Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Christine Bacareza Balance, Jack Halberstam, and Sarah Banet-Weiser (Part Two)

Jack: Christine, I really enjoyed your piece - the compact way you account for the colonial context within which popular culture is absorbed, reviled and then transformed by those very people whom colonialism has reduced to the status of mimics. I also appreciate your effort to refuse the sharp distinction between fan and critic, poetry and prose, song and soundscape. In relation to your observations on "fandom" and "fanaticism," I would love to hear you say more about excess, about over the top performances that go beyond the reproduction of the same. I also have struggled with that Sedgwickian notion of "reparative" and I wonder how you are using it. I love her take on the paranoid form of reasoning that dominates academic style but I never really believed in the reparative as an alternative...

Sarah: Jack, Christine, I'm also interested in this notion of excess--both in fan activities as well as in constructions of other subjectivities, including gender, race, sexuality. I struggle with how to articulate this in my own work, because accounting for excess (or spaces of ambivalence) is tricky yet vital, as this is where performances of identity, as you say, can go beyond the reproduction of the same. Excess allows us to imagine new spaces of possibility and transformation. . .

Christine: In response to Jack's post and query and, in allegiance with her opening anecdote, I too have endured such distracting and annoying concert-going experiences (too many to name, in fact). The most recent example: this past June, I attended Janelle Monae and Bruno Mars' concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre--the only Los Angeles stop on their national "Hooligans in Wonderland" tour--both as a critic (currently writing a review of their performance) and a fan (of both artists). Armed with the critical analytics--histories of labor and musical performance as re-cited in each artist's performance (Monae and chitlin circuits, Mars and Hawai'i's tourist economies-- that were going to frame my review of the show, I was first slightly peeved by the audience's (mainly teenage girls and boys and their parents) lukewarm reception of Monae and then fully irritated about two songs into Mars' set. In a similar fashion to Jack's Radiohead experience, my seatmate decided to not just sing but, instead, scream the chorus to his hit single, "Billionaire," sans irony or self-reflexivity. Needless to say, I had to switch seats in order not to inflict fan-on-fan, audience member-on-audience member violence. Indeed, the "fantasy and impossibility" embedded in fandom and being an academic is what makes such a scene difficult. But I try (after physically distancing myself), in such situations, to curb the critical desire to position myself as an omniscient or holier-than-thou audience member, for, it is precisely this stance--one generated and performed by collectors and critics in other settings--which forecloses any possibility of dialogue or conversation.

The "reparative" here becomes a call to stand alongside other fans, rather than above them, no matter how difficult it might be. It signals a type of ethical relationship. For me, the genre of performance--with its qualities of immediacy, ephemerality, improvisation, and liveness--is particularly generative in cultivating what Alexandra Vazquez (by way of Barbara Johnson) identifies as moments of "surprise"--on stage, in the classroom, on the written page, and in everyday life. These days, in my own work, I am finding the analytic of surprise--something unexpected that can incite various affective responses (fear, astonishment, wonder, and even violence)--to be more generative than "excess," especially when (again) the subjects, objects, and performances I am most interested are being generated by a historical relationship (U.S. empire in the Philippines) otherwise deemed "invisible" in mainstream U.S. popular culture.

I also appreciate Sarah's comments regarding "the fan as self-brand." Needless to say, none other than this past weekend's Comicon gathering brings to the forefront the ways that, as Sarah notes, the "fan is positioned and validated as a kind of product within a circuit of commodity exchange." With the increasing presence of mainstream popular entertainment industries (such as films, television, video games) at this long-standing fan-centered event, it becomes quite obvious that Hollywood is present to capitalize on its fans--consumer-participants whose a) identities are themselves "products" of particular forms of consumption and b) fandom does the work of publicizing upcoming new releases (mainly, through social networking outlets such as Twitter and Facebook but also by wearing t-shirts featuring their favorite comic book characters or films). At the same time, by dressing up as characters from particular franchises (this year's favorites: Black Swan, Harry Potter, and the tried-and-true standby, Star Wars), teenage and adult Comicon attendees inhabit and bring to life these particular pop cultural products. Fueled by a "desire for visibility," I witnessed firsthand how these "dressed up" attendees actually extend and are part of the "long tail" of mainstream franchises in a manner similar to amusement parks, as parents photographed their children posed next to other attendees dressed like Tinker Bell or Wolverine.

But, again, rather than merely maintaining some type of critical arm's length from the slew of (mainly) teenagers dressed up as characters and huddled together on the convention center floors, I allowed myself to hearken back to my own adolescent yesteryears, to the theatre competitions and showcases that colored my high school weekends. Where and how can we draw the line between dressing up like Lady Macbeth as opposed to Xena the Warrior Princess, Huckelberry Finn instead of Luke Skywalker, Stanley Kowalski rather than an Avatar? I believe that any attempt to draw lines of difference between such examples of "dressing up" recapitulates the age-old divide between "high" and "low" cultures while it prohibits the potential meanings made by both these performers and their audiences.

Jack: Sarah, I think your notion of the fan as brand and as a distribution point for the circulation of popular culture actually dialogues with my worry that the fan becomes a "celebrity subject" in training - in other words, we consume to learn how to produce well and then produce well in order to facilitate more production. At the same time that I am compelled by these critiques of fandom and the sense of fandom as a economic relay point, I still do want to hold on to some kind of resistant notion of fandom, one where the branding changes the meaning of self, consumption, branding, capital in the process of participating in it.

Sarah: Jack--yes! Your idea/worry about "celebrity subject" in training is truly in conversation with my worry about fan as brand (and self-branding in general). But I also hear both you and Christine about holding on to a concept of the fan as a resistant notion, or a resistant subject, or just in terms of the surprise of meaning Christine gestures toward when talking about dressing up and performing as an adolescent (and I appreciate the notion of surprise over excess). For me, the trick is to hold on to both of these notions simultaneously (fandom as economic relay point, and fandom as potentially resistant), without resorting to a commercial v. non-commercial binary. Which is why I think, Jack, that your last statement, about those moments where branding changes the self, consumption, capital in the process of participating within branding, is vital for me in thinking about how meaning circulates in advanced capitalism. how do we utilize the logic of branding for progressive (and I'm not talking about socially responsible corporations here) or resistant ways? Again, I'm not talking about culture jamming or detournement (though both certainly can have their uses in terms of resistance), but making and remaking brands and fans within new parameters of meaning and signification--that is, how branding can surprise you.

Jack: Christine - well, exactly, one wants to stand or sit alongside the annoying fan from an ethical point of view but in actual, material reality, one wants to get as far away as possible!! So, that is exactly why I mistrust the reparative - it is a gesture of the ethical, a way of knowing the right thing to do but it clashes with the instinctive gesture of, in this case, recoil and disconnection. Moments of surprise are similarly wonderful pedagogical opportunities but hard to come by in an age of self-branding, self-marketing and commercial child manipulation! The only cultural productions that have really been continuously surprising to me in recent years have been animated films for children, which I discuss extensively in The Queer Art of Failure, which manage to address the child viewer in non condescending and often non-normative ways...and then of course, the surprise and wonder of the animated landscape gives way to the banality of the tie-in action figure served up with the kid's happy meal a few hours later. How do we extend the momentary surprise so that it has more affective intensity than the desire for the figure, the dress-up or the happy meal? Sarah - can you give us an example of when branding can surprise?

Sarah: Yes, well, that is the question, isn't it? I love your question of how we can extend the momentary surprise so that creative and potentially resistant cultural forms don't end up like happy meals. I don't have the answer, but one interesting example might be the recent branding of Wikileaks (the Wall St. Journal covered this in February of this year), where Julian Assange's organization began selling t-shirts, etc that said things like "Free Assange!" and "the truth is not treason." The profit generated by the t-shirts supposedly went to Assange's legal fund, or to the maintenance of the site, or somewhere (and of course, the "somewhere" is always the question--the company that made the Wikileaks t-shirts also made Spice Girls t-shirts). To brand something like Wikileaks and its subversive potential is simultaneously a bit of a surprise and entirely predictable. And I'm not sure if it has "more affective intensity than the desire for the figure;" there's got to be a Julian Assange action figure out there for sale somewhere. I'm thinking, though, that this kind of move within branding represents a sort of bending or distorting of commodity exchange, that could possibly lead to different sorts of affective openings. . .

Christine Bacareza Balance is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies (UC Irvine). Her research & teaching interests include: Filipino/Filipino American studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, and In Media Res (online). One-ninth of the Polynesian power pop band The Jack Lords Orchestra, she is currently writing a book on popular music and performance in Filipino America.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children's cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007). Her current book project, Authentic TM: Political Possibility in a Brand Culture (New York University Press, forthcoming) examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. A co-edited book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee, is under contract with New York University Press (forthcoming 2011).

Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam's last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam just finished a book titled The Queer Art of Failure due out 2011 from Duke University Press.

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Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Christine Bacareza Balance, Jack Halberstam, and Sarah Banet-Weiser

Christine Bacareza Balance

fan (n.): a person enthusiastic about a specified sport, pastime, or performer; devotee

fanatic (Latin, "of a temple"): unreasonably enthusiastic, overly zealous; a person whose extreme zeal, piety, etc. goes beyond what is reasonable.

I begin with these two brief definitions of "fan" and "fanatic"--from which the first term is typically derived--because they touch upon some of the topics I am interested in, both in my research and everyday life. As someone whose early scholarly training came by way of U.S. ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, my research today focuses on the labor (productive, consumptive, affective) of making music within Filipino America--a soundscape created by the historical relationship (imperial, postcolonial, neocolonial) between the U.S. and Philippines. It is an intimate yet oft-forgotten relationship and, thus, is charged with the racial/cultural invisibility of Filipinos within a U.S. racial imaginary. In other words, what is Filipino culture in the eyes of the U.S.?

Nothing but a merely mimetic nation, as evidenced by its most notable cover performers--Arnel Pineda, Charice Pempengco, and the hordes of cover bands playing in a global tourist circuit, the spectacular choreography of its prison inmates set to a Michael Jackson beat, and a deadly penchant for singing "My Way" on a karaoke machine.

Here, then, in a U.S. popular imaginary, Filipinos are fanatics--people who go beyond what is "reasonable"--when it comes to their relationship to their former colonizer's popular culture. It is a type of affective charge that simultaneously places them outside of a certain modernity (and therefore, post-modernity, as well) seemingly located in a logic of culture industries--TV, film, popular music--the same industries which render them "invisible" (or, more likely, collapse them within a limited idea of "Asian-ness" as evidenced in the common occurrence of Filipino stars "playing" characters of other Asian races--Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, but never Filipino) within a landscape of U.S. racialization.

Instead, as Apl de Ap of the Black Eyed Peas--one of the most "visible yet invisible" Filipino Americans in U.S. popular music today--notes, these and other Asian Americans remain a "quiet storm" of music producers, songwriters, and simply undercover agents (note one of pop's biggest stars today--Bruno Mars--is often noted for his Puerto Rican ancestry, Hawaiian upbringing but rarely, if ever, his Filipino heritage).

Along with this, however, I also sense a common belief within fan studies (and perhaps the term "aca-fan" specifically) that there can and does remain a divide between fans and performers--as if never the twain shall meet. Though my research has most definitely led me to examples of participatory culture--specifically, through the interactive communication technology (ICT) and everyday performance event of karaoke singing as well as the "viral aesthetics" evidenced in the recent emergence of Asian American performers on YouTube, from my interviews with and personal experiences interacting with musicians, events organizers/producers, club owners and DJs from Manila to the San Francisco Bay, I have witnessed the various forms of fan-dom these musical producers themselves inhabit.

Here, they are not only devoted the U.S. or European popular musics but, most especially, OPM (original Pilipino music)--from the 1950s up until today. In turn, my complicated relationship to this larger soundscape of OPM--as scholar, fan, and colleague--I believe, is not a rare incident. There a number of other popular music studies scholars in the U.S. and beyond who maintain a place in each of these (as well as other) categories of identification.

In the end, I am currently most interested in the styles of writing about musical cultures and sonic phenomena--in other words, the various ways that we, as critics, can attempt to write performatively--understanding our roles in the process of making meaning of culture--and, in the terms set by the late Eve Sedgwick, reparatively. Since many of the artists I choose to write about are generally people I have maintained an close relationship with--as a friend or fan or collaborator, the question of writing in a style legible to them is always there.

But, I believe that we should always be striving to be much more than just "legible" or "transparent" in our critical writing. Instead, we should, as Daphne Brooks once aptly stated, try to make the music sing in our writing. Or, as Josh Kun has shown us, we should imagine music creating places, bringing together worlds through both performance and listening. And, with their keen interest in the relationship between words and sound, Fred Moten and Alexandra Vazquez's work always remind me, it's not only that we try to capture the essence of music but, instead, that we travel inside of music's poetry and allow it to show us other ways of seeing, hearing, and being.

Jack Halberstam

It is hard to be a fan sometimes: a few scenarios come to mind - I am at a Radiohead show circa 2004, miles from the stage and while I am trying to be absorbed by the live performance, I am deeply distracted by a young woman sitting on her boyfriend's shoulders next to me and singing "Everything in its riiiight place" in the same tone that she may have been singing "give me what you want, what you really, really want" just a few years earlier while swinging her blond hair back and forth and whooping "oh yeah" in between little bursts of lyrics. I remember feeling really irritated, thinking to myself, well if she is a Radiohead fan, am I?

Or, a few years before that, probably the same year that Ms. Thing was screaming to the Spice Girls, I was going to drag king shows in NYC, heading out late at night to take in the queer night life scene of downtown New York. But instead of entering into dens of subcultural intimacy, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with gawkers, the beautiful people who were following a buzz and lining up now to take in the freak show before moving on to the next hot subcultural site.

And before that it was going to punk shows and pogo-ing alongside scary skinheads who may not have been attracted to the Clash, the Jam, the Slits, X-Ray Spex for the same reasons that I was.

Fandom is full of jeopardy and heartbreak, it is a jagged experience that confirms you and shatters you and often in the same location. It summons a sense of community but also calls forth snobbish and elitist modes of differentiation (why was I SO put out by the blond girl at the Radiohead concert? What made me SO sure that I and not she was the proper kind of Radiohead fan?). When we study fandom or bring our fannish commitments into our academic work, perhaps we are just trying to smooth out the rough edges of an experience that never quite delivers on what it promises - that precisely cannot deliver on that promise if only because fantasy and impossibility are the fuel upon which fandom thrives, burns and, ultimately, crashes.

I have succumbed to the siren calls of certain forms of fandom--punk, drag, gaga--and I will be called to plenty more in the future but I am now more wary and cautious of fandom than in my younger days. I am interested in thinking about forms of fandom that not only flirt with ecstatic pleasure but that also turn quickly to hostility and even violence when disappointed - think All About Eve, think about the killing of John Lennon or Selena. I would love to talk about fandom in an age of ubiquitous and mundane celebrity - if subjectivity, more and more, runs through the territory of everyday celebrity (everyone is a celebrity in their own mind), then what is fandom? A tutelage mode? A training in celebrity subjectivities? In academia and in the realm of popular culture, I think it is time to think about breaking with fidelity, devotion, discipleship (and other quasi-religious modes of practice) in favor of what I call "low theory" in my new book, what Foucault names as subjugated knowledge and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harny call "fugitive knowing."

Fandom does encompass many of these modes already, but lets be clear that fandom can both reproduce the norm or neutralize all that opposes it. Fandom entails risk, danger, complicity and explosive possibilities; it's hard to be a fan.

Sarah Banet-Weiser

I appreciate how Christine begins her post with two definitions of "fan" and "fanatic;" I am, I must confess, a person who often harbors unfair assumptions about the blurring of the two categories. This partly comes from the fact that I never really consider myself a "real" fan--certainly I'm a fan of popular culture in a broad sense, but I've never gone beyond the typical audience subject position to vote on contestants, to write fan fiction, to comment on a fan site (okay, once I voted on American Idol, but just for Adam Lambert).

So I've felt at times a certain (ir)rational distance when thinking about fans who position themselves in more active ways in relation to cultural texts, and am certainly guilty of occasionally merging the two definitions Christine offered, so that fans were often de facto fanatics in my mind.

Christine powerfully reminds us, though, that the merging between the fan and the fanatic is often complex and multi-layered, and certainly fans and fan activity do not circulate in culture in the same ways, across all boundaries. Fandom, as Christine points out, is often racialized, so that particular fans are seen as fanatics due to their racialization, their "irrational" or "cultural" bodies, such as the Filipino musicians Christine writes about.

Jack also reminds us that what fandom is isn't always clear, and it can be many things at once. Fandom can entail risk and challenge, but it can also--and often does--reproduce the norm.

What I want to do in this post is to draw on this multivalent notion of fandom, and invoke yet another iteration: the fan as self-brand. I would say that all fans and fan activities are situated within a commercial context, though again, this means different things for different fans. That is, while the cultural and commercial economy is surely a framing or shaping context, it is not always a deterministic one. The fact that fans, texts, and fandom take place and are often enabled by a broad milieu of consumption does not mean that fans and their activities do not have cultural, political, and social meaning.

However, the commercial context of much fandom and fan activities also animates other processes by which the "fan" is positioned and validated as a kind of product within a circuit of commodity exchange. The practice of self-branding is an increasingly normative practice in US culture, where "building a brand" seems to more and more be the logical go-to strategy for marketing our personal and professional identities. There often seems to be a relationship between self-branding and actively constructing oneself as a particular fan.

That is, I'm troubled by the ways in which there seems to be an increasing collapse between business brand strategy and personal identity construction in digital spaces--and it seems that in this collapse, it becomes harder (at least for me) to always discern what it means to be a "fan." Digital media, and the ways in which users are interactive within this space, offer flexibility for fans to not only produce their own media, but also facilitate strategies of self-branding.

Part of being a fan means contributing to the distribution and publicity of popular texts, especially if fan production is posted on-line. While this is not necessarily a negative thing, it does have a heightened significance in an economic context where the individual is privileged as a commodity, and where cultural and social life is increasingly organized and experienced through the terms and conditions of business models. This means that cultural values, such as morals and personal standards, can be harnessed and re-shaped within these same business conditions, so that building a brand becomes almost like a moral obligation to oneself.

In particular, I'm interested in the ways digital media and media production authorize the practice of self-branding for girls and young women, often in the name of self-empowerment, on social network sites, such as Youtube and Facebook. The practice of individuals becoming what Nikolas Rose calls "the enterprising self" has implications for women within the 21st century, where "putting oneself out there" and the quest for visibility is an ever more normative practice for young women.

So I suppose my contribution to this discussion is to ask the question: what happens when the fan becomes a kind of product? Or when the discourse of fandom and fan activities is not so much about individual tastes and desires, or belonging to a community, but is rather about fans laboring in the name of both the self-brand and a company brand? As Jack said, it is hard to be a fan.

Christine Bacareza Balance is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies (UC Irvine). Her research & teaching interests include: Filipino/Filipino American studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, and In Media Res (online). One-ninth of the Polynesian power pop band The Jack Lords Orchestra, she is currently writing a book on popular music and performance in Filipino America.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children's cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007). Her current book project, Authentic TM: Political Possibility in a Brand Culture (New York University Press, forthcoming) examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. A co-edited book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee, is under contract with New York University Press (forthcoming 2011).

Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam's last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam just finished a book titled The Queer Art of Failure due out 2011 from Duke University Press.

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Three)

This is the final installment of my interiew with Brian David Johnson. Sorry for the delay in posting. I had some difficulty with email access during Comic-Con.

You talk in the book about "ubiquitous television." Many readers will not know this concept, so can you explain what it means and how it represents a significant shift from our current relationship to content?

Ubiquitous TV is built off the idea of ubiquitous computing. This was a concept pioneered by Mark Weiser while he was at Xerox PARC. Weiser saw computing existing in three stages: Stage one was the old mainframe computer. These were the computer the size of an entire room. The second stage of computing was the personal computer. This is the Mac or PC that we all know and love.

Now we should point out that the shift from stage one to stage two was massive. This shift defines the world of computing as we know it today. There was a time when it was fantasy to think of a computer that could fit in your pocket. But of course we all know that happened. And Weiser made a leap to the next stage of computing.

For Weiser stage three was where computing disappeared and literally could be found everywhere. It would be invisible. It would be ubiquitous. This has been a long standing area of study in the academic and corporate research worlds. In my book I took this approach and showed how it was actually beginning to happen in the world of entertainment. I also expanded it to how consumers and people would experience TV in their lives.

The idea of ubiquitous TV means that people would live with TV throughout their day and across all the digital devices or "screens" in their lives. What I always found lovely about the idea of ubiquitous TV was that it shifted the focus of the definition and experience away from the devices and to the lives of consumers. No longer would you go to your TV just to get TV. You wouldn't go to your PC to access the Internet and phones wouldn't just be for phone calls. The idea of ubiquitous TV really is the foundation of my idea of Screen Future.

For consumers it's not about the TV or the PC or the smart phone or any other devices. When our social scientists talk to consumers they hear that for real people it's just about the screens and the entertainment and social communication that these screens give us. That is truly a ubiquitous experience. It's not about one device to rule them all but about whatever device we have handy at the time. In this world of ubiquitous TV it is less about the device and more about how that device does, what we want it to do and how it gives us the experience we want.

When I think about ubiquitous TV now for me it is a real life actualization of Weiser's theoretical ideas. The world of ubiquitous TV is happening and gives us a real world glimpse and application of what we can expect to see In the future.

One could argue that there is a core tension between the idea of media as "personalized" and the idea of media as "socialized," something we consume through networks (whether old school broadcast or new school digital/social). This is not a new tension, but it seems hard for advocates for new models of television to keep both aspects in their heads at the same time. How do these two pulls impact the design of the next generation of television-related technologies?

You couldn't be more right. It has been hard for people to keep both of these concepts in their heads at the same time. But for me I approach it differently. For me I think about what consumers and people are telling us. Because ultimately it's about what they want and people have no problem managing these two ideas at the same time. The reason why it's easy for them is because they want it both ways.

As we start to think about how to design for both the personalized state as well as the socialized state, I think we need to remember that for consumers both of these states are still TV. In the business of entertainment and even in the business of thinking and writing about entertainment, we like to create categories and systems for understanding what's happening in the modern media landscape. This certainly is important as we need to have these discussions but even as we discuss and debate we have to remember that for consumers they don't think this way. They are not thinking about the business or cultural implications of media. People are simply enjoying it as a part of their lives.

I realize this might sound a little over simplified but I've noticed over the past few years that many people I've been talking to forget this simple difference.

So as we start to think about designing for consumers we must remember that there is no line between personalized or socialized. It's about access and communication. I've written a few times that the goal of my kind of futurism is to ultimately become mundane.

People often quote Arthur C. Clarke's third law. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But I'd like to humbly add Johnson's Addendum to Clarke. It would say that yes - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - But come next Tuesday evening that magic will be mundane.

For us to design in this landscape we need to understand how people move through their days interacting with people and entertainment. If we remember that people want it both ways. They want to interact and socialize sometimes AND they want to just sit back and be passive sometimes PLUS they want to switch between these modalities freely then I think we are starting to approach a proper design sense.

BUT this is just a start! What I'm most interested in is not their either or approach that we are taking. We always seem to be talking about New TV and Old TV. That's fine. As I said above we have to remember that people want both and that's a good thing. But what I'm really interested in is the landscape I'm between these two experiences. The uncharted territory around these TV experiences. I'm worried we are still encumbered by our past prejudices and experiences. This is why I typically tell my students that they are the future of TV-- not me. I may be working out how people will be interacting with TV and computational platforms and screens and even you Henry will be writing about what's happening and COULD happen but they are the ones who will actually build these experiences. They are the ones who need to be unencumbered by the past. We always need to appreciate what consumers what and respect the TV entertainment experiences but there are so many places to innovate and invent.

