The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One)

I first became aware of Peter Ludlow and his work for the Alphaville Herald when NPR called me up and asked me to be a pundit commenting on a nationally broadcast debate between the candidates for the leadership of the largest town in The Sims Online -- a debate between a 14 year old girl from Palm Beach and a 20-something airline employee from Virginia. I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the mechanisms surrounding the election broke down, some voters were denied the right to cast their ballots, the election technology was manipulated, and charges of corruption and poor sportsmanship flew right and left. The Alphaville elections, in other words, were the game world counterpart to what happened in Florida in the 2000 elections. Ludlow, who was far more deeply emershed in this world than I was, became my expert guide through this whole process. I wrote about these events for Technology Review and later revisited them for a section of my book, Convergence Culture. I lost contact with Ludlow for a while but recently he wrote me to see if I might give him some advice about his own new book project -- his account of his time as the editor first of the Alphaville Herald and then of The Second Life Herald, co-authored with Mark Wallace. Their book recounts a fascinating saga of mobsters and griefers, of civic boosters and would be socialites, and of the challenge of governing virtual worlds. The book will be coming out some months from now from the MIT Press but in the meantime, what Ludlow had to say was so timely, especially given my recent exchanges with Clay Shirkey and Beth Coleman about the value of Second Life and given our forthcoming Beyond Broadcasting conference that I wanted to share some of his reflections with you much sooner than that. When he is not playing the part of a muckraking journalist in Second Life, Ludlow is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Linquistics at the University of Michigan.

In the conversation that follows, he explores more systematically what it means to construct civic media in Second Life and discusses his contributions to the life of this emerging online community. Tomorrow, he will share his reflections on the Second Life Debate as well as his thoughts about the challenges of governing online worlds. Together, these two installments represent a fascinating inside perspective on the nature of civic engagement in Second Life.

Axel Springer announced the other day that they would establish a full time newspaper in Second Life. What do you see as the significance of this announcement? What does it mean to the existing local newspapers which are indigenous to SL?

The Axel Springer virtual newspaper, called The Avastar, launched a few weeks ago, and they have had, suffice it to say, a rough start trying to find their way around Second Life. One problem is that Second Life is a very complex and hard to understand cluster of social spaces, and the Avastar managers don''t seem to understand the world very well. I also don''t think they have had great success in lining up knowledgeable and articulate writers, and if they think people are going to *pay* to read their paper (or, for that matter, advertise in it) they are badly mistaken.

The fundamental problem with their project, however, is their idea that there is some sort of value added by virtue having their newspaper in a PDF format, rather than a blog-like format. PDF doesn't integrate into the Second Life infosphere in the appropriate way (they can't link to other stories, we can't link to them, people can't comment, the stories are stale by the time they appear, etc).

If you think about it, their project is somewhat reactionary. They had an opportunity to come to this strange and fantastic new place where all the rules can be rewritten, and the only thing they could think of doing was coming up with a product that mimics meat space newspapers as much as possible. Far from offering us a new way to think about news and entertainment and how it should be presented, they are effectively trying to make a last stand for static push media by using PDF instead of a blog or some sort of social software.

From the outside, I''m sure they look all bleeding edgy ("oh look, a newspaper in a virtual world!") but from inside they look reactionary in concept, and clumsy in execution.

You've been involved with local newspapers in two virtual worlds now -- SL and Sims Online. What do you see as the importance of civic journalism in imaginary space? How important is it that the perspective be "local" -- coming from the player community itself?

Civic journalism in virtual worlds is very important, and it has grown up a lot over the three+ years I have been involved with The Alphaville Herald, and now the Second Life Herald. When we started in October of 2003 there were lots of fan sites for online games, but the concept of blogs/journals that covered in game events and player/owner conflicts with a critical eye was foreign. People reacted to the Herald like it had come from outer space. I can''t speak for other virtual worlds, but today in Second Life there is a very rich community of dozens of bloggers - many of which are self-labeled as newspapers. It makes for a very interesting media ecology for Second Life.

Some of the sites are merely fan sites, and some are personal journals of some form or other, but there are some that take a serious and critical look at the world and Linden Lab policies from time to time. All of them play an important role in recording and commenting on various aspects of this very rich and complex space.

This sort of journalism is important, and the way I think of it, there are three audiences: the internal audience, the external audience, and the audience that isn''t born yet.

The internal audience involves other players, and the flow of information can be crucial to maintaining a fair playing field. Just as an example, we ran a story about a memo the Lindens had sent to some key land owners, informing them that prices for private islands would be going up shortly and that if they acted now they could grab islands at the current price. That story embarrassed the Lindens into opening the offer to everyone and extending the buy-in period for land at then-current prices. There are lots of instances of this sort - policies and actions have serious economic consequences and virtual journalism can be a watchdog.

For the external audience, we provide a window onto the world that hopefully accurately reflects what is going on there, so that people will come join for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. Also, if you have thousands of people in a given space interacting, it is important that people on the outside know what is going on. If this isn''t clear, consider the case of The Sims Online, which is a space that is supposedly suitable for children as young as 13. Well, I think it is important that parents and policy makers be informed about what is going on in that space. I''m not going to tell them what to do about it, but I do think there is a kind of civic responsibility to point out some of the adult activities that are taking place.

The future audience: a hundred years from now people will want to know what was happening in the rapidly evolving social web of our era, and these journals provide important records. Sometimes when I write for the Herald I even imagine that I am writing for an audience that won''t come along for a hundred years. (Usually though, I''m just banging something out as fast as possible.)

Some of your critics have argued that your coverage of the issues facing the communities in game world could be used to spur on reform and regulation efforts by outside government authorities. How do you balance your responsibility to the community within the game world (to expose problems so they can be addressed) with what they perceive as your responsibility beyond the community (to not stir up public controversy which could bring outside attention)?

It certainly can''t be my responsibility to cover up in-world problems. I understand that people view critical commentary and exposure of outrageous in-world behavior to be an attack on the community, but of course it is nothing of the kind. The problem is that sites which constantly spin the world in a positive light have no credibility when an outside critic comes along. For example, when Clay Shirky launched his recent attack on Second Life, it was easy for him to dismiss the defenders of SL as a bunch of breathless logrolling fanboiz. He can''t do that with the Herald however, and we are, I think, positioned to slap him down good and hard when we have the time to get around to it.

