Reforming a Mean World: Hero Reports

"In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in

the position of having to play detective" --Walter Benjamin 1938

In the research on media effects, one of the most fully developed findings is what is known as the "mean world syndrome." Research finds that the average citizen grossly over-estimates how dangerous her neighborhood is because she reads the newspaper and assumes that the crime reports are actually a sample of the whole and thus amplifies them accordingly. In practice, a higher portion of violent crimes get reported than most people assume, although there are statistical biases as a result of the under-representation of crimes based on the race and class of the victims.

A larger problem is created by the over-representation of crime and the under-represented of everyday acts of kindness and generosity. The news often shows us people acting at their very worst without allowing us to see those moments where people help each other out. How might this under-reporting of good deeds also contribute to the mean world syndrome?

This is a question which is guiding a new research initiative being launched by Alyssa Wright, an MIT Media Lab student who is affiliated with the Center for Future Civic Media. The center is a collaboration between the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program and has been funded by the Knight Foundation. As one of the co-Directors of the Center, I've listened to lots and lots of proposals for projects that might enhance civic engagement and community consciousness, some good, some bad.

Alysa's project, Hero Reports, is among one of the very best I've heard. It's practical enough that she's already begun to implement it in New York City. It's provocative enough that it's already begun to attract media interest. It was featured several weeks ago on WNYC The Takeaway. And it is suggestive enough that it has generated great conversations with everyone I've mentioned it to.

Wright says the project was inspired by New York's "See Something, Say Something" Campaign in the wake of 9/11. The campaign sought to solicit everyday citizens in New York City to be on the look out for suspicious activity. They became, in effect, agents in the war on terror. Maybe playing this role left them feeling more in control over their situation. Or perhaps, the act of performing this role left them in a permenant state of alert and anxiety, depending on your perspective. Given how broad the mandate is, it is no surprise that the city received many many reports. One recent advertisement boasted that the government had received 1944 such reports. The New York Times found, however, that very few of these reports resulted in arrests and that the bulk of the reports were directed at brown people whose suspicious activity mostly consisted of being brown in public.

Often, we see what we are looking for and our cultural biases literally color what we see. A campaign that invites us to look for suspicious behavior forces us to scrutinize our neighbors for signs and symptoms of terroristic activity. So, Wright wants us to reverse our lens and look for people who are doing things that are socially constructive. She wants us to find evidence of the good conduct that surrounds us all the time and bring it to greater public attention - the person who goes out of their way to help someone else, the people who intervene to stop a domestic dispute or a violent act, the people who give up their seats on the subway to accommodate a passenger with special needs, the person who cares enough to contribute to the homeless or give directions to someone who seems lost.

She is collecting these reports via her website and she's investigating news reports of everyday heroicism that she reads in the newspaper trying to flesh out a portrait of the ways that her fellow New Yorkers are making life better within their communities. She is also deploying state of the art mapping tools to construct accounts of "everyday heroicism" in different neighborhoods, hoping that they can be read alongside maps which show crime rates and other negative factors, to give us a fuller sense of the places where we live. Ideally, such maps can become a source of local pride as people work to improve the perceptions of their communities by doing good deeds.

What follows are some of Wright's reflections about the project:

Hero Reports was inspired by the "See Something, Say Something" Campaign in NYC. What disturbed you about that campaign and how do you see Hero Reports as responding to that concern?

I was in New York on 9/11, and I was very scared. In its wake, I saw myself start to evaluate safety with different checklists. And it's still "different" than it was before. Just today, I was on a subway car and there were all these men with luggage. The trigger goes up. "Why are there so many attended packages on the train?" but then I pieced together another, probably more likely, story. It's the end of a 4th of July weekend and a lot of people travel at the end of a 4th of July weekend. and ohh right. i'm on the subway that goes to the airport. It's all about context but after 9/11 and after the anthrax scare in particular, the only context I absorbed was fear.

What got me thinking about a project, were 3 rather contemporaneous events:

1) how people responded to cherry blossoms. when i walked around with cherry blossoms, I was under the radar. i was a girl, white, wearing makeup. and yet i was walking around with a backpack that looked like a weapon. people didn't "see something" let alone "say something."

2) i went to Madrid and learned about March 11 bombings. and i rode their metro. and

guess what. they still had cans to throw away garbage (the MTA got rid of most garbage

cans, the few remaining are supposedly "bomb proof") AND they weren't surrounded by

instructions to say something. i'm not sure when it happened, but i left that trip CONVINCED that because of its history, Spain can recognize the encroaching signs of

facism.

but then there's 3) --> the followup in the See Something series. "Last Year, 1,944 New

Yorkers Saw Something and Said Something." I can't recall the first time I saw the

initial 'See Something, Say Something' campaign, but I do recall the first 1,944. It was

a bus. and as i watched it go by, I turned and said something to the effect of: "what

the fuck is that? what the hell does that number mean?"

And that's when things became a bit comical. Like the farce was over. I mean, are we

supposed to be impressed by that number?

These three combined with another lesson from Cherry Blossoms, the power of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) database. I am forever in debt to Hamit Dardagan who started keeping count of _news reports_. Now that was a number I wanted to see. And that was a number that gave context. They took what already existed and aggregated. Together these left-to-the-archives reports found new "life." A life whose range included my exploding backpack and a Bush speech citing IBC as his body count reference.

I see Hero Reports akin to IBC. Essentially Hero Reports starts with collecting what

already exists--the stories of everyday heroes. That aggregation holds the possibility

of for social change, and the seeds for many other projects. Artistic, academic,

political, economic. ..

But back to my thoughts about See Something: The campaign makes me feel caught in the role of civilian detective. In its most dramatic version, they tell me I can be a hero

no different than the army solider, engaging with the monster on the ground. But even as I reject that version, my vision and behavior is effected. I'm caught in a dichotomy.

Having grown up in the 80s, all of this feels soooooooo much like the war on drugs.

I believe that the MTA had best intentions. If there was ever a time when New Yorkers needed to know that they had agency in the city's security--that they weren't helpless--it was after 9/11. Whether intentional or not, the campaign has nonetheless been proven ineffective and most activism done in response has been critical in nature. Its important to have critical work, it has a strong place in the dialog. but because this is a formula that we have been doing for much longer than the war on terror, we also need to build another formula. So Hero Reports offers an alternative approach.

You've used the suggestive phrase, "Everyday Acts of Courage," to describe what you hope to find through your project. Give us a sense of what you mean by this concept?

Everyone can be a hero -- cape and all. At its beginning, I was very much inspired by the battles of Terrifca and Fantistico, dueling real life superhero and villain, that roam the streets of New York. They were not waiting around in silence or stirring in anger. They were taking matters into their own hands, and bringing the extravagance of camp into a dialog with the civilian detectives.

In my opinion, the term "hero" has been co-opted by institutions like Hollywood and the government. The firefighter is the hero. Iron Man is the hero. Because these her stories are so enrolling, the everyday person does not need to be heroic. Our myths

set it up so that its a loss and not a gain, to get involved. Our misinterpretations of

equity (e.g., should I help the old lady across the street, or will she be offended), our

laws (e.g., the Seinfeld Good Samaritan Law) and our technologies (e.g., the iPod) create an attention span where we select not to see others. And if we do see, we decide it is someone else's responsibility to help in an accident, someone else job to put out the

fire; someone else's good nature to return the wallet.

We are constantly trained not to get involved, and this is gendered and classed in

particular ways. And we continue to build systems that support this lack of involvement.

It helps explain, why I find myself pissed off at people---and at myself---all the time.

Why the hell does this man need to spread his knees three feet wide while we're all

packed in like sardines? Why the hell does this woman on crutches have to stand against a pole? And why doesn't anyone say anything? Why don't I say? And why when I saw an accident on 14th street, why was my instinct not to help?

Hero Reports proposes to value the opposite.

What is a Hero Map? What do you see as the value of mapping where "everyday acts of courage" occurs?

In its present iteration, a Hero Map is the positioning of a Hero Report to a GPS location, and correspondingly a neighborhood. This mapping gives the heroic moment a collective memory, which in turns gives the Hero Report political and economic weight.

Typically an heroic moment, particularly an everyday heroism, has a very narrow frame.

These moments are not connected to each other, but appear as disconnected blips on the radar. When they do appear, the attention is on the self and the individual. What did

it take for said person to take that risk? Would I do the same? It does not reflect other

cultural factors like race, gender, and class. This focus on the individual stops any

possibility of these moments gaining a larger perspective, and cultural impact. By

aggregating them, and mapping them, we give the heroic moment weight. This weight can be placed back onto a community, a cultural bias, and a neighborhood.

For instance, consider the power of the Hero Map in how we evaluate real estate. In the

search for a home (aka apartment) one might look at crime rates, school systems,

transportation access AND hero statistics. How would this inclusion change our

priorities? And our economy? The perspective fits into a more general trend of

aggregating neighborhood specific, qualitative data. Rottenneighbors' search for local

dirt is directly relates to potential power of Hero Reports. But also sites like

Outside.In and Everyblock illustrate this trend of filtering importance through

geography. It's as if ranking systems are no longer as useful.

You are hoping to present 1944 reports of civic heroism to the transit authority. What's the significant of that number and how far along are you towards meeting that goal?

The significance of this number is still being investigated by conspiracy theorists. The MTA claims that 1,944 New Yorkers Saw Something, and Said Something. It's an objectless number that can easily translate into racialized forms of perception. But this objectless number, also makes it useless. And comical. What does 1,944 number mean? In a city of 8 million?

I'm fascinated by the number's lack of context, its classified nature, its broadcasting

with pride and perhaps most circuitously its connections to D-Day. (read here the letter

Eisenhower wrote to the troops.

Because of this fascination, one goal of Hero Reports is to collect the same number of

reports into a book and present it to the mayor. How such a book will be curated/edited

is still unclear, but at its heart, it would be a transparent narrative of security.

We are 300 into this goal number, but much more are needed, before we being to edit.

(And editing here being akin to what the MTA did. About 4000 New Yorkers actually said

something.)

What is the most interesting story you've received so far? What kinds of incidents are

you hearing about the most?

Actually, I find what I'm hearing the most to be the most interesting. A LOT of things happen with taxi drivers. This is significant because the majority of taxi drivers are the skin color (brown) most targeted by this campaign. That means, that while only brown people were arrested in this See Something campaign, brown people are the city's most consistent heroes. This reinterpretation of a community bias I extremely powerful.

Another recurring theme is "proof" that a personal hero story wasn't as impossible as it

seemed. From my personal archives, there are two examples of this.

The first is a story about the stones of my engagement ring falling out and the women

who dropped on their knees to help find it. For me, this incredible moment is re-enacted with a story from taxi driver and his finding of a passenger's ring.

The second is when on a cold winter night transfer, an out of service train gave myself and a friend a subway ride home. This illegal moment of courage was verified when a transit worker told me of the time when he was out of uniform, and a train picked him up. (not written up yet). He concludes with: "See! We're not so mean. We're people too."

Besides the patterns, there are some amazing stories. A number of the more dramatic are covered in the press, and I've taken the content from such news articles. The latest in this category is someone giving birth on a subway platform. Here, the media did cover

how strangers came together to make it happen. (Though I suppose something would have happened regardless) Most times, however, the media coverage of these dramatic stories neglect the heroes. For instance, the other week there was a pitbull attack. When I interviewed him, the man had a story about police incompetence and expressed amazement towards a neighborhood. When this man screamed "Help!" it wasn't a Kitty Genovese moment. People came pouring out of their home to help. "And Louis was amazing." Now there's no mention of Louis in the news coverage. Louis doesn't sell. Part of Hero Reports is to spin Louis's story so that he sells. Turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. That's what Hollywood does, when Hollywood does it well. It is at the heart of novels, theater and comedy.

Its about the framing. Tackling how this sort of everyday heroism can sell is the

challenge of Hero Reports. ("Sell" here not being synonymous with "make money", but

rather sell meaning, create cultural weight and urgency.) Hero Reports is more likely to

fail than succeed. But personally I think technologists (especially at the lab) should

be taking on such challenges and such risk. We're so afraid it's not going to work, that

we don't play with failure. And when it comes down to it, not only do most things not

work, but by not tackling these questions we contribute to this society of suspicion and

isolation.

Augmented Learning: An Interview with Eric Klopfer (Part One)

For the past five years, Eric Klopfer has helped to lead the Education Arcade, the MIT based research group which is seeking to explore the pedagogical uses of computer and video games. One of his biggest contributions has been to insist that our research reflect the realities which teachers encounter with trying to deploy learning games in the classroom. Well before the Arcade launched, Klopfer has been doing cutting edge work on Augmented Reality Games. Here's a description I wrote four years ago for Technology Review of one of the games he helped to create:

In early February, a powerful demonstration of augmented reality took place at Boston's Museum of Science. Eric Klopfer, an MIT professor of urban studies and planning, along with a team of researchers from the Education Arcade (an MIT-based consortium devoted to promoting the pedagogical use of computer and video games) conducted what they called "a Hi-Tech Who Done It." The activity was designed for middle-school kids and their parents. Participants were assigned to teams, consisting of three adult-child pairs, and given a handheld. For the next few hours, they would search high and low for clues of the whereabouts and identity of the notorious Pink Flamingo Gang. Thieves have stolen an artifact and substituted a fake in its place. Thanks to museum's newly installed Wi-Fi network and the players' location-aware handhelds, each gallery offered the opportunity to interview cyber-suspects, download objects, examine them with virtual equipment, and trade their findings.

Each parent-child unit was assigned a different role--biologists, detectives, or technologists--enabling them to use different tools on the evidence they gathered. As I followed the eager participants about the museum, they used walkie-talkies to share information and to call impromptu meetings to compare notes; at one point, a hyperventilating sixth grade girl lectured some other kid's parents about what she learned about the modern synthetic material found in the sample picked up near the shattered mummy case. Racing against time and against rival teams, the kids, parents in tow, sprinted from hall to hall.

I was with one of the teams when they solved the puzzle. A young girl thrust her arms in the air and shouted, "We are the smartest people in the whole museum!" What a visceral experience of empowerment! The same girl said that everyone else in her family was smart in science but that on this occasion, she felt like a genius.

Talking to the parents afterward, one woman told the research team, "This is the longest time I've ever spent having a substantial conversation with my son in as long as I can remember--without any fighting." Many of the others had in the past dragged their kids to the museum kicking and screaming. This time, however, these same kids wanted to go back and spend more time looking at exhibits they had brushed past in their investigations.

The activity had forced the kids to really pay attention to what they were looking at, to ask and answer new questions, and to process the information in new ways. These kids weren't moving in orderly lines through the science museum; they owned that space. It wasn't a sanctuary; it was their playground.

But there was nothing chaotic about their play. This was hard work, and it engaged every corner of their brains. Though the robbery was imaginary, the kids had to go through something akin to the real-world scientific process to solve the mystery--gathering evidence, forming hypotheses, challenging each other's interpretations, and in the end, presenting the data to the judges to see how close they came to figuring out all of the case's nuances.

As this description suggests, Klopfer's games blend fantasy and reality, combines the capability of location-aware mobile devices with the power of direct observation, and merge together individual and collaborative modes of problem solving. And what's more, Klopfer has been working with teachers to get them not only to deploy his own games but to develop their own games which take advantage of the resources and concerns of their own local communities. He's been a huge influence on the games-oriented students who have come through the Comparative Media Studies Program, leading to thesis projects such as Karen Schrier's Reliving the Revolution, which simulated the first shots of the American revolution. And I recently featured Klopfer's handheld work as part of an account of the history of our serious games research.

Now, it's my pleasure to direct your attention to Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games, newly released from the MIT Press. As the title suggests, he shares some of the insights he has gained from his extensive research on mobile and augmented reality games, research which will be of great interests to those interested in developing their own learning games as well as to teachers who want to harness the power of gaming through their classrooms. The book is written in the matter of fact and pragmatic style I've come to associate with Klopfer. He reflects back on his own work, offers frank assessment of the existing mobile games space, and proposes some basic design and instructional principles which should guide all future work in this space. If your ideas about learning games begin and end with the commercial marketplace, Klopfer will shake up many of your preconceptions, offering radically different approaches to what a learning game looks like which take advantage of social dynamics and real world spaces rather than relying on 3d graphics and complex AI. He offers a model of what we can do right now for very little money using existing technologies.

He was kind enough to agree to an interview here. In part one, we explore in more depth his concept of augmented reality games and in the second part, we will explore the field of serious games more generally.

Most contemporary mobile games consist of casual games ported onto the mobile phone. Yet such games do not exploit most of the unique properties of mobile technology. How do you define those properties and what do you see as the limits of current games being developed for such platforms?

I think that in the near term mobile games for cell phones will continue to primarily take the form of ported casual games. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, these games fit the playing habits of people playing mobile games. That is, they can be played for a few minutes at a time while riding the train, standing in line, etc. Second, the development costs of mobile games is disproportionately high, primarily because of the current need to develop a single game hundreds of times for each different phone and carrier. As the industry moves towards consolidation of platforms through things like the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Google's Android, I think we'll start to see developers make a move to develop new and interesting games on mobile devices. We've already seen this on the Nintendo DS, which has broken a lot of new ground in the mobile games space, and also has sold phenomenally well.

Because of the powerful hardware in cell phones, I think we'll see even more innovative work on this platform.

When Kurt Squire and I sat down to make our first big push into mobile educational games we defined a number of characteristics that we attempted to tap into, namely:

• portability - can take the computer to different sites and move around within a location
• social interactivity - can exchange data and collaborate with other people face to face
• context sensitivity - can gather data unique to the current location, environment, and time, including both real and simulated data
• connectivity - can connect handhelds to data collection devices, other handhelds, and to a common network that creates a true shared environment
• individuality - can provide unique scaffolding that is customized to the individual's path of investigation.

These principles have guided much of our work, and we're starting to see more of this in the marketplace. Apple is going to make a big push for mobile games on the iPhone and this will mean taking advantage of these unique properties, and other companies will follow.

Much of your own work has focused on the development of augmented reality games. Can you explain that concept and offer some illustrations for the kind of work you've done in this area?

Augmented Reality, as we define it, is a digital layer of information spatially overlaid on the real environment. While others narrowly define this space to include heads up displays using helmets and goggles with precise positioning providing real time visual overlaid information, we use the term broadly enough to include location-based games on handhelds and mobile phones which provide additional virtual data or information at given locations. Specifically we focus on what we call "lightly" augmented reality. That is, we provide a minimal amount of virtual information, and players use a lot of real world information as a part of game play.

For example, our most recent game TimeLab, starts with a video that sets the players 100 years in the future when global climate change has wreaked havoc on Cambridge. They are then sent back in time to present day to study ballot initiatives that could potentially remediate the effects of global climate change in the future. Players walk around the MIT campus and surrounding areas collecting information (real and virtual) on methods of reducing climate change and the impact of climate change on Cambridge. For example, at one point they look across the Charles River to the Hancock Tower that currently uses a beacon to provide information about the weather, and consider whether a more comprehensive weather warning system could be of use to warn future area residents of frequent severe weather. As players stand on Memorial Drive near the MIT campus, they consider how 100 years in the future that location is often under water from floods, and think about ways that those floods could be prevented. In the end, the players choose a number of ballot initiatives that they must debate, and through some simple game mechanics ultimately find out whether those measures are approved and what impact they have.

Some would argue that augmented reality games don't look or act very much like commercial entertainment titles. Is that an advantage or a disadvantage in terms of getting teachers to engage with these activities?

In most cases this is an advantage. Game is still a four-letter word in most schools, and teachers will sometimes ask us if we can call it a "simulation" or "technology-enabled activity" instead. I'm less concerned with the label than with the learning and engagement so I usually oblige. In terms of the actual experience, while students sometimes elaborate 3D games with holographic images to emerge from the handhelds (this is MIT), they quickly engage with our much more primitive map-based interfaces. Finally in terms of game play, the format of the games are quite flexible and can be changed by the teachers or the students themselves to create games that involve varying degrees of collaboration and competition.

You've developed tools which enable teachers to design educational games that are appropriate to their own locations. Can you give us a sense of how educators have been using those tools? How might my readers get access to those tools?

Our Outdoor Augmented Reality Toolkit, which is a drag and drop authoring tool for location based games on Windows Mobile devices, has been used by dozens of researchers and educators around the world. We're putting the final touches on our first public release, which should be available within the next few weeks on our website (http://education.mit.edu/drupal/ar).

In many cases teachers are using this to localize an existing game that has been created elsewhere. At a minimum this means importing new maps and GPS coordinates, and making sure that players need not walk into the middle of a road or a lake to get the information that they need. But ideally, this means making some changes to the content to localize it a bit better including some local history and personality, or incorporating unique features of the geography.

The tool is easy enough for a non-programmer to use (technically) to create an AR game from scratch. But this still requires a fair bit of thought in terms of the actual game design. We expect this feature to be used by educational institutions like museums, zoos, and science centers. In many cases we expect that teachers will wind up doing this kind of design as a class activity, rather than solo, and we're designing new versions to specifically support this kind of design.

Your augmented reality games combine elements of simulation with the direct observation of the real world. Why is "reality" an important element to tap for educational games?

Many of our AR games are built around socio-scientific problems, that is issues that require both an understanding of the underlying science as well as an understanding of the social and real world context for the problem. We've found that the AR games do a good job of integrating these two components. When using AR to study problems that are seemingly "entirely scientific," players tend to think more holistically considering many of the subtle real world constraints - how will this impact me or the people I know? What will the community think? How will this impact what I see around me? It is much harder to generate these kinds of considerations in a purely virtual experience we have found. Many of our games are explicitly designed around these tradeoffs.

Eric Klopfer is the Director of the MIT Teacher Education Program, and the Scheller Career Development Professor of Science Education and Educational Technology at MIT. The Teacher Education Program prepares MIT undergraduates to become math and science teachers. Klopfer's research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science and complex systems. His research explores simulations and games on desktop computers as well as handhelds. He currently runs the StarLogo project, a desktop platform that enables students and teachers to create computer simulations of complex systems. He is also the creator of StarLogo TNG, a new platform for helping kids create 3D simulations and games using a graphical programming language. On handhelds, Klopfer's work includes Participatory Simulations , which embed users inside of complex systems, and Augmented Reality simulations, which create a hybrid virtual/real space for exploring intricate scenarios in real time. He is the co-director of The Education Arcade, which is advancing the development and use of games in K-12 education. Klopfer's work combines the construction of new software tools with research and development of new pedagogical supports that support the use of these tools in the classroom. He is the co-author of the book, Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo, and the author of Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games for MIT Press.

"What Is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part Two)

What criteria should we use to evaluate good and bad remixes?

I think that, as with any work of art, the criteria for judging whether a remix is 'good' or 'bad' is largely subjective and what some people passionately love, others will think is a complete waste of time. I believe there is no artistic work in existence that everyone on planet earth would unanimously agree is 'good.'

Having said that, for the purposes of the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, I have set some general criteria for the public and for the judges to use as guidelines when rating the videos. These are overall impact, which will account for 50% of the marks, creativity for 25% and communication for the remaining 25%. If you were to analyse a video remix that is generally accepted as being 'good', for example Titanic 2: the Surface by Robert Blankenheim, we can see that the video is exceptionally well produced, so much so that you could easily believe that is a genuine trailer for a new Titanic movie! The basic idea behind the piece is very clever and well executed on every level. Personally, I think that believability is a recurring theme in many of the most popular and well received video remixes. For these types of remixes, it is a huge challenge to convince the viewers that what they are watching is real. There is a long history of people messing with media channels to communicate a message effectively, e.g. Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast and I feel that speaking to an audience in a language that they are intimately familiar with, e.g. movie trailers, is an excellent way to communicate a message. The Adbusters movement have been 'culture-jamming' for decades, mostly in the medium of print, but I expect a lot of video remixed work to emerge in this niche in the future.

But what about 'bad' remixes? Well, it is fantastic to see that so many amateur video makers are trying their hand at producing video remixes, however, as with every art form, the ratio is usually about 10% quality, 90% garbage. The ratio holds true in the case of video remixes. Here is an example of a particularly poor effort, but hopefully the creator will stick at it and improve as they produce more work. Having said that, production skills are not necessarily the be all and end all. Sometimes, the idea is strong enough to bring the video popularity even if the production values are not 100%.

An interesting debate has sprung up around so-called 'YouTube Poop' videos. To some people, these types of videos seem to make no sense, are offensive and are even difficult to watch. People said similar things about punk. Personally, I think that YouTube Poop videos are some of the most potent examples of remixed videos out there, and although they may not be attempting to communicate a particular underlying message, bearing more resemblance to stream-of-consciousness poetry, they have their own artistic merit. But I am certain that many people would consider them to be 'bad' remixes.

The statement above implies that you think the current influx of remixes and recuts is a product of shifts in the technological environment. Yet, we could point to a much older history of cut-ups, collages, montages, scratch video, fan video, running back across much of the 20th century. Remix was part of 20th century life well before digital tools and platforms arrived. What factors do you think have given rise to our current remix culture?

I agree with you that remix itself is by no means a new phenomenon. In fact, it dates back as far as we can trace human history. The earliest example I am aware of is the anagram, which is essentially taking the building blocks of a word, i.e. the letters, remixing them into a new order that creates a new word and a secondary meaning and association by connecting the first word to the newly formed second word. There have been examples of remix in every creative art since time immemorial. For example, in art, the obvious one is collage. In music, folk music was spread by word of mouth, and so when one person would learn a new song from someone else, they would often apply their own variations to it, essentially remixing it to suit their own style.

In more recent times, in the history of recorded music, music remixes date back at least to the 1950's, when Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman remixed Orson Welle's War of the Worlds with various musical snippets. In the world of film and video, recuts and remixes have been in existence since the art of editing was invented. Some of the most well known filmmakers that experimented in the field of remix and montage as far back as the 1920s include the Russians, Sergei Eisenstein and his mentor Lev Kuleshov. Joseph Cornell and Hans Richter also experimented in the genre in the early part of the 20th Century.

The distinct difference between the work that was produced by these masters and the video remixes that we see today on Total Recut and YouTube, are that now the tools of production have been democratized. What was once an art form confined to professionals who could afford expensive film-making equipment and distribution companies with established networks and connections, is now affordable to the majority of creators in the western world. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection today can produce and distribute their work for costs close to zero. Every new computer comes shipped with editing software, video content is widely available on video sharing networks like YouTube and the Internet Archive, and it is easy to reach a potentially large audience by uploading your video to one of these sites.

The net result is that the medium is evolving. Video remix includes everything from movie trailer recuts, political parodies, music mash-ups, subvertisements, fan made vids, machinima, overdubs and many others. There is no doubt in my mind that many other sub-genres will evolve as more and more people begin to experiment in this area.

In your thesis, you suggest that video recuts are "stifled by overzealous copyright owners who are over-protective of their work." What can you tell us about current legal responses to the remix community? Are there any signs that the studios are becoming more accepting of remix culture as remixes become more widespread on sites like YouTube and are finding their way back into commercial media channels?

