That's Me All Over: Catching Up With Myself Over the Holidays

I've always loved that moment in The Wizard of Oz where the flying monkeys have knocked (not to mentioned pulled) the stuffing out of the Scarecrow. His body lies like an empty sack. His head's been thrown someplace else. And the straw lies scattered on the ground. And he looks out and says, "well, that's me all over." There are many days when I know how he feels and also appreciate his self-deflating sense of humor. All of this is by way of saying that I flew too much, spoke too much, and otherwise stretched myself way too thin in 2008 and I hope that the steps I've taken at the end of the year will put me in a position to slow down a little in the coming year.

That said, today's post is intended to share with you some of the digital traces which survive from some memorable speaking gigs that I did last year. Each of these represents content I had planned to post at some point last year and never got around to sharing. I figured I'd start the new year by clearing out my inbox.

For example, the day before the election, I spoke at the University of Oregon in Eugene, sharing some of my thoughts about the role of new media and popular culture in the 2008 presidential campaign. While I was there, they got me into the studio to tape a segment of the University of Oregon Today, which recently went up on the web. I was in a particularly reflective frame of mind, talking about some core themes of my work -- especially about the shifting relations between fandom and academia, about the goals and ideals of the Comparative Media Studies Program, about convergence culture, and about politics as a transmedia practice. I will especially value this interview as recording many of the core talking points about the Comparative Media Studies Program just a few weeks before I announced my decision to leave the program. It should give you some sense of why it was so hard for me to walk away from what we had built at MIT.

Earlier in the year, I participated in a lively and spirited exchange at the Consumer Research Conference here in Boston. Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and I had been invited to represent the Convergence Culture Consortium in a mock debate with some of the key thinkers in the field of Consumer Research. We begin the debate slinging zingers at each other, but as the conversation went along, we all became so engrossed in the points of contact between the two fields of research. Consumer Research shares many core assumptions with the Cultural Studies tradition which informs my own research but it has by and large taken shape in a business school context. To be honest, few of my cultural studies colleagues have ever walked across campus to talk with their counterparts in the business school and we know very little about the research being done there, even when it explores some of the same themes or developments shaping our own research. I'm very lucky to have made contact many years ago with Robert Kozinets who has been a key thinker on the topic of "brand communities" and who has been my bridge into the Consumer Research space.Such interdisciplinary conversations should occur more often. I know that I have many readers who come from industry or Business School backgrounds and so I'm grateful that you've been open, on your part, to such dialog.

My former student, Vanessa Bertozzi, now works as a community organizer inside Etsy, an online arts and crafts community. The community had been struggling with issues of copyright and fair use as they were more and more attracting fan artists. Bertozzi, with whom I did research on Young Artists for an essay that ended up in the recent book, Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life (edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey), asked me to join her online for a real time but virtual conversation about the nature of fan art, about appropriation as a transformative and expressive practice, and about the legal and ethical implications of a world where many of us create in response to existing media texts. In many ways, this exchange brought me back to ideas I first explored in Textual Poachers almost twenty years ago.

While I was speaking at the International Communications Association in Montreal last spring, I was asked to do an interview about mobile communications, new media literacies, user-generated content, and privacy for a multimedia web project being developed by Steven James May, an MA candidate at Ryerson University. I had no idea how creative May was going to get in terms of the context for the interview. He talked to me out on one of the main streets of one of Canada's busiest cities, standing inside a phone booth, and holding an outsized early mobile telephone. People were stopping on the street to stare at the strange configuration of media and at one point, an academic associate stopped, yanked out his cellphone camera, adding one more layer of mediation and telecommunication to the mix. May's project is now up on the web and my somewhat befuddled interview now lives alongside interviews with Greg Elmer, danah boyd, Toby Miller, Jonathon Zittrain, and David Weinberger, among others.

Tourists and Collectors Enter the World of Tomorrow: An Interview with Angela Ndalianis (Part Two)

You suggest some connections between the birth of Superman and the 1939 World's Fair with its theme, "A World of Tomorrow." Explain.

The New York World Fair of 1938-9 reflected a mindset of the times that saw utopia as becoming an achievable reality in the not too distant future. The birth of Superman was also very much a product of a culture that nurtured this mindset; Superman was a character from a science fiction reality, and the product of a technologically advanced society as represented in his home planet of Krypton. His arrival on Earth was very much presented as the arrival of a god-like being who offered humanity its own utopian potential. In the real-world context of the late 1930s, visionary futures were considered realizable as a result of advances in scientific knowledge, technological development, and urban planning. As early back as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, World Expositions and Fairs - especially in the U.S. - had explored the concern with creating idealized cities but it was the 1938-9 NY fair (and the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-1934 that preceded it) that took the first important steps in forging a relationship between science and society. But more significantly, these concerns were integrated with the visions and consumer pleasures that were offered by science fiction and entertainment. The futuristic, technologically reliant cities found typically in science fiction examples like the Buck Rogers comic strips, sf novels of Edward Bellamy and H.G.Wells, and sf magazines like Amazing Stories collided with science at the New York World Fair. In particular, living up to the Fair's motto "Designing the World of Tomorrow", the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes created his 'Futurama' exhibit - a City of the Future in 1960. Designed as a diorama, viewers sat high above this miniature city while a motorized belt moved them around the exhibit. Drawing heavily on the aesthetics of flight - both through the technological capabilities of aviation and the biological capacity of the Superman body - the omnipotent view point from above was further empowered by the sensation of flight. To cap it all off, on July 4, 1940 the fair hosted 'Superman Day' (with the actor Ray Middleton playing Superman) and a further association between Superman and the U.S. was sealed. Superman's first appearance was in Action Comics #1, in 1938, and his own series began in 1939, but 1939 also saw the publication of New York World's Fair Comics and the two issues that were released at the 1939-40 exposition featured both Superman and Batman visiting the New York Fair to solve crimes. The new figure of the superhero was clearly seen as playing an important role in envision a future, utopian America. In the 1980s, the All-Star Squadron comic book series would return to these origins by placing their superhero team in the 1940s with their headquarters based in the Trylon and Perisphere - the iconic buildings created for the fair.

To broaden outward, much of your work has centered around juxtapositions across media and across historical periods. For example, your book, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, combines consideration of Baroque painting and architecture with discussions of contemporary amusement parks and special effects. What do you gain by bringing old and new together in this fashion?

What I enjoy about adopting this approach is exploring and unraveling the dynamic process that is history, and trying to understand the connections that exist across diverse media that may, on the surface, appear to be radically different to one another, but which on closer inspection share a great deal in terms of perceptual, cognitive and sensory responses they may want to extract from their audiences, despite the temporal and cultural gaps. One of the things I'm primarily interested in my research is the history and development of entertainment media. How have certain experiences remained the same, and how and why have they altered. In my (almost finished!!) book on theme parks for example, I look at the parallels that exist between the aristocratic villa gardens of C16th-C18th and theme parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios. In addition to the layouts and design of the park spaces (which have much in common with the plans for villa gardens), I love comparing the minutiae - all the smaller gadgets and media toys that make these places generate delight and pleasure.

Take the trick fountain, for example: in the gardens of Versailles, Louis XIVth and his followers were entertained by the sudden spurts of water that would spray them as they walked by a statue or seat that were rigged as trick fountains. The Alice in Wonderland labyrinth in Disneyland Paris and Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure have almost identical entertainment features that are similarly rigged to trigger gut, sensory reactions of laughter, surprise and joy from their recipients. I remember the fabulous little fountain in the Lost Continent section of the Islands of Adventure. The fountain didn't pretend to be anything other than a fountain, but this one seduces you into its world by acknowledging your presence and by clearly being able to see your actions; just when you feel comfortable with it and engage it in conversation, a spurt of water erupts from one or two of the many barely visible holes that are on its surface and sprays you in the face or body. Hysterical! Crowds of people stand around waiting to see the next victim become part of this slapstick routine. What does this tell us? Well, humans are still entertained by similar toys but with one dramatic difference. The space that's home to this fountain no longer belongs to royalty and to a select few who wield power over the masses. This is now a space that entertains the masses. But are the masses the new royalty, or is this now the role performed by the multinational corporations? Lots of questions that need untangling but which are not necessarily easy to find answers to; I think there's more to be gained from opening up and presenting more questions that complicate these relationships between the past and the present, than providing black and white answers that simplistically draw conclusions (e.g. 'the new royalty are they corporations who are the new oppressors of the people' - it would be easy to conclude this, but I think it would offer a myopic understanding of the complex relationships and conclusions that can be extracted via, in this case, a comparison of trick fountains and their function in entertainment spaces past and present).

A new research project I've just started also adopts a media historical approach. I'm looking at emerging examples of artificially sentient beings, in particular, robots like QRIO, Asimo and Zeno and artificial intelligence programs used in computer games and film effects - in other words, examples from within an entertainment context. But I'm also researching their historical precedents, the intention being to place current robot and AI technologies within the context of the diverse media, trans-temporal and cross-cultural history that they belong; it's through such an approach that a deeper awareness of the historical and cultural implications of humanity's continued fascination with artificial life will emerge. The automaton, for example, is a mechanical predecessor of the robot and harks back to medieval times but reached its peak in popularity in the C18th and C19th in Europe and Japan. While the automaton was reliant on clockwork mechanics and lacked any form of sentience, it shared something crucial with the contemporary examples: a product of technological and scientific invention was presented as entertainment. Like Sony's QRIO, entertainment was the vehicle that delivered the automaton's performance as technological display of the possibilities of new science and technology. To date, no study has asked why? Why entertainment? I guess, I want to ask 'why'?

You have written extensively through the years about the amusement park and location-based entertainment more generally, a topic which has received only limited scholarly attention given its cultural and economic importance. What do you think the study of amusement parks contributes to our understanding of media convergence?

The amusement park and, especially the theme park, is the example of media convergence par excellence. In some respects, it serves a similar role to the earlier World Expositions and Fairs. It's in the theme parks that the latest in entertainment technology is trialed and first exposed to the public. The most cutting edge examples of film technology, for example, has first been experienced in the theme park - the Omnimax experience offered by the Back to the Future ride in the 1980s, or the 3D Imax extravaganzas of the Terminator 3D and Spiderman rides at Universal studios more recently. But these weren't only film experiences. The theme park, and its ride technologies, bargain on engaging the audience on intense and immediate multiple sensory levels and the way this is most effectively achieved is through media convergence. Let's take the Spiderman ride: it's a truly multimedia experience that immerses the participant in cartoons on television, sculptured and architectural environments that reproduce the spaces of the Daily Bugle and New York, filmed environments in 3D on IMAX screens, and amusement park roller coaster technology that flies us seamlessly through all these different media. Add to this the fact that Spiderman originated in comics, then became a series of animated cartoons and tv shows as well as a series of highly successful blockbuster films and a phenomenal theme park attraction and you have the ultimate in media convergence. The thing with the theme parks, though, is that the convergence is more literal and in your face.

You are just about to start an extensive project focused on the impact of new media on collector culture. Can you give us a preview of some of the key themes you plan to explore there? How might comics collecting fit within the book's core arguments?

Yes, I'm co-writing a book with Jim Collins from the University of Notre Dame, which is tentatively (and possibly permanently) titled Curatorial Culture. What we're interested in is the radical transformations that have occurred in collecting culture in light of the central role that entertainment media conglomerates and digital technologies are playing in global culture. New delivery systems are redefining what going to a movie or watching TV means at the beginning of the C21st, just as they have also transformed the "display" of images at art museums throughout the world, and the accessibility and portability of digital information has given rise to a curatorial culture in which seemingly anyone can assemble their own music, film, television and art libraries. I know someone (who shall remain nameless) who owns every Superman comic book ever published - and it's stored on his/her hard drive. I mean, that's phenomenal! Do you know how much physical space you'd need to house (let alone actually find copies of) every Superman comic every written? Our book asks how the omnipresence of the personalized digital archive has altered our understanding of what acquiring culture means, whether it be in the form of an iPod playlist, a media home library, or a public art museum.

We're looking at the relationship between private and public archives as a shifting continuum that depends increasingly on the convergence of media space and museum space, and we're investigating this continuum by concentrating on five distinct sites of convergence-personal media technology, the private home, the public art museum, the retail store, and the urban landscape. So in addition to looking at ipod culture and p2p downloading and collecting, we're also interested in the fluid exchange between high culture and pop culture aesthetics - what Jim calls High Pop. Retail centers like those owned by Nike, Apple, Sony and Prada hire 'star' architects like Koolhaas, Hadid, and Gehry who have designed destination museum sites to design their retail spaces as unique consumer experiences, while also displaying their consumer products as if they're original artworks on display in a gallery. Or, to give you a couple of examples from the city of Las Vegas.... The new CityCenter residential-retail-entertainment complex being built on the Strip (and owned by MGM Mirage) will include a $40 million public Fine Art program that will distribute contemporary masterpieces throughout CityCenter's public spaces - the gaming areas, hotel and residential towers, and the retail and entertainment districts will now all serve the role of public gallery. Las Vegas represents--in intensified form--the ways in which our urban environments and leisure experiences are transforming into a collecting and display culture that has collapsed traditional boundaries that demarcated spaces of art display and those of consumerism and mass pleasures. In very real ways, the city of Las Vegas does precisely this: it visualizes global, conglomerate culture at its most intense point and, in the process, transforms itself into a living museum. In the Bellagio Casino Hotel, for example, traditionally cultural opposites collide: a visitor can tempt fate by feeding slot machines, and then walk out of the gambling hall and into the Bellagio Fine Art Gallery that's situated down the corridor to view the works of Picasso, Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh (who were on display when I visited). Even more bizarrely, in the Bellagio's Picasso restaurant it's possible to taste and smell the delights conjured by the "legendary" Spanish chef Julian Serrano, while being surrounded by the paintings and drawings of that other legendary Spaniard, which decorate the walls of the restaurant. Picasso's name now serves a dual function: Picasso the artist who created masterpiece artworks, and Picasso the restaurant that now promises to feed its customers with masterpiece food creations. What Vegas is lacking is a Superheroes casino and entertainment complex. When that happens, I'll be packing my bags and moving to the city of lights.

Angela Ndalianis is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on entertainment media and their histories, and she's especially interested in the aesthetic and formal implications of media collisions between films, computer games, television, comic books and theme parks - an area she has published widely in. Some of her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), and the anthologies The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures, which looks at the historical and cultural influence of and on the theme park, and is co-authoring a book titled Curatorial Culture with Jim Collins.

She can be contacted on angelan@unimelb.edu.au

Defending the Bats: An Interview with Angela Ndalianis (Part One)

In the summer of 2005, I went to Melbourne to attend Men in Tights: A Superhero Conference, hosted by the School of Art History, Cinema, Classical Studies, and Archeology at the University of Melbourne. It was like a dream come true for this particular comics geek to be able to hang out in Australia with comics scholars from around the world. Well, now you get a chance to share some of the fun, because highlights from the conference are being published as The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, a new book edited by one of the conference hosts Angela Ndalianis. (My own essay on superheroes, multiplicity, and genre theory appears in this book. I ran an earlier draft of this essay on my blog a while back.) Since I like to use this blog to keep people up to date on new work in comics studies, along with fan studies, games studies, new media literacies, and a number of other topics, I wanted to flag this book for your attention and in doing so, direct your attention to its editor Angela Ndalianis. Angela's work should be of interest to anyone who cares about comparative approaches to media: her first book, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, manages to cover Baroque art and architecture, special effects, science fiction, comics, and amusement parks -- what's not to like. She's been teaching a course for several years which take Australian students to places like Disneyland and Vegas to study location-based entertainment and now this fieldwork is resulting in a forthcoming book on the history and theory of public amusements. And recently I learned that she's collaborating with James Collins on a fascinating new project dealing with collector culture and digital media.

In this first part of a two part interview, I grill her about her work on superheroes. Next time, we catch up with some thoughts on amusement parks and collector culture.

Your introduction to The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero begins with some autobiographical reflections on your childhood experience of reading comics. As many have noted, the autobiographical turn has been central to alternative comics and to comics scholarship, though most often, the story told has a decisively male focus. What do you think your experiences as a female comics fan brings to this discussion?

I guess, primarily it undermines these gendered assumptions. It's hard to say - especially when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s - how much the association of comics and male readers was a socially generated pressure (of 'correct' tastes and interests becoming to little girls and little boys) , and how much was 'naturally' ingrained in our make-up as individuals. I actually lean towards thinking it's a socially induced taste-behaviour - sort of like the early game arcades, only this attitude has persisted. If anything, having more female readers engaged with their comic book experiences may open it up, both in terms of giving expression to the voice of female readers, and opening up the way to new female readers.

There may be shared gendered comic book experiences for male and female readers (like identifying with the empowered super-muscled male superheroes in the superhero comics; desiring the mega-bazooka female superheroes; rolling eyes in disbelief at those very same heroes but nevertheless becoming engrossed in their stories) but we need to also keep in mind that the reasons and ways we each consume our favourite comics carry with them their own personal reasons and associations. As I explain in the Introduction to the book, my father handed me my first comic as a 3-year old, and I was hooked from that point. All I remember about the comic was that it was a superhero comic - I don't remember which superhero. And there was something about the entire ritual of 'reading' comics (at this stage in my life it only involved reading the images): the touching and flipping of pages, the texture of the paper and the colours and images that the pages contained, and the sense of intimate possession associated with holding these comics in my hands. This sense of comfort I felt through sensory possession is still one of my oldest and happiest memories. Then there was the way wonderful worlds opened up to me in each panel on the page, and the immersion and intense relationship I developed with the superheroes and their stories. (It was nearly always superheroes, although, I did occasionally become sidetracked by the adventures of the Archies, Disney characters, and Hollywood stars like Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis). Comics and cartoon shows are the two popular culture objects that left an imprint on my early memories and I still associate both with a combination of fondness and a feeling of being at peace with the world. I've always been a television junky, but there was something about the ability to physically possess comics in a way I couldn't possess my favourite tv shows that made them weave into the autobiographical and the personal more intensely - for me, at least.

And, from the perspective of female readership, I can say with certainty that, as a girl, I rarely felt short-changed or undermined by the fact that I was drawn to so many male superheroes. I cannot tell a lie, Batman was (and is) an object of desire for me. Somewhere in the fantasyscape of my brain, I still dream that there may be a reality in which he exists, and when I cross into that parallel universe, our future together will be guaranteed. Aside from my feelings for the Dark Knight, however, for me, Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Batgirl existed on the same level as Batman, Superman and Spider Man. It was their power, sense of their humanity and values, and ability to resolve crises that I associated with. I don't want to turn all academic on you here, but, I think it's Yuri Lotman who talks about hero roles not being gendered but associated with narrative action: it's society that imposes the 'norms' that associate active characters with the male, and the more passive roles with the female. Maybe 'society' never got its 'how to' ideological claws in me as a little girl and, I must say, my parents never encouraged me to play passive or victim roles - far from it. I think children don't start to fall prey to performing gendered roles till they approach their teen years, until then, they're fluid. I look at my 3 nieces (who are 4, 6 and 10) and am overjoyed to see that they in no way feel hemmed in when it comes to their abilities. In their minds, they're invincible. The difference is that they have more female superhero and hero roles to choose from - especially in animated cartoons - than I did as a kid, and that's more liberating for them as girls.

What has your experiences running the original conference and editing this book told you about the current state of comics studies?

I couldn't believe the amount of interest both during and after the 'Men in Tights: a Superheroes Conference'. The conference was held in mid-2005, and to this day I receive emails about follow up events and conference publications, as well as queries about whether courses are offered in comics studies at my - or other - universities. I've also had an increase in the number of PhD students I have who are writing on comics and superheroes. In your essay in the anthology, you write about the tendency in public consciousness to collapse the superhero genre into the comic book medium and given that the superhero's been such a driving and sustaining force behind the medium, it's not surprising. There are a number of anthologies and books that have come out in recent years that have taken a more serious and academic approach to comics and, in particular, superheroes in comics. This anthology, and the one I co-edited (Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman) emerged from the conference in 2005. The current anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero focuses more specifically on comics and superheroes, whereas the earlier book centred more on predecessors and mythic prototypes. In addition to scholars I know who are currently writing books or essays for future publication on the topic, the healthy growth of comics studies is also evident in books like Comics as Literature (Rocco Versaci), A Comics Studies Reader (edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester), Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (Roz Kaveney), Film and Comic Books (edited by Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich and Matthew McAllister), and Superhero: the Secret Life of a Genre (Peter Coogan). To add to this, there was the Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy exhibition and mini-conference that was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in mid-2008. If anything, the exhibition revealed the extent to which the superhero - as representative of comic book culture - is woven deeply into the consciousness of so many people. Even if their first exposure to the superhero has been through film or television, most people know that it's the comics that gave birth to them. I should also add that the Institute for Comics Studies was unofficially launched by its Director Peter Coogan at the Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy mini-conference event which was held at the MET in June 2008. The official launch will take place at ComicCon in 2009 and what's exciting about this Institute is that it aims to address and support the thirst for knowledge that's out there by providing scholars, professionals and fans with a contact point that can direct them to comics resources, courses being taught, conferences, as well as encouraging and organizing events with the industry. I'm really excited to be on the Board of Directors, which, in addition to including other academics such as yourself, also includes comics creators, distributors and producers.

One of the funniest outcomes of the Men in Tights conference had to do with my Batman obsession. In Melbourne, we have a problem with fruit bats. At the time of the conference they had over populated our botanical gardens and before the more logical solution of capturing the bats and migrating them to outer suburbs was achieved, a bunch of trigger happy stooges were going into the gardens and killing off bats by the hundreds. The organizer of an group called "Save the Bats" had attended the conference and heard me talk about my love of the Batman - and soon after the conference, I was contacted by this guy who asked me to become a Bat-Spokeswoman and to get the word out to students to attend protests and be more active in saving the bats of the Botanical Gardens. So how could I say no? My students thought it was hysterical - I still remember making an announcement about a save the bat protest (complete with the backstory) at the beginning of a lecture in my Genre Studies course and they cracked up in fits of laughter. In their eyes, the sequence of events made sense. Of course I'd become the spokeswoman for bats - I had, after all, shared my Batman fascination with them for years!! And this story did find sweet closure. When the Melbourne City Council eventually did move the bats out of the city, many came to settle in my suburb. So now, if I go out into the garden at night, I can sit on a bench with my cats Bats and Elektra, and look up at the giant pear tree in my back yard and listen to the very audible crunching sounds that are made by the giant fruit bats that visit my garden. Happy times!

Your introduction links the contemporary superhero to much older mythic traditions. What do we learn by searching for more "universal" themes underlying contemporary comics? What are the limits of this mythological approach to contemporary culture?