I should also add that over time people do come to understand that we are not attacking the community, and some of the Herald''s harshest critics have gone on to be good friends and contributors to the Herald. If you stick around, that shows people that you are committed to the community, and that is what really counts the most.

Some people have made fun of your efforts suggesting that these virtual worlds are "only games" and that you are taking them "too seriously." How do you respond to this criticism?

The ""only a game"" meme is of course not merely leveled at the Herald, but at anyone who participates in online worlds (and participatory culture more broadly - it is a species of the "get a life" meme that you have discussed in Textual Poachers and elsewhere). The first thing that has to be said is that as applied to Second Life it is badly mistaken, since Second Life is barely a game at all --- it is a completely open platform the content of which is provided by participants (that is they build, texture, and script whatever they want). The platform can be used for many purposes, but developing and playing what might be called games has never really been a big part of Second Life.

Beyond that, I tend to think that not much in life is *only* a game. Even spaces like World of Warcraft that are pretty clearly designed to be games are also spaces where people socialize, exchange real world information, work on projects together etc.

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating ""only a game"" so much. If you google ""only a game"" and "Second Life" together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay - and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying "it''s only a game" they are really saying "the rest of my world isn''t like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent." Saying "it''s only a game" is like saying "this isn''t how things really are, this is just a bad dream." People need to pinch themselves, because this ain''t no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

At various times, you have seemed to struggle with whether you are playing a reporter in a game and taking seriously your responsibilities as a journalist covering real people in a real community. To what degree does the "magic circle" give players --- including yourself -- license to shed real world responsibilities in virtual world? Where should we draw the limits?

I don''t think we struggle with whether we are in or out of the magic circle so much as we intentionally play at the circumference. Sometimes, when I think we are getting too serious, I will post a silly story, and when we are starting to get too silly I will put together a serious interview or offer a polished essay or piece of serious journalism. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable; they want to know if we are serious journalists or just playing at being journalists. But the answer is we don''t respect the distinction and we are constantly trying to flout it.

Playing (sometimes even being) seedy tabloid journalists has helped us to learn the role that tabloid journalism plays in the media ecology of Second Life and the internet more broadly. I''m fascinated by this topic. If you think of media as a kind of eco-system them you see that tabloid journalism plays an important role - churning up stuff that publications with bigger budgets and more time can sift through and investigate.

What is frightening, however, is seeing the number of so-called serious media outlets that pick up our stories (and other blog flotsam) and just reprint them as though it was the word of Gopod. More frightening than that, however, has been the many instances we have seen where major news organizations research their own stories and end up with great big piles of steaming crap. So I am in this strange position of thinking both that (i) people should not be reprinting our stuff without doing their Serious Journalism thing with it and (ii) the content we generate is on the whole more reliable and informative than what they come up with when they do that Serious Journalism thing.

The net effect of this has been that it has made me very pessimistic about the state of journalism in the business and technology sector; it seems to be mostly about recycling press releases without reflection. And it's even worse than that. The *real* problem is that too many people now equate Serious Journalism with the recycling of press releases. Critical journalism is so foreign to people (except maybe on the sports page) that they recoil against it. Well, let me modify that statement. People in the US have this problem. Readers from other countries (Germany, Italy, etc.) find the critical stance of the Herald altogether natural and they are baffled by the Americans who complain about it. So maybe this is just a problem with the American media consumers - they have forgotten what a genuinely critical media looks like.

The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout

On February 24th, MIT Comparative Media Studies will host a conference in collaboration with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The one-day event will be held at MIT, and is entitled "Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy." It will bring together industry experts, academic leaders, public media professionals, and political activists for panel discussions and focused working groups. Beyond Broadcast 2007 builds on the overwhelming success of last year's sold-out event, "Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture" held at Harvard Law School. Over 350 people took part in-person and online through the virtual world Second Life. Attendees used several unique online tools, including a web-based "question tool" to probe panelists, a collaborative wiki, live blogging, flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us tagging, and YouTube video production. These tools enabled the conference to practice what it preached, turning the event into a two-way participatory interaction in contrast with many conferences. The tools have been expanded upon this year, already spurring an active conversation on

the conference web site, weeks before the event.

I will give the Keynote Address, followed by panel discussions from media makers and policy commentators. Details of these panels are being updated on the conference web site

In the second-half of the day, the conference turns its focus to working groups that attendees will help organize. Building on themes coming from the plenary sessions, participants will target specific issues or questions and join efforts with the diverse crowd of others. In the past, these groups have been facilitated by thought leaders in technology, policy, and academia. Many attendees last year expressed their appreciation for this hybrid conference approach in

which they had a chance to "do something before heading home."

There will also be an evening reception, called "Demos and Drinks," showcasing groups that are doing exciting work related to conference themes.

Registration is only $50 (before February 9), and includes lunch and the evening reception. There is also a special 50% discount for students. The conference follows the 2007 Public Media Conference taking place in Boston February 20-23.

As we lead into the conference, I am running a series of features on the blog which foreground the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy. In today's post, I offer an interview with another of the conference's speakers, Zephyr Teachout. The Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, Teachout has emerged as a leading thinker about the role of new media in fostering what she describes here as a "culture of citizenship." After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center. In 2006, Teachout became the national director of the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director. According to Wikipedia, "The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. At the core of all of the Foundation's work is a focus on the power of technology and the Internet to transform the relationship between citizen's and their government."

In the conversation that follows, Teachout shares her perspective on politics and popular culture, Second Life and Wikipedia, all focused on helping us to better understand what elements in the new media landscape might be deployed to intensify civic engagement and insure a more transparent government.

Let's start with the core conference theme. Many media reformers have attacked the "bread and circus" aspects of popular culture as distracting voters from serious aspects of politics. Yet, this conference's theme, "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy" invites us to imagine a different relationship between popular culture and grassroots politics. What do you see as the relationship between the two?

Both of these seem right to me -- the possibility and the threat. In the last four years, I've met thousands of people whose political creativity, public thinking, and public activity has vastly increased directly because of the internet. I've met people who I think you can fairly say have switched from never thinking of being a citizen as one of their central roles, to thinking of citizenship as being an integral part of their identity, the way being a mother or employee or sister or cousin is part of an identity. The internet has enabled that switch -- for some, its been a gradual shift, from reading arguments on blogs to contributing to arguments on blogs to joining groups making political statements to holding community fora. For others, its been an instant jump -- a Meetup-enabled political meeting has led to a leadership role. For still others (and here I'm thinking mostly of geeks and internet artists), a habit of creativity and responsibility in one arena has led to taking the same attitude in a political arena.