Of recent times there has been a serious crackdown on video sites like YouTube where copyright owners have made claims of copyright infringement and the videos have been taken down, in compliance with the DMCA. Unfortunately, many remixed videos that legitimately make fair use of copyrighted content are being caught in the crossfire of outright piracy. I feel it is very important to highlight the distinction here as this is possibly the number one reason why the remix community gets targeted and bullied by 'overzealous' copyright owners. If somebody rips an episode of Lost from DVD, for example, and uploads five ten minute segments of the episode to YouTube unchanged and without permission, this is piracy and should definitely not be condoned. ABC Studios would be completely within their rights to request that YouTube remove these infringing videos from their site. However, if someone were to sample small clips from various episodes of Lost, recut them, add effects and overlay a soundtrack from the classic 80's TV show The A-Team, this would clearly be a fair use of the copyrighted material.

Unfortunately, the filtering technology that has been developed to track copyrighted material cannot distinguish between these different types of videos, and fair use video remixes are being wrongfully taken down from YouTube every day. One of the problems here is that the creators of these ingenious videos are unaware that they are within their rights to file counter notifications against copyright infringement claims that they believe to be false. In my own case, I had three of my remix videos removed by the BBC, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, which led to my YouTube account being disabled. Three strikes and you're out. Each of the videos were less than three minutes long, and the use of copyrighted material in them was clearly fair use. I filed counter notification claims with each of the allegators through YouTube, which is a relatively straightforward process. The BBC conceded that my video was a fair use and the other two companies did not respond within the DMCA time limit and so my three videos were put back up and my account was reinstated.

I am certain that there are many other people out there who have had similar experiences but did not realise they could do anything to get their videos put back up. I would encourage anyone who feels that their work is fair use to file counter notifications and to make sure that their videos are put back online. Alternatively, they can upload them to Total Recut!

On a more positive note, I have noticed a trend among some of the larger media corporations that suggests that they are becoming more accepting of user generated remix videos that sample from their copyrighted material. Some, including Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and Warner Bros have even dabbled with remix contests of their own to coincide with the release of their movies including School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly and Rambo. We have also recorded a significant exponential increase in the number of video recuts being uploaded to the web every day and less being taken down, which suggests that more people are getting interested in the area and that copyright owners are beginning to realise the potential benefits of allowing, and possibly even encouraging their fans to play with the content they produce.

In my opinion, video remixes are a free form of advertising for copyright owners and also create more devoted fans of the original work. In a few years, we will all look back and it will be mind boggling to think that big media companies tried to stop fans of their content from creating remixed videos that actually served to promote the original work, as well as being entertaining pieces in themselves.

Your site features a space for political remixes. Do you see remix as an important form of political speech?

I personally feel that remix is one of the best ways for people to voice their opinions and increase their chances of being heard. What better way is there of communicating how you would like George Bush to act than to literally change the words that come out of his mouth? With the current build up to the presidential elections in the United States, we are seeing and hearing a lot of media surrounding the actions and words of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. A plethora of remixed videos have sprung up with Obama , Clinton and McCain as the subjects. I think that having the tools to be able to create videos like these and express personal opinions to a wide audience is extremely empowering for individual users in the digital age. Members of Obama's campaign realise the potential power of grass roots creativity and a video contest has been hosted this month by the folks at moveon.org with a view to creating a 30 second spot for the presidential candidate that will air on national television. No doubt, many of these will be video remixes and we look forward to seeing the finished pieces.

Many people use political parodies as a way to highlight the issues that particular politicians are facing and suggesting courses of action. When Tony Blair was considering his resignation as Prime Minister, a fantastic remix appeared illustrating Blair's internal debate. Another classic video that has done the rounds is the Blair Bush Endless Love remix. This video is interesting in that it pokes fun at the perceived notion of the apparently odd relationship between a submissive Tony Blair and a dominant George Bush.

I have tried my own hand at one or two political remixes in the past. Being from Ireland, I decided to poke a little fun at the two candidates for the Irish General elections last year, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, the two candidates for Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the country at the time. One video showed Enda Kenny as if he was auditioning for American Idol and coming up against a decidedly unimpressed Simon Cowell. The other clip showed Bertie Ahern as if he were pitching a business idea in the Dragons Den I think it is very important that citizens of a country can air their views about their political leaders, and I feel that video remix is one of the most powerful ways to do this.

What are your hopes for the future of remix culture? How do remixes relate to the larger Free Culture movement?

I see remix gradually becoming more mainstream and more widely accepted as a creative form in its own right. Ever more examples of commercialised remix are appearing on our TV and computer screens every day. Many people involved in remix culture detest the idea of the commercialisation of this type of work as they see it as a grass roots, perhaps even rebellious movement, and one that gives a voice to the individual. I don't see this going away. Even if a lot more commercial remix work is created, the tools that enable individuals to transform and recreate the media and culture around them and the new channels of free distribution that enable their work to reach huge audiences are here to stay. My hopes for the future of remix culture would be for this type of work to seep into all walks of life. I would love to see even more educational institutions adopting it as a technique of learning, for example, asking students to create a remixed video about George Washington rather than handing in a written report. In the professional arena, I would love to see more video remix artists being headhunted by studios based on the remix work they showcase online or being commissioned to create new work.

Before this can happen, however, remix artists need to stop being afraid of frivolous legal threats. A large number of remix artists are very careful about revealing their true identities online and use anonymous alter-egos for fear of being sued. I would hope that remix artists will eventually feel as though they don't need to do this anymore, as it could be stifling potential opportunities for them. The copyright issues surrounding remix work are a headache for everyone interested in freely expressing themselves using digital media. Of course, fair use enables the use of small samples of copyrighted material for non-commercial purposes, but I envisage new business models emerging around copyright cleared remix work in the not too distant future.

In terms of the larger Free Culture movement, there are many people and organisations doing fantastic work to help combat the ongoing problem of corporate greed that has seen the copyright term extended to a ridiculous degree in the latter half of the 20th century. Organisations such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Social Media, the Convergence Culture Consortium and FreeCulture.org are all doing incredible work to prevent the scales from tipping too far in the wrong direction and of course individuals, such as our judging panel for the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, provide invaluable insights through their written and spoken words that help to raise much needed awareness of the issues surrounding remix culture.

We are hosting the Total Recut Remix Challenge primarily to the same end, and we invite anyone with an interest in this area to enter the contest and help us to raise awareness of the changes that need to take place so that we can build a society where copyright owners are fairly rewarded for their artistic labours and artists can freely express themselves by drawing inspiration from the culture around them. Every voice counts.

"What is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part One)

Several weeks ago, I announced here that I was serving as part of a panel of other "remix experts" as judges for a video competition being hosted by the website, toralrecut.com. Participants are being asked to submit videos which address the question, "What is Remix Culture?" The contest is intended to help educate the public about the debates surrounding remix, copyright, and fair use. As someone currently developing a teacher's strategy guide for teaching remix in the context of high school literature classes, I am very interested to see what kinds of materials emerge from this competition. The submissions will become visible on the site soon and the public is being encouraged to help rank the submissions. In the spirit of sparking further conversation around the issues the contest is exploring, I asked Owen Gallagher, the mastermind behind TotalRecut, if he would respond to some questions about the contest and about remix culture more generally. Alas, his responses got lost in my dreaded spam filter and are just now seeing the light of day. In this two part conversation, he explains why he created the site and sponsored the contest, identifies some of his favorite videos, and offers some insights into the politics and aesthetics of remix video.

Here's a brief bio Owen shared with us:

Owen Gallagher (28) is a graphic, web and digital media designer, an accomplished musician and a graduate of the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland with a first class honours Masters degree in Design Communications. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he has been travelling around the United Kingdom and the United States for the past 12 months as part of the NCGE / Kauffman Foundation Global Scholars Entrepreneurship Program. Gallagher is the founder of TotalRecut.com, an online social networking community for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups that facilitates online collaboration between video artists. Total Recut has been shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards including the Golden Spiders Awards, the NICENT 25k Awards and the BBC Innovation Labs.

Gallagher is the CEO and Creative Director of GDG Interactive, a web design and development business based in Ireland. In his spare time, he dabbles in video art and has created a number of political video remixes that received significant media attention in his home country. He is an avid piano and guitar player and has composed and recorded over 100 songs as well as performing in various bands since he was 16. He is a qualified music teacher and has taught piano and guitar to a number of students. He has also acted as a part time Assistant Lecturer of Design at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland teaching web design, flash animation and digital video production.

Gallagher is passionately involved in remix culture and has a particular interest in Intellectual Property law as it applies to creative content. His Masters thesis, entitled 'Video Recuts and the Remix Revolution: Whose Rights Are Being Infringed?' explores some of the issues surrounding the appropriation of previously published content, focusing on the delicate balance between copyright and freedom of expression.

What can you tell us about your new contest? What are its goals? What kinds of videos are acceptable?

The Total Recut Video Remix Challenge is a contest that we are hosting to try to encourage people to think about the issues around remix culture and creating remixed media. We want people to create a short video remix that uses footage from any source to communicate the message: 'What is Remix Culture?' The video can be anything from 30 seconds to 3 minutes long. The idea of the contest is to produce a series of videos that raise awareness and help people to more clearly understand what is going on in the world of digital content creation, remix and intellectual property. Ideally, the videos will be educational and will communicate a clear message but we essentially want our entrants to be creative and portray what remix culture means to them. The prizes include a laptop computer loaded with all of the software needed to create high quality remixes, a digital camcorder, a digital media player and lots of Total Recut goodies.

The contest began taking entries in May and judging will begin in June. We have an exceptional judging panel of some of the elite thought-leading personalities involved in remix culture today including yourself, Larry Lessig, Pat Aufderheide, Kembrew McLeod, JD Lasica and Mark Hosler. The contest is open to everyone so I would encourage anyone who is even slightly interested in video remix to put a video together and enter the contest in May to be in with a chance of winning.

The Video Remix Challenge was an idea that developed out of my Masters project at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, which was very much focused on Remix Culture and intellectual property issues as applied to the digital creative arts, in particular, online video production. As part of the project, I developed a basic version of the Total Recut website and set up a small scale video remix contest where the idea was to create a 60 second PSA commercial using found footage to portray a particular theme e.g. Environmental Issues, Safe Sex or Drug Abuse. At the time, I was also working as a part time lecturer, teaching an interactive design class to undergraduate students at the University of Ulster, so I decided to use the students as guinea pigs and get them to produce a remixed video for their project, which had to be entered into my contest, as a requirement of their design brief. It worked like a charm and the end result was over thirty highly creative remixed videos on a diverse range of socially conscious issues which the students themselves rated and commented on, before a small judging panel decided on the final winners. Following the success of this contest and the ongoing development of Total Recut as a whole, I decided that I wanted to try and host a larger scale contest. My original idea was to try to open it up to other Universities in the U.K. and Ireland and build from there, but it has now scaled to the point where it is open to anyone who wants to enter. The basic premise of the Video Remix Challenge is to create a short form video remix that portrays what 'Remix Culture' means to you, using found footage from any source.

The reason this is such an interesting theme to pursue is because of the ongoing debate about copyright and freedom of expression in the developing landscape of user generated digital content. This is a debate that a lot of people feel very strongly about. There are extremists on both sides, some advocating the complete freedom of all content and others fighting tooth and nail to extend copyright terms and protect their assets. Then there are those who are trying to seek a middle ground - a balance between these two opposing views. This is where Total Recut and this contest reside.

The current landscape places too much emphasis on the copyright owner's control over how their content is used and leaves little room for new artists to exercise their rights to freedom of expression. However, a free-for-all where all content is free would result in no compensation for copyright owners, which would mean less incentives for people to produce new creative works. The balanced approach enables copyright owners to make money from their work, but also enables other artists to freely use samples from the entire pool of creative works to express themselves. This contest encourages people to draw inspiration from the culture around them, from the culture they grew up with and to use these images and sounds to produce something innovative with a brand new meaning.

The goals of the contest are to generate a number of creative video pieces that will help to raise awareness of these issues and perhaps help to educate people about the true nature of copyright, which is to promote the production of new creative works for society at large, by providing creators with a degree of protection over their work for a limited time. This message has been twisted and distorted almost beyond recognition by the likes of Disney and some of the larger corporations that own the copyrights to most of the content out there. Instead of creative works existing to benefit society, some of the corporations feel that creative works exist to make more money for them, for as long as possible. That is why they lobby for copyright term extensions and unfortunately, they have historically been successful in these attempts.

Ironically, many of Disney's most successful works are based on Public Domain stories, which they would not have been able to create in the first place, had the original copyright owners tried to exercise the kind of control that Disney now displays over their works. There is an excellent educational remix video created by Eric Faden of Bucknell University, that uses short samples from Disney movies to communicate messages about copyright and fair use. Here's the link.

In terms of the types of videos that are acceptable in our Video Remix Challenge, we are encouraging our entrants to be aware of, and exercise their fair use rights. The Center for Social Media at the American University of Washington have some excellent resources and guidelines. We are also encouraging people to use Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed material in their work, many of which can be found at the Internet Archive and Creative Commons respectively.

The videos will first be rated by the public and whittled down to the ten best videos, which will then be given to the judges to decide on three winners. We are very excited to see what kind of work will be produced. Going by my previous contest, there will be quite a mix of quality in terms of production skill, but sometimes the best ideas simply shine through.

Tell us more about Total Recut. How did this site come about? What are your overarching goals? What kinds of resources does it offer the remix community?

I remember very distinctly when I came up with the idea for Total Recut. I was lying out in the sun in Portugal, contemplating what I might consider putting forward as a proposal for my then upcoming Masters Degree, and the idea came to me. I wanted to create a collaborative environment for artists to be able to take existing media, remix it in some way and produce something completely new.

My interest in remix stemmed from an early age - I have always been into collage and mixed media and studied Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland before undertaking my Design degree in Donegal, but even before that, I always remember playing with toys as a young boy. My brother and I were the proud owners of many Star Wars figures and vehicles, Transformers, Thundercats, MASK, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Action Man and a whole host of other toys from various movies and TV shows. Our games always consisted of us combining these different realities and storylines, mixing them up and making up our own new narratives. It was not unusual to have Optimus Prime fighting side by side with Luke Skywalker against Mumm-Ra and Skeletor. So, from a very early age it seemed completely normal for me to combine the things I loved in new ways that seemed entertaining to me. I think that my generation and those younger than me have grown up expecting this sort of interaction with their media, on their own terms.

The idea that some corporation can tell you that you are not allowed to play with media seems ridiculous and wrong. Unfortunately, there are many who seem to believe that their control over how content is used should be absolute and unquestioned. I created Total Recut as a way to gather people together who believe that we, as a society, should be able to freely build on the works of the past. If this is successfully prevented by corporations, the practical result is that people will stop making new things out of old things for fear of being sued. Innovation will chill and the overall quality and quantity of new work being produced will be lower. Luckily, there are millions of people who refuse to accept the corporate line and they are continuing to produce new work, despite the veiled shallow threats by overzealous copyright owners.

So, when I was considering how to practically put a community of this nature together, my initial idea was to create a site for digital artists - I had the idea of taking public domain paintings and posting the images on the site, cutting them up into squares and then asking participants to choose a square each and reinterpret it in their own style. The remixed square would be uploaded to the site again and the end result would be a very interesting collaborative collage of styles inspired by the work of an artistic master.

Through my Masters research, I realised that one of the hottest technologies at the time was online video and so I decided to refocus the project to centre on remixed video work. I discovered a thriving underground community of video producers who were creating work as diverse as movie trailer recuts and machinima to remixed political parody and mashed-up music videos. One of the first remixed videos I saw was a movie trailer recut, created by Robert Ryang, of the Stanley Kubrick movie, 'The Shining', which casts the classic horror in a completely new light. Another amazing video remix that I came across early on was a political piece created by Chris Morris where segments of George Bush's State of the Union speech were recut to create a new narrative. Some of the most technically accomplished and entertaining remixes I have seen were created by a Parisian remix artist called Antonio da Silva, known online as AMDS Films. He created a number of remixes, one of the best of which is Neo vs Robocop.

So, I set about creating a site 'for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts and mash-ups that provides resources and collaborative opportunities for video remix artists in a social networking environment.' The end result was Total Recut, but the site is constantly developing. Each week, something new is added or changed based on the feedback from our members and advisors. The main focus at the moment is the Video Remix Challenge but we have a plethora of new ideas and potential directions of where we are going to steer the site in the future.

The site works on a number of different levels. Primarily it is a place where people can find and watch entertaining or thought-provoking remixed videos. Our current categories are Movie Trailer Recuts, Political, Machinima, Advertising, Educational, Music Videos and Others. This category list is by no means exhaustive and we are looking at adding to it in the near future.

Secondly, the site acts as a showcase for video remix artists, to enable them to put their work in front of the eyes of a receptive audience. We also provide a growing library of Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed video work for people to download and remix in their own projects. We are working on developing our Tutorials section, which will eventually become a 'Remix Academy' with courses and grades for people to learn everything they need to know to produce a video remix. Information and links to literature and websites about remix culture, intellectual property issues and key players in the scene are included in the Remix Culture section. We also provide remix tools where users can gain access to video editing software, conversion tools and video downloading software. The community section includes a blog, forums, user profiles and job opportunities. Virtually every aspect of the site is set up to be similar to a wiki environment, which essentially means that all registered members have the ability to add things to the site or update information about any of the content.

With regard to long term goals for Total Recut, we would love to build up the community to the point where we are considered the primary online location for people to find the very best in video remix work and talent. We intend to host more regular contests and provide links between our remix artist members and potential employers. As the site scales up, we intend to take it global and offer a multilingual version of the site to accommodate the Asian and European markets and eventually become a truly global community website for remix culture.

You write, "Video recuts...are a new art-form enabled by the convergence of emerging technologies." How do you respond to those who ask whether remixes and recuts are not creative because they build on the works of others rather than working with original material?

This is an area in which I have a huge amount of interest and have considered pursuing as a research area for my PhD - the origin of originality. It is of particular interest to me because I am what I consider to be an 'original content creator.' I write songs and lyrics using nothing but my mind, a pen and paper and a guitar. Are my songs original? If I use a combination of different chords and a variety of words to create sentences that rhyme, am I not using elements that have been used by other people in the past? What makes my songs original, in my opinion, is the unique way in which I composite the words, chords and melody. In this way, every song is created using the basic building blocks of language and music, but combined in a slightly different way.

Coming from a Graphic Design background, I often come across other designers who are adamant that their work is completely original. The nature of a Graphic Designer's work is to combine elements from different sources in creative ways to produce new pieces of work. Similar to a collage artist who takes pieces of different photos, images etc and brings them together to create new meanings. Is the finished piece not original because it is made up of building blocks from a variety of sources? In the same way, when a video remix artist combines pieces of video from different sources in new ways to create new meanings, is this not original and innovative?

Yes, remix artists build on the works of others. But do so-called creators of 'original material' not build on the works of others also? Would you consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to be an original piece of work? Even though the idea was based on a story by William Painter, which was based on a poem by Arthur Brooke? No matter how far back you go in the origin of a piece of work, you will find that the idea was built on or inspired by the work of someone else before it. I consider remixed videos to be original works. The finished piece is more than the sum of its parts.

Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (Part Two)

How important do you think hardcore fans are to the success of genre entertainment? How do such fans create value around your properties?

As exemplified by the efforts of many recent genre producers, the cultivation, validation and celebration of fandom are vital to the success of any genre rollout. It's interesting to note that two major genre releases in 2007, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising and The Golden Compass were both released with either limited or no transmedia components designed to immerse a potential fan base into the fantastical worlds of the films--no one was indoctrinated into the fiction--and both failed spectacularly.

Genre fans are passionate. Passion is the least expensive and most powerful driver behind any endeavor. Passion can punch holes through the wall of noise that is media culture, it generates curiosity and leadership, and the passion of a base of fans can help to keep producers and creatives "honest"--forcing them to remain true to the core messages, themes, mythology and characterizations of the story world. Passion generates value, because it draws attention and is often quite infectious.

What do you see as the downsides of generating such passionate consumers?

On the other hand, passion can be blind and judgmental. Fan zeal can threaten to "box in" a property, potentially stunting its growth. It can generate negative "buzz" around a project, which can leak into media coverage and plant seeds of doubt in the general audience base. Despite the attachment of a well known director in George Miller for Warner Bros. upcoming Justice League super hero production, for example, many fans have expressed doubt around casting and story issues that have leaked to the fan media. These have raised concerns in the studio strong enough to postpone the start of production until after the Writers Guild of America strike ended. The delay allowed for the production to take a lower profile and for script and casting choices to be amended. Whether or not this will help the production remains to be seen.

As some of these genres have become more commercially viable, the San Diego Comic Con has emerged as an important media marketplace. Can you speak to the role this gathering plays in the marketing of your properties?

Comic Con International in San Diego plays a more and more pivotal role in heralding, marketing and launching new genre efforts. In the midst of negotiating with executives at The Walt Disney Company for a job working with one of their largest franchises, Starlight Runner took them on a tour of the Comic Con exhibition floor. Many of the "worlds" we helped to develop were on spectacular display: Mattel's Hot Wheels universe, the fantasy realms of Magic: The Gathering, high priced back issues of Valiant Comics, and the announcements for new video games and comic books based on Turok and our own "Team GoRizer" at Disney's own booth! Suffice to say, a deal was quickly sealed!

Each year, Comic Con attracts well over 100,000 "gatekeepers," fans of niche, cult or genre entertainment who make it their business to spread the word about the newest and coolest content to their friends and acquaintances both in their home communities and on the Internet. It used to be that one of these gatekeepers would have a circle of five to ten contacts back home to whom he or she would convey what was best about the convention. Now in the age of social networking and pop culture web portals, that number has multiplied exponentially. Add to this the mass media coverage given to Comic Con and content producers can reach untold millions through it.

The Christian community might be read as another kind of niche public for media properties -- often alienated from mainstream content, deeply interested in providing alternative forms of entertainment for their families. What are the challenges of reaching these consumers, and can their tastes be reconciled by the demands of the mass audience?

Like any niche audience, the Christian community wants to enjoy entertainment that reflects their values and sensibilities. Interestingly, the classic Hollywood ethos reflects Judeo-Christian values: good usually wins out over evil, the hero triumphs after embracing the just and moral path. The problem is actually rooted in how the studios choose to communicate with them.

When Disney and Walden Media reached out to the Christian community to promote The Chronicles of Narnia, what was interesting was that this was a property filled with supernatural beings, witches, magic and violence. However, the studio played up the film's allegory as evocative of the stories and themes of the New Testament.

Quite the opposite happened with The Golden Compass, another children's film that also portrayed supernatural beings, witches, magic and violence. Instead of bravely strategizing a plan and communicating to the Christian community that the film could be used as a tool to discuss vital issues such as faith, false prophets and the abuse of religious power, New Line Cinema chose to downplay those elements of the film and avoid contact with religious leaders. The result was suspicion and distaste for the film among smaller Christian organizations that leaked into the mass media, creating unease with the film among the general population. The film failed in North America.

In short, the entertainment industry is still grappling with how to properly market broad content to the Christian community niche, let alone content specifically designed to appeal to their personal experience.

To extend the religious metaphor of "cult media," do you see cult fans as playing a particularly important role in proselytizing for the content, "evangelizing" the brand?

Fan "apostles" often play an instrumental role in spreading the word and drawing attention to niche content. Many studios and publishers of genre entertainment are currently developing programs to secure relationships with the fan community (or various subsections thereof). While this is not easy to do and often brings on headaches large companies would rather avoid, it is becoming inevitable. After all, without evangelists, how can new religions (or tentpole franchises) spread?

Some have suggested that media producers with strong niche followings might be able to develop alternative distribution models for their entertainment content, marketing their properties directly to the public through subscriptions or downloads, rather than negotiating with networks or film studios. How realistic do you think this scenario is within the current marketplace? What do you think are the obstacles of establishing such a direct relationship between producers and their fans?

There has never been a better time to explore and establish alternative distribution models for niche entertainment content, but these opportunities are still not easy to exploit and may not last forever. It takes a cocktail of money, talent, timing and pure luck to build a major head with direct digital distribution of entertainment content, particularly if your resources are limited compared with those of a Hollywood studio or entertainment firm.

Of course, we've seen recording artists (Coldplay), independent filmmakers (The Blair Witch Project) and amateur content producers (Ask a Ninja) do just that, but it's still a long shot and remarkable resourcefulness is necessary to cut through the noise enough to generate global distribution that generates a reasonable return.

Starlight Runner views alternative distribution models as a means to launch a new property, particularly one with "cult" qualities, in an effort to build buzz, develop a fan base and establish proof of concept. This is a killer combination that can help producers leverage more equity and creative control over their properties after larger partners such as movie studios or media conglomerates move in.

The Nickelodeon smash TV series The Naked Brothers Band, for example, started out as a low-budget indie film making the rounds at small film festivals, before the producers established a web site that offered the film's songs as downloads and sparked a modest but intensely loyal fan following. Nickelodeon took note and granted the production a sweet deal in return for the rights.

Even now, tools and models are being devised that will more readily enable niche content producers to connect directly with their potential audience. Fans want to participate and express themselves, and producers must accommodate them with structures that will allow for guided user-generated content, story material that dovetails with the current storylines set in-canon, and perhaps one day, the opportunity to touch and interact with the canon itself.

Talking Transmedia: An Interview With Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (part one)

Jeff Gomez, the chief executive officer of Starlight Runner entertainment, spoke at Futures of Entertainment last fall as part of a panel discussion on Cult Media, which also included transmedia creator Danny Bilson, Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander, and Gordon Tichell from Walden Media, the company which produces the Narnia films. Not surprisingly, given I was moderator, the session quickly became a geek out festival mostly centered around issues of transmedia entertainment. You can enjoy the podcast of the event here. As we were preparing for the session, we distributed a set of questions to the speakers, some of which were covered during the panel, some of which were not. Gomez recently wrote to send me his further reflections on many of those questions in the hopes to continue public conversation around recent developments in transmedia entertainment.

Here's a bio on Gomez:

As the Chief Executive Officer of Starlight Runner Entertainment, Jeff Gomez

is a leading creator of highly successful fictional worlds. He is an expert

at cross-platform intellectual property development and transmedia

storytelling, as well as at extending niche properties such as toys,

animation or video game titles into the global mass market.

After establishing himself in the tabletop adventure game industry, Jeff

helped to develop the super hero universe of Valiant Comics, adapting its

characters and storylines into videogames for Acclaim Entertainment. Jeff¹s

first transmedia effort was for the Wizards of the Coast trading card game

Magic: The Gathering, where he dramatized the mythology of the cards in an

elaborate storyline across a series of comic book titles, web sites and

videogames.

Jeff conceived and co-produced one of the most successful transmedia

storylines of the decade with Mattel's Hot Wheels: World Race and Hot Wheels

Acceleracers comic books, video games, web content and animated series for

television. He has gone on to work with such blockbuster properties as

Pirates of the Caribbean and Fairies for The Walt Disney Company, James

Cameron¹s Avatar for 20th Century Fox, and Happiness Factory for The

Coca-Cola Company.

Jeff has also spoken at M.I.T.'s Futures of Entertainment conference and

given his seminar, Creating Blockbuster Worlds: Developing Highly Successful

Transmedia Franchises, to the Game Developers Conference, New York State Bar

Association, International Game Developers Association and the Producers

Guild of America, as well as to such corporations as Disney, Fox, Microsoft,

Coca-Cola, Scholastic, Wieden+Kennedy, and Hasbro.