Much early writing on digital media implied that the era of mass media would be displaced by an era of niche media, yet there remains an ongoing engagement with our shared experience of broadcast media which has allowed television to weather the storm. What factors have allowed television to withstand competition from the net and the web?

I love the old ideas of where TV was going to go. People always said that it would all be personal; that mainstream broadcast media would shrivel and die. No longer would large corporation dictate to the people what they should watch. It would be a wild and wooly collection of intensely personal niche channels that would change and adapt to the needs and desires of people.

Well yeah that's cool but it didn't happen exactly like that. It turns out people love mainstream broadcast TV. People all over the world love watching American Idol or Pop Idol or Indian Idol... And there's nothing wrong with this. Consumers love personalization and they also love watching Idol live. This is not hard for them to understand.

Look we have to be clear here. Our research shows that the majority of people all over the world still watch the majority of their TV on an actual TV in real time, in broadcast from traditional broadcast, cable or satellite. TV...traditional TV is still very important to people. But that doesn't mean it can't change. Obviously what has happened over the last few years with the delivery of entertainment via the internet to multiple connected computational screens clearly illustrates that people's imaginations can get captured with new entertainment experiences. But that's TV. It can be both things and it's an experience that is strong enough and robust enough to be up to the task.

Part of the frustration of print publishing about emerging media practices is that the book is always out of date before it reaches the reader. What recent developments do you wish you had been able to discuss in the book?

Ah yes! At the end of Screen Future I wrote that I figured that by the time people read the book there would be a whole host of issues and technologies that were outdated.

But in Screen Future I really wanted to spend more time writing and talking to people in the gaming industry. I have always been a gamer. Pong and I were born in the same year. I grew up with a joystick in my hands. My generation is a generation of gamers and the affect that this has had on how we think about entertainment is massive.

I got to do a little writing in this in one of my columns. I spoke with a round table of gamers and game developers at the PAX convention in Seattle and that was really informative. Ultimately I think we need to rethink how we define gaming and that this could have a massive affect not only on the gaming industry but perhaps the entire media landscape.

I've joked that I could write an entire book on social TV. I feel in the book I barely scratched the surface. I really think the social activity is the future of TV and entertainment. Now really this is a bit of a copout because social experience has always been in the bedrock of TV but I do think there is so much more we can do.

What happens when TV and entertainment becomes the platform not only for being social for our friends and family? What happens when TV becomes the platform by which we are social with our government and with our culture and with education?

I'm thinking I should really explore this with you Henry. It's an amazing area and one that I think we need to keep our eye on. The future is going to be really amazing here.

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Two)

What aspects of television can not change and have television remain the same medium?

That's a tough one because TV, like any good system or organism, has survived for so long because it adapts. This is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the history of TV. TV as a collection of technical innovations, business models, story structures, cultural indicators and motivators is in a constant state of change. I could give you the long list most of us take for granted: Black and white to color. Sponsored shows to the 30 sec spot. The big three broadcasters to cable and satellite. TiVo! The complex web of broadcasters and affiliates. The birth and refining and reimaging of the half hour sit com. The sit com or more pointedly the American sit com is really strange and deeply interesting...but I'm gushing

When I think about what would not change so that TV remains TV. I could defer to USC's own Jeffrey Cole from The Center for the Digital Future. He says TV is easy. TV is video. For most people they know TV when they see it and it's simply video.

Now some might think of this a being a little too broad but I like it because it puts the burden of the recognition of TV on the people who are consuming it. Which fits really. I also love it because it defines TV as an audio visual medium. Which keeps it broad and allows us to include not just broadcast TV or even Internet delivered TV but any video or games or even applications that is intermingled with video.

You argue that a fundamental change occurred when the computer changed television into data. How so? How is this shift experienced by the everyday television consumer?

I should start off by saying that this fundamental shift to TV from digital to data has not happened yet on a broad scale. It's certainly coming. Some folks I've talked to peg 2015 as a possible date from this but I'm thinking now for mass consumption it might be a bit longer. At the moment the average consumer isn't experiencing the world that I described...yet.

But behind the scenes it's certainly happening and happening right now. At Intel I've seen some really smart work in this area three years ago. I write about it in my book that we have been doing work in the fields of video analytics and computer vision. In a way you can think of it as computers warning TV. How do computers watch TV? What computers what TV what do they see and how do they see it?

In one of our labs in China we did some interesting work with computers watching soccer or football depending upon where you are from. The team created a system that would track the different players, identify them and even track the ball movement. The whole system would go crazy when one of the teams made a goal. It was great.

What was generated from this was a massive amount of data. Essentially TV, the football match, was turned from something that was a digital transmission to data. The tracking of the different objects in the frame and also the links that identified the players created a running data feed. This turned TV from digital to data and once you do that then we can do some really interesting things with. All this data allowed us to search the videos in ways we'd never been able to do before. We could also then pull that data apart and put it back together in some interesting ways. That shift from digital to data was key.

Now the real question is what do we do with that data? That's the question that I'm not sure we know what to do with yet. It's similar to the data mining and massive data set questions that are being discussed now. Practical examples might be the Net Flix prize (which I write about in the book). One way to look at this future of TV and entertainment is those who have the best algorithm to search this data wins. Fascinating!

But we aren't there yet. Although there is some really interesting work going on in universities and companies all over world we haven't got this technology to the point where we could take it to scale and roll the capability to the general public. But this isn't really I think what you are asking.

We aren't there yet. But we will be soon. It's not a failure of technology at the moment but a failure if imagination. What I mean by this is that I really believe we don't know what's possible when TV and entertainment become truly data based. What do we do with that data? How do we organize it? How do we search it? Who owns it? Who owns that data about us using that data?

These are the issues that are just coming up as the algorithms and technology get to the point that they become a viable business option. Once this goes to scale and consumers really begin to see it like you asked I think it's going to be really interesting.

Some are arguing that television is moving from an appointment-based medium to an engagement-based one. What roles will new technologies play in supporting and sustaining our engagement with television?

Oh this is an easy one. You are throwing me a softball here Henry. Technology, the very technology we have been discussing has brought about the transformation of entertainment from a broadcast model or an appointment based TV experience to a more personated and engaged TV experience. Technology did this. No question. In the early days of the DVR is way ReplayTV and Tivo. Heck even to a very limited extent the VCR.

(Side note: The original goal of the VCR was really trying the bring engagement TV into the lives of consumers. The original slogan for the Sony Betamax was: "You don't have to miss Kojack because you're watching Colombo." But as we all know the VCR is a tale of unintended consequences. Although the VCR was originally designed to allow you to personalize your TV experience it really didn't do this. Very few people were recording live TV. Where the VCR shined was allowing consumer to bring home movies and turn their living rooms into a movie theater. In fact what was actually time shifting wasn't TV but the cinema. And it literally changed the underlying financial model of movies and Hollywood forever.

But this wasn't TV. It took the digitization of the TV signal to turn appointment TV to engagement TV. Little upstart companies like Tivo and ReplayTV slowly but surely changed how we acted and interacted with TV.

Of course it wasn't just being able to record TV that brought this change. It was also being able to manage the TV shows you liked (aka the season pass in TiVo) and also find new shows and even get recommendations. Although admittedly the initial accuracy of these recommendations was so questionable that it led to a sitcom spoof.

But even this was a perfect indicator that the world of TV had changed. Never before would the big broadcasters assume you were homosexual and change their broadcasting to meet you new preconceived likes and dislikes. That sitcom was a perfect mainstream digital marker that the world of TV had changed forever.

Enter the Internet. Hokey smokes. Think about all the various ways the Internet and it's accompanying apps and services have literally changed the face of the world. The delay in applying this to the world of TV and entertainment hasn't been technological. As we talked about earlier, the pressure from the technological changes have forced changes in other areas of business, unions, contract and distribution.

Now as I finish up here let me say that appointment TV is not going anywhere. Regardless of how technology transforms TV to an intensely personal experience, appointment TV will not go away. We will always have World Cup and the Olympics and American Idol.

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part One)

Shortly after I arrived at USC, Brian David Johnson from Intel came to the office to interview me for a book he was developing on the future of screens and entertainment. I was giddy from having taught the first session of my Transmedia Entertainment class, and we had a great exchange about the relations between consumers and technology and how it might impact our future relations to television and other entertainment media.

The interview was included in Johnson's book, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices We Love, which was released last year. Johnson's book combines interviews with key thinkers about media's future from both academia and industry with his own reflections on recent technological developments being developed at labs and what their long term implications may be.

After years of teaching at MIT, I am often skeptical of work on media which starts from a technologist's perspective since they rarely factor in the social and cultural dimensions of media. Johnson is a notable exception -- a deep thinker who groks the interface between technology and culture, who may work for industry but also understands the consumer perspective on why we love television and what we want to get out of watching our favorite series. So, I recommend his book to anyone who wants to expand their thinking and learn about the visions of screen futures which are driving technological development at Intel and a range of other companies.

Johnson was nice enough to sign on to let me reverse the microphone, so to speak, and do an interview for this blog. Over the next few installments, Johnson will share some of his current thinking. Here, he talks about television in relation to such trends as ubiquitous computing and social media, and shares some of the factors which drove him to produce this book.

Here's Johnson's official bio which should give you a clearer sense of where he is coming from:

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.

You begin the book with Isaac Asimov's warning that predicting the future is a "hopeless, thankless task." Given this, what do you hope to accomplish with this book?

I love that quote! I have tremendous respect for Asimov not only as a science fiction writer and a thinker but also as a person who brought science and conversations about science into the mainstream. When I was writing Screen Future I actually had two books always within reach. The first was Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law - his collection of lectures and the second was a collection of Asimov essays The Planet that Wasn't. Asimov was such a good writer, easy to understand and quite funny - that people had no problem reading about the intricacies of planetary motion or the theoretical planet of Vulcan. Both Feynman and Asimov were passionate communicators and conversationalists. Feynman was known as the great explainer, while Asimov was the great popularize of science.

Getting people to have conversations about science is certainly important. But I think getting people to have conversations about the future is even more critical. The future is not a fixed point in time that we are all hurdling towards. The future is not set. The future is made every day by the actions of people. The of the most significant ways that we can all affect the future is to have conversations about it. We need to ask ourselves: What kind of future do we want to live in? What kind of future do we NOT want to live in? Having these conversations, when they are based on sound science can have a real affect on where we are going. Science fiction can do this - I believe science fiction gives us the language so that we can have this conversation about the future. But nonfiction can do the same thing. Both Feynman and Asimov knew this. The ultimate goal of Screen Future and the future casting work I do is to have conversations about the future.

Ultimately what I want to accomplish with the book is twofold:

First we are in an incredibly interesting time when it comes to technology and storytelling. For quite a while now we're been talking about telling stories, meaningful stories across multiple mediums, platforms and technologies. I don't have to tell you this Henry - you've done some of the best writing in this area. But I think something changed in 2010 and I really recognized it when I was walking around the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2011. Wondering the floor of that massive show, looking at all these different connected devices and screens it became really obvious to me that we had passed a kind of technological tipping point. What I mean by that is that for years most of the reasons why we've not really been able to take this screen future mainstream or distributed widely was because of technological limitations - the processors were to slow, there wasn't descent broadband connections, heck there really wasn't a robust Internet - things like that. But ultimately that's all changed.

We've really reached that tipping point where we have the processing power, battery life, storage, connectivity and human interfaces (small form factors, touch screens, etc) to be able to delivery people the entertainment and communication experience they want. And businesses have the ability to bring out not just one device - it's not just Apple or Sony or Samsung - it's a entire robust and sometimes zany collection of device manufactures that are bringing all kind of wonderful devices and screens and form factors to market. It's not a technological problem anymore getting across these experiences.

I think where we are now is smack in the middle of a new set of challenges which are very different in nature but just as important. Right now I think we are seeing the gathering of a business tipping point and an experience tipping point. Now forgive me for overusing the tipping point metaphor here but I think it applies. Right now we're watching some really interesting developments around the business of entertainment and computing. People a really beginning to explore what it means for their businesses to deliver these experiences. It has repercussions all over the world, in union negotiations, government regulations, mergers, long term strategic plans...anything that is touched by entertainment and computing industries. And what' most exciting is that we a right in the middle of it - it's happening right now.

I wanted to explore this in Screen Future. There's a lot of culture, history, technology and economics in the book to give us some background on this - but when the book gets really good is when we start having discussions about where things might go, how businesses might change and what are the underlying factors to this change. Since the book has been out and I've been on the book tour I've had some really interesting and well informed discussions and sometimes arguments about the business of storytelling and the business of delivery those stories to people using technology.

The second goal for writing Screen Future is a little more broad. As you know I travel around the world talking to people about the future and I'm always struck with how passionate, interested and engaged people are when they talk about their visions for the future. I wanted the book to be a place to gather together a wide range of research and opinions and offer up a vision for where we might be going. My process of future casting really isn't about prediction at all. Asimov was right THAT is a thankless task. Future casting is a little more pragmatic - I use things like social and computer science, global trends and conversations with experts and visionaries to construct a grounded vision for where we are headed. Then we use this vision to talk about what's good and bad about that vision - like I said before. But ultimately we're using this future casting to develop visions that we can build. In the book I wanted to capture the future casting process with all of its disparate inputs and show what a vision for 2015 might look like. Then use it as a way to have conversations with people about the future that they wanted and the future they were worried about

.

You describe yourself as a "Consumer Experience Architect." What does this entail? What kinds of expertise and insight shape your models of the consumer experience? What factors are shifting the consumer experience of television? Are the changes being driven by shifts in technology, in business practice, or in social and cultural expectations?

I'm going to give the answer that I give to my engineering colleagues. But I have to warn you that they hate this answer. So I kind of like giving it to them. The answer to your question is....yes. The answer is yes. All of the above. The changes in consumers experience with TV are due to all of the factors you mentioned. Let's look at each one and see if we don't uncover some more.

Let's start with "shifts in technology". Because I work in an engineering company this is the easiest to tackle. I've watched the evolution of TV technology first hand for more than twenty years now. In the early 1990s I worked on interactive TV deployments in Europe and Scandinavia. Now to give you an idea of the types of things I worked on I should tell you about one of our most successful projects. It was a huge success and we thought it really showed the way forward for "interactive TV". But thinking about it today in 2011 the sad truth is that it really illustrates the technical limitations of TV before recent improvements.

The project was done for British Airways. They were looking to sell vacation packages to Spain at the time. A big problem for them was lead generation, actually finding the right people who would be interested in the vacation package. Now the vacations they were selling weren't super expensive but they also weren't budget vacations either. They were right in the middle. So what BA wanted to do was use an interactive TV application to find the right people to market to.

To do this they produced a really slick commercial. I think it was about 5 minutes long. At the end of the advertisement the viewer was prompted to press a button on their remote control to request a glossy brochure for more information.

We launched the test in Cardiff Whales and it was a huge success as a pilot. We thought we were geniuses. The back end was pretty complicated. To actually make the thing work you had to send the request via the back channel on the set top box. It then had to interface with the head end, pull the subscribers address and information then send that information to the fulfillment center so that they could mail out the glossy brochure of beautiful beaches and smiling people. For BA it was great because they were gathering prequalified leads for their vacation packages, only sending the costly brochure to people who were interested. For many this type of lead generation is the holy grail of advertising. You actually get your potential customers to ask you for advertising materials.

Like I said it was a success and we thought we were geniuses ushering in the future of interactivity on TV. How pathetic is that? Press a button and get a brochure...that was the staggering brilliance of interactive design. A button that sends you a piece of paper mail!

Now I'm not trying to trivialize how difficult it was to pull off this project. It was actually kind of hard but I think it really illustrates the technical and infrastructure limitations of TV systems in the past.

Flash forward 20 years and look how far we have come technically. We all know the Internet really changed everything from a media and storytelling standpoint. But behind the scenes and inside the TV a lot of little and large changes have really turned the TV itself into a computational device. Two decades ago the TV technically look pretty close to the old RCA sets that used to bring I Love Lucy into American living rooms. Today TVs look more like computers and smart phones.

I guess that's really the big shift and one of the main points of my book. Today technically speaking TVs and PCs and smart phones and any connected device is just that; a screen that can connect to the Internet and give people the entertainment and communications they want. It's just a screen not a specific device. When you look at it this way the conversation is less about the TV or PC or whatever and more about the form factor, the size of the screen and they way it fits into your life; the way all the different screens you own fit into your life

That's a huge shift! I'm a TV guy and recasting the TV and entertainment experience like this is worlds away from where we were 20 years ago. Much of this shift has been started and brought about by the technological advances to both TVs and PCs; which really I just think about as computational devices across the board.

This isn't a completely linear story by any means but for the moment let's pretend it is. So, after all they technological advances, the introduction and popularization of the Internet, the reduction in the cost of computational power to consumers and the expansion of meaningful broadband networks then it really got interesting. Well let me restate that...what got interesting is what people did with all of these changes. (Here's a tiny aside: I wrote all of my notes for our conversation on my smart phone as I flew from London or LA or Mumbai - even how we compose and were has evolved!)

Few people have chronicled and explored these cultural shifts more fully than you Henry - so I'm not going to bore you with my poor summary of your work of which I am a huge fan. But let's just say people got involved in their entrainment. They got involved in making it, finding it, talking about it and did it on their schedule and to better fit their preferences not the preferences of the companies and corporation that were producing, distributing and advertising with this content

Now the entertainment industry isn't stupid. We often forget that these large companies are made up of many passionate intelligent people who mainly want to make the best stories possible on whatever medium they choose.

So around 2007 the media and technology industry really began to change and intermingle. A lot of writers cite the 2007 consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas as the turning point where all industries realized the fact that the future of TV and the future of entertainment was digital or a mix of traditional delivery mingled with the Internet. This was massive realization for these large global companies.

This really brought about and is continuing to bring about the business practice changes you asked about. And it's really these changes that we are witnessing and will continue to watch for the next few years. This is something I really came upon while working on my book. From a technological stand point we are there. When it comes to having technical capabilities to deliver the entertainment experience the majority of people want we have the engineering done. We might even be a little ahead. This of course will change but for today most of the technical hurdles have been solved.

We are now witnessing the business changes as they adapt to these technological advancements as they mix with expanded consumer expectations and habits. I find this fascinating! All you need to do is pick up The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Variety and even Entertainment Weekly and underneath many of the articles you will see the influences of these changes.

And the changes will come. They have to come. People want them. Now I'm not saying TV is going away or even that big budget entertainment is going away. That's not going to happen either. The main reason for that is that people love it. People don't want it to go away. They will still pay for it. But their habits and expectation for where they get it, how they get it and how they can participate with it are changing. The entertainment industry will adapt to this just as it has done the past. As I see it this is an exciting time full with a lot of juicy stories and incredible opportunity.

Now Available: Transmedia Hollywood 2 Videos

Due to technical difficulties, we've been delayed in sharing with you the videos from our April Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, jointly sponsored by the cinema schools at USC and UCLA, and hosted this year at UCLA. We hope to be back next April at USC with a whole new line up of speakers and topics, which we are just now starting to plan. In the meantime, check out some of these sessions, which should give the ever expanding Transmedia community plenty to chew on this summer. As for myself, I'm flying down to Rio, even as we speak.

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Denise Mann Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC. (Some of my comments here got me into trouble at the time and I hope to post something here soon which explores the issue I raise here about the role of radical intertextuality within the same medium.)

Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Henry Jenkins Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play": Designing Virtual Worlds--From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond

Hollywood has come a long way since Walt Disney, circa 1955, invited families to come out and play in the first cross-platform, totally merchandised sandbox -- Disneyland. Cut to today and most entertainment corporations are still focused on creating intellectual properties to exploit across all divisions of the Company. However, as the studios and networks move away from the concrete spaces of movie and TV screens and start to embrace the seemingly limitless "virtual spaces" of the Web as well as the real-world spaces of theme parks, museums, and comic book conventions, the demands on creative personnel and their studio counterparts have expanded exponentially.

Rather than rely on old-fashioned merchandising and licensing departments to oversee vendors, which too often results in uninspired computer games, novelizations, and label T-shirts, several studios have brought these activities in-house, creating divisions like Disney Imagineering and Disney Interactive to oversee the design and implementation of these vast, virtual worlds. In other instances, studios are turning to a new generation of independent producers -- aka "transmedia producers" -- charged with creating vast, interlocking brand extensions that make use of a never-ending cycle of technological future shock and Web 2.0 capabilities.

The results of these partnerships have been a number of extraordinarily inventive, interactive, and immersive experiences that create a "you are there" effect. These include the King Kong 360 3D theme park ride, which incorporates the sight, smell, and thunderous footsteps of the iconic gorilla as he appears to toss the audience's tram car into a pit. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have joined forces to create the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a new $200 million-plus attraction at the Islands of Adventure in Florida. Today's panel focuses on the unique challenges associated with turning traditional media franchises into 3D interactive worlds, inviting you to come out 2 play in the studios' virtual sandboxes.

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists:

• Scott Bukatman, Associate Professor, Stanford University (Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century)
• Rick Carter, Production Designer (Avatar, Sucker Punch, War of the Worlds)
• Dylan Cole, Art Designer (Avatar, Alice in Wonderland)
• Thierry Coup, SVP, Universal Creative, Wizarding World of Harry Potter, King Kong 3D
• Craig Hanna, Chief Creative Officer, Thinkwell Design (Wizarding World of Harry Potter-opening; Ski Dubai)
• Angela Ndalianis, Associate Professor /Head, Cinema Studies, University of Melbourne (Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment)
• Bruce Vaughn, Chief Creative Executive, Disney Imagineering (elecTronica, Toy Story Mania)

TH2 Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Panel 2: "We're Looking For Characters": Designing Personalities Who Play Across Platforms

How is our notion of what constitutes a good character changing as more and more decisions get made on the basis of a transmedia logic? Does it matter that James Bond originated in a book, Spider-Man in comics, Luke Skywalker on screen, and Homer Simpson on television, if each of these figures is going to eventually appear across a range of media platforms? Do designers and writers conceive of characters differently when they know that they need to be recognizable in a variety of media? Why does transmedia often require a shift in focus as the protagonist aboard the "mothership" often moves off stage as extensions foreground the perspective and actions of once secondary figures? How might we understand the process by which people on reality television series get packaged as characters who can drive audience identification and interest or by which performers get reframed as characters as they enter into the popular imagination? Why have so few characters from games attracted a broader following while characters from comics seem to be gaining growing popularity even among those who have never read their graphic adventures?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists:

• Francesca Coppa, Director, Film Studies/Associate Professor, Muhlenberg College; Member of the Board of Directors, Organization for Transformative Works
• Geoffrey Long, Program Manager, Entertainment Platforms, Microsoft
• Alisa Perren, Associate Professor, Georgia State University (co-ed., Media Industries)
• Kelly Souders, Writer/Executive Producer (Smallville)

TH2 Panel 2: "We're Looking for Characters" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Game On!: Intelligent Designs or Fan Aggregators?

Once relegated to the margins of society, today's media fans are often considered the "advance guard" that studio and network marketers eagerly pursue at Comi-Con and elsewhere to help launch virtual word-of-mouth campaigns around a favorite film, TV series, computer game, or comic book. Since tech-savvy fans are often the first to access Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Second Life in search of a like-minded community, it was only a matter of time before corporate marketers followed suit. After all, these social networking sites provide media companies with powerful tools to manage fans and commit them to crowd-sourcing activities on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Two corporate leaders--Warner Bros. and Disney -- have entered the fray, pursuing disparate routes to monetize the game industry, each targeting a different type of consumer. While WB is investing in grittier, visually-arresting, adult-oriented, console games like Batman Arkham Asylum, Disney is banking on interactive entertainment like Club Penguin's online playground built for kids and family members. Hard-core gamers worry that the kid-and family-friendly Disney approach will neuter the video game industry; however, the unasked question is whether these interactive playgrounds linked to corporate IP are training next-generation consumers to bridge the gap between entertainment and promotions.

