had seen some of the music videos argued that they did not belong in the competition because they were "derivative," that is, because they used found footage. In fact, though, "Closer" shows pretty well that these fan media makers can generate original interpretations through their manipulation and recontextualization of these images. Whatever you want to say about it, "Closer" makes a statement about the original material.

When I did Poachers, the music video makers were the only fans who asked not to be named in the book: they were concerned because their raw materials drew clips directly from the films and television episodes but also drew songs from top recording artists. They felt most exposed to legal prosecution and felt they had the weakest case that their works would be protected under Fair Use.

Today, some of these women do share their videos via the web but without much fanfare, on sites that are only known within a relatively closed fan community. Fans have learned how to use the web to make their content accessible to those already in the know while decoupling their content from access via most search engine. It's quite likely that in the current case, the artists lost control over the circulation of "Closer" and that it went more public than they intended. That's also part of living in a world where amateur media often circulates virally and without any direct attribution. Few of the blogs which have mentioned "Closer" even acknowledge the artist's names even though they are featured prominently in the video itself and there may not have been an expectation that whoever posted it to YouTube needed to respect the artists' choices about where and how it should be distributed. We still accord much greater respect to commercial artists than grassroots artists. This is a video which has been circulating within fandom for some time without getting this level of public notice and so many fans have been started by its sudden visibility.

The circulation of "Closer" outside of the fan community is apt to be causing concern not only for the original creators of this material but also for many others within the fan community. I suspect their reactions are mixed.

On the one hand, it is exciting to see some work within this tradition get some public visibility and respect. On the other, its visibility increases the likelihood that the Powers that Be will come crashing down on the whole practice of fan music videos, there must be disappointment that it is being discussed outside of the larger context of many people producing work within this tradition, and there will be some concern that this work includes some controversial practices -- such as porn inserts or the themes of sexual violence -- that may further enflame the situation.

You may note that I am not offering links here to other fanvids. I have made it a policy not to send people to fan-produced material, even if it is on the web and therefore theoretically "public" without their permission. I am sending pointers to this video only because it is already the subject of such public circulation and discussion that not doing so would amount to closing the barn door after the cow have already gotten out.

Thanks to Cynthia Jenkins for her help in preparing this post.

Experimenting with Brands in Second Life

In 1954, Frederick Pohl, a gifted social satirist and science fiction writer, published the short story, "The Tunnel Under the World", which should have been made into a first rate Twilight Zone episode. A man wakes up in bed next to his wife, gets up, and goes to work, and along the way, he starts to sense that there's something subtly different about his world:

He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were most unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

But no one else seems to have noticed that the entire adscape has changed overnight. And then it happens again, and again, and again. By the end of the story, he discovers that he is living inside a consumer research experiment:

They aren't Russians and they aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow -- heaven knows how they did it -- they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people -- right under their thumbs. Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else; but however they do it, what happens is they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day they see what happened -- and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising....They test every last detail before they spend a nickle on advertising!

Pohl's short story about this microworld that allows Madison Avenue to run experiments on consumers anticipates the role that brands and advertising will play in new multiplayer game worlds such as Second Life. Second Life has been one of the hot new stories in participatory culture in recent months. Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks uses SL as a primary example of the grassroots energies being unleashed in network society. Educators are increasingly experimented with the affordances of this space with Harvard's Berkman Center teaching a course in intellectual property law this term open to Harvard students and their avitars. Psychologists are using Second Life to conduct therapy -- especially for autistic patients for whom it can represent a gradual introduction into reading and communicating cues about emotional states during social interactions. There are experiments going on that are exploring new governance structures in political science, new forms of community in sociology, and new modes of transaction in economics. Activists are using the space to increase public awareness of their concerns. And sexual minorities are finding new outlets for erotic expression amid the hidden corners of this world.