I've always been fascinated by myths and myth studies and, in particular, by the fact that heroic patterns of behaviour, hero types, and hero stories are repeated again and again throughout time and across different countries. I've always been a fan of ancient Greek and Old Norse myths and their heroes, and despite the fact that surface details may change there was so much that was similar - especially in the stories radiating around Asgard and Mount Olympus, with their shared epic tales of superheroic battle related to creation and apocalypse and everything in between. I guess it's the idea that there may be a shared desire that crosses temporal and geographic boundaries and that's fundamental to human nature (and to our understanding of the world around us) that I find so impelling. What really does my head in is trying to come to terms with 'why'? Why these stories of grand heroic battles where humanity and the universe itself is under threat? Of fearsome heroes with superhuman strength who face dark, monstrous doubles that threaten the social balance? Why have basic narrative patterns of hero myths repeated themselves across time and across different cultures? What human needs, desires, or fears does this repetition fulfil?

Having said that, there are so many limitations to universal myth models. Once you locate the repeated themes and hero types, what then? What about all of the specifics? Sure Superman may have much in common with ancient characters like Hercules and Zeus; and Thor may be named after and serve similar actions to his Norse namesake, but there's so much more to Superman and Thor as contemporary superheroes that speak to our own times. Both emerged within the specific context of C20th culture and that specificity has to count for something. Superman and Wonder Woman's origins, for example, were nurtured by the realities of Nazism and Hitler's 'perfect man'. The creation of the Fantastic Four through exposure to cosmic rays while on a scientific mission in outer space can be place very firmly within the 1960s, the rise and faith in science and technology and the emerging Space Race. And as retcons and continuity rewrites have shown us, the identity of comic book superheroes don't necessarily remain fixed across the decades: they've been revised, deleted from history, and rewritten into a new history. Beyond such socio-cultural reflections, newer superheroes like Animal Man, Hitman, Planetary, the Invisibles, the Authority - especially in the hands of 'auteur' artists and writers - tell us as much about the processes at work behind creating, reading, interpreting and refashioning comic book heroes across many decades of their production and consumption. If the fluidity of the superhero mythology shows us anything it's that a universal model of interpretation fails to come even close to understanding the nature and rationale of such dynamic processes of production.

Why do you think the superhero has been such a persistent figure across the history of 20th century popular culture?

Let's face it! On a basic level, they're exploits, dramas, relationships, stories and fashion sense are just great fun and the comic books invite repeat performances on the part of the reader. On a more serious level, like the cowboys of the western superheroes have embodied ethical codes and moral structures that society needs to embrace in order to survive. Despite their excess and hyper-humanity, they've always represented the voice or, more precisely, the various voices of the people, reflecting the social dilemmas and belief systems of their time. Even when the superheroes became darker in the late 80s, propelled by writers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, they still reflected abstract moral crises of their era. Significantly, individual superheroes have consistently reflected the changing times that they belong to, learning to adapt to each decade that passes and the cultural changes that come with the passing of time. The Spider-Man of the 1960s, for example, is not the same Spider-Man of the 2000s - they're identities that are the product of different societies at different times that have reached different audiences. The superheroes who have survived across each shifting decade have been able to adapt their form, and connected to this is the superhero's capacity to translate and cross over into other media. This has been a huge plus in extending and familiarising audiences with the superhero stories. The Flash, Superman, Wonder Woman, Catwoman, the Hulk, Elektra - while originating in the comic book format, have also migrated media to appear in radio, television, B-film serials, blockbuster films, novels and computer games.

Angela Ndalianis is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on entertainment media and their histories, and she's especially interested in the aesthetic and formal implications of media collisions between films, computer games, television, comic books and theme parks - an area she has published widely in. Some of her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), and the anthologies The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures, which looks at the historical and cultural influence of and on the theme park, and is co-authoring a book titled Curatorial Culture with Jim Collins. She can be contacted on angelan@unimelb.edu.au

Race in Digital Space (Revisited): An Interview with Sarah N. Gatson (Part Two)

Your work on Buffy Fandom, specifically the Bronze, explores the ways that online communities empower some participants at the expense of others. What lessons might we take from this research which would help us to better understand the ways that racial exclusion operates in fandom?

Last week I was reading the N'Gai Croal commentary on the Resident Evil 5 trailer - I read both his interview with MTV and the online discussion that followed, and I think that the interchange is a good representative of the ways in which a fandom community (or in this particular case, a fandom public sphere or audience) exposes its multiple boundaries The dominant themes therein were 1) that talking about race is racist, 2) that Croal and anyone else that saw anything racist about the trailer were, in addition to racist, unhealthily focused upon race and/or crazy, and 3) that if the trailer did contain disturbing racial imagery, it was not the intent of the designers, and thus those who did see such imagery should either ignore it, or forgive, forget, and move on, since the fault of seeing it was their own problem. While Croal kept making the point that he was talking about the trailer, not the game (which no one had seen or played), and that he was talking about it in its larger cultural context, the general exhortation to "move on" from race was repeated quite a bit.

This audience response contains several classic narrative points in what we might call the post-civil rights or indeed post-racial era, discussed in #1 above, that critical race scholars have identified. 1) Rearticulation of race and racism (Omi & Winant; Feagin; Bonilla-Silva; Moore); 2) Innocence/Intent (Moore) (usually of whites, but in the commentary responding to Croal it is extended to the Japanese game designers, as if Japan has no history of its own racial and ethnic constructions); and 3) Rearticulation of objectivity. Critical race scholars argue that the frame that only racists see race functions to turn the legal notion that race is a suspect class on its head by decontextualizing it from its historical and legal intent.

This whole framework can be seen in this statement from one of the responses to Croal: "Well, how about you flip that around and consider the possibility that you are trying to make something out of nothing. Maybe these gamers don't see the racism because they aren't racist and they don't see it as an issue of color. If you want to know what is keeping racism alive in America, then I suggest you start by looking in the mirror and build from there."

Croal and a few members of the audience/fandom address this framing of the issue several times in the course of the discussion, although the dominant narrative likely remains the take-away message, as the bulk of the comments remain in the post-racial frame. The discussion is itself an example of a great deal of discussions about race in the U.S. - people mostly talking past each other with a distinct lack of empathy - I saw the exact same narratives played out during the recent election, particularly in comments responding to Obama's speech on race that appeared online at the New York Times, with one of the most mind-boggling (to me, a biracial person whose family members don't seem to be all that angst-ridden about having discussions about race and racism) being a comment that Obama was a horrible, horrible person for talking about his grandmother's having told him about her own fears of black men. That outing her in this way was disrespectful.

That this is a framework reflective of available cultural narratives, and not something which naturally resides in people based on their group memberships per se is reflected in that comments in the critical race frame are made by whites, and comments in the dominant racial frame are made by non-whites,

Michelle says:

July 22nd, 2008 at 2:07 am

Hello,

Im black...I've seen the trailer... It is a video game; if you dont like it don't watch it or play it! Maybe you, instead of writing about a video game trailer, you should be discussing something important like the AIDS problem in Africa or anything else of importance in the world. Games are for fun; an escape. Nothing else.

Sucka.

This comment also reflects the frame I noted above that entertainment media, being non-serious, does not matter. Anything goes because it's "for fun," and to "escape" the real world where serious and "important" problems occur. This frame is addressed by some in the discussion, as they argue that media is art, and games involve artistic expression, and thus have cultural meaning, which is as appropriate an arena for serious discussion and deconstruction as anything else.

It is well established at this point that the highest rated television shows among African-Americans are often the lowest rated shows among white Americans and vice-versa. (A notable exception are reality television programs, such as Survivor and American Idol). What are the implications of this data for the future of fandom? Are there things that fan communities might do to become more racially diverse? And is this even the best response to this configuration of tastes and interests?

I'm reminded how integration is defined by whites (10% black) and by blacks (50% black) (see Larry Bobo's work on residential integration). I'm also reminded of Herbert Gans's argument that people are entitled to the culture they want. That we value different media because we have different taste cultures shouldn't be either surprising or problematic per se. I think it becomes a problem when, in part because we're mainly talking about commercial products, taste cultures reflective of smaller and/or less powerful parts of the overall potential audience don't actually get to reach the audiences that are entitled (in Gans's terms) to access those media. The Tyler Perry empire is an interesting phenomenon - his media is extremely popular in the African-American community, and within that market segment, he dominates stage, TV, and film; he's a mogul, and in "mainstream" venues like Entertainment Weekly, his success has come as quite the shock, although his stage work has a deep connection to the historical "chitlin' circuit." Obviously, his success reflects not just an existent market for black multimedia, but a change in the buying power of those who make up that market - this segment can support not just media, but multiple forms of media, and increasingly expensive media. It's one thing to have your market segment and "mainstream" audiences buy your work (see hip hop); it's another to gross $5,000,000 on one play in 5 months in one city when the vast majority - if not all - of the audience comes from one group. These are market concerns that producers are certainly paying attention to. As I suggested above, I don't think audiences are necessarily as segmented as we are when we are talking about things like residence - media flows more freely than does real estate. Perhaps the most a particular fandom community might do in terms of diversity is recognize that freer flow, and not police their boundaries quite so vehemently when it comes to discussions of race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. vis-à-vis their favorite media products.

You've written an essay explaining the ways you draw on your own autobiography to inform your pedagogy about race across a range of academic subjects. How would you mobilize your autobiography to talk about race in a course on fan studies?

Okay, here I guess I should provide an autobiographic brief, so here are some possibly relevant facts about me: I am a 39-year-old, heterosexual, biracial African American woman, nominal Unitarian, sociologist who is 8 1/2 weeks post-partum with my first child, and married to a white man. I was born and raised in Kansas City, MO, attended college in Iowa, and graduate school in Illinois. I now live in Texas. I'm about as Midwestern (and I'd like to deconstruct that identity with you when you have the time) as you can get, although I am also fairly well-traveled and not particularly "small-town," and due to my advanced degrees, part of a statistical elite. I was raised, by both my parents, as a feminist, and self-labeled as such before the age of eight. I'm a geek, and get my original fan cred mostly from Trek and comics. This is what you get when you're raised by Linc and Julie in their real world sci fi/comic fan, history/political science major, social worker incarnations. Or something.

Anyway, this is the answer in which I get more ranty, and less academic. A while ago, I was reading an article about the Sabbath in Israel, and I was struck by the following, "Who talks of 'public culture' anymore? Everybody talks about popular culture, but ours is the era of segmented markets, when hip-hop fans share no common ground with, say, OC addicts. Communitarians talk of civil society, but the voluntarism and community activity they demand is (and ought to be) local, not national; there's no obvious way to bring all those Knights of Columbus councils and bowling teams in contact with each other."

This part in particular is what chapped my hide: when hip-hop fans share no common ground with, say, OC addicts.

Because. You know. I think that's a creation of marketing and market research which, I think, is like a lot of survey research - people are more likely to be forced into boxes, and those boxes are more likely to be reified into mutually exclusive categories, when you only have boxes to check, and when your analysis is driven by a methodology (e.g. regression analysis) that forces you towards parsimony. It's not that there aren't patterns and segments, but I think a lot of that may be overdrawn... I mean, if I have to read one more article about fanboys that ignores the documented history of the myriad of ways in which women have participated in the fan-culture of the supposedly male bastion of science fiction, I may have to hit someone with my shoe. I think this Slate author is ignorant of fandom in general, and did the thing that many do - looked at the surface of hip-hop and The O.C., and decided he knew who the actual audience is for each, and that never the twain shall meet (and he also ignored the already widely documented potential of the Internet to bring together Knights of Columbus bowlers). That's easy to do when the face of the product is fairly homogeneous, but from this example alone, it seems to me that he never talked at length with any hip-hop or O.C. fan - just on my LJ flist alone I can name five people who like both of these things. I myself have been known to put Missy Elliot, the Dixie Chicks, Bob Marley, and The Clash in the CD player (yeah, I don't have an iPod) while I read back issues of X-men. It's possible that I am just weird, and that I just hang around with weird people, but as a researcher, I prefer to think we should at least investigate audiences before pronouncing who likes what and who doesn't talk to whom...

I suppose, then, I would mobilize my autobiography and the autoethnographic technique - in the same way I already do - to question the clear-cut boxes of market segments and fandom identities. Both of these ways of seeing the audience are focused upon a concern with boundaries - on the one hand, the audience is defined by outsiders (the market researcher) and on the other the audience is being defended from outsiders by those on the inside (the fans), race is ultimately about group boundaries as well. Examining how these three concepts interact and overlap would, I think, be useful in a course on fandom.

I am seeing more and more stories out there discussing Barack Obama's

background as a fan (someone who cites Star Trek in casual conversations, who reads comics, who enjoys Harry Potter, etc.). What kind of role model might Obama represent as we rethink the relationship between race and fandom? How does this geek image connect to historical constructions of black identity in the United States?

Hmmmm. I think the relationship between race, media and fandom, like that between gender, media and fandom, is very interesting - again, media constructions of media geeks tend to be dominated by images of white heterosexual men, and my personal favorite media-geek-media (is that a word???) are those that acknowledge that reality, and comment upon it. Free Enterprise's Eric when he says, "Robert. Dude. Great party but... where are all your friends of color?" The same film's Claire, who takes down Robert in the comic book store for assuming she's buying a comic for her boyfriend. Chasing Amy's Hooper X, the gay black comic artist who must front a particular black identity to be taken seriously. Currently, I'm sort of in love with The Big Bang Theory, as it's peopled with academics who are media geeks, even if it mostly does replicate the fanboy stereotype... I have conversations like those guys do, that start in my professional jargon and end in letting everyone know that Ho-ho's are a vital part of my cognitive process. In a subculture that is into dressing up as our favorite characters, Black geeks usually have Uhura on one end, and Urkel on the other - liking geeky pop culture is different than getting any kind of cred by actually being a geek. But really, Wu-Tang Clan is pretty damn geeky if you ask me, especially The Rza. I mean. Wu-Tang Clan. Let's announce our geekstyle love of subcultual fandom in a more blatant way!

Geek and Black are not normalized co-identities, but really, if geeks' specialized knowledge is more or less impenetrable to outsiders, who's geekier than Samuel R. Delany?

Have we ever had a geek president? The intellectual aspects of geekitude (geekness? geekosity?) have certainly always (okay, mostly) been present in the oval office. But there's a certain aspect of pop culture savvy to being a geek, however much we might be marginalized by the, um, extremity of our fandom love. If Barack Obama's election says something about deconstructing aspects of political power as white, it says just as much about deconstructing elite intellects as bastions of whiteness, and deconstructing the geek as a white's only identity...

Sarah N. Gatson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University-College Station. She earned her B.A. at Cornell College in 1991, and her M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. at Northwestern Univserity (1999). In addition to her work on Internet community (Interpersonal Culture on the Internet - Television, the Internet, and the Making of a Community, with Amanda Zweerink, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), she collaborated on a NIH/NIDA-funded project looking at Computer-Mediated Communication as it intertwines with Rave and Drug-using subcultures, which has just been released as a book: Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online, edited by Edward Murguia, Melissa Tackett-Gibson, and Ann Lessem (Lexington Books). Her research interests are centered on how people organize themselves in terms of community and citizenship. Her graduate work focused upon gender and race as they intersect with these processes, their significance as cultural systems, and as ideologies that permeate all our lives. Her work has moved back and forth from a focus on policy and law, and thus the more formal process of citizenship, to a more generalized focus on the micro- to macro-level processes of identity, community, and citizenship, and the connections between these processes. Some of her work has been published in Contemporary Sociology, Law & Social Inquiry, Research in Community Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Research, and Feminist Media Studies. Currently, she is a collaborator on a project whose focus is the development of scientific learning and professional communities and future scientists, particularly focusing on access to education, mentors, and scientific networks for underserved segments of the population. Innovation in both offline and online methods to increase access are being explored. This project currently has NSF funding as a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site, a Research Experiences for Teachers site, and a Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institute site, and NIH funding as an R25 site to increase diversity in research personnel, and is housed at the TAMU College of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Physiology & Pharmacology. Her teaching interests include the sociology of law, race and ethnicity, popular culture, qualitative methodology, marriage and family, and the introduction to sociology; all her course are framed with attention to intersections of race, gender, class, & sexuality.

Race in Digital Space (Revisited): An Interview with Sarah N. Gatson (Part One)

"In Cyberspace, nobody knows your race unless you tell them. Do you tell?" Several years ago, I put this slogan on a poster advertising an MIT-hosted public forum about race and digital space. The resulting controversy was an eyeopener.

Like many white liberals, I had viewed the absence of explicit racial markers in cyberspace with some optimism-seeing the emerging "virtual communities" as perhaps our best hope ever of achieving a truly color-blind society.

But many of the forum's minority participants-both panelists and audience members-didn't experience cyberspace as a place where nobody cared about race. Often, they'd found that people simply assumed all participants in an online discussion were white unless they identified themselves otherwise. One Asian American talked of having a white online acquaintance e-mail him a racist joke, which he would never have sent if he had known the recipient's race. Perhaps covering up for his own embarrassment, the white acquaintance had accused the Asian-American man of "trying to pass as white." Even when more than one minority was present in a chat room, the forum participants said, they didn't recognize each other as such, leaving each feeling stranded in a segregated neighborhood. If they sought to correct ignorant misperceptions in online discussions, they were accused of "bringing race into the conversation." Such missteps were usually not the product of overt racism. Rather, they reflected the white participants' obliviousness about operating in a multiracial context.

Perhaps when early white Netizens were arguing that cyberspace was "color-blind," what they really meant was that they desperately wanted a place where they didn't have to think about, look at or talk about racial differences. Unfortunately, none of us knows how to live in a race-free society. As Harvard University law professor Lani Guinier explains, "We don't live next door to each other. We don't go to school together. We don't even watch the same television shows." Computers may break down some of the hold of traditional geography on patterns of communication, but we won't overcome that history of segregation by simply wishing it away.

This passage comes from an essay I published in Technology Review in 2002. (The article still periodically generates whole class sets of angry letters when it gets taught at various universities. Almost no one wants to accept that the taken-as-given "color-blindedness" of cyberspace could be anything other than the realization of Martin Luther King's Dream.) The forum the article describes was held four or five years before that and was intended to foreground the relative lack of research on race and cyberspace.

Yet, I fear that the same conversation could be held today (though I am less likely to make the same mistake in my framing of the event) and despite some ground breaking work on race in digital spaces by writers like Anna Everett and Lisa Nakamura, among many others, there is still far less scholarship about race in digital theory than there is about gender, generation, or sexuality. You should certainly check out Anna Everett's edited collection, Learning Race and Ethnicity, which is part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning book series and can be read for free online.

This gap between gender studies and critical race studies looms especially large in research on fan and geek culture, as was suggested again and again in the conversations we held here last year about "Gender and Fan Culture." I've been struggling ever since to try to figure out the most productive way to open this blog to conversations around this topic. All suggestions welcome.

Knowing of this interest, Robin Reid, a participant in those discussions, recently introduced me to a colleague of hers, Sarah Gatson, whose work straddles fan studies, digital theory, and critical race studies, who is currently organizing a conference on race and digital media, and who is co-editing with Reid a forthcoming special issue of the Transformative Works and Culture which tackles this topic.

Here's the call for papers for Gatson's forthcoming conference:

Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media April 30-May 2, 2009

The Race & Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University convenes a symposium every other year, and the proposed theme for the 2008-2009 year is Shifting Terrains: Inequalities in the 21st Century, and the symposium itself is to focus on Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media. The explosion of work on New Media (including the Internet, mobile devices, Web 2.0) and the juxtaposition and overlap between 'old' media (radio, television, film, and mass-print media) and New Media is a rich field of cultural production and scholarly research in which scholars of race and ethnicity have not been particularly well-represented. However, there are cutting edge scholars who do indeed explore various aspects of race/ethnicity and (New) Media (including audience/fan studies, representations of racial and ethnic identities in a variety of media, identity-focused online communities, etc.). We invite such scholars to submit papers with the intention of presenting work that deals with these topics during a 2 1/2 day interdisciplinary symposium, with several keynote speakers, including Dr. Lisa Nakamura and Dr. Henry Bial. We intend that a number of these papers will be compiled into an edited volume intended for publication, and that all papers and participants will have the opportunity to upload their papers on our developing interactive website for scholarly exchange on working papers.

500 word abstracts or full papers of no more than 8000 words (including notes and references) should be submitted to: gatson@tamu.edu and resi@tamu.edu by December 31, 2008. Submissions will be reviewed by an organizing committee, and authors will be notified of acceptance/rejection by March 15, 2009.

In the following interview, Gatson spoke with me about the current state of research on race and new media, about what critical race studies could contribute to our understanding of fan culture, and about how Barack Obama is transforming our understanding of the "black geek."

You are currently organizing a conference on "Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media." Almost a decade ago, I was part of a group at MIT, UCSB, and USC which organized a series of similar events on "Race in Digital Space." There has been a massive amount of research and reflection on digital media over that decade. Why do you think there has been relatively little reflection on the place of race in the new mediascape?

A recurring myth is that the online world is essentially color-blind. As the classic cartoon explains, "in cyberspace, nobody knows you are a dog." What is wrong with this argument? Why do you think it carries such persistent force?

I think this second question is the beginning of an answer to the first. Since I think that discursive and narrative frames have some influence on how people understand things - especially new things with which they may actually have very little direct experience - the insertion of the color-blind (or post-racial) discourse into the online context is important. On the one hand, color-blind discourse has as one of its often implicit foundations the idea that racial identity in particular is or should be invisible. This idea is obviously rooted in the discourse of the civil rights movement itself, but its use after the last successes of this movement in 1968 has arguably (as pointed out in the now classic work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States) been turned on its head (or, rearticulated in Omi and Winant's terms). Instead of focusing on race and what it does (what we make it do, what it does to us) in the real world, we are told not to focus on race because in an ideal world, it does not (should not) matter. Cyberspace, as in some ways it is the ideal "ideal world" (this is arguably one of the two dominant narratives about cyberspace), fits very well with this post-racial/civil rights discourse. I think that sometimes we don't want the problems of the "old world" invading our shiny new cyberspace, especially when so much of what many of us ordinarily do online involves leisure and entertainment.

Most often considerations of race and new media get subsumed into discussions of the digital divide. What do you see as the limitations of this framing of the issues?

Obviously issues of access to media are important, especially when we are talking about access to the creation and dissemination networks involved in the processes of media production. While it is understood generally that new media technology - being both expensive and powerful - is pervasive, its relative lack of penetration into and use by racial minority communities, some of the most prominent research on the digital divide however (e.g. Van Dijk's most recent book) is fundamentally disconnected from the vast literature on race and ethnicity. The digital divide framework in one sense replicates one strand of race/ethnicity theory (I think it tends to be more grounded in assimilation theory), but does not engage with more contemporary theories.

When I hosted the "Gender and Fan Culture" conversations last summer, there was a persistent agreement that the field of fan studies needed to address issues of race, though we could find few examples of scholarship which did so in any systematic way. What do you think critical race studies would contribute to our understanding of fandom? And conversely, what do you think an understanding of fandom would contribute to our understanding of the way racial identities operate in the online world?