A similar revolution is taking place in the post-network television industry as creators form alliances with network marketers in an effort to reach out to engaged fans. Many of the cutting-edge creative team at Smallville forged this path in the wilderness, creating innovative on-line campaigns that they later took to Heroes. Fans avidly pursue TV creators who incorporate an arsenal of visual design elements derived from films, comic books, games, web-series, and theme park rides in the series proper and in the online worlds. Experimenting with ways to reinvent an aging medium and buoyed by a WGA strike that assigned derivative content to showrunners, the question remains whether these creators won the battle but lost the war as more and more network dot.coms have asserted control over the online interactive entertainment space. Do web-series like Dr. Horrible and The Guild represent the next frontier for enterprising creators or can creative personnel learn to play within the confines of the corporate playground?

We will ask creators from both industries -- gaming and television--to explain their philosophy about the intended and unintended outcomes of their interactive properties and immersive entertainment experiences. Marketers clearly love it when fans become willing billboards for the brand by wearing logo T-shirts, deciphering glyphs, or joining mysterious organizations such as Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Fairies, Elves, and Trolls, and then sharing clues, codes, and supporting content across a virtual community. These and other intriguing questions will be posed to the creative individuals responsible for designing many of these imaginative and engaging transmedia worlds.

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists:

• Steven DeKnight (Spartacus, Smallville, Buffy, Angel)
• Jeph Loeb, EVP/Head of TV, Marvel Entertainment (Heroes, Smallville)
• Craig Relyea, SVP, Global Marketing, Disney Interactive (Epic Mickey, Toy Story3-The Game)
• Avi Santo, Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University (co-creator of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television)
• Matt Wolf, Double 2.0, ARG/Game Designer (Bourne Conspiracy, Hellboy II ARG, The Fallen ARG)

TH2 Panel 3: "Game On!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

"It's About Time!" Structuring Transmedia Narratives

The rules for how to structure a Hollywood movie were established more than a century ago and even then, were inspired by ideas from earlier media -- the four-act structure of theater, the hero's quest in mythology. Yet, audiences and creators alike are still trying to make sense of how to fit together the chunks of a transmedia narrative. Industry insiders use terms such as mythology or saga to describe stories which may expand across many different epochs, involve many generations of characters, expand across many different corners of the fictional world, and explore a range of different goals and missions.

We might think of such stories as hyper-serials, in so far as serials involved the chunking and dispersal of narrative information into compelling units. The old style serials on film and television expanded in time; these new style serials also expand across media platforms. So, how do the creators of these stories handle challenges of exposition and plot development, managing the audience's attention so that they have the pieces they need to put together the puzzle? What principles do they use to indicate which chunks of a franchise are connected to each other and which represent different moments in the imaginary history they are recounting? Do certain genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- embrace this expansive understanding of story time, while others seem to require something closer to the Aristotelian unities of time and space?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists:

• Caitlin Burns, Transmedia Producer, Starlight Runner Entertainment
• Abigail De Kosnik, Assistant Professor, UC, Berkeley (Co-Ed., The Survival of the Soap Opera: Strategies for a New Media Era; Illegitimate Media: Minority Discourse and the Censorship of Digital Remix)
• Jane Espenson, Writer/Executive Producer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica)
• John Platt, Co-Executive (Big Brother, The Surreal Life)
• Tracey Robertson, CEO and Co-founder, Hoodlum
• Lance Weiler, Founder, Wordbook Project

TH2 Panel 4: "It's About Time!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Three, Part Two (Kristina Busse, Flourish Klink, and Nancy Baym)

Kristina: I think it's interesting to look at three of us and how our different background quite strongly affects not just the way we do research but also the things we worry about. Coming from a straight up literature department (in the middle of High Theory no less) and teaching in a philosophy department, I worry a lot about what represents, both in research and in teaching. Meanwhile, my fan life feeds directly into my academic research, so that I feel a strong responsibility toward my fan friends to neither exploit nor to misrepresent them.

Unlike Nancy, I was trained to analyze texts, and it actually took me a long time to negotiate my solely text-based background with, for example, ethical concerns for my research subjects/fan friends. In other words, it was my fannish background that made me create a research ethics that to most social scientists is probably totally obvious. At the same time, though, moving back and forth between studying texts and studying people, looking at blog posts as textual artifacts and looking at them as revealing material about a person, has forced me to address these issues in ways I feel many literary scholars don't (they often subscribe to the notion that everything that's accessible online is citable and in an almost New Critical way follow an author-less text model) and many social scientists don't (insofar as they erase the identity of individual fans when they don't name names).

As for Flourish, I can't really speak to her experiences except that for me fandom is something that isn't connected to production and industry. As a fan I don't want to engage directly with actors/writers/directors, and as an academic, I don't care about that side either. I know it's an important area, and I'm very happy that we have good and smart people explaining and representing fandom, but to me fandom is mostly about what we as fans do. I'm passionately and hopelessly in transformational fandom, and I am interested in tracking and analyzing what fans do on their own rather than how fans interact with the industry. [And I am well aware of the gendered aspects of that attitude and its drawbacks!]

The other thing that I notice a I'm looking at the three of us is generational. I don't know Nancyís age but I know she published already when I was just entering English grad school, so I think of the three of us possibly representing not only different disciplinary backgrounds but different fan studies generations. And maybe that means that Flourish's industry collaboration indeed is the future?

Flourish: At least within transformational fandom, I do think that you're right about the generational issue, Kristina. Right around the time that I was getting involved with fandom, my friends began getting cease and desist letters about their Harry Potter fanfiction - this would be around 1999 or 2000. Partially, I think, because Harry Potter was a more or less "feral fandom," people resisted rather than going underground - and it worked. So, on a personal level, I've never experienced fandom as something separate from industry; it was always very clear that industry knew about us, cared about what we did, and often misunderstood us. Even the most transgressively transformative works, for me, are inextricably tied up with issues of industry and production - recall the ëTwins Against Twincest sign, held up by the actors who play Fred and George Weasley! I think that that experience is probably more common among young fans, especially young fans who didn't grow up going to media fan conventions.

Nancy: Uh oh, I think I've just become a grandmother! Give me a few more years! I published my first piece about fandom in 1993. Like most of that work, until it took book form in Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage, 2000) it was being positioned primarily as work about online interaction, not as work about fandom (even in the book, it is at least half and half). Again this colors why the term "acafan" has never seemed relevant to me. I wasn't positioning myself as a fandom scholar, I was a qualitative internet researcher who studied what fans do.

I like Flourish's points about industry and I appreciate her bringing them in as a third party to the personae we balance as people who study and participate in fandom. I love that people like Flourish are working with industry. In the last several years I have begun to speak at industry events and talk more with people in industry, particularly the music business, and the more I see, the more convinced I am that we really need fans represented in those rooms where Flourish sits with her teal hair (and I sit with my asymetrical hair with streaks of color that don't belong there). As fans we are constantly being viewed as ATM machines - "let's connect so we can monetize you!" - and I believe that the sustainability and long term future of the entertainment industries relies on a new kind of engagement with fans that must be informed both by those within fandom and by academic research.

I keep going back again though to the notion that these concerns are not unique to fandom in any way. It's always incumbent on researchers to recognize the different audiences who have a stake in our work and to figure out the ethics of treating them all appropriately. These are rarely problems with obvious answers that fit everyone. They are ongoing processes we all work through on moment by moment and project by project bases.

I don't think we all have a responsibility to speak to industry, and I totally get where Kristina is coming from in saying she wants to keep fandom for the fans. I do think, though that we have some responsibility within fandom to listen to the voices of the industry. Actors, musicians and writers are also real people with real feelings. I interviewed a woman in a band who had stumbled across fan fiction about her having an explicit erotic encounter with another female musician whom she knew in real life. She read it and the fan responses (which were along the lines of "wow, what a cool pairing") and felt both violated and kind of mortified about ever having to see her friend again without thinking about that. I believe in transformative works, but to me, this is a problem. As I've interviewed musicians about their interactions with fans, it's become clearer to me that some of the things fans do to gain status within fandom hurt the musicians. I'm not saying they shouldnít do them, and I do advise musicians to toughen up and let things go, but I do think it's worth thinking about how we might raise fans' awareness of how they affect the people they are discussing as well as the industry's awareness of how they affect fan discussions and academics discussions about both.

Kristina: Oh, Nancy, I apologize, but then academic generations!=actual age :) I think I may indeed be older than you, but I didn't even start studying fans and fandom until almost a decade after you, so that's where my generational idea came from. In fact, what made the analogy so enticing is that we do indeed represent such different views in terms of where fans, academics, and industry relate to one another. And I must sidestep the academic aspect for just a second to focus on the fan-specific engagements with industry that both of you brought up. Like Nancy I see a problem in having a celebrity reading about fantasized sexual encounters. Unlike Nancy, however, I do not think that writing and even sharing the fan fiction is the problem. Instead, I think that fans behaving inappropriately is the issue and, just maybe, celebrities connecting to fans in likewise too intimate ways.

In other words, when you present a version of yourself that may make fans believe that you're open and accessible to reading about your hot steamy romance and then google yourself, it might be in part your responsibility. In turn, I'm a big fan of warning pages and robot/spider blocked pages so that you need to be looking and knowing how and where to look in order to find the material. So, in the end, I blame a celebrity culture and a fan/industry intersection that makes it seem OK to erode boundaries that I am perfectly happy and comfortable keeping up. I don't think it's appropriate to shove sex toys, references to underage incest, or manipulated sexualized images into actors' hands--just like I wouldn't give those things to strangers or random acquaintances unless in an environment where this is collectively acceptable.

In turn, I feel like I don't owe the industry all that much and so for myself I kind of disagree with Nancy that as a fan I need to (or that all fans need to) listen to the voices of the industry. My particular corner of fandom, for example, is mostly not that interested in industry and production or even the actors and celebrities in themselves, even if we're not naive about the intersections. I'm pretty indifferent to industry that has yet to prove itself to me in any way, shape, or form, so I feel like we're left as fans to create the characters, characterizations, and plots that move beyond the interests of white, straight, cis, male able-bodied 18-34 year olds. Given that this industry still doesn't speak to and for me and mine, I frankly have no interest in being "their" version of interpellated fan and play by their rules.

And that may indeed be my age showing: maybe, Flourish, you have better experiences, and maybe, Nancy, your situation is different when you engage with musicians one on one, but my creative heroes, the people I want to meet and talk to, want to engage with and write fan letter to are my fellow fans. And I'm perfectly happy not sharing our conversations with the musicians who form the blueprint for potential fictionalized adventures, or the actors whose characters we extrapolate and interpret, or even the writers who provide the characters and worlds we continue to play with. And I know that there are fans who love that interaction, but for myself, that's not where my fannishness is.

Shifting back into acafan mode, I think that there's a lot of different fan communities and fannish ways of interacting with industry (including not interacting at all) that we need to study. But I also think that the way we approach academic fan identities is deeply affected in the way we think about our fan identities by themselves, isn't it?

Flourish: Nancy, your story about the band member makes me think about fans' reactions to the academic articles they themselves are in. That's a productive comparison, I think - "fans are to acafen the way that band members are to RPF writers" - because I think it opens the door to discussing the competing ethical responsibilities we have. Part of defining oneself as an 'acafan,' I think, is about making an ethical commitment to the fan community, yes? So that when they read your academic work, they don't feel like that band member - misrepresented and kind of miserable. On the other hand, as a fan, Kristina is eager to reject any responsibility towards the creators of source texts for transformative works (or the actors and musicians whose lives provide source texts).

Obviously, there''s some important differences - an academic is making truth claims, whereas a fan is not; academics have cultural power, whereas fans rarely do; fans do not (usually) put themselves forward as public figures, whereas musicians and actors must by the nature of their work. But ultimately, academics and fan fiction writers both mine preexisting texts and come up with narratives that make arguments about our world, right? They aren't the same, but they are similar.

While I'm sensible to the argument Kristina is making about industry's interests not intersecting with hers (and the implicit argument I think she's making about industry's power and desire to control fannish behavior), I think it's interesting to think about the question of whether academics' interests actually match up with fans'. For many years, I pooh-poohed the idea that academics publishing about fandom would have any impact at all on what industry understood or thought - but now I see people in industry independently bringing up articles that have appeared in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. (One result of having an open-access journal is that, yes, fans can read the articles published therein, but so can folks in industry.)* If there are fans who truly want to be left alone, they haven't been helped by academics, not one bit.

Besides, that horse has already bolted. Whether fans like it or not, there are more academics studying fandom than ever, and there are more people in industry sniffing around than ever. At this point, there's no reversing it. As Nancy suggests, the only thing that's left to do is to think about how to create some kind of balance - how to make sure that everybody can co-exist. Academics do play a role in that, whether we want to or not - which is one aspect of being an acafan that's not usually highlighted.

*Yes, I realize that this somewhat contradicts what I was saying above about industry having more of an impact on daily life than academia. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Nancy: I'm not sure how major a point it is for this discussion, but I am troubled by the idea that a performer who presents herself as willing to engage fans is thus obliged to be written about in public spaces in explicit sexual terms and, should she encounter that work, obliged to ignore it. I have no issues with people imagining and writing sexual encounters between fictional characters, but I do think that for fans to treat real people as fictions for their own and one anothers' imaginations can be selfish and even cruel, and that is not the fault of a musician for daring to be nice while looking good. I stand by my sense that one thing academics ought to be doing is giving fans frameworks for at least thinking critically about the ethics of what they do, just as we are well positioned to argue to the industries about the ethics of the choices they make towards fans.

Our conversation seems to have revolved largely around ethics and accountability. When I first started studying fandom and read much of the textual analytic work on soap opera fans I was mortified by the willingness to make claims about what fans got out of the genre without ever actually looking at what fans did or talking with them about it. Not surprisingly, these textual analyses often led to analyses of fans as deeply screwed up people living vicariously through texts. I was also struck by the fact that so much of that work was written in language that was borderline incomprehensible without a Ph.D. in the area. In response, from the start, my core obligation has been to write about fans in a way that honors their perspectives and in a way which they can read easily [as a sidebar, open access publishing is an increasingly important part of this]. But 'honoring' does not mean 'fawning.' When fandom misbehaves, when there are fan works that are problematic or poorly done, when there are fans within communities who pull weird power plays or whatnot, we mustn't paper over that in order to make sure fandom looks good. We are often eager to criticize previous research in order to situate the value of our own, we need to be willing to criticize the fandoms we study too. Similarly, there are temptations to paint fans as good guys and industry professionals as bad guys, which is just as intellectually sloppy.

What academics contribute isn't necessarily "truth" as Flourish said - I'd argue truths are multiple and contestable when youíre talking social behaviors and meanings - but insight. I see my role as an academic as doing systematic and rich analysis that provides a basis for understanding social phenomena. All of the relevant identities we experience as researchers can be mined for their contribution to understanding if we are reflexive throughout the research process.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Kristina Busse (http://kristinabusse.com) is an English Ph.D. who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. Kristina is co-editor of†Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection†Transmedia Sherlock.† She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

Nancy Baym (http://www.nancybaym.com) is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Her recent work on independent Swedish musicians, labels and fans has been published in Popular Communication, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and First Monday. She blogs (now and then) at http://onlinefandom.com and collects links about artist-audience relationships at blog.beautifulandstrange.com.

Flourish Klink leads the Fan Culture Division at The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. She writes transformative works of fiction - both interactive and non-interactive - and studies fandom and popular culture. She is also a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned a S.M. in that same program; before that, she earned a B.A. in religion from Reed College. By the time she was 14, she had helped co-found FictionAlley.org, a Harry Potter fan fiction website. Most recently, she has been secretary of the board for HPEF Inc., which puts on educational conferences centering around Harry Potter.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Three, Part One (Kristina Busse, Flourish Klink, and Nancy Baym)

Kristina Busse

Being an acafan to me means constantly negotiating two often quite competing codes of conduct and ethical expectations. In particular, I worry about the compromisesóboth fannishly and academically when I do acafannish research. I have a pretty strong fannish ethos in my research, i.e., I tend to not cite and reference material without the permission of its fannish creators and I am well aware of the limitations that may put on my research material (Fan Privacy and TWC's Editorial Philosophy). Not only am I restricted by texts I know but I self-restrain to texts where I can easily contact the creator and likely get a positive response. In addition to this limitation, there still remains a desire to present fandom in its best guise; after all, if another scholar gets to read one story, sees one vid, I want it to conform to traditional aesthetic notions. My selections are thus restrained not only by the textís possible representativeness and accessibility, but also by my desire to not embarrass my community. There are enough shoddy journalistic pieces who point and mock, and the fan in me desires to impress the academicís colleagues.

The result, however, is that we as acafen are faced with not only the general problem of any qualitative scholar of popular culture on which texts to pick, but also compound the issue by having a variety of vested interests that complicate that selection. In my presentation at the SCMS acafandom workshop, I addressed "The Ethics of Selection: The Role of Canonicity in Acafannish Pedagogy and Publication," and it is this conflict I continue to worry about. The problem is one of choice and selection and the responsibilities this entails. Doing qualitative research one has to pick and choose, and unlike my initial discipline of English literature, there isn't a ready-made canon of important texts that anyone is expected to recognize if not know.

And yet, fan studies tends to create its own version of a canon, and while I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, I do worry about the fact that we do it seemingly unthinkingly. In fact, given the a wide variety and such idiosyncratic choices, it is surprising how small numbers of vids, for example, dominate academic vid shows, class showing, and academic papers. I'm just mentioning Lum and Sisabet's "Women's Work" and Lim's "Us" here, two vids that might indicate that there is indeed a vid canon, after all.

The reason for that has a lot to do with what fans like and what academics like. In fact, these two criteria beautifully intersect in these two vids, making them ideal representatives, so to speak. And yet I see some danger in creating our own academic canon, so to speak, of texts that fit our theoretical frameworks, texts that are sufficiently experimental, queer, political, or whatever else we may decide to focus on. the problem is not that there shouldn't be an essay on "Women's Work." There totally should! The problem is that by showing the vid every single time and namechecking it (as I'm doing right now :), we're effectively construing a canon, a canon that then gets reflected back on fandom who, of course reads and responds to academic canon formation. Moreover, in so doing, we are on some level ignoring the thousands of vids not as experimental, not as political, not as well edited.

And the question is then whether there really is a problem in that and what political implications that may have. When we choose fan works that fit into our arguments, that make fandom look more creative, more political, more subversive to outsiders because that's the image we want to give to the world at large, are we ultimately misrepresentating and betraying fandom? When we decide on picking exceptional texts, are we properly studying the fandom? How do we justify picking the three most excellent, most politically progressive genderswap stories while ignoring the dozens of stories that are misspelled and poorly plotted, that are reactionary or right out offensive?

Of course, it's more fun writing about stories we like, stories we consider aesthetically and ideologically pleasing. I can spend time with a text I like; I can present my fandom in the best light; and I can get easy permission, because I can show my analysis and not offend the author. I can please academics, fans, and myself in the process. But I'd like to ask what texts and what forms of cultural expression we may ignore in the process, and that we remain vigilant to our vested interests when we decide to choose one text over the many available others.

I am certain that any subcultural member and scholar faces similar ethical concerns to remain true to their two competing codes of conduct: not to betray/expose/embarrass one's community and not to do bad scholarship. But I also fear that the danger is always there that one part compromises the other. Constantly acknowledging and evaluating that balance is at the center being an acafan to me: I cannot let my academic side exploit my community yet I must be careful to remain aware of my biases without letting them control research.

Nancy Baym

I have to say I don't feel like I'm trying to reconcile competing sets of expectations and codes of conduct in being a fan studying fandom within academia.

One reason for this may be the primary fandoms with which I've aligned myself. I was never involved in fanfic or vidding communities. I've always been involved in and studied fan communities where we talk about and critique what we're into and it seems like the dynamics are different than in communities based on fans' creative works.

I think it also has to do with the fact that I study people, not texts, and I study the relationships between people, so I come at fandom research from a different set of background contexts and assumptions. For me, canonizing within fandom just isn't an issue since I'm not looking at fan texts per se. The parallel concern I encounter is how to sample examples of fan discourse or sites, but, I see my first obligation as both scholar and member of fan communities as trying to come up with a sampling that will leave fans saying "yes, that's a fair take on what we do" and academics saying "I trust that she's given me a representative view." We always have a responsibility to situate what we study and teach within a wider context that includes some analysis of how representative our choices are.

Throughout much of these discussions (including those already posted) I feel like so many of the issues raised are not unique to academics who are fans and who study fans. The term "acafan" has never resonated with me. I've never felt that a disconnect between the two that was problematic or that called for special language to label, nor have I ever understood the problems in what we do as different from the core problems everyone encounters in doing qualitative ethnographic styles of research. "Acafan" was a response to a tradition of media research that I didn't come from. I started in interpersonal communication and online interaction with methodological training in ethnography and qualitative methods. I've never thought of these issues as being any different from those that, say, people who enjoy using the internet and also study people who use it face - yes it colors our perspective and gives us access to some points of view and inside knowledge, and yes it makes some other perspectives harder to palate, but research is always guided by points of view. We always speak from perspectives. If fans who study fandom lack critical distance, that is a failure of their academic training, not of their being fans, and the same charge can be leveled against anyone who studies anything they are part of. This is what theory and methodology are for, to help us step beyond the everyday experience into an analytic mode that takes advantage of what we know and feel without being limited to it. In that regard, I do think methodological training is very important.

I will say, though, that I have often felt there is a risk to studying my pleasurable passion in that it can come to feel like work. That is the identity risk for me, not seeming not fannish enough, or not academicy enough, but not loving the music I write about as much because I am also interviewing some of the people who make it. I worry more about burning out on the pleasure than I do about not having the academy think it's scholarly enough or the other fans thinking it's too scholarly.

Flourish Klink

I come from an unusual place: by the time I was really involved in fandom, the term "acafan" had already come into general use. I knew the term "acafan" first from the fan's perspective and not from the academic's. What's more, the conflict I experience regarding fandom and professional life is much more general than concern about acafandom.

The reason for this is because while academics do influence others' thought about fans and fandom, the moment that they really begin to make immediate changes in fans' lives is when they begin to work with the industry. I realized this when I began to work with the Alchemists: holy shit, people really take my advice about what to do. I had better make sure it's good advice! Publishing an academic article, or a purely academic book, is one thing: it may change what people think about fans twenty or thirty years down the road. Actually getting into a room with entertainment execs is another thing entirely. The decisions that get made there will go into effect next quarter, and they may determine whether fan sites are harassed with C&Ds or whether they're ignored or whether they're solicited for advice.

It may seem silly and self-absorbed, but my concerns with regard to how to represent fans in these situations have even dictated whether or not I should dye my hair. If I am the only self-identified fan that a network exec meets in a year - should I have teal hair? Or not? Unlike the traditional scholar, my very embodiment of fandom is one of the things that helps me get my professional message across. To be honest, it's part of my personal brand. With each client, I have to ask myself: what aspects of my personal fandom should I emphasize to most effectively get my points across? And that's a worrying state of mind to get into: so calculating, it doesn't feel fannish to me...