We might think of Second Life as a platform for thought experiments -- a place where we can test ideas that might not be ready for prime time, where we can experiment with new ways of being on both a personal and communal level. If you can think it, you can build it on Second Life, and so far, if you build it, they will come. Some have called Second Life the digital counterpart of Burning Man -- a place where people come to see and be seen, to build and to see what others have built, and to celebrate their power to reimagine the terms with which they conduct their everyday lives.

One of the recent graduates of the Comparative Media Studies master's program, Ilya Vedrashko, has been exploring the relationship between games and advertising. The Russian-born Vedrashko is perhaps the most unapologetic capitalist to ever pass through our program. He has found his calling in exploring the ways new media technologies can give rise to alternative approaches to brands and advertising. He has started blog on the future of advertising and a second on advertising through games. He recently posted his thesis online. Vedrashko now works at the Boston-based agency, Hiill Holliday, analyzing trends in emerging media that impact the advertising world. It is perhaps inevitable that he would turn his attention to Second Life, where players are generating their own versions of familiar advertising icons and forming their own agencies while corporations are looking for ways of making their own presences known in this ecclectic and rapidly evolving environment.

The following text is taken directly from Vedrashko's thesis.

What Is Second Life

Second Life, whose membership has tripled in the past six months (January-July of 2006) to surpass 300,000 players, has recently landed on the cover of Business Week that wrote, "It's hard to imagine a less corporate setting than the often bizarre online virtual worlds such as Second Life. But to a surprising extent, mainstream businesses are already dipping their toes into the virtual water." Second Life, whose player base was only 30,000 a year ago, is undergoing a remarkable transformation from a little-known hobby for geeks to what can now be defined as almost-the-edge-of-the-outer-fringes-of-mainstream.

Second Life is still no MySpace.com in its mass appeal, but among its residents are high-level executives, writers, journalists and the rest of the public-opinion-shaping digerati. As far as the virtual social networking applications go, it has been able to avoid many of the problems plaguing the popular online teen hangout. Second Life has corralled everyone under the age of 18 into a walled garden impermeable to adults, solving the issue of child safety before it had a chance to arise. Its business model relies on subscriptions instead of advertising for revenue -- Second Life sells what it calls land but what in effect is server space with game templates. This has allowed the Second Life makers at Linden Lab to adopt a laissez-faire approach to all marketing activity that goes on inside their game. Every player can advertise anything without having to pay the company, and becoming a resident is as easy as downloading Second Life software and installing it on a sufficiently powerful computer.

For the uninitiated, here is some background. As mentioned earlier, Second Life (SL for brevity) lacks any overarching objectives (kill the monster and save the princess) and scoring, and is technically not a game at all. Linden Lab insists on defining it as a 3-D virtual world, but a rather fitting description was offered by Wagner James Au who spent three years as SL's embedded journalist: "[I]t's just a weird cross between a 3D development platform and a chat program, AutoCAD meets the Sims." The world sprawls across hundreds of servers, called sims, that are all connected into one grid. Unlike many other massively multiplayer games, SL is not divided into parallel realities or shards, which means that all players can see each other regardless of the server on which they are located. All of the game assets, its avatars, buildings, land and everything else, are hosted on Linden Lab's servers so the only way to experience the world is through an Internet connection. The only thing that resides on the player's computer is the so-called client that visualizes the world-related information and is best thought of as a specialized 3-D web browser. The client also comes with editing and scripting tools that allow players to create, edit, color, texture and animate three-dimensional objects, and add lighting effects. This particular capability combined with the in-world economic infrastructure that facilitates trading and stimulates it by making the game's Linden dollars convertible into the real currency is what drives the players' creative and entrepreneurial genius. The introductory kit for new avatars contains some pants and shirts, a few household items and, significantly, a basic shopkeeper kit complete with a small booth, a showcase and a blank signboard.