Jeff Gomez can best be reached at jeff@starlightrunner.com.

Let's start by examining the concept of "cult media." What does this phrase mean to you, and do you think it accurately describes the kinds of projects you've worked on? Why or why not?

To me "cult media" is exemplified by the slow crumbling of traditional media content aimed at huge swathes of the population, down to the more contemporary approach of designing content to engage subsections of that population or even smaller "niches."

My company Starlight Runner works on "cult media" in that we work on projects that already have mass appeal or have the potential to reach mass appeal, but what those projects always have to begin with is a specific genre appeal that almost guarantees an extremely loyal core "niche" audience.

Starlight Runner also consults with movie studios, comic book and fiction publishers, and videogame developers to take their niche or "cult" content and prepare it for extension across multiple media platforms. In this case, we are acting as transmedia storytellers, developing and producing "cult" properties for exposure to a much larger audience.

The idea of cult media historically referred to films that appealed to a fairly small niche of consumers. But many genres, which once were regarded as cult -- fantasy, science fiction, superheroes -- have emerged as increasingly mainstream. What's changing? What accounts for the mainstreaming of niche media?

There are five factors that seem to be contributing to the "coming out" of cult media:

1. Baby boomers and gen-X'ers weaned on the explosion of pop culture spurred by the proliferation of television and movies in the aftermath of World War II have come of age and taken control of the entertainment industry. Naturally, they have a strong desire to recreate what they loved and share it with others who've had similar cultural experiences.
2. Genre product such as science fiction serials and horror films, which had been relegated to Saturday matinees and second or third billing in movie theaters, could now be given A-list treatment. The new moguls and visionaries could now apply top grade production value to this content, and hire marquee talent for it, secure in the knowledge that genre fare is more than likely to turn a profit. In the international market, a growing hunger for action and genre content could boost domestic failures into profitability.
3. Attention to quality extended to storytelling. Filmmakers, comic book writers, genre novelists and their ilk were better educated and more interested in stories that conveyed better character development and stronger verisimilitude. Star Wars was fueled by the work of Joseph Campbell.
4. Genre content became more reflective of the mood and politics of the time, and therefore resonated more powerfully with mass audiences. Note the nuclear spawned monsters of the 1950s, the "acid trip" sci-fi of the '60s, the terrifying "evil children" of the early '70s, the "gee whiz" hope ofStar Wars and Close Encounters later that decade, the political morass and moral ambiguity of Battlestar Galactica currently.
5. Like no other time in history, devotees of this type of content have complete access to one another via the Internet. Fans whose imaginations are fired by these stories make a deep and lasting connection with them. They become "specialists," intensely knowledgeable of the property, the way that sports fanatics memorize the accomplishments and statistics of their favorite teams. These fans become "apostles" for the property, devoting time, effort and creativity in celebrating the story and characters, collecting ephemera and licensed extensions of the brand, celebrating it with others of their ilk. They form the property's core fan base, which in turn fuels the continued success of the brand.

What do you see as the challenges of generating content that appeals to both niche and mass publics at the same time?

Like any good story, content designed for genre-lovers or niche markets should contain strong characters, evocative issues and clear, accessible throughlines. Story arcs must be designed from the outset to feel complete and deliver on their promise.

Also importantly, the audience needs to be able to appreciate and enjoy the content as it is presented solely on the driving platform of the trans-media production. With Heroes, for example, the driving platform is the television series. Much of the success of the franchise hinges on the audience finding the show exciting, intelligible and complete.

What the producers of Heroes are doing quite well is in providing fans of the show with a far more expansive experience of the fictional universe of the show on the complementary or orbiting platforms of the trans-media production. This additional content is presented in the form of web sites, graphic novels, prose fiction, etc., and this material all takes place within the canon of the Heroes chronology. So fans are provided with the level of depth, verisimilitude, sophistication and complexity that they crave, but casual viewers are not required to seek it out to enjoy the show.

When the two approaches cross over, we have seen the potential for pop culture phenomena. The media's coverage of "The Lost Experience" for example, conveyed the fact that there was a greater architecture to the fictional universe of the Lost TV series than was originally suspected. The excitement generated by the trans-media components of the show helped to boost broad interest in it. The same can be said of similar approaches for both the Batman: The Darknight and Cloverfield feature films.

Also powerful on the home front, as families gather to watch Heroes, a teen fan of the show might recognize a peripheral character making her first appearance on a given night's episode as one he originally read about in the online comic. So our fan takes on the role of gatekeeper for the show, filling in family and friends on the backstory of the character, and giving them a greater appreciation of the show with his "exclusive" knowledge, and making the whole experience more entertaining.

In short, depth and complexity are built around the show, rather than weighing it down by presenting it front and center.

What kinds of trade-offs have to occur in order to broaden the appeal of media properties?

Studios and entertainment companies are now learning that fewer and fewer trade-offs are necessary to broaden the appeal of niche or "cult media" properties. Contemporary audiences are now primed for high quality genre entertainment across all media platforms. So long as marketing efforts place focus on a driving platform, the launch platform and complementary content can be used to build anticipation, educate audience "gatekeepers" about the property, and enrich the overall experience.

There may be trade-offs, however, when it comes to the level of depth and complexity of the core property and how interdependent the driving platform content is with complementary content. The Wachowski Brothers ran into difficulty with the mass audience reception of the second and third Matrix films, because the films were hard to understand without a working familiarity with the characters and storylines of the orbiting platforms (graphic novels, video games, direct-to-video animation). Hence, at this point in the evolution of transmedia storytelling, it is still vital to present a full and complete entertainment experience within each component of the rollout.

It should be noted that niche productions such as alternate reality games don't tend to bother with these distinctions, trusting the sophistication and intense loyalty of their audience to follow plotlines and story nodes back and forth across multiple media platforms almost indiscriminately. I believe that some day soon, web-based alternate reality games and experiences will evolve into much more accessible and dynamic productions, playing a vital role in transmedia storytelling.

What are the risks involved in alienating the base of your audience?

Franchises are built on the energy and loyalty of their hardcore fan bases. While these bases are often a fraction of the size of the total audience, they are indispensable, because they are vocal, passionate and active. A tiny fraction of the genre television series Jericho sent tons of jars of peanuts to the network that had just cancelled the program--moving them to reinstate the series. A small group of fans that gathered at conventions and shared amateur publications centered on the original Star Trek series managed to bridge the period between that series' cancellation and the Star Wars-inspired relaunch of the franchise in the late 1970s.

When the producers of the television series Enterprise publicly stated that the show was being designed for a much wider audience than previous incarnations of Star Trek, and exhibited this intention by altering the shows music cues, pandering to sexual titillation and (perhaps most egregiously) ignoring at will the established continuity and thematic tone of the fictional universe, the result was a gradual erosion of the franchise's core fan base. Without the approval and loyalty of "Trekkers" there would be no reason for the greater audience to stick around.

The original Crow graphic novel and feature film generated an extremely loyal fan base. But with the second feature, producers chose to ignore the fictional rules and tenets set down by the original work, and so the franchise experienced the first of what would become many fractures. Dubbing the property an "anthology franchise" that could be wildly altered based on the vision of individual artists and storytellers, the producers continued to build and deconstruct The Crow into smaller and smaller pieces, each with its own dwindling following. They chose to place the needs of their artists above the integrity of the mythology of the universe--a mythology that the fan base deeply cared about. The property now languishes in limbo.

Children as Storytellers: The Making of TikaTok (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you an interview with CMS alum Neal Grigsby and MIT Media Lab alum Orit Zuckerman, two of the key players in a new startup company, TikaTok, which is working to encourage children to create their own books and share them with other young readers. This time, we get a bit more personal as the two share their sense of how their MIT education contributed to their current projects. Your site also seems to promote opportunities for collaboration between young authors and illustrators. Is this a way of introducing young people to the world of collective intelligence?

Neal: It certainly is, and although it was always on our road map to add this feature, necessity made us move it up the schedule. Our users demanded it. Drawing, and getting an illustration up on the site, can be a creative and technical challenge for many. The team went back and forth for a very long time about the possibility of providing a digital drawing tool before finally coming to the conclusion that it was a bad idea for several reasons. But if you could use the illustrations that other kids had already provided and pledged to the community, if only until a time that your own drawings would be ready, it would really help.

Now we are seeing writing and illustrating as potentially two separate modes of participation, and it is quite exciting. Of course there will always be children who enjoy writing more than illustrating, and vice versa, and this gives both groups the ability to engage deeply on the site and not feel like they're missing a big part of the experience. I also suspect that for many users their first experience with collaboration will be almost accidental: they will use someone's illustration, or someone will use theirs, and the system will automatically attribute the illustration credit. And then once those two kids see the power of this passive collaboration, it may pave the way for a more deliberate collaboration like co-authorship of the text, which the site also supports, or even "massively multiplayer" co-authorship with a large group.

It is certainly possible that we will provide even more modes of participation in the future--one could easily imagine introducing analogs to the traditional roles of editor, copy editor, layout and design artist, and even publicist--but we haven't determined yet which of these would be the most meaningful to our community.

In a "Mother's Welcome," Sharon Kan suggests that this project emerged from the experience of "two mothers who wanted to create a place where children can write, illustrate, publish and print their own books." What specific experiences did you have as mothers which pushed you to start this company?

Orit: As mothers you see your children grow and their brains develop. It is one of the most fulfilling experiences to look at the world from a child's view. From very young age children try to express themselves in pictures and in stories. When I sat with my daughter and we created a story together, she knew exactly what she wanted to say and draw; she enjoyed creating a story and was very happy when it was presented to the world by her proud parents. Even though it wasn't storytelling as we see in books that are written by adults, the ideas that come out and the simplicity of the storyline was very interesting. I also noticed that through kindergarten she was always encouraged to draw, but when she went to first grade the emphasis went to reading and writing only, and all that talent of telling stories by pictures was neglected. Then I looked at my daughter's bookshelf. She loves books, yet all of her books were written by adults, edited by adults, and published by adults with adult priorities in mind. Why aren't there books for kids by kids? They clearly tell stories differently but no one publishes it? This is what led us to think that creating a platform where kids can tell their stories, bind them into real books, and be active in a community of book lovers would be a great thing to build.

Neal, you are in the process of becoming a father yourself. How is that impacting your perception of this project? What would you say in a "Father's Welcome" to the site?

Neal: In an interesting coincidence, the day that I learned I was becoming a father was the same day that we launched the private alpha release of the site. So you could say that both baby and website have been gestating for about the same amount of time. As you might expect it has been an incredibly busy and exciting time, and I approach the future with a sense of deep responsibility but also optimism.

Since learning of my impending fatherhood, I have been following blogs like Parent Hacks and GeekDad, and have been inspired by the ways those sites integrate this resurgent DIY culture with parenthood. From the stereotypes, one might expect a geeky parent to be particularly disengaged or self-absorbed, but these blogs almost show geek parents as the best hope for our future; they show passionate and caring parents who involve their children in projects of investigation, exploration, and invention.

If I were to write a "Father's Welcome," then, I would express my hope that the families who use our site embrace the opportunities it provides for parent and child to share a creative experience together. I am fully aware that, especially when he becomes a teenager, computers and the Internet will become tools of autonomy for my son. The old man will be embarrassingly uncool, as it is my destiny to become, and he will forge his online identity largely outside my direct supervision. Many sites for young children already reinforce this model, requiring the parent only for his blanket permission or his credit card. I hope on Tikatok a parent can hone a different facet of his relationship with his children: he can assist, collaborate, and inspire.

Orit, you recently completed a degree at the MIT Media Lab. Can you describe the work you did through the lab and what you learned there which has contributed to the current venture?

Orit: Part of my research in the media lab was creating a unique communication system for kids to involve remote relatives with their daily routines. Communication systems as we know them were designed for business use, later on they were adapted to home use, but without any changes to the basic design. Looking at what children need to communicate led to the development of a very unique video system that created contextual video correspondence between relatives. For example, a grandmother would read a story to her grandchild on the other side of the world; and then the grandson would get that message when he went to bed. The system would know the right time to connect between the relatives and thus create a more meaningful connection between them. Looking at things from the user's point of view creates a different product all together. With Tikatok, I tried looking at storytelling from a childs point of view and create something that would be easy and fun to use.

Neal, you recently completed a Masters through the Comparative Media Studies Program. Can you describe the work you did with us and how it has contributed to the current venture?

Neal: All of my work at CMS was united by the program's commitment to multidisciplinary thinking, and for putting theory into practice. It was really invaluable experience to me as I began work on Tikatok.

The research project I worked most on was the Project for New Media Literacies. As your regular readers well know, it is a project very much created to address the challenges of participatory culture. As a graduate student researcher it was my responsibility to create educational media and associated curricula that would illuminate media production practices for a youth audience. I produced materials around blogging and science fiction authorship (using BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow as an exemplar), public art and graffiti, Wikipedia, and video games. The project forced me to think of creative ways to teach both the practical and ethical dimensions of media production, and that experience has certainly come in handy for designing materials that engage and instruct our users. The project also trained me to see these processes of creation and expression not only as individual processes, but as social process that occur within a context. This perspective has frequently come in handy when, as a team, we discuss new features and priorities for the company. The community illustration database is the perfect example. Do we solve the problem of illustration uploading with a tool that allows individual children to create digital drawings instantly? Or do we provide a more powerful way for kids to work together and take advantage of their unique abilities? My work with NML helped me provide an informed opinion on this decision and others.

I also worked briefly at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab as the design lead for a team of Singaporean and MIT students charged with creating a multiplayer video game for mobile phones. GAMBIT really prepared me for the kind of rapid, iterative product development within a small team that is characteristic of many startups, including our own. My GAMBIT experience also gave me a heightened appreciation for the extreme importance of user interface design and QA. I believe that video games really have some of the best user interfaces of any interactive media. There are design principles common to video games that designers of websites and virtual worlds should ignore at their own peril. The multidisciplinary approach I learned at CMS has allowed me to recognize relevant connections between these different media modes.

Finally, there was my academic work. My thesis explored "Narrative of Adolescence Across Media" and its final chapter, which imagined video games as a platform for a new kind of player co-authored coming-of-age story, articulates many of the same goals that we are trying to meet with Tikatok. For someone whose thesis was inspired by Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, in which a young girl is aided in her development by, essentially, a digital platform for collaborative storytelling, it has been exciting to bring my research to bear on one of the closest real-world examples of such a platform that I have encountered.

What has been the biggest surprise as you've explored the intersection between these two MIT-based approaches to media?

Neal: The biggest surprise to me, I suppose, is how compatible the two approaches have been. If I were to believe the Media Lab stereotype, it would be that the folks there put too much faith in technological solutions. Certainly there is a huge technological optimism behind projects like the One Laptop Per Child, and it's important to peel away the layers of hyperbole to assess its potential impact. In starting a new company, it puts you in the position of having to promote yourself and your ideas, and it can be tempting to let your high aspirations get the best of you and let the hype flow unchecked. But I have never found myself battling Orit over unrealistic expectations. I think because the project is so grounded in her commitment to making something cool and worthwhile for her children, it makes her a sharp judge of what really works vs. what we want to work. She's not making something for "the children," she's making something for her children.

And while Orit works on a very intuitive level, the CMS approach has allowed me to bring a multitude of theoretical frameworks to the project, and helped me articulate what we are trying to achieve, sometimes to people on the outside, but sometimes even to the team. In that sense it is a nice marriage of a more bottom-up, creative approach with a top-down, analytical approach. But even that is a simplification - I think we both bring creative and analytical skills. As MIT media scholars I think we definitely speak the same language.

Orit Zuckerman - Co-founder and CTO

Orit has designed online communities since 1996, when she worked for Gizmoz Networks. In 1999, Orit co-founded uTOK Inc., a San Francisco-based Internet startup that created a "decentralized blogging community." She designed the community product, and supervised the R&D team. Most recently, Orit earned her Master's Degree from the MIT Media Lab, where she designed and implemented an innovative communication system for children. Orit has also exhibited her interactive portraiture installations in Milan, Monaco, Boston, British Telecom headquarters, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

Neal Grigsby - Director of Online Community

Neal Grigsby worked for seven years at LookSmart.com, where he managed volunteers on a user-generated Web directory, co-managed partnerships and developed content for FindArticles, and designed education-themed search verticals. Neal recently earned his Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where he produced educational media for the Macarthur-funded Project for New Media Literacies, and

designed video games for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Neal also

holds a BA from UC Berkeley.

From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with human rights advocate Sam Gregory, who I met at USC's DIY Media event earlier this year. In this second part, Gregory explains why Witness is creating its own video distribution site, discusses the role of remix in the realm of human rights activism, and explores what it might mean to "do it with others" rather than "do it yourself." Tell us more about The Hub. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of creating a platform specifically for distributing human rights videos as opposed to tapping into the power of shared or general portals like YouTube?

The Hub, WITNESS' most recent project tries to address what's missing in the online media sharing ecosystem for human rights activists. It's in Beta at the moment, and launched on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2007. In our first four months of quiet beta, we've had in the region of five million views of media, and going on eight hundred items of media uploaded.

It's envisioned as the human rights channel for the online community, as a place where anyone can upload human rights-related footage, share it with others and self-organize into affinity groups, comment on material there, and most importantly access online tools for action, and guidance on how to turn their video into compelling advocacy material. It places a strong emphasis on security both for the uploader and for those filmed, on providing contextualization for imagery wherever possible, and also seeks to provide normative leadership around the impacts of participatory media creation and distribution in oppressive contexts. For me, that option to act is critical. There's nothing worse from the activists' point-of-view than risking your life to film a piece of footage, and to then to have that experience dismissed. From the viewer's point-of-view there's nothing worse than being exposed to scenes of misery, and to have no way to take action. It's deeply draining and de-motivating for people to watch and not be able to act, it misses the opportunity to engage support, and it contributes to the compassion fatigue that we all already experience.

We're not in favor of walled gardens, and to create something like that would be to waste so much of the potential of the networked online environment. So why not just use YouTube? (or Daily Motion? LiveLeak? etc.). In fact, many of the videos on the Hub have also been placed by activists on YouTube (it is possible to use YouTube or any other commercial or non-commercial site to host content, and then embed it on the Hub), and in many cases we can see real value in drawing on the mass public reached by YouTube. The power of YouTube is that it is increasingly becoming the most prominent platform (at least in the global North, and for English-language media) for video online - although finding an appropriate human rights video can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. From an advocacy perspective, we can see how IF a video achieves either prominent placement, or takes off virally on YouTube it can take off in terms of public prominence. Similarly for many non-governmental advocacy organizations that are trying to engage a general public either with a single video or via a channel, YouTube is likely to be the first place that public will look. And we also recognize that YouTube is a pushing-out point for footage that finds homes in many other subculture-specific media systems, including human rights, where it is embedded and re-contextualized - I particularly appreciate Michael Wesch's commentary on this.

However, we see some significant current limitations on YouTube as a platform for human rights activism. For some publics - namely concerned citizens on a global scale concerned about security, looking to ensure that their footage galvanizes action, and suspicious of corporate and government surveillance, it may not be the best choice. These issues of concerns include questions of being a small fish in a big pond raised by the Center for Social Media's report last year, opportunities for meaningful community and to generate action, and the dilemmas raised by the Transmission network and others of commercial exploitation of human rights imagery, safety and security for the uploaders and filmed, surveillance by corporations and state, inflexibility in redistribution, downloading and sharing, and where editorial control is vested.

To illustrate one of these points, human rights video is generally among the least-viewed content on YouTube amidst the proliferation of music videos, parodies and commentary. A March 2007 Center for Social Media study found (though this was before the launch of the YouTube Nonprofit Channel which has increased slightly the visibility of social issue videos, and the pro-active work of the Citizen Tube editor at YouTube), public-issue videos find themselves 'small fish in a vast sea' . The most popular social/public issue video in the Center for Social Media study had 150 times less viewers than the most popular video on YouTube, and the terms on which they must compete for the public audience are the co-option of the characteristics of humor, celebrities, popular culture touchstones and music that are most common in the top-ranked YouTube videos. You yourself talk about the vaudevillian aesthetic of online video in which 'the best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared'. Some human rights video can play in this field. A powerful example is the 'Waiting for the Guards' video developed by Amnesty UK for their Unsubscribe-me campaign that feature a recreation of the stress position enhanced interrogation technique used by the CIA, as the center-piece of a web 2.0 campaign focused on action via social networking sites. But with some exceptions much human rights material is not immediately powerful performance, and may not be most effectively or honestly presented in that mode.

Another aspect is what happens to grassroots human rights video on YouTube if it does secure viewers. WITNESS' own experience with YouTube has included two videos that were very fortunate to be picked as Editor's Picks - 'Shoot on Sight,' produced by partners Burma Issues documenting military attacks on ethnic minority civilians in eastern Burma, and picked during the height of the crisis in Burma in autumn 2007; and 'Awaiting Tomorrow' highlighting lack of access to HIV/AIDs treatment in Democratic Republic of the Congo, produced by locally-based partners Ajedi-Ka, and placed on YouTube's homepage on December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day. Both videos received reasonably high viewer levels (approximately 380,000 and 225,000 as of now) and significant levels of comments ('Awaiting Tomorrow' ranks among the top forty most-discussed ever videos in the Non-Profit and Activism Channel with almost 1,400 comments before comments were disabled preventing further belligerent commentary). These levels of viewership are great in terms of reaching an audience that would know little about ethnically-targeted violence in eastern Burma, or access to anti-retrovirals in the Congo. However, the comments ranged from the constructive to the racist, and conspiracy-theory obsessed, and the framework of the YouTube page does not lend itself to using individual videos to focus action of the type WITNESS or local human rights advocates seek, or to foster discussion.

From the point-of-view of human rights advocacy, it was very hard to turn a transitory audience into an engaged public, or to measure the transition from viewing to action or impact. For human rights activism you want a community oriented towards action, recognizing also that online environments where no-one 'listens' to others and responds constructively are the opposite of the empowerment of voice that grounds WITNESS. As Howard Rheingold has observed in relation to youth participation online, in an analogy that could easily be extended to over-stretched, marginalized human rights advocates, "it isn't "voice" if nobody seems to be listening". Our experience illuminated the need for a channel dedicated to human rights and related action.

Recognizing that YouTube should not be viewed solely as a single site, but as a nexus of content that circulates in more detailed, niche contexts, I should note that the most effective uses of the YouTube version of 'Shoot on Sight' were in blog postings where it was embedded in additional context, commentary and recommendations for action, and in its use by venues such as the Facebook 'Support the Monks in Burma' action group.

As additional factors to consider -- in contrast to many commercial platforms -- the Hub carries no advertising, does not track IP addresses and advises users on how to avoid surveillance, and will soon include functionality allowing downloads so that people can use it in the most appropriate setting to generate action. Although we do currently have an editorial process to ensure fit of videos to guidelines, our hope is that the community will eventually monitor, rate and control the content that is on the site; and WITNESS does not claim ownership on the footage and allows the user to choose a Creative Commons license that will exactly lay out how they would like their work to be used

What, if any, kinds of remixing are appropriate in the space of human rights video? How can we reconcile this mash-up aesthetic with the evidentiary claims made for traditional documentaries?

Remixing is one of the most powerful aspects of the new participatory culture. From a human rights advocacy point-of-view, the positive dimensions of this are clear: the narrative possibilities of remixing footage are extensive and build on an increasingly reflexive contemporary media literacy, and there is a possibility to benefit from the creativity and capacity of a distributed network of peer production which can rework the 'raw' audiovisual material to appeal to diverse communities of interest, and within which the opportunity to be a 'co-'producer rather than just a user may promote sustained engagement.

Some of the most powerful political commentary in the US over the past 5 years has featured powerful remixes of news, archival and user-generated footage, especially around President Bush and his actions in Iraq, and groups WITNESS have worked with at a local and regional level around the world have used karaoke remix formats to communicate effectively around human rights issues. One example of the karaoke remix style I've seen in Southeast Asia is a video by one of our Video Advocacy Institute alumni, Dale Kongmonts's from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers. The rub is in how this remix culture relates to a human rights culture that is concerned for the dignity and integrity of victims and survivors, and the role of ethical witnessing. We love seeing George Bush remixed, but where would we draw the line? For me, that's a bigger concern than the evidentiary aspect. I think we have to recognize that the process of narrative creation is always subjective.

The remix question raises the underlying problem that bothers many human rights advocates when they consider visual imagery. WITNESS has wrestled for years with how to try and ensure that people filmed in human rights contexts understand how the video will be used, and the implications both positive and negative (we produced a whole chapter on 'Safety and Security' in our recent 'Video for Change' book), emphasizing model that relies on presenting worst case scenarios for impact, to enable genuine informed consent to be given. Simultaneously, human rights culture emphasizes the value of the integrity and dignity of the individual survivor of abuse on the basis of the first principle that every human being is possessed of 'inherent dignity', a concept which runs through every right articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A particular concern in the victim and survivor-centered human rights model is to avoid re-victimization either directly or indirectly (as can happen when an image is distributed and exploited inappropriately). The most graphic issues - of violent attacks, or at the most extreme, sexual assault - is seen as the material that most easily translates into a loss of dignity, privacy, and agency, and to the potential for real re-victimization. Individuals featured in videos who are not victims or survivors, but bystanders or witnesses, are also understood to be in positions of vulnerability and risk.

But that's a practice that's difficult enough to promote in the 'professional' documentary world, and impossible to sustain in an online participatory media culture of user-generated citizen media. How do we support emerging norms in the emerging online culture that, promote respect, tolerance and an understanding of risks? Over at Internet Artizans Dan McQuillan talks about "propagating an online culture pervaded by a sense of fairness & justice" and suggests "writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in to all web 2.0 Terms of Service". I think this is really one of the key tasks ahead for a concerned community online, only brought home more and more as we increasingly experience global human rights crises - Burma, Tibet - via imagery circulated online. The urgency of this normative work is clear if we think about the implications of increasing live eventcasting from cell-phones facilitated by technologies like Flixwagon and Qik. These technologies will have powerful positive implications for sharing footage and engaging constituencies immediately, but at the same time consent and security norms become even more critical once more video is streamed immediately rather than edited/uploaded after the fact?

You are an advocate of a "DWO" (Do With Others) approach to video production.

Explain. What value does collaborative production and distribution bring to the field of advocacy and activism?

The biggest concern for human rights activists is how video can be deployed to create real change. Alongside renewed opportunities for individual production and targeted advocacy both online and offline, I think collaborative production, distribution and advocacy offer powerful new possibilities for a network-centered video advocacy.

This DIWO (Doing It With Others) recognizes the advocacy possibilities of drawing on some "audiences" as collaborating publics both between themselves and with you, and as co-producers and not just as consumers or passive distributors of advocacy video. This means attention to how to facilitate meaningful and responsible ways in a many-to-many environment for people to speak to each other and create locally-specific and contingent media.