In comparison to these ethical conflicts (or "personal angsty excrescences," if you'd like), concerns over the term "acafan" seem to me to be - not unimportant, but certainly not immediate, personally. My current contributions to scholarly work are not likely to go much further than a really good meta might. My contributions to the Alchemists, on the other hand, might influence the policies of next year's TV lineup - which I think most people would rightly be concerned about! But there's no pat term to speak about the conflict of professional and fannish responsibilities outside the academic realm.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Kristina Busse (http://kristinabusse.com) is an English Ph.D. who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. Kristina is co-editor ofFan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection†Transmedia Sherlock. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

Nancy Baym (http://www.nancybaym.com) is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Her recent work on independent Swedish musicians, labels and fans has been published in Popular Communication, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and First Monday. She blogs (now and then) at http://onlinefandom.com and collects links about artist-audience relationships at blog.beautifulandstrange.com.

Flourish Klink leads the Fan Culture Division at The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. She writes transformative works of fiction - both interactive and non-interactive - and studies fandom and popular culture. She is also a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned a S.M. in that same program; before that, she earned a B.A. in religion from Reed College. By the time she was 14, she had helped co-found FictionAlley.org, a Harry Potter fan fiction website. Most recently, she has been secretary of the board for HPEF Inc., which puts on educational conferences centering around Harry Potter.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Two, Part Two (Henry Jenkins, Erica Rand, and Karen Hellekson)

Erica Rand: Karen, I'm really struck by your passage: "My writing of slash fan fiction must be subsumed under the rubric of interpretation; how else to explain the overwhelming pleasure of the (writing of the derivative) text, without resorting to "it was confusing and I hated it! So I fixed it!" I hate to sound so simplistic but is it partly liking to do a different kind of writing? I've recently gotten the chance to reprise a previous sideline of queer sex advice columnist. I just love the different style of it. But I see what you're saying about how for you, fan fiction has a bit of the same function as critique.

Also, is there also something about people's relationship to being "an academic"? Little anecdote: I was just at a workshop on teaching first year seminars and the person leading it did the icebreaker of having us discuss in small groups an incident in college where we first identified as scholars. (Not my idea of an icebreaker, which I think of as more like, "Name a cheesy song you would stay in the car to listen to if it came on the radio.") Anyway, it made me realize that I don't think of myself as a scholar. I think of myself as a nerd because I think superb punctuation is hot and like to watch number patterns emerge on my odometer--although not so much since the numbers don't turn mechanically. But scholars, they work down the hall from me; a crazy disconnect like describing the family weirdness of one's siblings as if one didn't come from the same family.

Karen Hellekson:

I do think that that creating fan texts is an interpretive response: fan fiction, fan vids, and other fan artifacts are really just analysis--exegesis with a point, and a point of view. The kneejerk emotional response (which I articulate here, obviously simplistically, as "it was confusing and I hated it!") can be pretext, but it's just the jumping-off point for exploring the why. It usually isn't particularly valuable by itself. Like or dislike--it doesn't matter which, because either can provoke a response. It is hard to engage intensely with something that leaves you neutral. I usually write academic texts about things that I like or that I find intellectually interesting. I usually write fan fiction about things that bother me or to explain things. My essay here was a chance for me to bind together the affective and scholarly voices.

My relationship to being an academic: it's fraught. I tend to feel insecure about it because I am unaffiliated, and people's reactions (when they see "independent scholar" on my name tag; when it comes up when I'm chatting with a professor-colleague of my husband's at a university party) are often weird, like they're not sure how to deal with me, and then I get flustered and say stupid things and overshare. My job as a freelancer is isolating. This academic thing is a way to get out of the house, to talk about things that really interest me, to engage with fabulous like-minded people, and to have substantive, thought-provoking conversations. If "what I am" is what comes out of my mouth when people ask me about myself, then I'm a consumer of media and a copyeditor in the sciences. My scholarship, including writing articles and books and editing an academic journal, is basically unpaid service that I can't explain in a sentence at parties.

(A cheesy song that I would stay in the car to listen to is Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz." I first thought of myself as a scholar when I delivered a paper as a MA student at KU at the Campbell Conference and was delighted that everyone seemed genuinely interested. It is because of that honest interest, now maintained especially through the Science Fiction Research Association, that I have kept a foot in that academy.)

Henry Jenkins:

Karen raises some important questions about the discipline specificity of the acafan position, which is one of the real value of having such a diverse set of contributors in this exchange. In Literary Studies, fan-scholars have had to overcome the affective fallacy, which has historically rendered our emotional responses to literary texts mute and irrelevant.

By contrast, in film and media studies, almost all writing starts from some kind of theory of spectatorship, whether media is understood as propaganda, art or popular culture. There are times that I think films would not exist if they were not projected to a viewer just as a tree falling in the forest would not make any sound if there was no one around to hear it. Even our formalist theories, or at least the version I was trained in, starts with the issue of defamiliarization, which assumes a viewer who is shocked or startled out of their habitual norms of viewing by some element in the text.

The question is whether your theory of spectatorship starts from the attempt to accurately capture your own emotional response to the work or whether you are, in my book, speculating about someone else's emotional responses. And the danger is that when you start speculating about someone else's feelings, you end up imagining that someone else as more vulnerable, gullible, and susceptible to influence than you see yourself, and that's why media studies was so pathologizing in its construction of fans in the absence of the acafan move. So much of the dread of popular culture from the academic perspective is precisely that it demands our emotional engagement as compared to the more distanced viewership imagined to be the domain of high culture (whether distanciation is imagined as a political position a la Brecht or a class-based posture a la Bourdieu).

You cannot write about soap operas or melodramas without a theory of tears, about horror without a theory of fear and dread, about Hitchcock without a theory of suspense, or comedy without a theory of laughter. And again, work which writes about someone else's feelings is apt to distort the nature of what it is describing in relation to popular culture, to be dismissive and simplistic.

Of course, one hopes that such a theory goes beyond your ""It was confusing and I hated it!" and the real test of the acafan perspective is not where it starts, but where it ends up.

Even on the level of its affective grounding, I would argue that the goal is to be more complex and sophisticated in describing our emotional responses and what sparks them within the work (or its context). And that points us towards some of the issues Erica raises, which I want to address more fully next time. For the moment, let me note that for me, a theory of fandom minimally tries to capture both fascination and frustration, both of which seem to be present in the best fan writing, whether fanfic which writes beyond the ending or Meta which challenges the ideological construction of a beloved text. Look at some of the responses I've run in my blog to the ending of Smallville -- the best of which have been critiques of gender politics or simply genre expectations which start from an impassioned and by no means uncritical perspective but which build out a fuller description of what provokes it.

For me, perhaps the most nuanced and challenging acafan posture to achieve is one of ambivalence, which is not at all "wishy-washy" but rather tries to deal with deep and conflicting responses to the work. A hallmark of ambivalence in cultural critique would be Laura Kipnis's extraordinary essay about Hustler -- which offends her and fascinates her and she's trying to work through this conflicted response. I can imagine this being part of what Erica is trying to capture in her work on figure skating (or at least seems to be part of what I am reading from her provocation here).

Karen Hellekson:

I'm struck by Henry's and Erica's remarks about pathologizing and addiction--terms with negative connotations that hint at fan studies' tendency to be perceived as extreme and therefore suspect, both by outsiders and by ourselves as we get our fix. Joli Jenson, in "Fandom as Pathology," sees this insider-outsider debate as central: fandom must be pathologized because "once fans are characterized as deviant, they can be treated as disreputable, even dangerous 'others.'" This othering permits separation in the field of play: "Fans, when insistently characterized as 'them,' can be distinguished from 'people like us' (students, professors and social critics) as well as from (the more reputable) patrons or aficianados or collectors. But these respectable social types could also be defined as 'fans.'" Here Jenson gestures to status and taste. The mode of othering and taste making inherent in the default view Jenson is working against still remain. Those of us who work in media studies must traverse these discontinuities: high and low culture, fan and academic, insider and outsider. Henry's coining of the term acafan is one way to mediate these oppositions.

I'm struck by my own tendency to be drawn to these so-called maligned fields: my literary specialty is science fiction, and no sooner does SF get all mainstreamed and I no longer have to defend myself, when I decide fan studies is tons of fun and I have to start all over again. Luckily there are many wonderful academic organizations where SF and fan studies are welcome, where acafans can go and have substantial conversations under the reassuringly default view that of course these modes of inquiry are valuable and useful. We can't spend all our time justifying ourselves or explaining that we are not pathological; we have to have time to interpret our world too.

Henry's term acafan filled a void: its very creation and then its subsequent deployment suggest that such a word was needed (and as a dealer in words, I very much enjoyed Henry's description of the context of its creation). I like linguist-novelist Suzette Haden Elgin's explanation of neologisms that fill a needed gap: she calls it Encoding, "the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before ... and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon [our] culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name" (Native Tongue, chap. 2).

The term acafan is thus wonderful, a naming of something that had been whose cultural context was suddenly right to explore the issues--and is still right, and thus this conversation. Although I find the word ultimately self-referential, I appreciate its generative aspects, which deploy from its overt linking of scholarship (aca) and affect (fan).

Erica found her work "an acafan-type call to find theorizing that matters in sources around us." I love this articulation of making meaning from things that we decide are interesting: Wordsworth found meaning in a cloud, whereas we might find it in, well, the cloud. Yet the same modes of interpretation resonate. English still owes perhaps too much to New Criticism in its approaches (valorizing the text), just as media studies still bases critical approaches on the spectator (valorizing the viewer), yet all fields concerned with making meaning rely on the complex interplay between the elements of the rhetorical situation: text, creator, consumer, context. Ultimately that is what the acafan conversation is about: what can we learn about these things when viewed through this particular lens?

Erica Rand:

Karen, I love the point you took from my comment about finding theorizing that matters all around us. But actually, I meant something related to what Henry wrote about how important it is to promote avoiding presumptions that professional critics and academics have more rich and complicated interpretations of culture than the people in pronouncements about what something means: means to whom? how do you know? Most obvious when reading student essays about how "society feels" or how raunchy music videos threaten to corrupt one's younger sister (always the sisters, somehow), but, as Henry notes, underlying a lot of work and whole fields, certainly the one I was trained in, art history.

And yes, to respond to Henry's comment just above Karen's, that ambivalence is part of what I'm trying to get to. Except with skating, it's different than I'm used to. Not so much like loving pop songs with sexist lyrics, but in addition to that, a layer of deeply felt contradiction in the practice. For example, in figure skating I've found my own femininity, as I understand it, alternately fed, trashed, and unrecognizable as femininity under figure skating's dominant codes of femininity, partly because queer femme dyke codes don't work with them. (Thus I might stand out as unfeminine for being the only female in our annual recital who chose to wear pants for her solo--gasp--and the pants is what people notice not the sparkly tight low-cut top that reads out differently, I think, if your underlying opposition is femme/butch (where showing/hiding protrusions might be a big gender marker) as opposed to a model locating an ideal in that ballerina(or ballerina/slut) look.

So I keep being slammed, hurt, judged--in a hugely educational, productive way--by being smacked up against standards I don't meet despite finding my pleasures in what I perceive to be living inside their essence. Somehow despite going on and on, in course after course ("legislative, judicial, executive, legislative, judicial, executive, legislative, judicial, executive . . . ." as the sometimes tedium of repeating basics is represented in the movie Election), about gender being complicated, vexed, painful, a story even if not centrally with trans content, being in the middle of it made a big difference. The sports studies version of acafan maybe.

Separate: I want to go back to something I brought up earlier about whether there is an acafan pleasure in adopting modes and voices for different contexts. I bring it up because I'm a bit hooked on this bit of weirdness: This season's Bachelorette is from Maine, and the Portland Press Herald, every Tuesday, has a FRONT PAGE article, at least below the crease, recapping the previous night's show as if it were a sports or news event. Tuesday the 14th, from Ray Routhier's article: 'The Bachelorette': Trip to Thailand helps mend a broken heart: A restaurant owner named Constantine helps Ashley Hebert put Bentley behind her":

The second date in Thailand was a "group date," in which Hebert and 10 men helped renovate an orphanage. On the night of that outing, Hebert was seen with J.P., kissing again. "Kissing J.P. is magical, the best kisses I've had here by far," Hebert said into the camera. "J.P. is one sexy man. That shaved head? Mmmm."

I'm very taken with what we might call this news-o-fan production (maybe without the hyphens when the term catches on). It's not quite the same as the now taken for granted celebrity news as news, because the author seems to be a guy trying on gendered writing and interests in ways that interest me.

Henry Jenkins:

The circumstances which Erica describes above hint at some of the difficulty with binary descriptions of participant-observation or insider ethnography. They sound like they cover more than they do. There are different forms of belonging and participating, different degrees of inside and outside. So, Erica belongs to the group she is studying but for many reasons, does not fit comfortably within their aesthetic and gender norms (or at least as she describes it). Similarly, as we are pulling this acafan discussion together, we relied on multiple kinds of connections with people, in relation to different communities and different scholarly traditions, and then purposefully mixed and matched them, so that we are all part of this conversation, but my bet is that each participant has reasons to feel somewhat inside and somewhat outside the "core" of the community being represented.

So, the goal is not simply to check a box and say "I am inside the community I study," but rather to use the provocation that "acafan" terminology represents, to dig deeper into where your knowledge comes from and how the work you are doing intersects your professional and personal identity in various ways. I think as we've become more familiar with writing in the first person, which high school and college writing teachers try so hard to discourage, then we have started to toss ourselves into more complex situations, which require more fancy footwork (to choose a metaphor appropriate to the situation that Erica is discussing),

And if there's a risk to the acafan label, it may be that it starts to feel too comfortable as a way of explaining or justifying what is always a much more complicated relationship to our object of study. At the same time, we want to avoid writing which amounts to nothing more than navel gazing. I struggled with this in writing Textual Poachers. It seemed vital to me to "come out" as a fan and yet at the same time, as a male writing about a predominantly female community, I did not want my voice to drown out the community I was studying and claiming that I was a member of the community did not seem adequate to explain my much more complex relationship to this group. I can never belong to that community in a simple way, given the gender composition, but I also do not want to be simply a "fan husband" given my wife's very active participation in this space. It's something I've continued to struggle with through the years and am not convinced I got anywhere near the right balance in my published writing on fan studies.

It seems uncomfortable not to acknowledge our participations and affective investments, these relationships are complex, and the minute we start to talk about them at all, it can start to feel like we are saying too much, either because we are directing attention away from our objects of study and onto us or because we are "oversharing" things which academic culture tells us should be private matters. What was so powerful about the first generation of queer studies folks is that they refused to be invisible, refused to keep quiet, when their silence could be read as complicit within a structure based around patriarchal and heteronormative power. In that circumstances, personal revelation was a vital part of the critique, and that was what I had hoped the acafan concept might help achieve.

Karen Hellekson:

Erica notes that she wants to avoid promoting "presumptions that professional critics and academics have more rich and complicated interpretations of culture than the people in pronouncements about what something means: means to whom? how do you know?" I agree that it doesn't take a professional critic to create valid interpretation. Professional critics have nothing on fans and their meta. Fans talking among themselves have some of the densest and richest text-based and self-referential analyses I've ever seen. I still remember the fabulous conversation about the TV show Leverage at the first Muskrat Jamboree fan con ("Hardison!"), and sitting on a panel about Margaret Atwood at Toronto Trek that had a great Q&A. Both experiences were like attending a really awesome English class, with excited students and detailed text-based analyses. Fan jargon may be different, but the analysis is fundamentally the same. In both worlds, my pronouncements are just as valid as anybody else's.

Science fiction critic Damon Knight, in In Search of Wonder, famously defined SF thus: "Science fiction . . . means what we point to when we say it." Part of this definition refers to the impossibility of adequately defining SF. But an important part of this is the self, pointing and making a declaration. So it is with the fan, and with the scholar: we self-define. Erica's good questions of means to whom? and how do you know? are answerable within the context of the conversation. It means to me and it means the object of study as defined in my text, and it also means to the audience of the text. I know because I studied it and thought about it. It has less to do with credentials and more to do with common agreement of appropriate modes of analysis: supporting ideas with text; placing the text within its context; juxtaposing modes to effect; perhaps constructing a critique within an established mode of theory. Fans and academics have different versions of these strategies, with fan fiction, fan videos, altered artwork, meta, and critical analysis all requiring community-valid construction and support.

I realize that Erica's real point here is that we must question what is at stake when such pronouncements are made. Fans analyze for the love of the source text; they may also analyze for some personal self-valorizing notions of thinkiness, networking, and credibility. (This isn't meant negatively. Many fans perform meta as their primary fannish activity.) Academics analyze basically for cultural capital, to be exchanged for jobs, publications, promotions, tenure. Both fans and academics may have authority, but it has a much-needed tangibility for academics in a way not necessarily relevant for fans. But analysis is not more pure because done for love and not profit; it is not more authoritative when done by a scholar and not a fan.

Henry points out in his Response 2 how the term acafan might be used as a pretext for navigating this binary that can result in an uncomfortable (because excessive) sharing. Yet it is polite to acknowledge your debts (to fans; to spouses). Likewise, it is common, even required in scientific writing, to acknowledge limitations that may affect understanding (as a person of a certain gender; as a person of a certain sexuality). Part of the problem is the difficulty in studying something that you're a part of. It's a Schroedinger's cat kind of thing, where the viewer always affects the thing being viewed, except it works vice versa too. Analysis leads to self-analysis, knowledge of imbrication in taste, class, authority, power, gender, and affect. That is as it should be.

It may be too much for the term acafan to carry such a heavy load, to meld together disparate practices and communities. All we can do is stand where we stand; point to what we point to; and call it like we see it. I think that's enough.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Karen Hellekson (http://karenhellekson.com) is a freelance copyeditor who lives in Maine. For her posts, she looked up the words name tag, kneejerk, exegesis, and imbrication. She studied with James Gunn and at the Institute for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Involved in face-to-face fandom from 1982 to 1996 and then online fandom since 2001, she writes slash and runs a fan fiction archive.

Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who...

Erica Rand teaches in Women and Gender Studies and in Art and Visual Culture at Bates College. Her most recent big project, which brings the aca, the fan, and a lot of ice time to sports studies, currently titled Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice (Duke U. Press), is forthcoming in 2012. She also serves on the editorial boards of Criticism, Radical Teacher and Salacious: A Queer Feminist Sex Magazine (submit, submit, submit) , and shares the Salacious Advisor job, in print and on the blog.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Two, Part One (Henry Jenkins, Erica Rand, and Karen Hellekson)

The Origins of "Acafan" -- Henry Jenkins I have been "credited" (or "blamed," depending on your perspective) with coining the term, "Acafan." Unfortunately, I don't remember when or how this occurred. Like many rich concepts, the term took shape over time, refined through conversations with students, colleagues, and fans. By the time Textual Poachers was published in 1992, I was moderating a short-lived discussion list called Acafan-L, involving mostly fans working on graduate degrees exchanging what we would today call "metafan" comments. "Acafan," however, does not appear in Textual Poachers which starts with my personal declaration as someone who is both a fan and an academic. I had been a fan for well over a decade, I was newly minted as an academic.

While built on the foundations of the Birmingham School, fan studies emerged in 1992, with the publication of Poachers and Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, of Constance Penley's key essays on slash, and Lisa Lewis's The Adoring Audience (which included Jolie Jensen, John Fiske, Larry Grossberg, and others). Bacon-Smith may have been the most immersed of all of us into the fan community, yet for methodological and temperamental reasons, she presented herself as "The Ethnographer" who observes but participants only through formal experiments to see how the community practices work. The fan community itself embraced those more willing to signal affiliation, the relationship the term, aca-fan, was intended to capture, and many found Bacon-Smith's self presentation off-putting.

I've always thought some bright graduate student should systematically compare Enterprising Women and Textual Poachers: two ethnographies of more or less the same community, published only a few months apart, but so fundamentally different in approach and attitude, accessing different voices, reaching different conclusions, both capturing (but not adequately predicting) a moment of transition when digital media was reshaping what had long been a print and postal focused subculture. Some of the differences reflect the move from second to third wave feminism and some, shifts in our understanding of the relationship between personal and scholarly experiences.

I do not remember when or under what circumstances we first used the term, "acafan", but I do recall why we felt such a word was necessary.

A small but significant body of pre-existing scholarship about fandom pathologized the enthusiasms and participations so central to our work. Often, fans were depicted as inarticulate, incapable of explaining their motives or actions. This claim of inarticulateness was typically coupled by the scholar's refusal to engage with the community (and thus a rejection of the value of ethnographic methods). Instead, there was a focus on textual or ideological analysis of cult television, often framed around episodes not significant and often despised within the fan canons formed around these same series. Part of what allowed this pathologization of fandom was that the researchers were not implicated in their own analysis and were not accountable to a fan community. Many researchers treated fans less as collaborators than as bugs under a microscope. At the time, many fans and fan practices were behind closed doors, especially in a pre-digital era. For example, one of the first online communities focused on slash specifically prohibited academics and men (so I was doubly out of the picture).

The new "acafen" (fen has been the plural of fan within the science fiction fan culture) sought to distinguish themselves from the previous generation by signaling their own affiliations with and accountability to the communities they were studying. At the same time, many of us were also being accused of being "inauthentic" when speaking as fans, accused of "slumming it" or "going native" when we claimed to be part of the world we were studying, reflecting assumptions about intellectual and cultural capital that separated high culture academics and pop culture fans. We wanted to signal a dual allegiance -- to treat our subcultural knowledge as part of what informed the work we were doing as scholars. We were not simply fans and we were not simply academics - we were acafen.

A later generation would claim our sense of fandom was too rationalized (Matt Hills), not sufficiently focused on issues of passion, desire, pleasure, and affect, and Derek Johnson would question whether we papered over the "fantagonisms" which occured within fandom. Perhaps, but at the time, the fight was to get rid of this taint of irrationality, seeing being a fan as a meaningful rather than trivial pursuit.

As writers like Jolie Jensen noted, this mixture of passion and knowledge was what qualified one to speak about classical music, serious literature, or high art, but because of the legacy of critical studies, being passionate about popular culture was seen as being duped by the culture Industries. Many of us felt that there were things we could not understand about popular culture from the outside looking in.

Tapping our lived experiences, we argued, returned cultural studies to its roots. Take a look, for example, at how Raymond Williams mobilizes his personal experiences as a scholarship student and his working class childhood in "Culture is Ordinary." Think about what he has to say about his youthful embrace of libraries and museums as opposed to the way he got treated when he went to tea shops. Think about how his anger shaped his theories.

Or think about the ways Angela McRobbie shook up the Birmingham boys club working on subcultures, calling out Dick Hebdidge and others for not owning up to their own relationships to the groups they study, and asserting the importance of her own knowledge as a woman about what took place in adolescent girl's bedrooms rather than in the streets.

And of course, the Birmingham tradition was only one place we could have turned for examples of the subjective turn in cultural analysis. "Writing from a standpoint" was a feminist issue, and Jane Tompkins was asserting the right to tap the language of affect and fantasy, to write in first person, arguing that what she knew about literary texts was being excluded from male-dominated critical practices and institutions. Within anthropology, Renato Rosaldo's book, Culture and Truth, was asserting a potential link between academic distance and the colonialist project of earlier anthropologists. The only way forward, he argued, was for ethnographers to describe their own subjective experiences and to be more accountable to the communities they studied.

For me, perhaps the most important influence, though, was the emergence of queer studies as a theoretical paradigm closely linked to the experience of scholars making decisions about whether or not to come out of the closet in their professional lives. My office at MIT was across the hall from David Halperin, who referenced my discussion of slash in his work in queer historiography; I was deeply informed by his stance as a scholar who openly acknowledged his own desires and sexuality as a source of insight and knowledge. In media studies, I was also inspired by the work of Alex Doty, Erica Rand, and others, who were insisting on the value of "making things perfectly queer" (as Doty's book title suggests). At the same time, Rand's work on Barbie was suggesting the ways we selectively mobilize and retrospectively construct aspects of our own lived experience in order to reconcile them with our current self-perceptions.

