Astroturf, Humbugs, and Lonely Girls

Last week, reader Todd asked me what I thought about LonelyGirl15. At the time, I had only a passing awareness of the Lonely Girl phenomenon. Just in time, though, my friend Zephoria posted a very interesting discussion of LonelyGirl15 over at her blog, Apophenia. Here's her explanation of the back-story:

For those who aren't familiar, videos by LonelyGirl15 started appearing on YouTube over the summer. She's supposedly a teenager who is home schooled by religious parents who don't know she's creating videos online. Her friend Daniel helps her with the videos and they often talk back and forth across their videos. It's rather endearing but too good to be true.

As more videos popped up, people started questioning whether this was real or not. Speculation mounted and fake lonelygurls started to appear. People created videos to comment on LonelyGirl15. People flocked to the LonelyGirl15 forum to discuss. Problem is the LonelyGirl15 domain was registered before the videos started appearing. People started tracking down more and more clues, trying to hone in on what it was, who was behind it. Suspicion mounted. In classic fan style, people dove right down and tore apart all of the data. Quite a few thought that this was an ARG, Jane McGonigal style, but she denied involvement on NPR. Others thought it was an advert or some marketing campaign.

The clues people dug up were fascinating. Personally, i was intrigued by "Bree's" MySpace profile. I knew it was fake but i didn't know if the YouTube LonelyGirl15 made the MySpace profile LonelyGurl15. Why did i know it was fake? Well, i read too many teenage MySpaces. Not sure i should give away clues as to how to create a real-looking fake MySpace profile. ::wink::

Then press started covering it. Hands down, The New York Times had the best coverage. I can't help but wonder if the NYTimes knew the truth because they are certainly using the same language: "Hey There, Lonelygirl - One cute teen's online diary is probably a hoax. It's also the birth of a new art form." If so, go Adam for good reporting!

And sure enough, the artists who had created the original Lonelygirl15 videos revealed their identities last week:

With your help we believe we are witnessing the birth of a new art form. Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story-- A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the internet. A story that is interactive and constantly evolving with the audience.

Right now, the biggest mystery of Lonelygirl15 is "who is she?" We think this is an oversimplification. Lonelygirl15 is a reflection of everyone. She is no more real or fictitious than the portions of our personalities that we choose to show (or hide) when we interact with the people around us. Regardless, there are deeper mysteries buried within the plot, dialogue, and background of the Lonelygirl15 videos, and many of our tireless and dedicated fans have unearthed some of these. There are many more to come....We want you to know that we aren't a big corporation. We are just like you. A few people who love good stories. We hope that you will join us in the continuing story of Lonelygirl15, and help us usher in an era of interactive storytelling where the line between "fan" and "star" has been removed, and dedicated fans like yourselves are paid for their efforts. This is an incredible time for the creator inside all of us.

As my son succinctly put it, "that's pretty bad news for lonelyboy15."

But it may not be news to many of the people who have suspected all along that Lonelygirl15 was a fake, a fraud, a hoax, or some other form of fiction. She was perhaps "fake" the way professional wrestling is fake -- that is a fake we are supposed to see through and enjoy nevertheless

. Prehistory

When I first saw the Lonelygirl15 videos, I was simultaneously reminded of two previous works. On the one hand, I was reminding by the autobiographical pixelvision films produced by teenage filmmaker Sadie Benning which became a cause celebre in the art world in the 1990s: here was a teenage dyke sitting in her bedroom, speaking with extraordinary frankness to a camera that was either handheld or propped up on her desk and which produced grainy and very authentic feeling images. In this case, the "authentic" teen girl turned out to be the daughter of an established avant garde artist who used his connections to the art world to help launch here career.

The second was Rachel's Room, an ongoing series of fictional videos produced by Sony Interactive, a few years ago, which also consisted of a teenage girl sitting in her bedroom, talking to the camera, sprawling on her bed, fighting with her parents, and developing a form of serial fiction which unfolded day by day on the web. In this case, my associate Alex Chisholm and I stood on the set in Hollywood and saw the amount of technical support which went into producing the effect of a normal teen's home videos.

The first was clearly marked as nonfiction, the second represented what might be called an epistolary fiction for the web.

ARGs and Epistolary Fictions

Yet, with Lonelygirl15, there was uncertainty about what we were watching: was it fiction or nonfiction? Was it made by an amateur or a commercial entity? Was it really what it seemed or did it represent a gateway to something else -- the rabbit hole into an ARG?

After all, ARGS do not explicitly mark their fictional status, often mimic real world documents, and thus provide another narrative frame for thinking about the relationship between fiction and reality. A while back, in Technology Review, I made the argument that ARGs (which constitute a modern variant on an older literary practice):

Alternative [sic] reality gaming could be seen as a 21st century equivalent of a much older literary form -- epistolary fiction. Many early novels, including Pamela (1740) Les Liaisons Dangereuse ( 1782 ) or The Sorrows of Young Werther (1815), consisted of fictional letters, journals, diaries, and newspaper accounts, which were presented by their authors with little acknowledgement of their fictional status. The authors often claimed to have found the materials in an old trunk or to have received them anonymously in the mail....The content of earlier epistolary novels turned readers into armchair detectives and amateur psychologists, piecing together the events of the story from multiple, fragmentary, and sometimes contradictory, always subjective, accounts. These ARGs take on a more public dimension, exploring conspiracies or mysteries which exploit the expansive potential of the transmedia environment. Though read in private, these early novels became the focus of parlor room discussions as people compared notes about the characters and their situations. ARGS today offer a very similar experience of mutual debate and collaborative interpretation for a society just beginning to experiment with what cybertheorist Pierre Levy calls collective intelligence.

Provocations

But, ARGs don't just blur fact and fiction. ARGS invite us to do something with the information they give us: we don't just watch; we act. Similarly, as I suggest in Convergence Culture, viewers are increasingly responding to reality television with a problem-solving mentality -- trying to track down what they can from various channels to uncloak what they can before it is broadcast.