I think the starting point for a fruitful discussion between these two research agendas would be first and foremost understanding fandoms as bounded groups (with more or less permeable boundaries). A crucial component of critical race theory (which is influenced by black feminist theory) explicitly examines the interplay between salient identities, how they interact, and how they are prioritized in macro and micro situations, by both those who hold the identities, and everyone else. Like any other group-identity, one's membership in a fandom may have more or less salience given a particular situation. While one might assume that a fandom identity takes the ultimately salient position in a fandom space, what exactly might that fandom identity entail, and who is to say what is the "appropriate" salience a fan's other identities should take in that fan-expressive space? Not talking about race, gender, class, sexuality - or being pressured not to do so - in a fandom space ends up offering a "generic" or "normalized" fan. If that fan is generic, what has typically been the go-to generic fan identity? The fanboy, who also has a presumed race, class, and sexuality, right? We're being disingenuous if we pretend that this isn't so.

Going online, we have to make decisions about self-presentation and identity in more purposeful ways than in offline situations. At least initially, we control a great deal more information about ourselves when we decide to go online - we may even present ourselves in anonymous ways not available to us offline (while letter-writing and graffiti are in many ways analogous to anonymous posting, the opportunities for near-thorough anonymous synchronous discussion are unique to cyberspace). However, those self-presentations still involve our offline identities, both those aspects we have more control over, and those we have less control over. Assuming either that these selves are or should be shed before entering into online space, or fandom space, or indeed online fandom space, is highly problematic.

Sarah N. Gatson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University-College Station. She earned her B.A. at Cornell College in 1991, and her M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. at Northwestern Univserity (1999). In addition to her work on Internet community (Interpersonal Culture on the Internet - Television, the Internet, and the Making of a Community, with Amanda Zweerink, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), she collaborated on a NIH/NIDA-funded project looking at Computer-Mediated Communication as it intertwines with Rave and Drug-using subcultures, which has just been released as a book: Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online, edited by Edward Murguia, Melissa Tackett-Gibson, and Ann Lessem (Lexington Books). Her research interests are centered on how people organize themselves in terms of community and citizenship. Her graduate work focused upon gender and race as they intersect with these processes, their significance as cultural systems, and as ideologies that permeate all our lives. Her work has moved back and forth from a focus on policy and law, and thus the more formal process of citizenship, to a more generalized focus on the micro- to macro-level processes of identity, community, and citizenship, and the connections between these processes. Some of her work has been published in Contemporary Sociology, Law & Social Inquiry, Research in Community Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Research, and Feminist Media Studies. Currently, she is a collaborator on a project whose focus is the development of scientific learning and professional communities and future scientists, particularly focusing on access to education, mentors, and scientific networks for underserved segments of the population. Innovation in both offline and online methods to increase access are being explored. This project currently has NSF funding as a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site, a Research Experiences for Teachers site, and a Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institute site, and NIH funding as an R25 site to increase diversity in research personnel, and is housed at the TAMU College of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Physiology & Pharmacology. Her teaching interests include the sociology of law, race and ethnicity, popular culture, qualitative methodology, marriage and family, and the introduction to sociology; all her course are framed with attention to intersections of race, gender, class, & sexuality.

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part Three)

In his recent book, The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein writes, "In an average young person's online experience, the senses may be stimulated and the ego touched, but vocabulary doesn't expand, memory doesn't improve, analytic talents don't develop, and erudition doesn't ensue." What kinds of evidence did you find which might support or challenge this assertion?

Becky Herr: I don't think that Bauerlein's claim (as quoted here) is completely off the mark. For many young people, including some of those who we interviewed and observed in the Digital Youth Project, the Internet is a "vast wasteland" of flash games shrouded by banner ads, websites full of inaccurate information, and corporations looking to make money off young eyeballs. However, unlike Bauerlein, I don't think this is the fault of the kids. I think it's our fault as adults--particularly adults who are parents, educators, and media makers--for not making an effort to understand the Internet from a kid's point of view and for preventing kids from having the time and space to mess around in ways that encourage them to learn to evaluate what they come across online.

I think what's important to unpack with respect to Bauerlein's claim is that his criticism is rooted in specific, class-based assumptions about media and about childhood. These are not new assumptions, nor are they new criticisms. Similar issues of media damaging young people's hearts and minds have been levied in relation to earlier forms of media. In talking with parents and teachers about our research, I hear echoes of Bauerlein's concerns in their complaints about students writing essays in "IM speak" or eschewing activities parents prefer (for reasons of nostalgia or cultural capital) in favor of playing video games or surfing YouTube.

Mimi Ito: It is tempting to blame the media or a new technology for social or cultural problems. But research has shown that things are much more complex than that, and using media as a scapegoat obscures some of the important underlying issues. A new technology grows out of our existing norms and practices. The fact that many youth are not part of the kind of culture that Bauerlein describes is not a problem caused just by the technology, but is much more deeply embedded in, as Becky notes, existing social and cultural distinctions. If kids are doing things online that seem unproductive or problematic, we don't feel that the answer is to ban the media. Instead we think that it is important to look at and try to shape the underlying social issues. That may be the commercialization of online spaces, lack of connection between kids and teachers, or the fact that academic knowledge seems irrelevant to many kids. It is rarely something that is being driven by the technology alone.

We share a concern about the "participation gap" and how that may create inequalities in experience and knowledge. What obstacles did you discover that might block some young people from exploiting the full opportunities offered by these new media? What role do class differences play in shaping the way young people experience these new platforms?

Lisa Tripp: While increasingly young people of all social classes in the U.S. have opportunities to go online and use new media, the nature and quality of access still varies greatly. A lot of poor and working class youth still rely on schools, for example, as their primary source for access to the Internet and digital media production tools. Whereas interest-driven and friendship-driven genres of participation are fundamentally "kid-driven" in terms of growing out of youth interests and motivations, schools typically incorporate media into instruction in ways that are "teacher-driven" and heavily constrained by institutional and adult concerns. This can be seen in many "technology-integrated" assignments that address the standard curriculum without engaging students' interest or curiosity. It can also be seen in school policies and rules that aim to keep out participatory media, such as by blocking social network and video sharing sites, instant messaging, etc. While young people find creative ways to use media at school towards their own interests and goals, those who rely on schools for access to new media are at a disadvantage from other kids. For them it can be a challenge to find the time, space, and resources to experiment with media in more open-ended ways, and to engage in the media practices that youth tend to find the most meaningful.

In the cases where we interviewed parents, we also saw class disparities in how parents approached computers and the Internet. For the middle class families in our study (who were also very tech savvy), parents provided significant scaffolding and encouragement of their children's friendship and interest-driven practices with new media. In contrast, for many of the poor families in our study, the parents had little or no experience with computers (and often learned what they did know from the kids in the family). While in both cases there were opportunities for intergenerational collaboration around the computer, in the case of the middle class families young people had access to a great deal more support to pursue their own interests online. In the case of the poor families we interviewed, parents wanted their children to focus on using the computer for homework. Many had heard scare stories on the news about MySpace and were hesitant to let their children go online unsupervised. Some parents even took the modem or cable with them when they left their children home alone. This represented a well-intentioned effort to protect children from perceived online risks, but it also made it harder for the young people in these families to mobilize online opportunities. I think these examples speak to the ways that young peoples' access to new media is determined not just by economic factors, but also social and cultural factors.

danah boyd: In my fieldwork, during the 2006-2007 school year, I started witnessing a divide in social network site usage between MySpace and Facebook. While this divide was extremely complex, it can be understood through the lens of Penny Eckert's "jocks and burnouts." These two social network sites became digital turf and usage reflected social categories. While many teens opted to use both sites, the division that did occur took place along lines of race and class. This may not look like a traditional participation gap as both groups were participating, but divisions in usage that reinforce dynamics like race and class require us to pause. Consider for a moment that Facebook is the "preferred" tool on most college campuses. What does it mean that some teens are already engaged with the normative collegiate tools while others are not? How does high school nonparticipation shape early collegiate life?

Your writing is sympathetic to the various ways young people "work around" constraints imposed by adults on their ability to access online social networks. How would you address the concerns of adults who imposed those restrictions in the first place?

CJ Pascoe: What I tended to see as I studied kids in urban and suburban public schools was that teens constantly tried to work around the constraints the school administration placed on their internet use. Schools blocked the students' access to Facebook, MySpace, certain search terms and instant messaging programs. In response teens developed a sort of knowledge network in which everyone knew which kid could find the proxy servers that would allow them access to these sites (though of course none of them knew the name for proxy servers). Interestingly many of the teachers at these schools found these rules too stringent. One teacher listed off several students who were the proxy server "experts" when one of her students needed to access a forbidden site. Similarly when one of his students was writing a paper on breast cancer a teacher let the student conduct research on the teacher's computer because the word "breast" was blocked from the network to which the students had access. In light of these restrictions it seems that adults are not an undifferentiated mass, that some find certain restrictions of teens Internet use problematic. It seems that what the more restrictive adults are afraid of is teens access to information and ability to process that sort of information as well as the fear that teens might not concentrate on the task at hand - school - if they could be hanging out on MySpace. To those adults I would say that banning information or certain sites does not prevent teen access. Instead it creates a community of mistrust. Thus adults should be working with teens on issues of media literacy, how to process the sort of information that appears on the banned sites, rather than forbidding teens to visit them.

Heather Horst: We saw parents across the socioeconomic spectrum express considerable concern about the threats and vulnerabilities their kids faced in the contemporary media ecology. Parents worried about the type of information that circulated and, given the timing of our research, the ability of sites like MySpace to be used as a way to access and exploit their kids. They also worried about multitasking and 'wasting time' online. In addition, because there's fear of kids hanging out outside of the home, and their lives can often be overscheduled, young people genuinely felt that they had very little face-to-face contact with their friends. The use of Instant Messaging and online sites like MySpace, Facebook and so many others are now a part of kids everyday lives, part of peer culture. In addition, the kids who were doing the most interesting things talked about having (or finding) the time to 'mess around' and explore in a way that did not have 'serious' implications (e.g. being graded. To deny participation in this space is to fail to acknowledge the importance of sociality in kids' lives.

danah boyd: I commend parents and teachers for being engaged and concerned, but I worry that their concerns are often based on inaccurate understandings of danger. As is well documented by researchers at the Crimes Against Children Research Center, the mythical image of the online predator is a completely inaccurate portrayal of the actual dangers youth face online. Yet, I found that fear of predators prompted many of the restrictions youth face. When restrictions are driven by fear rather than risk, we do a disservice to our youth. I think that it is very important for parents and other adults to know the data. The findings that we share in our report focus primarily on the positive opportunities for learning and social engagement, but in a different role, I have aggregated all that is known about the risks and dangers youth face. For more information on this, check out this Literature Review, a product of the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force.

Heather Horst: In addition to knowing the data, as danah suggests, we also want to emphasize that the 'dangers' of online participation must also be understood within the wider context of kids' lives. For example (and too channel CJ Pascoe), part of the reason going online is so compelling for GLBT teens is that they lack the opportunities for dating that are available to heterosexual teens in their local communities as well as the social support of other GLBT teens navigating complex relationships. At the same time, the lack of local support from peers, parents and teachers also makes many GLBT teens vulnerable to individuals who might take advantage of them online. Developing an understanding of these problems from a youth perspective may help to bridge the gap in understandings risk and vulnerabilities - blaming the medium merely distracts us from the root of these complex social problems.

A key argument throughout your book is that young people are often using new media to do things that teens historically did off-line such as spend time with friends or dating. Why have so many of these activities moved into the realm of "networked publics?" What kinds of new activities or social relations have emerged as a consequence of the affordances of new media platforms?

Christo Sims: I always feel funny writing as an authority on teenage flirting and dating as it certainly wasn't what I went into the field intending to find. But, of course, this was a big oversight on my part since flirting and dating is so central to teenage culture in the U.S. I think these practices are a good example of how existing offline practices are moving online. The practices are the same, but being reshaped in some new ways. In terms of flirting and getting to know someone, the primary advantage of doing so online is that the entire process can be simultaneously more controlled and seemingly more casual. The asynchronous exchanges afford more time for composition. Plus there are far less cues to manage when compared to being on the phone or interacting face-to-face: tone-of-voice, posture, and a host of other non-verbal cues don't have to be managed. Additionally, each round of messaging is, at least initially, quite brief and seemingly low key: a short little message is "no big deal." I've called this "composed casualness" because often quite a bit of effort and time goes into composing that seemingly casual and lightweight message.

Another advantage of flirting online is that it doesn't have to be done in front of a bunch of peers at school. Boys in particular mentioned how rare it was to be able to talk to a girl at school one-on-one. Girls are in groups and almost any interaction you have is witnessed. While the Internet can amplify this sense of acting in public it also affords more private communications. Messaging features on sites like Facebook and MySpace, and well as SMS on cell phones, allow teens to carry on one-on-one conversations outside earshot of friends and family. Online communications also make rejection easier, or less confrontational, during the flirting stage. Rejection is often signaled by not responding to a message. Such a passive strategy is easier for the one doing the rejection but it also allows the person being rejected to save face since they never "officially" got rejected, the conversation just stopped. In terms of dating, sites like MySpace and Facebook offer a stage for announcing and performing the relationship. My take on this is that most of the negotiations over relationship status are handled more privately, between couples (although these too might be mediated), and when they've agreed on an "official" status they announce it to the peer group.

CJ Pascoe: As the other team member focused on teens' dating, romance and hanging out practices I'd like to build on what Christo is saying. Historically adults, particularly parents, have had a lot of control over teens' social lives and the scope of the social world from which they could draw friends. New media allows teens to move beyond the institutions in which they have been historically located (schools, churches, sometimes civic groups) to create relationships and friendships of their own choosing. So in many ways making friends or sustaining friendshps in these networked publics allows teens to create friendships independent (or at least less constrained by) the institutions in which they are located because of their age.

danah boyd: Networked publics offer new opportunities for social interaction, but they are also used to replace mobility and freedoms that have been taken away. When I asked teens if they'd prefer to socialize online or offline, face-to-face encounters consistently were preferred. Yet, for many youth, such interactions were often infeasible. The reasons for why are diverse. Some teens lack transportation to meet up with friends or do not have friends who live nearby. Others have no time because their lives are heavily structured with activities or, when they do have time, their friends don't. Many places in which adults gather do not allow youth to hang out and various laws forbid youth from gathering at certain times and in certain places. Some teens face heavy restrictions because of parental values or cultural norms. Yet, the most pervasive explanation for why youth were unable to get together with friends often came down to adult fears. All told, youth have little opportunity to gather with their friends, let alone their peers. Social network sites and other networked publics enable youth to gather in new ways, asynchronously and in different physical spaces.

Dan Perkel: In some of our case studies on creative production, we're also seeing interesting dynamics in how kids are extending existing practices in new ways online. Networked publics provide space for people to more easily share and circulate their creations to others. We've seen how for both kids and adults, many people are taking existing practices of sharing photos and video and moving them online. A lot of this reflects very familiar kinds of sharing with friends and family. Posting drawings and stories online may be a different story. Here there is the opportunity to find other people who you may not know offline, who are into the same thing you are. This is the difference between friendship-driven and interest-driven kinds of sharing. So if you are creating fan fiction or drawing fan art or making fan-related movies, you may have a few others in your school, or friends you might meet at a local comic book store that share your interests. But online there are many more opportunities to share and discuss this kind of work. Moreover, there may be more opportunity to not just post this work and talk about it, but to improve and learn from others over time. These dynamics point to how the online space can provide new kinds of learning experiences that wouldn't have otherwise been available to kids.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is an Associate Specialist at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. Becky's research interests include media literacy, teaching and learning with popular culture, and youth media production. Her dissertation, "Kids as Cultural Producers: Consumption, Literacy, and Participation," investigates issues of access and media literacy through an ethnographic study of media production projects in two mixed-grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) special education classes. Previously, she was a member of the research team for the Digital Youth Project and a graduate fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Before beginning her graduate studies, Becky worked as a production manager for companies producing original content for the web and multimedia museum exhibits. Her current work with the DMLstudio involves a literature review of institutional efforts related to youth digital media production. Becky recently completed her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

C.J. Pascoe is a sociologist who is interested in sexuality, gender, youth, and new media. Her book on gender in high school, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, recently received the 2008 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. As a researcher with the Digital Youth Project she researched the role of new media in teens' dating and romance practices. Her project "Living Digital" examines how teenagers navigate digital technology and how new media have become a central part of contemporary teen culture with a particular focus on teens' courtship, romance, and intimacy practices. Along with Dr. Natalie Boero she conducted a study titled "No Wannarexics Allowed," looking at the formation of online pro-anorexia communities and focusing on gender, sexuality, and embodiment online. C.J. is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Colorado College.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

Lisa Tripp is Assistant Professor of School Media and Youth Services, College of Information, Florida State University. Lisa received her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2002 and collaborated with the Digital Youth Project to study youth in Los Angeles-area middle schools and neighborhoods. Her research with the project emphasized classrooms incorporating media arts into instruction and the role of the Internet in the lives of Latino immigrant families. Before coming to FSU, Lisa was Associate Director of the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She has a background in developing media education initiatives and she continues to research new media literacy and digital inclusion.

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part Two)

Many writers talk about "digital natives" or describe these young people as "born digital." What do you see as the strength and limitations of these terms given what you found in your research?

Becky Herr: One potential strength of the term "digital generation" for describing young people and their relationship to technology is its acknowledgement that youth are using media and technology in interesting and important ways. Talking about kids as "digital natives" can be seen as a counterargument to pervasive discourses about kids as deviant users of technology--hackers, cheaters, wasters-of-time--or kids as victims of technology--the "prey" of online predators, for example. This is not to say that the term is used exclusively to describe positive interactions with technology; it also emphasizes the gap between the ways "digital natives" use technology and the ways non-natives (like adults) use technology.

What is worrying about the discourse of digital natives is that talking about young people as a "digital generation" risks romanticizing certain types of youth participation and ignoring important differences in access to media and technology, including barriers to access that are not tied to a lack of hardware--barriers like not reading and writing in English, being a girl and having to compete with boys in a classroom with limited resources, or parental rules borne out of moral panic. Further, the idea of a digital generation marked by shared characteristics (other than the dates of their birth) that outweigh other aspects of identity/subjectivity--race, class, gender, ability, (etc.) is problematic. What we have found in the Digital Youth project is that there is a huge amount of variation in the ways kids are using media and technology in their everyday lives. Yes, the ways in which these practices are enacted vary, often by peer group or by individual kid. We've also found that things like class, race, and gender continue to have significant influence in kids' lives.

In my own research, for example, I worked with kids at the middle school level who were using media production software (iMovie and PowerPoint) for the first time. At home, most of the students I observed and interviewed did not have a computer, Internet access, or any video equipment. However, they had other media and technology that was incredibly important to them and that they used in creative and sophisticated ways to find information, to express themselves, to communicate with friends, and to mess around in order to figure out things like game cheat codes or how to substitute a borrowed digital camera for an mp3 player. Some had vast music or DVD collections, others spent hours each day playing games on a video game console. Were they "digital natives"?

Christo Sims: There are also plenty of folks who weren't "born digital" who have developed incredible fluency in various forms of online participation. We also met numerous youth who weren't technically adept or comfortable participating online. By emphasizing a generational break we risk mystifying the factors that structure online participation, and equating competency automatically with age.

danah boyd: Many of those who use these terms often do so with the best of intentions, valorizing youth engagement with digital media to highlight the ways in which youth are not dumb, dependent, or incapable. Yet, by reinforcing distinctions between generations, we reinforce the endemic age segregation that is plaguing our society. Many social and civic ills stem from the ways that we separate people based on age. If we want to curtail bullying and increase political participation, we need to stop segmenting and segregating.

Parents and teachers often want to structure young people's time online. Yet your research suggests that some of the most productive experiences come when young people are "hanging out" or "messing around" with computers in relatively unstructured ways. Explain.

Mimi Ito: In a lot of our case studies, we saw examples of kids picking up media and technical literacy through social and recreational activity online. When they were given time and space to experiment, they often were able to pick up knowledge and skills through messing around, whether that was learning how to make a MySpace profile, experimenting with video, or figuring out how to use cheat codes in a game. Some kids used this kind of messing around as a jumping off point towards much more sophisticated forms of creative production or engagement with specialized knowledge communities.

Christo Sims: One story that comes to mind is a youth named Zelan who we feature in one of the sidebars in the Work chapter. Zelan comes from a very rural area where most of his peers will end up in working class jobs, doing construction, building roads, working as mechanics. Zelan, who identifies himself as a computer geek, leveraged his technical know-how for economic gain starting in junior high school: fixing electronics, buying and selling gaming and computer gear, and servicing the computers of neighbors and teachers. His passion, though, has been video games. He started as a player but soon became an enthusiast, subscribing to game magazines, following the latest releases, looking for tips online. In addition to becoming a fan he started messing around with broken consoles, taking them apart to see how they worked, trying to fix them so he could play a better console or sell it for a profit. He did all this without seeing it as leading towards a career or success in school. It was only once he started seeing that he his gaming interest was actually valuable to others at school and in the community that he began to imagine how these interests could lead to a life after high school. When I first met him he was a Junior and was thinking of starting a computer service business when he graduated. When I saw him again last summer he was headed to a technical college on scholarship.

Dan Perkel: Another person featured in one of the sidebars is Jacob. Jacob was an African American senior who had moved from the East Bay to Georgia and back again. Jacob, like others we talked to in our studies, joined MySpace when someone else made an account for him. For a while, Jacob didn't understand how to customize his page--again like other new members to the site--and had other people do it for him. On the friendship-driven side he used MySpace as a way to communicate with people he met and friends he left behind after various moves. However, at some point he made the connection between changing MySpace profiles and the web design classes that he had gotten into at school. He then took the time to better understand how to customize his own profile and consider making and distributing MySpace layouts, something he had seen others do on the site. When I last talked to him, he was considering a career in web design and said he had been offered a job already.

danah boyd: It is important to note that "productive" engagement doesn't necessarily mean only traditional learning or media and technical literacy. As a society, we've never spent much time considering how youth learn to be competent social beings, how they learn to make sense of cultural norms and develop social contracts, or how they learn to read others' reactions and act accordingly. We expect youth to be polite and tolerant, respect others' feelings, and behave appropriately in different situations. This is all learned. And it is not simply learned by telling kids to behave. They need to experiment socially, interact with peers, make mistakes and adjust. Stripping social interactions from youth's lives does not benefit them in any manner. I would argue that even the oft-demeaned social practices that take place online are extremely productive.

You write about "genres of participation." Explain this concept. What are the most important genres at the present time and why?

Mimi Ito: We use the concept of genre as a way of describing certain social and cultural patterns that are available and recognizable. Friendship-driven and interest-driven practices are based on genres that youth recognize, have particular practices associated with them, as well as certain kinds of identities. For example, interest-driven genres of participation tend to have a more geeky identity associated with them, involve congregating on specialized and often esoteric interests, and reaching beyond given, local school networks of friends. This is a whole package of things that goes together, a recognizable genre for how youth participate in online culture and social life. We also think of hanging out, messing around, and geeking out as genres of participation.

When and how might the borders between friendship-driven and interest-driven forms of engagement start to blur?

Mimi Ito: As with all genres, there are a lot of things that don't totally fit, and a lot of blurring between genres. When kids engage in friendship-driven practices, they often get involved in messing around with technology, and that can become a jumping off point for more interest driven activities. For example, some kids will begin messing around with video or photos that they take with their friends, and then they get more interested in the creative side of things. Conversely, we find that kids who connect to others around interests will often see these groups become really important friendship networks, and an alternative source of status and identity that is different from the mainstream of what happens in the school lunchroom.