Queer politics was being felt within fan culture itself during the early 1990s, with the rise of a global AIDS pandemic and debates about Robert Mapplethorpe's federal funding representing turning points in terms of how slash fans in particular saw themselves and their culture. Many were talking about "coming out" or being "outed" as fans. Reading as a fan was often a queer practice, and many fans joined pride parades and spoke out for gay rights. Queer scholars often signaled their identities through their introductions, feeling that there was an ethical obligation to be honest about how you knew what you knew and what motivated your work. And for me, this commitment spilled over into how I wrote about fandom. I do not mean to see the stakes of queer studies in the age of AIDS as comparable to fans trying to defend the value of their cultural identities but one informed the other. In some cases, they were linked, as when young fans were thrown out of their houses when their parents found their slash zines hidden under their beds or when adult women had to hide their involvement in fandom from husbands who saw their reading and writing of male-male erotica as sexual betrayal.

So, I can't tell you when Acafan was born, but these are the ideas and feelings from which it was born.

Is the term still useful today? I don't know, and that's why I am eager to host such a conversation. I know that the term has become so much a part of my identity through twenty years of use that I am going to be one of the very last to abandon it. "Acafan" should not be abandoned unless we can hold onto what has been gained by its deployment through the years.

Pleasure/Politics; Twirling/Defence -- Erica Rand

For the past five years, I've been trying to work my way out of the problem represented by the prompt: "Have we found a way to talk about pleasure [that] no longer requires self-reflexivity about our politics?" I know how long it's been partly by the date of a 15 December 2007 Dear Abby column that I grabbed from The Portland Press Herald, my local paper, early into my participant-observation project grounded in adult (grown-up vs. xxx) figure skating. "Abby" told the "Woman Search[ing] for Reason to End her Guiltless Affair," that "when something feels good, it is easy to become addicted . . . and then you'll be in for a world of pain." I used the comment in my first essay derived from this research, writing that pleasure had a bit of a bad rep among theorists of pleasure from Barthes (Pleasure of the Text) to Abby. In that context, I think, Abby functioned as a funny anti-model and the pairing with Barthes functioned, implicitly and a bit to the contrary, or so I hoped, as an acafan-type call to find theorizing that matters in sources around us.

I hadn't quite intended the first exactly, however, or lived up to the second. Revision changed things. The first draft I'd submitted began with a personal anecdote positioning myself as a surprised, somewhat rueful compatriot of Abby and Barthes. It concerned discovering that my adamant pro-pleasure stance was not as solid as I had imagined it to be before I took up a project where the brief summary didn't have "I fight oppression" as an obvious subtext. "Migration policing," even "Barbie," serve the purpose in a way that "figure skating" simply does not. In response to feedback from the editor/gatekeeper, which I interpreted to require me to make my theorizing more visible (to him, I thought crankily but not necessarily fairly), I frontloaded words like "neoliberalism" and some theoretical engagements that I'd originally positioned later.

It worked on him and, consequently, for me, especially after a series of conference paper and article rejections suggesting that either the work was terrible or that pleasure was indeed still a discredited topic as I'd heard. (I couldn't even interest the p.r. people at my own institution, formerly so interested in my work.) But the capitulation had some negative effects. Most important to me at the time was that even though the primary theory-engagement-demonstrator I used was pretty juicy--Kiss and Tell's Her Tongue on My Theory (Press Gang, 1994), one of my favorite texts--the beginning became far less reader-friendly. Even my academic skater friends commented "your article was so interesting--after I got through the first few pages." I wished I had fought more for the pleasure of my own text. The article lives in my own head as not quite the one I would have written and I shrank from inviting people to read it, fearing that it would turn them away from reading more.

By the time I finished the to-copyediting book manuscript on the topic (shameless ad in the bio below), I saw Abby's advice differently. I'm no fan of applying the label "addiction" to anything pleasurable that one does a lot. Why is a lot of pleasure a problem? What and whom does medicalizing stigmatization benefit? But I came to see the interconnections between love, money, and time that give so many adult figure skaters--including me--the ingredients for a classic addiction narrative. As I put it in the manuscript,

It can come upon you the way that bumming a cigarette at a party can turn into a pack-a-day habit: bit by bit before your very eyes, yet before you know it and while you half-deliberately missed what was happening. It begins, perhaps, with a group lesson every week, that you attend if nothing else is up. A few years later, skating has shunted other activities to the side, involving cash, prioritizing, and sacrifices that would have seemed unimaginable at first. Maybe they seem lunatic still. But the bar for sanity, or justifiable lunacy, has surely risen. So has the bar for satisfaction. You need more to have enough. You scheme to get it. Maybe you cut your expenses by getting in on the delivery. Perceived wants become perceived needs. You can't quit, or moderate, even when you know you're hurting yourself (or others). Shame and guilt--about having, spending, wanting--dampen, or fuel, the thrills.

There's something to learn from how well the analogy works that isn't "(say) you need to go to rehab if you sext outside of marriage." I'm still thinking through about what.

I'm also still trying to think through attaching "politics of" to "pleasure." I want to study political matters about pleasure, but came to think that describing my topic as the "politics of pleasure" was especially a way to butch it up, aligning with bad histories of gendered dichotomizing. Pleasure/politics; art/science; sex/war; twirling/defense (as in offense-defense); the first term in each has been denigrated in numerous contexts for allegedly feminine attributes. Plus, there's the creepy aura of alibi a la cause-related marketing (Product (RED)): notice all the white people around you and buy permission to skate your life away.

From that angle, the "politics of pleasure" seems like an excuse for no self-reflexivity about one's politics. Plus, here is one of many ways that immersing myself in figure skating brought me to rethink my relation to a political position I really believe(d): put simply, people should not have to rely on the Oprah-style largesse, parodied in Bring it On, for fun or survival. Yes but who am I to toss out someone else's pleasure with a disdainful "ugh, neoliberal" because a 501 (c) 3 is buying them figure skating lessons in Harlem?

Five years into it, I'm still rolling around with it, now mixed with a bit of self-absorbed sadness and panic: fieldwork is done, now what?

Affect and Interpretation-- Karen Hellekson

As a scholar trained in the field of English, which is all about interpretation and not so much about affect, I tend to be unconcerned about how people feel about ideas or texts. Back in the distant mists of time, when I taught, I was annoyed by student writing that dealt with emotion alone as though it were a valid response to a text. A response like, "It was confusing and I hated it!" to a complex novel is not in any way useful, despite what students clearly seem to think. Get to the formal aspects that made you feel that way! I exhorted them. What about the text made you hate it? What characters, what situations, what textual choices, what aspects of the authorial voice? If you must valorize your emotional response, use it as a doorway into interpretation!

I actually stand by that assertion, even as I left students behind when I happily left the academy more than ten years ago. In terms of critical engagement and analysis, feeling may certainly exist--in fact, it must, or where is the love, joy, and interest that compel active engagement? Academics are nothing if not fans, although for people who work in science fiction (like me) or media or fan studies (like all of us posting today), the term fan may have a slightly different articulation than the average Jo, thanks to the formal structures that have sprung up to permit fannish expression, including things like fan fiction and fan conventions and fan online message boards. Suffice it to say that for me, the pleasure of the text seems occult and forbidding, even forbidden. My writing of slash fan fiction must be subsumed under the rubric of interpretation; how else to explain the overwhelming pleasure of the (writing of the derivative) text, without resorting to "it was confusing and I hated it! So I fixed it!"

As someone who thinks that everything ought to have either use or beauty, and preferably both, the term acafan falls short. Positioning oneself in relationship to the text seems delightfully old-fashioned. Why use up an essay's precious words explaining an obvious relationship? Isn't the disinterested scholar a thing of the past? Has postmodernism taught us nothing?

Aca has a snooty connotation: I have been trained to interpret, and I know better than you. Fans are immediately suspicious. Fan has the connotation of unthinking, uncritical adoration. Academics are immediately suspicious.

The portmanteau word so constructed must bear a heavy load, mediating the disinterest of the scholar with the passion of the fan. Further, the term's use does not necessarily benefit. To fans, acafans may be treated with suspicion. To some fans, to become an object of study by someone you thought of as a friend or community member is fun, even flattering; to others, it is threatening, something to be shut down. To academics, it signals a level of immersion that may confer credibility even as it may cause a fear of bias, along, perhaps, with a raised eyebrow.

What unites the academic and the fan is the unbearable pleasure of the text--unbearable yet faced and negotiated, a (pre)text responded to with text. As a practitioner, I prefer to focus on the aca side, but that is the result of my discipline's biases and my training. By such a focus, I think I become a better practitioner because I try not to be partisan. While researching, it helps me negotiate the terrain. I am horrified by certain aspects of the fan world, like incivility and name-calling (in my defense, some of my recent work has been on fan kerfuffles and wank, where incivility can be the order of the day), even as I am struck by fans' thoughtful, decisive analyses (known as meta), performed in a different register than acafannish work--personal, biased, honest in a way that acafannish work tends to dance around because of its use of a dispassionate tone and its choice of publication venue.

I suspect--I know--that aca work and fan work are the same work, performed for different audiences. I perform them both: I write fan fiction to critique the source text in my fan work, but my academic work performs the same function. For me, "It was confusing and I hated it!" is the same thing as "It made me think and I loved it!" The text I generate is the why.

Acafan is a created structure that serves to gesture mostly to itself, a term whose use speaks to a relatively small subset of researchers who recognize the bifurcation inherent in the term and exploit that bifurcation. Its power lies in the academic's power; the fan gains little or nothing from its deployment. Within the realm of fan studies, the term has become a shorthand that indicates a particular approach and stance--one that involves affect, thanks to the fan, and power, thanks to the academic, yet it is deployed at an academic moment (at least in English) where such self-positioning is not considered useful. Its use announces the interweaving of affect and scholarship and signals the topic as fan studies.

The instability between fan and scholar provides endless modalities to play with, gaps to fill, and openings to exploit. To close them is to shut down a conversation that is still generative as it explores notions of authority and affect. For this instability alone, acafan is a useful term; and for me, as I consider the word, flung at my feet, for me to dance with or not, it can be beautiful.

BIOS

Karen Hellekson (http://karenhellekson.com) is a freelance copyeditor who lives in Maine. For her posts, she looked up the words name tag, kneejerk, exegesis, and imbrication. She studied with James Gunn and at the Institute for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Involved in face-to-face fandom from 1982 to 1996 and then online fandom since 2001, she writes slash and runs a fan fiction archive.

Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who...

Erica Rand teaches in Women and Gender Studies and in Art and Visual Culture at Bates College. Her most recent big project, which brings the aca, the fan, and a lot of ice time to sports studies, currently titled Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice (Duke U. Press), is forthcoming in 2012. She also serves on the editorial boards of Criticism, Radical Teacher and Salacious: A Queer Feminist Sex Magazine (submit, submit, submit) , and shares the Salacious Advisor job, in print and on the blog.

How Do You End a Cult Series?: Fans Respond

I asked for your thoughts about how cult series should end and in particular your expectations and responses about the resolution of Smallville. Here are your responses: Hello:

Read the twitter from Allison, then read your blog. Very interesting stuff.

I watched Smallville at the beginning and kind of faded out when Jonathan died. I left it alone for a couple of years and picked it back up again in season 8. I've since watched all the episodes in order and truly love the series for so many reasons. The messages were so positive, family was important, good, truth, justice and all the things that we seem to be lacking or maybe I should say we're trying to uncover again.

I thought the end of the series was excellent. I truly was not disappointed other than learning it took another seven years for Clark to marry Lois. I'm not a comic book fan so I don't know what's happening in that reality. As far as Chloe goes, my impression was she was happily married to Oliver, she's a mother and she's still involved in the Justice League albeit in a role that keeps her anonymous for her protection and the team's. Given her propensity to stick by Clark no matter what, I can't imagine Chloe doing anything else with her life. It would have been nice for them to work Lana in there somehow. I wanted to know what happened to her but I wasn't disappointed per se.

Hope this is what you were looking for. I'm just so grateful not to have a St. Elsewhere or Dallas kind of ending.

As it was done, Smallville and Superman live on.

Happy writing!

Kim Kloes

Smallville fan

Prof. Jenkins,

Thanks for your recent blog post about Smallville's ending and more specifically, character Chloe Sullivan's ending. As a Chloe and Smallville fan myself, I've been engaged in some passionate discussions about this ever since the finale aired.

First of all, I was so happy to see Kelly Souders' statement about Chloe's career:

First I have to give a big "HUH?" to the Chloe part. As a woman who has a pretty demanding job and two children at home under the age of four, I have to say I was floored by that one. I'm not sure why anyone thought her reading a book at night meant she wasn't going to her computer down the hall to check in with the JLA.

This is precisely the point I have been making to people arguing the converse. We were shown nothing in the finale to contradict what had been established in "Fortune": that Chloe was going to be a reporter and a JLA headhunter/recruiter. Working mothers still read bedtime stories to their kids. How anyone could think that the Chloe we have been shown for the past 10 years would ever give up all her personal goals and career ambitions just because she became a mother is beyond me.

I know that some fans were disappointed that Oliver did not appear with Chloe in the scenes with their son, and it was not stated outright that the child WAS their son and they were still happily married. It seemed clear to me that Smallville was operating under some constraints from DCU and the producers still did their absolute level best to push those to the limit to show Chloe's happy ending: her prominent wedding rings, the child actor obviously cast for his resemblance to both Allison Mack and Justin Hartley; accessories in the child's bedroom including the bow and arrow set and the carpet decorated with targets (!).

I know there are Oliver/Dinah fans (and Chloe haters) who continue to argue that we don't know the child is Oliver's, they might be divorced despite the wedding rings, she might be married to someone else, etc. Some fans have claimed that a close-up screenshot of the envelope Chloe sent the blue ribbon to Lois in, postmarked from Singapore, with a return address of Chloe Sullivan (rather than Queen) is proof they are not married. Despite the fact that a happily-married Oliver called his wife "Sullivan" affectionately in the finale and it's been established that they both travel internationally for business and own a jet. Some posters on a SV fanboard pointed, apparently without irony, to a quick closeup of a supply locker at Watchtower containing both Oliver's and Dinah's equipment as proof that even in the SV-verse, they ended up together. (Yeah, I don't even know.) I guess what it boils down to is that some viewers need things spelled out very, very literally and concretely and specifically, and some of us are happy that the writers and producers actually trust the viewers NOT to need very heavy-handed expository dialogue to Get It.

As for where I'd like to see Chloe go in the future? Easy. The DCU reboot offers a unique opportunity to give Green Arrow a fresh start. Disgraced, isolated, divorced from Dinah, he really seems painted into a corner right now comics-wise. Why not do a reboot or at least a Smallville Alternate Universe spin-off with an Oliver Queen/Green Arrow who is younger, less of a bastard and has more possibilities for redemption? And all the better if a young reporter named Chloe Sullivan, already introduced in a Jimmy Olsen title, came along to verbally spar with him, tell him when he's being a jackass, and ultimately become something of a partner for him?

What I loved most about the Chloe/Oliver relationship is that they started out as teammates and friends first; knew everything about each other, both the good and the bad; weren't afraid to call each other on their crap; and still saw the hero in each other. They elevated each other; together they were more than the sum of their parts. Contrast that with comics Oliver cheating on Dinah repeatedly, having at least 2 out-of-wedlock children with other women, and the ultimate failure of their marriage. I don't like that Oliver Queen much, and thrilled as I was that Chloe was being introduced into the comics, I hated that it was in a Jimmy Olsen title, since the Smallville Chloe/Jimmy relationship was largely reviled by fandom. Give Chloe and Oliver a fresh start with each other in the comics, and let's see all the interesting new stories to be told.

Thanks again for the interesting topic--I plan to go back and read more now that I've found your blog.

--Susan

Hi Allison I have been watching Smallville since my dad had me watch it with him which was "Justice" in season 6 as my starting episode. It was awsome and I have loved your character ever since. And just between u and me I think chloe was more fun with Oliver then Jimmy. Besides the Finale what episode do u think u liked the most of the ones u were in for season 10? For ur role I think the best was probably "Masquerade with Desaad" but u looked like u had a lot of fun with "Fortune." What kinda props did u take home when the season ended? Did kristen and erica not like each other that much because after season 5 they actually (and i looked back) had only 6 scenes together in 2 whole seasons. Or was it the writers who did that? Im sorry if this is a little akward and u dont have to answer but i always wanted to know was it akward that u and tom knew each other for 9 years and u guys did a naked scene together in season 9 in "Escape"? With Silver Banshee? I think thats enough questions and I loved Smallville and I will always love it. I also was happy with Chloes ending being a recruiter of heros, a mom, and still a reporter. Your character always developed in fun ways and whats good is that it never changed it just kept adding on. Thanks, Justin your Smallville fan

My 1st response is about the show: The most awesome part about it is that, because of it's origins of Comic books, it already had it's core fan base; Those that weren't comic book geeks are more abstract/contemporary viewers.

I think with these 'types' of Shows, you have to stay true to the skeleton of the story line, though one can be creative with the flesh part, if I can put it in those terms. I don't mean to cast out the other viewers, their opinions count too (they add to the success), but because their perspective is more abstract/contemporary (where they want to change/challenge the very skeleton, I think there has to be that standard without apology, because then you disrespect the whole origin of the comic book storyline & it's genre (especially since the origin of the show is birthed from that, what an insult to the artist). It's always a bad idea to step on creative toes, or hands- lol!

If you want my honest opinion, opinions fluctuate so often, there is just no pleasing [everyone]. I think if the agenda is upfront in the beginning, eventually everyone will respect the outcome.

However, to alleviate the abstract/ contemp. crowd, I think there could've been a more consistent forum on the shows website. I think it lacked an online team specifically for that purpose (it's very time consuming). It could've used consistent interviews with the actors (both personal & the show), people like that personal connection, even if it was sharing one piece of personal information that isn't commonly known, along with the interview about the character on the show. You'd be surprised how most people are forgiving/fickle with their perspective if they like the interview & if they feel the actor was personable-Fans don't feel so "used"....and they forget they were upset. LOL!!

As for the continuation, wow! That you're even asking that question, cause in my opinion your heart & soul reflected your passion off screen! Wow! You could also sense the heart of the writers & basically everyone involved wanting to finish well. I think y'all (excuse the Texan in me-hehe) did the best you could.

I am curious though since the Chloe character was integrated into the comic's chorology, I wonder about the chain reaction in all the comics now? In Smallville the super heroes from the future came and said they never heard of her, How about now I wonder?

It would be cool to see THAT dynamic on a web series to start. Showing the ending of Smallville's "likeness", where Chloe is reading the book to the child as the beginning of the series (much like Clark being found as a child scene), whether the child that Chloe is reading to, is one she had with the Green Arrow, or the one that Green Arrow is supposed to have mentored and becomes "Speedy"(Red Arrow), his sidekick (a lot of content there in that relationship between Speedy & Green Arrow and how he grew from "Speedy" to "Red Arrow"). It would be great to see THAT Dynamic of the family type effort with the other Heroes: Ardimus (Arrowett) & Batman, Green Arrow was known to work them the most, on a show! I wouldn't cover the child growing up though, just that intro. (no one wants to see Chloe as a mom, just knowing she was) everyone knows she could do that & run a country from another galaxy. LOL! (Did I make sense? Sorta rambled in my brainstorm lol!)

I would love to see Chloe's part in the whole integration. Making Chloe a solid place to fit inn would be AWESOME! I think there is a pool of creativity yet to be discovered & written!!! I would LOVE!!! L-O-V-E- to take part in it's writing!!

I think it would do better as a web series, because of it's un-explored (to my knowledge) content. Man! It would be so killer!

love you woman!

Irene

Howdy,

Wow, you are a brave person, opening up your inbox to comments from a horde of Sci-Fi fans :)

I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in, so I'll keep my comments brief. I'll lead off my comments by pointing out that there's obviously no way they could have satisfied everyone with the finale, especially with a Canadian TV show budget. If you did everything all of the fans wanted, you'd spend a hundred million dollars, which was clearly not in the cards.

I also note that many folks appear to be quite satisfied with the finale. For my part, though, I found the finale to be monumentally unsatisfying, but not for the reasons that are being cited by many. My only expectation was that I expected the producers handling the finale to deliver a cohesive, meaningful story that wrapped up the TV series, its characters, and its plotlines during their last outing, and it is in this basic storytelling respect that it really came up short.

The best example of this fact is the way in which the Lois and Clark wedding was handled. The fact that Lois and her relationship with Clark was so important to his destiny was one of the truly innovative and memorable things about this season and a really novel, welcome addition of the Superman mythos; the storyline and accompanying great performances by the two actors really enhanced the show. They ultimately built up the wedding into one of the prime narrative drivers of the season, to the point where it took up half of the time in the series's final episode. The Lois and Clark wedding was, of course, also heavily hyped by the network. If you spend that much time building up to something, you have raised audience expectations to the point where you really, really, need to cohesively deliver a satisfying resolution onscreen.

Instead, the wedding gets interrupted at the halfway point to the show, we get to the end of the final episode, there's a brief 7-year flash forward sequence, and the two main characters still aren't married. As a viewer, my response to that moment was roughly: "WHAT?!!! Are you kidding me? All that buildup and this is what we get?"

The fact that the ending of the show establishes that they are still trying to get married is really just a bad storytelling decision. It rudely snaps the viewer out of the story. This ending raises a host of uncomfortable questions that the viewer really shouldn't have been induced to ask, since they completely ruin the "suspension of disbelief" that is absolutely required for a show with an (admittedly zany) premise like this one.

Questions like: Why didn't they just finish the wedding in the parking lot with the minister 7 years before? Why did it take so long for them to try to get married again? More importantly, why haven't Superman and Lois Lane, of all people, not been able to find a day--or heck, even an hour--in seven years to finish their 90% done wedding, which had been portrayed as immensely important to them both for an entire season? You make time for what's important, and waiting seven years is very much out of character for them.

The Lois character in particular goes from "never accepting defeat" just two episodes prior to apparently blithely accepting defeat in the case where her own wedding doesn't get finished. Bottom line: the whole thing just defies belief, and having a prime narrative focus of the series be handled in this fashion really makes no sense.

What makes it even more frustrating is that there are any number of ways this plotline could have been handled more satisfyingly; I for one would have been A-OK if that last scene had just established that they were were married offscreen at some nebulous point beforehand, which would have been shockingly easy to do (a simple "Hello, Mrs. Kent" would have worked just fine...). Instead, although we did get lots of wedding-related character moments and the ending clearly shows that the two characters are still together, the viewers categorically did not get a satisfying onscreen narrative conclusion to the season-long wedding plotline. You spend that much time building up to something, you have to deliver, and they did not.

It would be interesting to hear about the thinking that went into this decision; to a completely average TV viewer such as myself, it is absolutely befuddling, and I just felt insulted by the way that the wedding plotline was handled. It felt like my time had been wasted for an entire season.

Now, I don't know if the non-wedding was mandated by the studio or was a misguided effort to leave the viewer "wanting more", but no matter whose responsibility it is, it was a huge mistake to end that plotline (and the show) in such a nonsensical and unsatisfying manner, especially when handling it in a more straightforward and crowd-pleasing way would have been just as easy and let them tell the same story.