This is the nature of art (fictional or nonfictional) in the age of collective intelligence: the work provokes us, incites us into action. Indeed, as an art project, Lonelygirl15 seems designed to encourage our participation. Yet we don't know what we are supposed to do if we do not correctly identify the genre within which the text operates: do we dig deeper into the text in search of clues (as in the case of an ARG) or do we go beyond the text in search of reality (as in the case of reality spoiling)? In this case, the public's uncertainty about the status of these images made figuring out the source of these messages the central task. The mystery overwhelmed the content -- perhaps more than the art students anticipated and forced them to out themselves so that we might hopefully engage with their work on another level.

As Apophenia writes:

They are telling their story, truth or fiction. Of course, this makes many people very uncomfortable. They want blogs and YouTube and MySpace to be Real with a capital R. Or they want it to be complete play. Yet, what's happening is both and neither. People are certainly playing but even those who are creating "reality" are still engaged in an act of performance. They are writing themselves into being for others to interpret and the digital bodies that emerge often confound those who are doing the interpretation. In many ways, this reminds me of the Fakester drama during the height of Friendster. As one of the instigators behind the Fakester manifesto explained, "none of this is real."

Something of the uncertainty that the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon has provoked can be seen by looking behind the scenes at Wikipedia where a heated debate has broken out about whether there should be a post about the phenomenon and what would constitute verifiable information on the topic. The blurry boundaries between fact and fiction here seem to have thrown the categories and logics by which Wikipedia works into crisis.

We'll Always Have Paris

In this regard, I am struck by the parallels last week between the Lonelygirl15 story and what happened with Paris Hilton and her new album. Here's how MTV news described the story:

British graffiti artist Banksy has placed 500 doctored copies of the heiress' debut CD in 48 U.K. record stores, replacing Hilton's album with 40 minutes of remixes and altering the cover to advertise titles including "Why Am I Famous?" and "What Am I For?," according to BBC News. The guerrilla artist also changed pictures of Hilton on the CD sleeve to show her topless and with a dog's head, but kept the original barcode intact -- which means that some may buy the LP thinking it is the real thing. A representative for record chain HMV told BBC News that it has recovered seven altered copies from stores but no customers have returned a tampered version of the disc. The altered copies also include a Hilton remix CD credited to "DM," which Danger Mouse's management confirmed is him. "It's hard to improve on perfection, but we had to try," the Gnarls Barkley mastermind said in a statement. Danger Mouse and Banksy are believed to have met while shopping for costumes in SoHo, New York. ...

So, in order to comment on the fakeness of Hilton's celebrity, someone created fake versions of her album and smuggled them back in the store. Back in the day, this would have been the work of amateur culture jammers, like the notorious Barbie Liberation Army, but now this is -- guess what -- an art project involving, among others, Danger Mouse, himself a star with a cult following for his bold mash-ups of other people's music. And as we speak, the fake Paris Hilton albums are going for ever larger sums on Ebay. So, how do we understand the nature of this particular recording: is it culture jamming or commodificiation? Is it art or self-promotion? Is it a fake Paris Hilton cd or a Danger Mouse/Banksy "original"? And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? What forms of participation does it require from us?

Humbugs and Network Culture

Before we dismiss this all as "postmodern", keep in mind that the epistolary novels discussed earlier also played with our uncertainty about the line between reality and fiction within a new medium (the printed book) whose conventions had not yet been firmly established. And keep in mind the elaborate play between reality and fiction set in motion in the 19th century, which writer Neil Harris has described as the golden age of the "humbug." Harris writes about the proliferation of fake "mermaids" and stone giants in the 19th century at a time when knowledge was in flux, science was at least partially amateur and participatory, new discoveries (both anthropological and technological) were being made every day, and people wanted to acquire new skills at discernment to keep up with the pace of cultural churn. In other words, there seems to be a fascination with blurry categories at moments of media in transition -- it is one of the ways we try to apply evolving skills in a context where the categories that organize our culture are in flux.

Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks describes network culture in terms of the intermingling between commercial, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and amateur modes of cultural production. We might extend his concept of a network culture to describe not only one where these forms co-exist through the same media platform but also one where the lines between them start to blur, where it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where one ends and the other starts. Indeed, we are once again in an era where the "humbug" takes on new significance -- as we learn to apply our skills, collectively and individually, to try to reassert order in the chaos which is created at a site like You-Tube where amateur produced and appropriated commercial product co-exist often in unmarked forms.

Astroturf

To be sure, artists are not the only ones who are exploiting our uncertainty about the source and status of content within this new networked culture. Commercial interests and political interests are also increasingly acting in unscrupulous ways -- inserting fake grassroots media content into YouTube and other such sites in hopes that it can be passed off as authentic bottom-up material. There's even a word for this fake grassroots culture -- Astroturf. Here's a classic example of Astroturf. Earlier this summer, The Wall Street Journal outted a YouTube video spoofing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth not as the product of an amateur but rather as the work of a Washington lobby group eager to discredit the former vice president:

The maker of the Gore-baiting spoof is credited as Toutsmith, a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills, California. The video appears to have been produced on a home computer, with a budget of pennies. But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has discovered that Toutsmith is actually operating from Washington, on a computer registered to a PR company called DCI Group. The company's clients happen to include the multinational oil company ExxonMobil. If the video was produced by DCI Group, it would not be the PR company's first attempt to produce its own content. The company operates a news and opinion website called Tech Central Station, which is sponsored by companies including Exxon, General Motors and McDonald's. The website takes a highly skeptical view of climate change, and is openly anti-Gore.

All of this brings me back to the debate which has been brewing here around my post about the efforts to save Stargate. One side has been asserting that the campaign I described as grassroots activism may be having closer ties to the production company, MGM, than has been acknowledged, a charge that the group leaders deny. And others are writing to suggest that it really doesn't matter since the goal is for fans and producers to work together to find a solution which allows them to keep a favorite television show in production. I have been trying not to take sides here. I don't know where the truth lies. But I am really fascinated by the controversy itself as an illustration of the increased blurring of distinctions between media producers and consumers.

As I suggest in Convergence Culture, sometimes these groups are making common cause facilitated by the shared communication context provided by the web. They are speaking to each other through multiple channels -- public and private, open and closed, commercial and grassroots -- and working together on an ad-hoc basis. Other times, the groups are steadfastly opposed to each other, pursuing their own interests in their own ways. And sometimes, nobody is certain what is going on. Are we working together or are we being exploited? Could both be going on at the same time? Or could our suspicion of hidden motives get in the way of pursuing common interests, leaving us always looking for conspiracies where none exists?