Collaborative production, distribution and advocacy allows for the possibility of drawing on all the potential resources in a given advocacy community. At the most simple format, it includes efforts like the video collages created by campaigns including 24 Hours for Darfur, which gathers expert, citizen and refugee voices to speak out on the situation in Darfur and join an online montage of voices, that was also screened at the UN. It also includes the YouTube and MoveOn.org approaches to user-generated or citizen-generated video contests, and what Greenpeace did last year in the environmental community, where it provided a stock of footage to supporters and encouraged them to "... Download our footage from the e-waste yards in China and India to edit and use in your video. Use it to make your own video about e-waste and how Apple should be a leader in helping tackle this problem...only limitations are please use the logo provided, a positive campaign message and the website URL somewhere in your video"

What is often most effective in advocacy are trusted voices, and often advocacy videos are blunt weapons in terms of finding a trusted voice that will speak to a broad and divergent audience. You either do it by finding a powerful story of a non-famous individual and find ways to engage your audience emotionally, or you take a default option of going with figures with a broad-based of 'authority' or just plain recognition, such as a celebrity. But with collaborative production of advocacy video you can go beyond that - you can mix together, say the footage from Burma or Darfur with the most trusted voices for a specific audience, to create locally-specific advocacy videos.

As a concrete example of this approach, I am currently working with the US Campaign for Burma, which has student chapters across the country on how to facilitate student action around divestment campaigns in universities. One idea in involves collaborative video editing, in this case using a software called Kaltura. At an online editing site they will find a set of stock clips of what is going on in Burma, including some interviews and visual footage as well as tips and advice from the coordinators and their peers about how to construct an effective advocacy video. They will then shoot their own material (for example, someone at University of Iowa could include a clip from a supportive academic or community leader) and create a localized video. All these clips, as well as the contingently finished films are shared online for all the student groups, so that another group has the option to borrow a useful video from others in the campaign, use it straight or remix it, or if they like just one of U-Iowa's local-specific clips borrow it for their own.

This is an example of a situation where collaborative production produces a range of advocacy videos, each locally-specific and targeted. We see the potential here for pressuring at a local level, by using shared footage and adding material that taps into local power dynamics - drawing on influencers and authority figures with specific resonance, or who have the 'ear' of a key person - and by making calls to action as specific as possible. You could also imagine collaborative production being used to produce one product that drew on the capacity and collective knowledge of many to create a more effective advocacy strategy

This approach - which relies on dense information connections to allow individuals to draw on and act with networked, shared resources has been termed 'network-centric advocacy' by Marty Kearns. As he defines it, network-centric advocacy differs from traditional advocacy in the strategy used to 'form and deliver an argument as well as the methodology used to build alliances across stakeholders'. Where traditional advocacy involves the advocate organization picking and packaging an argument for delivery to an audience, a network-centric approach 'asks the network to find, package and select the arguments (think MoveOn Bushin30Seconds example). The network picks the message.' Similarly whereas a traditional advocacy campaign has a core communications team at its center 'managing' the campaign, a distributed network campaign trains 'many spokespeople to speak their own voice'. We're seeing this in political campaigns in the US - see for example the excellent analysis by Connect US (which is doing work on doing network-centered advocacy here in the foreign policy community in the USA) of Obama's campaign.

From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part One)

I came back from the USC DIY Media Event with a whole range of new contacts. One hallmark of this outstanding conference was that it brought together people from very different social networks -- people who are working in parallel across different communities to explore the potentials of participatory culture. I've already featured through this blog an extensive interview with independent filmmaker and critic Alex Juhasz exploring her efforts to teach through and about Youtube. Today, I want to showcase another participant in the USC event -- human rights activist Sam Gregory. Gregory's comments about the strengths and limitations of Youtube as a site for media activism were eye-opening to me and I hope you will find them equally illuminating. In the interview which follows, Gregory describes the evolution in the thinking of his organization, Witness, from the aftermath of the Rodney King video, to the recent use of Youtube as a platform for the Burmese democracy movement. Drawing a phrase from Jamais Cascio, Gregory speaks here about the "participatory panopticon," the potentials of a world where citizens can use light weight portable cameras, including those built into their cellphones, and video distribution platforms to alert the world about human rights violations in their country. The past decade plus of DIY activism has taught veterans to be skeptical about some of the more utopian claims of the previous generation, even as they are learning to be more effective at exploiting every available opportunity to capture and distribute harsh realities that much of the world doesn't want to watch.

Sam Gregory, Program Director, is a video producer, trainer, and human rights advocate. In 2005 he was the lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007 he lead the development of the curriculum for WITNESS' first ever Video Advocacy Institute. Videos he has produced have been screened at the US Congress,the UK Houses of Parliament, the United Nations and at film festivals worldwide. In 2004 he was a jury member for the IDFA Amnesty International/Doen Award. He was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where his Master's in Public Policy focused on

international development and media. He has worked as a television researcher/producer in both the UK and USA, and for development organizations in Nepal and Vietnam, and holds a BA from Oxford University in History and Spanish. He is on the Board of the US Campaign for Burma, and the Tactical Technology Collective. He speaks fluent Spanish, conversational French and basic Nepali.

Can you tell us something about the thinking which led to the creation of WITNESS? How has your organization's vision shifted over time in response to shifts in the nature of participatory culture?

In the late 1980's, our founder, Peter Gabriel had been participating in the Amnesty Human Rights Now Tour, travelling the world and meeting human rights activists at each concert stop. And in many cases, it struck him that their stories were not being heard, and that new tools like the consumer video-camera could perhaps change that. Fast-forward a couple of years, and the Rodney King incident brought the possibilities home. From the window of his apartment George Holliday filmed a sequence of graphic human rights violations that generated massive media attention. That provided the impetus for the creation of WITNESS - founded in the assumption that if you could place cameras in the hands of the people who chose to be "in the wrong place at the right time", i.e. human rights advocates and activists around the world living and working with communities affected by violations, then you would enable a new way to mobilize action for real change.

For the first decade of our work we wrestled with how best to operationalize this idea. In the early 1990's we were focused on the technology. We distributed hundreds of cameras to human rights groups around the world, assuming that they would be able to gather footage that could get on television or be used as evidence -two polar extremes of usage, one very specialized and targeted at a judicial fact-finder or jury, the other playing to a vast, undifferentiated court of public opinion.

In those first years we learnt that without technical training, you could shoot raw video but you could not create the finished narratives that matter in most advocacy contexts outside of providing raw footage to the news media. We evolved to a strategy of working intensely with a select group of 10-12 'core partners' - human rights groups on the ground who approach us to collaborate in helping them integrate video into their campaigns; as well as doing extensive trainings, producing online training materials like our Guide to Video Advocacy and writing books like 'Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism' to promote effective ideas in our community. And most recently we embarked on a new project, the Hub, which is the most DIY part of our work - a participatory media site where individuals and organizations can safely upload footage of abuses and finished advocacy videos, share it, learn how to deploy it in their campaigns, and present clear context and links to more information, groups working to address the issues, and actions that viewers and supporters can take.

Over the past fifteen years, a number of factors came to characterize the WITNESS approach. We focus on the empowered voices of those who are closer or closest to rights violations - including victims, survivors, community members and engaged advocates on behalf of affected communities. And until recently we've generally sought to use "smart narrowcasting" rather than "broadcasting" to reach key audiences. So for example, the video 'Bound by Promises' was framed for and used in screenings to government officials and legislators in Brazil to push them to prioritize concrete programs to reduce rural slave labor. Our work has also always blurred the line between amateurs and professionals in terms of using video -we are training human rights workers, and now concerned citizens, to use video as an everyday facet of their work, rather than to turn them into documentary film-makers.

We've seen a progressive expansion of the participatory possibilities of video: first, increased access to cameras, the increased access to editing capacity, then the dramatic growth of online video-sharing for distribution. And in the past three years we see the possibilities for increased collaboration in editing and production, for online distribution, and for more immediate and widespread filming - all facilitated by a digitally-literate youth, by mobile technology with still image and video capability and by new online tools.

What role does do it yourself video play in heightening public awareness of human rights issues around the world?

I would identify three spheres of usage of DIY video in raising awareness of human rights issues around the world: advocacy videos, witness documentation and perpetrator video. All three are facilitated by ubiquitous technology for documentation (via video-cameras, digital still cameras with video functionality, and cell-phone cameras), by increasing digital literacy, and by increased opportunities for sharing, remixing and re-circulating.

To date most of our focus has been on advocacy video and on working to find the spaces where bringing the visual story into the virtual or real room can make a difference. Here we're trying to change the vernacular language of human rights advocacy, to make a space for the voices from outside, and to push a new way of communicating around rights abuses.

Frequently we've promoted an approach that's all about smart narrow-casting, speaking to a particular audience at a particular time, and seeking a distinct change in policy, behavior or practice. Videos are always part of a continuum of action -- and a strategy -- rather than stand-alone. Here we're working in the middle ground between the extremes of undifferentiated mass media attention and direct evidence in the courts. This could include showing video to an international or regional tribunal (we've been involved in a precedent-setting case to present video before the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, on land rights in Kenya), it could involve bringing to the voices of victims and the visual evidence of abuses in Burma into a Congressional briefing or a meeting of Security Council representatives, and it can involve engaging communities themselves to take action on a rights issues, for example by showing a video on voluntary recruitment of child soldiers in villages across eastern Congo. Videos always provide a 'space for action' by the audience, encouraging them to participate in solving the problem.

The scope of this use of video is increasing by the day, alongside more traditional human rights documentaries. We can see it on the Hub, where many of the videos uploaded are produced by NGOs, both at a national and an international level - for example, Video Volunteers' 'Stop the Privatization of Water, films by Amazon Watch, and 'Drying up Palestine.

The two modes that we're seeing now in increasing prevalence are witness documentation and perpetrator footage. Both are circulating increasingly in online video sharing contexts, and in the blogosphere. It's partly in response to the radically increased possibilities for participation in creating human rights video online that we've created our Hub project. In some senses with both witness documentation and perpetrator footage you're revisiting a Rodney King moment - only this time, there is a potential global audience of both activists and publics who can have access to the footage, and there are distribution options to get it to them, and knowledge about how to frame action around them. It's an exciting moment as people experiment with what can work with this radically expanded access to production and distribution.

Our founder, Peter Gabriel talks sometimes about "little brothers" and "little sisters" watching Big Brother, and this world of the 'participatory panopticon' as Jamais Cascio calls it - is one filled with emancipatory potential as long as we can make sure that the footage that circulates helps facilitate voice and change, rather than enable repression.

You've written that the project was initially shaped by assumptions about the "transparency" of the video medium. Explain. What happens to human rights video as we become more self conscious about the properties of the medium and the ways that it can be manipulated?

Our starting point was what the scholar Meg McLagan has succinctly termed a moment of "1990s technophilia and (with a) model of change based on the transparency of media". So it was very technology-focused and grounded in a perhaps naïve belief in the indexicality of the image - a firm conviction that 'seeing is believing' and that seeing would create action, in the same way that the Rodney King had seemingly inspired mass outrage and in the same way that at first.

Our initial assumptions about audience and how footage would be perceived and used, were not correct. In those days before widespread online video sharing, the modes to access broad publics were ineffective. We focused on video in judicial processes, and sharing video with the mass media - both of which are premised on the 'evidentiary' value of human rights footage. Yet both news media and evidentiary settings were challenging to access. The Rodney King experience was anomalous. Although George Holliday's footage permeated the mass media and was used in the subsequent state and federal trials, the overwhelming majority of human rights video cannot and does not reach those venues. And if it does, as many marginalized groups have experienced in their media advocacy, it is often presented in ways that are contradictory to the desires and intentions of the communities affected by the rights violations. The reasons for this - of course -- vary. But the result is the same. In some countries it may be that media is government, or corporate-controlled, or won't screen graphic imagery -- or is only interested in screening graphic imagery. And in many cases news media focuses on episodic framing that emphasize individual actions, victims and perpetrators, and is less interested in structural violence, systemic challenges or the ongoing problems that characterize many of the most pernicious abuses, and especially violations of economic, social and cultural rights. So, for example, a group I work with in Papua, Indonesia documents the systematic, ongoing and pervasive exclusion of indigenous Papuans in an economy dominated by migrants from other parts of Indonesia, and in a justice system that moves rarely against the powerful. In seeking widespread media attention they will face the triple barrier of government censorship, popular neglect and an issue that is not easily reduced to blow of a security force baton.

Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence frequently does not work. The rules of evidence are hard to navigate. And even if the evidence is admitted, we need only see how the Rodney King footage was flipped around and manipulated both to prove that the Los Angeles Police Department officers were following the training they had been provided to deal with a resisting suspect, and to demonstrate the grotesque abuse of power evident in the fifty-six strikes delivered on Rodney King.

So what this boiled down for us - alongside some re-thinking on audience --- was the need for framing and narrative to create effective advocacy videos. This framing can come both within the video and in the way it is presented within a campaign. Rather than relying on the 'visual evidence' in and of itself, you have to place this in a rhetorical framework that explains it, and offers ways to act. Seeing may be believing, but it may also lead to pessimism, and compassion fatigue in the absence of opportunities to act. We're not promoting a journalistic model of studious neutrality - our experience is that marginalized voices are excluded enough, without the need to balance their voices in a one-for-one ratio to the voices of authority or perpetrators. So most advocacy videos do have a point-of-view and an outcome in mind, but the best do this with clear respect for the facts of the situation.

You've argued that some of the most effective videos for dramatizing human rights issues have come not from activists but from the oppressive regimes themselves. Can you cite a few examples? Why were these videos produced in the first place? What new significance has been ascribed to them as they move into new contexts?

The futurist Jamais Casco has suggested that the 'Rodney King' moment of the digital camera era may hav e been the Abu Ghraib photos, and I would argue that the analogue for cell-phones was the footage of Saddam Hussein's execution. Yet both sets of images were filmed by perpetrators or by insiders, not by concerned citizens, advocates or observers. More broadly we can see a proliferation of images, particularly of torture by police, security force and military personnel.

One of the most viewed videos on the Hub is a redacted version of footage shot by Egyptian police in which they humiliate a Cairo bus driver by slapping him repeatedly. These and other more graphic videos that include the sodomization of another driver were filmed by the police themselves. They were then used to humiliate the victims - including by sending the images to other drivers-- and to intimidate other people by demonstrating what would happen if they didn't follow police orders. They share many similarities with the psychology of happy-slapping: adding for the victim the humiliation of the act of filming, as well as the humiliation of the probability of preservation, and allowing the perpetrator to relish the memory, and share it with their friends. Similar cases have galvanized debate in Greece, Malaysia (the notorious Squat-gate incident) and a number of other countries. And of course, footage is also shot increasingly by government to document and apprehend protestors and dissidents - here in the US, there has been the contentious suit around the NYPD and activists filming at the Republican National Convention in 2004, while most recently we can see official cameramen in the footage of protests from Burma and Tibet (for example, at 00:32 in this clip).

What happens is that these videos then circulate beyond the circles for which they were intended - and are re-ascribed new meanings. For example in Egypt, bloggers and journalists lead by Wael Abbas and Hossam el-Hamalawy circulated leaked cell-phone videos to challenge repeated denials of accountability for police brutality and torture by the government. By circulating the videos, and connecting online to both a local and international audience, they were able to generate media attention, and force an official response. Although the government initially tried to discredit the activists, it was very hard to deny the truth of the images, and for the first time, there was an investigation into the conduct of police officers in two of the leaked videos leading to a prosecution.

One issue that does arise is around the re-victimization of individuals featured in the footage. They are often doubly humiliated in the first instance - by what happens to them in custody, and by the act of filming, and then they are further exposed as the footage achieves widespread circulation. We've tried to address this in our own practice - for example, by respecting the victim's wishes in the Squatgate case and not re-posting the video on the Hub pilot project, but I think the most important thing we can do institutionally is to support the growth of norms in the online video community that are respectful of individuals' dignity and rights (the Transmission community has been leading on this concept)

Human rights videos, you've claimed, need to be thought of as "transnational stories." What are the implications of that statement? What factors insure that the video will achieve its desired effect as it encounters alternative audiences?

Much human rights activism is still about speaking to distant audiences, often to generate a 'boomerang' effect in your home country. In these cases you are telling transnational stories that must speak to an audience inevitably less grounded than you in the everyday realities of the oppression. So, the footage in the video produced by our partners working undercover in Burma 'Shoot on Sight' must speak to activists not only within Asia, but to government officials, decision-makers and solidarity supporters in North America and Europe. Most human rights situations are embedded in contexts of structural complexity, long histories of repression and reaction and many actors with different agenda. As activists and concerned citizens create human rights advocacy videos they face a dilemma. They want to resist a globalization of local images stripped of their meaning, by keeping intact local voices in local contexts, and in a way that is faithful both to the direct visible violence of a situation as well as the underlying structural causes. But at the same time as you move testimony and images between different advocacy and media arenas it often 'helps' to strip out some of the markers of specificity. From experience, I know that with many audiences too much analysis of the particularity and nuance of a testimonial story may undermine it as an advocacy call.

You are balancing the ethical demands to be true to the people who speak out, a recognition of the real complexities and the desire to make viewers genuine ethical witnesses, against the need to convince, shame or horrify a distant audience with a medium whose power often lies in directness both visually and in narrative. You also have to make tough choices in balancing the visceral power and problems of raw visual evidence (for example, of graphic violence) with the use of testimony.

Now as human rights video circulate increasingly unmoored from its original location - i.e. embedded, shared, remixed - it becomes key to place context and ways to act within the video and imagery itself rather than outside it since no sooner has your video been forwarded from YouTube, the Hub or elsewhere it becomes de-coupled from options to act unless those are built into the video itself, and unless your message comes through loud and clear.

Is Ally McBeal a Thing of Beauty?: An Interview with Greg M. Smith (Part One)

Greg M. Smith (Georgia State University) argues that there is no word more "obscene" in television studies than "beauty." Television studies has run away from aesthetic claims from its inception and in so doing, they contribute to (or at least do nothing to combat) the wide spread public perception that mainstream television has little or no aesthetic value. In his new book, Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal, Smith offers a sustained reading of a single television series, demonstrating how key themes and images unfold over time, and how the intriguing parts add up to a most satisfying whole. Smith doesn't avoid issues of gender and sexuality which have concerned earlier writers who have discussed this series, but he shows the complex ways that these issues get worked through across the entire run of the series, rather than pulling out one "representative" episode as standing for the work as a whole. Smith insists that we need to respect the particular character of television series as a kind of long form storytelling even if doing so places serious demands on a critic, especially in discussing a series which ran for more than a hundred episodes. A died-in-the-wool formalist in the Wisconsin tradition, Smith is utterly fearless in his defense of applying aesthetic standards to talk about popular art both here and his other work (which deals with topics as diverse as the cognitive theory of emotion, the formal experimentation of Myst, the functions of dialog in the Final Fantasy series, the visual style of The West Wing, and the adaptation of The Maxx from comics to cartoon series). As this list suggests, Smith has been willing to apply his skills at textual analysis to film, television, games, and comics. Some years ago, Smith wrote one of the best answers I've ever read to the oft-heard protest of undergrads taking Introduction to Cinema classes: "But it's just a movie!"

Smith has by now become accustomed to people asking "Why Ally McBeal?" It's a question which he deftly discusses in the book's introduction and in the interview below, he offers at least some of the rationale for this selection. In this first installment, Smith discusses the place of aesthetic evaluation in television studies, makes an argument for why we need to expand our canon as a field to include works which do not necessarily seem "cool" to our students or "worthy" to our colleagues, and offers a new take on the relationship between formal and ideological analysis. In tomorrow's installment, we will explore more fully the lasting impact of Ally McBeal on American television.

You open the book with the observation, "Complexity of narrative or the beauty of construction can justify critical consideration of a novel or a film, but when a television show is no longer au courant, those considerations matter little." Why do you think this double standard has persisted for so long and

how does your book attempt to address it?

Television's low critical status is eroding, but like all erosion, the process is erratic.

Last week the Sunday Washington Post discussed the "dumbing of America" and laid the blame squarely on "video culture." In the same week I went to dinner with someone who sniffed in derision when I said that my latest book was on Ally McBeal. "You can write a whole book on that?" He'd never have said the same thing about a novel or a play, even though there's an awful lot of bad fiction and theater. But junk novels and crappy plays don't get piped into your living room (unlike television), so they're easier to ignore. As an aca/fan of television, you have to recognize the larger context of your work in society: the broadly held assumption that TV is crap.

Unfortunately, most academic writing on television has done little to combat this assumption. In fact, most academic writing on TV implicitly sends a similar message. that we can look through the television text to more "important" issues (race, class, gender, and so on). The construction of the program itself is the least important factor.

The reason for this has to do with how television studies grew up in universities. TV studies wanted to differentiate itself from film studies, a discipline deeply interested in the text, and so it adopted cultural studies as a way to clearly distinguish itself: "It's not about the text; it's about the context." TV studies has greatly benefited from its alliance with cultural studies, but now the field is mature enough that we should create a space for criticism that focuses on the text itself: its complicated narrative construction, its interesting aesthetic choices. If we academics don't do this work, then we leave the dominant social view of television unchallenged: that television isn't worthy of close analysis unless you justify your work with other social concerns.

The best way to demonstrate that television is good is to proceed as if this were clearly true. Lots of people who are making this argument today: you can see it in popular magazine and newspaper criticism, in online writing by devoted fans, and even in online writing by academics (such as in the journal Flow). But the gold standard in academia still remains that old-fashioned medium: the single authored book. There are anthologies on TV shows, but none with a focus on the show's aesthetics. A book like Beautiful TV (by its very existence) demonstrates that a contemporary television show can sustain a long, productive aesthetic analysis. It's a small step toward eroding the big social assumption that TV is bad.

You've also been critical, though, of the formation of a cannon of "cool television" shows within the field of media studies, asking why we don't study series, such as Jag, which are extremely successful over a long period of time but do not appeal to the same aesthetic criteria as those shows academics like to watch. Explain.

Television studies is a small field, and like any small town, there's a tendency to be a bit insular. If you poll TV scholars, there's a remarkable consistency in what we watch. We watch hip stuff like Lost and 30 Rock. And so when we write, we naturally tend to write about the shows that appeal to that particular sensibility.

The paradigm of cool TV for many of us was defined by Buffy: complicated, long-term storytelling with liberatory "go girl" politics, appealing to a diehard fan base. It's great that we can have an entire subfield devoted to a single show like Buffy; that's a step toward a more mature television studies. But the trap is in focusing too much on television that fits that mold (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the same kind of television that producers are aiming for: shows that inspire loyal fans to visit the website and buy the DVDs).

If we're going to call our field "television studies," then we should study all of television. If we just study the shows we think are "hip," then let's stop pretending and call it "hip studies." Basically, television studies needs to become as broad as television itself. I would love to see us producing scholars who are sincerely interested in a show with not-so-progressive politics but which still has strong popularity: something like JAG or Everybody Loves Raymond.

I'm not proposing a field of "square studies" to counter our "hip" tendencies, but we need to be aware of our blind spots. Just as we need to make room for studies of TV aesthetics and narrative (as well as cultural studies), we also need to broaden our field to look at shows that are utterly middlebrow. One of the reasons I chose Ally McBeal was that it seems so squarely middlebrow: not as high-falutin' as The Sopranos, but not Jackass either. If we can make the argument for the aesthetic importance of Ally, then that makes the discussion of TV aesthetics that much easier in the future.

Your analysis of Ally McBeal operates first and foremost as an aesthetic analysis of an innovative television series. Yet, you also explore what the series has to say about love, sexuality, and the workplace. What relationship do you posit between formal and ideological analysis?

When I was first writing this book, I sincerely tried to make it all about aesthetics and narrative just to prove that such an approach could be done. But I couldn't do it, partly because of my training. Cultural studies has changed how we study film and television, and we can't pretend that aesthetics exists in a timeless vacuum outside of culture. I realize that if I wanted to show an alternative to a cultural studies approach to television, I shouldn't artificially ignore culture but instead should restore a balance to dealing with the text.

I had to talk about the place of sexuality in the workplace because that's so much of what Ally's storylines are about. If I kept my blinders on and didn't talk at all about culture, then I would be doing violence to the show. I realized that my point was that I wanted to do television criticism that took the show seriously on its own terms, not justifying my criticism in "more important" issues that I brought to the text.

This allowed me to present one of my biggest justifications for studying Ally's narrative. I argue that the show takes advantage of serial television's ability to work through a complex set of issues over time. An individual episode can make an assertion about the nature of love in the workplace, only to have those assertions turned on their head in the next episode. Over time the show eventually makes a long-running argument about the tension between love and career in the modern workplace.

I don't follow this argument because it deals with a big social issue; I write about this to demonstrate how serial TV narrative can make a complicated, subtle argument. I started this book when I realized that I loved Ally McBeal but hated all of the characters. What, then, brought me back every week? The gradual unfolding of an argument that was more intricate and captivating because it was staged in narrative.

Learning From YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first installment of a two part interview with filmmaker, activist, and cultural critic Alex Juhasz. In the first part, we focused primarily on a course she taught this fall on YouTube, describing some of the pedagogical issues she encountered, and some of the ways her course got distorted through mass media coverage. Today, she is focusing more fully on some of her concerns about profoundly "undemocratic" aspects of YouTube, concerns which her teaching experience brought into sharper focus. While Juhasz and I start from very different perspectives, I see her critique as a valuable starting point for a conversation about the ways that YouTube does or does not achieve our highest goals for a more diverse and participatory culture.

You've expressed concerns about the blurring between education and entertainment in the Youtube environment. What concerns does this pose for you?

We are clearly living in a time where conventionalized methods must be re-thought because of the increased functions of the media. Teaching and learning are two conventions that will adapt in the face of web 2.0. Now, I've been an advocate of critical pedagogy my entire career as a professor. In particular, I have been keen on refiguring power, expertise, and objectivity in the classroom attempting instead to create more collaborative, imaginative pedagogic interactions where there is a self-awareness about how embedded structures of power (race, class, gender, age, expertise) organize classroom participation, and access to learning. That said, while trying to learn through YouTube, there were significant challenges posed to the traditions of teaching that both my students and I experienced as obstacles. So maybe I'm not as radical as I pretend!

Before I enumerate these, I would beg your readers to consider whether these are hold outs to a lost and dying tradition, and good riddance (as some of my students believe), or whether there are certain tried and true approaches that were developed and nuanced over time because they work: methods of teaching and learning we don't want to lose even as technology brings us new possibilities.

We found that just what defined YouTube as good entertainment -- its compelling lack of depth and expertise, and its all but disappeared procedures of coherence, order, and forced attention -- made it poor for education. Of the many surprises and challenges of this class, it was most dumbfounding for me to find how resistant my students were to the loss of discipline, authority, and structure in the classroom. They hated the amount of process this demanded; disliked that I wouldn't just tell them stuff; were reluctant to do course work in a new format in which they lacked training; and generally wanted me to take control so that they could attend to other things and know what they needed to do to satisfy me.

Why, we might ask, do they enjoy the aimlessness and devaluing of authority on YouTube, but still want it in their education, even as any student would say, in a heartbeat, that they wish school was less boring, more fun, more entertaining? We found that the rigorous, controlled, contained, and rationale argument is key to learning; not the flow, but the building of knowledge. Meanwhile, ease of acquisition, while comforting, and perhaps numbing, to my mind can never meet the sheer joy of a challenge, and the prize of the steady, often communal and hard work of growing complexity. While its nice to wast time on YouTube, people want to get something (hard) from a class!