The completely illogical conclusion to the wedding plotline is emblematic of other, similar problems in the finale, like (for example) the bizarre Chloe-and-the-comic book framing story that gives away Clark's identity already noted by many, as well as the fact that (despite two seasons of some pretty thick foreshadowing) we never get to see Lois name Superman and reveal him to the world, a fairly important and defining moment for both characters.

In the cosmic scheme of things, of course, it doesn't really matter. Griping about the final episode is of course a symbolic gesture at this point since the show is over, we'll never see the actors in these roles ever again, and everyone (myself included) is moving on.

But, that's just why I think some people remain frustrated. The producers apparently took the position "We don't need to show [insert really important Smallville character milestone here] on our TV show, since we all know from [insert comic book or movie here] that it will eventually happen!". Well, that's just lazy.

As a fan of the TV show, I wanted to see these iconic story moments with "our" versions of these characters, and that's what the viewers really didn't get. I had always held off buying the Smallville DVDs, because I knew there would inevitably be a big box set at the end of the series, and I knew that for me the payoff from the destination (the finale) had to be worth making the journey. Let's face it, this show had some real clunkers along the way.

Unfortunately, the final episode (and in particular, that final scene, where the two main characters are inexplicably not married after a whole season of buildup) was such a let down that I'm not going to waste my time and hard-earned money on the DVDs in order to relive a journey that has such an unsatisfying destination. Which is kind of a shame.

Thanks again for the opportunity to offer an opinion! I don't mind if you utilize the preceding paragraphs for public consumption, but I would request that my identity remain anonymous.

Cheers,

Samuel Lawrence

I am a huge Smallville, Superman fan and have been from day one. I am also

involved heavily in the online fandom on various sites including Twitter and Kryptonsite forums so I have a very good idea of how the Finale of Smallville was perceived. Generally, I've only come across a small minority who didn't enjoy the finale for various reasons and unfortunately these people are also the most vocal.

Many people loved the episode, myself including. I couldn't have think of a more perfect way to end the show after 10 years. Clark Kent, the boy who was so scared of being alone finally became the man he was destined to be with the woman he loves by his side. The show is about Clark Kent, not Chloe or Lex and he was the reason I watched from beginning to end.

The only thing that offended me was having Chloe being the only one to call him 'Superman' by name. I waited till the end to hear Lois call him that so I was disappointed. In my opinion, only Lois deserves that.

I don't have a problem with the way they ended Chloe's storyline. It was ambiguous, yes but that's what makes it interesting. For those that want it, they can imagine her and Ollie married, in love and happy. My scenario for Chloe would be to have her successfully raising her son away from the heroes and carving a life for herself outside it all. For too long, she's been defined by the heroes that surround her and sacrificed so much of herself to their cause. Working for JLA doesn't make her successful. She could be a

editor, painter, journalist and be more powerful, successful because success comes with inner happiness and strength in what you do.

Since I was a little girl, Lois Lane has always been my favourite character. I wouldn't love her any less if she wasn't the Pulitzer winning reporter that she is. Her character, integrity, her never-ending faith in others is what draws me to her.

With shows, movies, books - there is always controversy to who belongs to who and the right way to end characters. You're never going to satisfy everyone. When JK Rowling ended her 7th Harry Potter book, there were people who said it was the worst book written but it doesn't make it any less a work of brilliance. But such is life that the negatives always get the focus over the positives.

I wanted to use this opportunity to thank everyone involved with the Smallville and for 10 years of love, laughter, tears and magic.

*Anon*

I wish I could write a logic piece analyzing bit by bit how the writers broke the contract with the audience they established in the pilot.

I'm a writer myself (in Spanish, English is not my first language as you probably can tell in my bad grammar) and I studied for years creative writing, plot points, chekhov guns, the journey of the hero and the heroine....so many other treaties about the art of writing and if the writers really think they did their job I pity any new fans that engage into their projects because they lack basic storytelling skills.

But I can't. I'm still mourning.

The connection the first five years created with this characters and me was strong and powerful, and it was downhill from them on and in the end they just destroyed it, to a point that all I can feel is rage thinking about it. I wish I could be more rational about it, is just a TV show that no one will remember in 10 years (maybe because of the horrible ending), but I can't.

I was in love with Smallville.

I usually call it my only abusive relationship, always believing the promise that the good times will come back and kept coming back for more mistreatment almost every week, like a beating husband that brings you flowers and promises not to hurt you again and you forgive because you are in love, but then the beatings continue coming and in the end you end up dead.

This is what Smallville did to me. It killed my faith on TV series.

I will say I haven't seen any other series and I don't plan to, I can't have faith again. Heroes started great and also ended in a mess, and the perfect TV series Pushing Daisies was canceled. There are many other great series that also suffered the same faith so is obvious that TV shows are stale like Hollywood movies are becoming now with nothing new or original just rehash, unlikeable characters and bad writing that they cannot see it for the life of themselves.

I really hope the producers of Smallville are really happy about being part of the many problems I have with TV that lead me to quit it altogether. For as much as they say this is the planned ending for the last 10 years I would love to see the original planned ended script or layout, I'm pretty sure it was totally different.

As for my kids I will be buying DVD of good TV shows of the past for them to actually enjoy watching good stories. Star Trek TNG for example, also finished in its own terms and their ending was perfect, IMO. It got closure for all the characters, gave us a glimpse of the future that was logical for them in most ways and opened new possibilities, organically integrating even the special guests....just perfection in writing.

But new TV shows and cable networks can keep airing bad written shows and Reality TV 24/7 if they want to. This viewer, that was willing to purchase the special 10 seasons package of Smallville if only the ending would had been...decent, Is going to take her disposable income and investing on good stories and people that are willing to actually do their homework and keep their promises, YMMV as usual.

Thanks again for the chance and who knows I might be able to write something proper in the future, at this point I just can't.

Ana Bastow

Editor's Note: Thanks to everyone (whether fan or professional) who took the time to share with me your thoughts on Smallville's ending or on the ending of cult series more generally. There were many different and sometimes conflicting perspectives expressed here, and it's worth remembering the range of production contingencies and restrictions which also figure into this process.

I've always contended that cult series are often most satisfying in the middle when these diverse sets of expectations can all be put into play and where fans feel free to speculate and generate a range of possible endings through their conversations which open the series to many diferent potential interpretations. The minute a series starts to close down, some of those possibilities will be rejected and some heavily invested fans will be crushed. In part, this is because even though fans ultimately play a huge role in how a series will be remembered, fans ascribe much greater value to canon, the officially generated storyline, than fanon, their own interpretations, speculations, fantasies, and productions.

Another theme here that interested me a lot was the sense that the ending determines the value of the series. My own views as a fan are rather different. I know I've been disappointed in the resolution of certain series but it also doesn't take that much away from the pleasures I had in the process of the series. If I had a series which had 100 plus great episodes and a bad ending, I'd be rewatching and remembering fondly the 100 great episodes, which was my primary experience of the series, and if my frustration was too high, tossing the disc of the final episode. Fan communities as a whole have developed purposeful amnesia, denying the existance of plot twists which they disliked, and writing their fan fiction starting just before the plot twist occurs. Blake's 7 fandom developed a whole genre of fan fiction involving writing beyond an ending which many found frustrating (though which I found especially provocative and clearly, given the number of stories fans wrote, generative.) We need put only as much weigh on the ending of the series as we chose to in our personal and collective imagination, and for me at least, a bad ending doesn't take that much away from the experience I had with the series as a whole.

Thanks again to our friends at the Alchemists for helping us to organize this exchange between fans and producer/actress.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part Two (Anne Kustritz, Louisa Stein, and Sam Ford)

In this second installment, the participants engage in back and forth conversation intended to extend upon the ideas contained in their opening statements. Louisa Stein: Anne and Sam, I'm struck by the harmony in our three separately written pieces. We all seem to recognize the perceived dangers or negative connotations of the term acafan, and yet feel a value in holding on to the term because of its potential as a self-reflexive signpost, a bridge between interconnected disciplines or subject positions, and even perhaps a politicized position.

One question I have is from where this perception emerges that acafan is an essentialized standpoint or identity connected to identity politics? All of our three responses here indicate that that none of us relate to the term acafan in this way, though we are all wary of these associations. Why and where does this negative perception of acafan as a divisive concept take root and how can we counter this narrative? Or is this perception an unavoidable part of the project of acafan work?

Anne Kustritiz:My concern stems from the universalizing tendency behind the aca-fan construct, when one might be tempted to lose sight of aca-fan as a discursive marker and act as though it identifies some kind of shared experience. Several times in the past (and perhaps in this discussion's future as well) I've seen dismissals of the aca-fan concept because it fails to account for that individual's lived experience, often either because of a mismatch in object (i.e. what kind of fans), discipline, or method. If fandom only refers to participation in active face-to-face communities, many of our colleagues would not qualify. If aca-fan relates only to those who directly interact with fans during the course of their studies, likewise many may see the concept as irrelevant. Partly, this may result from the preponderance of aca-fen from community-oriented fandom who use and reflect on the label, which sometimes makes it seem as though the concept only applies to them (not necessarily by ideology or design, but by sheer numbers).

Particularly for those engaged in literary analysis, aca-fan terminology may seem like an unwelcome imposition of social sciences concerns, and it could be useful to consider how reflections on the researcher's identity might still offer enrichment for those who see themselves pursuing primarily archival or textual work.

For me, identifying as an aca-fan certainly incorporates a political stance because of my object, method, and disciplinary position: for example, identifying with and as my work identifies me as queer, and copy-left, among other things (which is not to say all slash participants identify as such, but these are strong associations). However, aca-fan describes only one aspect of my fan, scholarly, and other identities and experiences, and it would not mark other scholars in the same way (an aca-fan doing textual analysis of wrestling fans' twitter accounts would find that telling academic colleagues about personal interest in wrestling and telling wrestling fans about discourse analysis have very different stakes and consequences than my positionality).

Even the suggestion that the term "aca-fan" always offers a relevant and contradictory identification to some extent implies a false universal. In cultural anthropology, for instance, the relevant term would be native anthropology, which does not offer a new or challenging intervention into existing disciplinary practice, but rather adds to an established field of study. Film scholars who also make films or passionately follow film similarly go without notice. However, even in both of these instances, their positionality also shifts if one begins to term them "fans" of urban youth culture, Portuguese jazz bar culture, Hitchcock, or horror. While the experience and passion may remain the same whether we are scholars, buffs, aficionados, or fans, the social positioning alters significantly, thus opening the possibility for solidarity (often with class implications) through fan identification.

Sam Ford: In Soap Fans in 1995, Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby made compelling points about the necessary balance between private and social fandom. I agree with Anne that, just as fan studies has often privileged the fan community over private consumption practices, the term "acafan" has come to hold particular meaning to participants in a community. The implications that being an acafan might have for those doing textual analysis, for instance, is strong.

I primarily study (and am a fan of) areas of entertainment whose cultural value is often missed by anyone who would not consider themselves a fairly ardent "fan" of the genre in question: soap operas and pro wrestling. From the "outside," both are often considered of no artistic merit, and the trouble that fans of either genre find is that even explaining the artistry of the genre or what makes for "good" vs. "bad" wrestling or "quality soap opera storytelling" is lost on someone outside the genre.

I remember in particular, after the cancellation of As the World Turns, being interviewed by a television critic for a prominent publication about the death of long-running soap operas. I was explaining what was unique about the soap opera storytelling model and what might be lost as daytime soaps go off the air. In the interview, she could detect from my passion and the depth of my knowledge that I did more than "study" soap fans or write "about" the genre: the "fan" side of my "acafan" was showing through. I could instantly tell that her radar went up. As she detected that I liked what she saw as lowbrow and lower-grade programming, she began to completely dismiss all that I had to say. After I finished, she said, "I've watched soap operas before, and I didn't see any of what you saw."

My point was exactly that: that the language of soap opera and the ability to see what DEFINES "good storytelling" and high quality texts within the soap opera genre can only be seen by someone who understands the genre deeply enough to know its lexicon. And, similarly, for soaps, I've written before about the fact that doing textual analysis for that genre (with 260 new episodes a year, for decades) is so complex that it's hard for those who aren't intimately familiar for the genre to follow and not see it as totally ridiculous.

All this is to say that, for textual analysis in genres like these, being an acafan provides a great wealth of experience and understanding of a genre that those who aren't dedicated viewers just wouldn't have. So I certainly believe that we too often, in using the term "acafan," privilege the social side of "fan" without thinking about the "aca" part.

And part of what we are questioning here, I suppose, is whether "acafan" becomes a label for a scholar's relative position to an object of study; a mode of engagement with particular methodologies and approaches; or a label for a distinct kind of scholar or a sub-field of work under "fan studies." Sometimes, there seems to be slippage across these uses.

Louisa Stein: Anne, I want to focus in on a very valuable point in your response that I'd like us to unpack further. You wrote: "Even the suggestion that the term 'aca-fan' always offers a relevant and contradictory identification to some extent implies a false universal."

This strikes me as very significant; I didn't mean to imply that there's always a contradiction between the academic and fan positions, but rather that they always exist in relation to each other, but what that relation is is in constant motion, and for me personally my acafan positioning pushes me to constantly probe at that relationship, to expore whether it is one of solidarity or conflict or more likely a mix and match of contradictory and aligned values.

So for example in going to Vividcon, or in my approach to vidding more generally, I come with a strange mesh of aesthetic values as a film scholar who has studied both mainstream and experimental film and as (perhaps resultingly) a fan who appreciates both highly polished vids by the most acclaimed vidders within fandom and vids that circulate in other spheres on youtube and don't adhere to the same vidding value sets. So to me the one universal that the acafan position brings with it is the need for a constant self reflexivity in regards to considering one's relation to one's object. Maybe that's why acafandom for me can encompass personal fans, anti-fans, community fans, and everything in between.

And this connects with your final comment, Sam, which I think also gets right to the heart of things. You write that "part of what we are questioning here, I suppose, is whether 'acafan' becomes a label for a scholar's relative position to an object of study; a mode of engagement with particular methodologies and approaches; or a label for a distinct kind of scholar or a sub-field of work under 'fan studies.' Sometimes, there seems to be slippage across these uses."

Yes, and yes, and I think that perhaps the problem comes in when that slippage goes unnoticed--or rather, where we move from slippage (which could be productive if it is recognized as such) and conflation. When these three elements become conflated or equated, we do have a vast narrowing of what one might understand as acafan, a narrowing that could easily become quite alienating. So how do we (or can we) rescue the term acafan to mean all three of these elements (among others) in tandem and multiplicity, rather than as a overly-simplified unified front?

Anne Kustritz: I agree that allowing for a variety of life experiences and disciplinary approaches to populate the aca-fan concept is the primary challenge. Partly, this may require that a case be made for what self-reflexivity has to offer, in tandem with the importation or creation of methods for critically evaluating aca-fan self-reflexivity, because as with any mode of writing, some authors will offer more nuanced, sophisticated, and productive analyses than others.

In the first case, this blog conversation will hopefully amplify the diversity of experiences and approaches taken by aca-fen, which will hopefully allow for all of us to be in broader conversation with the field as a whole. In the second instance, the aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding and evaluating how scholars employ self-reflexivity to separate justifications of the aca-fan concept from the success with which it is employed in various pieces.

Perhaps this addresses Sam's concern about the relatively unexamined "aca" end of things. As I've mentioned, because of my background in cultural anthropology, I tend to draw upon that literature for its specialization in analyzing the researcher-participant relationship, but it would likely behoove us to collectively build a literature of our own specifically on the process of scholarly analysis for aca-fan works. Thus, perhaps instead of questioning whether one ought to be an aca-fan, which as a question of identity and identification seems problematic to police, and instead move toward creating principles for thinking through aca-fan works. Which aspects of an aca-fan text make it more or less successful or useful?

Sam Ford:I think both of your suggestions are key here and get back to one of my concerns of what would be lost if the ideas surrounding "aca-fan" were to be lost: a space for academics from a wide range of traditional disciplines to come together to share work that both study fans/fan communities in a way that shows respect, nuance, and an acknowledgment of autonomy for those fans--and a space that allows for the intersection of academics and fans to converse with one another on high-level concepts surrounding the reception and socialization of texts that draw high levels of engagements from their viewers/listeners/readers/players.

There has been compelling work in the past few years to, for instance, look at the intersections (or lack thereof) in work about sports fandom and media fandom. I think we should always strive to continue expanding the inclusivity of fan studies, and part of that requires--to Anne's point--drawing together collections of methodologies, "best practices," etc., of what constitutes using an "aca-fan" methodology or including an "aca-fan" positioning of one's own relationship to a work. This doesn't necessarily require too much formalization--treating fan studies as a discipline all its own in ways that puts too much rigidity for an area study which I believe is all the richer because it crosses disciplinary bounds. But I think it does require being able to present grad students, undergrads, fans, and young scholars with ideas of what constitutes an "acafan" mode of engagement.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

Anne Kustritz will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Amsterdam in Media Studies as of fall 2011, after teaching in Women and Gender Studies at the College at Brockport, SUNY. Her work focuses on slash fan fiction, internet ethnography, and queer reproductive politics. Her articles include "Slashing the Romance Narrative" and "Postmodern Eugenics" (forthcoming), and she sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. Anne is a fan of Michele Foucault, baking, fruit forward red wines, Ani DiFranco, hatha yoga, sustainable agriculture, Ruth Behar, international travel, and fan creative works, among many other things.

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom Strategic Communications, an affiliate with both the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment group. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company. Sam is co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (NYU Press, forthcoming) and is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures. You can find Louisa on twitter here and on wordpress here..

Coming Soon: Acafandom and Beyond

In the summer of 2007, this blog hosted a rich series of exchanges concerning "gender and fan studies," which paired male and female researchers together to reflect on the impact that gender had on their work. We are still feeling the impact of these exchanges in terms of new collaborations between researchers and new paradigms for approaching our shared interests. This summer, the blog is going to host another large scale conversation, this time focused on the concept of the Acafan and the kinds of work this term has done for helping us to sort through our complex emotional and intellectual relationships to our object of study and the equally complicated relationship between our professional lives as fans and who we are in our personal lives. We wanted to expand the concept to bring together people from Game Studies, Critical Race Theory, Performance Studies, Queer Studies, and Gender Studies, who are confronting similar issues surrounding the role of subjectivity and cultural criticism. This time, we are working with groups of three, a number purposefully chosen to avoid binaries and force us to collectively find common ground across a range of perspectives. Each week, we will have three short 500-1000 word provocations coupled with the transcript of an exchange between the three contributors. Public discussion sparked by these provocations will continue at a yet to be designated spot on Live Journal and periodically I will be sharing highlights from this larger public discussion through this blog. We want as many fans, academics, and acafen to weigh in on these topics as possible and will do our part to give you stuff to chew on all summer long.

The discussion has been organized and will be moderated by Kristina Busse, Drew Davidson, Henry Jenkins, Louisa Stein, and Karen Tongson.

This series builds upon a series of exchanges in the Fan Studies world over the past year around the concept of the "Acafan," including a rich discussion last summer through Jason Mittell's and Ian Bogost's blogs, a special issue of FlowTV, and a Society for Cinema and Media Studies panel organized by Louisa Stein. Contributors for the series are also drawn from participants in Drew Davidson's Well Played books, which offer subjective criticism of computer and video games, and are intended to showcase the launch of the new Postmillenial Pop book series which Karen Tongson and I are co-editing for New York University Press.

Overview

At the heart of the acafan debates has been the question of what aspects of our lived experiences we bring to our work as scholars and critics. All of us, of course, write from many different identities based on race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, generation, ideology, discipline, and cultural preference. The acafan identity, as it has emerged through fan studies, offers a response to accounts of media consumption that in their supposed objectivity were too distanced, too critical, and ultimately pathologizing. The term describes specific relations to our objects of study and draws upon situated knowledge to help explain the contradictions of contemporary popular culture. Acafan scholarship has worked to model a scholarly position that is proximate and impassioned and engaged, but which also is substantive and demanding (in all of the best ways that fan writing can be).

In this discussion we want to expand the questions and the focus to address autobiographical research and the role of the researcher in general. In so doing, we want to look at the ways different fields and disciplines have faced the problem of being invested in and accountable to different aspects of our identity, such as academic and fan. We are interested in the way this can and has affected our research and the way it has affected our intersectional identity. We are also interested in discussing the relationship between forms of academic knowledge creation and presentation and the relation between lived experience and academic work.

As we search for interdisciplinary commonalities, we also want to explore the limitations to the notions and practices of acafandom. Beyond objectivist proponents, who fault acafans for being too close and too engaged, some scholars resist the approach for the way it possibly affords fans special status and forces too much attention on one particular mode of interaction, ignoring other equally important modes of inquiry. Acknowledging and exploring these objections without abandoning the concept of a participatory and vested research with autobiographical self-awareness is central to this conversation.

Provocations

• [Intersectional identity] How do these identities--as lived, performed, constructed, and embodied--shape what we see, what we study,what we say and who we address through our professional work? What are some of the ways we mobilize these identities within our work and when do they get in the way of the critical distance expected of serious scholarship?
• [Origins and influences] What does the acafan concept owe to larger debates about the nature of "subjective criticism" in feminism, critical race theory, and queer studies? What has been the contribution of fan studies to these other related fields, or what might fan studies contribute in the future?
• [Related developments] How might the debates about the acafan concept relate to other debates in connected fields of popular culture studies, such as discussions about the emergence of the "new games journalism" as a means of capturing the subjective experience of players?
• [Affective investment] These debates historically had to do with the unstable relations between pleasure/affect/the body/desire and politics/identity/power. Do stable or essential terms have the flexibility to respond to this shifting terrain? Have we found a way to talk about pleasure which no longer requires self-reflexivity about our politics?
• [Acafan as a concept] How have the evolving traditions of acafandom shaped the landscape of which fan practices are studied and which are left invisible? In our increasingly digitized academic public sphere, how do performances of simultaneous academic and fan identities raise both pragmatic and ideological concerns?
• [The limits of acafandom] Acafandom--be it understood as a cultural and scholarly position or as an interdisciplinary community--has increasingly come under fire from a variety of directions. After more than a decade of use, what do you see as the strengths and limits of the term acafan as a way of characterizing the shared subjectivity between fans and academics? What has the term allowed us to communicate? What mixed messages might it carry? What has it limited our ability to see and to say?
• [Acafandom as institutional practice] The term acafan emerged from a particular configuration of the relations between fandom and academia, yet the emergence of a new and rather substantial generation of acafans has resulted in some changes in the practices and norms of the academic world. How have the relations between fans and academics shifted over the past decade and how do these changes impact the concepts which acafan was intended to express?

Participants:

• Christine Bacareza Balance
• Sarah Banet-Wiser
• Nancy Baym
• Gerry Bloustein
• Will Brooker
• Jayna Brown
• Rhiannon Bury
• Jay Bushman
• Kristina Busse
• John Campbell
• Heather Chaplin
• Melissa Click
• Francesca Coppa
• Drew Davidson
• Alex Doty
• Jennifer Doyle
• Corvus Elrod
• Sam Ford
• Nick Fortugno
• Jonathan Gray
• Judith Halberstam
• Karen Hellekson
• C. Lee Harrington
• Matt Hills
• Henry Jenkins
• Alex Juhasz
• Flourish Kink
• Derek Kompare
• Anne Kustritz
• Frank Lantz
• Alexis Lothian
• Alan McKee
• Jason Mittell
• Roberta Pearson
• Alisa Perren
• Erica Rand
• Cornel Sandvoss
• Suzanne Scott
• Parmesh Shahani
• Sangita Shreshtova
• Louisa Stein
• Karen Tongson
• Catherine Tosenberger
• Matt Yockey

How The New York Public Library is Sharing "The World of Tomorrow" Now: An Interview with Deanna Lee

I am now the proud owner of an iPad. I'd been meaning to get one for some time, but what motivated me to make the leap was the release of Biblion, an extraordinary new app developed by the New York Public Library to showcase and contextualize their rich collection of materials surrounding the 1939 New York World's Fair.