There are millions who have participated in political life because of the internet, first by ventriloquism (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this political article was interesting") then by speaking (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this article is interesting because x, but they got it wrong because...") who then become more comfortable in their other communications, on and offline, in speaking about political issues.

And then there are those extraordinary people, like those we've seen at the Sunlight Foundation, who take citizenship to a whole new level. Simply by being asked, "help us investigate this question about earmarks," a handful of people not only responded to that question but have becomes intrepid, creative citizen watchdogs, digging up information about our politics and sharing it broadly, all on their own time.

There are still more who have participated in a one-dimensional way, the way one "participates" in the coca cola industry by drinking coke (and an increasing greed on the part of candidates to increase this kind of participation -- big lists, assigned tasks), where neither personal responsibility nor creativity are engaged. But even this flat kind of participation leads a handful to taking the role of citizen seriously.

The internet breaks down some barriers to creativity, to public expression, to information, to public conversation, and to collective action.

That said, our human hunger for humor, connection, games, entertainment, gossip, is nearly limitless, and when the supply is nearly limitless it is hard to avoid. When I go to the airport, I can't tear my eyes away from celebrity gossip magazines, even though there is no barrier to my reading the Economist -- when I'm online, the celebrity gossip, the games, and the political gossip constantly beckon. There is now no barrier to instant dopamine hits from playing games, from reading gossip, from emailing and instant messaging friends. I can't generalize from my experience, but I know I'm not completely alone when I say that the internet has diminished many of my other experiences -- I cook less, read fewer books, plan fewer parties, and wander the streets aimlessly less frequently because I can always trust in some small comfort online when I would have to risk much more by taking on the streets. As applied to politics, its an open question -- will we, as a culture, choose the limitless entertainment because its there, and will our civic culture continue to decline (with a small percentage the exception?). Or will the new possibilities lead to a new culture of citizenship?

I happen to think the culture of citizenship is possible, but it will take real vigilance, care, cultivation, and a collective choice to make it a priority. It may also take some serious thinking about whether we want something like the fairness doctrine for the internet -- whether, looking at ourselves in the mirror, we decide we want some structural supports for our civic selves -- it will take a choice. The internet -- no matter all the joyful possibilities of political engagement it enables -- will not make us citizens, we will have to do that ourselves.

You were The Director of Internet Organizing for the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Given those experiences, what advice would you offer the current crop of Democratic candidates about the potential use of new media in the forthcoming campaign? Do you have any predictions about which campaigns seem to best understand this current era of web 2.0?

I am far more interested in who will make the best President than in who uses the best tools, and a clumsy use of email, youtube, and blogs wouldn't dissuade me from supporting a candidate who I largely support. The only way they really relate is that part of any support for me is necessarily a commitment to citizenship and to transparent government.

If you were advising a candidate in this election cycle, would you recommend that they adopt an avatar and go into Second Life?

Yes, I would have a full time staffer, with three interns at least, who were

responsible for gaming outreach.

For the past 40 years or so, there have been basically three ways a citizen can reliably interact with a Presidential candidate:

1) She can join a group (like a labor union) and engage in that group's decision-making, which is then communicated to the candidate through an intermediary.

2) She can watch the candidate on TV in a debate, on a news story, or in an ad

3) She can live in New Hampshire or be lucky.

Other forms of interaction were possible, but there were not that many, and they were not scalable. Suddenly there is Second Life, listservs, email, games that a candidate can play with and against others, a dizzy mess of kinds of interactions that are possible. The only real limitations on these new kinds of interactions are scale, creativity, and political will.

I once saw an interesting talk by a Microsoft sociologist, in which he talked about the kinds of characters that show up in list-servs. Its easy to be inauthentic in one forum, one time or a few times, he said, but over time, its pretty clear who isn't acting like a human - there are certain personality types we all recognize (including the trolls) and those that don't quite seem right we shy away from, picking up subtle signals that suggest that "this person is sort of lying." This is finally a positive conclusion for internet communities - it sugests that guerrilla marketers may be able to strike once, but astroturf will reveal itself in the end. Language, used unrelentingly over weeks and months, will out the shill.

This thesis is also interesting when reflecting on the efforts candidates make to engage people in completely new forms of interaction - a chat room, say, or in Second Life. While candidates won't necessarily lie, inasmuch as they do not sound like humans sound and bring prefabricated phrases, or phrases of others, it can undermine their credibility - and certainly undermine their interest. (The cookie cutter emails that so many campaigns now send have growing lists but idle members, who do not believe that the emails carry any authentic connection to them.) Likewise, even if thousands of people show up to watch candidate y "chat" or "blog", the interest will only remain so long as there is some reason to think they are getting something more than a press release or scripted notes. And the fashionable time-delayed "chat" in which questions are submitted before hand is not a new form - is similar to having a guest on talk radio, except leaves the candidate more control.

But back to your question -- a real time chat, or a conversation in Second Life, is a new form. That, as it develops, will be fascinating for politicians, who have so much more on the line in every word than the reporters who regularly do this. Would I recommend it? Yes. Presidential

candidates should be outreaching in gaming forums, including game-of-life forums, actively. But it will take some innovation and looseness to work well.

We had some very fruitful real time chats during the Dean campaign, when they were used for policy experts from the staff to answer basic policy questions by chatters. It was a narrow enough context that policy experts were quite forthcoming, and the discussions were fruitful from both sides - the chats we had with Dean involved were more chaotic and less likely to be fruitful. In both cases, much of the interesting conversations that I had were the side-chats, carried on in groups of two and three who pinged me, seeing the name of a staffer. In Second Life, with new dimensions added (and the possibility for visual demonstrations), I can imagine these lecture-like moments being even more valuable - a candidate could have a forum on net neutrality, for example, in which he presents not only himself but his policy experts, creating a new kind of conversation, but one more likely to inform a citizen both about the issues and about the way in which a candidate makes decisions.

Second Life, chat rooms, and social networking tools makes it easier to both create groups and be creative -- so instead of having to speak to a candidate through a large community years in the making, 30,000 people with shared interests can get together and ask for a town-hall meeting from each of the candidates, and invite tough questioners to attend.