Chaos or Churn?

Earlier, I shifted between calling this chaos (a negative term no matter how you cut it) and churn (a more positive spin). Writers like Virginia Postrel (The Future and Its Discontents) and Grant McCracken (Plentitude) use the term, churn, to describe a culture of rapid turnover and constant change, describing this uncertainty and unpredictability as generative. Churn encourages the experimentation and innovation at the very heart of the creative process. Clearly, we should be hunting out Astroturf which is simply a new form of spam but we should also be enjoying the creative spark which drives something like Lonelygirl15 or Danger Mouse. We should, like the 19th century patrons of P.T. Barnum, take pleasure in trying to see through a good humbug. We should be going into all of this with our eyes wide open but we should also be prepared to accept impure motives and hybrid works that emerge at the nexus between different levels of cultural production.

Thanks to danah boyd, Zhan Li, and Anna Pauline Van Someren for information included in this post.

Behind the Scenes: Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Part One)

A little while ago, I raised the question of whether one can be a "fan" of high culture and was pleased to see a high level of interest in this question. I am excited to report that there is a new book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, which pushes even deeper into the question of how we evaluate various forms of popular culture and how those evaluations do or do not connect with the ways we assess work in high culture. Alan McKee, who teaches in the Creative Industires program at Queensland University of Technology (which I increasingly think of as the sister program to Comparative Media Studies), has brought together a world class mix of academics, fans, and journalists, who share with us what they see as "best of breed" examples across a range of different sites of popular aesthetics. So we get Will Brooker on the Best Batman Story (The Dark Knight Returns), Sue Turnbull on the Best Serial Killer Novel (Red Dragon), Thomas McLaughlin on the Best Basketball Player (Michael Jordan), Simon Frith on the Best Disco Record ("Never Give Up"), Sara Gwenllian Jones on the Best Villain in Xena:Warrior Princess (Alti), and John Hartley on the Best Propaganda (Humphrey Jennings, The Silent Village).

As this sample of the categories and judgements suggest, all of these claims are open to debate and that's precisely the point. Contributors were asked to offer "defensible" but not "definitive" choices and then to deal precisely with the terms of debate that might shape the judgements we make in these particular sectors. If the categories here seem like a grab bag -- and trust me, there are some even more surprising categories here such as the Best Motorbike, the Best Australian Romance Novelist, and the Best Website for Men who have Sex with Other Men -- then it is because popular culture is not a unified field, not one thing that can be simply contrasted with high culture. (Of course, high culture is also not one thing but that's a debate for another day.)

We would never judge Lisistrada, Everyman, Mother Courage, Oklahoma, A Noh drama, and A Doll's House by the same criteria -- each gets read according to terms defined minimally by a specific tradition and historical period and in some cases, by specific artists. (I never stop laughing at the college journalist who reviewed a Brecht play and complained that he just couldn't identify with the characters.) So, why should we apply a single set of criteria to talk about popular culture and why in the world should that criteria get defined by the norms of high culture?

I will admit that I am biased since I have a piece in this particular collection -- The Best Contemporary Mainstream Superhero Comics Writer (Brian Michael Bendis) -- which I will excerpt here in a few days time. But I have rarely enjoyed reading any "academic" book as much as this one. McKee is an editor who values lively and personally engaged writing, someone who pushed all of the contributors to write to a general readership, and for once, they listened. I never knew academic prose could be this fun! And underlying it all are some powerful ideas about how we value the culture we consume.

I wanted to share some of McKee's own thinking on this topic with my readers, so I asked him to address some core questions about the book's premises and will run the interview here in two parts.

What constitutes a "beautiful thing" in the book's terms and how do we recognize

one when we see it?

A 'beautiful thing' is the best example of an area of culture - the best serial killer novel, pair of sneakers, disco record ... I decided to use 'beautiful' rather than 'best' because it ties us into the tradition of aesthetic judgments that has been jealously guarded by fans of high culture. And I love the idea that, in the case of the chapter on 'the best website for men who have sex with men', that webpages full of arse-fucking can be, in their own way, 'beautiful'.

And how do we judge what's 'the best' in a given area? How do we recognize a beautiful thing when we see it? The key here is that 'we' might not recognize it - 'we' - cultural theorists, researchers, academics - may in fact have to speak to the experts in the area, and ask them to explain to us what is beautiful and why it is so.

That's a challenging idea for some Cultural Studies academics. Because there's a still a strong remnant in Cultural Studies of the Literary Studies idea that what distinguishes us as academics - the reason that we're worth our salaries - is because we've learned how to 'read' texts better than other people. Traditionally in Literary Studies one learned to read more 'sensitively', to understand the art in books that common people simply couldn't see (my first degree was in Literary Studies - in fact I got a medal for the 'Most Distinguished Shakespearean Scholar' at the University of Glasgow! - so I'm familiar with this tradition). In Cultural Studies, it's a similar thing - except we're trained to think that our readings are better, not because they're more sensitive to the art, but because we can see the 'truth' of ideology, exploitation, hidden capitalist messages, that the masses don't see because they're blinded by hegemonic processes, or not fully educated ...

And so, to abandon that idea, and to think that we might actually be interested in - respectful of, and learn from - consumers talking about the interpretations that they make of texts ... well, it's a challenging idea for a lot of academics!

That of course, leads on to the question - if we're not intellectually superior to the masses, and they don't need us to lead them out of the darkness and show them the correct, 'true', anti-capitalistic interpretations of culture, then what is the purpose of academics? In brief I think that the answer lies in focusing on the 'anthropological' element of defining cultures. Nobody suggests that anthropologists should be telling the people they observe that their culture is wrong, and they're blind not to see that. Personally, I don't agree with some of the claims that anthropology makes to objectivity. But it's still acknowledged that anthropology - trying to understand how a culture operates - can produce valuable knowledge.

A central goal of this book is to revitalize the place of evaluation in the writing about popular culture. Why do you think Cultural Studies has moved so far away from a focus on evaluation and what have we lost as a consequence?