I was honored to be asked to participate in this great new venture of the New York Public Library. The App includes an interview which describes the ways that the Fair translated early ideas from science fiction into a physical location which promised people a chance to see the World of Tomorrow and offers insights into the continued hold that the Fair has over the popular imagination, including its role in shaping "retrofuturist" trends in contemporary comics and novels. In the interview, I share a little about my own lifelong fascination with the Fair:

When I was a child, my godfather and godmother went to the 1964 New York World's Fair and brought back a program which described in detail each of the pavilions. I spent endless hours reading the descriptions and imaging what the buildings were like, somehow not quite grasping that the Fair itself was long gone. As I've gotten older, though, my interests has been drawn towards the 1939 Fair, in part because of my intellectual engagement with science fiction as a genre, and in part because of my personal fascination with the style of that period. I have started to collect artifacts from the fair -- through antique shops when I am lucky, increasingly through eBay -- which exist in my collection alongside other remains of older media practices -- magic lantern slides, a 1920s era dictaphone, wax cylinders, Victorian stereoscope slides, Winsor McCay comic strip pages. Much of this constitutes "residual media" or what Bruce Sterling has called "dead media."

I prefer residual media because it suggests the "undead" presence of such media in our culture, the sense that bits and pieces of them have been left behind, shoved into the corners, often forgotten but still shaping the way we understand ourselves and the world. When I moved to Los Angeles last year, we ended up moving into a 1930 era Art Deco building, which reflects similar aesthetic sensibilities. My interest in the fair has been fueled by the fact that my Mother-in-Law grew up in Brooklyn and came to the event as a child. She had valued a medallion shaped like a Heinz Pickle which had somehow gotten lost through the years. When my wife found the item on eBay, she ordered it and snuck it back into her mother's jewelry box, just to mess with her mind and see how long it would take her to find it. The item, a cheap disposable novelty at the time, was welcomed with tearful nostalgia and shared laughter.

As for myself, I was born far too late to have attended the fair, so it remains only a mental construct -- as much an object of fantasy as a historical reality -- yet one which has become more material for me as I have been able to claim some bits and pieces from the fair for my own collection. Ironically, one of the key events at the Fair was the creation of a time capsule which sought to choose representative items from the 1930s and preserve them for the next generation. The time capsule is premised on the idea of scarcity -- that much of the past will be lost -- while today, so much of the junk people bought at the fair is still in circulation, thanks to eBay.

There has never before been such a rich resource for 1939 Worlds Fair buffs than what the New York Public Library has pulled together -- a rich mix of documents, photographs, videos, and audio files, coupled with smart contemporary writing which puts the events of the fair into a range of contexts, from the history of American diet to the ways the Fair was impacted by the encroaching events in Europe, from its place in the history of American media and domestic technology to the spectacular showmanship that shaped the Midway attractions.

Much like the 1939 World's Fair itself, Biblion represents a chance to see the World of Tomorrow...Today. The emergence of new publishing platforms should not simply be greeted with fear by public institutions or by the simple reproduction of traditional print books into new delivery systems. Rather, we need creative people to explore what e-publishing can do that expands the capacities of authors to convey information in powerful new ways, that enhances and broadens the capacity of print to include a wealth of other affordances, and which gets readers thinking about the reading process from new perspectives. Biblion takes a bold new step towards achieving all of these goals and it's fitting that the New York Public Library, one of our most established and cherished national institutions, is helping to guide our progress towards distant horizons. After all, the future is where we are going to be living for the rest of our lives.

The following is an interview with Deanna Lee, one of the primary architects of the Biblion project, which discusses both the discoveries they made digging through the New York Public Library's collection and the ways the design of this new app reflects the library's larger vision for epublishing.

What has been the historic relationship of the New York Public Library and the Fair?

As early as 1936, the Fair's Director of Research and Library, Frank Monaghan, began discussing a "mutually advantageous working agreement" with New York Public Library Director H. M. Lydenberg. The Library would provide research and advice to the Fair--everything from information on previous fairs to input such as Lydenberg's questioning of what language Time Capsule materials should be written in (an exchange included in the app). In exchange, the Library would receive all of the Fair archives and materials "to be preserved for posterity" (and for Biblion readers!).

What are some of the discoveries you made in pulling together the materials for this project?

There were so many treasures that emerged from the collection; and the 700-some items contained in the app represent just the tip of the iceberg. There were the poignant pieces such as the letter from the Czech Consul's wife (actually William Grimes' discovery while researching his book Appetite City--unexpectedly contained in the food boxes), many heartbreaking, and others even ridiculous. A glossary for words coined for the Fair and folders full of letters from people who were desperate for money offering up family members to the sideshows are both cited in the application. All of the contributors made interesting discoveries in the materials--from the real story behind William Grant Still's supposed "color-blind" selection as composer of the Theme Music, complete with administrators' correspondence weighing the pros and cons of how the race issue might play, to the process of how the documents were originally arranged and catalogued.

Finally, a constant source of amusement and admiration were the charming, informative captions by the Fair's PR guru Leo Casey and other publicity staff. In this app, not only do you see the original source items, but also the original backs and captions of the items. Just take a look at Casey's captions throughout the "New York is Calling" story on the AT&T exhibit where visitors could make free long-distance calls (E. B. White's favorite exhibit) and you'll see captions like "'Hey Mom! Send me some money' says Robert Craig, 16 years old, of Akron Ohio. Craig, who hitchhiked to the New York World's Fair, won a free telephone call...and promptly called home for bus fare."

What do you think the organizers of the Fair, who embraced "the World of Tomorrow," would have made of this contemporary mode of publishing?

I think Robert Kohn, the Fair Board of Design member responsible for defining the "Building the World of Tomorrow" theme, would have fully appreciated the potential of e-publishing, and what we have tried to open the door to, with this digital publication. As one can read in the app, in a memo titled "Catholicity of the Fair's Design," his vision of Tomorrow was right in sync with our idea of "Know the Past, Find the Future"--building upon traditional presentations of the written word to achieve a new "variety of expressions." The Fair, he said, "is attempting to use the past and the present as stepping stones toward a much better future," using "things that are available in the world of today and with which, as tools, the 'World of Tomorrow' is to be built." This is a great time for content producers doing just that through new directions in publishing.

Biblion has elements of a magazine -- rich and compelling stories -- and of an archive -- primary documents, photographs, audio and visual materials. What does this suggest about the ways that the multimedia potentials of the ebook may be rewriting the genres of academic and scholarly publication?

Biblion aims to provide an "infoscape" within which readers can not only experience but pursue and explore different story lines--guided by curators and scholars, but towards more personal journeys of academic discovery. It includes a magazine-like compilation of stories, galleries and essays--but moving beyond the traditional magazine experience, each person's reading of a story may lead to different places. It also has the feel of a research archive--but moving beyond the experience of riffling through boxes of original source material to a process by which people group those multimedia source items into what become their personal stories.

There is a definite spatial aspect: the whole layout of information is metaphorically based on taking one into and through the Library stacks, entering through an exhibition wall as you might in a museum. After taking in that exhibition wall orientation, you often want to be able to choose which rooms you visit in which order, and which items to focus upon. Biblion is based on the premise that once original sources are given shape, infinite narratives emerge. We've referred to it as a multilinear reading experience, one in which you can jump from story to story, stack to stack, through multiple combinations of media.

For example, while reading Professor Ethan Robey's essay about the Westinghouse "Battle of the Centuries" competition between Mrs. Modern (with the new electric dishwasher) and Mrs. Drudge (hand-washing), one might follow an inter-story connection to see and learn about the model Electric Kitchen in the Town of Tomorrow. Another reader might be led to a second Westinghouse exhibit, the Time Capsule. Film of the Middleton family visiting the capsule can then lead to additional video of their other visits, or through the audio/video sort function to the "Cavalcade of Centaurs" soundtrack, newsreel, and more contained within the story lines; it's all very organic and integral. A particularly fun multimedia piece is an original piece--a recreation and remix of the Democracity exhibit. Using and incorporating designs, photographs, the script, score, and even lighting directions from the Fair records, we've made a video complete with 3D animation that rebuilds and imagines the experience of visiting the Fair's centerpiece futuristic city.

Overall, the presentation of multimedia was key--not as simple add-ons to written stories, but as elements one could experience in a variety of ways. And so, landscape or "gallery" view allows people to browse horizontally in a way that feels like research, flipping through and zooming in to photographs, memos, press releases, letters, telegrams, film, news clippings, posters, and more. At the same time, you have the option of experiencing the documents and media in a more traditional magazine-like way. In "reader" or portrait view, we've added text breaks to give the documents context and more of a story line, drawn from the extensive press materials by the Fair's public relations whizzes, and the extensive finding aid to the collection compiled by the Library's archivists and curators. The "discovery" here, for us, was actually about the idea of research--and translating it into a different, perhaps less intensive, activity. In order to bridge the ideas of searching/discovery and narrative--we had to provide context in which people would be encouraged to read the documents and see them as more than mere artifacts (things to look at instead of to read and to read about). Text breaks and narrative voice--providing just enough of an introduction as to encourage further exploration--ended up making the documents seem like entry points. In the end, the text breaks made the items feel more like actual content--parts of original and deep stories that in turn could lead to further narrative lines.

I would add that these last ideas came as a revelation to us--an evolution in how we came to present the material. We tried a variety of ways of incorporating and displaying media, including with differing amounts of text. What you see in Biblion today evolved from and is part of a whole discovery process in creating the app with the tremendous developers and designers at Potion.

Do you have other future projects planned? If so, can you share any details?

The Library has a number of new digital projects underway, including a crowdsourcing project now in beta, to transcribe tens of thousands of historical restaurant menus from 1840 to the present that are in our digital gallery menu collection (you can find out more and take part, at menus.nypl.org).

We're also preparing for next year's 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth a multimedia "living archive"--a website featuring music performance videos narrated by professional musicians, students, and anyone interested in contributing to the understanding of Cage's philosophy and the process of interpreting his music. The starting point is our Library for the Performing Arts John Cage Music Manuscript Collection; from there we want to bring the music alive through videos that encourage an exchange of ideas on not only how to perform Cage, but on the questions his work raises of what constitutes music, sound, art and more.

Finally, we're working on a web version of Biblion: World's Fair tied to our Digital Gallery at nypl.org, and an NYPL app allowing users to manage their accounts and search our catalog online from mobile devices.

Deanna Lee is the Vice President for Communications the Library, responsible for promoting the Library and its mission, activities, and collections through publicity, marketing, digital and print publications, multimedia content, and design. She came to NYPL from the Asia Society, and before that worked 20 years in broadcast news--as a senior producer for ABC's World News Tonight, documentary producer, and overseas producer for Nightline.

What can Journalists Learn from The Daily Show: An Interview with Amber Day (Part Two)

What do these news comedy programs add to our understanding of contemporary life which may be missing from mainstream news?

What these programs excel at is deconstructing the scripted quality of the contemporary political conversation. Though we may be aware that politicians and corporate spokespeople are all carefully groomed and staged, and that their PR people are experts at getting the talking points on television, the news media rarely actually point this out, nor do they do the work of moving the conversation beyond the talking points. Satire, then, offers a way of satisfyingly breaking through the existing script. Stewart and Colbert (as well as their counterparts in other countries) have built a reputation on their repeated attempts to demonstrate the ways in which the public political conversation is being manipulated, and to gesture to some of the very real issues that are being obscured.

Is there anything journalists could learn from and emulate from these forms of political humor which would not compromise their self-construction as neutral and objective voices?

Journalists likely shouldn't start copying the fart jokes or sexual innuendo, but they could certainly learn how to hold public figures and pundits more accountable, how to push interviewees beyond the sound-bites, and - oddly- how to do more investigative reporting. When a politician suddenly does an about-face on an issue due to political expediency, Stewart and Colbert seize the opportunity to point it out by juxtaposing particularly revealing clips. Journalists should definitely not aim to ridicule public figures, but they should hold them accountable to their own statements and attempt to ask them hard questions.

How has the shift from broadcast to narrowcast impacted the nature of political humor on television? What do you see as the potential shifts that are occuring with the rise of online content in this site?

Narrowcasting has allowed for the development of much edgier, more critical satire. In the broadcast era, there were very few examples of true satire on television. Programs that did veer toward that territory typically attracted a great deal of controversy and did not last long, as producers were wary of alienating any of the viewing public.

Longer-running programs like Saturday Night Live have had moments of incisive critique (particularly in the beginning), but have stayed far more firmly in the realm of personality-focused political humor discussed above. In the age of narrowcasting, however, there has been an explosion of niche programming (including a great deal of satiric programs) designed to appeal to select audiences without as much worry about potentially offending viewers.

The rise of online content seems to be further fueling the changes brought about by narrowcasting in that it has become easier for content to find receptive fans and for fans to come together around particular material.

Your account of comedy news stresses the careful balance that needs to be achieved between being the clown and being the preacher. Your book ends before Colbert and Stewart staged their march for sanity on Washington. What do you think this event did to the public's perception of them?

That is an interesting question, and I think the answer depends on who you are. The press did not know what to make of the event. For the most part, they interpreted it as silly comedy with no larger message whatsoever. The preacher part of the equation totally went over their heads.

On the flip side, partisans on the political right interpreted it as narrowly political, either assuming that it was somehow meant to be in support of Obama and the Democrats, or that it was aimed solely at poking fun of Glen Beck.

Partisans on the political left were hoping that Stewart and Colbert would step forward as political leaders or activists and were ultimately disappointed.

However, most of the long-time fans I spoke with on the mall that day seemed ecstatic to be there. For fans, the rally was perfectly consistent with both the comedy and the critique they were familiar with from the programs. It highlighted the extreme polarization of political debate in this country and lambasted cable news for playing to the extremes, failing to investigate the facts, and wallowing in sensationalism. This critique was made in playful form throughout the variety acts and then by Stewart in a heartfelt plea at the end. The palpable excitement in the crowd that day was over being able to publicly perform support for that critique.

As far as the performers themselves are concerned, in interviews before and after the event, they were careful to continue maintaining the balance between political truth-teller and clown, and they have continued to do so since then. The subtle change, though, seems to have been the realization that they have earned the space to occasionally indulge in moments of heartfelt expression of their views, regardless of whether it makes for uproarious comedy. Stewart, for instance, dedicated several lengthy segments and then an entire episode to drawing attention toward political foot-dragging on passing the Zadroga act (for compensating sick 9/11 first responders), and crafted a dead-serious episode on his response to the Gabrielle Giffords' shooting.

What do you see as the strengths and limitations of satire as a form of political activism?

The limitation of satire as a form of activism is that it can exacerbate polarization and feed a form of in-group elitism. That being said, what irony and satire are good at is creating a feeling of community, which I would argue is a crucial component of political organizing. Ironic activism works to hail people who already might have similar beliefs or sensibilities and remind them that there are others who share their feelings, fueling the sense of community in opposition.

Many would dismiss that as merely "preaching to the converted," but I argue that the so-called "converted" are often discouraged or apathetic, or are simply not focusing on that particular belief at that moment in time. This sort of activism, then, fulfills the integral function of providing affirmation and reinforcement. Ironic activists challenge their audiences to not only get the joke and fill in the unsaid ironic meaning, but to actively identify with the issues as their own.

Additionally, ironic activism works to push issues that may be peripheral to the wider public debate into the dominant public sphere, ideally helping to incrementally shift or reframe that debate. What the genre is good at is engaging an audience, attracting attention, and rallying support.

Does satire necessarily express an oppositional position or are there ways that satire can be a vehicle of the utopian imagination?

I think it absolutely can do both. Certainly most satire is created in reaction to a situation deemed in need of critique. However, I think it does possess the capability of presenting alternatives or even painting a picture of a utopian future.

That is why I end the book with a discussion of the fake New York Times stunt engineered by The Yes Men (in cooperation with a number of other activist groups) in late 2008. About a week after Obama was elected they printed and distributed thousands of copies of a parody version of the New York Times, but rather than critique the state of the news media or spoof a particular story, the activists created a vision of the world they hoped to see in the not too distant future.

The physical object was a very convincing Times look-alike but the lead headline proclaimed the war in Iraq over, while the rest of the stories covered topics like Congress passing a "maximum wage law" and the creation of a national health care bill. The end result was a wide-ranging utopian vision for what they believed the new Obama era should look like. The overall message was that some of it could be possible if everyone got involved and pushed to make it happen. It was designed precisely to spark the collective utopian imagination.

Amber Day is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Bryant University. She is the author of the book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.

Your comments are, as always, most welcome. Unfortunately, the comments feature here has had to be disabled due to persistent spam. In the meantime, if you want me to post your comments, send them to me at hjenkins@usc.edu, and signal your desire to have them posted.

What can Journalists Learn from The Daily Show: An Interview with Amber Day (Part One)

In case anyone was wondering, I'm not dead...yet. I seem to have spent the past few weeks AWOL on this blog, having gotten my rhythm thrown off over a particular intense period of activity on my part. Every day, I've been deluding myself into thinking I'd jump back into the swing of things, and I've been busy planning some really cool stuff for the summer which I will be announcing soon, but I've been silent. Sorry, guys. This week, I want to share with you an interview with Amber Day, the author of a fascinating new book, Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate. Day writes here about Colbert, Stewart, Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, the Yes Men, not to mention a range of international satirists (mostly British and Canadian) who are at the bleeding edge between comedy and documentary. She challenges those who think news-comedy is trivializing or cynical; she makes a compelling case for why these kinds of expression encourage healthy skepticism and earnest participation in the political process, helping to foster media literacy skills which can allow us to critically engage with political rhetoric (the so-called talking points) and the frames which the mainstream media constructs around current events. She certainly speaks to the controversies which surround such texts and as such, it is a helpful guide to contemporary debates about the relations between news, popular culture, and civic engagement, but she also offers cogent challenges to anyone who finds it quick and easy to dismiss the importance of what's happening here. This book is in dialogue with other contemporary writers on the theme of news-comedy including Stephen Duncombe, Meghan Boler, Jonathon Gray, among others, so I figured it would be of interest to many of my readers. Enjoy this interview with the writer, which will give you a taste of what's in the book.

Your book, Satire and Dissent, discusses comedy news casts (such as The Daily Show), satirical documentaries (such as those of Michael Moore), parodic activists (such as the Yes Men), and to a smaller degree, parodies on YouTube. What do you see as the major similarities and differences in these forms of political humor?

The impetus for beginning this research was the feeling that there was a sort of renaissance taking place in political satire and parody, one made up of strikingly earnest, deeply political forms of satire. So it was definitely the similarities that piqued my interest.

All of the different case studies I focus on have developed out of previous genres, but the contemporary incarnations differ from many of the previous forms in that there is a more complicated inter-penetration of the real and the satiric. Rather than relying on impersonations or fictional scenarios and one-liners about political figures, they are trespassing deeper into the realm of traditional political debate. Michael Moore, for instance, accosts real officials, forcing them to play themselves in the satiric script he has set up. Similarly, when Jon Stewart plays clips of a politician directly contradicting himself, it becomes evidence in the real political debate, while the Yes Men attempt to speak on behalf of real corporations as a way of hijacking the public conversation. All tend to be interested in actively intervening in the debate rather than just commenting on it.

The differences between them are primarily traceable to the different media forms, as there is a fairly wide distance between the aims of a television program and those of an activist group. However, it was the fact that there were so many striking similarities that made me want to investigate why these forms were all exploding at this moment.

As you note, many have assumed that the rise of comedy news programs may foster cynicism about political participant. Yet, throughout the book, you want to challenge these assertions. What evidence do we have that the skepticism fostered by political humor may encourage rather than discourage political participation?

I think it very much depends on the type of political humor. Most of the traditional late-night comedians like Leno and Letterman do traffic in a more cynical form of political humor. The jokes are primarily aimed at the personal foibles of particular public figures, sending the overall message that all politicians are corrupt/lazy/stupid, etc. and that there is not much we can do about it except feel superior. That type of political humor arguably does foster a cynical distrust of politics.

However, I think the satirists surveyed in the book are doing something far different. For starters, both the humor and the critique tend to be aimed at policy as opposed to just personalities. While someone like Jon Stewart, for instance, does not necessarily pass up all opportunities to take pot shots at particular people, his primary focus is more often on a particular bill, an ideological fight, or the way in which a substantive issue is being framed by the news media.

This type of humor is not ultimately about how useless it is to care about political issues; rather it is premised on the feeling that there are political issues out there that we should care deeply about. Indeed, Stewart's interview segments often then demonstrate an attempt to find solutions to problems through earnest debate with his guests.

Further, in the case of the documentarians and activists I examine, their work is aimed almost exclusively at getting people engaged, often imploring their audiences to take action, which is the antithesis of cynical withdrawal. Finally, the fan communities coalescing around these forms overwhelmingly demonstrate an avid engagement with the larger political debate.

As you note, many writers have assumed that parody and satire represent conservative forces on society, where-as many have seen the artists you are exploring as essentially progressive. How do you explain the disjuncture in how we evaluate political humor?

I don't think satire is inherently progressive or conservative. Rather, it can be mobilized in many different ways. There has been a tendency, particularly when examining classical literary satire, to assume that it functions conservatively because it has often been used (as discussed above) to criticize personalities rather than larger political systems or to disparage unconventional behavior, all while the satirists remain safely on the sidelines.

However, as I've said, these satirists are clearly not as removed from the political realm (often even using their own bodies as primary components of the stunts). They are also interested in pointing to alternatives and often in entreating viewers to take action.

Further, these forms of satire tend to be mobilized in a fairly populist register, as the satirists position themselves as stand-ins for the everyman citizen frustrated at the dissembling of public figures and the irresponsibility of the press corps.

I would definitely describe these examples of contemporary political satire as progressive. This certainly does not apply to all types of satire across all media in all periods of time, but it does demonstrate that satire has become a particularly attractive mode of intervening in the larger political debate at this moment.

Amber Day is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Bryant University. She is the author of the book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.

From the VCR to YouTube: An Interview with Lucas Hilderbrand (Part Two)

In talking with fans, it is clear that many of them began "recording" programs well before the availability of videotape. That is, many fans of the Baby Boom generation used audiotape to capture and replay moments from favorite films (smuggling it into the theater) and television shows (using alligator clips attached to their set). What would we learn about the prehistory of video by extending your count back further in time to account for the capacities of audiotape as a means of preserving and exchanging media content? This example suggests some of the challenges, since I gather such practices are rarely discussed in official records of the period, yet loom large in the popular memory of many fans of my age.

It struck me that the histories of video, as they had been written, had not paid enough attention to audio. Not only was the technology for videotape based upon audio recording technologies, but it also seemed to me that popular uses and adoption of the format were similarly modeled upon audio cassette tapes. In addition, my thinking about the grain of videotape was enormously influenced by the histories on sound recording, sound art, and music--for instance, the way intentional distortion or snippets of tape played backward in a song calls attention to a technologically specific aesthetic. Of course video bootlegging had a prehistory in music bootlegging, and of course home taping started with audio. Such audio taping would have implicitly called attention to its own limitations: both in terms of low fidelity recording and the absence of a corresponding image. Yet, such recordings were deeply personal, and likely to either be listened to repeatedly or kept as part of a personal archive.