Your students pointed towards a fairly limited range of representations of race and gender in YouTube content. Why might such stereotypes persist in what is in theory an open and participatory channel? More generally, what factors do you think limits the cultural and ideological diversity of current digital culture?

I ended up learning a lot from this class (particularly from its unique YouTube-like structure) and even more from its students (which is where I started, I did believe correctly that on this subject they could educate me). Their keen observations about the down-side to user control were a revelation to me, lefty media activist, who has made a career around expanding media access. YouTube uses its users for almost everything: they create content, sort it, judge it, and censor it, all the while producing the revenue which runs the company by producing both its content and its consumers. There are incredible opportunities this affords us as a society: primarily unparalleled access to the thoughts, experiences, interests and documents of the daily life of real people, as they wish to be seen and heard. However, two other key results are less beneficial, especially if we want to think of YouTube as a democratic commons, which is certainly how it sees itself and is broadly understood. First is the idea of mob-rule, and how it functions for censoring.

Currently, on YouTube, if a few people flag a video as being objectionable, down it may go, within an opaque system and with no recourse. My students have learned that controversial opinions, outside the norms of the society, are often so flagged and censored. This is not a commons, where everyone has a right to a voice.

Furthermore, my students found that the system of user-ranking, or popularity, has the effect where normative or hegemonic ideas rise to the top of YouTube. The society's already accepted opinions about race, or politics, are most highly valued, receive the most hits, and thus are the easiest to see.

Meanwhile, there is a lively world, just under the surface on YouTube, where opinions counter, or critical, to those of the mainstream are articulated. However, given that the search function relies first upon popularity, this niche-tube is hard to locate, and is currently playing a small role in the conventionalizing standards of this new form. As I've said before, access is only one part of an equation of liberation. In this case, I'd highlight education in media literacy, aesthetics, theory and history as equally formative.

Many critics have praised the role of confessional video in the hands of feminist and avant garde filmmakers (the works of Sadie Benning for example) yet you seemed critical of the ways that this mode gets deployed on YouTube. What differences do you see between the two?

Patty Zimmerman's Reel Families traces the various factors which have historically turned amateur media content into "home movies," locked away in the domestic sphere, ridiculed as uninteresting to anyone beyond the immediate family. Whatever else one may say about Youtube, however, it has

brought amateur media content into broader public visibility, allowing it to circulate well beyond its communities of origin and in ways that allow greater control for contributors than found in, say, America's Funniest Home Videos, an outlet Zimmerman ridiculed. Would you agree?

These two questions are closely linked in my mind. Of course I agree that YouTube has opened access to video production and distribution, and that many of these newly allowed videos appear in either the home or confessional mode (a sub-set of the YouTube staple, the talking-head or rant). But this is where my particular project interfaces with, or perhaps veers from, that of the study or use of the home movie (or mundane, or DIY media) rather than the activist or art video. I am less interested in the fact of who produces, as much as I am how she does so and in what context. I am most interested in media cultures that allow regular people not simply to document their lived experience, not merely to reflect their experience through and to the norms and values of the dominant culture, but to create art and/or opinions about their lives and culture, in the name of a stated goal (of world or self-changing), and to an intended community.

Learning From YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz (Part One)

What does it mean to learn from YouTube and what would it mean to treat YouTube itself as a platform for instruction and critique? Alex Juhasz taught a course about YouTube last term at Pizer College, a small liberal arts school in California. As she explains below, Juhasz and her students adopted novel strategies for not simply engaging with YouTube content but also for using the YouTube platform to communicate their findings to a world beyond the classroom. In doing so, they took risks -- inviting outside scrutiny of their classroom activities, bringing down skepticism and scorn from many in the mainstream media which itself plays such a central role in the cycle of self promotion and publicity which surrounds the platform and its content. They became part of the phenomenon they were studying -- for better or for worse.

Earlier this month, I served as a respondent on a panel at USC's 24/7 DIY Video Event on a panel during which Juhasz shared her experiences. I felt that both her pedagogical approach and her critical perspective on Youtube would be of interest to readers of this blog. I should warn you that Alex Juhasz comes at these questions from a very different perspective than I do. For those used to my blatherings about the virtues of participatory culture, you will find her skepticism about much of the content on YouTube a bit bracing. But she raises many of the concerns which we will need to address if we are to achieve a truly participatory culture. Over the next two installments, she raises important questions about whether a participatory platform necessarily insures diverse, meaningful, or innovative content. Juhasz approaches YouTube from the perspective of someone who usually writes about independent, avant garde, and documentary film practices, from someone who speaks from the vantage point of an activism and an experimental filmmaker. She is reading YouTube against both the goals and the accomplishments of other movements to foster greater democracy through media production and finds YouTube lacking in many regards.

Be sure to try out some of the links here. Many of them will take you to work that Juhasz and her students have produced for distribution on YouTube. These videos offer some interesting model for the forms that critique might take in this new media environment.

What can you tell us about how you approached the challenges of teaching a course about YouTube? What methods of analysis did you apply to its content? How did you select which materials to examine given the vast scope and diversity of Youtube's content?

I decided to teach a course about YouTube to better understand this recent and massive media/cultural phenomenon, given that I had been studiously ignoring it (even as I recognized its significance) because every time I went there, I was seriously underwhelmed by what I saw: interchangeable, bite-sized, formulaic videos referring either to popular culture or personal pain/pleasure. I called them video slogans (in my blog where I engage in reflections on YouTube and other political media): pithy, precise, rousing calls to action or consumption, or action as consumption (especially given how much on the site is made by or refers to corporate media). I was certain, however, that there must be video, in this vast sea, that would satisfy even my lofty standards (although search words couldn't get me to it), and figured my students (given their greater facility with a life-on-line) probably knew better than I how to navigate the site, and better live and work with this recently expanding access to moving and networked images.

Thus, Learning From YouTube was my first truly "student led" course: we would determine the important themes and relevant methods of study together. I had decided that I wanted the course to primarily consider how web 2.0 (in this case, specifically YouTube) is radically altering the conditions of learning (what, where, when, how we have access to information). Given that college students are rarely asked to consider the meta-questions of how they learn, on top of what they are learning, I thought it would be pedagogically useful for the form of the course to mirror YouTube's structures for learning--one of the primary being user, or amateur-led pedagogy. So, the course was student-led, as well as being amorphous in structure within a small set of constraints, for this reason of mirroring, as well. As is true on YouTube, where there is a great deal of user control within a limited but highly limiting set of tools, I set forth a few constraints, the most significant being the rule that all the learning for the course had to be on and about YouTube (unless a majority of the class voted to go off, which we eventually did for the final). While this constraint was clearly artificial, and perhaps misleading about how YouTube is actually used in connection with a host of other media platforms which complement its functionality (which is really nothing more than a massive, easy to use if barely searchable, repository for moving images), it did allow us to really see its architecture, again, something that the average student would not typically be asked to account for as part of the content of a course. Thus, all assignments had to be produced as YouTube comments or videos, all research had to be conducted within its pages, and all classes were taped and put on to YouTube. This immediately made apparent how privacy typically functions within the (elite liberal arts) classroom setting, because YouTube forced us to consider what results when our work and learning is public. This produced several negative results including students dropping the class who either did not want to be watched as they snoozed or participated in the class; or did not want their class-work to be scrutinized by an unknown and often unfriendly public. Furthermore, students realized how well trained they actually are to do academic work with the word -- their expertise -- and how poor is their media-production literacy (there were no media production skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). It is hard to get a paper into 500 characters, and translating it into 10 minutes of video demands real skills in creative translation of word to image, sound, and media-layers.

This is all to say that the methods and materials for the course were selected by the students, who were forced by me to be atypically creative and responsible, and that they ended up inventing or recycling a wide range of methodology for academic research and "writing." Surprisingly, the themes of the course ended up quite coherent: looking first at the forms, content of videos (see research projects and mid-terms), then the function of popularity (see popularity projects), and finally the structures of the site (see finals). Furthermore, and quite impressively given their lack of skills and deep initial qualms, the students devised a series of methods to do academic assignments in the form of video. I would briefly characterize these styles of work as: word-reliant, the illustrated summary, and the YouTube hack, where academic content is wedged into a standard YouTube vernacular (music video, How To, or advertisement).

Finally, it seems important for me, at this earliest stage in the interview (and I hope this will not alienate some of your readership), to identify myself as someone with a very limited interest in mainstream or popular culture, even as I am aware and supportive of the kinds of work you and your readers have done about the complex and compelling (re)uses of dominant forms. While I, too, focus on the liberating potentials of people's expanded access to media, I have specialized in (and made) alternative media connected to the goals and theories of social movements. This is a lengthy, and formative history within the media (what I call Media Praxis) that includes some of the best media ever made, like early soviet cinema, Third Cinema, feminist film, AIDS activist video, and a great deal of new media. I continue to be concerned about why I am not seeing more on the site that is influenced by, and furthering this tradition, and my orientation in the course was to push the students to consider why serious, non-industrial, political uses of the media were not better modeled or supported on the site. Another way to say this is through a concern I have articulated about the current use of the term "DIY." I think it is being used to identify the recent condition of massive user access to production and distribution of media. My concern is that the counter-cultural, anti-normative, critical, or political impulses behind the term (as it came out of punk, for instance), drop out of the picture--just as they do in most DIY YouTube video--when access to technology occurs outside other liberating forces. I believe that for engagements with the media to be truly transformative, the fact of expanded access to its production and exhibition is only one in a set of necessary conditions that also include a critique, a goal, a community, and a context. I'll get to more about this in my later answers, but one of my great fears about YouTube is that it consolidates media action to the video production and consumption of the individual (this, of course, being a corporate imperative, as YouTube needs to get individual eyeballs to ads).

You also sought to use Youtube itself as a platform for pedagogy. What limitations did you discover about Youtube as a vehicle for critique and analysis?

My hope that the students would be able to see and name the limits of this site as a place for higher education were quickly met. By the mid-term, we could effectively articulate what the site was not doing for us. Our main criticisms came around these four structural limitations: communication, community, research, and idea-building. We found the site to inexcusably poor at:

• allowing for lengthy, linked, synchronous conversation using the written word outside the degenerated standards of many on-line exchanges where slurs, phrases, and inanities stand-in for dialogue.
• creating possibilities for communal exchange and interaction (note the extremely limited functionality of YouTube's group pages, where we tried our best to organize our class work and lines of conversation), including the ability to maintain and experience communally permanent maps of viewing experiences.
• finding pertinent materials: the paucity of its search function, currently managed by users who create the tags for searching, means it is difficult to thoroughly search the massive holdings of the site. For YouTube to work for academic learning, it needs some highly trained archivists and librarians to systematically sort, name, and index its materials.
• linking video, and ideas, so that concepts, communities and conversation can grow. It is a hallmark of the academic experience to carefully study, cite, and incrementally build an argument. This is impossible on YouTube.

Given that the site is owned by Google, a huge, skilled, and wealthy corporation, and that all these functionalities are easily accessible on other web-sites, we were forced to quickly ask: why do they not want us to do these things on this particular, highly popular, and effective site? This is how we deduced that the site is primarily organized around and effective at the entertainment of the individual. YouTube betters older entertainment models in that it is mobile, largely user-controlled, and much of its content is user-generated (although a significant amount is not, especially if you count user-generated content that simply replays, or re-cuts, or re-makes corporate media without that DIY value of critique). The nature of this entertainment is not unique to YouTube (in fact much of its content comes from other platforms) but it certainly effectively consolidates methods from earlier forms, in particular those of humor, spectacle, and self-referentiality. As YouTube delivers fast, fun, video that is easy to understand and easy to get, it efficiently delivers hungry eyeballs to its advertisers. It need provide no other services. In fact, an expanded range of functions would probably get in the way of the quick, fluid movement from video to video, page to page, that defines YouTube viewing. Of course, this manner of watching bests older models of eyeball-delivery, which is not to even mention that users also rank materials, readily providing advertisers useful marketing and consumption information.

Your course drew the interest of the mass media. In what way did this media coverage distort or simplify your goals as a teacher? What advice might you offer to other educators who found themselves caught up in a similar media storm?

The mainstream media attention served as a huge distraction and energy-drain for the course, while also being highly informative about one of the main functionalities of YouTube: popularity/celebrity. I must admit, it was downright baffling to me how my students initially could not seem to see the systems of popularity or celebrity as constructed, as made to keep them distracted. No matter how I approached it, they would only understand the concept, "you do something to get more hits, to be seen by more people and become more famous," as innately and inherently true, the reason to be on YouTube, the reason of YouTube. When our pretty massive visibility led to prying cameras that took up a lot of classroom space and time, but never bothered to see or understand our project with any depth, and a media culture that ridiculed us without interviewing us, the idea of celebrity as an unquestionable good in itself was easily cracked open for the students. I must also add here that we were handled with much more sophistication in the blogisphere.

As for advice: I learned I'm glad I am a professor and not a pundit because I do best when I can talk in length, in context, and in conversation. While I've been critiquing YouTube for its inadequacies in these respects, mainstream television and radio pale in comparison, and remind us about how YouTube really does differ from these earlier corporate models. Outside innate skill, hiring a handler, or wasting all your time memorizing and practicing blurbs, I am not certain how a garden-variety professor like myself could make mainstream media attention really work for her.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies, Pitzer College, teaches video production and film and video theory. She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and has taught courses at NYU, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, Claremont Graduate University, and Pitzer College, on women and film, feminist film, and women's documentary. Dr. Juhasz has written multiple articles on feminist and AIDS documentary.

Dr. Juhasz produced the feature film, The Watermelon Woman, as well as nearly fifteen educational documentaries on feminist issues like teenage sexuality, AIDS, and sex education.

Her first book, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1996) is about the contributions of low-end video production to political organizing and individual and community growth.

Her second book is the transcribed interviews from her documentary about feminist film history, Women of Vision, with accompanying introductions (Minnesota University Press).

Her third book, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, edited with Jess Lerner, is recently out from University of MN Press. She is currently completing her first "book" on the web, Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics.

Ordinary Men in Extraordinary Times: An Interview with Iranian Underground Band, Kiosk

If you have seen the film or read the graphic novel of Persepolis, then you will recall the joy that the young protagonist took in listening to western Rock music and the risks that she was willing to take to get access to tapes of recent heavy metal or punk recordings. In many ways, music was the gateway into her political consciousness. Talieh Rohani, an Iranian-born CMS graduate student, recently wrote a paper for my Media Theory and Methods proseminar which shed light on what has happened to the rock music scene in her home country and suggested the ways that new digital tools for production and distribution were impacting the Iranian underground music scene. These insights emerge from an interview she did with Kiosk, an Iranian underground band which recently immigrated to America. An Interview with Kiosk

By Talieh Rohani

The 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran brought so many social changes and so much repression to the lives of Iranians including the decision to ban the western music. The young generation found it impossible to access any music from the rest of the world. As a result, pop music abruptly stopped progressing in Iran. At the same time in the Western World, the progressive rock scene was allegedly terminated by the arrival of punk rock, because many punk admirers incorporated progressive elements and were inspired by progressive rock bands.

Although the Iranian youngsters had already been influenced by progressive rock music from the late sixties to the late seventies, the war years made it irrelevant for the younger generation to listen to and embrace this musical goldmine. But with the arrival of satellite the Iranian young generation became aware of the current world rock music. The introduction of the Internet and the possibilities it presented allowed the Iranians to participate in the music scene.

Iranian underground music became an alternative to the mainstream pop Persian LA music. Most Iranians started to recognize this revolutionary movement. Underground bands like 127, Hypernova, Kiosk, and Abjeez have received great support in their debuts outside of Iran. And as a result, a new taste in music has emerged within Persian communities that are no longer satisfied with the mainstream LA music. What you'll be reading is an interview with the underground Iranian rock band Kiosk conducted in Boston in November 2007. Kiosk is a Persian Blues/Rock/Jazz band established in Iran's basements. The band's first album Adame Mamolli (Ordinary Man), released outside of Iran by Bamahang Productions, was known as one of the most successful of Iran's underground music recordings.

Over the past few years, Arash Sobhani, the founder and the lead singer of the band, left Iran to US and released his second album Eshgh-e Sorat (Love of Speed) in May 2007. What distinguishes "Kiosk" from other Iranian bands are the social commentaries in their lyrics. The music video clip for Love of Speed has been viewed almost 400,000 times on YouTube.

Babak Khiavchi is the founder of Bamahang Productions, which aims to help Iranian underground music gain recognition across the globe. He is also one of the main guitarists of Kiosk. Babak talks about the restrictions that were enforced on the Iranian Music Scene. He says he finds the red lines invisible but he cannot ignore their existence. According to Babak musicians cannot address certain things in their lyrics. In order to produce an album, the musician needs to get permission to start a band from Iran's Cultural Ministry. He will also need to get permission for the lyrics, the music and even the vocals of the singers. If the ministry feels that the band is imitating a famous Persian singer in Los Angeles, it probably won't give them permission to sing unless that music promotes the government. Babak talks about something called Laleh Zar Mafia that basically controls all music productions and distributions in Iran. This mafia knows both the audience and the market and has a monopoly on it. He refers to O-Hum group. Their lyrics are all from Hafez and Rumi and there is nothing illegal about that. However, O-Hum could not get permission for production in Iran because it was trying to fuse traditional Persian music with Rock music. This is something that is not acceptable in Iran.

According to these red lines, any presentation of Western values and style is considered decadent. Babak doesn't face such restrictions in the American music scene. When he started working in the IT industry about 10 years ago, he decided to help his friends in Iran who were trying to get their music recorded and heard.

Babak claims that Kiosk's Ordinary Man album was probably the first Persian underground band that was officially released and copyrighted here and he managed to add it to the iTunes catalog. He thinks that is a big step and it gives a lot of motivation to all these underground musicians in Iran to know that there is a channel for underground music on the Internet and there is an audience there for the music they are producing.

Babak believes that one of the significant things about O-Hum is that their sound engineer, Shahram Sharbaf, recorded everything on his home computer using Pro-Tools software and some other sound engineering devices. He showed everyone that they can do this at home and they wouldn't have to go to a multi-million dollar studio. Babak strongly believes that it is the content and the idea that matters. From his perspective, it is okay to have a low quality production. But the originality of styles and ability to integrate culture into music makes it attractive to people. Babak claims that everyone followed O-Hum example and learned how to use the software and started recording. "The qualities aren't good," he says, "They are mostly demo quality. But even the demos have so much raw emotions."

He compares it to the LA music market. From his point of view, the underground Persian music has so much emotion that the audience tend to forget about the quality. "You really feel the pain and frustration that these musicians burden and how they found music as an outlet to express themselves," says Babak.

Arash sees a life that is going on in Iran underground. He describes the ways people meet and socialize with each other in underground parties. Arash says, "What you see on the streets and on TV is different than what the true life is". This reminds him of the movie Underground. "The majority of people in Iran live underground," he says. Arash believes that most Iranians do not live according to the values that are reinforced on TV or the Islamic values that the government wants people to live with. So he finds underground music as a medium that is exposing the emotions of those people who cannot talk on TV or newspapers to reflect their opinions to others. That's why "These people turn to underground music and blogs...This gives voice to majority of people who do not have access to any kind of media to get heard," Arash says.

On the other hand, Babak finds the restrictions imposed on the music scene to be the main reason for the emergence of underground music. According to him, the music produced and distributed in the LA area, although they have many resources available to them without any limitations, has no content. "What suffers here is art itself. If art is the means of self-expression, and if you can't do this through the legal channels, and the channel that gives you the most audience, you just have to go and find your own channel underground and express yourself the way you want to be heard," says Babak.

Some people commented that their two albums have major differences in terms of culture and restriction. The first album, Ordinary Man was made in Iran facing government restrictions. The second album, Love of Speed was released here in the US facing none of those restrictions. It took Arash three years to write the lyrics of the first album. It covers three years of his life when he was going through "different emotions," he says, "than when I moved to San Francisco". Most of the social commentaries of Love of Speed were created in Iran. And he only polished them here. He calls it the process of growing up. Different things are more important for him now than four years ago. I wonder what those different things are. Arash says, "Nostalgia".

When Arash was writing the lyrics of Ordinary Man, he never planned on recording and releasing this as an album. He used to write for other people to sing and after Babak heard his demos he told him that he had to sing it himself instead of giving away such good songs. When he was writing Love of Speed, he knew he had more room to express himself. There were fewer limitations. He knew he had a chance to talk more about the social issues instead of just on a personal level.

Arash does not see the existence of censorship within his personal life in Iran as a positive factor in forming his music. He says that he did not plan to release the first album when he was writing it. He was doing it for himself so the red lines didn't matter to him. He claims that after Khatami's presidency, many people felt sorry for waiting for 8 years to see a progressive stable change in the society. And after, this guy, Ahmadinejad, came and took over and ruined everything. So he does not have that much time for personal songs anymore, he explains.

Kiosk received two major criticisms from people within the underground music scene. First, many people consider Mohsen Namjo Music revolutionary because it introduced new sound and rhythms to the Iranian Music. Some people believe that Kiosk has nothing new to offer other than the lyrics, and it's an imitation of Dire Straits and Bob Dylan. Secondly, many people believe when the underground musicians moves from Iran to US, they can no longer be a part of the underground music scene. In order to be known underground, the music will need to remain underground. Kiosk no longer suffers the restrictions and limitations in underground music scene in Iran.

Arash accepts that his music sounds like Dire Straits but he says he is proud of that. "I don't know any band that wasn't under the influence of any other band," says Arash, "And I don't know any good band that wasn't influenced by Bob Dylan." According to him, the challenge was to use the Farsi language in a rock context, using guitar and bass. Adapting Farsi with its own music. Arash describes that this challenge started in the 70s with Koroush Yaghmayi, Farhad and Faramarz Aslani. They tried to challenge different angles. He says that the best they could do was to take poems from Rumi, Hafez and other traditional songs and mold them to Rock music.

Kiosk's success is that it adapts Farsi lyrics to Rock and Blues. In the second album, Love of Speed, they were trying to find their own sound, similar to other rock bands that are always looking for their unique sound. "Dire Straits' first album was influenced by JJ Cale," claims Arash. From his perspective, everyone starts with an influence. "The important thing is that everyone is trying to find his own sound" Arash says. He thinks the second album was a big step for Kiosk in trying to establish a new sound and he finds himself hitting in a right direction.

In Babak's opinion, if you want to get the audience's attention, the best approach is to start from an angle that the audience is familiar with. "If you listen to "Dailiness(Roozmaregi)" you might think that it sounds like Dire Straits but it actually reflects Iranians' social issues," claims Babak. He argues that in Love of Speed there is a lot less influence of Dire Straits.

Babak considers Kiosk as an underground band still. He explains that they always try to call themselves an alternative to mainstream Persian music generated in Los Angeles. "Not that there is anything wrong with LA music. We all like to dance," Babak says. Apparently Andy played in his wedding. Babak argues that Kiosk is trying to give people another alternative. "People are fed up with recycled ideas of the same old cheesy lyrics about eyebrows, eyes, lips and how tall she is," claims Babak.

Babak mentions that they are not promoting themselves through any mainstream channels. All their concerts are being organized by grass roots support. They rely a lot on Persian student organizations in all cities that they go to. They approach them directly and ask for help. Students volunteer to do the CD sales and T-shirts. "You never see any of the big Persian promoters backing us," says Babak.

I wonder if they know their audience and if they define underground as an alternative to the LA Mainstream music, what they would tell those people that think that Kiosk has lost the reality of Iran by immigrating here and can no longer be the voice of the underground life. Arash is concerned about that. But he believes that fortunately or unfortunately, many things has happened to him in Iran that he has content to write for many more years, he says it while laughing hysterically. But he is concerned that sooner or later he will be talking about things that people in Iran can no longer relate to. He is trying not to fall in that path. "Once we become distant from contemporary Iran we will also join others to write about hips and eyebrows." he laughs.

Babak recalls when they started in basements. He says that they are trying to stay close to the vibes that they came up with in the basements. According to him, they were never concerned about the audience. They just did it for themselves. Fortunately there seems to be a wide range of Iranians all over the world who could relate to their music. They are from all ages. "We hear from them through emails, fan communities and social networking sites," says Babak. They have some fans that are analyzing every word in their lyrics. He believes that no one ever sees Persian lyrics being analyzed this much. "If people would analyze LA Persian music, maybe they could do better by now," he says sarcastically. He says that the first feedback they have got was from Persian middle-aged divorced men. Recently they have had a much younger audience. Arash thinks that is because people got exposed to their music through the Internet. They were underground and they couldn't be played on radio or TV. So their audience was among those who had access to the Internet. Mostly educated and mostly divorced!

Arash explores more the issues regarding the restrictions on music in Iran. He reminds us that Iran has the youngest population in the world. The Islamic republic is backing up inch by inch. He remembers the time that VCRs weren't allowed in Iran. And when satellites came around the government removed restrictions on VCR and video clubs. And then Internet came and they accepted it. So Arash believes that the government is giving room but very slowly. And the young generation wants more. They want more concerts and more music and this is not something that the government has allowed. This is because Iran is young and they need music and Radio Payam is the best they can get, says Arash. There are no other resources available to people. In Arash perspective, that's not even what people want.

Babak recalls an incident in Iran. There was a raid at a party in Karaj (a city close to Tehran). It was a private concert in which two hundred people participated. The police arrested all of them. And the news agency announced that it was the gathering of the devil worshipers. Babak believes they were just a rock band and maybe someone was wearing an Iron Maiden metal t-shirt. In his perspective, this proves that there is a demand for rock music.

Traditional Persian music just wouldn't satisfy Iranians. He believes that people need to have the energy of Rock music. The government knows that there is a big demand for this. That's another thing that is pushing the boundaries in his opinion. So he believes that in the long term it might work out.

Talieh Rohani studied filmmaking at Soureh University in Tehran, Iran, before going on to do a BFA in Image Arts/Film Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto and to pursue an MFA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. She has directed four short films and worked, variously, as a director, art director and production designer, cinematographer and editor. She is interested in the emergence post-revolutionary popular culture in lives of young Iranian women and in the larger impact of technology on the development of a new global imagination. She sees CMS as a place to broaden and strengthen the ideas and skills that she hopes to bring back to her flimmaking practice.

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part One)

I am posting tonight from the west coast, having flown out to California to participate in 24/7 A DYI Video Summit being hosted by the University of Southern California. The event brings together videomakers from a range of different communities -- everything from fan video producers to activists who use Youtube to get their messages out to the world. I am thrilled to be participating on a plenary panel on the future of DYI Video, featuring Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig, hosted by Howard Rheingold. As I was getting ready to head out to the conference, I conducted an interview for the blog with media scholar Pat Aufderheide (of the Center for Social Media) and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University. I've long been interested in the work Pat and Peter have been doing promoting fair use in relation to a range of different communities of practice -- including documentary filmmakers, media literacy instructors, and producers of online video content. We featured some of the work they were doing through the Media in Transition conference at MIT last year. You can hear a podcast of that discussion online. I wanted to check in with them because in the past few months, they've issued several major new studies on the impact of copyright confusion on our culture, work which is setting the stage for efforts to identify "best practices" and to negotiate "acceptable use" standards to broaden the protections afforded those of us who are tying to integrate media production activities into our classrooms or who are involved in mashing up content as a form of expressive practice. Today, I am running the first installment of this exchange.