I completely understand why Cultural Studies has a problem with evaluation - I've avoided it myself for many years. It's because there has been so little awareness by academics in any area - including in Cultural Studies - of the aesthetic systems of popular culture. That meant that you could pretty much guarantee that whenever anybody said 'we have to reintroduce aesthetics/evaluation into Cultural Studies', what they meant was 'we have to reintroduce high-culture aesthetic systems into the study of popular culture - and start studying television programs in terms of literary values such as philosophical themes, and references to T S Eliot', and so on. Which is, of course, completely the wrong way to go about things.

Why have we thought that 'aesthetic systems' automatically means 'high culture's aesthetic systems?'. Well, it's been hard to get away from the idea that an aesthetic system must be unitary. The idea that we could have multiple, irreconcilable, overlapping aesthetic systems coexisting has taken a long time to get established. I suppose it's because, in order to do that, you pretty much have to throw out everything in the philosophy of aesthetics from Kant onwards and start again. Which I'm pretty happy to do, personally. But I know that not everyone is!

What has really surprised - and upset - me, working in Cultural Studies is the extent to which Cultural Studies has managed to smuggle traditional forms of aesthetic evaluation back in by the back door. We don't say that art is superior to popular culture because it reveals insight into universal truths about humanity. Oh no - we say that art is superior to popular culture because art is politically progressive, and genuinely challenges capitalism, whereas popular culture is inextricably tied up in the capitalist economy within which it is produced .... It's so depressing to hear this kind of nonsense. It really is just traditional snobbery dressed up in new arguments. And that has been the place that evaluation has played in Cultural Studies. We've kind of forgotten what we all know to be true, about the power relations and class relations involved in making judgments about what is good and bad culture - and fallen right back into lazy thinking about art being superior to mass culture. I blame Adorno. I mean, you read his work on 'The culture industry', and it's so obvious that he doesn't know anything about popular culture, he's never consumed any popular culture - in fact, it seems like he's never even spoken to anybody who's ever consumed any popular culture!

So we've thoughtlessly accepted old prejudices about cultural value, smuggled in via the back door, which is one problem. And a second problem is that by refusing to study evaluative judgments in an anthropological sense, we've actually accepted the myth, perpetuated by the snobs, that mass culture is all the same. We actually play into their hands. But you can make an anthropological, or perhaps a sociological, study of aesthetic systems - one that asks how the consumers of popular culture make these judgments. And that isn't the opposite of aesthetic thinking - it's directly linked to it. It means that you can ask people 'Why do you love this program, this book, this comic, so much?'. And then listen to their answers. It's a simple idea - and yet, it hasn't been done before.

The question you posed to your contributors -- what constitutes the "best" in class within a given form of popular culture -- is the stuff of many barroom conversations. I suppose that's part of the point: we can't talk about popular

culture without debating values and evaluation. But what do we as academics bring to that discussion which wasn't already a part of fan knowledge and expertise?

I gestured towards this question before - if we're not telling people that their interpretations are wrong, what is our function? How do we earn our hefty Professorial salaries, with associated benefits? As I said above, there is an anthropological function, trying to understand cultures better. And more than this, we can then act as translators, letting groups know about each other. The information that we gather is fan knowledge. We can bring that together, synthesise it, and put it into forms that different groups can access. Our skills here are in editing, building networks, understanding genres and communication and so on. And ultimately we can then help different parts of culture to be aware of each other. That's an extremely important - and a very political - thing to do. I'm an old fashioned utopian, and my vision of the ideal world is a soppy, hippie, love-drenched place where people actually find ways to live together. I reveal this at one point in the book where I get all misty-eyed and say "knowing that there are people who do love and think about and discuss things that don't engage me isn't a threat to my way of thinking. It's a source of delight. The more joy that's in the world, the better for all of us, I say". I know - I'm a sad old hippie. But it does seem to me that one of the most positive aspects of our mature capitalist democracies is that different groups in society are becoming more and more familiar to each other, and there's an increasing interchange of ideas between cultures - across races, genders, sexualities and nationalities. I think that pretty much everybody would agree that the average, non-university-educated white man, for example, currently knows more about Black culture, or women's culture, or queer culture, than they have at any point in the history of Western culture, simply because of the increasing visibility and recognition of those cultures in mass popular entertainment.

I'm afraid I also have to say that one of the main forces working against such cultural exchange is humanities academics and cultural theorists, who want to insist that there is only one good form of culture - rational, informed, artistic, high-quality public debate - and that other forms of culture - Black culture or women's culture or queer culture, rap, debates about body image, emotional forms of communication and so on - are worthless. It bothers me that 'my people' (academics) are struggling so hard against what seems to me to be one of the most positive aspects of our cultures.

Fan Activism in a Networked Culture: The Case of Stargate SG-1

Last week, on the eve of its 200th episode, the Sci-Fi Channel announced that it would not be renewing Stargate SG-1, ending a run that extended across 10 seasons. The series began on Showtime, where it was canceled after five seasons, and then, as the result of fan activism, got picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel, where it ran another five season and spawned a successful sequel, Stargate: Atlantis. One might imagine that the series was dying a natural death after a run which is far longer than the vast majority of series -- science fiction or otherwise -- in the history of American television or that the network and creative artists are performing a "mercy killing" of a series that might be well past its prime but as far as its most hardcore fans are concerned, the series is "not dead yet." They are seeking to rally the troops one more time and their efforts to do so demonstrate the potentials for audience activism within networked culture.

The Modern Minutemen, er, Minutepersons?

The first thing that strikes you when you look at the fan community's efforts to save SG-1 is the speed with which they were able to respond to the news of the series' potential cancellation. The contemporary fan is a modern day minuteman -- ready to respond at a moment's notice to information that threatens their community, whether it is a cancellation notice or a cease and desist letter. Reader Sara Goetz, a graduate student from California, wrote me the day after the Sci-Fi Network announced its verdict with the following news:

The SG-1 fandom is no stranger to fan campaigns, having lobbied to bring back a beloved actor four years ago (with some question as to whether his return was their responsibility or his and the studio's - I wasn't in the fandom at the time and can't do more than speculate). Additionally, with the recent cast additions of two actors from the late, lamented Farscape, a large number of fans have carried over and feel a strong sense of deja vu. As sci-fi fans are practically trained to do now, we moved into action as soon as the news broke yesterday afternoon. The experience of the past is informing the current action, and while I don't know how much success SG-1 fans will achieve, we'll certainly be heard.