You note throughout the report a broadening of who gets to "geek out" in today's youth culture. Explain. What factors are reshaping cultural attitudes towards "geek experiences"? Who gets to "geek out" now who didn't get to do so in the past?

Mimi Ito: Now that digital media and online networking has become so embedded in kids' everyday social and recreational lives, there is a certain baseline of technical engagement that is taken for granted. Only certain kids, though, decide to go from there to what we consider more geeked out kinds of practices. Predictably, it tends to be boys who geek out more than girls. Even though girls are often engaging in highly sophisticated forms of technology use and media creation, often they don't identify with it in a geeky way. What does seem to be changing though, is the overall accessibility that kids have to more geeked out practices because of the growing accessibility of digital media production tools as well as the ability to reach out to interest groups on the Internet. Although our study didn't really measure this, this may be particularly significant for less advantaged youth who would not otherwise have had access to specialized creative communities or media creation opportunities.

Patricia Lange: Being able to connect with dispersed networked publics enables kids to explore skills and receive mentoring that may be difficult to gain from co-located peers or teachers who do not have the same interests or experiences. For example, in my study of the video-making culture of YouTube, accessing mentors or assistance in a "just-in-time" fashion is inspiring and encouraging, especially given kids' decreasing ability to connect with other adults and potential mentors in neighborhoods and local communities. One of the things we heard very often was that friends, family, and kids at school often did not understand why young YouTubers wanted to "geek out" making videos. YouTube participants' school peers did not always have the same familiarity and expertise with how media is put together in ways that kids on YouTube did. Many of the kids we interviewed have already had extensive experiences making media. They often have very sophisticated visual literacies and complex ideologies about what makes a good or bad video, what constitutes appropriate participation in technical groups, and how they think about online safety. Failing to engage with these sites in school means there is no hands-on dialogue between teachers and students that might help shed light on why some kids thrive by geeking out and why others have difficulty.

You are using terms to describe these experiences which are much closer to those which might be used by young people than those deployed by parents and teachers. What are the implications of that shift in the terms of the discussion?

CJ Pascoe: In general we tried to take a Sociology of Youth approach to our findings in this book. In line with this approach we try to let the categories of analysis as well as the descriptive terms arise from the youth themselves, rather than imposing our adult categories on our findings. What this means is that we tried, for the most part to describe a social world from the point of view of its participants, rather than as (more powerful) outsiders. I think foregrounding our participants' terms, categories and experiences allowed us to challenge some of the common assumptions adults have about youth participation of new media.

Heather Horst: As is common in most ethnographic research, we integrate terms like 'hanging out', 'messing around' and 'geeking out' into our analysis in order to highlight the categories and perspectives that are meaningful to young people themselves. Throughout this project, we felt quite strongly that part of our role and responsibility as researchers as working to navigate the gaps between youth and adult-centered perspectives. While we recognize that this may involve some degree of translation work when talking to different audiences (e.g. educators, policy makers, etc.), if we really want to see changes in discussions about learning and education, youth voices and perspectives need to be brought to the table.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is an Associate Specialist at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. Becky's research interests include media literacy, teaching and learning with popular culture, and youth media production. Her dissertation, "Kids as Cultural Producers: Consumption, Literacy, and Participation," investigates issues of access and media literacy through an ethnographic study of media production projects in two mixed-grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) special education classes. Previously, she was a member of the research team for the Digital Youth Project and a graduate fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Before beginning her graduate studies, Becky worked as a production manager for companies producing original content for the web and multimedia museum exhibits. Her current work with the DMLstudio involves a literature review of institutional efforts related to youth digital media production. Becky recently completed her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Patricia G. Lange is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her areas of interest for the Digital Youth Project are centered around using theories from anthropology and linguistics to understand the cultural dynamics of video creation, reception, and exchange among kids and youth. She is studying YouTube as well as video blogging groups to gain insight into the cultural aspects of video sharing and how these practices change ideas about the public and private. Lange is exploring how the content and form of videos as well as material video sharing and response practices serve as sites of identity negotiation, emotional expression, and promotion of public discourse in increasingly video-mediated, online milieu. She has recently published articles in a variety of journals including: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Discourse Studies, Anthropology of Work Review, First Monday, and The Scholar and Feminist Online.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

C.J. Pascoe is a sociologist who is interested in sexuality, gender, youth, and new media. Her book on gender in high school, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, recently received the 2008 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. As a researcher with the Digital Youth Project she researched the role of new media in teens' dating and romance practices. Her project "Living Digital" examines how teenagers navigate digital technology and how new media have become a central part of contemporary teen culture with a particular focus on teens' courtship, romance, and intimacy practices. Along with Dr. Natalie Boero she conducted a study titled "No Wannarexics Allowed," looking at the formation of online pro-anorexia communities and focusing on gender, sexuality, and embodiment online. C.J. is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Colorado College.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part One)

On Thursday, the Digital Youth Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, released "Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out," a report on a massive ethnographic investigation into the place of new communications and media technologies in the lives of American young people. I have had the distinct honor to watch this research take shape over the past few years, to get to know the core researchers on the team, and to attend meetings where they struggled over how to process the sheer volume of data and insights they have gathered. The team is a model for collaborative research with senior faculty and graduate students working side by side across disciplines and universities to make sense of problems which none of them could fully understand on their own. You will get a sense of the dialogic nature of this research in the interview which follows, a conversation which involves nine members of the research team, sharing insights from their own specific research projects as well as expressing the rich synthesis that emerged from their collaboration. The report represents one key outgrowth of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Learning and Youth initiative, which also funds our own Project New Media Literacies initiative, along with providing support for such key educational researchers as Sasha Barab, James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Howard Gardner, Howard Rheingold, David Buckingham, and Katie Salens, among many others. "Hanging Out..." is staggering in its scope and in its implications. The researchers take seriously young people, their lives online, their subcultural practices, their identity play, their nascent civic engagement, their dating and social interactions, their involvement with fan production practices, and much much more. What emerges is a complex picture of how they are living through and around emerging technologies, how they are innovative in their use of new tools and platforms, and how they are struggling with the contradictions of their lives. This report is in no simple way a celebration of the digital generation, though it respects the meaningfulness of their involvement with digital and mobile technologies: it raises questions about inequality of access and participation; it points to conflicts between adults and youth around the deployment of new media; it identifies risks and opportunities which sites such as MySpace and YouTube pose for their young participants. Those of us who care about young people and education will be struggling with some of the implications of their research for a long time to come. I am proud to have a chance to offer this interview with some of the key members of the Digital Youth Project team over the next three installments of my blog.

By way of background, here's how the Digital Youth Project is described on their homepage:

Since the early 1980s, digital media have held out the promise of more engaged, child-centered learning opportunities. The advent of Internet-enabled personal computers and mobile devices has added a new layer of communication and social networking to the interactive digital mix. While this evolving palette of technologies has demonstrated the ability to capture the attention of young people, the innovative learning outcomes that educators had hoped for are more elusive. Although computers are now fixtures in most schools and many homes, there is a growing recognition that kids' passion for digital media has been ignited more by peer group sociability and play than academic learning. This gap between in-school and out-of-school experience represents a gap in children's engagement in learning, a gap in our research and understandings, and a missed opportunity to reenergize public education. This project works to address this gap with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies: communication, learning, and play.

The Principal Investigators on this project are Peter Lyman at the University of California, Berkeley, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito at the University of Southern California, Michael Carter of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, and Barrie Thorne of the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, the project is administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change. With the help of a large number of graduate students and postdocs, a variety of projects are under way in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.

This project is sponsored by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

To see the white paper and full report of the Digital Youth Project.

To learn more about the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Can you give us some sense of the scope and scale of the project?

Mimi Ito: This was a study that was conducted over three years, with 28 researchers and research collaborators. We interviewed over 800 youth and young adults, and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations. This was done in the form of 22 different case studies of youth new media practices. Some of the studies looked at particular online sites, such as YouTube and social network sites. Other studies looked at interest groups, such as gaming groups and fans of anime and Harry Potter. Other groups also recruited youth from local institutions such as afterschool programs, parent networks, and schools. We believe that this is the most extensive qualitative study of contemporary youth new media practice in the U.S.

What were your goals with this project?

Mimi Ito: Our goal was really to capture youth perspectives and voices to understand what is happening in the online world today. We wanted to look at how young people are incorporating new media into their everyday social and recreational lives, in contexts that they found meaningful and motivating. Our thought was that it was only by looking at these kind of youth-driven contexts that we could get a grasp of what youth were learning through their online participation, and how that activity was changing the shape of our media and communications landscape.

Ethnography often gets praised for its process of discovery. What was the biggest discovery your team made through this process?

Mimi Ito: One of the strengths of the ethnographic process is that it involves listening and learning from people with different perspectives, and having that inform our research frameworks. One of the big things that we learned from doing this with such a large research team, was how it was that different kinds of youth practices and social groups were related to one another, either in a synergistic way or a more antagonistic way. We learned that the main thing that distinguishes different kinds of youth new media practices was the difference between what we call "friendship-driven" and "interest-driven" participation. Friendship-driven participation is what most youth are doing online, and involve the familiar practices of hanging out, flirting, and working out status issues on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Interest-driven participation has to do with more of the geeks and creative types of practices, where youth will connect with others online around specializes interests, such as media fandom, gaming, or creative production. It wasn't the just usual things like gender and socioeconomic status that necessarily determined the big differences, but it also had a lot to do with categories in youth culture, like is considered "cool," "popular" or "dorky."

Heather Horst: In addition to friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, we also identified three genres of participation and learning - hanging out, messing around and geeking out. Hanging out is when kids are using technologies like IM, Facebook or MySpace to hang out socially with their friends. Messing around is when they are looking around online for information, or tinkering with media in relatively casual and experimental ways. Geeking out is when they really dive deep into a specialized area of knowledge or interest.

What is important about this framework is that it's not about categorizing kids as having a single identity or set of activities. What we are doing is identifying different ways that kids can participate in media culture, and this can be quite fluid. For example, we talk in our chapter on Media Ecologies about a teen named Derrick who participated in Christo Sims' study of Rural and Urban Youth. He uses Instant Messaging and his mobile phone to coordinate hanging out with his friends. Yet, and like many other teens, Derrick has also earned a reputation for geeking out through his interest in locating and downloading movies through BitTorrent. He also uses the Internet to 'mess around', such as the time he did a search on Google until he found tutorials and other information to help him build a computer. The diversity of practices reflect differing motivations, levels of commitment and intensity of use which frame Derrick's (and other youths') engagement with new media.

Mimi Ito: These genres of participation were things that we found across the different case studies that we looked at. In addition, each individual case study discovered a wealth of interesting details and findings that were specific to each case. What was unique about this project was that we discovered things that were grounded in the specifics of deep case studies, which is typical of ethnographic work, as well as identifying these broader cross-cutting patterns.

Parents often express concerns that young people are interacting online with people they don't know while those excited about social network sites talk about the ways they allow us to escape the constraints of local geography. Yet, your report finds that young people often use these tools primarily to interact with people who they already know. What can you tell us about the relationship between the online and off-line lives of teens?

danah boyd: While there are indeed examples of teens meeting others through these sites, it is critical for adults to realize that these sites are primarily about reinforcing pre-existing connections using mediated technologies. Youth's mobility is heavily curtailed and they desperately want to hang out with their friends from school. These sites have become that gathering space. Just because they can be used by youth to connect to strangers does not mean that they are. By focusing on the possibilities of risk, adults have lost touch with the benefits that these sites afford to youth.

Christo Sims: As danah says, most of our participants used social network sites to complement their offline social relationships rather than to experiment with identity or to make a bunch of new "friends" from around the country or world. With that said, there were instances where youth developed online relationships that extended beyond school, neighborhoods, and local activity groups. Youth that were more marginalized in their local social worlds would often go online for friendship and intimacy. We heard several stories of gay and lesbian youth using internet-based tools in these ways. Similarly, we heard stories of immigrants and ethnic minorities connecting online despite being widely distributed geographically. Then, there's youth who engaged in interest-driven online participation who often interacted with folks far beyond their local region. When friendships did develop they grew over sustained participation in those interest-driven activities, not out of more friendship or intimacy seeking behavior as you'd find in an online dating site. Finally, we did hear several stories of youth developing pen-pal like relationships with other teens. These interactions tended to be conversational, sharing accounts of what life was like in their respective towns or cities, discussing the challenges and confusions of being a teenager. These sorts of interactions more closely resemble the self-exploration and identity-play that earlier accounts of online participation tended to emphasize - a sense of anonymity, a degree of freedom from the trappings of one's identity in the family or at school - yet they weren't anywhere close to the dominant day-to-day uses of these tools.

Dan Perkel: Just to follow up on a point that Christo alludes to, there are in-between categories of people that might be overlooked in the split between "people you do already know" and "strangers." For example, there are people who are friends of friends, or friends of cousins, who you may not know, but go to neighboring schools, or live in the same area of town. We heard from participants in San Francisco, the East Bay, and I believe in Brooklyn as well, stories of people meeting up and getting to know people who they knew through others but only "met" using MySpace or another site. We also heard stories or in some cases watched people play out situations where they had met someone offline, and gotten their MySpace username so that they could contact them later. This was one way of facilitating dating (like asking someone for a phone number). In this case, this is someone that they have met, but is not necessarily someone they "know" or at least have any other contact with before back and forth conversations using social network sites. The point is that we learned how confusing it can be to even categorize who is a stranger versus a known person. How some of the participants use online media happens in the space inbetween.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

Changing the Game: An Interview on Games and Business with David Edery and Ethan Mollick (Part Two)

The use of Second Life as a platform for consumer advertising and corporate promotion has generated a great deal of buzz in recent years. Now that the dust has started to settle, what do you see as the strengths and limitations of virtual worlds as a platform for brand messages?

The answer depends on the virtual world. But, since you mention Second Life, we'll focus on that. Second Life is, as innumerable news stories have pointed out, simply not a good place for traditional advertising. The world is too large and too sparsely populated for billboards, in general. And unmanned virtual exhibits and structures, no matter how glorious, are simply not interesting to most consumers who visit Second Life to experience the thrill of creating and the joy of interacting with others. Why would anyone choose to walk through an uninhabited virtual

hotel when they can visit remarkably creative and/or otherworldly territories, populated and/or created by individuals like themselves? Why walk past a virtual billboard when you can teleport anywhere in an instant? Low-cost, targeted advertising campaigns that are designed toengage consumers on a personal level, and enlist them as brand agents, are far more effective.

All that said, the virtual hotel news article we referenced previously contains a hint as to the real potential of Second Life for businesses: not advertising, but harnessing user creativity to generate useful business innovations. Several large corporations have started working with the users of Second Life to model new products and test new services. Philips, for example, has been working with users to design new appliances in Second Life. Pontiac gave out virtual versions of its cars and encouraged Second Life users to hack and modify them.

At the end of the day, Second Life is a world created by its users for its users. There's something poetic -- not to mention very sensible -- about enabling those users to create and modify virtual goods that could someday be sold in the real world for millions, if not billions of dollars.

As you note, there is now a rush towards corporate sponsorship of Alternate Reality Games. What factors should a company consider before entering this space?

To date, most ARGs have required a significant financial commitment and tremendous effort to successfully execute, so businesses that are interested in creating an ARG should be sure to work with an expert in the field. That said, an ARG can prove an effective marketing tool, as demonstrated by Audi's Art of the Heist. Visitors who were attracted to audiusa.com by online advertisements promoting Art of the Heist devoted 34% of their page views to "buying indicator" pages - i.e. car configurator, dealer locator, payment, estimator, and request a quote -- which represented a 79% increase in qualification over previous launch efforts. And Art of the Heist resulted in over 45 million PR impressions for Audi, while generating over 10,000 unique leads for Audi dealerships.

Jordan Weisman, one of the inventors of the form, shared with us his well-informed views on the commitment necessary to pull off an ARG marketing project. In his words: "There's a misconception that this form of marketing entertainment has to be cheaper. Well, it's not cheaper. A heck of a lot more effort goes into an ARG than a 30-second TV spot. You have to create a lot more content, and there's a much larger editorial process involved. But the benefits, as opposed to the 30-second spot, are the level of immersion you create, and the level of affection that a person has for the brand and the experience, not to mention the community that grows around the brand and the experience. Those things provide real lasting benefit to brands. And one of the great things about an ARG is that, unlike with a TV spot, you know how engaged people are. You know how many people visited your websites, you know how many people are participating on the message boards - you can quantify things."

All that said, ARGs are poised to become much more than just marketing tools. In Changing the Game, we discuss how ARGs can be used for training purposes, and even for harnessing collective innovation. At this point, there are some

exciting experiments in these areas that are worth examining, but more work is

needed to develop ARGs to their full potential.

Corporate training games have been a huge growth area, even as other kinds of serious games have struggled to get traction. What should the developers of educational games learn from the space of corporate training and conversely, what do educational game designers get right that should be considered more closely in corporate training games?

Educational game designers seem to think more about engagement and the role of fun in games than most corporate trainers. By focusing on how to reach kids, educational game designers seem to become more aware of the "holy grail" of training -- education so entertaining that it proves self-motivating. Ironically, this is also the greatest weakness of many educational game designers. In an attempt to make learning as much like a game as possible, they end up creating the proverbial "chocolate-covered broccoli" -- shoehorning educational content into traditional games. The result is neither fun nor particularly educational.

The corporate training market has typically proven less concerned about stereotypical "fun," and instead has invested more in simulations in which learning happens naturally. Simulations like Virtual Leader, the leadership training simulator, end up being fun because the player gets to experiment with the role of leadership. Similarly, the Beer Game (a system dynamics simulation) is engaging because it is played as part of a team, in a competitive environment. Both Virtual Leader and the Beer Game teach valuable lessons in interesting ways because they allow exploration and experimentation, and encourage team interaction -- not because they ape traditional video games. Educators should think more about how to encourage interesting exploration and interaction, rather than combining time tables with first person shooters, or hiding multiple choice examinations beneath the thin veneer of a "trivia game."

Some of the most interesting sections of the book deal with the use of games as a means of collecting user innovation and tapping collective intelligence. To what degree is this section speculative? What work is already being done in this space?

We wouldn't call it speculative, but we would say that this is the very cutting edge of the serious games movement. While there are only a few examples to speak of, they have proven very successful. In particular, Luis von Ahn's work on "games with a purpose" has been published in a number of important journals, and von Ahn won a MacArthur Genius Grant for his work. One game of his, the ESP Game, encourages players to voluntarily identify random images on the Web in a way that computers simply aren't capable of doing on their own. Many people play the ESP Game for over 20 hours a week, and over 20 million image labels have been harvested in just a few years; the equivalent of several million dollars of free labor. Professor von Ahn estimates that just 5,000 people playing The ESP Game for a month - a tiny number, compared to the active populations of many gaming websites - could label every image on the Web.

Other efforts include Fold.it, a game designed to help its creators identify the optimal shape of proteins. Fold.it players are already proving to be of great help, and interestingly, many of the top players are not biologists, or even people with a strong academic background in biology.

You may also have heard about the X2 Project (which has evolved into Superstruct, the forecasting game.) Efforts like these show how ripe this area is for future work!

For more on Changing the Game.

DAVID EDERY is the Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, and a research affiliate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a regular speaker at game industry events such as GDC, has published numerous articles on the topic of game development and the business of games, and maintains a personal blog called Game Tycoon.

ETHAN MOLLICK studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also conducting a large research project on the game industry. He has consulted to companies ranging from General Mills to Eli Lilly on issues related to innovation and strategy, and has worked extensively on using games for teaching and training, including on the DARWARS project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Changing the Game: An Interview on Games and Business with David Edery and Ethan Mollick

Editor's Note: The election has come at a particularly intense moment in my life. I plan to run a more extensive reflection on the role that media played in shaping and responding to the outcome but I have not been able to write it yet. I expect to post it early next week. For the moment, let me say that this early "Obama Boy" could not be more delighted with the outcome but fears that all of the "transformational" language got used up on tuesday night, leaving us with no new adjectives to throw out there.

Around the Comparative Media Studies Program, there's been considerable discussion over the past few weeks about the decision of the Obama campaign to advertise in an Xbox 360 game, Burnout Paradise. The topic is the perfect intersection between our researchers focused on games, branding, and civic media, and reflects an ongoing conversation we've been having on the blog and elsewhere about Obama as the candidate for all platforms. If convergence culture can be described as a world where every image and idea flows across the maximum number of media platforms, acquiring meanings and value and attracting new participants at each step along its trajectory, Obama's people have embraced the full range of new media -- from mobile phones to social networks, from virtual worlds to video games -- in their effort to reach and mobilize young voters.

Hoping to get some further insights into this story, I reached out to David Edery and Ethan Mollick, the authors of a newly released book, Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business. Both Edery and Mollick are alums of MIT's Sloan School of Mangement; Edery was involved with us while still a graduate student, was briefly on our staff, and has continued to be an affiliated researcher on our Convergence Culture Consortium since he has graduated. As experts on current trends around games and advertising, I was curious to see what they would have to say about the Obama ads:

The Obama campaign's decision to advertise within the Xbox 360 game Burnout Paradise is notable for being, to our knowledge, the first time a presidential candidate has ever taken advantage of advertising opportunities within a retail video game. The ads appear as billboards by the roadside, and contain the message "Early voting has begun" and "voteforchange.com" in addition to Senator Obama's photograph.

The message on the billboards seems to indicate that the Obama campaign was hoping to achieve a very specific outcome: give young adults who support Obama, but who perhaps lack the drive to vote, a nudge in the direction of the ballot box. More interestingly, the Obama campaign may also have been hoping to send a subtle message to gamers and young adults in general: "this is a candidate who understands technology and new media, isn't afraid of it, and doesn't intend to demonize it." If the latter was indeed a part of the campaign's strategy, it worked out brilliantly, because the Burnout/Obama advertisements received a tremendous amount of mainstream and game industry press. Whether you played Burnout or not, if you're a highly engaged gamer, odds are you heard about the Obama ads.

So in-game advertising and US presidential politics have converged. Is this a particularly important milestone for the in-game advertising industry? Perhaps, and perhaps not. After all, plenty of Fortune 500 companies have beaten the Obama campaign to this milestone, and are in fact experimenting with games and advertising in far more interesting ways. But there's no doubt that this *is* an important milestone for the game industry in general. It suggests that a US presidential candidate has recognized, for the first time, that gamers are an important voting group.

As they note, businesses have been using games as platforms for branding, advertising, and corporate training ever since the first platform games were released. Changing the Game offers a cogent overview of the thinking shaping current corporate strategies for deploying games as well as offering some thoughtful and forward looking recommendations about how companies can be even more effective in deploying these new media platforms towards their interests. There are plenty of lessons here which will also be helpful to those developing serious games or otherwise using games for pro-social ends. And there's much here that needs to be understood by the media literacy community if it wants to help young people understand how branding impacts the games that they play.