A recent study by the Pew Center for Internet Research suggests that almost 60 percent of teens on line have produced their own media content and a growing percentage of them are circulating that content beyond their immediate friends and families. What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?

PA: A more participatory media culture is definitely going mainstream. While it's still true that many more people watch than make at the moment, you're right to point out that young people are growing up as makers, and seizing upon blogs, online video and social networks to express and even form their identities. There are DaxFlame aficionados, and there are dozens of take-offs on "Dick in a Box," and "Dramatic Chipmunk" has spawned "Dramatic Snake" and "Dramatic Squirrel" and even compilation and fan websites for the phenomenon.

Many practices enthusiastically being pioneered and developed online involve use of copyrighted material. That's normal for new cultural creation. It builds on existing culture. Our culture is markedly commercial and popular, and our current copyright regime features default copyright (your grocery list is copyrighted when you've written it down) and very, very long terms (meaning that nothing you'd want to quote ever seems to fall into the public domain). So quoting of copyrighted culture will continue to be a key tool of new cultural producers.

Those new cultural producers often today believe that they're doing something illegal by quoting copyrighted culture. That's partly because of relentless miseducation on the part of corporate owners of content. They are justifiably terrified of peer-to-peer file sharing and other digital copying that threatens their business models. Their response has been to demonize all unauthorized use of copyrighted material as theft and piracy.

At the same time, they're desperately trying to revamp their business models for a digital era, and are making the blanket assumption that all unauthorized copying could be a threat to some as-yet-unimagined or as-yet-unpracticed business model.

Well, you wouldn't want to be them at this moment, it's true. At the same time, when they ignore the right of fair use, they are ignoring a very vital part of the law.

They're now worried about online video as a kind of "DVR to the world." So content providers like NBC Universal and Viacom are working out deals with online video providers like Veoh and MySpace, for specialized filters and software to identify copyrighted material. These filters will be able to "take down" videos that are copies of copyrighted material. The trouble is, nobody has yet figured out how to protect online videos that may be using copyrighted material legally, under fair use. As Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, it's like going tuna fishing without a dolphin-safe net.

Until now no one has known how big the problem of accidentally suppressing legal work really is. Our study, called "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video," (available at centerforsocialmedia.org/recut) demonstrates that it could be a very big problem indeed.

Many online videos, we showed, use copyrighted material in one of nine ways that are eligible for fair use consideration. (We weren't saying that they all are examples of fair use, only that these kinds of uses can be seen and in some cases have been widely recognized as fair use.)

Many of the precedents concerning fair use could be read as protecting specific classes of users -- the right of journalists or academics to quote for the purposes of reviews or critical commentary, for example. To what degree can or should those rights be extended to include amateur media producers?

PJ: It's really not a question of extending rights, but of making users aware of the right they already have. Fair use has been around as a judge made doctrine since the mid-19th century, and back in 1976, in its (for once considerable) wisdom, the Congress came up with a formulation of the doctrine that was general in its application rather than specific to any area or areas of practice. The problem for any group of practitioners is knowing how fair use applies to them and having the collective courage to rely on it. Some groups (journalists and academics are good examples -- and commercial publishers are another!) have done well at this over the years, and as a result they enjoy use rights that are apparently more extensive. But the truth is that documentary filmmakers, K-12 teachers, and on-line video producers have the same entitlement to fair use as everyone else.

That's why the "Best Practices" approach that we've been working on over the past several years is so important. It's an effort to help practice communities claim their legal rights by formulating consensus statements of what kinds of unlicensed use of copyrighted materials are necessary and reasonable for the creative work they do.

YouTube's impact has directed much greater public attention onto the work of these amateur media producers. In your white paper, you walk through a range of different genres of media appropriation and remixing. Which of these are the most clearly protected under current law? Which seem most at risk?

PA: First, a note: Because we're at the end of the mass media era, and because the pioneers of participatory media have been end-users or non-commercial producers, we think of this as an "amateur" movement. But it won't be for long. It'll just be expression in an open digital environment. Some of that expression, whether it's produced by professionals or not, will be monetized; much of it, most of it, will be available to be monetized. So the neat distinctions between professional and amateur, and between non-commercial and commercial use, are getting a lot messier and will soon be unhelpful. One thing we're very sure of is that we won't solve this problem by creating a non-commercial, amateur zone. Now, everyone's a player.

In our study, we identified a wide range of kinds of practices -- remix/remash (Ten Things I Hate about Commandments), quoting of a whole work for online commentary (The Worst Music Video Ever), critical commentaries (analysis of Fox news bias for instance), tribute videos (Steve Irwin), diaries (Me on Stage with U2 -- again!!), to name a few. We also saw a wide range of actual practices within those genres. One of the things we didn't do was to pass any lawyerly judgment on the fair use of any particular instance. We stopped at identifying kinds of practices as fair-use eligible, which is all that the survey we did permits us. We think this is very valuable because the kinds of practices are all clearly eligible for fair-use consideration. We hope that the next phase of our work, creating a best-practices code, will provide guidance to help people make judgments for themselves about what is fair use.

You can, however, make some generalizations:

• It gets harder to claim fair use the closer people get to merely quoting the work without commenting on it, reframing it, or adapting it.
• It gets harder to justify fair use the closer the copier's purpose is to the original.
• It gets harder when the quotation is longer or more extensive than is justified by its purpose.
• It gets harder to claim fair use the more the copier is intending to monetize the original item in order to compete with the copyright owner.
• It gets harder when proper credit isn't given.

We also found that it's very easy for everybody to understand why it's o.k. to use copyrighted material for critical, political and social commentary. People understand that you can't critique something without referring to it, which in video would also involve hearing and seeing it. They also see critical speech as a great example of the First Amendment.

What's harder for people to grasp is that it's also o.k. to use copyrighted material to make new work that may be illustrative or celebratory or illustrative rather than critical, or may re-imagine the culture as remixes do, or may archive it, or may simply record reality that includes it. Why is that so hard to grasp? All this activity uses the same cultural processes, the building of new work and meaning on the platform of the old. We think it's because people have cultivated, in the mass media era, a cult of the author, a belief in creativity as the product of the genius of the individual creator. This of course flies in the face of everything we know about the creative process, which is a social, collective and iterative one. It also flies in the face of cultural evolution. After all, until very recently in the West, copying was homage, copying was learning.

Many of these amateur media makers know little about the law. Most of them lack the resources to seek legal advice about their work. What steps can or should be taken to protect their fair use rights?

PJ:We're suggesting that a "blue ribbon" panel of experts in law and communications should take on the task of developing a set of "Best Practices" for fair use in on-line video production. The first step would be to talk with a wide range of producers (and platforms) about what they regard as necessary and appropriate quotation. Then the panel would be in a position to craft a document that would be a useful reference for media makers themselves and for the platforms that make their work available – as well as for the content owners themelves. In particular, it would be a point of reference that platforms and content owners could use when they develop mechanisms (like filtering techniques or take down protcols) designed to block or disable infringing on-line content. Everyone seems to agree that mechanisms of this kind shouldn't interfere with fair use, but unless there is some consensus about what constitutes fair use in this new area of practice, these pious affirmations aren't likely to be translated into meaningful practice. In the extreme and unlikely case that an issue involving fair use and on-line video were to find its way to court, a "Best Practices" statement also would help to guide the courts. Following a long-standing (and sensible) tradition in fair use decision-making, judges in these cases pay close attention to practice communities' views of what is fair and reasonable. (More about tradition and its implications is at www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf),

And, of course, if a media maker working within the framework of a "Best Practices" document were to be sued or otherwise harassed, there would be a healthy supply of expert IP lawyers lining up to defend that person on a pro bono basis. IP progressives -- and there are plenty of them in the legal community -- always are looking for good "test cases" to demonstrate the reach of fair use. In fact, Stanford's Fair Use Project is actively looking for such cases, and would offer legal defense if it could find one.

Pat Aufderheide, one of American University's Scholar-Teachers, is a critic and scholar of independent media, especially documentary film, and of communications policy issues in the public interest. Her work on fair use in documentary film has changed industry practice, and she has won several journalism awards. She is the founder, in 2001, of the Center for Social Media, which showcases media for democracy, civil society and social justice. She recently received the Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation from the International Documentary Association.

Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. He was Pauline Ruvle Moore Scholar in Public Law from 1981-82; Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Awardee in 1982; and he received the AU Faculty Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Development in 1996. He is a member of the Selden Society (state correspondent for Washington, D.C.). Previously he was a member of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. trustee, 1992-94; International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property; National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., Animal Welfare Board, 1986-present; Library of Congress Advisory Committee on Copyright Registration and Deposit (ACCORD), 1993. He has written many chapters, articles and monographs on copyright, intellectual property, technology and other issues. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994 (with M. Woodmansee) (also published as a law journal issue, 10 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 274, 1992). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, Third Edition (Matthew Bender & Co., 1994).

Confessions of a Superhero: An Interview with Filmmaker Matt Ogden

Earlier this month, documentary filmmaker Matt Ogden released his most recent film, Confessions of a Superhero, on dvd. I first became aware of this film, which depicts the personal lives of the people who perform the parts of superheroes in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, when it played at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin. Ogens' previous work includes Timeless and The Life for ESPN,

Players for VH1, each of which deals in one way or another with the colorful personalities behind the scenes in sports and show business. The film is hauntingly beautiful, showing us something of the fantasy lives of its protagonists, as well as heartbreaking in its depiction of these men and women, their motives for performing, their professional dreams and disappointments, and the society they have created for themselves. There are places where the film edges a bit too close to pathologizing its subjects for my taste, but there's always something to complicate any easy judgment we might want to make about these people and the choices they've made with their lives. You can learn a good deal more about the film over at their engaging homepage or at Myspace. You can also see some sample sequences on Youtube, including this sequence of Superman working the streets, an exploration of the economic realities of street performing, The Hulk's account of his struggle to escape homelessness, and a sequence showing the superheroes at home getting ready to perform.

What first attracted you about this topic? In your Director's statement, you describe a process which takes you from estrangement towards a closer identification with your subjects. How did this reassessment of these people and their lives come about?

I'm always attracted to stories about the underdog, about people on the fringes of society, or just interesting, sometimes quirky characters. At first, I thought it would be an oddball comedy documentary. Who would dress up and work for tips on Hollywood Boulevard? After we began production, Los Angeles became a character in itself. The city draws so many different types of people from all over the world seeking fame and fortune. It's a cliché, yet it's true. As I delved deeper into filming, I discovered these "superheroes" aren't much different than myself on the inside; and not much different than the other seekers in Hollywood. They want to make it. They want success. Deep down they want to matter, to make a difference. Don't we all want that, whether it's through acting, as a doctor, lawyer, entrepreneur, or teaching? Success comes in many forms - money to some, awards to others, a sense of accomplishment, et cetera - but in the end we all want to feel like we're enough. It's easy to judge people that are different. At first glance most would say they do not relate to these characters. But stick around and get to no anyone and you just might find something you have in common. I did.

Many of your earlier films -- The Life about sports, Players about Ludacris -- dealt with celebrities in the traditional sense of the word. This film deals with people who see themselves as having found fame but not fortune, as one of the characters puts it, having acquired fame for the characters they perform but not as a result of their own personalities. How did that earlier work shape your perception of these people? What did making this film suggest to you about the culture of celebrity?

I'm an idealist. I think celebrity is ridiculous. Then, why the hell did I choose this career, you might ask? I love it. I love telling stories. And I don't mind being paid for it, but I don't need the fame. I just don't care about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. People should be recognized, if it all, for being good at what they do, what they contribute, not for who they date or who they made a sex tape with. I'd like to think the other people I've directed whether it's a hip hop artist named Ludacris or an MVP in the NBA or NFL, are more than just celebrities. They are good at their chosen professions whether anyone knows their names or not - they are great at what they do. Celebrity is just a natural offshoot of that. It's when people become celebrities for doing nothing that I don't relate to. When it's not about their profession, but what they do when they're not working - that is not what I want to learn about.

The characters in my film have found a different kind of fame. They've been featured on Jimmy Kimmel, Jay Leno, in magazines and interview shows all over the world. But they're not household names. And most people don't know their real names. They just recognize them for the characters they portray. And there is nothing wrong with that. In Robert Fritz's book The Path of Least Resistance he states "the path by which you move from where you are in your life to where you want to be cannot be put into a formula." This applies to my career as a director, even more so to these characters. This is their path and the road they chose to hopefully find success in the entertainment industry. Who's to say they want find it? Not me.

As far as celebrity goes, I do feel kids today want to be famous as opposed to a great actor. They want to be filthy rich, drive a Bentley GT Continental and where a Rolex instead of playing basketball for the love of the game or making music because they have to make music. Entertainment is a means to an end for a lot of people. If you aspire to be a celebrity, well...good luck, I guess.

In your director's statement, you said, "At first I wanted to show the eccentricities of these characters, but I didn't want to take the easy route and simply make fun of them. I wanted to peel the onion and go deeper." What steps did you take to avoid the stereotypes and preconceptions that your viewers might have about these people?

I attempted to keep my point of view out of the film. Once you turn the camera on, even if you never ask a question, reality is manipulated of course. People act different in front of a camera. In most family photos everyone is smiling. As soon as mom points a camera at you, you're trained to smile. Same with moving pictures sometimes. But I kept myself out of it as much as possible. If you laugh at the characters, they're being themselves and I'm not editing it in such a way as to get you to laugh at them. Im just showing you, the audience, what happened. As I got to know them better while filming I began to empathize with them. I hope the audience will take the same journey I did and end up rooting for the characters by the end, or at least some of them.

How have your subjects responded to this film? On the one hand, you do give them a kind of visibility on the screen. As they suggest in relation to the news coverage of the arrest of Elmo and Mr. Fantastic, all publicity has a value in their world. On the other hand, you really don't pull many punches here in terms of depicting some of the painful and humiliating aspects of their lives. Yet, several of your subjects came out to South By Southwest to help you promote the film.

Certainly, I was concerned and curious as to how they would react, particularly Max, who portrays Batman. He is definitely the antagonist, or villain of the film, if there is a villain. Truth be told, I do not know how Max feels about the film. Chris "Superman" Dennis seems to love it. Some people love recognition whether it's for good or bad reasons. Bad publicity is better than no publicity. I'm sure there's a little bit of this in play.

At SXSW, Superman and Hulk were celebrities. People loved seeing them there. And they deserved the notoriety.

One of the striking components of the film is the visual style -- especially your use of still photographs and oversaturated colors. How did these two stylistic choices come about and what do they signal about your relationship to this content?

From the moment the idea came to me, I knew I wanted this to be a visual documentary. In my opinion, a film should look as good as the story its telling. Charlie Gruet, the director of photography and a producer on the film, set out to give a style to the film, and not just shoot willy-nilly. The idea was to make this look cinematic, filmic, like you're watching a narrative film, not a talking head corporate video. All of the verite moments on the boulevard were shot handheld, in a fly on the wall style. The sit down interviews, scenics of Los Angeles, and specialty shots were more set up and art directed. But we didn't make things look "cool" for the sake of it. Each set, if you can call it that, was discussed and reasoned. Superman was interviewed on a vinyl couch against patterned wallpaper as if he was in Martha Kent's country home in the movie or comic book versions of Superman. Batman was shot in a cavernous warehouse (instead of a cave), but you get the point. Batman's past is dark. And we wanted a darker setting for him.

In addition to directing, I also shoot stills and we always shot during production for marketing materials, the website, posters, etc. The idea to use stills within the film didn't come until late in the process. We didn't settle on using still photos for the transitions until a month before we locked picture. We felt the composition of the photos complemented the sit down interviews and helped tell the story.

You clearly portray Christopher Dennis not simply as someone who performs the part of Superman but as a hardcore fan, someone who actively collects Superman related materials, who hero worships Christopher Reeves, and who shows clear disappointment when he doesn't win the costume competition.

Chris "Superman" Dennis is hardcore. He is obsessive about his character to the nth degree. The others certainly have an affinity for their characters, but not nearly to the extent as Chris. I personally feel Chris has lost himself in his character and I think he would agree. I know his wife Bonnie would agree. He so much want to be a leading actor, he is only known as Hollywood Superman. I think he's afraid of shedding the costume. He has an identity with it and without it he may feel no one will recognize him.

How did you select these particular characters out of the dozens of other performers you suggest are working in this same space? What made these stories stand out against the pack?

It was not a long "casting" process. I thought it would take forever to find the right characters. There are probably 80 people who work on and off on the boulevard and we highlight four of them - Superman, Batman, The Hulk, and Wonder Woman. First, I decided early on to stick with recognizable superheroes. For one, I felt like Superman or Wonder Woman was more iconic and forever then Sponge Bob or Freddie Krueger. Also, I felt that superheroes would make a good metaphor for the lives of the people inside the costumes.

Superman was the first character I approached. He looked like one of the leaders out there. That's how he carried himself. He introduced me to the others. I could have kept "casting." We did have a Spiderman character, played by Spike Henderson. And he was a great character. As opposed to trying to make it as an actor, this ex-professional golfer is trying to qualify for the Senior's Tour. We just didn't get enough footage of him. He didn't allow us enough access into his life to make a full story with an arc, so we had to leave him on the cutting room floor.

The film suggests at places that there is a hierarchy among the performers who work the Strip -- with Superman as a leader of sorts within this community -- as well as some antagonisms between some of the performers. What can you tell us about the community of personalities who interact in this space? Are there, for example, rival Superman performers competing for the same bit of turf or is there an understanding that once a character is taken, newcomers need to assume new roles?

Chris Superman Dennis certainly is the self-proclaimed leader of the boulevard. I don't know if the other characters would agree. But he is probably one of the most knowledegable out there. And he takes the unwritten code of the boulevard seriously. I never witnessed a second Superman but I did see rivals of other characters. Max Batman Allen has had a longstanding rivalry with another Batman character. The two have had many arguments over the years (with police involvement at times). People know what the rules are but don't always follow them so you will see duplicate characters and they compete for tips, argue, and sabatoge one another. This is how these people put food on their tables so someone coming on the boulevard with the same outfit is a problem they must take seriously. It is quite a soap opera out there. I spent two years witnessing it. God, I'm exhausted.

Gender and Fan Culture (Wrapping Up, Part Four)

Cynthia Walker: This conversation series has been very enjoyable and interesting and even, at times, fascinating, and I would like to thank everyone who participated and Henry Jenkins for hosting it.

It felt very much like a virtual conference and, as with most academic conferences I attend, I came away feeling both exhilarated but also overwhelmed. Indeed, I've been spending the last few days reviewing each of the conversations and making notes so I can remember the participants and their areas of expertise for future reference.

Although the conversations were organized around the question of gender, they ranged across a wide variety of subjects including fan fiction, fan vidding, machinima, gaming, horror, graphic novels and more. Still, there were common themes running through the discussions, particularly the relationships between individual fans and fan communities, between and among academics, and between audiences and producers.

What has become clear to me is that what we're seeing in fan studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field and as such, we should be moving toward establishing our own conferences, our own forums (such as this one) and our own journals. Unlike the folks in other fields who sometimes seem to be talking just to each other, we have the opposite problem: we have to comb academic conferences just to find one another. I know I often search the programs of conferences I attend in Communication, popular culture, media literacy and media ecology, just to find panels on fan-related topics. Sometimes, there's just one. Sometimes, there are none at all. This needs to change.

Another point that struck me in reading these conversations was how much we depend upon impressions, anecdotes, and personal conversations and experiences in discussing fan identity and fan practice. Perhaps because, originally, I came into academia through Communication and media studies rather than cultural and literary studies, I think I would like to see more quantitative and qualitative research, more surveys and focus groups, exploring just how fans see themselves, what they do, how they do it, and why. In this, I have felt encouraged to pursue my own research in that direction because I would really like to get a sense of the lay of the land of fandom -- a map as it were. What exactly is this phenomenon called Fandom (with a capital F)? Does it have boundaries, and if so, what are they?

Since the relationship of media producers and fan audiences is also a subject that keeps cropping up, I would like to see more research in this area, research that is not conducted only by mainstream Communication and media studies scholars, but by those of us who also have some knowledge and acquaintance with fan communities. This is especially important because more and more of those working as media professionals either come from, or self-identify, as fans, and, particularly on the Internet, commercial and fan spaces are encroaching upon one another.

Finally, because gender apparently does influence, at least to some extent, fan identity, community, practices, interests, and interpretation, I hope these conversations will inform our work in this new field of fan studies so that certain topics, practices and approaches are not privileged over others. We have more in common than not, and as fan studies scholars, I believe it's in our collective interest to find those areas where our identities and interests overlap and pursue them.

Will Brooker:

If this was a superhero summer crossover event, I guess I was Animal Man, or the Blue Beetle, or Booster Gold& one of those third-string DC characters (barely even superheroes, more a normal guy with a bit of a gimmick) who appears for a few issues then vanishes between the frames, leaving only his most die-hard fans to wonder where he went.

My little narrative involved a team-up with Kristine Busse and Ksenia Prassolova, across a series of messy personal emails that we then group-edited down into a neater conversation. I enjoyed those emails; I felt we found some common ground, disagreed respectfully and had a few laughs. It was a positive experience for me, especially given that the last time I'd seen Kristine in real life, in the bizarre setting of the Dog and Duck English pub, Austin Texas, we had the kind of mildly-drunken debate about gender privilege that may have prompted this whole event.

My feelings about that mini-narrative entering the bigger debate of Henry's blog and the LiveJournal mirror are closely tied into my feelings about internet forums in general. I was deeply involved in maybe half a dozen discussion groups between 2001 and 2006, and while that's late in the day by some people's standards, about a third of my life seemed to be lived online during that period. So I'm familiar with the sniping, the cross-board politics, the elaborate insults, the wounded egos - the dynamics that occur when normal people meet online as larger-than-life textual persona, often with a few different codenames, a hardcore group of followers and an established reputation - maybe the closest we get in academia to a clash of superheroes. I know a handful of the participants in real life, and I often didn't recognise the way they were being constructed and responded to; sometimes it did seem as though the debate demanded a few villains to knock up against and tear down.

So I bowed out of participating in the spin-off discussions because I've had enough of internet arguments for the time being, and it looked to be going a way I've seen before. I think the anonymous, text-based nature of an online forum encourages people to see each other as cartoonish, stylised opponents, encourages the sense of a grand battle complete with allies and cheerleaders, and encourages individuals to carefully craft poisonous barbs and rhetorical missiles, and fling them at each other trying to cause maximum damage. When really, if they sat down face to face, they'd just be normal men and women with a bit of a gimmick. But I've probably been reading too many comics.

Francesca Coppa:

What's been striking to me over the course of this debate is the extent to which the gender issues reflect general problems of convergence culture--that is, the mainstreaming of fannish practice as well as the as growing respectability of "fandom studies". Fandom is a subculture well on its way to becoming culture, and while that has many benefits, it also raises the risk of re-marginalizing the groups that the subculture once represented. The Enterprising Women of 1992 are now only a small, not terribly profitable, subdivision of Fandom, Inc. The line between "fans" and "consumers," once fairly distinct, is blurring as we talk of Apple fans, Dr. Pepper fans, Hummer fans, etc.

I worry about women becoming, yet again, a minority voice in a mixed gender fannish culture in which the makers of Chad Vader get a movie deal and the makers of the K/S vid Closer flee the internet when their vids go viral. The media--especially the genre media which has been the center of so much fannish activity--has typically courted a male demographic, despite (or perhaps because of) their female-dominated audiences. And female fans have typically made lemonade from these lemons; it's no accident that so much "remix" culture happens in the context of minority communities: women, blacks, and the disabled. But in the end, my lovingly crafted fanwork is not your marketing team's "user-generated content."

I think this is why there was such a strong reaction to the gender composition of the panel audiences at MiT5: it reflected our larger cultural fears about the way media is marketed and which consumers matter. In a world where fanboys get development deals, many female fannish interests--and the scholarly works about them--can look comparatively non-mainstream; with their longstanding (and culturally determined) commitment to the local, the handmade, the non-profit, female fans can seem small time, of limited interest, insufficiently "universal." In fandom studies female-created artifacts were a priority because media fandom was so heavily female. Now, as this summer's debate proved, the field has expanded to include all sorts of new arts, practices, and communities.

This is a good thing; I think fandom studies is exciting right now because of its diversity of subject, and also because it has a lot more than its share of "public intellectuals": we're not simply nattering to ourselves, locked in our own esoteric disciplines. We're talking to media producers, legislators, teachers, public advocacy organizations, and we're making connections across fannish communities. But it's important that we keep talking to each other, too, because there's a danger that minority communities (and somehow women in a mixed-gender groups end up as "minority communities," no matter how many of us there are in the room) might be marginalized in the transition from subculture to culture.

Robin Anne Reid

Now I must admit up front that there are gaps. During the first rounds, I was in summer mode, with more time to read and comments. Later on, as we started a new term in a department with major new program and curriculum initiatives taking place, I fell back on skimming, without being able to take the time to read carefully enough to respond. I hope to spend some more time reading over the winter break (and of course I'll respond in the LJ community then!), but take what is below as based on a partial reading (and if you want to point me at great rounds I missed, feel free to do so).

I learned :

That while there are still some important issues regarding gender in the area of fan studies, one of the more serious gaps that needs to be addressed are disciplinary differences. I have a much stronger sense than before of all the current academic disciplines that fan studies is developing in, and a sense that we need to talk more. That being said, I was disappointed to

see so little representation by people trained in the social sciences [remember, point me to stuff I might have missed].

I was glad to see so much work being done along such a wide spectrum of fan productions and communities, and in fandoms such as sports, soap opera, etc. I learned a lot from reading postings by people active in those areas.

I was glad to see some sense of the international nature of fan studies, although I look forward to seeing more work in future by academics working with fan communities and cultures in other national languages.

However, I also learned:

My initial skepticism about the tendency of the majority of male academics to show little to no interest in any serious discussion about gender disparity in scholarship, status, texts, professional places, etc., was confirmed. Perhaps the existence of some women academics saying they had not faced discrimination indicates that in some academic environments things

are changing, or in some disciplines, but the lack of acknowledgment of other women's experiences was problematic.

I am concerned at the extent to which, even in discussions where feminism was identified as an important part of a field or discourse, many of the participants seemed to insist on locating sexism as individual intentional acts as opposed to acknowledging the systemic and institutionalized nature of organized and restrictive hierarchies. Being marginalized in one academic discipline because you study X subject being consistently equated with being

marginalized in the whole academic culture because of gender and field or study and perhaps sexual identity reduces the whole debate to accusations of some individuals lack of character

I learned that if it was this hard, after thirty some years of feminist discussions in mainstream culture and academia, to discuss gender disparity, that serious discussion of class and race are probably not going to happen any time soon among the aca-fen (despite happening more in fandom). I saw only one round where a participant seriously discussed race and class.