The forms and format of the meetings can go beyond the classic candidate forum, because of the low cost of bringing people together - and it may be that in these liminal forms we learn more than we thought possible, even if the candidate does not step on his tongue.

What lessons do you think political leaders should take from the Wikipedia movement?

I think there are two key lessons:

1) Small groups of people who feel responsible are highly competent to manage difficult and boring and very important tasks. I think this is one of the most under-told stories, especially in politics -- politicians are eager for mass numbers, big email lists, big readerships, big donations, and thousands of people door-knocking for them. This is all fine -- but to truly be a democrat (small d) they must also believe that citizens are competent at decision-making and governing, and express that belief through their campaign structures and their governing structures. Any politician you ask will gush about the possibility of the internet to enable citizens to give her good ideas, but most are wary of actually distributing roles, not tasks, to groups of people that are not on the payroll. Wikipedia should help change that story -- self-governance is possible.

2) Millions of people want to engage as creative, intelligent adults in political life. Wikipedia, for all its neutral point of view, is a profoundly political project, and evidences, along with hundreds of other examples, the hunger of people to be meaningful contributors to political society.

What connection do you see between the ideals of citizen journalism and the kinds of voter participation and government reform efforts being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation?

Sunlight Foundation is committed to using technology to strengthen the relationship between citizens and Congress. Our grants support people who are making amazing transparency tools, and other parts of our work is more explicitly political, lobbying (with facebook groups and an open, distributed attititude) for Congress to open up its processes and join the 21st century. We beleive that a transparent budgetary process, once impossible, is now possible because of the internet, and the more citizens engage in that process, the closer we are to achieving ideals of self-governance.

I don't personally have an ideal of citizen journalism, but an ideal of citizenship -- which is to say that people actually take responsibility for their government. They can discharge that responsibility in infinite ways -- much as one can discharge the responsibility of motherhood or owning a pet in infinite ways. But we all know the difference between someone who owns a pet and takes responsibility for it, and one who does not -- what I seek is a culture in which most of us take responsibility. One of those ways is to research and write and mashup and make videos and generally engage others in Congress, and we are working to enable those (a quickly growing community) that are interested in this. There are some amazing people who work with Congresspedia and our Senior Researcher, Bill Allison, doing the hard investigative work it takes to actually understand how Congress works, and they are doing all of us an extraordinary service.

Can you give us a preview of your remarks at the Beyond Broadcasting conference?

Nope! Because I don't know what they are yet...

More Second Thoughts on Second Life

A week ago, Clay Shirkey, Beth Coleman, and I launched a three-way conversation across our blogs which was designed to spark a greater public conversation about the value of Second Life. We have been extremely pleased by the range of other responses to our posts which have cropped up on other blogs. By agreement, we are each returning today to respond to each other's posts and offer some concluding thoughts on the issues which have emerged through the conversations so far. Beth's post can be found here. Clay's post can be found here.

As some readers have noted, the disagreements here may be more apparent than real. Clay, Beth and I agree that Second Life is probably being over hyped if our criteria of significance is defined statistically but that it may still be an important site of cultural innovation and deeply meaningful to the people who spend their time there if we adopt more qualitative measures.

The "debate", if you can call it that, circles around competing criteria by which we might measure the importance of Second Life. Shirkey's original post sparked such heated response in part because it seemed to be pushing statistical and commercial criteria forward at the expense of other ways of evaluating the importance of what is going on there.

Shirkey says as much:

Concerning popularity, I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. Such niches can be profitable (an argument I made in the Meganiche article), but they won't, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users.

Beth believes that Second Life may well push well beyond niche status by providing a compelling model for how we might live in a virtual world that captures the public imagination and paves the way for subsequent developments in the design and deployment of virtual worlds. Second Life, she suggests, represents one step further along a century long evolution of human communications capacity:

What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication. We seem to yearn for synchronous connectivity and virtual worlds promise to deliver exactly that. Looking at the 150-year build out of telecommunications capabilities, what we find with many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity. Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. These platforms are not simply to facilitate shopping but to develop further (or perhaps more massively) the ways in which virtual and "portable" spaces can be inhabited as a home.

Shirkey, by contrast, believes that "virtual worlds" is not a meaningful category:

Put another way, I believe that the group of things lumped together as virtual worlds have such variable implementations and user adoption rates that they are not well described as a single conceptual group...Pointcast's management claimed that email, the Web, and Pointcast all were about delivering content, and that the future looked bright for content delivery platforms. And indeed it did, except for Pointcast. The successes of email and of the Web were better explained by their particular utilities than by their membership in a broad class of "content delivery." Pointcast tried to shift attention from those particularities to a generic label in order to create a club in which it would automatically be included.

I believe a similar thing happens whenever Second Life is lumped with Everquest, World of Warcraft, et al., into a category called virtual worlds. If we accept the validity of this category, then multi-player games provide an existence proof of millions-strong virtual worlds, and the only remaining question is simply when we arrive at wider adoption of more general-purpose versions

Ironically, of course, many bloggers have responded to Shirkey by arguing that he is comparing apples and oranges by lumping Second Life together with these other gaming platforms. Second Life, they argue, is not a game. And in doing so, they are making his point for him: Second Life, he argues, can not be meaningfully lumped in with these other forms of virtual worlds because it is not a game and read on its own terms, it does not demonstrate there is a robust or widespread public demand for this kind of online experience. Again, though, this is to revert back to a set of statistical criteria for evaluating the cultural significance of Second Life.

Let me repeat for the third time the statement which may best sum up my own position: "Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there."

Here, we can imagine a range of other ways of evaluating the importance of what happens in Second Life:

1. on the basis of which groups or institutions are conducting business there. As I have suggested, Second Life embodies a mixed media ecology in which business, government, educational, civic, nonprofit, and amateur media makers co-exist, each using Second Life as a test bed for innovation. It has always been the case that the playgrounds of the rich and the powerful take on a cultural significance that far outstrips the realm of our own everyday lives.

2. on the basis of the quality of civic engagement which emerges there. In a forthcoming book, Peter Ludlow, the editor of the Second Life Herald and the former editor of the Alphaville Herald (based in The Sims Online), has described what has happened as players move from one "virtual world" to another. Ludlow argues that there are a number of people who were "griefers" in The Sims Online who have begun to make meaningful contributions to the community on Second Life. His implications is that there is something in the mechanisms through which community life is conducted in Second Life which fosters a greater sense of civic engagement and personal responsibility -- in part perhaps because people are constructing their own reality and making their own rules there. (By the way, watch for an interview with Ludlow about Second Life on my blog later this week).