On any single day, the value of transactions between players tops $100,000 in real-world money. Everything imaginable is for sale: cars, trucks, houses, castles and skyscrapers, clothes, avatar bodies and body parts, hair, shoes, flowers, guns that shoot watermelons, flying cows, mountains, theme parks, tornadoes, holodecks and things unmentionable in a thesis. If something isn't available, someone will design it for you. The stores are abundant and commercial activity continues outside the world's boundaries on the websites set up by entrepreneurial residents.

The supply of goods is so high and the competition is so strong that the world's economy warrants its own advertising infrastructure. SL businesspeople whose real-life careers are often lie in unrelated fields and whose knowledge of advertising practices might have been limited are quickly learning the skills of copyrighters, art directors, merchandisers and media planners all at once. For them, an in-world magazine packed with business advice was launched in August of 2006.

Design Your Own Advertising

Many SL companies have already built what can be objectively regarded as brands in the sense that their business or product names are highly recognizable, associated with a particular image and can command a price premium on perceived product value; Betsy Book in her paper profiled two such SL brands and the strategies behind them. Strong brands can be found in many different categories: from clothing to homes, from avatar design to digital interactive genitalia.

While players can advertise their wares on the SL's official classifieds listings, many more turn to the world's independent advertising industry. They can contract services of design firms or purchase hi-tech signboards that float, rotate and flash in mid-air. They can hire one of the many modeling agencies to have their in-store signage professionally decorated. (While there are still no highly recognizable super-model names in Second Life, players with a rich collection of scripted modeling poses and an outstanding avatar design command hourly fees that can easily cover a month of rent of an in-game castle.) Shopkeepers and club owners can equip their businesses with any number of automatic vendors, sales robots, greeting systems, pagers, and camping chairs that pay residents to spend time in their establishments. Many give away free merchandise along with a business card and a bookmark to their location, or hire hosts and event managers to run their promotions.

The SL advertising market is booming. A player whose in-game name is Ruthe Underthorn has created MetaAdverse, a network of billboards placed throughout the world in high-traffic areas such as malls and clubs, and its technology can rival Massive's or IGA's in technical sophistication. Property owners place MetaAdverse's signs on their land for a 70-percent cut of the revenue. Advertisers feed their messages to the billboards belonging to MetaAdverse and the amount they pay depends on how many people have faced the sign directly, for how long and from what distance. In my exploration of the world, I have discovered at least three other billboard networks competing with MetaAdverse.

As the SL's technology evolves, new media forms come to life and with them -- new advertising opportunities. Live streaming radio shows developed specifically for the game sell advertising time, and so do in-game newspapers. Potential for video advertising exists as well; many SL homes are equipped with TV sets that stream video clips and some entrepreneurs sell ad time on those as well. TV shows with their own machinima production have also started to appear as the game's creative population grows.

Like many other games that can be modified by players, Second Life is peppered with user-created objects carrying real-world logos. My own inventory includes a larger-than-life bottle of Absolut vodka, a Corona t-shirt, an entire Hooters outfit, a pack of Marlboros, a Mac laptop, a Honda motorcycle, a case of Mountain Dew, a pair of Elmo slippers. Vending machines giving away or selling Coke, Pepsi and common snacks are a common sight in SL clubs; one can be bought for about 30 American cents. Replicas of NASCAR racing cars are emblazoned with logos of their real-world sponsors. All this brand equity is built on pure enthusiasm without a dollar spent on product placement by the trademark holders.