I learned that it is very rare for male academics even in this more informal forum to talk at all about how children might affect their careers in any way whatsoever. Whether there is little or no effect, or whether men are simply trained never to talk about their children in professional

spaces, or some combination of both, I am not sure. From research done about women's marginalization in the academy, I suspect that the gaps showing up between childfree women and women who choose to have children will consider to be a problem for some time.

I learned that identification of male privilege, a common concept for decades among feminists, is still perceived as an attack on individuals by some.

I learned that there are always male allies who are appreciated.

I have been glad to meet those men who I will consider from now on as part of the (numerically mostly) female networks where I prefer to spend most of my networking energies.

On the whole, however, I do not think that new and evolving disciplines are necessarily move egalitarian than existing/traditional ones, and that without careful and on-going self-evaluation, a new discipline can easily ossify into old patterns, even if there are a few more white, middle-class women active in it.

Jonathan Gray

One of my original responses to Kristina when she and I discussed fandom, fan studies, and academia's gender divides in Austin was that a lot of the divisions were "just" because of friendship groups. I've since come around to seeing many structuring divides that determine those friendship groups in the first place. And since knowing each other's work and ideas are the best "in" towards establishing better social networks, which will in turn determine more balanced panel constituency, audience constituency, collaborations, etc. in the future, I'm cautiously optimistic that the discussions that have taken place here have formed something of a community (The Fan Détente Summer Camp?) that wasn't there before, and that is now considerably more gender diverse. I know many more people's work, and I feel I know the field much better now.

That said, I don't want to make it sound like the work's done, since I think this Détente has pointed out how much work is required to try and fight the subtler forms of gendered privilege. In particular, clearly more effort is required of us guys to be feminist fan studies (or fan studies-ish) scholars than just smugly knowing we're not the overtly sexist bastards we see elsewhere, and than reading, teaching, and writing with feminist theory.

In moving forward, part of what interests me is how representative or not this group is. For instance, there've been numerous "fandom-lite" males at the Détente, but few fandom-lite females. I know they exist en masse, though, because I meet many of them at conferences, in dept corridors, etc. I'd like to hear how streamlined the experiences of the "fangirls" are with those of the "non-fangirls," as this might tell us what's unique and what's not to fan studies' gender divides. I worry somewhat that at times in this discussion the small group of scholars here, along with their fandoms and fan practices, have been asked to stand in for female or male fandom and female or male consumption more generally. So I'm keen to continue these discussions, both with the Summer Camp and with other fan and non-fan studies men and women.

All along, though, I wish we could've had this whole thing take place in a pub. With Henry buying. Nevertheless, thanks go out to Henry and Kristina for getting the ball rolling on this, and here's to some pub trips in the future.

Karen Helleckson:

Although these fan debates have been valuable, for me, they were less valuable as an explication of gender disparity than as an examination of current scholarship in a huge variety of arenas. I liked the biography parts the best: I found myself looking for others like me, like Deborah Kaplan (#16) and Kristina Busse (#7)--those of us who are unaffiliated. I read everybody's bio with interest. This situating of the self helped me construct their theoretical framework for reading their texts. These constructions of self credential, but they also illuminate. With "my published books include" laid next to "my primary fandom is," it's clear that the academic and the fan must coexist, else how to entwine the interests?

The explications of the entwining that followed ranged from practice (eg, #21, Lucas and Santo) to theory (eg, #18, Russo and Postigo). I found myself enjoying the latter just a little bit more: I have my own practice, my own ways of engagement, which seems unlikely to change anytime soon, but my mind grabs onto these theoretical elements and then begins free-associating. I read about affect and gender (#14, Coppa and Kozinets) and was seized with a desire to revisit the poetics of pleasure; or I read about Japanese cinema fandom (#19 Morimoto and Surman) and it struck me that I have not seen much Japanese cinema, and certainly that must be rectified immediately. The sheer range of interests makes me dizzy, and everywhere I look, I see potential for good, fruitful, interesting work--work that I would like to do, and in that regard, the fan debates have inspired me to begin writing again, after a long time away.

I wrote my dialogue with Jason Mittel using Google Documents, where each could go in and edit the work of the other--a collaboration I very much enjoyed and have used since then with others. I began writing down my own thoughts at my WordPress blog, a process I enjoy despite the lack of dialogue inherent in the fan debates. So the fan debates have certainly helped make me engage better, and they've drawn my attention to the work of many people I didn't know anything about--as well as taught me things about people I do know.

Instead of he said/she said, the fan debates have become we said. The dialogues, taken together, have created a kind of metadialogue. True, it doesn't come to any kind of grand conclusion. The gender-based feelings of exclusion that inspired the project are still in evidence (I witnessed much the same thing at the recent 21st annual SLSA meeting). The same notions of power and authority still apply, even as we discuss them. But the connections made, interlocutor to interlocutor, pairing to pairing, strike me as worthy things in and of themselves. I would consider e-mailing someone I don't really know to ask for advice or an opinion, rather than staying close to my own network. I spend too much time in a small group, and it's time to widen my circle of acquaintances.

Thanks for that opportunity.

Anne Kustritz:

In reviewing these past few months of blog posts, I find I'm left with tentative optimism and a few areas of future concern. I've appreciated the opportunity to speak publicly in this company, and particularly to raise the visibility of gender as an axis of oppression and a lens for analysis within fan studies. When time permitted, I greatly enjoyed reading the contributions posted here for the glimpse that they provide into such a wide range of approaches to fan studies. However, I must also recall moments of shock and dismay as the discussion repeatedly revealed the enormous amount of work yet to be done on gender issues within our field, and in the academy more generally.

Overall, I remain unconvinced that a discussion series between individual scholars adequately responds to the institutional problems which prompted this debate. The issues of sex/gender related disparities in graduate student admissions, hiring, tenure decisions, wage levels, publishing, and conference organization require broad, institutional interventions far beyond the scale of our conversations here, and I hope that the détente will inspire those larger acts of intervention.

In addition, this series of exchanges magnified some of the difficulties which always plague interdisciplinary work and communication within an interdisciplinary field. Crossing disciplinary boundaries is incredibly exciting and necessary to the study of fan activities. Yet, such hybrid methodologies also involve increased risk. As fan studies adopts the tools of many disciplines, I think that we must take a very serious look at how those tools developed, and what kind of theoretical, socio-cultural, and historical baggage they carry with them. Further, if we are committed to being able to talk with each other, the task of translation across disciplines also deserves attention as the language of fan studies moves to embrace the jargon of an ever expanding number of fields. This détente included scholars from a promising array of disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, and methodological hybridities, but that very richness demands that in the future fan studies scholars work together to understand each other's theoretical languages, and work to fully engage with the literatures associated with our interdisciplinary methodological choices.

Barbara Lucas:

While I cannot say that I have faced the same level of institutional sexism that has been discussed in (and was, in part, the impetus for) our debates, mostly because my full-time job is in management at a Fortune 100 company, I am a woman working in a male-dominated industry. My company has women managers in accounting and call center operations, human resources, and client relations, but I am the only female manager in field operations. I believe it is easier for me to compete in my corner of the corporate world than it would be in academia. In my corporate position, I can measure success in terms of goals met and results achieved. Those are the things I am judged on, and they are things that can be documented and verified. However, in academia, I am judged on my ideas, my interpretations and perceptions, and the judgments people make based on such things are definitely more subjective, more likely to be colored with their own biases.

In these debates, we have touched on what it means to be a part of an environment where judgments are made in such a fashion. We've also taken care to distance ourselves as individuals from the sort of behavior. I would have liked to have seen this issue discussed in greater detail. It seems critical when we consider that we are called on to specialize and hone a particular area of expertise, only to find that the texts or approaches that speak most strongly to us are the marginalized ones. This makes it all too easy to marginalize the scholars who work with them and the work those scholars produce.

One of the things that our shared field of study encourages and demands is a flexible, interdisciplinary approach to texts. While our critical approaches may reach across disciplines, at times, our focus and application of them can become decidedly myopic. These debates have afforded me the opportunity to see how other scholars approach their own work, and it is this unearthing of the rich veins of possibility that I might not have stumbled across on my own that I found this the most valuable part of our exchanges. I hope that we can continue the dialogues we stared in this forum.

Eden Lee Lackner:

While I think the discussion has been useful in allowing for some limited cross-discipline discussion and for bringing gender, racial and cultural issues to the fore, I do believe that it has also underlined the insidiousness of institutionalized sexism. This may be a function of individualized debates in which participants are far more focussed on person-to-person discourse than larger frameworks, as much of the gendered considerations seemed to whittle down to individual experiences that discard the context in which they take place. That is fairly disheartening as it is a block that requires work from all sides to dissolve, and I do not get the sense that that willingness is in place as of yet.

Additionally, in preparation for these debates I was once again reminded that sexism is not only intergender, but is also -- perhaps more insidiously -- intragender. Issues around providing childcare are largely ignored by many academics on either side of the gender divide, as are essential caregiver roles for those of us with elderly or ailing parents; while these may be major barriers to traditional notions of "proper" academic compliance, no quarter is given for those of us who have loved ones depending on our support. By and large, it is women who fill the caregiver role, and most often suffer the consequences of it: lack of opportunities to move up the academic ladder/participate in projects, lack of tenure, lack of recognition, lack of support. Although I saw this spectre of intragender sexism raise its head, I did not see it discussed in a frank manner within the scope of the series.

I think the reliance on binaries -- fan/academic, female/male, fangirl/fanboy, pink/blue -- is damaging, as it polarizes research and researchers, and frankly, most observations and interactions tend to fall somewhere in between regardless. By forcing our work and ourselves into neat categories, we fail to consider a multiplicity of viewpoints and the palimpsests that make up so much of active fanworks.

Regardless, I was pleased to see a number of different facets considered, from sexism to racism to ethnocentrism, and I do hope to see these discussions spin out in other arenas. And of course, while we touched on these things, we have by no means plumbed the depths of any of them. There is much work still to be done in these areas, which will prove fruitful for those who pursue them. I think we missed an all important complicator, however, in terms of class and who has access to the media we study.

In short, I think these debates were a good start. The interdisciplinary nature of them was eye-opening and fascinating, and the various approaches therein provide Fan/Media Studies with a scope that other disciplines lack. It'd be in all our best interests to continue discussing and interacting with one another, and I would hope in doing so we not only strengthen the discipline but also become more open to issues of privilege.

Robert Jones:

When I was first asked by Henry to participate in the Fangirl/Fanboy discussion, I was both honored and unsure of how I would fit in the conversation. Having published a chapter in Nina and Karen's book on fan cultures, I figured that was what had earned my invitation into the discussion. But as with that volume, I tend to find myself odd man (and I use that intentionally) out among the aca-fan crowd because my fandom extends strictly from gaming. I will always be a lover of the Star Wars sage, but would hardly count myself a fan of the ranks of so many of the other participants in this discussion. And I say this not to alienate gaming fandom from TV/Film fandom because there are certainly crossover elements that many have explored; Bob Rehak and Christian McCrea in particular have illustrated that during this process. However, so many of the aca-fans who primarily come from literary backgrounds and deal mostly with fan fiction seem to share a lack of interest in gaming as a narrative form. Add to that the fact that gaming already carries with it a huge amount of cultural baggage as an area that has so far to come in terms of gender divides, and the fit seems even more difficult. I certainly found the process rewarding and felt I have learned quite a bit about the many tensions at play within the fandom literature.

I would say that the defensive nature in which people were so quick to guard their sacred cows was somewhat surprising. Looking back at my own contribution, I even surprised myself in falling into that same trap. I hardly intended to fetishize gaming technology in regards to the fandom of machinima, but it certainly reads that way in retrospect. My intent was to instead introduce that gender divide that gaming brings with it as it pertains to the technology. Far from essentializing gender as a prescriptive way for understanding why we find so many more men participating in gaming fan culture (i.e. machinima, mods, tournaments), I wanted to suggest cultural discourses and expectations become the motivating factors that make gaming spaces more welcoming to young men. So access becomes the key issue to address here, which is why I really liked it when Robin Reid suggested we expand this to a larger discussion of race/class. Because when we talk about fanboys, we are most often talking about white males with access to these texts and free time to consume them. Unfortunately, the discussion I wound up having tried to situate gaming technology on a different plane than fan-fic and fan-vids. In retrospect, not my best move.

In regards to the split of the discussion that ultimately migrated to Live Journal, I wonder if that is just indicative of this tension/conflict (I hate even using such combative language) that this whole project aimed to overcome. As many had pointed out, the gender divide seemed to carryover into that forum as well, with the women commenting on LJ while the men commented here. Again as an outsider to traditional fan cultures, I found myself only lurking there without the courage to respond to what was certainly a more "spirited" debate than the tamer comments on Henry's site. So while this experience has been rewarding in many ways, particularly being directed to the work of Hector Postigo, I'm not sure that we get to say that "we did it." Not that there were ever any hard and fast goals set out to what this was to achieve, but I would be curious how this will ultimately impact practice. Perhaps a good question to ask everyone would be: What do you plan to do differently within your own work now that you have been a part of this ongoing dialog? To be honest, I'm not even sure how I would answer that question. I'd have to give it some more thought.

Gender and Fan Culture (Wrapping Up, Part Two)

Editor's note: The blog has been under attack from hackers in recent weeks. We have had to disable the comments function in the short run but hope to have it working again soon. I am still very interested in your comments about the Gender and Fan Culture series so send comments to me at henry3@mit.edu and I will post them as soon as we get the comments section functioning. Sorry for encouraging comments just as the whole site went down. Really bad timing! Bob Rehak:

I enjoyed reading and taking part in the summer's conversations, in part because I don't consider myself an aca-fan so much as -- if you'll forgive the neo-neologism -- a fan-aca: that is, while fandom definitely informs my research and teaching (it's what led me to graduate school in the first place), my projects tend not to center on fandom "as such." So while I engaged with the dialogues most immediately for moments of fellow-fan-recognition ("Hey, she likes Battlestar Galactica too!"), I spent more time reflecting on the strange phenomenon of acafandom: this group of exceptionally smart and articulate people positioning ourselves -- with varying degrees of forthrightness, self-critique, pride, and disavowal -- around not just the texts and objects that we love/hate, but the potent essence of love/hate itself. In short, it was interesting to watch ourselves wrestling with our own jouissance, a collective (if variegated) upwelling passion that functioned both to disrupt and drive our interactions.

But to boil it down to a few blunt, highly subjective specifics:

1. The women ruled. Not that there aren't a lot of cool guys here. But I grew impatient with the defensive, almost willful missing-the-point that snaked through the dialogues like a malingering virus, usually expressed in some version of "Gendered power may exist, but it's not germane to what we study/how we study it" or, more perniciously, "Gendered power may exist, but I myself am free of it." Again, I don't mean to totalize. Standing back from the debates, though, it seemed that "we" (the men) were first and foremost being invited to consider the idea that gender has different but valid meanings to, and significant material impact upon "them" (the women), and that, too often, we chose to counterattack rather than to listen.

Of course, it *was* a debate, and assessing the validity of arguments is one aspect of what we do professionally. I just think that if we're going to cross the troubled waters, we should start by building bridges, not standing on opposite shores tossing rocks at each other.

2. Forum matters. It's utterly intriguing to me how the debate unfurled in two distinct realms, Henry's blog and LiveJournal (with of course a halo of side discussion throughout the blogosphere). While I tended to read Henry's blog for the initial posts, I would usually bounce over to LiveJournal for the comments, which seemed more lively and dynamic, more raw and honest. My sense is that we all tried to *behave* on Henry's blog; we were guests at the dinner party (and grateful, let me add, to be invited!). By contrast, LJ was like the afterparty, where people felt free to let their hair down. Was this good or bad? Inevitable or avoidable? I dunno. But the way in which these two spaces structurally reproduced certain essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity is troubling, and I will leave its exegesis to more experienced LJers (I was but a nomad, passing through the territory).

3. We're all really smart! Really. I was astounded at the depth, range, and sophistication of the exchanges, and glad to see that, freed from classrooms, conferences, peer-reviewed publications, and other restrictively overdetermined speech environments, we remain capable of

nuanced, compelling, adventurous intellectual engagement.

4. Where next? More dialogue. More debate. More connections. More friendships. More misunderstandings on the way to enlightenment.

Kristina Busse:

After I posted publicly about unexamined gendered assumptions in play across scholarship

of fandom as well as within the community of fan scholars, Henry approached me about

launching a conversation that would bring a variety of fan academics together to discuss

and debate gender. Within my corner of fandom and among my female acafan friends, we'd

been discussing these issues repeatedly, so I was very excited that Henry's forum would

bring these concerns to broader attention. In fact, I hoped it would offer all of us the

chance to engage more constructively with it among a group of academics that would

include those who had quite different approaches and investments. I thought the series

might result in more general awareness and maybe greater recognition of the academic

contributions of the women around me, but over these recent months I have seen that and

much more: I've seen conference panels organized, co-written articles planned, and more

awareness across the gender line, of both the importance of fan artifacts as subject

matter and of particular scholars. I think everyone has made connections and gotten to

know scholars they might otherwise not have interacted with. More women have started

blogs, more men have started LiveJournals, and more scholars are talking to one another,

whether in public or private. Personally, I hope to attend SCMS with a fanboy/fangirl

panel that effectively draws from our different perspectives, and will be co-writing an

essay on fandom, hopefully offering both perspectives. I have made personal friends and

started corresponding with more scholars--male and female.

So while there remain a lot of things that are frustrating to me coming out of this

conversation, while there are exchanges and comments that still exhibit unreflected

acceptance of patriarchal culture, I think it's been a great beginning. Beyond continuing

the discussion in other venues, however, there are two things that I think we need to

focus on as we complicate the issues. One is the question of different realms of contact

in which being a woman matters. Most of the debates tried to separate academic and

fannish and personal spheres, but in my experience they are all connected. The

disproportionately amateur status of women is interwoven on the one hand with the type of

fan productions we prefer and on the other with the conditions of our offline lives. I

don't think we should focus on one area alone, because gender issues run through all

areas and mutually affect one another. As we continue to address women and gender in

fandom studies, I'd like more of us to examine these often repressed issues of how and

why women create what they do (or not), analyze what they do (or not), choose the

academic careers they do (or not), and how these are interrelated.

Also, on a larger scale, I feel we're still not reaching out enough to bridge other,

related gaps. Race has been mentioned multiple times as a conspicuous exclusion, and I

hope that we can all become more aware of what trajectories we might be leaving out even

as we're becoming more aware of the axis of gender. But the one issue I'm most interested

in, and which I believe to be closely related to gender, is academic status. We haven't

succeeded in sufficiently addressing, let alone solving, the professional/amateur divide

in academia that is also so central to fandom itself. I think the fact that all of us

have gotten connected with at least one (and quite often many more than one) scholar we

may not have known before has increased the depth of the overall fan studies world. In

particular, as fan studies is so interdisciplinary, the debate allowed us to meet across

a variety of disciplines and methodologies. I hope that going forward we can strengthen

acquaintances and friendships and reach out to new scholars. I want this debate to be the

beginning of an ongoing increased awareness of gender and the way it inflects all other

areas we need to now focus on: race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation,

and all the issues that have been raised as insufficiently addressed and, even more

importantly, those we haven't even begun to think about.

C. Lee Harrington:

I was very intrigued by this series of dialogues though my own area of fan studies (mainly soap opera) has not been fraught with the gender concerns/debates that launched the blog. I have been more a lurker than a participant these past 5 (6?) months, as is my nature, but I learned a lot -- about scholars whose work I was unfamiliar with, about fan studies in general (especially areas outside of my own), and most useful to me, about specific books/articles/chapters that I haven't read but should. I have compiled a large list of materials to slowly plow through. I've been intrigued by gender debates I didn't really know existed, and frustrated at times with attempts to work through complex notions of gender, feminism, privilege, and media through written (rather than spoken) dialogue. Gender is a hard topic to talk about, teach, and learn, regardless of the context or topic in question, and it was hard at times here. I was dismayed by several exchanges that seemed to devolve into personal attacks. I was impressed by most participants' seeming open-mindedness about hearing perspectives very different from their own. Participating did not change my own line of research in any way that I could articulate on the spot, but as I slowly digest both the exchanges and my to-read stack, I'm sure new ideas and ways of thinking will emerge that would not have happened otherwise.

The only real negative for me is that I'm not in the blogosphere much. It's not a preferred method of communication for me so at times participating seemed like homework rather than intrinsically motivated. I also became more and more guilty over time because I *have* been lurking rather than participating actively....I'm happy to have been invited to the table, though.

Alan McKee:

The reason I haven't sent anything in is because I'm slightly embarrassed about what I would say ...

There is nothing worse than members of a dominant group saying that they haven't noticed the importance of an identity category: 'Why do you have to go on about being gay all the time? Why do you have to talk about your sexuality? We [ie, straight folk] don't do that ...'

So I'm hesitant to say that for me the experience of taking part in this discussion was about the delight and excitement of finding a like mind (Deborah). I wasn't really aware before I started about the gendered debates in fan studies, and I didn't find that they impinged on my discussions with Deborah. But you see? Even by saying that I feel like a patriarchal oppressor.

So - I thought this was a wonderful project. Mostly I find academics tiresome - their interests and debates bore me. It is always delightful to find others who are interested in things that interest me, who value fun, and decency and delight and joy. Oh, and who are deeply informed about things that I don't know about, but care about (yes, there are a lot of them who know a lot more than I will ever know about the writings of Deleuze, but I really can't bring myself to care about that. There's something wrong with me, I suppose. I'm missing the 'caring about philosophy' gene).

Every time I read what Deborah had written, I laughed and got excited and thought about stuff, and had more that I wanted to say. In the end we were almost late with our contribution simply because it was so hard to let go - there was always just one more paragraph that I just *had* to squeeze in, inspired by something she had said.

And so - thank you so much for setting this up. I am awe of your energy, your passion, your ideas, your networks, your organisational ability. How do you find time to sleep?

Lori Morimoto:

Throughout the Gender and Fan Culture conversations, I've been continually interested in

the degree to which women comprise a much muddier field of fan commentators than do men.

It doesn't seem to be an exaggeration to say that, for the most part, participating men

have been firmly situated within mainstream academic culture - their fannish activities

notwithstanding - while many of us female participants have a more tangled relationship

to that culture. As a graduate student teetering on the edge of academic employment,

I've been encouraged by the extent to which women outside of academia have nonetheless

managed to publish and otherwise contribute to scholarly discussions about fandom; yet,

the ways in which our lack of affiliation with recognized institutions hampers our

ability to conduct and disseminate our research is dismaying. This situation seems, in

some ways, to mirror fans' relationships to the media they consume (and produce), and, in

this sense, something we might engage with more transparently as 'aca-fans'.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty Two, Part Two): Eden Lee Lackner and Jes Battis

NEGOTIATING SUBCULTURAL VALUES ELL: And now I find myself thinking of the fact that many people approach fandom as if it is a monolithic counterculture, very much invested in subverting mainstream notions -- which certain parts are, of course -- but each part operates very much as a series of small subcultural groups, thus not rejecting the larger cultural norms, but rather creating rules and modes of behaviour that fit within the larger culture. Right now, a number of fiction/art exchanges, patterned on the "Secret Santa" model, are gearing up or in progress, and it reminds me of the discussions around whether fanfic/art itself is the gift and feedback a thank-you, or the flipside of that, where feedback is the gift. Obviously within the fic exchange, there are hard and fast rules not only around participation but also in terms of how a recipient must respond (positively, since the fic/art is a gift), but in the larger community, outside of the exchange, the relation between constructive criticism and positive-only feedback is one fraught with tension and a reoccurring discussion. Despite the fact that a more formalized type of fen mentoring appears to have fallen away, the amount of time spent by active fans in discussing etiquette, values and "correct" behaviour certainly argues for a subculture that is continually negotiating its own set of norms to allow it to more easily fit in with the reigning culture.

Actually, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Fandom_Wank, a long-standing community of close to five thousand fans who exist, by their own mandate, to mock the absurdities and less-than-rational behaviour in fandom. They're widely known past their own membership, and while they discourage trolling, as a member of fandom I know I'm potentially inviting "wank" by bringing them up in any sort of critical way, much as one expects a throat-slashing after calling for Bloody Mary. And yet despite situating themselves as extra-fandom -- i.e. only there to mock, not participate -- their very existence acts as a type of watchdog to enforce specific behaviours. There's much debate over whether or not they're a "good" or "bad" influence, whether they're the "mean girls" (and yet I can't help but note a top-heavy masculine moderation team) or if those that dislike them are the "nice girls," but all issues of quality aside, there's a clear sense within related fandom circles that one must avoid "wank" or wanking publically, lest one ends up reported on Fandom_Wank.

TEXTUAL BODIES

ELL: You mentioned your interest in CSI fic, which I think is fascinating. Given that it's a more episodic show than many fan-favourites, do you find that there are certain issues that exist within the community that differ from those in closed-text fandoms? Or do you note any issues around writing both het and slash within one story, given that het, gen and slash communities often have rather clear boundaries between each? What are the challenges in straddling the divide between fan writer and author, especially in light of how fanfic is often charged as good for practise, but not "real" writing?

JB: My response from different fan communities has been mixed. When I was writing the OC paper, I contacted a few fic writers for permission to include their work, and often they didn't want it published at all. They drew very clear boundaries between their professional lives and their fanfic writing. I tend to be really non-discriminating about the different genres that I write in, and I don't mind if people come to my writing through a novel, an academic essay, or a slash-fic CSI story, just as long as they're reading! But part of that comes from the privilege of being a middle-class white fag working in progressive cultural-studies institutions.

I like writing CSI fic because the show is so patently unsexy, at least from the standpoint of bodies colliding in bed. All of the sexuality is traced through the forensic analyses, and cadavers themselves become erotic objects (think of all the scenes where Doc Robins is gently washing and debriding a body on his autopsy table). All of the erotic subtext between Gil and Sarah (well, until a few weeks ago) was/is communicated through glances, gestures, and science. So it's perfect for slash, since you literally have to use chemistry and science to make queer sexuality happen. Most of the CSI fic circulating is hetfic, but several authors have explored the Greg/Nick relationship, which just fascinates me.

ELL: There's a perennial argument that goes on in the LiveJournal circles about the preponderance of slash vs. het and gen, and an odd sense that there's far more slash in any one fandom than het and/or gen, so it's interesting to see the flipside of it. Strangely enough, most of my interaction with CSI fanfic has been with Greg/Nick writers (apart from the one time I tried my hand at Grissom/Nick for a friend, that is), so I'd always had the skewed sense of it as a large area of CSI fanfic.

I love the idea of CSI as furthering the work of body as text, as after all, the fan writer is already inscribing on the canon body, or dissecting and reassembling it in a more pleasing manner. It's curious that the body through which one explores the erotic/queer in CSI is so often deceased; a closed text, if you will, in a still-open canon.

MARGINALIZATION

JB: As some who's always used academia to explore marginalized genres--queer writing, fantasy/sf, disability studies, children's and adolescent lit--I feel drawn to fanfiction because it straddles so many cultural and professional divides. The thought of a tenured-prof writing mpreg or really hot slash is just so kickass to me, I love it. I want my students to read the slash that I write. I'm teaching a class on Cult TV in the spring, and one of the assignments is to write an essay on fanfiction, to see fanfic as critical theory, and hopefully I can encourage them to write their own fanfic as well.