In this two part interview, the authors share their insights about games and advertising, the use of games as platforms for training, the value and limits of virtual worlds for corporate purposes, and the potential of games as tools for gathering collective intelligence and sparking user-based innovation.

The central premise of your book is that there are significant benefits for companies that recognize that games can be "more than just a diversion." What do you see as the primary rewards of integrating work and play? How do we confront a tendency in our culture to see play as the opposite of meaningful employment?

The primary reward of integrating work and play is happier, more effective employees. The problem is that when most people hear that claim, they immediately assume you're making the old, tired argument that games are good solely because taking a break from work is good for productivity. While many studies have purported to prove the latter, the latter is not what we are focused on.

In Changing the Game, one of our major arguments is that games can be used, not as breaks from work, but as enhancements to work. There's ample evidence that games can be used to cost-effectively train employees and to motivate them. We found great examples in the health care industry, the high tech industry, and (not surprisingly) the military, to name a few. And as we note in the book, it's rather remarkable how many managers struggle to maintain acceptable productivity levels when they control an employee's paycheck, while many game developers have found ways to make *us* pay *them* for performing tasks that seem remarkably like work. (We really don't want to know how many hours we personally spent crafting virtual armor and other items in World of Warcraft...)

Fortunately, great examples of the constructive power of games are starting to find their way into every corner of American life. Public schools are bringing Dance Dance Revolution machines into their gyms to combat the obesity epidemic, and millions of Americans are bringing Nintendo's Wii Fit into their homes. Educators are hearing about the incredible sales of games like Brain Age and realizing that maybe play and education *can* go together. These things have little to do with work, so we don't spend much time discussing them in the book, but they are helping to change the way people think about games, in general, so they certainly merit mention!

You open the book with some acknowledgment of some of the social policy debates surrounding games, including a consideration of video game violence and media effects. Many media reformers use the analogy to advertising to explain why they believe that games may have negative impacts on the people who play them. If advertisements may shape consumer behavior, they argue, games must have an influence on players. As someone who has reviewed the research on the impact of advertising on consumer decision making, how would you respond to this analogy?

What many media reformers don't understand is that games are powerful advertising (and educational) tools in large part because they can be used to communicate a persuasive message or lesson to a *highly involved* audience. People playing video games are not passive, mindless zombies... on the contrary, they are quite consciously engaged. They have to be; otherwise, how can they win the game? Anyone who doubts this should pick up an Xbox 360 controller and try to play a stereotypical first person shooter (like Call of Duty 4). These games are incredibly complex -- most first time players have trouble just figuring out which buttons to press, much less successfully navigating the entire game. Winning many video games is anything but easy.

At any rate, our point is that because gamers are quite consciously processing gameplay -- because they are NOT mindless zombies -- they are not being "brainwashed." And this is apparently what the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) determined after performing their own extensive study of video games, in which they noted: "far from having a potentially negative impact on the reaction of the player, the very fact that they have to interact with the game seems to keep them more firmly rooted in reality. People who do not play games raise concerns about their engrossing nature, assuming that players are also emotionally engrossed. This research suggests the opposite; a range of factors seems to make them less emotionally involving than film or television."

All that said, we prefer not to simply cite research in a situation like this, because critics of video games have their own body of (in our opinion, questionable) research to respond with. So why not stick with the cold, hard facts? The U. S. Secret Service recently examined each of the 37 non-gang and non-drug-related "targeted" U.S. school

shootings and stabbings that took place from 1974 through 2000, including infamous incidents such as the Columbine massacre. They found that there is no "profile" of a school shooter. In fact, only 1 in 8 of the perpetrators studied by the Secret Service showed any interest in violent video games. Given that in the same time frame, the vast majority of school-going males were playing video games, how can critics continue to claim any sort of correlation between games and school violence?

What factors are leading towards the increased interest in advergaming and product placements in games?

Put simply, it's getting harder and harder for advertisers to reach their target audience with traditional advertising. Games are an increasingly popular medium that is well-suited to carry (and to be) advertising, so why wouldn't advertisers by interested?

What does marketing research tell us about good and bad approaches to integrating brands into games?

We wrote two whole chapters on that, so it's difficult to boil down into a couple paragraphs. Rather than tackle every point, let's address the most important one. As we noted earlier, it all comes down to a question of involvement. When a person is highly involved in an aspect of gameplay, they are thinking very actively about it, and they aren't likely to forget it later on. In such situations, an advertisement really needs to not only make sense within the context of the gameplay, but to fundamentally enhance the gameplay experience and communicate a useful message to the player. Otherwise, what you get is an annoyed player whose experience is disrupted, and who therefore forms negative associations with the brand.

Imagine that you're watching a James Bond movie. Q tells Bond that he's got a great new car for him. They walk into the secret lab, and a shiny Ford Pinto is waiting there. That's an example of a product placement not fitting into the context of the entertainment media. But let's take this further. Imagine instead that the car is a sporty BMW. That's more like it! But what if the sporty BMW never broke 30 miles an hour during the entire movie? That would be an example of not communicating a useful message. The idea here is that you have a highly involved gamer on your hands. They are actively processing the information you are putting in front of them, and they probably aren't going to forget it. So, not only should you be extremely careful not to put

something in front of them that simply doesn't make sense (the Ford Pinto), but you should also make sure that what the player can do with your product placement actually communicates a message you're interested in communicating as an advertiser.

Conversely, there are moments in gameplay that are not highly involving. When players run past a billboard in a virtual sports stadium, they are focusing on the action in the stadium (i.e., an offensive play in a football game) -- they are not focusing on the billboard. The football game is highly involving; the billboard is not. Those low-involvement advertisements -- which we call "peripheral" advertisements -- are a good place to put simple ad messages like logos and short slogans. These advertisements don't have the ability to convey a complex, persuasive message that

consumers will generally recall, but they do have the ability to simply increase our familiarity with a brand, and that has its own significant benefits.

DAVID EDERY is the Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, and a research affiliate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a regular speaker at game industry events such as GDC, has published numerous articles on the topic of game development and the business of games, and maintains a personal blog called Game Tycoon.

ETHAN MOLLICK studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also conducting a large research project on the game industry. He has consulted to companies ranging from General Mills to Eli Lilly on issues related to innovation and strategy, and has worked extensively on using games for teaching and training, including on the DARWARS project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Playing Columbine: An Interview with Game Designer and Filmmaker Danny Ledonne (Part Three)

In making the film, you are choosing to tell your own story, yet you are also interviewing some of your harshest critics. Watching the film, I kept wondering about the dynamics of some of those interviews. What was it like to interview the organizers of Slamdance or Jack Thompson or the Columbine survivors about their reactions to your work?

I decided early on that making a film about this topic was not merely a matter of editorializing my own perspective. When I told people I was making a documentary, many imagined a bombastic, Michael Moore approach of framing the story with my narration, maintaining a strong on-camera presence as the "main character," or generally centering the film on me. Frankly, I found the debates this subject matter engages to be far more interesting than my own opinions on it; I filmed many of the presentations I gave during this time and cut out almost all the material as more exciting, articulate ideas arose during other interviews.

Many of the interviews with my harshest critics were not conducted by me at all. I knew that in order to conduct a more impartial interview, I would be better served by having other filmmakers sit down with Parents Television Council president Tim Winter, Denver resident Roger Kovaks (who initially ousted my anonymity after being outraged by SCMRPG) or anti-videogame activist Jack Thompson. Often times I prepared the questions myself and watched the footage with great interest as their points of view were very insightful as I began to reflect on my own. If given the chance, I recommend everyone take the opportunity to interview their most outspoken critics!

My interview with Slamdance Film Festival director Peter Baxter was very challenging because he seemed rather disinterested the entire time. It seemed to me that every question I asked was met with the phrase, "well like I just told you..." as though I was simply not listening. When Brian Crecente of Kotaku interviewed Peter, he reported much the same experience: "I spent forty-five minutes on the phone trying to get him to answer the question of 'why.'"

During this interview, while Peter would shower videogames as a "powerful" art form with praise, he seemed generally disengaged from his own decision to pull SCMRPG and questioned the effectiveness of other game developers protesting his decision by boycotting the festival. He more or less deferred to legal advice he'd received and a court of law that he imagined would ruin his festival (never mind that no legal threat--specific or vague--was made of Slamdance in connection to SCMRPG).

The film draws some parallel between your game and others about current events, ranging from what sounds like a pretty exploitative game about the Virginia Tech Shooting as well as games about Waco and Darfur. Are all of these games equally valid? What criteria should we use to determine whether they represent appropriate or meaningful responses to the events they depict?

In my eyes, all games are equally valid insomuch as they offer us opportunities to evaluate their game rhetoric. That means that I can think critically about Tetris as well as Manhunt. As protected speech in this country, both games should enjoy the same open discourse in a pluralistic society. How much time I choose to spend playing either of these games is up to me as a media consumer--hopefully a well-informed one. I think the best way to illustrate how I would answer this question is to give you a specific example.

Recently there was a game released by a young Australian man called Muslim Massacre. The title had obvious reference to mine so I wanted to play the game and evaluate it using my own admittedly biased criteria. I did not find the game itself overtly offensive as I read the game as satire--much in keeping with a film like Team America: World Police which I enjoyed immensely. I projected my own political views onto the game when I determined it was an effective videogame caricature of US foreign policy and the US media's representation of Muslims.

As one might predict, the game came under immediate scrutiny by the Western and Arab cultures. I emailed the game's creator after reading a letter of apology he posted in response. However, the game's creator replied to my email indicating that the apology was fake and designed to offend and dupe more people. This, to me, eroded the credibility of the game developer; he was less interested in socially-engaging discourse from his work and more interested in executing a juvenile stunt with a videogame as its central function. While that many invalidate the game developer, I still see the same initial value I held in the game itself; Muslim Massacre remains valid to me because I can identify with the cultural criticism it represents to me--whether the game's creator meant it or not.

This is why my film raises the point of authorial intent. In some ways, it is irrelevant whether I made SCMRPG to create a dialogue, make money, encourage school shooters, gain attention for myself, or to save the whales. The game stands on its own as a valid expression--free for interpretation and conjecture. I believe that my decision to stand behind the game, author an artist's statement, and argue for its value in the press has helped my credibility as a multimedia artist. The game stands alone, however--as all cultural artifacts ultimately do when we engage them.

In the film, Jack Thompson talks about the backlash against him in the games blogosphere as a threat to his own free expression rights. What similarities and differences do you see between the responses to Thompson and the responses your game has received from some of his allies?

John Bruce Thompson, disbarred attorney at law, is an interesting fellow. I find his self-fueled conviction fascinating--so much so that I made a music video about his crusade entitled When Jack Thompson Talks to God that can be found on YouTube. Jack was so enamored with this video that he called my phone at 5am on a Sunday morning demanding that I call him back (so he could threaten me and tell me that I'm "messing with the wrong guy.") What a charming voicemail, indeed.

What Jack and I share is the experience of being a controversial public figure--one that includes receiving hate mail, death threats, and assaults on our characters by people who will never know us. Some of his criticism in the film is directed at the immature antics against him--people who oppose Jack's point of view and see fit to mail sex aid products to his wife. He has also carved himself a unique cornerstone as the arch-nemesis of game culture (or at least its bumbling court jester).

Generally Thompson and I are not attacked by the same people; often I can imagine that those would have sympathy for Jack's position are the ones emailing me with clear information as to how quickly I am going to Hell. Similarly, I have won support from those who imagine that I have created a headache for people like Jack Thompson. To put this in general demographic terms, Jack Thompson is attacked by gamers and I am attacked by their parents.

Unlike Thompson, I do not feel entitled to press and don't use it to establish my professional credentials (Jack Thompson predictably introduces himself as the man who predicted Columbine on the Today Show and appeared on 60 Minutes twice). Also unlike Thompson, I do not believe I am on a personal mission from God to accomplish my goals.

What advice would you have for other game designers who find themselves in

similar controversies in the future? What do you wish you had known going into

this struggle that might have changed how you approached things?

At the end of my documentary, I try to provide just such advice. Let me summarize it here:

1. Do not be afraid of controversy. It can be a useful tool to spread your message. Just make sure you have a message. You will gain respect from people for standing behind what you believe in.

2. Stand behind your creative decisions. While some people will always call you "pretentious" or "vapid," articulate your intentions and design choices. It may not change everyone's mind, but it will challenge them to think more carefully about their suppositions.

3. Welcome allies and actively form new ones. I slowly discovered that for every email I received from an angry person, there were ten more that silently supported my efforts even if they could never take up such an effort themselves.

4. Take creative risks. There are boundaries on all fronts to push with regard to the creation of media. If you don't push them, someone else will. If you are a creative person and really love what you do, ask yourself what impact you want to leave on the world.

I read that "well-behaved women rarely make history." That is not just true for women.

Playing Columbine: An Interview with Game Designer and Filmmaker Danny Ledonne (Part Two)

The film suggests that generating controversy is a tribute to the artistic accomplishments of the game. Is this to suggest a bad or banal game couldn't generate controversy? To what degree is the controversy about the subject matter of the game rather than its execution, given the fact that the film also tells us that many of the critics have never played Super Columbine?

Controversy generated for its own sake is a pointless exercise that is soon forgotten and rarely culturally impactful. While some charge SCMRPG with being just that, the inclusion of a discussion forum--augmented by an artist's statement and my commitment to defending the project--is a testament to the ongoing discourse I sought to create. What makes SCMRPG an important cultural discussion point is that it is, by your own admission, a "perfect storm" for discussing matters of videogame violence, representation of real events in digital culture, and the future of videogames as an expressive medium.

I do think that the polarizing effect the game has on people (those who play it and those who do not) indicates its overall cultural value. Very little of social impact has been received with universal praise. The polemical presentation of the game certain denotes controversy as an aesthetic choice. Ours is a culture where so often the only way to be heard outside the established information channels is by being provocative and challenging social taboos. In some ways, the act of being offended is really one of being intellectually challenged--by encountering an unfamiliar or difficult idea. Some people handle this challenges better than others; we see those that are easily offended as the very same who rally to censor media and regulate creative expression. I have no problem with the allegation that SCMRPG is a "bad game" since it works outside the expectations of what a "good game" is supposed to be. But I would hardly call SCMRPG "banal," Henry.

The controversy around SCMRPG is largely one of the subject matter and not its execution. Only when I give talks at game design schools am I taken to task for my design choices. For example, the Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor, or Parents Television Council were not complaining with:

"Why did you hide a book in the upstairs classroom that you need to complete the last part of the game? I had to start over!"

"The hallway is really hard to sneak through. I couldn't even tell those were security cameras until my friend showed me!"

"The graphics suck, noob."

Instead, the mainstream press attacked the very notion that a game like SCMRPG could exist! Heavens, we can have a film or book or magazine article about Columbine but a VIDEO GAME? This was the tone of much of the initial reporting. Eventually, however, a few credible journalists for Wired and other publications began to take the proposition of a game about Columbine seriously--and their articles reflected that. Consequently, their readership reported a greater understanding of the game and larger social phenomenon of digital media for change.

You position the game in relation to the serious games movement. What does the concept of "serious games" mean for you and how does it relate to forms of nonfiction in other medium, including documentary films like Playing Columbine? What do games add to the mix in terms of shaping our understanding of real world events and processes? Would Playing Columbine have worked as a game?

As I have come to understand it, the traditional definition of "serious games" has virtually nothing to do with kinds of social issue-driven games like SCMRPG. Let me try and analogize.

The serious game has been akin to a training manual--such as the airline safety card or a "how to use your new vacuum" tutorial booklet. The military, medical, and corporate sectors use these serious games as pedagogy; these games do not make rhetorical claims. The kinds of games that Playing Columbine showcases are different. They are more like editorials in the New York Times or a polemical book on bookshelves or downloadable on the web. These are games that make arguments; these are "games with an agenda" as Persuasive Games' Ian Bogost says.

Let's pull this down to first principles. Why do you think games are an art form? What kind of art are they? What criteria should be used to evaluate games as art?

Throughout my travels in interviewing game developers, their critics, and those affected by videogames in relation to school shootings, no one claimed outright that videogames are not an art form. Most recognized that there are some games perhaps more artistic than others, that some art is appropriate for youth whereas other art is not, and that videogames are a relatively new art form with much potential and boundaries yet to be defined. Some people think the Grand Theft Auto series represents the future of immersive, state-of-the-art gaming. Others revile at the notion that one would call such a game "art" at all. These are inevitably conversations of subjectivity rather than concrete empirical claims.

For myself, I think games are a synergy of existing media traditions of visual arts, graphic design, musical composition, the written word, and the cinema. Of crucial distinction to, but certainly not exclusion from other art forms is the interactive nature of games--the elements of role-playing and narrative authorship being chosen in whole or in part by the audience ("the player"). Interactive media therefore combines many of the art forms we are familiar with but adds to them a significant degree of audience participation. Not audience control, however; aspects of the game physics, narrative, world design, etc. are not generally defined by the player as these are simply the pre-ordained "rules of the game."

I am not sure we ever got around to calling board games, card games, or table top role playing games as an art form or a "medium." Which is too bad; these earlier societal distinctions would have paved the way for a less misunderstood reception of game design. Videogames have as much in common with chess as they do with Starship Troopers.

In terms of how games as art are evaluated, clearly the existing systems are ill-equipped; games are currently evaluated as products. A typical evaluation of a videogame in a popular magazine or online publication might read:

Graphics: 9

Sound: 8.5

Play Control: 9.5

Challenge: 8

Replay value: 7

As one might imagine, games like SCMRPG would fail rather miserably by these traditional standards and indeed in 2006 PC World declared it the 2nd Worst Game of All Time (just behind E.T for the Atari). When reviewed by Jason Rohrer for Arthouse Games, SCMRPG was praised for its bold use of the form to critique a contemporary social event. Perhaps then the question of "games as art" asks more of the player than the ability to score points and navigate pristinely-rendered 3D environments; perhaps games as art are those which challenge the player emotionally or intellectually rather than strategically or tactilely.

The larger question for each of us to answer when we ask ourselves how to evaluate art--whether in games or cinema or literature--is what we expect it to accomplish. A great number of people will not tolerate a subtitled, foreign language film or a videogame that offends their assumption that games are escapist entertainment. Indeed, the concept that films could affect social change was hotly contested by filmmakers, distributors, and critics for decades. As the boundaries of what a game can be expand, the evaluation for games as art becomes more charitable.

Playing Columbine: An Interview with Game Designer and Filmmaker Danny Ledonne (Part One)

Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG! has been the center of controversy since it was released in 2005, on the sixth anniversary of the shooting at a Colorado high school which sparked international controversy surrounding the links between video games and real world violence. Some have embraced the game as a powerful demonstration of how games can force us to re-examine controversial issues from new vantage points. Others have condemned the game in the harshest terms possible, suggesting that it exploits a deep human tragedy. In 2006, PC World declared the game #2 on its list of "The 10 Worst Games of All Time." Every time the controversy started to die down, some new development shoved the game back into the news, whether it was attempts by the news media to link it to a Canadian shooting or the decision by the directors of Slamdance's games festival to withdraw the film, a decision that led to strong support from many invested in the idea of games as art or simply the value of free expression. Ledonne's game has been a model for other serious games projects and has been a focal point for discussion about whether there are some topics which can not or should not be explored through this medium. For an overview of the controversy, check out this Wikipedia entry. You can see the game yourself and make up your own mind about its merits.

Now, Danny Ledonne has produced Playing Columbine, a compelling documentary which allows him to tell his own story. This film will be extraordinarily valuable as a classroom resource for those who want to spark discussions about games as a medium. It will also be a useful film to share with skeptics who doubt that games can deal with serious topics.

Danny was kind enough to agree to an extensive interview for this blog, one which takes us through the various controversies as well as examines the process of producing this documentary. You will see that I adopt a devil's advocate posture here, pushing Ledonne to pull down to first principles and explain his own thought process concerning the Super Columbine game and Playing Columbine. I hope this three part interview will spark further reflection on these very important topics.

Ledonne is a graduate of Emerson College's film program. He has worked as director of photography on KiskaDEE, as editor for An Awakening Journey, and shot and edited Kenya Jidaya. He is a native of Colorado and currently lives in Washington DC where he owns Emberwilde Productions.

What were motives for making the Super Columbine Massacre RPG? It sounds like you had not done much work in games before this. Why did you think games were the right medium to say what you wanted to say about Columbine?

I have answered the question of "why did you make this" many times--probably so many that I have begun to wonder why I am asked so often what my motives were. I suppose releasing a highly controversial game on the Internet, free of charge, and setting up a discussion forum does make one wonder. I guess if I had charged five dollars per download it would be evident that I was trying to make money and then the question would shift from "why" to "how could you?"

SCMRPG is my first game and perhaps my last. What most outsiders to the creation of games do not understand about game design is how specialized a field it is--involving a multitude of skills from computer science and programming to graphic design and (hopefully) a flare for storytelling. Games generally cannot be made without a set of highly acute skills and usually a great deal of training. My efforts were amateur and my game certainly reflects that--but even then the results were only possible because I had a game creation program (RPG Maker) to act as middleware between an untrained user and a finished game concept.

Columbine had been a subject of considerable importance in my own life. I was a sophomore in high school at the time of the shooting in another Colorado high school. I listened to the same music, played the same videogames, and at times even had similar feelings of anger or depression as Harris and Klebold (the shooters). Amidst all this was a media frenzy and subsequent political fervor over a "culture of violence" replete with condemnation toward Hollywood, the music industry and videogames (in short, the best ways to decompress after another day of high school). As a politically powerless teenager, I had no real way to challenge the official assumptions as to why the shooting occurred. Among my friends, though, the consensus was that the real causes of Columbine could not be answered by pointing to Doom, Natural Born Killers, or Marilyn Manson.

Years later in the fall of 2004, I came across RPG Maker and it occurred to me that the RPG form could yield a deep and complex story-driven environment for a game. As a fan of such games as Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, I had always taken an interest in this game genre. Because I was 22 and not 12, my interest in games was not one of childish fantasy but of contemporary reflection and examination. In some ways, Columbine had been a latent thread in my life and the opportunity to explore it in interactive form seemed especially promising since the event itself was inextricably linked to videogames. While authors, politicians, moral pundits, musicians and filmmakers had contributed their thoughts to understanding Columbine, no game developer had (probably for reasons of sensibility and an interest in preserving company relations). As an outsider to the game developer world, I could afford to take those risks--though the ramifications to follow were quite surprising nonetheless.

The film suggests you grossly underestimated the interest and backlash your game generated. Why do you think the game spread as far and as fast as it did? What aspect of the reaction surprised you the most?

It is worth mentioning that for a long time the game received the kind of underground, subdued exposure that I expected it to get. I posted the game online around April 20th, 2005 to coincide with the sixth anniversary (not the best word to use here, I know) of the shooting. For over a year, it remained an Internet anomaly--receiving about 10,000 downloads. I more or less went back to my life of working as a youth mentor, honing my filmmaking craft, teaching Tae Kwon Do, and volunteering as a community radio station DJ.