3. On the basis of the specific kinds of outcomes which emerge from our social experimentation in Second Life. We may need to wait longer to evaluate impact on this level but Second Life will matter if it teaches us new things about what it is like to live in a virtual environment or if, for that matter, we take innovations and insights from Second Life back with us to reshape our real world institutions and practices.

4. On the basis of the ways that Second Life incites the public imagination and thus becomes part of the general cultural understanding of what it might mean to inhabit a virtual world. In that sense, Second Life might occupy a space closer to Snow Crash or Diamond Age -- that is, as a fragment of the popular imagination rather than as a real space. In a literal sense, if Second Life didn't exist, we would have to invent it because it plays such a vital role in contemporary discussions of participatory culture, user-generated content, and online worlds. One could argue, in fact, that the public imagination of virtual reality is so far in advance of the current state of the technology that we may never have the patience to actually take the baby steps needed to get from where we are to where as a cultural we want to be. There's a danger that the public imagination of Second Life is so much more vivid than the reality that this contributes to the phenomenon of people trying it out and abandoning it.

Perhaps we can identify many more ways that Second Life might matter culturally without necessarily mattering statistically.

As we look more closely at Shirkey's arguments, he seems to hold onto a very specific set of criteria by which we might evaluate the quality of experience visitors have in Second Life -- criteria which start from the assumption that Second Life is designed to be a "simulacra" of reality, that it is judged according to its fidelity to the real world. Consider this passage from Shirkey's post

Games are not just special, they are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism. There is still a premium on good design and playability, but the magic circle, acceptance of arbitrary difficulties, and goal-directed visual filtering give designers ways to contextualize or bury at least some platform limitations. These are not options available to designers of non-game environments; asking users to accept such worlds as even passable simulacra subjects those environments to withering scrutiny.

All of this makes sense if you assume the goal of Second Life is "maximal realism." In my last post, I argued for a different understanding of what it might mean to have a Second Life -- based on the classic notion of carnival. By this criteria, Second Life is a place we go to escape the constraints on our everyday life, to explore new possibilities through our imagination which would be hard to realize in the realm of our First Lives. It doesn't mean everything goes: in fact, much of the literature on carnival implies that it re-enforced existing rules and norms precisely by inviting people to imagine what would happen if they were overturn.

Second Life can be immersive without in any way convincing us that it is a thorough model of the real world. After all, Second Life is a place where people routinely embrace identities -- say, a panda in a ninja costume -- which would have no basis in the realm of our real world experience, where people may casually swap avatars as they move from one space to another, where they may just as readily copy the space ship from Firefly as duplicate the architecture of Tokyo. Hell, it's a world where there are giant flying penises!

None of this has anything to do with "maximal reality" and everything to do with the "consensual fantasy" William Gibson saw as the defining characteristic of cyberspace. I am certain there are people and institutions that strive relentlessly for "maximal realism" but that's only one potential goal people might embrace as they enter this realm. Second Life is what we as participants make of it.

Shirkey himself demonstrates that games, because of their structures, may create immersiveness without achieving anything near "maximal realism" or even "passable simulacras." Who is to say that Second Life may not be generating altogether different mechanisms for achieving immersiveness -- having to do with our own shared participation in the design of the world -- without depending on perfectly mimicking the realm of our everyday experience? The problem is that if the "immersiveness" of Second Life is a product of our own participation then it may not be immediately communicated to the casual visitor who doesn't contribute directly to the production of this consensual fantasy but simply goes there expecting to consume it much as they consume an amusement park or a multiplayer game. This would surely account for the difference in how casual visitors and immersed participants experience the quality of experience created within this world.

Are You Hep to That Jive?: The Fan Culture Surrounding Swing Music

When Sue Turnbull (a scholar who has written very interesting work on murder mysteries, their female readers and writers) asked me to be the outside reader on a PhD dissertation being written by one of her students at LaTrobe University (in Melbourne, Australia), on contemporary swing dance, I was resistant at first, insisting that I knew little or nothing about the scholarly literature around dance. Sue pushed me harder, suggesting that this project had much more to do with my own work than I might imagine, and being a trusting sort, I agreed to read the work, satisfied in having made my own lack of credentials clear, intrigued by why she was pushing so hard, and a bit pleased to be reading something on swing since I am a closset enthusiast of the new Swing revival (though I certainly can't do the Lindy Hop to save my life.) Thus, Sam(antha) Carroll entered my life. Carroll's dissertation did indeed fascinate me -- it is frankly some of the best work by a graduate student in cultural studies I have read in some time. She draws not just on the literature in performance studies on popular dance traditions in America but it also shows a deep familiarity with cultural studies work on fan appropriations and transformations on media content as well as work in digital studies on virtual and online communities. She captures the world of swing dance culture -- from the inside out -- and traces it across multiple media channels, showing how their lives online are connecting to their physical encounters in geographic space, and especially exploring how they trade video clips of obscure dance performances which become core resources in the development of their own performance repertoires. And, hey, the dissertation came with its own dvd of amazing clips -- and you could dance to it!

I felt that some of her work would be of great interest to readers of this blog given our ongoing discussions of various fan cultures, of the ways digital media is transforming traditional cultural practices, and of the poetics and politics of remixing media content. (And to add to my pleasure, she writes about Hellzapoppin', a much beloved film in my household, and one which I regularly assign to graduate students in our program.) Even if, like me, you think this may be outside your field of interest, think again and give it a closer look.

The following entry was written specifically for this blog by Sam Carroll. I asked her to give us some more biographical data and here's what she wrote:

Sam Carroll has just completed her Phd at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In that doctoral thesis she discussed contemporary swing dancers and their use of digital media in embodied practice - or, in other words, what dancers do with computers. In addition to writing about dancing (and computers), Sam also likes dancing very much. And watching footage of dancing on her computer. She began learning lindy hop in 1999 in Brisbane, but found the swing dancing community an excellent complement to academic life when she moved to Melbourne in 2001 to pursue a postgraduate degree - less writing, more dancing. Sam is now trying to learn as many authentic jazz routines from the 1930s and 40s as possible. Her progress is more a performance of fandom than an embodiment of elite fan knowledge.