This is a powerful illustration of a point I make in my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide:

As a fan community disbands, its members may move in many different directions, seeking out new spaces to apply their skills and new openings for their speculations and in the process, those skills spread to new communities and get applied to new tasks

In other words, each new campaign is not only important in its own right but also represents an educational opportunity that develops new skills and knowledge which will then inform all subsequent fan efforts. There's a tendency for both academics and journalists to compartmentalize fandoms rather than seeing fandom as an interconnected network. Fans move between series and as they do so, knowledge gets transmitted from one fan community to another.

At the core of the fan community were seasoned veterans who knew what needed to be done and quickly rolled up their sleeves and took control over the situation. News of the network decision spread across discussion lists, fan websites, blogs, and Live Journal pages and as it did, people began weighing different tactics, collecting relevant information, and assigning tasks. This is a beautiful example of how knowledge communities work to pool resources and tap networks in order to achieve their goals. The striking thing is that there is no one approach being advocated here. The goal is to get the word out to as many different people as possible through as many different means as necessary. In that sense, fan communities are adhocracies not bureaucracy: some people have taken charge of different aspects of the process on a largely volunteer basis but no one is trying to control or orchestrate the movement as a whole.

Learning to Speak the Industry's Language

One can see the consequences of this effort if one visits this site which has emerged as one of several central clearing house for people involved in the campaign. The first thing I notice here is a pretty savvy analysis of the factors which led to the show's cancellation, one that shows a deep understanding of how and why networks make the decisions they do. The analysis factors in issues of demographics, scheduling, and audience behavior. Here's some of what they say:

The complicated US Nielsen ratings system has baffled fan commentators on many genre shows. There may not be one single cause contributing to the ratings slide, but more likely a combination of factors, such as:

First, the SciFi Channel dismantled its three-hour SciFriday block of original programming - the showcase of the network. The airing of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica not only helped SciFi compete, but win tough Friday night ratings battles. This year, SciFi chose to hold back Battlestar Galactica, which won't air until October 2006, reducing their three-hour block to a two-hour block of programming.

Any fan with Tivo or a VCR could have told the SciFi execs it's common sense to watch the three-hour block and record the shorter two-hour block for convenient viewing later. Taking that third hour out of the equation removed an impetus to make SciFi the network to watch live on Friday nights.

An additional ratings factor is acknowledged by Mark Stern, SciFi Channel's Executive Vice President of Original Programming. Interviewed by Mary McNamara for the May 8 issue of Multichannel News, Stern "believes some of the show's tech-savvy, toy-loving, time-shifting audience gets missed in ratings compilations. 'Part of it is the DVR,' he explains, citing digital video recording devices. 'Nielsen's sampling is not representative of the larger universe yet. They're sampling 3% and the larger [DVR] universe is something like 10 to 13%."

Second, new timeslots for the shows have put Stargate SG-1 in direct competition with the cable ratings powerhouse Monk, and locked both SG-1 and Atlantis on SciFi in a head-to-head with Monk and strongly performing new show Psych on parent channel USA. Ironically, Bonnie Hammer is President of both the SciFi *and* USA networks!

The ratings of both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis have dipped and there is no guarantee that without their strong lead-in, Battlestar Galactica will fare any better when it finally airs in October. With all the advantages of the original three-hour programming block behind it, its ratings were only on par with those of Stargate last season. No one can predict how it will perform solo. SciFi Channel's Farscape was equally beloved of the critics but was unable to sustain a financially viable audience.

Such fan analysis does important work as a form of informal media literacy education -- teaching consumers how network television reaches its decisions and what kinds of arguments will be effective at getting them to reverse course. The fans have monitored trade press discourse and reached out to sources into the production company and have some awareness of the conflicting interests between the network and the production company, offering their own views on the negotiations that impact the economic viability of the series.

At another site, one can see a range of potential tactics identified -- including addresses for key decision makers and suggestions that a strong sign of support for digital downloads may help them demonstrate their clout through the marketplace. A major argument has been that the series fans are so tech savvy that their numbers may not be adequately counted by the Nielsen Ratings which tend to only measure viewers who watch the broadcast as it is aired and not those who watch it via digital recorders or downloads.

Mobilizing the World

The second thing one notices is the international nature of the fan response with the site including templates in many different languages -- from Spanish to Croatian -- that fans in those countries can use as models for writing letters to key decision-makers. The Sci-Fi Network may have made its decisions in part in response to declines in viewership in the United States but because the series is internationally syndicated, the decision will impact fans world wide. Fans in many different countries are working together to respond to the program's cancellation, exerting pressure not only directly on the network and production company but also through the networks in their own country which air the series. The coordination of these efforts across different nations (not to mention languages) suggests the global composition of most online fandoms.

Grassroots creative artists -- who might otherwise turn their attention to the development of fan fiction and fan art -- are deploying their skills towards supporting the save the series campaign. The resource page lists an array of different materials designed to get the word out to the fan base.

Downloading for the Cause

More generally, you can see the fans are deploying such social networking sites and web 2.0 applications as MySpace and Flickr as tools for identifying potential supporters and pulling them into the cause. They also recommend using Bittorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies to identify fans that are downloading the series and solicit them for the cause. They write:

many fans are savvy when it comes to the P2P file sharing power of bittorrent. Whatever your personal stance on the legalities of downloading episodes via torrent, there's no denying their popularity.

This is particularly true for overseas fans who aren't hurting the ratings of first-run episodes of the show in the US, and who might not get to see the current season for a year or two.

We could turn the power of peer-to-peer file sharing to information sharing. Check out the busy torrent sites such as Mininova, IsoHunt [which links many other torrent sites from its database],TorrentSpy, TV Torrents, #eztv @ EFNET.

Wherever you see a Stargate-related download, jump in and make a comment about the cancellation of the show and the paramount importance of:

(1) watching episodes LIVE

(2) spreading word of the cancellation as widely as possible on and offline

(3) pointing people to this website savestargatesg1.com for more information.

(4) pointing to the $1.99 legal downloads for US fans from iTunes!

Often, there are thousands of downloaders for Stargate episodes and people will check comments in case there's anything nasty in the file they're saving.