I posted the game anonymously for many reasons, some practical and some ideological: 1) I was aware that the approach of using a videogame to represent a school shooting would generate outrage from those unwilling to acknowledge games as a socially-conscious medium. 2) I was interested in fostering discussion not about myself and my motives for creating the game but rather the shooting at Columbine itself. 3) I had no interest in furthering a career in game design so putting my name to the work in some attempt to be "discovered" or "recruited" was unimportant. 4) The larger experiment was one of digital culture; I wished to combine musical, photographic, and textual elements gleaned from the web, assemble them in a piece of software, and finally release this reassembled contextualization onto the Web for further discourse. I did not know why, per se, but that the possibility to do so did not exist a decade earlier and this experimentation seemed interesting to me as a multimedia artist. It was as though the Internet itself assembled this game--as though it were a living information machine giving birth to a new creation.

It was a full year later around April 20th of 2006 that the game began to get the attention of gaming blogs like Kotaku and Watercooler Games. Not long after this, the game crossed over into the mainstream press. By the time the Washington Post article ran in late May of 2006, the game was getting 8,000 downloads per day and despite several PayPal donations to keep the game online, my server crashed. It was also at this point that my identity became sought after and I chose to publicly defend my game amidst harassing emails and death threats. Before long, the game was back online at several download mirrors. Little did I know the controversy was just beginning. To date the game has received nearly 700,000 downloads on the main mirror location--although the real number will never be known since it is being shared in so many decentralized ways.

What were the biggest misunderstandings people had about the game?

Misunderstandings can be miniscule or they can be gigantic. Among the smallest misunderstandings was that I was a former Columbine High School student who made the game as an act of catharsis to personally grieve or process the tragedy. Among the largest were that I made the game for money, I made the game to get on television, or that I made the game to encourage school shootings.

On some level, I welcome one form of misunderstanding because I enjoy eliciting a broad range of responses from my work. Many elements of the game have personal interpretations to me but others view them differently. The water fountain, for example, gives the exact particle content as described by Denver's municipal water authority when Eric or Dylan drink from it. Some have taken this to be meaningless, others a joke, while some have observed that this is commentary on the notion that whatever caused the shooting, it wasn't what was in the water.

The larger opportunity here is not misunderstanding but rather self-understanding. A game like SCMRPG can take players to an ethical situation they have never been to before. It can challenge them with a role not of mindless power but of tormented anguish, revenge, or anger. In doing so, players often reflect on their own feelings of childhood depression or angst while at the same time interacting with a pivotal event in US history. I do not have a specific expectation for what that understanding is supposed to yield. That is the beauty and perhaps the danger of art.

Which criticisms of the game hit you the hardest? Were there moments when you questioned your own creative choices?

At first I was hesitant to keep the game online. However real or imagined the charges are, the legal implications of producing controversial media can be intimidating. And that is precisely what I have faced from time to time. As one can imagine, various groups and individuals have sought to take SCMRPG off the Internet--using a variety of tactics from baseless claims of personal injury to draconian interpretations of copyright law (the game features the same media posted all over the Net and in news reports and documentaries which employed Fair Use in Copyright).

The major point of introspection occurred at the time of the Dawson College shooting in Montreal in the fall of 2006. Here I had successfully defended the game's right to exists for the entire summer and I thought I was in the clear for future projects and a kinder, gentler Inbox. However, on September 14th, my phone began ringing at 8am and did not stop quite literally for days. I cannot tell you how many emails I received threatening me with violence, legal action, or both. I replied to as many as I could, patiently diffusing allegations the mainstream media had whipped up about a game they had never played and did not understand. In the weeks to follow I formed new alliances including one survivor of the shooting, Joel Kornek. Having initially written me in anger after leaving the hospital and learning of my game on the news, we soon leveled with one another and set about to collaborate. The results of that collaboration are my documentary and his suicide prevention website, killthinking.com.

I began to realize that making meaningful media sometimes has a personal cost--and perhaps it always should. My creative choices have always been questioned. Sometimes my answers strike people with more satisfaction than others. I think such questioning (of ourselves and of others) is very healthy, though--not just for creative efforts but in general; I'm writing you in a time of national leadership that bombs first and asks questions later. We would be living in a better world if we were just a little less certain of our own hubristic convictions.

All of these debates came to a head around the Slamdance Guerilla Games

competition. What are your thoughts about those events, looking back on them

several years later? Do you have any clearer sense of why the festival made the

decision to pull the game?

If the Dawson College shooting was the low point in the discourse of SCMRPG, Slamdance pulling it from the Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition would have to be the high point. For the first time, I was not defending my game in solitude but with some solidarity--often from game developers far more talented and established than I. If it weren't for this competition and the controversy that pulling out the game created, the dialogue about games with a social agenda would be slightly further behind. Finally game writers and cultural critics began to take notice of the double standard our culture has imposed on games in comparison to other popular media. Finally the game wasn't the central scrutiny of every article it was mentioned it. Finally the wagons were being circled and the case was being made in the larger culture for Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

In terms of why the game was pulled, I think the most likely answer is the most disappointing: Peter Baxter was unwilling to assume the same legal risks of showing a controversial game as showing a controversial film. In the service of obscuring this double standard, circular logic abounds: music clearance issues which had previously been vetted were reintroduced, "moral obligations" which had been previously weighed, and the imagined loss of sponsorship when in fact a sponsor only left upon the game's removal rather than its inclusion.

As I write this, the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition has completely fizzled; entrants into the last iteration of the program have been refunded their entry fees. While film festivals such as Slamdance want to celebrate independent game making, the task must be taken with utmost respect and courage for the medium. In the meantime, several substantial game industry events are held annually to celebrate independent games and game developers are deeply appreciative of them.

Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part Two)

Universite de Montreal is developing a new web strategy, they intend to integrate web 2.0 features. They are thinking about letting students become

publishers, but they fear a teacher backlash. Is this fear reasonable? What

would be the worst case scenario?

When we create more open platforms, we destroy old monopolies of information. That can be a brutal blow for those who gain their self worth from their role as the dispersers of that information. So, yes, when you open it up to students to submit materials, teachers feel threatened. There are some legitimate concerns here, having to do with the credentializing of information and the liabilities of the university. For most of us, credibility on the web is situational: we are not so much assessing content as we are assessing the reputations of the sources of that content. We tend to put our greatest trusts in the institutions we would trust for information in the physical world. So, many people who sought information from Universite de Montreal or MIT will make a general judgment about the reputation of the institution and then apply it to all content which gets circulated.

For me, a lot of this has to do with how we frame the materials -- as a reference work (which meets certain criteria of reliability, which many faculty members would be hard pressed to meet) or as a space for investigation, deliberation, and discussion (where there are ongoing conversations about the value of different content being circulated). Most academic web resources represent the former; Wikipedia and YouTube would be better understood as the latter. The need is to be clear about who is contributing the content and then you need to create a context where the community has the literacy practices and collective intelligence processes to take ownership over critically engaging with the materials being shared.

Everyone in the university would need to have a stake in insuring the integrity of the process and that means being highly critical and skeptical of anything that gets submitted, whether by a student or a teacher.

Can a platform upstage the learning process ? By that I mean that students

would get lost in a pile of information and would no longer be able to know

what to use ?

A platform certainly can upstage the learning process if by a platform you mean a technology. It is not at all unusual for faculty members to become enchanted

with one or another kind of hardware and not think through its pedagogical implications. We can see some of the ways universities have embraced Second Life as an example of this process. Second Life has some remarkable affordances which can support powerful new kinds of learning, but it's also a challenging technology to learn how to use. There's no point in using it for things that can be done just as easily through more traditional learning platforms and there's no point in using it if it takes much longer to learn how to use the program than it is going to be possible to use the program for instruction. In

other words, we have to do a cost/benefit analysis and know why we are using this platform, why it is better than traditional means, what it allows us to do that we couldn't do otherwise, what challenges it poses to learners, and so forth.

On the other hand, I would argue that a process or a community is less likely to upstage learning because for the most part, it comes with its own pedagogical logic and if you work within that logic, everything you do will ultimately contribute to learning. Again, the choice of the community needs to be aligned to the pedagogical goals, because the community will impose its own goals which will often be more deeply motivating.

Is there more value in sharing ( as with OpenCourseWare) or in mashing and

allowing expression ?

For me, they are two parts of the same process. When I hand you a printed book, which couldn't be more fixed in its content and couldn't be harder to reconfigure, you are still going to pay attention to only those parts that are of interest to you; I can't determine whether you read the whole thing; I can't determine what parts you cite in other works you write; and indeed, the book only becomes valuable when you can take out your yellow pen, mark up the passages that are meaningful to you, compare them with other books on your shelf, and use them as resources for your own explorations and ruminations.

So, why should we imagine that digital resources are any different? Once you share them, they are going to be sampled and remixed, if they are of any value to the person who receives them. That's at the heart of the learning and research processes. So, the question isn't whether to allow remixing; you can't stop it and you really wouldn't want to if you could. The question is whether to facilitate it or for that matter, whether to increase the visibility of what readers do with the content you provide. In the end, that boils down to the question of whether you want to be part of a conversation or whether you simply

want to publish.

In our participatory culture, though, keep in mind that publishing as an end unto itself is having diminishing return and people are much more likely to be drawn towards spaces which enable and support meaningful dialog. You can try to block it, if you wish, but you are also cutting yourself out from the marketplace of ideas, so what's the point?

Should all this self-expression be recognized ? Where can we draw the line between « artistic self-expression » and bad work ?

The point is that I don't draw the line; the community draws the line. A society where there is lots of bad work out there is ultimately more generative than one

which supports only excellent work. It provides points of entry for more people who are encouraged to try things, be bad, get feedback, and do better. A society which circulates only excellent work creates too strong a barrier to access and thus discourages most people from producing anything. The result is that we lack the diversity we need for collective decision making or shared cultural experiences.

So, the goal should never be to get rid of bad work; the goal should be to develop mechanisms which helps us to identify what we see as valuable or meaningful work according to our own criteria. There are a number of different mechanisms which allow us to do so: we can have gatekeepers who curate the materials and use their personal reputation to bestow recognition on work they consider valuable; we can have some kind of system of aggregation, such as Digg, where many people vote on what's valuable and the "best" stuff rises to the top; we can have some system of collective deliberation in which we have ongoing debates about what constitutes good work and what works are

good. All of those mechanisms can be found at work in one or another site online.

We still don't fully understand how these mechanisms work and what kinds of areas each works best. And universities would have a lot to contribute into research in these areas if they would free themselves from the burden of feeling like they can only support excellence.

A lot of bad work could tarnish the reputation of a university. How can it reconcile openness and the promotion of itself as a supplier of good knowledge?

It depends on what the university is trying to sanctify: is it seeking to guarantee the integrity of the product (in which case, every bit of content needs to be vetted) or the integrity of the process (in which case, the university is creating a space where people learn through vetting each other's content.) Is the reputation of a university based on the fact that they gather together lots of people who know things or is it based on the fact that they create a context where the ongoing questioning of information takes place?

What is the role of universities in this new « knowledge society » ?

Universities have gathered together many forms of expertise into one institution and they have provided the time and space for those expertise to be exercised

around compelling questions. They have developed processes by which questions can be asked and answers can be debated, where information can be produced, exchanged, and evaluated, and where expertise can be exchanged between many different minds. So, how do universities expand those functions and processes beyond their brick and mortar campuses? How do they open up these conversations to include a larger public who wish to continue learning beyond their undergraduate years or who wish to learn things that are not available to them at their local level? Universities can potentially play an enormous role here but it requires them to rethink their interface with their public and indeed, requires them to expand their understanding of what constitutes the constituency for higher learning.

Note: In response to the first installment of this interview, reader Chris Lott asks why the Creative Commons license for MIT's Open Courseware initiative constitutes a "conservative" approach to Fair Use. I am not, in this case, concerned about reader's making Fair Use of my materials. They are welcome to use them with attribution as far as I am concerned. But my problem is that as a media scholar, I need to be able to provide excerpts from other people's media -- especially corporate media -- if my teaching materials and approaches are going to be accessible to people around the world who may not have ready access to American media. MIT's position is that we have to clear rights for every piece of material that we include in our course materials, rather than asserting a broader understanding of Fair Use which would define such materials as being circulated for the purpose of critical commentary. I apply such a broader notion in my own blog but so far, the Open Courseware people will not accept this perspective and as a result, I've been locked out of contributing to this program. People often ask why not use materials under Creative Commons license and the problem is that the kinds of materials currently circulating under Creative Commons tends to be indie media, which is great, but in teaching media studies, I also have to deal with material by mainstream media and universities feel themselves vulnerable to the exagerated assertions of copy right by many corporate rights holders. I hope this further clarifies my position.

Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part One)

I was recently interviewed by a Canadian journalist, Alexandre Cayla-Irigoyen Chef de pupitre - Societe Monde, about OpenCourseWare, Collective Intelligence, and the modern university. Somehow, the interview questions sparked me to dig deep on some ideas that I hadn't really formulated before and I figured the answers might prove interesting to blog readers. So I asked the reporter if I could run the transcript here, once he had gotten what he needed from it for his story.

I read your book (Convergence Culture) and also a couple of other of your publications. You argue that, right now, the school system is failing its children because they are learning more experimenting outside class than in it. Do you think that Internet and the tools that are being developed will help change this situation ?

The internet is improving opportunities for learning for at least some portion

of our youth, but most of what is most valuable about it is locked outside of

schools. For example, many American schools block all access to YouTube, to

social network sites, even to blogging tools, all of which are key sites for

learning. Schools are discouraging young people from using Wikipedia rather

than engaging with it as an opportunity to learn about the research process and

to engage with critical discussions around issues of credibility. The schools are

often frightened of anything that looks like a game to the point that they lock

out many powerful tools which simulate real world processes, encourage a 'what

if' engagement with history, or otherwise foster critical understanding of the

world.

As long as they react to these developments as risks rather than resources, then those kids who have access to this online world are going to be de-skilled as they enter the schoolhouse gates and those kids who don't have access are going to be left further behind because they have been abandoned by the institutions which are otherwise best situated to address the digital divide in terms of technical access and the participation gap in terms of access to skills and experiences. So, yes, informal learning is taking place outside of school for those who are able to access it but the refusal of schools to engage with it further amplifies the inequalities between information haves and have nots.

Can such changes be implemented in university classes? Flexibility seems to be the key aspect of this new approach whereas the university classroom is typically governed by a rigid student-teacher relation (at the undergrad level at least).

Whatever their limitations in terms of bureaucratic structure, most university

instructors have much greater flexibility to respond to these challenges than the average public high school. Unfortunately, by the time we get to college, these gaps in experiences, skills, and resources will have already had a near lethal impact on those kids who are being left behind. It isn't just that we will need to have a head start program to get them the technical skills they need to deploy these technologies. It is going to be much harder to give them the sense of empowerment and entitlement needed to allow them to feel fully part of the online world. They are going to be much less likely to play and experiment with the new technologies because they will be afraid of failing and looking dumb in front of classmates who will have been using these tools for more than a decade.

That said, we certainly do want to integrate these skills into college classes, because they are key to higher order thinking an research in most of our disciplines, because doing so is the best way of reaching a generation that expects to be able to participate in social networks and manipulate data through simulations. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we can fix a decade's worth of neglect through the public schooling system.

How can an institution recreate the type of communities you spoke about in your book ?

The kinds of communities I discussed in the book are what Cory Doctorow calls "ad-hoc-cracies." They emerge quickly in response to shared interests and concerns. They last as long as people need the community to work through a common problems or query. They vanish when they are no longer useful to their members. They are radically interdisciplinary or I'd prefer, "undisciplined," in that they draw together people with many different expertises and they deploy social networks which observe few of the barriers to interaction we experience in the physical world to bring people together who should be working together. They develop informal yet very powerful systems for vetting information and for carrying out deliberation.

Almost none of this holds with the average college class which has a fixed duration, a prearranged sequence of materials and problems, a disciplined border, a geographically narrowed location, etc. So, if we want to integrate these into our classes, they require

much greater flexibility in imagining what constitutes an educational context. They certainly involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and requires students to build on each other's work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goals since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like.

MIT has the OpenCourseWare program that seems to follow a more open logic. Does MIT have other programs that would help it achieve (or create) a more open, flexible and creative environment ?

The Open Courseware Initiative has very worthy goals -- indeed, the vision

behind it is deeply inspiring to me. Universities like MIT should be opening up their resources to the planet. We should being supporting independent learners and providing materials to support education in parts of the world which do not have what major research institutions have to offer. The scale on which Open Courseware is operating now is astonishing and a real tribute to the people who developed it.

That said, I do not myself participate in Open Courseware. I freely give away my own content through our various blogs, podcasts, and online materials. But MIT has failed to assert a strong Fair Use defense which allows instructors to meaningfully quote from and repurpose existing materials as part of their instructional process. As a media scholar, my teaching centers on helping students understand other people's media content and if I can't quote from and share that content with the users of the Open Courseware, I can not meaningfully reproduce my instructional practices online. MIT had an opportunity to be a leader in the arguments about Fair Use, especially given the good will they have gotten through Open Courseware, yet they have chosen to take a very timid and conservative legal approach to these matters and as a consequence, I feel like it severely compromises the goals and ideals of the Open Courseware initiative.

I am thus a conscientious objector in my relation to this project. I am going into this here not to slam the Open Courseware people but to suggest that the ideals of free distribution of content by educational institutions are compromised by the current intellectual property regime and that we are not going to be able to meaningfully achieve the full ambitions of such a project until we develop stronger defenses around Fair Use.

At the present time, MIT is thinking about its next step in its Internet strategy (after the OpenCourseWare project), what are the options ? What should a university try to implement ?

Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations. In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it. As I think about what makes YouTube YouTube, I see a number of factors:

• Anyone can submit content at anytime and thus doesn't have to operate from a base of academic and institutional authority. It respects multiple kinds of expertise, understands people are differently motivated, and appreciates that information can be posted for many different reasons.
• YouTube content can be embedded on any website, blog, or social network page. It is spreadable and it gets value as it gets inserted into these various contexts, because they represent different social communities which are having ongoing conversations. YouTube sees information as something that can be used, not something that is simply stored.
• YouTube provokes responses. Indeed, the most valuable content on YouTube is content which inspires other users to talk back, reframing and repurposing materials, coming at them from many different angles.
• The content on YouTube can be reconfigured many different ways. It is not part of a structured curriculum; rather, it is modular, nonliner, unstructured. And as such, we are encouraged to play with it rather than being disciplined to approach it in set ways.

  So, I don't know for sure what the next stage of an academic content system looks like but my own sense is that it should look MORE like YouTube and less like what university lawyers and department heads think will be "something like YouTube".

Inviting Our Participation: An Interview with Sharon Marie Ross (Part One)

Increasingly, television invites our participation. Some shows, like American Idol, do so through explicit calls to share our thoughts and reactions. Some shows, such as Lost, do so through their deployment of serial structures which demand a particular kind of attention that we associate with cult media. In Convergence Culture, I talk about building entertainment properties to be cultural attractors (drawing like minded people together) and cultural activators (giving these networked audiences something to do). In the recent book, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet, media scholar Sharon Marie Ross identifies as range of "invitational strategies" in contemporary television which encourage our participation as fans. Beyond the Box is an important contribution to our understanding of convergence culture, an exciting example of what happens when scholars effectively blend research methods including political economy, fan studies, and close textual analysis, which have historically been set in opposition to each other. Ross is able to understand not only what draws fans to such programs but also to explain what fans mean economically to television producers at the current moment of media in transition. I read this book with great gusto, delighted to find a kindred spirit, and pleased to see this further elaboration of the affective economy surrounding contemporary broadcasting.

I am pleased to be able to share with you this interview with an up and coming media scholar. Here, she not only lays out some of the book's core ideas but she also applies them to some very contemporary developments in Broadcasting, such as the Writer's Strike, the Gossip Girl phenomenon, and the release of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible.

Throughout the book, you write about what you call "invitational strategies" surrounding cult television series. Explain what you mean by this term.

The term "invitational strategies" actually emerged from a conversation among me, Janet Staiger, Amanda Lotz, and Matt Hills. I had started with "interpellation" but that didn't quite work for what I was trying to capture in terms of what I see emerging in TV and the Internet. What I've seen, across several genres, is a mode of address (sometimes explicit and sometimes less obvious) where producers/writers, and marketers also at times, create stories (which can encompass the show plot itself, and also how a show is marketed and how a show works with Internet addendums) that reach out to viewers/readers and "prod" them to become a part of the storytelling process. The goal is to have the reader become actively engaged and also to elicit among readers a feeling (and I mean "feeling" emotionally) that the story belongs to them in a significant way. This can run from overt invitations (asking viewers to vote or chat online or buy something) to organic (where a viewer is already likely to be engaged and the invitation is embedded more deeply in the plots) to obscured (where the invitation seems "hidden" and those outside the experience might not see any behind-the-scenes constructing of an invitation at work). I think organic is becoming dominant. The key element is that the reader feels as if those creating the story want their input and involvement in some way--and the reader has the power to refuse the invitation, accept it, bring along a guest, drop by or stay and really party (etc.) A definite two-way event (though as we know, the host ultimately decides what is available for consumption and what the hours of the party might be...I find myself slipping into more metaphors, but hope this explains it!:)

As a fan, I kept asking myself whether we really needed any kind of an invitation or whether fan culture might emerge around any program. You seem to suggest that

some texts are more "inviting" than others and more open to exploring alternative forms of audience participation. How important is that solicitation, whether implicit or explicit, to sparking such responses?

I do think invitations aren't necessary for people we think of as fans ( a category that is murky in and of itself). Those who become a fan on their own are ready to jump in and especially use the Internet to create their own forms of involvement. However, I do think fans respond to invitations when offered in the right way--not too confining, being key. This is especially true of more cult like shows like Lost or Dr. Who or even soaps. An invitation is appreciated as it shows deference to fans--but that invite better not preclude already established ways on interacting. For those for whom "fan" still connotes "horrors" of geekdom and over-investment, an invitation might provide the legitimacy needed to allow them to overcome the stigma of fandom and become involved in similar ways with a show. So many people still think of TV and the Internet as "guilty pleasures" that can slip into unhealthy involvement, and an invitation suggests that any involvement they then engage in is distanced from those societal fears of falling in too deeply...

Throughout the book, you draw heavily on research on soap operas to try to explain the kinds of responses surrounding reality television and cult dramas. What do you think television critics miss by trying to discuss the complexity of contemporary television without dealing with soaps?