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY SAM CARROLL

This is a clip of the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers dancing a Big Apple routine (choreographed by Frankie Manning) in the 1939 film Keep Punchin'. In the last section of this clip they dance lindy hop on a 'social dance floor'.

And here's footage of dancers in the US dancing the same routine in 2006.

If you follow this link you can listen to the Solomon Douglas Swinged playing the same song on their recent album.

Both dancers and musicians have painstakingly transcribed what they see and hear in that original 1939 clip.

Lindy hop - the partner dance most popular today in swing dance communities - developed in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 30s by African American dancers. Over the following years it moved to mainstream American youth culture, carried by dance teachers and performers in films like Keep Punchin' and in stage shows, and then moved out into the international community, again in film and stage plays, but also with American soldiers stationed overseas. Though it was massively popular in its day, by the 1950s changes in popular music, where jazz was replaced by rock n roll or became increasingly difficult to dance to with the rise of bebop, saw lindy slipping from the public eye.

In the 1980s, dancers in Europe and the US began researching lindy, using archival footage like Keep Punchin' but also including films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races - popular musical films of the 1930s and 40s. The aim of these dancers was to revive lindy hop, to recreate the steps they saw on screen. Learning to dance by watching films, particularly films that were only available at cinemas or in archival collections, was unsurprisingly, quite difficult, and these revivalists began seeking out surviving dancers from the period. Among these original lindy hoppers were Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Al Minns, Sugar Sullivan and Dean Collins.

Twenty years after these revivalists began learning lindy, there are thriving swing dance communities throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Korea. They come together in their local communities for classes and social dancing, and also travel extensively for camps and lindy exchanges. My research has focussed on the ways these contemporary swing dancers utilise a range of digital media in their embodied practices. This has involved discussing the way DJs in the swing community use digital music technology; the way swing dancers use discussion boards (Swing Talk, SwingDJs), websites (Dance History), instant messaging and email to keep in contact with dancers in their own community and overseas and to plan their own trips to other local scenes; and the ways in which swing dancers have use a range of audio visual technology. These uses of audio visual technology include the sorts of revivalist activities first practiced in the 1980s, but continuing now in lounge rooms and church halls in every local scene, but also to record their own dancing and local communities and also performances (on the social or competitive floor) by 'celebrity' lindy hoppers.

The Big Apple contest from Keep Punchin' is a useful example of the ways swing dancers make use of digital media in their embodied practices. But it's also the focus of my own dancing obsessions at the moment. I've been dancing lindy for at least eight years, and dance a few times a week in my local, Melbourne scene. I've travelled extensively within Australia to attend dance events, I've run events in my own city and I've travelled overseas for large dance events (such as the Herräng dance camp). This year, having just finished my Phd, I've decided I finally have time to work on my own dancing, in the sweaty, embodied sense, rather than the academic or abstract.

Writers in fan studies like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills and Camille Bacon-Smith have discussed being a scholar-fan (to use Matt Hill's term), where you're a member of the community of fans you're researching. This approach is fairly standard in much of the dance studies literature - it is notoriously difficult to write about dance and dancing with any degree of convincingness if you don't dance - it's a little like dancing about architecture. I've also found that combining my academic work with my everyday, making my everyday experiences my work, has been a satisfying way to extend my fanatical obsession with dance into every corner of my life (a little like Henry's writing about Supernatural, a program I also love, here on this blog).

So when I decided I needed to get back to some level of dance fitness, to end the thesis-imposed hiatus from hardcore dance training, I chose this Big Apple and a number of other 'vintage' or 'authentic' jazz dance routines as my focus. I've learnt the Big Apple and Tranky Doo (another venerable jazz dance routine choreographed by Frankie Manning) before, but this was to be my first solo mission, using clips garnered almost entirely from the internet, though also making use of sections of an instructional DVD produced by a famous teaching couple.

Dancing alone is an essential part of lindy hop. The dance itself revolutionised the European partner dancing structure with its use of the 'break away', (which you can see danced by the last couple in the film After Seben), where partners literally broke away from each other to dance in 'open' position. In open, partners are free to improvise, and the most common improvisation in that historical moment and today, is to include jazz steps from the vast repertoire of steps developed by African American vernacular dance culture over centuries in America. Learning to dance alone not only offers dancers the opportunity to work on body awareness, fitness, coordination, individual styling and expanding their own repertoire (a point upon which I was relying), but also encourages a creative, improvised approach to music which they can then bring to their lindy hop for those 5 or 6 beats of the 8 count swing out - the foundational step of lindy hop.

I've written a great deal about the gender dynamics at work in lindy hop, a dance which prioritise the heterocentric pairing of a man and a woman, beginning with my own discomfort with a dance where the man leads, the woman follows, and traditional gender roles prevail. But I've also written a great deal about the liberatory potential of lindy. The open position and the emphasis on improvisation are an important part of this - in those moments both partners are expected to 'bring it' - to contribute to the creative exchange within the partnership. Lindy, as it was danced by African American dancers in that original creative moment, also embodies a history of resistance and transgression, as a dance with its roots in slavery and created during a period of institutionalised racism and oppression. One of my own research interests has been the extent to which the resistant themes of lindy hop, of African American vernacular dance, have been realised by contemporary swing dancers. The fact that most of these contemporary dancers are white, middle class urban heterosexual youth goes some way to discouraging my reading of contemporary swing dance culture as a hot bed of radical politics and revisions of dominant ideology and culture. Yet I have also found that lindy hop and African American vernacular jazz dances like the Big Apple structure and the Tranky Doo offer opportunities for the expression of self and resistance of dominant gender roles.

As a woman, and as a feminist, I've found that archival footage such as that Keep Punchin' clip offer opportunities for reworking the way I dance and participate in the public dance discourse. When we watch that Big Apple clip, while we can clearly see that each dancer is performing synchronised, choreographed steps, they are also clearly styling each step to suit their own aesthetic, athletic and social needs and interests. We see the personality of each dancer as they execute a set piece of choreography. The very concept of a Big Apple contest involves dancers performing specific steps as they are called, and being judged not only for their ability to dance the correct step in time and with alacrity, but more importantly (in a setting where dance competency, as Katrina Hazzard-Gordon has written, is demanded by the social setting - everyone can dance), for their individual interpretation of the step. This is a performance of improvisation within a socially, collaboratively created structure. The representation of individual identity within a consensual public discourse. This is the sort of thing that jazz musicians do - improvise within a given structure.