I have once stumbled across a resident-run store that sells iPods, Shuffles and Nanos that come preloaded with a set of popular songs (I bought instead an outfit that transformed my avatar into a walking iPod silhouette ad.) On another occasion, I rented a real-world movie from a Blockbuster-looking store. The success of these businesses - the movie store was part of a large and supposedly profitable chain -- or their very existence indicates that Second Life can become a model for content distribution that is based on a curious paradox with a new twist to Nicholas Negroponte's model of bits and atoms. When viewed from the outside, all of Second Life's assets can be considered "content", and the "bona fide content" -- music and video -- even more so. Yet when viewed from within the game, this "content" acquires certain tangibility and the assets become objects with their own volume, mass, clearly defined boundaries and often a price tag. Within this new coordinate system, content distribution as perceived from within SL seizes to be the process of streaming bits and once again becomes the task of shipping atoms that can be counted, tracked, and locked up when needed. Second Life provides a theoretically unbreakable way for item creators to limit distribution and modification of their wares by marking them with any of the three flags "no copy", "no modify", and "no transfer", and in this sense the objectified music and videos are no different from shirts and coffee mugs. SL thus becomes an overarching meta-DRM system: the only way to copy a movie marked with "no copy" and "no transfer" flags is to screen-grab the entire game from the outside.

The real meets the Second Life's virtual in many other ways. The tribute to Pink Floyd takes shape of a small hut covered all over with the band's art, with a continuously running soundtrack inside. A similar monument to Grateful Dead is a dizzying complex complete with a hot tub inside a spinning psychedelic globe. There are replicas of individual famous buildings -- such as the Twin Towers -- and the whole blocks of Manhattan, San Francisco and Amsterdam. Residents are also recreating famous fictional spaces -- the Second Life blog wrote about Counter-Strike and Mario Brothers levels built in SL's construction areas, and there are many more. One island sells avatar bodies modeled and equipped after real-world movie characters including the entire cast of Harry Potter. For a modest amount of money, you can have your avatar's body custom-made to resemble any celebrity, from Lenin to Johnny Depp. A dedicated group of players regularly puts out public tribute U2 concerts where avatars closely resembling Bono, the Edge and the rest of the band are animated on stage in sync with the streaming soundtrack.

Modding Corporate Style

The world's creative flexibility coupled with the pioneering spirit of its residents makes Second Life an attractive sandbox for advertisers willing to experiment with new ideas that might be difficult or costly to try elsewhere. Some are already taking notice. The Wells Fargo bank built a private Stagecoach Island area designed to educate kids on the basics of money management (the company later moved the island to a similar environment, Active Worlds, citing technical issues). BBC runs an SL studio where it records regular shows for broadcasts in the outside world. The movie giant 20th Century Fox organized an in-game promotion of its X-Men sequel. Warner Brothers threw a release party for its artist Regina Spektor. Major League Baseball put together a simulcast of the Home Run Derby on a specially designed stadium with the real-time reenactment of the game. One day, we might see TV commercials played out in a similar theater-like manner instead of being shown on a flat screen, or bump into artificially intelligent Burger King mascots handing out whoppers at virtual sports events. In its cover story on Second Life, Business Week described many other ways in which real-world companies engage with the world. Head of technology at an underground tank testing firm uses the game as a training environment for new hires. A PR company set up SL headquarters to "provide companies a fascinating way to build new bridges to their key audiences, whether for marketing purposes, customer support or customer feedback." Residential architect Jon Brouchoud created, textured and showed a 3-D model of a real house commissioned by his clients, all in Second Life.

This, of course, is only the beginning. As the platform's technological sophistication and its links to the outside world grow -- Linden Lab is working on integrating a standard web browser into the game and sending emails into and from the world is already possible -- so does its attractiveness to outside businesses. One can imagine a travel agency building models of its destinations, from hotels and cruise ships to exotic islands. Ikea could work with the fan base to showcase its catalog in three dimensions and let players try its virtual furniture in their virtual homes. Universities, some of which are already building in-world presence, could conduct open houses to court prospective students.

If a single 3-D game-like platform emerges and gets widely adopted and if Second Life

and similar worlds are indeed precursor of the three-dimensional web to come, advertisers would be better off by exploring the opportunities and challenges these environments present while the scale is still small and mistakes are affordable.