Your discussion of Superstar highlights Todd Haynes' origins as an independent videomaker who used "bootleg" practices to create and circulate his work. As I am writing these questions, my Tivo is already set to record Haynes' high profile version of Mildred Pierce for HBO. What might a fuller elaboration of Haynes' career tell us about the ways grassroots and independent media production is helping to shape the commercial mainstream? Has anything remained from the "bootleg aesthetic" as he has made this transition?

Todd Haynes was always a filmmaker rather than video artist, but his work is frequently citational. In other words, most of his work builds from pre-existing sources in cinema and popular music, which in and of itself suggests a sensibility of the video era, when one could have access to an array of old films from different periods, and to fan-based remixing. His appropriation has gone from unauthorized music use with Superstar to complicated fabulations of rock history with licensed and original music in Velvet Goldmine to a simulation of mid-century melodramas with Far From Heaven to a remake with intentions of fidelity in Mildred Pierce. Yet, even Mildred Pierce is filtered through 1970s cinematic representations of the 1930s. I don't subscribe to HBO, so I'll have to wait for the DVDs to be available on Netflix to see Mildred Pierce.

Much of the fascination with video has rested with the ability to form our own collections, archives, libraries of materials, which reflect our own idiosyncratic tastes and interests. As you write, "VHS and other analog formats have allowed users to own texts and to make texts their own: to keep them, study them, rework them, copy them, and share them with their friends." Yet, with the drying up of the DVD market, some are predicting we are moving towards a world where we rent access to media but may not be able to collect and own it. Do you think this is a reasonable prediction and if so, what do you see as the losses to our culture implicit in this move towards a new model of access?

I've already suggested something along these lines, but basically, as we move from a tangible media model based on purchasing an object (a physical cassette or DVD) to a streaming media model based upon licensing or subscription, we may lose access to a particular title at any moment when its contract expires or it goes offline. In the tangible model, what is paid for is the hard copy, not the "content", but that tangibility guarantees access to the recording until that copy becomes unplayable. In streaming scenario, we may find ourselves assuming that a particular video will always be available, only to find it's no longer there. I think we've probably all experienced this kind of unreliability with trying to watch something that has been pulled off of YouTube. But it can also happen on Netflix or Hulu. However, the content industry, as far as I know, has never gone to anyone's house and taken back VHS tapes and DVDs that someone has recorded or bought.

You discuss the kinds of feminist media network which emerged through the practices and ethics of video "sharing." To what degree has this politicized conception of "sharing as caring" continued as we moved deeper into the digital era?

We can find numerous examples of using YouTube or other sites for posting and circulating grassroots, activist, or expose videos. But we also see a couple different conceptions of community video emerge. One is Kickstarter, which has become an important way for raising financing for independent media projects, which depends on social networks of friends pledging small financial contributions and an ethos that personal investments are increasingly necessary to mount radical work in an age of limited public funding. But there also continues to be a less overtly politicized model of fan communities forming around reworked media texts that circulate on YouTube yet that may do so in ways that seek to remain stealth. For instance, I have a friend who has recently become deeply involved in the numerous Glee fan videos posted on YouTube centering on Klaine (the relationship between Kurt and Blaine). The comments reveal intense emotional--and eroticized--responses to these videos that essentially form a community based upon feelings, but they are also clearly aware that the videos are uploaded without network permission. So the comments reflect contradictory impulses: the profuse emotional expressions are always in tension with self-policing tactics to never mention the name of the show in the comments, in the hopes that Fox will not track the videos and issue take-down notices.

In your concluding discussion of YouTube, you make a claim that one of its defining characteristics is that of "instantaneity", noting "Users post television clips almost as soon as they have been broadcast," a practice that can call attention to specific moments captured from the endless flow of the broadcast signal. From the start, video has been tied to "time shifting", so what does YouTube add to our relations to the time of Broadcast experience? And how do these new temporal relations shape what becomes the most valued content at this video-sharing site?

One of the things that YouTube reminds us of is the complicated--and often seemingly arbitrary--rules of access for TV. Some broadcasts are truly fleeting, while other shows seem to never go away and recur in syndication with inexplicable frequency and longevity. But YouTube also expands and blurs our understanding of the boundaries of what counts as television by streaming network clips alongside webcam rants, fan remixes, and cat videos. When I've taught television, I have found it impossible to make any assumptions about what students watch now or what their cultural touchstones would have been growing up. The timeshifting of video, cable, and now YouTube only make this more complicated: new popular texts no longer have the same cultural dominance in their own moment, for better or worse, at the same time that our experiences of older texts seem to be less and less periodized. As YouTube comes to seem more everyday and less novel, we are amassing a history of viral videos, too, and so they may have less cultural penetration or staying power in cultural memory. What we see on YouTube are idiosyncratic viral phenomena and long tails.

Lucas Hilderbrand is faculty in film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to core courses on film and TV, he teaches classes on popular sound media, documentary, sex in cinema, Disney, and queer nightlife. He is a contributor to flowtv.org and is currently researching the cultural history of gay bars in the U.S.

From the VCR to YouTube: An Interview with Lucas Hilderbrand (Part One)

What happened before YouTube? It's a question we've addressed here many times before. Many different histories lead to our current moment of video sharing and DIY media-making -- some subcultural (the history of fandom and a range of other communities of practice which are generating new content), some economic, some technological. Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, holds some critical pieces of the puzzle, writing with historiographical sophistication about the emergence of video as a technology and as set of cultural practices, about the debates it sparked especially around shifts in control over production and distribution, about the communities which formed around the sharing of tapes, and about how all of this looks forward to contemporary digital practices. It is a book which raises vital questions and provides a rich historical context for our current debates.

As someone who lived through the era when the VCR was launched, the book brought back many memories of things I had almost forgotten about the dramatic adjustments which the culture made to this transformative and transgressive technology. Working through the book for an interview, I was struck by the fact that I, like many other instructors, have had very little to say about videotape in my current course on new media and culture, something I will work on the next time I teach it.

Given my enthusiasm for this book, I was delighted to be able to interview Hilderbrand and share with you his own reflections on the ways the history of video can help us to understand some contemporary media developments.

As you note, the debates about videotape form an important precursor to current debates about digital technologies -- especially those concerning the implications of expanding grassroots control over media production and circulation and debates around copying and intellectual property. From the start, video was understood as "out of control," as shifting the balance of power between established media producers and distributors, new entrepreneurs, and consumers. What can we learn from tracing the history of video, which might better inform current discussions around file-sharing, piracy, and YouTube?

For me, the stakes of the project were always largely historical and in response to a threat of cultural amnesia. On the one hand, I was interested in intervening in new media studies, which has historically focused on the newness and nowness of technologies. I was intrigued by work that rethought newness in a historical sense, by returning to the 19th century and examining old media in their own moments of newness. But even this more historical work seemed to erase recent and increasingly obsolete technologies from memory and from the histories of new media. It seemed to me that many of the functions and political struggles surrounding new digital technologies had already pre-existed with tape technologies. I thought that it was important not only to complicate the hype surround new media but also to look back at the lessons we could learn from these prior moments that shaped the present.

In terms of questions of policy and sharing, I was struck that so much of the anxiety about piracy and the litigation around copyright seemed like a replay of the controversies that surrounded audiocassettes and videotape when they were introduced. Both the recorded music and the film industries fought tape because they feared that if audiences could make their own copies, that there would be economic collapse for the content industry. For the film studios, at least, VHS proved to be a huge economic boom. The challenge then, as more recently, was to find a new business model that didn't alienate the audience but also provided reasonable and accessible ways to market content.

But the differences between digital distribution and analog tape sharing are also obviously significant in terms of efficiency and scale and in terms of their financial threat, so we need a technologically specific understanding of both the material practices and policy implications. But there's also a major difference between the ways file sharing and burning a DVD work, so even "the digital" needs to be complicated and differentiated.

You describe video as the beginning of "on demand" culture, but also note that this culture has always been constrained on a practical level by issues of availability. How might we carry forward these tensions between the promises and reality of access to think about recent offerings by Amazon, Netflix, and others, that would make more movies and television shows available on demand?

The innovations are largely changes in convenience: as you have suggested in Convergence Culture, convergence often means the availability of the same content across multiple platforms. Even before streaming video, Netflix was functionally the best video store in the world, insofar as it has more selection than any single brick-and-mortar store could, yet even Netflix's inventory was limited to content that had been released on DVD. There remain treasures and obscurities that have never been made available on DVD. And, of course, every tangible technology wears out eventually, so if Netflix's discs of a film got scratched, broken, or lost and that title had gone out of print, it could not be rented. So there is always the limitation of what is made materially available.

For me, streaming video creates a different set of issues. On the one hand, people seem very enthusiastic about Netflix streaming and Hulu. These offer instant streaming access to an ever-increasing range of films and TV shows, and these have been two of the leaders in establishing a new business model that makes online distribution economically viable for the industry. But that model is based upon licensing and subscription rather than purchase. In other words, what is sold is time and access, but that access could be cut off at any time--if the user stops paying or the service's licensing agreement with the rights-owners lapses. Unless users figure out a way to hack, download, and store the material, we are moving toward a model where there is no longer fixity and the assurance of long-term access that a videotape or a DVD allows. We are also moving away from a collector model. This is potentially alarming for fans and especially for teachers and scholars. It will be very hard to teach film and TV when we no longer have stable access or recordings that can be cued. But in the meantime, most people seem to be embracing the streaming model for its convenience. It's been an economic boom for Netflix, and I frequently hear people complain if they have to wait for a DVD to be mailed rather than have streaming access.

Your book argues that issues of access and copying give rise to an aesthetic that recognizes if not respects the reality of "degeneration" which characterizes all analog video. Yet the digital introduces the potential for a "pristine" copy, an image that does not wear down through use. In my own research, I've watched aesthetic shifts in the fan vidding world between early vids which showed rainbow lines and other technical imperfections which emerged from the process of copying and more recent work that uses digital editing techniques and uses DVDs for the source material. What changes do you think have occurred in "video" aesthetics as a consequence of the shift from analog to digital?

First, I'd like to challenge the concept that digital technologies are perfect. Although in principle reproduction should not involve degeneration, most digital reproduction does involve compression, which is a different kind of loss. Perhaps I didn't think this through as clearly as I could have at the time when I was writing: analog reproduction operates through degeneration, digital reproduction through compression. In addition, so many of our interactions with new technologies involve frustration and troubleshooting, whether it's an unreadable DVD or a problem toggling a laptop to a projector or an email missing an attachment. Some of these problems are about mechanical failure, others about human error.

In terms of resolution, I was struck that, when the electronics and content industries began the push for audiences to adopt HD TVs and DVD formats, we saw more rapid adoption of low-resolution video technologies, from YouTube to cameraphones. These low-res options have become increasingly refined to allow for clearer resolution, but it seemed to me that it was convenience rather than pristine quality that generated a massive response. That said, there are numerous instances on YouTube and elsewhere that viewers will prefer a high-quality copy when it's equally available. But we also see a blurring of the two models of "prosumer": producer-consumers often have access to professional-consumer grade technologies that allow for slick fan productions.

Yet evolutions in video aesthetics, I think, make outmoded image resolutions not just dated but increasingly visible. When I started thinking through analog video aesthetics, there wasn't much analytical work to build from, but there are now many popular examples that suggest recognition of what old video technologies look like. The technology has become a style. A friend told me that his iPhone has a filter on its camera to make the image look like VHS. I've seen similar effects that make still images look like Polaroids. So now we have a fetishization of the retro.

Lucas Hilderbrand is faculty in film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to core courses on film and TV, he teaches classes on popular sound media, documentary, sex in cinema, Disney, and queer nightlife. He is a contributor to flowtv.org

and is currently researching the cultural history of gay bars in the U.S.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Four)

Despite your title, you spend less time here talking about "gender" than might be expected from other books which talk about women and gaming. What roles does gender play in your analysis? What claims are you making about the different kinds of experiences and identities female players construct around games?

For me, the book is not about gender. It is about women and girls who take gaming beyond gaming to become designers within well-designed passionate affinity spaces that change their lives and the lives of others. It about these women and girls because we believe that what they are doing, how they are doing it (e.g., combing technical modding with modding for emotional intelligence and social interactions), and what they are accomplishing is on the cutting edge of where all of us are going--male or female.

Women and girls are leading the way here as they are in many other areas of society. There has been lots about modding for games like Half-Life and its connections to technical skills--and indeed this is important. But much less has been written about modding the Sims to create challenges and game play that is simultaneously in the game world, in the real world, and in writing things like graphic novels.

Such modding is the force that sustains a passionate affinity space that builds artistic, technical, social, and emotional skills. We wrote the book because these woman and girls rock, not because they are women and girls.

Also I had a sin to expiate. I had left the Sims and women gamers pretty much out of my first book on games. Betty helped me see that The Sims is a real game and a very important one because it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming. She helped me see that how women play and design is not "mainstream" (see comments above) but cutting edge, the edge of the future. If it were leprechauns that were the cutting edge of the future I would have written about them.

In the case of The Sims, you have a designer -- Will Wright -- who has been outspoken in his desire to empower his users to construct community and build their own content around his games. How does this goal on the part of the designer impact the kinds of stories you can tell about these women's relations to this particular game?

See answer above. Will Wright is doing in an extreme way what lots of game designers want to do: empower people to think like designers, to organize themselves around the game to become learn new skills that extend beyond the game, and to express their own creativity. Many say the Sims is not a game--and I myself used to believe that. But as Derrida would remind us, what we find marginal is often actually central. Out book argues that games like the Sims--and gaming beyond gaming--will eventually be the new center of gaming or maybe something eventually all together different.

As you get into forms of cultural production such as fan fiction, I start to wonder why is it important for you that this a book about gaming rather than about the much wider array of forms of participatory culture that have emerged in a networked society.

It is important to me because I do not want to compete with you for the participatory culture space. Further, I want to stress production, though I know well you care about production as well. There are some--not you--who in education celebrate participation in a mindless way. They argue that just because people are participating they are learning. But people can participate in ways that allow themselves to be "colonized" by a group or to gain much less than others in the group or even to be used as an example that makes others look good. I think a demand that everyone learns to produce and design--to be a "priest"--can mitigate these dangers, though I am sure that dangers remain.

I know you have expressed in the past great skepticism that our current schooling system can adjust to the potentials of this more participatory culture. Without school involvement, how do we insure a more equitable access to the kinds of formative experiences you describe in the book? On the other hand, how does a school culture so focused on standardized processes and measurements maintain anywhere near the flexibility to respond to personal passions that you've identified in The Sims?

What I have called "situated embodied problem-focused well-designed and well-mentored learning" will either come to exist primarily for elites who will get it 24/7 on demand across many institutions and their homes or it will be given to everyone.

In the first case, the regular ("mainstream") public school system will continue to teach the basics accountably and will exist to produce service workers. In the second case, we will have to reinvent a public sphere and transform our view of society, civic participation, markets, and what constitutes justice, fairness, and a good life. We are headed the first way right now, but there is always hope for the future. Both you and I are trying to push the train to the second future and not the first, though, in the end, in the future the real actors and activists in this "game" will be younger (and often browner) than we are.

The current accountability regime MUST be removed. It is immoral, stupid, and counterproductive. We define accountability around teachers failing to teach children. This is like doing accountability for surgeons by waiting to see how many people they kill and then getting rid of them if they kill too many.

Far better to have accountability back when teachers and surgeons were trained, which means radical changes in Schools of Education and universities. Surely we should not wait to see how many patients they kill or kids they screw. Teachers are punished if a kid's test scores go down, but scores could go down for many reasons, not just what the teacher did in one year. This is like punishing a surgeon when a patient dies in back surgery because his wife poisoned him--and lots of things are poisoning our children, not, by any means, mostly teachers.

What we need accountability for is curriculum and pedagogies, not teachers per se (who should have been well trained and then held to high standards that most of them can and do meet, as in the case of surgeons). Today curricula and pedagogies are often politicized, seen as right wing or left wing. If we could agree on a common measure (say a NAEP test or some other test we can come to agree on), a measure that is given to a sample of students (not given to all), so that it cannot be taught to, then we can simply say which curricula and pedagogies correlate with strong or weak results on the common measure. This is what we do with drugs and surgical procedures.

In the end, though, we MUST change our assessment system or we will never have new learning, since assessment systems, in an accountability regime, drive what is taught and how it is taught. Today's games and other digital media allow for learning to be so well designed that finishing the "game" means you have learned and mastered what it being "taught". No one needs a Halo test after finishing Halo on hard and no one should need an algebra test after finishing an equally well-designed algebra curriculum.

Furthermore, games and digital media can collect, mine, and artfully represent copious moment-by-moment data on a great many variables. So we can, with such data, assess learning across time in terms of growth; we can discover different trajectories towards mastery and use this information to help learners try new styles; and we can compare and contrast learners with thousands of others on hundreds of variables tracked across time (as we already do with Halo for instance).

When the day comes where we can contrast such assessments (based on growth, trajectories, multiple variables represented in ways that inform and develop learners, and comparison among thousands of people sorted into a zillion different types for different purposes) with our now standard "test score"--one number taken on one day--the game will be over. The choice will then be stark. Either we will develop only some or we develop everyone. The bell curve will be gone. No one needs always to be "in the middle" ("mainstream"). Everyone can, in some places and at some times, be at the very top of their game.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Three)

The part of your arguments for affinity spaces which get the most push-back from my students are your claims that "a common passion-fueled endeavor -- not race, class, gender, or disability -- is primary." To many, these seems like a very utopian claim for these spaces, which you have been careful to describe as not "communities" in the way that term is most often used. Yet, surely, inequalities impact participants at all levels, from access to the technology to access to basic skills and experiences, to access to the social networks which support their learning. How can we address these very real inequalities while recognizing that there are indeed ways where class, race, and gender matter differently in the kinds of spaces you are describing?

The statement that passionate affinity spaces are focused on a shared passion (and shared endeavors and goals around that passion) and not race, class, and gender (while allowing people to use such differences strategically as their own choices) is not an empirical claim, it is a stipulation. Something is not a passionate affinity space if it does not meet this condition. So perhaps there are none. But, then, such spaces become a goal and an ideal and we can talk about how close or far away from that goal and ideal we are.

On the other hand, it does little good to follow the standard liberal line that race, class, and gender are always and everywhere one's determining identities. This, for example, locks an African-American child into always being "an African American". A white kid can be a "Pokémon fanatic" or an expert modder, but the African American kid is always "an African-American Pokémon fanatic" or an "African-American modder".

We are never, none of us, one thing all the time. Sure, the world continuously tries to impose rigid identities on all of us all the time. But it is our moral obligation--and one necessary for a healthy life--to resist this and to try to create spaces where identities based on shared passions or commitments can predominate.

In reality, the real identities that count in life most--that define us and make us who we are--are rarely named. They are identities like "a person who would never kill someone because they did not share his or her religion" or "a person who would rather love and be loved than be rich" and a great many more such as these. These sorts of identities constitute our most significant form of human sharing and bonding. And such identities are where the deepest divisions among people occur.

It may be here that I diverge from some others. I have repeatedly seen people who are pissed off because someone said they or their work were not "mainstream". If someone called my work "mainstream" or called me "mainstream" I would be insulted. If I discovered that my work or myself was "mainstream", I would retire or find something else to do. Note, by the way, that NO good academic wants to be mainstream. If something--say, what they teach in high school--is called "mainstream history", you can bet no good young historian wants to do it and you will find next to no one, old or young, in a good history department with such a sign on his or her door.

Chibi-Robo, Ico, Psychonauts, and Shadow of the Colossus are not mainstream games. They are however great games and their designers will be long remembered when many mainstream designers are long forgotten. Remember, too, that 19th century America had only two world-class poets (Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman) and at the time neither was remotely close to mainstream. One never published and the other published his own book himself and reviewed it under various names. The monk Mendel wanted to be a high school biology teacher, but he failed his state teacher's test and was relegated to the monastery's garden. He was unknown in his time, entirely non-mainstream, and yet also the only man in his time who actually knew biology (including Darwin, who knew less than nothing about genetics), though no one knew that until much later.

Throughout the book, you celebrate "grit" as a key virtue of these new forms of cultural participation. How are you defining "grit"? Is this a skill that is valued as much in contemporary schooling?

"Grit"--originally used by Angela Duckworth in a somewhat different way--is passion plus persistence. Human expertise is a practice effect, it requires hours of effort, practice, and persistence past failure. This is unlikely to happen without passion. School has a very hard time producing grit because different people have different passions (and school is about everybody learning the same thing) and passions are something people choose (and school is often not about choice). Furthermore, interest is kindled into passion inside things like passionate affinity spaces and related sorts of social formations and these are hard to come by in schools.

In modern developed countries, only grit will lead to work or lives that are rewarding, given that most jobs will be service jobs. The passion one develops may well be in an out of work space and off market. But there has to be some space where a person has a sense of agency, intelligence, control, and creativity.

Some people have a good deal of grit at school because they believe that putting up with even badly designed schooling will lead to a good college and a successful career. It will lead to a good college, but no longer necessarily to a good career.

The world is full to bursting with educated and talented people, many of whom can compete for the same jobs across the world. Being just good at what others are also good at, in standard ways developed in standard sorts of education, will just put one in competition with millions of well-trained Chinese and Indians and many many others across the globe. In my own view, one needs to have a passion for something and master it in a creative way--it almost does not matter what it is. It could be, for instance, carving art out of avocado pits.

Whatever it is, avocado pits included, you will find via the Internet a critical number of people across the world with whom you can join with for social learning and among whom one can rise to status, respect, and a sense of real contribution and, in some cases, profit (there is not a lot of competition, at least yet, for the top places among avocado artists and, thus, a whole area is waiting to become "hot").

Many of the projects coming out of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative embrace the importance of passion-driven or interest-driven networks. Yet, increasingly, we are being asked to think about young people who do not have or have not yet discovered driving passions of the kinds the book discusses. How do you respond to critics of "geeking out" as an educational ideal? What can we do for kids who "just don't care"?

A person who cannot find a passion is going to be in trouble in our modern world as far as I am concerned. Many people will gain status, respect, control, and creativity off market (since not everyone can gain these things on market for profit in a world where, in developed countries, only 1/5 of people will be well paid). But all people need to gain these things.

All our schools and institutions are set up very poorly to help kids find their passion. We want to teach "what every citizen should know" in things like science and math (and we succeed, all Americans pretty much know the same things about science, mathematics, and geography, which is nothing).

We think we can force people to learn things. We treat collaboration as cheating. We do not give kids the time--and places where the cost of failure is low--to try out a variety of interests and identities in an attempt to discover passion or passions. We do not let kids engage with professional-like tools and activities in areas like urban planning, game design, or journalism.

Rather, we define everything to be learned in terms of content names like "algebra" or "civics" even when this "content" might be best learned as a tool set for other activities like 3-D design. We let rich kids experience what passion and practice can bring one in the world and what the routes to success are, but we do not let poor kids have this knowledge. We treat certifications and degrees as more important that actual talent and achievements.

Now what about people who just "don't care"? Barring serious illness, there are none. Every baby is born as a passion-seeking being. That is why children acquire their native languages and master much of their cultures without formal schooling.

One day, when my son Sam was a mere toddler, I found some plastic figures at the grocery store. I had no idea what they were. I brought a couple home and gave them to Sam. They were Pokémon and they led to interest, passion, and practice that made him a passionate gamer. That passion for gaming led, in ways no one could have predicted, to his current passion for acting and theater, on the one hand, and for Africa, on the other (since Age of Mythology hooked him on mythology and then on cultures beyond his own).

School is defined around outcomes it knows in advance, but does not meet for many children. Real learning kindles passions that make new kinds of people--and people capable of making themselves over again when they need to--but does not know or predict the outcome and does not, by any means, insist on the same outcomes for everyone.

MORE TO COME

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.