This approach shows recognition of the potential of such sites for social networking as well as the ways that illegal downloads may render invisible the level of interest in the series.

All told, both the tactics and the analysis behind it shows an extremely sophisticated understanding of the current media landscape and the various points by which grassroots communities may leverage their power to exert pressure on corporate stakeholders in the series. Activists of all ilk can learn a lot by dissecting how these guys are approaching their effort to save their favorite series. As a long time fan, I can't help but contrast this with the now relatively primitive snail-mail efforts that kept Star Trek alive in the 1960s: new media has given fans a lot more resources to mobilize in a roughly similar situation.

I have limited personal stakes in this particular series. Ironically, the Sci-Fi channel is not available in the MIT dorm where I live so I have only seen a few episodes. Be that as it may, I am really going to be interested to see how this campaign takes shape and what, if any impact, it may have.

Snake Eyes

Squawk. Slurp. Squawk. Slurp.

This is the sound of me eating crow. I'll admit that I fell prey to some of the hype about the Snakes phenomenon when I predicted several months ago that it might result in one of the strongest opening weekends this summer.

Now that the dust has settled, it is pretty clear that this isn't what happened. In fact, Snakes did manage to be the top box office earner last week but it barely broke beyond $15M, there's some dispute as to whether it really came out on top of the Talladega Nights, and there were three other films (none of them huge box office champs) that were only a few million dollars under it. All told, it was a pretty lackluster weekend at the box office -- as might be predicted by a late summer release date.

At the moment, New Line is getting caught by the expectations game. The media has turned the Snakes box office into a referendum of sorts on the new kind of collaborative relationship between media producers and consumers. They are taking its "failure" to meet some inflated expectations as evidence that internet based marketing doesn't work. I suppose we should use the below expectations performance of any number of films this summer as signs that movie previews and television commercials just aren't enough to open a movie.

Let's be clear that the hype surrounding Snakes was partially built on line and partially built through traditional media channels. What portion of you first learned about Snakes on the internet and what portion read about internet interest in the film in Entertainment Weekly or USA Today? The new seems very good at innovating and experimenting; the broadcast channels though play a crucial role in amplifying those voices and getting them in front of mainstream consumers. In the case of Snakes, the double whammy of internet activism and media hype has succeeded in creating a very high level of awareness of this particular film but was not enough to overcome some core skepticism about the core premise. I found this out talking to my mother-in-law and sister-in-law this weekend: neither is much of a film buff; most films pass through town without registering on their radar; but both knew about s Snakes and knew that it was the film that was generating such interest on line. That's no small accomplishment for viral marketing.

Of course, one might well question the motives of traditional journalists who have jumped with such glee on the Snakes phenomenon and tried to flatten the idea that fans might play an active role in promoting a motion picture. Here's a sample of some of the scorn thrown at fans of the film following the box office returns:

The Internet buzz over "Snakes on a Plane" turned out to be nothing to hiss about. (Yahoo)

The horror-comedy starring Samuel L. Jackson took in $15.2 million last weekend, a tepid opening that dashed the hopes of Hollywood and especially of New Line Cinema, which released the movie, that vigorous marketing on the Internet would be a powerful new way to propel fans into theaters at a time when movies are working hard to hold their own against other forms of entertainment. ( *Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Despite a year of blog-fueled fanatacism that spilled over into the mainstream media in recent weeks, Snakes on a Plane didn't exactly sink its fangs into the box office. (E Online)

Of course, such writers may have a personal motive for proving that the public may not be ready to decide for itself which new releases are worth getting excited about. After all, these are the people who have historically played a gatekeeping function within our culture.

At the same time, fan groups are lining up to suggest that the low box office was actually the product of the studio's efforts to capitalize on the grassroots buzz rather than letting things play out on their own, as reader Stefanie Kechayas, a media student at the University of Melbourne doing thesis work on movie marketing and the online community, explains:

SoaP has not been released in Australia yet (is released Thursday), but I wanted to add what I thought was a really interesting trend on the websites I'm looking at. Yesterday, all the sites began to report on the "poor"

performance of SoaP at the U.S. Box Office at the weekend. In trying to analyse why the film performed as it did there seems to be a "blame game" happening. Devin Faraci at CHUD, in particular, (just as he was with Firefly) is preoccupied with the fan vs. studio angle. These websites seem to have a major issue with the way the film went from being a 'genuine' cybersubcultural fascination (because of subcultural manifestations of cool and knowledges about 'good' and 'bad' cinema turning the film into one big joke) to being capitalised by studios into a 'mainstream' marketing extravaganza (hence detracting from the film's - and subculture's - countercultural clout). Through this over-capitalisation and also a too long wait on the release, the film has lost its interest factor (its 'undergroundness') and hence underperformed, and this - according to these sites - is the studio's fault.

I find this fascinating because, I think, this convergence between producers and consumers has been happening for years now and this transition between what is seen as sub or counter-cultural capital and mainstream cultural capital is nothing new. I think the difference now is that these websites and subcultures are beginning to realise what's been going on, and are not sure how they feel about it. They are fan groups and they do display some of the hallmarks of textual poaching and ownership as well as strongly displaying their capital through professionalism common in most fan groups studied. Yet they are uncomfortable with the power shifts that are occurring. This is not he first time these sites have been poached for information by film producers (look at the "planted review" phenomenon, or the new film Fanboys), and yet there is still a great amount of animosity directed towards studios and their marketing techniques. When a film underperforms, wether critically or financially, these groups blame the

studios. When a film performs well at the box office, these sites either give the film text critical merit or credit the studios with good marketing. Interestingly though, the sites place themselves also in judgement of other more hardcore fan groups, like Star Wars Fanboys and Browncoats. Devin blamed the Browncoats' over-zealousness for grass roots advertising for effectively scaring away average movie goers, amongst other reasons. And yet he rejects the blame for SoaP, drawing a major distinction between Internet Movie Fans and 'hardcore' fans. The Hollywood Film Review Websites and Internet Movie Fans I'm looking at seem to want to situate themselves as a place of convergence of power between consumers and producers, and yet really seem to struggle with their place in it, when push comes to shove. Ironically, although the Internet Movie Fans are angry that the studios took what was originally going to be a 'cult hit' only known to a niche group and tried to make it mainstream, the film hasn't earned blockbuster levels and may well actually turn into a genuine 'cult hit.'