Oh--sooo very much! As far as I'm concerned, soap operas (with their roots in also comics and Dickens' serials of yore) are the fundamental form of storytelling. Think about it: a story that keeps going--that will always be there for you no matter what stage of life you're in or what kind of mood--and even persists if you leave; a story that responds to the times and milieu of its viewers; a story that reacts to viewers' desires to some degree...and that requires careful attention without holding you too much to account. When critics dismiss this genre (often via its lower production values and its association with women) they overlook its core pleasures, which aren't about missing out on excitement in one's own life, or having little to do with one's day. The pleasures are about storytelling in its most basic sense: someone tells you a little bit about this person and their life, and you consider it in relation to your own; then you can consider further in relation to those around you--especially those who have also been told the story. And then you can spin the story outwards--what might happen next and why. I believe that humans inherently need stories to empathize with others, plan their futures (individually and as cultures), dream dreams, etc. Soaps tap into this need--and I think it's a healthy need. Contemporary TV that doesn't seem like a soap can often replicate this appeal using soap-like strategies of narration (interruption, open-endedness, current events and mores at work, sprawling plots to follow sprawling casts). If we as critics try to explain the appeal of modern shows without acknowledging their roots in this form and its seriality, we not only do a disservice to history (of the medium), we also are ignoring an understanding of what stories offer human beings. And at an academic level, how can we teach why a show has appeal or how a show needs to be written to have appeal without understanding a genre that has existed since pre-TV? I think scholars have often ignored the soap connection because academia shies away from things emotional in favor of the rational and formulaic...yet stories are all about emotion and psychology because humans are all about emotion and psychology. There are things in life and the world we don't always understand; seeking the answers is what makes us human. Stories (when done well) tap into this--and soaps especially have gloried in basic human questioning. (Why do people stop loving us? why do relatives die? what am I here for?)

You describe your own experiences in viewer activism around Buffy as paving the way for some of your intellectual interest around this topic. What did you learn through your fan involvement and how did it inform your work on this book?

Oh, very very much is indebted to Buffy!! I became a fan "on my own" and this show spoke to me as a woman, a scholar, a feminist, a lover of TV...It tapped into so many of those human questions mentioned above...I had loved TV before, but this was my first real experience as a fan beyond soap operas proper. I found myself fascinated BY myself (ha ha--narcissism reigns always among scholars!). How could a TV show--especially one so initially disparaged--allow me to grow as a person and as a teacher and scholar? How could such a show appeal to so many different kinds of people (as I eventually discovered)? After focusing on this and Xena initially, I began to see other shows that did the same for other groups of viewers--from wrestling to sports to reality TV. Was there something connecting such disparate groups and such disparate styles of TV programs? And given the role of the Internet with Buffy fandom and the role of Joss Whedon in becoming involved with fans online (and off), was there something about this new medium that was bringing together these areas of culturally "disconnected" forms of storytelling? As I started working on this book, Buffy always served as a barometer of sorts. How was Buffy fandom different and how the same from say American Idol or The O.C.? How did the structure of the show differ and not from other shows? How the content/themes? How the role of the producers and critics? I began to see the storytelling connection as fundamental to linking different things that seemed so very different...In the end, does a show call out to people in such a way that they feel a personal connection AND ultimately a social connection to other people? Last, via my involvement with Buffy fandom both personally and as a scholar, I began to see at work the real role and impact of cultural biases against genres and fandoms and to become fascinated by what can get in the way--and also aid and abet--people's willingness to embrace a story as having true value and meaning in life--to embrace "entertainment" as something that serves a purpose.

One of the most talked about examples of "viral media content" this summer was the online distribution of Dr. Horrible. How might we see this experiment as an outgrowth of Joss Whedon's long-term engagement with his hardcore fans?

Definitely an outgrowth! (Loved it, by the way...) Dr. Horrible is a fascinating example of so many themes in my book coming together (after publication, of course! That's always the way...) People who had come to respect Joss Whedon as an auteur came to this text; along with those who loved Buffy or Firefly; and those who love Neil Patrick Harris and How I Met Your Mother; those who follow viral videos...and of course it was a by-product of the writers' strike that was immersed in the Internet's relationship with TV. Some heard of it through friends, some online, some via Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide...So on the one hand, while its success was rooted in Joss Whedon's awareness that his fans are out there and always looking for new work from him and that they will seek work in untraditional forums, on the other hand the success was also a product of the Internet becoming a more acceptable venue for storytelling in the ways in which I have been discussing it and the ability of the Internet to draw together "unheard of" combinations of fans. In short, when someone reaches out with a personal story (and it was pretty personal to pull this off when a strike was going on), people will respond in kind with personal attention.

You discuss teen television as one genre that reflects contemporary youth's expectations of participation. What have current teen shows, such as Gossip Girl, learned from the earlier experiments in "teleparticipation" you discuss in the book?

This is funny--I was watching Gossip Girl all summer while pregnant and began loving it as a junior Dynasty. Having interviewed Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage about The OC and hearing about their travails with the show and Internet fans and FOX, I definitely was looking for signs of the old (good use of soap strategies, attention to the role of new media communication) and signs of the new (how to attend to fans without cowtowing to them, how to not spill all of a story too soon). And there I am, watching a week ago, and I see a brief funny bit in which pre-teen girls accost Serena and Dan (the main couple) in the park, offering their totally contradictory two cents about whether or not the couple should stay together, etc. And Serena and Dan became Josh and Stephanie: we hear you, we admire your interest and your new media involvement (hearing about the couple's troubles via the Gossip Girl blog)--but back off! The story is still unraveling and if we listen to all of you, it'll all spiral into meaninglessness as a story. This reminded me so much of my interview with them, in which they discussed the many different groups of fans they were dealing with, and how trying to keep up with all of their demands ultimately robbed them of their power to deliver a story they were connected with. You can't please everyone--but you should listen at the very least.

Teen shows make it tricky--there are so many different social audiences invested, with differing needs and desires. But the teen demo is so very new media savvy, you need to be able to keep up with their interests--and their skills as readers. I see Gossip Girl skillfully negotiating this demo with its older demo (18-34) by weaving in new media more deftly to the plots, by heeding online talk--but ultimately by the producers laying claim to their role as storytellers. (vs. story-givers--where you totally hand the story off and abandon ship.) It will be interesting to see if 90210 follows suit and if Smallville can survive its core Lex/Clark fan base now that Lex is gone (too early to tell). But I think the teen demo is so key to success with many shows that producers are definitely working harder to listen to them, and reach out to them online and via script. The key thing is can they do this without sacrificing their own creativity and their own needs as storytellers? (I think we often forget that writers, even in L.A., are humans too--driven to tell stories for very personal reasons and not solely driven by profit. It's a mean business and no one sticks with it without really loving it.)

Sharon Ross is an assistant professor in the Television Department at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches courses in the areas of TV history and critical theory and her research focuses on issues of television reception; this semester she is excited to be teaching a 5 week intensive seminar on a single script from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is the associate editor of the journal for the International Digital Media Arts Association and co-editor with Dr. Louisa Stein of the anthology Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. She has too many "must see" TV shows to mention but highly recommends Mad Men and How I Met Your Mother this season.

The Informal Pedagogy of Anime Fandom: An Interview with Rebecca Black (Part Two)

To what degree are the pedagogical advances you saw simply a product of being motivated to spend more time writing? to what degree can they be traced back to Beta-Reading and Reader Responses providing greater feedback to the writer?

Well, I believe that one of the best ways to learn a new language and to improve your literacy skills is to practice using the language in meaningful, communicative tasks. So, I think that a good amount of the progress that the English language learners from my study made can be attributed to their motivation to write and read fan fiction and related texts. I also think that their success within the fan community allowed them to develop confidence and begin seeing themselves as people who write and use English effectively. For Nanako and Cherry-Chan, this was very different than how they were viewed in school--basically, in school they were seen as students who struggled with all literacy-based (as opposed to Math or Science-based) tasks. So, if you're constructed as "bad" at something for long enough, after a while you start to believe it. Fortunately, for Nanako at least, her success in the fan community helped her achieve success and popularity as an online author--which in turn provided her with motivation to continue writing and improving her English. Cherry-Chan, on the other hand, used her participation in the fan community to improve her social connections. Still, she used her language and literacy skills to make her own LiveJournal pages, forums, and web sites, and to post reviews of other people's fictions and to leave comments on other people's web pages.

In terms of the effect that beta-reading and peer-feedback might have had on their language abilities--it's important to note that they were both in English classes at school, so I can't really make any causal statements; however, over the 3 years that I followed her participation, Nanako's readers very clearly pointed out grammatical errors that she consistently made in her texts. And, she would acknowledge their feedback and then go back and correct her errors. In terms of second language acquisition, this is an important aspect of learning-- actually noticing errors and then figuring out how to correct them. For Nanako, sometimes her readers would tell her how to correct the errors, but other times they would simply point out the phrases, sentences, or paragraphs with errors and leave her to figure out how to correct them. In my opinion, I think these activities helped her to improve her English composition skills. Most of the fan fiction authors that I've talked with say that their reviewers and beta-readers were definitely responsible for helping them learn to be better writers.

Some argue that the fan fiction world supports literacy skills precisely because it doesn't operate under the structures and constraints of formal education. These critics would argue that we would destroy what's valuable here if we tried to integrate it back into formal schooling. Do you agree or disagree with this claim? What, if anything, can traditional educators learn from this affinity space?

I tend to agree that assigning fan fiction in classrooms would probably ruin its appeal for many students. However, other students might really appreciate having fan fiction texts or gaming-related texts available as options for their in-school composing. For example, many adolescents might feel more comfortable mastering the compare and contrast genre if they were able to write about subject matter that they have some expertise in, such as comparing and contrasting the merits of certain video game character classes or using Inuyasha or Harry Potter to discuss character development. Educators can create lesson plans that include or even encourage different options for students to incorporate their extracurricular literacy activities and/or interests in popular media texts into their classroom activities. Educators can also help students make the connections between their in and out-of-school practices. However, I think it ultimately should be up to students to decide to what extent their out-of-school activities will inform or work in concert with school-based tasks.

What do you see as the value of studying the process of fan fiction writing as opposed to studying fan fiction as a series of texts?

Well, one of the primary values that I see in studying fan fiction writing as a process is that it provides a mechanism for understanding the role of audience participation in the creation of texts. All of my focal participants' received a great deal of feedback from readers--for example, Grace has received around 9400 reviews, Nanako 7600, and Cherry-chan around 650. I don't know about you, but I've never had that many people respond to anything that I've written, especially not when I was a teenager. Hmmm... on second thought, you probably *have* had that many people respond to things that you've written. Anyway, the fan fiction audience often plays a significant role in determining the direction that a text will go in. As you pointed out in Textual Poachers, the audience has a vested interest in the media series, and they have strong opinions about what should and should not happen with the characters. So, they are happy to provide suggestions for how things should go and complaints about how things should not go in a story. Nanako in particular was very responsive to readers' suggestions about her texts. Sometimes she would incorporate their ideas into the narrative, other times she would go back and revise her chapters based on reader feedback. She would also use her Author's Notes to explicitly request guidance on certain parts of her texts, and the audience would respond to these requests. So, simply studying her fan fictions as a body of texts would be missing a great deal of the reciprocal interaction taking place as she goes through the process of writing, negotiating with readers, revising, and finalizing her texts.

Traditional notions of literacy have tended to see it in fairly individual and personalized terms. Yet, one could read your book as making a case for social and collaborative notions of literacy. Would you agree?

Absolutely. I think we have this whole focus in classrooms that's based around "keep your eyes on your own paper," and testing for what each individual learner knows, and it really stifles a lot of the potential for collaborative learning. Using language to effectively communicate ideas, negotiate perspectives, and even collaboratively complete projects is important for all students, but it's especially important for English language learners to have these kinds of interactive learning experiences. Through collaborative interaction, they're able to build on and extend the knowledge that each participant brings to the space. And, they're able to further develop their own skills and knowledge by using language for authentic purposes in meaningful contexts.

Appadurai suggests that the contemporary imagination is collaborative in nature--that people are growing accustomed to creating and thinking through things in collaborative contexts. We can see examples of this in how many people will post their projects or ideas on a blog or publish their creative texts online and await feedback. It seems to me that this sort of approach to creation and even thought might be a very effective way to come up with robust representations, perspectives, and solutions to difficult problems. So, it may not just be a matter of social and collaborative forms of literacy, but rather a turn towards all sorts of collaborative activities that are facilitated by new media and technologies.

Tell us about the cover of the book. You mentioned to me that it was designed by a fan artist. How did that come about and how did the press respond to working with a fan artist?

Well, after one of my talks, a professor from the audience told me that his daughter was actively involved in the anime fan community, creating fan art and scanlations (which are fan-created translations of Japanese manga) and suggested that I contact her. We stayed in contact a bit over the years, and when I started the book, she seemed like the perfect person to create the cover. I told her about the main themes of the book, and she came up with this fantastic cover with an original anime character actually drawing herself onto the page with a pencil. I thought this had a nice parallel with one of the points I was making in the book--that many of the focal participants were writing different aspects of their identities into their fictions. They weren't really writing Mary Sue's, but they did integrate different aspects of themselves and their lives into their fan fiction texts. The series editors, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, and the press, Peter Lang, were all very supportive of using this artwork for the cover. I think it speaks to a strong ethos of valuing the communities and the practices that are represented in the text.

Rebecca W. Black is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her research centers on the forms of literacy and social engagement that are emerging in online environments. In particular, Black has focused on the ways that popular culture-inspired environments, such as fan communities, provide adolescent English language learners with opportunities to develop their language skills, establish social connections with global networks of youth, and construct powerful identities as successful authors and knowledgeable fans. Her work has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, TeacherÂ’s College Record, and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. In addition, Prof. Black 's book titled Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction was recently published in the Peter Lang series on Digital Epistemologies.

The Informal Pedagogy of Anime Fandom: An Interview with Rebecca Black (Part One)

One of the central animating idea behind the New Media Literacies movement has been the observation that young people often learn better outside of schools -- through their involvement in informal communities, such as those formed around fandom or gaming -- than they do inside the classrooms. Researchers have sought to better understand these sites of informal learning and the often unconsciously developed pedagogical practices by which they communicate skills and information to newbies. James Paul Gee has used the term, "affinity space," to describe such sites of grassroots creativity and learning. Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler deploy the "affinity space" concept to talk about communities of gamers. I've used the same concept in my discussion of young fan fiction writers. Rebecca W. Black, one of Gee's former students, has recently released an outstanding new book, Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction, which uses the study of anime fan fiction as the focus for a consideration of informal learning. Her central focus are on how fandom helps students for whom English is a second language refine their linguistic abilities and sharpen their expressiveness. She argues fandom has allowed many young people -- especially those from Asia -- to find their voice and gain greater social acceptance because the community is so eager to learn what they know about the cultures where anime is produced and circulated. This book reflects some of the best thinking in the current field of educational research on the value of participating in popular culture and will be of interest to parents, educators, policy makers, and fans.

I had a chance to meet Black some years ago when she was at the beginning of her research; my early conversations with her and with Gee helped to inform my own writing about "Why Heather Can Write" in Technology Review and Convergence Culture. I am proud to share her insights through the following interview.

The central claim of your book is that the practices and processes around the writing and sharing of anime-related fan fiction show many of the signs of a very robust and effective learning community. What aspects of fandom do you think support this kind of learning?

Well, for one I think that the openness and scope of the fan community really fosters learning. And, I should clarify that I don't just mean traditional school-based forms of learning but rather learning in a broad sense. For instance, in terms of openness, you don't have to pass any kind of a test, and there aren't any requirements for gaining access to all the sections of Fanfiction.net. Therefore, youth at all different skill levels have the opportunity to tackle any sort of communication or writing task that they choose. However, in schools the activities that students participate in are often determined by ability level. And while I think it's important to make sure that curricular materials are accessible, I also think that lessons are often oversimplified for certain groups of students, such as English language learners (ELLs) and struggling writers and readers, to the extent that these students aren't offered many opportunities to use language in rich and creative ways or to participate in challenging literacy activities. In contrast, ELL youth participating in the fan community often take on challenging tasks, such as writing stories with multiple chapters or creating their own fan-based websites. In addition, they're able to draw on an array of resources in the community for support. Other fans are available and happy to peer-review their fictions, they visit other websites to receive tips on how to compose their texts or to build their websites, to name just a few examples. Interestingly enough, schools often seem to discourage activities with these distributed forms of knowledge and resources, instead focusing on testing for what students have "inside their heads". However, I think it's just as important to recognize, evaluate, and help develop students' strategies for learning, collaborating, and accessing knowledge that they don't already possess, as this seems to be much more aligned with what we do as adults. I mean, I don't know all sorts of things, but I have pretty good strategies in place for finding them out.

You deploy James Paul Gee's concept of an "affinity space" to talk about FanFiction.net. Can you explain this concept and share some of your thinking about FanFiction.net?

Well, this is related to the previous question. For Gee, there are several defining features of affinity spaces that make them particularly effective sites for informal learning, and many of these features can be seen in fan fiction writing communities. For example, one defining feature is that experts and novices participate in the same areas and activities in affinity spaces. So, as I mentioned previously, novices aren't prevented from engaging in creative activities that they find interesting, even if these activities are challenging for them. And, through working in the same space as experts, novices are able to benefit from this exposure, by asking questions, collaborating, and by observing how experts go about certain tasks.

Another defining feature of affinity spaces is that they are organized around a common interest or goal rather than around age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender, or ability. One of the ways that this is really salient in anime fan fiction communities is in how they provide points of contact for individuals from diverse backgrounds. For example, the participants in my study had people from over 20 different countries reading and leaving feedback on their stories. I used to write fan fiction when I was younger, and the only people who read my stories were my closest friends who lived in the same town, went to the same school, and had similar backgrounds. And even they only saw the stories that I wasn't too shy to show them. Publishing on the web wasn't really an option back then. But now, the internet really provides unprecedented options for either anonymously (or somewhat anonymously) sharing content, and for exchanging information and ideas with people from all over the world. As one example, if a fan fiction writer wants to write a story that's based on high school students in Japan, s/he can post questions to a fan fiction forum asking for specifics about what everyday school and home life is like in Japan, and s/he can be pretty sure of getting some accurate responses from audience members who currently are living or have lived in Japan. And, the diverse and networked nature of affinity spaces also opens up a space for youth to discuss different culturally grounded practices and perspectives. For instance, one of my focal participants wrote a story that involved an arranged marriage between cousins. Now, this arranged marriage wasn't even a big part of the story, but it was something that several of the readers reacted pretty strongly to. Her response to this was to write a couple of fan fiction stories that focused on anime characters and their arranged marriages as part of a cultural practice that is grounded in familial duty. This was her way of pushing some of these readers to move beyond their limited scope of knowledge and learn more about a practice that is very common in many parts of the world.

These points of cultural connection also are providing many youth with the incentive to learn different languages and to find out about different cultures. I think this is related to the "pop cosmopolitanism" that you discuss in your book Convergence Culture. Many anime-based fan fiction texts are linguistically hybrid, in that they contain more than one language, and, as I mentioned previously, they're often set in Asian countries. But, it's important to note that this isn't limited to anime communities and Asian elements. Fan fiction authors use many different languages and cultural elements to enhance their stories. Sirpa Leppanen has some interesting insights into these hybrid language practices in the article "Youth language in media contexts: Insights into the functions of English in Finland". I think that reading and trying to write these hybrid texts creates a cosmopolitan sensibility and a culture of interest in learning about new things. For example, online anime translation dictionaries have become very popular; there are forums specifically for fan fiction authors trying to do historical and cultural research to make their narratives more accurate; there are discussions about the historical, cultural, and linguistic accuracy of fan fiction narratives taking place between authors and reviewers on fanfiction.net. And these are just a few examples that come immediately to mind. On a related note, Eva Lam has pointed out that these points of contact in online communities don't necessarily or automatically bring about empathy and acceptance, and the previous example about arrange marriages clearly supports this. Still, I think that the shared interest of the affinity space provides unprecedented exposure to other linguistic and cultural traditions that just wasn't available before, and exposure is the starting point for moving toward understanding.

What led you to an interest in fan fiction as a space for understanding informal learning?

Well, I was actually a fan fiction writer as a child. It started when I read Tolkien's trilogy for the first time. I was pretty upset that Arwen Evenstar had to give up her immortality to be with Aragorn. So, I came up with my own version of how this part of the story might go. I'd rather not go into detail about that particular fic, but I'll at least say that it involved a magic immortality potion and a bird carrying letters back and forth between Middle Earth characters. Unfortunately, I didn't really have any friends who were interested in this sort of writing; they were more interested in television and MTV, so I gradually abandoned these writing activities for others. Almost 20 years later I went to UW Madison to work on my doctorate with Jim Gee, and I started looking at the literacy practices of fans in gaming communities. This led me to online fan fiction, and to be honest, I was pretty excited to find that there were so many people like me, writing their own versions of popular texts. Also, my background is in linguistics and teaching English as a second language, so I became particularly interested in the communities where non-native English speakers were composing and interacting in English. At the time, there was very little discussion of fan fiction in relation to literacy--in fact, I think that only Kelly Chandler-Olcott & Donna Mahar and you had even remotely touched on the literacy aspect. So, I decided that a dissertation based on English language learners and online fan fiction might help us to understand how this literacy phenomenon might be impacting immigrant youth's literacy development and language socialization and providing a significant venue for informal learning.

You offer detailed accounts of how and what several young fans learn through their participation in the world of fan fiction. How was the world of fan fiction able to facilitate and support their different goals and styles as learners?

My focal participants were all in very different situations as English language learners, and they had very different goals for and outcomes from their participation in the site. For example, Grace lived in the Philippines, and she learned English as a third language there. Most of her experience with English had been in writing academic texts in her classrooms. In an interview, she explained that participation in fan sites helped her learn how to "speak American" and that made her feel more comfortable developing the texts for her own websites and interacting with people online. So, for Grace, the value of writing these texts in English was that it provided her with feedback and input on how to "Americanize" her existing English skills. Nanako, on the other hand, didn't learn English until she moved from China to Canada with her family when she was about 11. She used to start many of her fictions with an Author's Note explaining that she was just learning English and really wanted to improve her language and writing skills. And, the audience was pretty receptive to this. They would comment on her grammar and spelling errors, but in supportive or constructive ways. Some readers would give her very specific feedback on grammatical errors that were common in her writing, and she would take note of this and actually go back and correct these errors in her writing. The audience also would give her a lot of positive feedback about her plotlines which helped bolster her confidence enough to continue writing in spite of her early struggles with grammar and spelling. As a very different example, another focal participant, Cherry-chan, found it taxing to write the sort of long, narrative texts that Grace and Nanako would write (for example, Grace has one fan fiction that's 30 chapters long, and Nanako has one that's 14 chapters long). So, she got into Role Play (RP) Writing, which is a type of fan fiction that takes place on a synchronous medium such as instant messenger. RP writers will take on the personas of different characters and then take turns constructing the narrative from each character's point of view. Cherry-chan liked the social aspect of this collaborative kind of writing. RP writing also gave her immediate feedback on how her co-author was responding to her text, and it more or less forced her to continue writing.