And man, is that some serious fun.

For contemporary swing dancers, the idea of taking particular formal structures and then reworking them to suit their own discursive needs extends from the dance floor to the mediated world. Online, swing dancers upload digital footage of themselves dancing, edited to best display their abilities. Or they edit whole narrative films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races and edit out the sequences they're most interested in - the dancing. And dancers like myself are still watching these edited clips, recreating entire routines, and then, even more interestingly, editing out particular steps and integrating them into their lindy on the social dance floor, or into their own choreographed routines.

The notion of step stealing is not new in African American vernacular dance - it reaches back to Africa. And Frankie Manning himself is often quoted as saying 'dance it once and it's yours, dance it twice and it's mine'. For me, as a dancer, this is exciting stuff. If I put in the time and effort, I can learn these steps (well, some of them - watch that Hellzapoppin' clip and you'll see what I mean). And if I practice, time it properly and really bring it, I can pull that out on the social dance floor. Perhaps. Contemporary dancers enact that philosophy on the dance floor every day -stealing steps that catch their attention on the social dance floor, or 'ripping off' moves they see performed in footage of dancers in competitions or performances or in social dance settings all over the world. Or from seventy years ago.

For me, swing dancers' tactical use of digital media in their embodied use of archival footage is not only a source of academic fascination, but also a very practical skill to develop. I have had to learn how to watch footage of dancing in a way that lets me apply my knowledge of dance to separate out distinct steps, then figure out how they work, practically. Learning to poach dance steps from archival footage is a useful skill for lindy hoppers. But the testing of my skills is not online or in my ability to write and talk about these things. The real challenge to my creative and critical faculties comes on the dance floor, when I have to bring it - to bring the right step at the right time, but with my own unique, creative twist.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

---. (2000). Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Clein, John, dir. (1939). Keep Punchin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Frank Manning and Hot Chocolates. USA.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. (1990). Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hills, Matt. (2002). Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Kaufman, S. J. (1929). After Seben. Short film. Perf. "Shorty" George Snowden. USA.

Potter, H. C., dir. (1941). Hellzapoppin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and Frank Manning. USA.

Solomon Douglas Swingtet. (2006). Swingmatism. USA.

Wood, Sam. (1939). A Day at the Races. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. USA.

A Second Look at Second Life

A few weeks ago, I posted here about the debate surrounding Second Life which was triggered by a high-profile critique of the popular multiverse by longtime cyber-pundit Clay Shirky. After corresponding with Shirky and with my colleague Beth Coleman, it was decided that we would offer some new statements about this controversy across our three blogs today and respond to each other's posts in about a week's time. We also agreed that we would post links to the other posts through our sites which would help readers navigate between the various positions. So, if you want to read the latest by Clay Shirky, you can find it here and if you want to read the latest by Beth Coleman, you can find it here. (These links will only go live once I know the other material is up on line.) None of us have had a chance so far to review what the others will say so I anticipate that the first round will mostly be a restating of or clarification of our previous positions. Clay's arguments rest on the following claims:

1.Claims about Second Life's user base have been dramatically overstated because the focus has been on the number of people who try out the multiverse rather than on those who return regularly. As he explains, "Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer."

A lot of effort has been put into debunking Clay's analysis of the numbers by writers such as Joel Greenberg

and Prokofy Neva. Frankly, my interest in Second Life has little to nothing to do with the statistical dimensions of this argument. I've never been one who felt that arguments about cultural change could be reduced to counting things.

I certainly agree that we should be concerned if the press's interest in Second Life is fueled by inflated numbers but I also recognize that these numbers give only a partial indication of the level and kinds of investments people make in these worlds, that Second Life may have cultural importance even for people who have never been there because it embodies a particular model of civic participation and cultural production.

The numbers matter if we are asking whether Second Life represents "the future of the web" but personally, I have never believed that SL is going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term. As I stated last time, I do not buy the whole nonsense that immersive worlds represent web 3.0 and will in any way displace the existing information structures that exist in the web, any more than I think audio-visual communications is going to replace written communications anytime soon. If nothing else, the ability to scan through text quickly gives it an efficiency that will not be replaced by more "technically advanced" solutions which are more time consuming to produce and to consume. I am pretty sure that the value of the web/net lies in asynchronous communications and that real time interactions -- whether we are talking 3d or skype -- will always represent a special class of uses which competes not with the web but with other teleconferencing technologies. Most of us will find uses for virtual worlds one of these days; most of us will not "live" there nor will we conduct most of our business there.

I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games -- it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What's striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

2. He argues that the hype around Second Life simply repeats earlier waves of enthusiasm about virtual worlds, none of which have turned out to be the "next new thing" claimed for them by their most ardent supporters. He concludes, "If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or Usenet, or IRC, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City."

I get the historical analogies Shirky is making here and he's at least partially right about the over-promotion that surrounded some of those earlier MUDs and Moos. My own sense is that Second Life has struck a deeper chord in our culture than those previous MUDS and MOOS did -- in part because of the engagement by other powerful institutions in our culture. To some degree, all of the corporate, academic, nonprofit, and foundation interest in SL is part of the hype which Shirky is dismissing here. There has certainly been a snow ball effect where this group has to be in SL because that group is in second life and so forth. But there is also a way in which SL embodies a new mixed media ecology in which institutions with very different levels of power, wealth, and influence co-exist in a shared virtual space creating more equivalence in terms of their relationship to the media landscape. This is the heart of what Benkler writes about in The Wealth of Networks and there is perhaps no more powerful illustration of this new hybrid media ecology than SL.

Some have dismissed SL as a costume party -- I see it more as carnival in the medieval sense of the term -- as a time and place within which normal rules of interactions are suspended, roles can be swapped or transformed, hierarchies can be reordered, and we can step out of normal reality into a "magic circle" or "green world" which can be highly generative for the imagination. The difference is that in the old days, carnival was something that existed for a very short period of time and people planned for it all year. Now, in the era of SL, carnival exists all the day and people have to decide how much time they want to spend there. In the old days, the power structures that led to carnival were religious and the church had to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. Today, the power structures that lead to SL are corporate and companies have to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. That corporate America seems to be experimenting with the alternative reality that constitutes SL is news -- even if many of these experiments fail and even if many of these companies have no clue what to do with their islands and even if most of them go back into their cloisters in another year or two.