Both sides seem determined to prove that there can be no meaningful cooperation between media producers and consumers.

But let's not be in such a big hurray to dismiss what's happened here. I would have loved to see Snakes outgross Pirates (or at least Superman Returns). But that may have been the wrong criteria for evaluating the success of internet based marketing. The idea of large opening weekend grosses is itself a product of mass marketing. In a world where films are designed to appeal to the broadest possible public, broadcasting makes sense as a way of getting out your message and the success of this strategy is going to be measured by how many people you can get into the theatre the first week. But, if you read Chris Anderson's Long Tail argument, he suggests that niche properties require longer shelf time to find their audience: they start slower, they last longer.

In this case, the hype was enough to heightened awarenes about the film but not enough to overcome skepticism. Some thought the film wouldn't be any good. Others worried that the film wouldn't be bad enough.

The folks who came on the opening weekend might be seen as the early adapters. Most of what we've heard here suggests that many of them liked what they saw. They are going to go back and reassure their friends. We need to wait and see whether the film has legs -- whether it's pattern is closer to the classic sleeper that holds steady over a number of weeks. We need to see whether the high awareness of the film translates into strong dvd sales. We need to see how the film performs internationally. We need to see how the film does on college campuses and on the midnight film circuit. Only then will we really be able to judge how much and what kind of impact the online phenomenon had in terms of shaping the success of this film.

David Edery makes a similar point in his discussion of the film at Game Tycoon:

To be blunt: the naysayers are wrong. What they don't seem to realize is that this movie could very well have been a disaster. The premise was ridiculous. Critics, not primed to think of the movie as camp, might have panned the hell out of it. Online fan communities gave this movie's creators a remarkable opportunity to turn a zero into something more. And they did!

Industry observers like John Hamann of Box Office Prophets seem on the cusp of understanding this, even as they question the film's "disappointing numbers." A quote from Hamann: Snakes won't change anything, but it could start a decent-sized franchise for New Line, with huge revenue from DVD in the cards. With a reported cost of only $35 million, this will be an okay performer for a studio that has struggled since the last of the Lord of the Rings films.

Huge revenue from DVD in the cards? That isn't a consolation prize -- that's a real win (and perhaps a miracle for a film as poorly conceived as this one.)

Keep in mind that all of this rides as much on expectations as on realities. Suppose this had been a documentary, a foreign film, or an independent film: this level of performance would have been seen as spectacular. Suppose this was a few decades ago when something like Snakes would have been a B Movie playing at the local drive-end: the idea that this film could be the top money earner would have seemed astonishing. In another era, this film might have gone straight to dvd and certainly would have taken longer to reach the current level of success. We still haven't adjusted to a world where there will be hits and there will be niche successes (and of course there will be flop.) No matter how you cut it, Snakes isn't a flop: it simply isn't a blockbuster.

We are at a transitional moment: web communities are capable of generating strong support for niche products but they still can't compete with the mass market success generated from broadcast media. We need to learn to be more adept at thinkiing about the relations between the two. And we need to curb our enthusiasms enough to lower expectations.

Squawk. Slurp.

Web Comics and Network Culture

I am participating in a very interesting conversation about digital storytelling, visual culture, and web 2.0 over at Morph, the blog of the Media Center, which describes itself as "a provocative, future-oriented, nonprofit think tank. In the dawning Digital Age, as media, technology and society converge at an accelerating pace in overlapping cycles of disruption, transition and change, and in all areas of human endeavor, The Media Center facilitates the process by gathering information and insights and conceiving context and meaning. We identify opportunity, provide narrative, stimulate new thinking and innovation, and agitate for dialog and action towards the creation of a better-informed society." The Media Center has asked a fairly diverse group of media makers and thinkers to participate in a "slow conversation" to be conducted over the next month or so about creativity in the new media age. So far, the most interesting post has come from Daniel Meadows, currently a lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, about work he has done with the British Broadcasting System to get digital stories by everyday people onto the air. He provides links to a great array of amateur media projects. I haven't spent as much time following these links as I would like but it's a great snapshot of the work being done in digital storytelling.

What follows are some excerpts from my own first post in the exchange which uses webcomics to explore some of the ideas in Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, a book I referenced here the other day.

I have been reading a new book by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which offers a pretty compelling account of the ways that the technological and social shifts wrought by the so-called digital revolution are generating new models of cultural expression and civic engagement. In the book's introduction, he writes:

These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.

Benkler is describing a mediascape which is profoundly hybrid -- that is, communication occurs on multiple levels (some motivated by economic gain, some by a gift economy, some by a notion of reputation building or education or public service or civic engagement or fan appreciation). People create culture for many different reasons with different expectations in terms of rewards on their investment.

I am also reading alongside Benkler another new book, T. Campbell's A History of Web Comics, which describes the gradual emergence of the Web as a platform for graphic expression. At first, webcomics seemed largely fringe to the commercial mainstream of newspaper comic strips and printed comic books, a place for gifted amateurs and art school dropouts with much of the content focused on digital culture itself.

Scott McCloud's groundbreaking manifesto, Reinventing Comics (2000) made the case for the Web as an "expanded canvas" that might allow new modes of graphic expression, as a more open space for newcomers to prove their worth as artists, and as a technology which might broaden the potential public for comics by allowing writers and artists to explore themes that would never make it into mainstream publications.

All of this has proven true - at least to some degree. Today, webcomics thrive across many different communities. People are creating webcomics for very different reasons - some are trying to hone their skills, demonstrate market potential, or build a reputation before going pro. Some are moving into print once they've found their niche and others are choosing to remain digital despite offers from print-based publishers. Some have developed political communities around their web comics which take on a life of their own and, in some cases, overwhelm the comics themselves. Some have created virtual artists colonies where amateurs and commercial artists share work and give each other feedback. And a small number are generating at least modest revenues online through subscriptions, micropayments, or the sale of merchandise.

Campbell describes a moment early in the history of webcomics when Fred Gallagher, the co-creator of MegaTokyo, a man who thought he was doing amateur work on the way to turning pro, finds himself swamped at conventions by his intense fan following and realized "he had no control - no one had control -- over whether online readers labeled them 'professional,' 'amateur', 'true artist' or 'rock star.'"