Angela Thomas has done some interesting work interrogating adolescents' identity construction in RP writing that helped me think about how this form of composition was a way for Cherry-chan to extend her social relationships and use the anime characters to "ventriloquate" some of her own identity issues and perspectives. I think this is a common element of both RP and traditional fan fiction-- in that the authors use the characters to represent issues that they are struggling with in their own lives. As one example (that might be a little bit off topic), while I was conducting my study, I came across a "suicide fic" in which the teenage author depicted the anime protagonist committing suicide. The author concluded this fiction with an Author's Note stating that this would be his final story. Basically, he was implying that he was considering suicide himself. What was so powerful about this event was the outpouring of support he received from the audience of readers. There were youth and young adults alike offering up supportive advice, encouraging him not to give up, and providing their instant messenger addresses so that he could contact them at any time when he felt like giving up. Now, I've had some people ask me if it was actually harmful to have all these untrained people offering this young man encouragement and wouldn't it be better for him to reach out to a suicide hotline or a counselor where someone trained in such matters could help? This is where I think the affinity space aspect of fan communities comes into play again. Specifically, I think a lot of youth who are in crisis might have a difficult time approaching total strangers with whom they have nothing in common. However, in the anime fan community, they feel at least some point of affiliation and contact with the people that they've been sharing stories and feedback with. This might make it easier for them to reach out within the affinity space where they feel comfortable, when they might otherwise not reach out at all.

Rebecca W. Black is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her research centers on the forms of literacy and social engagement that are emerging in online environments. In particular, Black has focused on the ways that popular culture-inspired environments, such as fan communities, provide adolescent English language learners with opportunities to develop their language skills, establish social connections with global networks of youth, and construct powerful identities as successful authors and knowledgeable fans. Her work has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, TeacherÂ’s College Record, and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. In addition, Prof. Black 's book titled Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction was recently published in the Peter Lang series on Digital Epistemologies.

Gay Bombay: An Interview with Parmesh Shahani (Part Two)

A central focus of the research concerns an online discussion list for Gay Bombay. What significance did this site play in the lives of your research subjects? What relationship exists between their online and off-line lives?

My research subjects were physically located in and out of Bombay city, and in some cases, out of India. Some of them accessed the Gay Bombay website and newsgroup exclusively online (either because they were apprehensive, married, lived out of Bombay or simply did not have the time to attend any of its offline manifestations) and for these individuals, the website and newsgroup engendered what Maria Bakardjieva has called "immobile socialization"- enabling them to feel connected to the Gay Bombay community at large. Those that lived in Bombay and were comfortable attending the local events equated their participation in Gay Bombay primarily with attending the city based events, and not with the list or website. Even here, there was a split between those who thought of it as primarily a party space and those who thought of it as a space for other kinds of community events.

For the newsgroup subscribers, the reasons for signing up were varied. For some it was just curiosity, for others, a way to know more about the emerging gay world in India. For activists, the possibility of advocacy and working for the issue of LBGT rights was the lure. But often, it was simply a search for empathic gay friends.

I found the Gay Bombay newsgroup to be an excellent site to observe the performative aspects of my respondents' identities. They used the Gay Bombay newsgroup along all aspects of Annette Markham's continuum of "tool", "place" and finally "a way of being".

The choice of their online nicknames typically resonated with their own sense of self or certain affiliations they wanted to highlight. For some, their nicknames were a combination of their religious and Indian identities. One respondent chose his nickname as a tribute to an iconic lesbian filmmaker, another's was the title of his favourite Bruce Springsteen song, and there were many nods in the direction of famous poets, fashion designers, and characters from literature and cinema. Others shifted between using multiple nicknames while posting to the group. Some respondents stated that their identities were the same online and offline. But the majority reported consciously activating a change in their online persona and performing it with pleasure. A few used their online selves to be more bitchy and flirtatious, something that they could not imagine doing offline because of shyness or being in the closet. Another said that he was very "violent and oppressive" in his writing, something that he was certainly not in his offline life. Significantly, for several respondents, the real issue was about identity in gay versus straight settings rather than online versus offline identities. Several of my interviews spoke about having distinct gay identities that they revealed or 'performed' in settings in which they were comfortable.

Given what you tell us in the book about the mainstream India media's often hostile treatment of gay-related stories, what has been the response to the book in India?

Well, I would call the media's treatment mixed. It is sometimes hostile, but at other times, the mainstream English media has been extraordinarily supportive to gay-related stories. Just last week, for example, the Times of India ran a front page opinion about why they felt section 377 of the Indian Penal Code needs to be abolished.

I am happy to report that the response to my book has been largely positive. It has been reviewed across the board - in mainstream newspapers and magazines, in the business press, and in the lifestyle media. In addition, it has also managed to get some decent international press, as it is available worldwide, including online on Amazon. I am especially happy that reviewers are looking at the book as not just a book about contemporary Indian sexuality, but about contemporary Indianness at large. You can check out some of these reviews:

Businessworld Magazine.

Financial Express.

Mint.

I suspect the autobiographical passages will be some of the most controversial aspects of this book. What do you think those chunks us to see about being gay in Bombay that we would not get through more traditional academic means?

I knew that the autobiographical pieces would be controversial. They were not easy to write, and I'm still queasy when I see them in print. But at the same time, I felt that if I had to do justice to the book, I needed to implicate myself in it, and this felt like the most personal way of doing so. For me, the process of research wasn't just a process of going through media archives, and of conducting and transcribing interviews with others; it also involved trying to understand myself, and where I fit into all of this. I felt that by going through my autobiographical passages, readers might have a closer to the ground view of everything else that I was describing. I call this autobiographical layer my memoryscape, which constitutes my thoughts, memories and lived experiences, both material and symbolic. It s the self-activation of my own imagination at work - my personal narrative of being gay in Bombay. I wrote the narrative exactly the way it appears in the book - in a weaving pattern, between and around the other parts of the book.

I think that all the approaches I use in the book combine to provide readers a fractal view about what it means to be gay in Bombay at this particular point in time. So, the media and cultural background provided segues into the interview comments, which in turn segue into the memoryscape. Also, specific themes raised within the book, such as the importance of family, coming out, class differences, etc. constantly repeat themselves - within the interviewee responses as well as within my own memoryscape.

You end the book with some very optimistic suggestions about the potential for change in your country. What gives you such great hope?

As I write in the concluding chapter, there are two Indian traits - fortitude and adaptability, which provide me with hope as I look towards the future of Gay Bombay and the Indian queer scene at large. Also, if Indianness is something that can be imagined and reimagined, then there's no reason why gay people shouldn't be a part of this imagination. I see daily instances of this imagination taking place all around me. I attended Bombay's first queer pride march some days ago where over a thousand people rallied, marched, sang and danced through the streets of Bombay. I cannot describe in words the spirit of that afternoon. This year, several such pride marches were held across cities in India. Recently, at at the world AIDS summit in Mexico, India's health minister came out strongly for section 377 being abolished. For someone in the government to be making a statement like this is unexpected. But the imagination isn't just confined to the law. There are gay marriages, commitment ceremonies and anniversary celebrations that keep on taking place in India, despite the laws being what they are, and several incidents, big and small, of society accommodating LBGT people, so at the pride march it wasn't just queer people who marched, there were so many families and friends, grandmothers, babies, everyone. It is moments like these that make me feel really positive, in the face of the negative news, and terrible incidents that also take place.

What did your time at MIT contribute to this particular project?

I could only have done this project at MIT. The idea for the thesis came about in 2003, during my first semester at CMS. As CMS students reading this might know (prospective CMS students, kindly note) we are strongly encouraged to think of our thesis from the moment we get into the program. :-) I knew right from the start that I wanted my thesis

to focus on contemporary India, and also work with many different media. There were a couple of factors that led me to fix on Gay Bombay as my final choice.

Firstly, I had just learnt about the existence of the Gay Bombay online-offline community before my arrival in Boston, and I felt kind of silly that I hadn't known about while I was in India. Secondly, I spent my first CMS semester in planning for a film festival and conference that would be held in the following semester called Between the Lines that dealt with South Asian LBGT identity. While working on this event, I discovered that MIT is one of the best places in the world to do queer-related research. The resources are top notch - professors, libraries, institutional support in terms of funding and facilities, LBGT student and faculty groups, and so on. Everyone from Katherine Wilmore then the Vice-President, to the Office of the Arts, to the Graduate Students Council, and of course, CMS, chipped in, and made a difference to the quality of the event. This was also a chance to read up about and see loads of queer South Asian films, which I enjoyed. Thirdly, the sudden death of one of my close friends, Riyad Wadia, the avant garde documentary filmmaker from India, towards the end of 2003. Finally, the encouragement of MIT faculty and staff members like William, Henry, Edward, Tuli, and Chris Pomiecko, who I first bounced the idea off.

Besides the excellent academic and institutional support, my time at MIT was also special in terms of my personal life. I met my (now ex) partner Junri at MIT, to who the book is dedicated, and in a sense the book and the relationship wrote themselves while we were living together. The relationship is a key part of the book; it dictates its optimistic tone and its hetero-normative politics. Incidentally, the break-up also happened at MIT, on the day that I received the first advance copy of the book in my hands, so I suppose, it was like completing a full circle.

Parmesh Shahani is based in Bombay, India, where he works on new media, venture capital and innovation for Mahindra & Mahindra and also serves as the Editorial Director of Verve magazine. He is also a research affiliate with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. His prior work experiences have included founding India's first youth website, business development for Sony's Indian television channel operations, writing and editing copy for Elle magazine and the Times of India group, helping make a low-budget feature film and teaching as a visiting faculty member at a Bombay college. Parmesh holds undergraduate degrees in commerce and education from the University of Bombay, and a graduate degree in Comparative Media Studies, from MIT. His first book - Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India (New Delhi, London, Los Angeles, Singapore: Sage Publications) was released in April 2008.

Mobilizing Generation 2.0: An Interview with Ben Rigby

This fall, I will be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement. The class is designed to provide a bridge between the research we are doing for the Center for Future Civic Media and Project New Media Literacies. It also hopes to explore in depth a range of current research about how the new media landscape is impacting how young people learn to think of themselves as citizens. Here's the course description:

New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement

What does it mean to be 'literate' and how has this changed as a consequence of the introduction of new communication technologies? What social skills and cultural competencies do young people need to acquire if they are going to be able to fully participate in the digital future? What are the ethical choices young people face as participants in online communities and as producers of media? What can Wikipedia and Facebook teach us about the future of democratic citizenship? How effective is Youtube at promoting cultural diversity? What relationship exists between participatory culture and participatory democracy? How is learning from a video game different from learning from a book? What do we know about the work habits and learning skills of the generation that has grown up playing video games? What impact are young voters having on the 2008 elections and why? What lessons can we take from the study of virtual communities which might help us enhance civic engagement at the local level? Who is being left behind in the digital era and what can we do about it? This class is designed to introduce students to a new wave of research which is bringing together scholars from many different disciplines to ask new questions, pose new models, and try new experiments to better imagine the future of American education and of democracy itself.

Much of the reading in the course will be drawn from a series of books recently produced by the MIT Press and the MacArthur Foundation. These books reflect a national push by the MacArthur Foundation to explore how young people are learning informally through the affordances of new media and what implications this has for the future of schools, libraries, public institutions, the workplace, and the American family. Researchers and guests from The MIT Center for Future Civic Media and Project New Media Literacies will play an active role in the course, sharing projects and curricular materials under development, grounding our more theoretical considerations with real world perspectives. Students will have an opportunity to explore these ideas through research papers but they will also be asked to get involved in the development of projects which are designed to have an impact on real world communities.

If you happen to be a student at MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, I hope you will consider taking the class this fall. The class meets Mondays, 11-2 pm, and Weds, 3:30-5 pm. I am hoping to write here from time to time about some of the ideas that emerge from the class. We will also be hosting several discussions through the MIT Communications Forum this term focusing on the roles which new media played in the 2008 Presidential Campaigns.

To whet your appetite on this topic, I wanted to share here an interview with Ben Rigby, the author of a recent book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0, which offers case studies and insights for activists and campaigns as they think about how to reach and court young voters. The book includes discussions of blogs, social networks, mobile technologies, wikis, and virtual worlds, among other web 2.0 practices, and features contributions from a range of key thinkers including danah boyd, Seth Godin, Mitch Kapor, and Beth Kanter. Rigby, who has developed web and mobile strategies for a range of nonprofit and Fortune 1000 companies, founded MobileVoter.org, an organization dedicated to using new media to politically empower young people.

You organize your book around new technologies and platforms. Yet at every civic media event I've been at lately, the core debate has been whether the change is

being brought about by new technologies or by new social and cultural practices

which help to foster a greater sense of civic engagement. Is this a false

debate? Where do you fall in terms of the relative importance of technologies

vs. social and cultural practices?

It's absolutely a false debate. Technology is a social and cultural practice. It means nothing outside of the context of the people who use it. This question led me to re-read the paper that inspired me to pursue a thesis program in Science, Technology, and Society back in college. It's called "Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians" by Lauriston Sharp.

To summarize Sharp's brief ethnography: The Yir Yoront is a Western Australian aboriginal group that, by the early 1900s, had very little exposure to any social group outside of their limited radius (and virtually no contact with non-aboriginal peoples). The stone axe played a central role in their lives as a productivity tool, but most important, as a lynch-pin of social relations. Being difficult to manufacture, these axes were in short supply. While any Yir Yaront was permitted to use one, their use was controlled by adult men. Women and children who wanted to use an axe were required to get one from a man (usually a direct relation) and needed to return it promptly and in good condition. A man referred to his axe as "my axe," but women and children never did. The axe also figured prominently in trading relations with nearby groups. The Yir Yaront traded sting-ray-barb tipped spears for raw stone with their neighbors to the south (where quarries were located). Again, adult males figured prominently in these relations as they were the primary producers of spears and lead negotiators.

When an Anglican mission arrived in 1915, the missionaries set up a plan for "raising native living standards." In return for undertaking certain tasks or behaviors, the missionaries distributed incentive goods to the Yir Yaront. The missionaries quickly discovered that their steel axes were valued more than any other trading item. Thus, they'd give out these axes as incentives for participation in their programs and as gifts during holidays. They'd give them to men, women, and children indiscriminately.

Sharp describes the events that follow the introduction of the steel axe as "the collapse and destruction of all Yir Yoront culture." Wives and children no longer needed to defer to their superordinate male. Men, in turn, became insecure as they questioned their roles and masculinity. The hierarchy of 'ownership' melted, which resulted in the rise in stealing and trespassing. Trading links weakened as stone was no longer highly valued. Associated trade ceremonies took on less significance and became poorly attended.

Frustratingly, Sharp's ethnography leaves off there. It appears that he left the field just as these monumental transitions were taking place. I haven't been able to find any followup reporting. It's the ultimate cliff hanger (if any readers have additional information on this group, please send!). He reports, somewhat melodramatically, that the Yir Yaront's southern trading partners passed through a similar set of cultural transformations which resulted in an "appallingly sodden and complete cultural disintegration, and a demoralization of the individual such as has seldom been recorded elsewhere."

Even without the melodrama or the end of the story, it's clear that a technical innovation (or introduction of such) sparked the transformation of a society. However, because the technology in question is a simple axe, it's easy to disambiguate the tool from the social and cultural practice that surrounds it. Here, the tool gets moderately more effective at its ostensible task (chopping), but it's how the Yir Yaront wove it into their life that's critical. If it were any garden variety tool, that'd be one thing. But the axe was central to the Yir Yaront hierarchy and belief system. It's impossible to understand the axe without understanding its cultural context - it doesn't make sense.

Similarly, email, social networking, and YouTube don't mean anything by themselves. They are what we make of them - and how we believe in them. Peer production of media is significant because of the way that we value media. Technology is inherently social.

In fact, this question ties into my motivations for writing Mobilizing Generation 2.0. In order to make social change, you have to understand -a- what the axe does (chopping) and -b- how people value it (cultural context). Of course, there's a chasm in complexity between the axe and today's technologies such that even understanding -a- is something of a challenge. However, it's -b- that's really important. And you can't get to -b- without first getting to -a-.

So the book is organized around our most significant axes: blogs, social networking, mobile phones, wikis, video and photo sharing, online mapping, and virtual worlds. It intends to give readers a crash course in understanding -a-. Then, once that territory is covered, the book goes into -b-: how young people are using their technologies and how organizations are, in turn, using these same technologies to connect with youth.

We have a curious relationship with the word "technology." In common speech, we use it to define a subset of our tools which are unfamiliar to some, but not all, members our social group. Thus, tools such as tshirts, shoes, and axes are just "things"... things familiar to everyone. But microchips, cell phones, and Web sites are "technologies." Of course, they all belong to a kind of tool continuum - and it's helpful to understand "technology" in this context.

There's a moment when a tool stops being referred to as a "technology" and becomes just a thing. A light bulb, for example, has moved from being a technology to just a thing. However, a cell phone is still a technology. It will eventually move into the category of "thing" as it becomes more familiar to more people and as newer and less familiar tools take its place. The dividing line on this continuum differs among age groups - it sits forward for younger people. This rough diagram illustrates this idea.

Of course the continuum varies from person to person. But for an older person running a nonprofit or political campaign (as most director level people tend to be), it's helpful to imagine that most of their "technologies" are just "things" in the minds of young people - nearly as natural and thoughtless as putting on shoes in the morning (which is not to say, however, that they're insignificant).

All along this continuum (and back to your question), each of these tools is embedded in our cultural context. I can't imagine it being any other way until the point at which our tools take on an agency that's quite outside of our collective control. To my thinking, this point happens when we start having earnest discussions about civic rights for intelligent computer systems - which means that these systems will have evolved into something entirely different from what they've been. I think that this moment will eventually arrive, but that it's many years away.

Over the past few years, organizations of all kinds have begun to explore the

value of virtual worlds. Yet, virtual worlds still arguably reach only a culture of early adapters. What is the current value of virtual worlds as a political platform? Are we experimenting with something that will have a long term impact but may offer only limited short term rewards? If so, how can you justify putting energy there in what may turn out to be a tight political contest?

I don't know much about the inception of Second Life, but I imagine it went something like this:

[Scene: friends sitting around a poker table drinking beer]

Philip Rosedale: Have you guys read Snowcrash?

Friend #1: Yea, it rocked.

Philip Rosedale: Wouldn't it be cool if we built that thing?

Friend #2: What thing?

Philip Rosedale: The thing! The actual virtual world that Stevenson describes. I know some tech guys.

Friend #1: Phil, you should do it. That would rock.

Philip Rosedale: Yea, maybe I will.

Then Rosedale takes the book, hires some coders, and transliterates the book into pixels. And so, we've got Second Life, which is Snowcrash come to life - irony and all. Second Life was such an early sensation that it has, thus far, defined what is meant by "virtual world." In fact, it's gone further by defining the common understanding of character-driven 3D space (which is distinct from a "virtual world").

Second Life's early success and recent woes have, in fact, put a damper on innovation in the 3D space. Second Life and its imitators (of which there are now dozens, including Google's recent project called Lively) continue to replicate Snowcrash. They recreate fantasy versions of something that approximates real-life. And social change efforts in these worlds are doomed. They are shoddy replications of experiences that are better in real life: walkathons, tschotchke giveaways, museum exhibits.

But these efforts are only the first forays into what will eventually be the next world changing technical movement. Snowcrash is not where we'll end up. The potential of immersive 3D space is much greater than imitating and fantasizing about our existing reality. Remember in 1995 when businesses would scan their paper brochures and use the resulting JPG as their Web site? That's where we are today with the use of 3D space.

So, for anyone concerned about the 2008 Election, there's very little of interest. I wouldn't spend any time at all in today's virtual spaces. From the candidate perspective, it's not worth the effort. My advice for social changemakers is to keep a close eye on the space and to wait for it.

You end the book with a suggestion that "web 2.0" constitutes a "tectonic shift" in the political landscape. Explain. What's the nature of that shift? How quickly is its impact being felt? What changes will traditional political organizations need to make in order to take advantage of this new model for reaching voters? And what do you think will be the biggest points of resistance in moving in this direction?

Yochai Benkler describes this shift wonderfully in the Wealth of Networks. We (I) owe him a debt of gratitude for the book. Benkler describes the shift as nothing short of a massive redistribution of the means of production. That's tectonic. It's a dozen steel axes put into the hands of everyone. And it's a power grab right now between:

a) Those who are trying to prevent the redistribution (ie: RIAA)

b) Those who don't recognize that massive shifts are underway (ie: most large nonprofits and traditional political organizations)

c) Those who love their newfound axes (ie: most young people and Web2.0 business owners)

So -a- will fight it; -b- will lose (most of the time); and -c- will fight to make -b- join them instead of joining -a- so that -a- doesn't win, which is not at all a certainty at this point in time.

All signs are that a record number of young people have been participating in the current presidential elections and that voter registration for those under 30 have increased dramatically in recent years. What factors do you see as contributing to this increase in youth participation? Will these trends continue to rise as we look towards the fall?

I don't have anything substantively new to say on this topic, other than to echo what you and other smart observers have been saying for the past couple of years. Young people's media has become participatory - and they're reacting positively to a candidate (Obama) who has shaped his campaign in a similar fashion. Moreover, he's using language and speaking about issues in ways that give him the air of authenticity. For the sake of increasing youth political involvement, it's a good thing he won the nomination.

You begin the book by discussing your experiences running a nonprofit, Mobile

Voter, which you suggest failed to meet its goals for registering and

mobilizing young voters. Why did Mobile Voter fail and what did you learn from

this failure?

There's such a finality implied by the word "failure." I don't believe in it. It's too black and white.

To take a recent example - this spring, we entered our newest initiative, Volunteer Now!, into the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. The Challenge involved two rounds. To make it into the first, we needed to generate votes on Net2's web site. I emailed my list asking for votes and we made it in. The second round involved two days at a conference center in San Jose. At the conference we met dozens of enthusiastic social change activists and several potential funders. We also demonstrated the product dozens of times. In sum, we met a ton of people, honed our pitch, and got great feedback for the project.

We didn't place in the top three. Did we fail? Of course not. There's so much value in this experience. I'm unsure what historical events brought us to consider our efforts in Manichaean terms (win/lose, evil/good, fail/succeed), but I think it's a big problem. We're afraid of nuance.

So, instead of slinking away from not winning the Net2 challenge, I sent out an email to my list again with the subject line "We didn't win!!" And funny enough, that email generated a response that was 10x higher than the initial email asking for votes. There was a lot of value in looking at the "loss" as an opportunity for engagement.

So, that's a long entree to your question about Mobile Voter's 2006 "TxtVoter" campaign. In 2006, we raised funds from the Pew Charitable Trusts to register 55,000 young voters. By Nov 5th, we'd registered about 35,000 - of which only about 2,000 came through our text messaging system. The rest came via our GoVote.org Web site which we built and operated in conjunction with Working Assets (now Credo, who put the lionshare of the effort into generating traffic to that site).

It would be disingenuous to say that we weren't disappointed by the numbers - especially since we started the season with a Dean-like yell and aspirations to register many more than 55K. However, there's a rich context to this "failure." In addition to TxtVoter's registration component, we helped to implement a get out the vote (GOTV) campaign that was studied (and party organized) by researchers from Michigan (Dale/Strauss) which has since become the seminal study on the effectiveness of text messaging for GOTV. We also developed a list of best-practices which is now being used to replicate the most successful instances of the TxtVoter campaign (there were some events in which response rates surged to 46% versus the 1% overall average). To boot, the experiences of the '06 campaign led directly to the writing of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, which intends to address some of the pain points that I saw across hundreds of nonprofits and political campaigns during the TxtVoter initiative.

In sum, the learning is: there is no failure and we need to better embrace nuance.