I'm just reading Judith Butler's new book with Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? wherein they exchange ideas about what makes the nation. It's produced as a dialogue between the two, and it makes me wonder what a dialogue between two expert fanfic critics--like Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith--might look like. The book itself is quite small and artfully made by Seagull Press, in contradistinction to the edited volumes on fanfic currently available. But its size also reminds me of Penley's Nasa/Trek, which was also a slim and very pretty volume, as if its aesthetic was meant to disguise that it would seriously be talking about fan communities. It makes me think of how a lot of fanfic critics tend to do more mainstream work that's published with university presses, and their essays on fan culture pop up in unexpected collections and online journals.

ELL: As someone who continues to struggle to find a place to do "serious" work on fan culture, I'd absolutely concur. It's such a marginalized area that a lot of institutions simply don't know what to do with it just yet. Hopefully with the rise in cross-discipline research in Fan and Media Studies and discussions such as these, this will stop being a hurdle, or something that almost has to be published on the sly.

JB: I was originally going to write my dissertation on Buffy. I knew that Michele Byers had done it at the University of Toronto, so there was a precedent. But I was still nervous about devoting 4-5 years on a Buffyology treatise. The only person who didn't worry about it was my supervisor. He basically said, "I think it's hot, you should do it if that's what you're drawn to, and I'll support you." That was so valuable. I ended up writing Blood Relations a lot earlier instead as a monograph, and then did something much broader for my dissertation, but to know that I could have done it was great. Not every supervisor is willing to give that kind of unconditional support. I was very lucky, because I developed relationships with several amazing people at SFU, and they all supported my engagements with pop culture and queer studies rather than telling me to become a Victorianist. I was originally doing an MA thesis on, of all things, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I loved the text, but hated the criticism. My then-supervisor, a medievalist, answered a frantic email from me one evening--holy fuck, I don't think I can do this project, I'm freaking out--by telling me gently that if I wasn't in love with the work, I needed to do something else. He even recommended someone else to work with. That's real pedagogy. So I started getting more and more involved with pop culture scholarship, until I suddenly realized one day that I was "doing" pop culture and television studies. How had that happened?

Things are getting better for interdisciplinary studies, but there's still a frustrating emphasis on literary canon and film studies in the humanities that makes it nearly impossible for pop culture scholars to get jobs teaching what they actually want to. Camille Paglia is up in arms because Buffy is being taught in undergraduate film seminars, and Jamieson's new book on SF Utopias contains almost no discussion of popular SF television, comics, manga, or fan cultures. Then again, Paglia is still getting over the shock that Judith Butler is popular among grad students. We need to do away with all this bullshit about gender performativity and just do close readings again. Like that's a viable answer. Conservative scholars see work on popular culture--work not based wholly on participatory analysis and endorsed by the stamp of Cultural Studies--as a violent movement in the wrong direction, but it's really a lateral movement. And those are the same arguments used to enforce ironclad class boundaries. Television isn't culture. Television promises too much access, both at the transnational and the inter-city level, and if we call it culture then we have to give it more grants, and if we do that we risk not giving money to the canonical research that actually keeps English and Film departments afloat. It's a bad situation. So fan-culture and TV specialists end up taking jobs explaining film aesthetics, because film aesthetics is Cultural Studies and television is really just poor culture.

I've always been pretty open about doing pop culture scholarship. I've got two books out that focus on television shows, but they were hard to publish, especially when I was still a graduate student. I enjoyed sending proposals to big journals and university presses just to see what they'd say. Everyone should email Duke UP with a crazy proposal just to see if they answer. I managed to write an essay on queer hobbits having sex for Modern Fiction Studies, which still probably counts as my name-brand publication, along with small pieces I did for Canadian Literature. But a lot of my work on science fiction and fan cultures has come out in online journals like Refractory, Slayage, Jump Cut, The Looking Glass. These are great journals who publish new and exciting scholarship, but they aren't getting indexed by MLA or HSSI because they're not Postmodern Culture. The hierarchy of these databases just infuriates me, especially because a lot of hiring committees embrace an ethic of: "If it's not indexed, it's not a real publication." Fuck that. Cynthia Fuchs has been publishing online for years. Which reminds me, I find it a little odd that Duke has suddenly decided to publish a volume of essays on Buffy, something like 8 years after scholarship on the show was being pioneered by critics like David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox. I'm happy that Fuchs got them agree to the project, but confused by its pertinence. And why doesn't it feature the work of critics who wrote about Buffy in Slayage and Refractory? What about grad student essays? You can't tell me that presses like Duke, Minnesota, and Routledge haven't gotten endless proposals for books on Buffy and Angel over the years. Why did this particular book get produced?

There's still a resistance to work on fan cultures because academics can't figure out if it's sociological, psychoanalytic, literary, or what. Every university press is back-logged with proposals, and most of the time they have to choose clearly definable work that's guaranteed to sell and get good press. That's not shitty of them, it's just survival. But as a result they end up passing on interdisciplinary work that blurs academic categories. If I write a book about television, for instance, is it a fan study, a literary analysis, a film analysis, or a piece of critical theory? If I include the work of online fan writers without going through the standard ethical reviews necessary for sociological analyses--since they aren't being interviewed, but their feelings, their affective orientations, their passions are being marshaled and invoked--what kind of "study" is that? If I use Of Grammatology to talk about CSI fanfic, what "novel" am I deconstructing? It gets confusing. And, given that a lot of acafans like us produce fanfic as well, there's a potential for scholarly incest--writing positively and uncritically about the same literature that we produce. When, in fact, most scholars are able to write critically (but not dispassionately) about texts that they love, and texts that they themselves might silently or publicly emulate. So it's really the same thing, but acafans are more open about it, so they get targeted.

I think that fanfiction provides a crucial and even redemptive inventory of terms, energies, and affects for writers and viewers. The ability to embroider a text and make it your own, to develop a charged relationship with the characters while simultaneously producing new possibilities, new pairings--to offer up those pairings to other fans and writers, who might adhere to them, possibilities that they never foresaw or never even knew they wanted--that's critical theory.

ELL: You make some excellent points. The interdisciplinary nature of Fan Studies and Popular Culture is a real barrier to "fitting in" with the more conservative aspects of academia, yet it provides a whole new frontier to explore in a myriad of really creative ways. I would hate to see pop culture relegated to one discipline, as I'm certain it would hobble it in ways that research more fixed in historical, social or political spheres is not. That's why I think that debates like the one hosted here are so important. The more conservatively-oriented realms certainly aren't going to go out of their way to make space for people interested in these areas, not even when they intersect with their own interests -- and here I note that I straddle traditional and non-traditional English Literature Studies in the fact that I chose to become a Victorianist and continue to nurture those interests in tandem with Fan Studies, especially as the Nineteenth Century paves the way for modern notions of popular culture and fan behaviour -- so it's fairly important that we make an effort to take note of what we're all up to, as well as sharing knowledge and working together to clear spaces for ourselves. Interdisciplinary projects, journals, conferences, collections, etc. are of paramount importance not just to get our names out there, but to create a solid base on which Fan/Media/Popular Culture Studies can rest and from which it can grow.

Furthermore, just as I think a lot of us are feeling our imperfect way to how to properly interact with the texts and people we study (who, after all, are often people we know personally and/or on a fannish level), it's important that non-acafen work with us as well. It's impossible for fandom to exist as a hidden subculture anymore, not with the globalization of the internet, and not even if all acafen stopped writing about fandom tomorrow. We're our own best friends; anti-academic sentiment gets us about as far as anti-fan opinion does, as it just sets up more barriers to understanding and allows for more othering by the dominant culture. One of the best things, I think, about the second wave of fan culture studies is that it has become more acceptable, at least within the field, to openly declare one's positioning as both fan and academic. Participatory studies can often bring more insight than the outsider looking in, as long as the critical eye is still in play, and as you said, most scholars are more than capable of remaining critical, even when dealing with something we love. It's a shame that in order to remain "legitimate" in the eyes of more traditional disciplinary work, one must remain somewhat closeted. (It's especially a shame in that I used to play a game with my officemates in which I'd make them name a text they enjoyed, and I'd find slash written in that particular universe in five minutes or less. Lots of fun, but harder to do when you're supposed to present yourself as a serious scholar.)

I think your assessment of fanfic as a type of critical theory is an important one, and something that would benefit from more explication in surrounding research. The fact that so much of fanfic exists in a legal grey area that does not recognize it as a critical engagement with a preexisting text is perhaps one of the sources of anxiety around the threat of Cease & Desist letters and DMCA notices. If fanfic is critique, it takes on a whole new legal standing, as I understand it.

There's a movement afoot to set up an umbrella organization under which fan fiction is recognized and defended as both transformative and creatively legitimate that I have been watching with great interest (The Organization for Transformative Works; news and updates on project process available at otw_news). I wish the organization all the success in the world. I hope it also heralds more acceptance by fans of the acafen in fandom's ranks; one day any one of us could find ourselves in a position to help bolster up fan fiction's claim to legitimacy, and working together, fan and acafan, can only help pave the way to wider acceptance.

Thank you, Jes, for an interesting and thought-provoking discussion.

Editor's Note: This is the last entry in the Gender and Fan Culture discussion series. Next week, I will run closing reflections from many of the participants in this conversation and will invite you to share your own reflections about what you have learned about Fan Studies through this series and how and where this conversation should be continued.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty Two, Part One): Eden Lee Lackner and Jes Battis

INTRODUCTIONS ELL: My name is Eden Lee Lackner. I'm currently an Independent Scholar, and I have a Master of Arts in English Literature with a focus in Victorian Literature from The University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta, Canada). While my Masters was particularly concerned with the sanctification of execution in Nineteenth Century novels (an interesting, if ghoulish topic), a lot of the narratives and theories I encountered helped elucidate some of my thoughts on the body as text, and further into the erotics of that written-upon body, which then links up quite beautifully with the erotics of fans writing upon a textual body with and for other fans.

To that end, I recently collaborated on an article titled "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh" with Barbara Lucas and Robin Reid, which is currently available in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. We discuss, in detail, this erotic exchange between writer, co-writer and reader, with an eye to complicating earlier, more homogeneous notions of "fan" as well as the straight/gay binary of the slash writer/reader. I'm particularly interested in the oversimplification of such binaries, especially as present in Fan/Media Studies and related areas. One of the assumptions that seems to remain largely unchallenged to date is the representation of internet-based fans as almost exclusively culturally American (a label which carries more problematic homogeneity, of course), when in fact the internet allows for cross- and multi-cultural contact, often without explicitly drawn/acknowledged boundaries. In line with these notions of boundaries, more recently I've been considering how gatekeeping works within both academia and fandom, and how in many cases the behaviours performed in the process of blocking/restricting access in either realm mirror each another.

For going on six years now, I've presented papers, as well as moderated and participated in panels and theory roundtables dealing with Fan Studies at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held annually in Florida (and still accepting proposals in a variety of disciplines for the upcoming year). I was actually (one of) the first to present on fan texts at the conference, which was a pleasure and a privilege, as the conference has begun to attract quite a number of academics interested in the area in the years following.

On a more personal level, I come from a family of fans. My mother, a hard-core science fiction fan (and an academic), introduced me to the world of speculative fiction at a very early age; in fact, Star Wars: A New Hope was the very first movie I ever saw in theatres. Granted, I was not quite two and it was a Drive-In, but nevertheless... She and I have a long history of shared fantasy worlds, and she encouraged me to devour those universes without apology. My father, on the other hand, is a dedicated golfer, and can very easily discuss and debate professional stats, amateur up-and-comers, and potential career-impacting issues for hours on end, preferably while on the greens himself. Thus fannishness has always been normative behaviour for me, and it's often a bit unsettling to interact with people who claim no fan status of any kind.

When I was eleven I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time (after a few years of repeated annual readings of The Hobbit), and was hopelessly and forever lost as, for lack of a better term, I found my "home fandom." I continued on for years as a feral fan, consuming all sorts of fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery texts on my own, until I encountered an anime club that was just starting up at my university during the first years of my Masters. From there I became much more involved in communal fannish activities, including taking part in a number of shared creative endeavours and organization of Province-wide events. Although I was already peripherally aware of the existence of fan fiction, it was around this time that I was introduced to shounen-ai/yaoi/shoujo-ai/yuri, and very shortly after, in 1999 (once I had seen Qui-Gon's death scene in The Phantom Menace and teased out the homoerotic subtext underneath), I became interested in slash fiction as a reader and writer. In 2001, with the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, I returned to my home fandom as a more active participant, where I continue to participate in the surrounding fiction-writing community today.

JB: I did my PhD at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, focusing on melancholy within LGBT fantasy texts. I covered a lot of writers who had never been given academic attention before, including Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Fiona Patton, Lynn Flewelling, and Chaz Brenchley. While I was writing the diss, I actually got in touch with Lynn and Chaz, and they offered me lots of great advice and encouraged me with fiction writing. Earlier this year, I got a contract from Ace for my first novel, Night Child , as well as a sequel. The first will be out in Spring/08, and the second will be released the following year.

So, I'm one of those weird hybrids: an academic-fan who also writes fantasy fiction. I got to meet Samuel Delany for the first time a few weeks ago! He was giving a talk at CUNY, and I (terrified) introduced myself in a mousey little voice and told (stuttered) him about my first novel. He said it sounded great, and offered to take a look at it. Now I fantasize about him smoking a pipe, surrounded by books in his massive office in Philadelphia, turning the pages of my manuscript. To me, that's hot.

I started reading fantasy early, although it took me till I was 20 to get through LoTR. I couldn't really appreciate it when I was younger, since I had such a short attention span. I'm still not good with Victorian novels, although I love Charlotte Bronte (especially Villette), and have a sort of affection for Dickens because he just describes things so fucking well. His desks and drawers seem more real than my characters sometimes. I decided to write the great (Canadian) fantasy novel when I was 11, and I would force all of my friends to read these bad, bad pages printed off on our old dot matrix printer. I still remember the screee--whrrrrr--screee sound of the printer as somehow being the most exciting sound in the world for me, at 11.

I came late to the fanfiction scene. A friend got me hooked on CSI, and convinced me to read some GSR fanfiction. It took me a while to get into it, but then I discovered a lot of slash devoted to Seth/Ryan in The OC, and I was a goner. I was watching The OC at the time, and reading the slash gave me so many ideas (some academic, some dirty, dirty), so I wrote an essay on incest and slash fiction with The OC as the focal point. The essay got rejected by some major journals, which is nothing new for me. It might get picked up by an edited volume, but the writing was so fun that I almost don't care if it ever gets published. Almost.

After writing the essay, I started experimenting with writing CSI slash, but containing elements of GSR as well. Basically, I enjoyed writing about Grissom and Sarah observing a fledgling relationship developing between Greg and Nick, kind of an older foster-couple giving advice to young foundlings. I want to keep at it, but once I moved to New York, things got really busy really fast. So hopefully I'll get the chance to return to it soon.

I started blogging as a way to talk about my anxiety around moving away from Canada, and that kind of morphed into a forum for talking about everything else. Recently, my little blog received some unexpected international attention when a reported from the National Post in Canada targeted my research on pop culture as "pointless" and "a drain on tax dollars." He tried to use my blog to discredit me, but just ended up giving my research more publicity and actually making me sound pretty cool.

CULTURAL HOMOGENIZATION

ELL: I must admit to being rather pleased to be paired up with another Canuck, especially since I've been itching to discuss how the globalization the internet affords affects fan exchange and assumptions. Perhaps your experiences have been different than mine, but I've found that when operating in multicultural spaces, whether as an academic, a fan, or an acafan (or, really, all three, because who can separate out the distinct strands completely?), there's a very strange positioning that goes on as a Canadian, living so close to the US (or in your case, in the US itself) and having such easy access to the same (or similar) streams of entertainment and popular culture. Since we often speak the same language, and have shared knowledge of trends, I've often run into the assumption on the part of other scholars or fen that "Canadian" is indistinguishable from "American," which has made me hyperaware of some of the (cultural/gendered/ethnic/linguistic/etc.) homogenization that goes on in fan spaces and the corresponding research. Of course, it's impossible to not make some generalizations when discussing any topic, but I think cultural assumptions are largely overlooked in Fan Studies at the present time. I note that there are some studies emerging that discuss non-English speaking fan groups, such as Finnish or Russian fans -- Irma Hirsjärvi's work springs to mind most immediately with regard to the former -- and their activities within spaces bound by language, but less consideration given to fans participating in fandom via a shared language yet coming from varied cultural backgrounds.

In fact, speaking from an experiential point of view, I've met more than one fan who has used fandom as a (fairly successful) way to learn English -- a close Italian friend of mine is fond of joking that when people ask her how she's acquired such impressive English skills she barely manages to suppress the urge to say, "from reading gay porn on the internet" -- or who has made a conscious decision to participate in fandom using a second or third language instead of her first.

In this debate series we've touched on many complicating spheres, including gender, race, and sexuality, and I think it's a worthwhile proposition to push for one more factor that perhaps requires a little more attention. Since you mention experiencing anxiety at moving into another culture, I wonder if you have some insight into how cultural assumptions work within academic and fan communities, or if you've seen any of this at work.

JB: As a "legal alien" living in New York, I definitely feel a cultural divide. My American colleagues tend to stress Canadian difference, however, rather than emphasizing sameness. This usually takes the form of: "Do you have this in Canada? Is this book distributed? Can you watch this show?" Suggestions that Canada has its own national programming are usually met with blank stares or polite astonishment. Also, I never get to talk about Degrassi Jr High to my students, which is traumatic.

ELL: I can imagine that's traumatic! (And, oh no, now I've got the theme song stuck in my head.)

It's interesting that you've found the cultural differences are emphasized. I wonder if that has to do with the difference between the anonymity the internet affords, and in person and/or communication that comes with background information already provided. I imagine one of the more difficult aspects of considering the diversity of the internet is that just like a myriad of other dimensions, nationality needs to be self-reported, and is often an aspect that is dropped from or left out of research into fanworks, or is simply not reported.

Oddly enough, in my encounters with scholars at international conferences, I've found that I need to state my nationality or display it prominently in my own discourse in order to achieve that same level of recognition or risk being folded in with other North Americans. It's a strange balance, though, isn't it, finding comfortable ground between being singled out as a stand in for a larger culture or being erroneously decoded?

I think that perhaps this is an issue that extends to cultures that mirror each other in Seymour Martin Lipset's sense of the concept. I've run across some of these same identity issues in conversation with New Zealanders, for instance, who are often folded in with Australians by outsiders despite having a distinctly different sense of themselves. I really do think that just like gender and sexuality, national identity, especially in concert with the global nature of internet fandom, adds an interesting complication to concepts of what "fandom" is.

GATEKEEPING AND GENDER

ELL: I'm absolutely fascinated by the encounter you had with the National Post! Not knowing the whole story, I can't help but wonder how much that particular reporter's story was an attempt to gatekeep; one of the perennial issues facing academia in North America seems to be a push towards "practical, hands-on" training over more esoteric pursuits, and of course Fan Studies itself seems to exist in a marginalized area of a larger marginalized specialization. (I'm thinking of Fan Studies as part of Popular Culture or even Speculative Fiction research, here, but of course there are a number of other flagships it often sails under.) It's interesting how throughout this debate we've been discussing potential othering and privileging of one gender over another while at the same time many of us are part of a larger othered discipline.

And here I must note that while I certainly believe that gender often plays a role in status and whose voices are heard -- the lack of interest by Chris Williams of FanLib in engaging with the largely female audience that opposed him and his decision to speak to a male academic being a relatively recent and high-profile example -- I do believe it's much more complicated than a simple binary of male vs. female, blue vs. pink would have us believe. Gatekeeping is certainly prevalent in fandom, academia and acafandom, and oftentimes it doesn't cross gender lines. There are a variety of fannish communities on LiveJournal, for instance, that require certain conditions be met before a fan is allowed to become part of the collective (Resistance is Futile!); often these conditions are some subjectively perceived level of quality or trustworthiness. Some, such as the "stamping" communities, which sort you into Hogwarts' houses or assign you a specific Star Wars character, go so far as to require others to vouch for you, and/or fill out complicated applications which are reviewed by part or all of the membership before the fan is granted access. And of course some of the most strident gatekeepers I've encountered in my own academic pursuits have had no regard for gender, but have, much like your National Post reporter, applied arbitrary standards that have little or nothing to do with "quality" or "worth" and have far more to do with perpetuating a system of (sometimes fairly petty) personal beliefs. I certainly can't discount the possibility that the intragender gatekeeping has extragender roots; very much a "don't embarrass me in front of the boys" impulse, of course, which I imagine loops right back around to issues of gender marginalization.

Now, granted, while to a certain extent gatekeeping is required in any group lest chaos reign, the more that control rests in the hands of a single person or small like-minded group, the more it seems to shuffle towards the absurd. I do wonder how much gatekeepers have replaced mentors as the first introduction to fan-writing communities with the increased access the internet allows.

Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (2 of 2)

The following is the conclusion to the interview that we published yesterday here on my blog. This full interview was featured on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog, conducted by C3 Project Manager Sam Ford. This interview, with Damon Taylor and Daniel Krueger from Electric Sheep, looks at the CSI:NY crossover into Second Life. Sam Ford: What is Electric Sheep Company's involvement in this project?

Damon Taylor: We are the vendor working with CBS to develop this, and it all started out as a relationship between Electric Sheep and CBS, working with Anthony E. Zuiker, who has become convinced that virtual worlds provide an opportunity for television companies or entertainment companies in general to create and provide content in ways that has never been done before. This has been a six-month planning process, culminating today. Our contract with CBS is to do this for six months, so we will be operating this experience for the next half-year. With content being updated every four weeks, we will be moving this story forward, along with a second television show next year that will tie back into the whole storyline.

Sam Ford: What brings the two of you specifically to this collaboration, and what personally excites you about the opportunity to work on this unique crossover?

Daniel Krueger: I have been with Electric Sheep about a year now, nad I worked on various community projects with The L Word through Showtime, Pontiac, Ben and Jerry's, and others, and this is the ultimate in community projects on Second Life. It is super-compelling, and it is really a win-win.

Damon Taylor: I helped co-produce the NBA project we did and was asked to come in on this project along with Libby Sproat, a colleague of ours who is a co-producer on this project. Libby and I, as Dan mentioned, have helped produce this project from day one, and now I am transitioning off and Dan and Libby are moving forward with implementing this project in the future. It has been an opportunity to work with some outstanding people, through a team of 10 people who collaborated on this project.

Sam Ford: From what I understand, one of the activities involve looking further into the mystery taking place on tonight's CSI:NY show, so it's clear that there will be a connection between the television series and some of the Second Life activities. Will there be ways in which the Second Life activities feed back into the main show?

Damon Taylor: I think it's fair to say that the Second Life experience is feeding off the television show. It's unclear at this point whether or not what happens in the virtual world will feed back or influence what happens on the show in the February 2008 sequel, but that will be determined by the producers at CBS. We wanted to connect with a storyline from tonight's show for our Second Life experience, and we have three main game experiences for CSI:NY in Second LIfe. We have a mystery game, and we will release a new one about every three weeks, which involves a crime scene, a crime lab, and suspects. It will be a 20-30 minute experience, and users can go to the crime scene, pick up evidence, process it, follow leads, and then choose the suspect they they committed the murder.

The second mystery game is the Murder by Zuiker blog game. Every month, CSI Executive Producer Anthony E. Zuiker will draft a storyline. We will create that crime scene in a virtual context and invite people to visit that scene. They will thengo to a CSI:NY message board and submit a 500-word-or-less entry describing what they think happened, as we mentioned earlier. Anthony reviews them at the end of every month and then chooses the top 10 and a winner, and he will reveal what really happened in the story. There will be six of those in all, with a new one being released once a month.

The third mystery game is Finding Venus. Venus is a character from the show tonight, and we wanted to create an opportunity for a more sophisticated mystery game experience for those who want something a bit more challenging than the 20-minute games. This game will have content driven by the story in the television show and will culminate in having users try and find her secret hideout in advance of the February 2008 television show.

To reiterate, though, we are influenced by the television show, but it's yet to be determined whether or not what happens in Second Life will have impact on the show in February. For us, this is a creative opportunity to use the TV show as the context for a substantive game experience that helps connect the dots between the two television episodes in this story.

Sam Ford: Electric Sheep is using this collaboration for the launch of OnRez, your viewer of the Second Life universe. What is it about the CSI:NY/Second Life collaboration you all are producing that made this the best opportunity to launch OnRez?

Daniel Krueger: I can't speak for our software development team, but I think that it's always been something that Electric Sheep wanted to do, as far as making an easier interface for navigating Second Life. It's not traditionally a very intuitive space for new users, so we wanted to make something simple for new users to come in with. We launched it with this project because we wanted to provide the easiest way for CSI:NY viewers who have never used Second Life to be able to come into the virtual world. It's really a perfect opportunity to launch OnRez.

Damon Taylor: There are two additional facts that we should highlight that is unique about this experience's launch in the context of the OnRez viewer. Unlike other launches in the past that are in any way similar to this project, when one goes through the registration page for this experience, they are able to choose an avatar from one of 12 provided, so when they arrive in the world they will appear as the avatar of their choice. These 12 avatars were custom-made by some of our best designers. Also, we have automatically attached the CSI toolbar to the viewer, so the CSI fans will be using the OnRez viewer for their experience in Second Life. All of that is designed to make the experience as user-friendly as possible within the confines of Second Life's technology.

Sam Ford: What precedent do you hope this crossover sets for future traditional media products looking to launch a transmedia campaign into a virtual world?

Daniel Krueger: This project is just showing the possibilities of virtual worlds and the various crossovers with different media platforms. This is the biggest project that's ever been done in a virtual world. We have 420 islands launching today in Second Life, with the four islands we have crated for the CSI experience replicated 105 times to scale for all the traffic coming in. This is showing the potential of what is possible in a virtual world, and the sky's the limit.

Damon Taylor: Sibley Verbeck, the president of the company, was at the Virtual Worlds Conference a week-and-a-half ago and mentioned the considerable buzz around the project we are working on. His statement was that one thing this does is begin to demonstrate what we already believe: experiences in virtual worlds can appeal to the masses. This is not a niche industry or a niche technology. With creativity and hard work and expertise, it is possible to launch this type of crossover, and we are hoping that the CSI:NY Virtual Experience will begin to demonstrate that companies can use virtual worlds in ways that appeal to a larger audience.

Sam Ford: Do you have any closing thoughts about what you feel will make this project successful?

Damon Taylor: One of the things I was surprised with is how dedicated and committed Anthony E. Zuiker has been in promoting virtual worlds as a medium for his viewership to wrestle with the content he creates every day. I have personally been surprised with his energy and excitement and his push for us to go above and beyond. I think that will be evident if someone spends time in this virtual experience and goes through some of these activities, such as the Murdre by Zuiker blog game that he spent a considerable amount of time on.

Sam Ford: Well, I know that you've got a lot of work cut out for you today, but thanks for the talk this morning, and best of luck in launching the CSI:NY Virtual Experience.