The book similarly qoutes publisher Joey Manley's comments about Modern Tales, an important example of the "artist colony" model I referenced earlier: "We've got manga-styled werewolf/cop dramas butting heads (or, um, maybe some other body part) with Fancy Froglin, medieval fantasy side-by-side with 'straight' autobiography, space-opera-charged science fiction right next door to Borgesian metafiction. And we like it all (as do our thousands of subscribers.)"

Both of these comments suggest the instability which occurs when you bring together diverse kinds of media stakers working with different goals and interests for different communities but all available through the same communications platform...

These shifts in the nature of our media landscape have the potential to transform how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Benkler writes,

They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new eyes -- the eyes of someone who could actually interject a thought, a criticism, or a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive and thus more engaged observers of social spaces....The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization.

Benkler argues that the threat of fragmentation and babel on the Web has best been dealt with by harnessing the collective intelligence of Web communities -- through efforts at tagging, filtering, and blogging, which help us weigh the value of different contributions and direct them towards the most appropriate audience. At the same time, we are developing new modes of expression which do use images to encapsulate more complex bodies of knowledge.

There's more on this topic at Morph -- but I figured I'd port over the part that was most relevent to our focus here.

Networked Publics Group Tackles Participatory Culture

The Networked Public group at USC's Annenberg Center recently posted a fascinating new essay on participatory culture, written by Adrienne Russell, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters. The group has been conducting conversations with leading thinkers about contemporary media and is now putting its collective heads together to jointly author a new book for the MIT Press. I was lucky enough to be included in the process, having an animated two hour conversation with them after they had read an advanced copy of Convergence Culture.

I was pleased to see that they had taken some of my insights to heart, expanding and enlarging on some of my book's arguments about participatory culture and linking it in productive ways with ideas from Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Convergence and Media Change

Here's what they have to say in the essay's conclusion:

"Convergence culture is not only a matter of industry and technology but also more importantly a matter of norms, common culture, and the artistry of everyday life. Professional commercial media brought us a slick common culture that has become a fact of life, the language of current events, shared cultural reference, and visual recognitions that lubricate our everyday interactions with one another. Commercial media, for better and for worse provide much of the source material for our modern language of communication. The current moment is perhaps less about overthrow of this established modality of common culture, but more a plea for recognition of a new layer of communication and cultural sharing. At best, this is about folk, amateur, niche and non-market communities of cultural production mobilizing, critiquing, remixing commercial media and functioning as a test bed for radically new cultural forms. At worst, this is about the fragmenting of common culture or the decay of shared standards of quality, professionalism, and accountability. The history of networked public culture has opened with a narrative of convergence and participatory culture; we lie at the crossroads of multiple unfolding trajectories."

The group describes our present moment as one where both grassroots and commercial interests are adjusting to some profound shifts in the relationship between media production and consumption brought about by the rise of networked media. The new media landscape, they argue drawing on Benkler, is characterized by a proliferation of different groups (some grassroots and amateur, some civic or public funded or educational, some commercial) which are producing and distributing content and by new kinds of social communities which are emerging to produce, evaluate, and discuss new forms of culture and new forms of knowledge. The era when commercial media dominated the marketplace of ideas is ending -- even if the mass media continues to exert a disproportionate claim on our collective attention. The commercial industry is reacting with great anxiety and often limited foresight, trying to shut down many of the opportunities which are emerging as the public exerts a greater control over the circulation and production of media. Yet, they are being forced to give ground again and again as fan communities are beginning to operate as collective bargaining units. Those interests which can not adjust to the changes become increasingly imperiled.

Transforming the Music Industry

At the heart, the essay outlines a series of compelling case studies of the interface between commercial and public culture -- including discussions of how amateur music is being reshaped by new technologies of production and distribution, how anime fans are partnering with Asian media interests to get their desired content into the market, how Madison Avenue is learning -- mostly by making mistakes -- ways to tap viral marketing, and how the journalistic establishment is struggling to adjust to the competition and critique offered by the blogosphere.

For my money, the discussion of amateur music production was perhaps the most interesting, if only because it is the area that I know the least about going in. The authors argue that "music has always been a domain of robust amateur production, making it particularly amenable to more bottom-up forms of production and distribution in the digital ecology, and ripe for the disintermediation of labels and licensors....As late as 2001 the prevailing wisdom described local/amateur music being considered by fans, scholars, and musicians alike as 'something to get beyond.' In other words, the end game for the artist was still 'getting signed' and following the traditional industry model, with the time-honored decision-making chain. However as the lines further blur, remix becomes embedded into the culture (even beyond music), and technological changes continue to occur, it would appear that perhaps "getting beyond" might no longer be the goal."

The Saga of the Legendary K.O.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of recent news about how the hip hop community in Houston was using web distribution of music to respond to the aftermath of Katrina. The Legendary K.O., a little known Houston based group, used their music to express what they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened.

The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum, achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos. The song may have started in Houston, framed around both local knowledge and national media representations, but where it was going to end up was anybody's guess. They have since used their reputations to produce more songs which speak to topical concerns, especially those facing the black communities of Houston and New Orleans.

The Legend of Grizzly Bear

I was also reminded of the story of Grizzly Bear, one of the young artists which my student, Vanessa Bertozzi interviewed for a project we were doing together. Grizzly Bear created music in his own bedroom, making imaginative use of found objects, and deploying low-cost but highly effective digital tools to record and manipulate the sound. He tapped local networks to get his music out into the world via mp3 files and into the hands of a record company executive. He ended up getting a contract without ever having performed in public and then faced the challenge of putting together a band to go on the road and perform in public.

I suspect we will be hearing many more stories about groups like The Legendary K.O. and performers like Grizzly Bear in the years to come -- more groups coming from nowhere and exerting some influence on our culture. As these two examples suggest, sometimes these artists are going to be making and distributing music -- and building up a loyal fan base -- almost entirely outside the commercial sphere and beyond the control of record labels. In other cases, they are going to find labels to be effective allies in getting their sounds before a larger public. It is the hybrid nature of this new communications landscape which is central to Convergence Culture and to the Networked Public group's essay.