The challenges will be many. One issue that is likely to loom big is privacy. The extreme level of detail with which games and avatars can be tracked and measured is both a goldmine and a ticking time bomb in the hands of marketers. It is a goldmine because virtual billboards will soon be able to tap into the enormous databases that have records on every single transaction, utterance and head nod of every avatar and serve individualized messages based on the customer's entire life history in all its complexity. When AOL inadvertently released a database containing results of millions of search queries submitted by more than half a million users, called it "catalog of intentions". If Paul Hemp is correct in his suggestion that the way avatars dress up, behave and socialize tells us something about their owners, then worlds such as are catalogs not only of intentions but also of fantasies, fetishes, beliefs, aspirations and repressed desires that have found their symbolic manifestations -- everything marketers today are trying to suss out with the help of focus groups.

It's a ticking time bomb because Second Life is much more Orwellian in its omniscience than anything existing on the public Internet with its decentralized structure. On the Internet, AOL may know something about the user and Amazon may know something else but the two don't share their information to create a holistic picture. Second Life, on the other hand, is a proprietary walled and self-containing garden whose infrastructure and intelligence gathering spans the entire user cycle from shopping to private instant messaging.

On the micro level, designing a commercial experience in a 3D environment is likely to be different from developing a "flat" web shop. Thinking in three dimensions of a social world endowed with physical properties will mean calculating the ceiling height, for example, to accommodate for customers who prefer flying to walking. While a popular web store may serve thousands of customers simultaneously, each of them shops from his own parallel on-screen universe with little interaction with the others. Clothing stores in Second Life, on the other hand, are more like real-world malls filled with customers sharing impressions and offering fashion advice in real time. Merchandising -- the science of displaying goods on store shelves -- will have to learn how to retain the visual appeal of the real-world racks while combining it with the effectiveness of online search and categorization. When sabotage (hacking, phishing, scamming and denial of service attacks) of online stores is a major concern, the solutions are also evident if not always feasible -- patch the hole and call in the cops. But what are shopkeepers to do if their stores are blocked by avatars protesting unfair trade practices?

Speaking of unfair trade practices, the foray of real-world businesses into Second Life has not been greeted with universal excitement, although the reasons for players' wariness are changing. If two years ago a private island where a marketing company had set up shop was picketed by SL residents because they felt the intrusion would ruin their carefully crafted escapist haven, today their concerns are more pragmatic and are not likely to go away as easily. Some fear that their budding SL family businesses will have to compete with cash-rich and marketing-savvy business empires for which Second Life is just another foreign market ripe for expansion. Others think that real businesses will upset the virtual world's entire fragile ecosystem. Today, in-game entrepreneurs make and sell their wares and services at prices that are significant in the game's context but the return on their time is way below the minimum wage when converted into dollars. Tomorrow, these entrepreneurs will be hired by the big businesses to produce the same -- but branded -- items and will be compensated for their efforts on the real-world pay scale, never to return to their original trades.

When Starwood Hotels and Resorts announced that it was bringing into the virtual world a model of its new Aloft hotel, a resident who runs a real-estate business of selling plots of land and renting out apartments in Second Life, Prokofy Neva, wrote in his comments to a blog post:

It's not about me or others in the land business. [...] I'm trying to use my experience to speak to the much larger issue going on here: big business from RL, helped by a few who were able to leverage their experience into "RL-in-SL companies", are displacing the *need* for business inworld and displacing *the transactions* of business as well as the Lindens *change the features and the client and their orientation toward these kinds of businesses, and not inworld customer-created businesses.* [...]

I wouldn't be able to see what is happening so clearly if I hadn't been able to see what happens to countries in the real world, like a Georgia or Ukraine, when the indigenous economies were able to sustain people without them leaving for guestworker status elsewhere or be drawn into sex trafficking, before the World Bank or Chevron or whatever came in and displaced their economies. This is a worldwide phenomenon, part of globalization.

SL is now globalized."

With Linden Lab actively welcoming the expansion of big businesses into its realm, perhaps it's time for Naomi Klein to revise her No Logo to include a chapter on free-trade zones and sweatshop labor of the virtual third world.