3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.

All of these seem valid criticisms of the media coverage of SL which is historically ill-informed, is simplistic, is subject to press releases proclaiming that "this is the first time that x has ever happened in a virtual environment before." That said, I am personally grateful that most of the coverage of SL has generally been supportive of participatory culture compared to the relentlessly negative coverage associated with sexual predation in MySpace or violence in video games. I take my good news where I can find it and for the moment, the coverage of SL, bad though it often is, is helping Americans in general adjust to the idea that there may be something positive to be gained by having an active fantasy life on line. I have always said that the myth of a digital revolution is more empowering, perhaps, than the reality may be because it keeps alive the idea that real world institutions may be subject to change from below and thus encourages us to imagine and push for the possibility of change. It only becomes disempowering when it gets draped in an aura of inevitability which convinces us that things are going to change by themselves and all we have to do is sit back and watch.

I care only a little bit about the future of virtual worlds. I care a great deal about the future of participatory culture. And for the moment, the debate about and the hype surrounding SL is keeping alive the idea that we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture. That's something worth defending.

Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error."

By those criteria, the Renaissance and the Age of Reason were less than rounding errors since the key innovations occurred among a much smaller number of artists and thinkers. This is to subscribe to a quantitative model of history which simply doesn't reflect the reality of how cultural innovation occurs. A small community of people can generate an enormously rich culture and can have a transforming impact on society as a whole. I am not saying SL has achieved this yet -- and indeed, it may never live up to that potential -- but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that the importance of SL has squat to do with such statistical measures -- though what those measures have to say about its market value may be another value.

I respect what Shirky is doing here in questioning the numbers. I just want to push us to ask deeper questions about the criteria we use to measure the value of Second Life.

As I wrote last time, "Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there."

Engagement Marketing: An Interview with Alan Moore (Part One)

Alan Moore created quite a stir when he called my apartment a little over a month ago. The guy on the phone had a delightful British accent of the kind one might imagine coming from the British comic book artist who is responsible for such works as Lost Girls, From Hell, Watchman, League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Promethea, Top Ten.... Well, it wasn't that Alan Moore. This Alan Moore is a distinguished figure in the marketing world -- the CEO of SMLXL, the Cambridge based "engagement marketing" firm, and the co-author of Communities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century. In Convergence Culture, I write about what I call "affective economics" -- the reappraisal of the value of fan and brand communities within the marketing sphere. I'd recommend Communities Dominate Brands to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the realm of "affective economics." Moore and his co-author, Tomi T Ahonen, have thought deeply about the changes that are rocking the current media landscape and their implications for the ways that brands will court consumers. The book is informed by contemporary media theory and rich in examples for recent marketing efforts that put the theory into practice.

In this interview, Moore shares with us some of his insights into what is going to happen to the branding process given the rise of participatory culture and the breakdown of the traditional broadcast paradigm.

HJ: Your Bio in the book describes you as a specialist in Engagement Marketing, which begs the question -- what is Engagement Marketing and for that matter, what constitutes engagement from your point of view?

AM: Engagement marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create.

And why is this important? Because in advanced economies the values of society and the individual change. AT the heart of this is the key issue around identity and belonging. We have always had community. Pre- industrialization, we were tied to our communities by geography, tradition, the state and birthright. External forces shaped our identity. However, in a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity.

This is described as Psychological Self-Determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition.

The Community Generation, shun traditional organizations in favor of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The Community Generation, seek and expect direct participation and influence. They possess the skills to lead, confer and discuss. These people are not watching television and have grown up in a world of search and two-way flows of communication.

Going further Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust these words define the migration form mass media to social media.

The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, Social search, The Guinness visitor centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre.

For example Al Gore believes Current TV's hybrid of digital platforms and broadcasting can help re-engage young people with politics and the media. A third of its schedule is created by its mainly 18 to 34-year-old audience with digital video cameras and desktop editing software. Al Gore says It's not political, it's not ideological. You get a cornucopia of points of view and fresh perspectives that force people in rigid frameworks to reassess everything.

You can load up your 15 min film. The community gets to vote if it should be broadcast on cable and the creator gets $1000

Interestingly it's a different set of incentives both personal and commercial.

So reputation begins to play an important role here. And will increasingly do so.

I see this process as having value, not only in a commercial context, but also in education, civil society, science and politics.

Engagement Marketing could help sell a product, an industry, a region, combat a social issue. It can attract and deploy the collective intelligence of the many people.

Engagement Marketing is built upon the power of the meritocracy of ideas, and the strategic combinations of different media to propel that idea into the world, stimulating and facilitating the involvement of its audience to a commonly shared goal.

Engagement Marketing is about connecting large or small communities with engaging content to a commercial or social agenda. Rather than boiling everything down to a unique selling proposition, Engagement Marketing creates bigger ideas that emotionally engage its audience, who have a desire to participate.

Rather than focus on the one single proposition which would be a manufactured communication strategy, Engagement Marketing is built upon the fundamental notion of shared experience, something which 'interruptive' communications cannot do.

Mass media, presumes, only one thing of its audience that they are passive and they will consume as much as marketers can persuade them to.

Mass media is cold media, its push, its myopic, its about as relevant to the 21st Century as First World War military strategy. The age of set piece competition is over.

If the 20th Century was about managing efficiencies, then the 21st Century will be about managing experiences.

In the book you write, "Conventional marketing and advertising is the silent movies of the 21st century. The proletarian nature of the internet, blogging, moblogging, the mobile phone, interactive TV, media choice and the PVR, the rich flows of information and the reach of that information, have all contributed to bringing an era to an end." A bold claim, indeed! I'd love to

see you unpack this for us a bit more. Why is this era ending? What evidence can you offer that this era has ended?

"TV advertising is broken, putting $67b up for grabs, which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup." Stated Bob Garfield in a Wired article just before Christmas. He cites "evolution of dance," which has got nearly 35 million views in six months on YouTube, as evidence that conventional media is in meltdown. These numbers are impossible in a conventional media world.

P&G bankrolled commercial television, so when Jim Stengel CMO for P&G said:

In 1965, 80 per cent of adults in the US could be reached with three 60 second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime time commercials to produce the same result. In the early 1960s, typical day-after recall scores for 60 second prime time TV commercials were about 40 per cent and nearly half of this was elicited without any memory aid. Currently a typical day-after recall score for a 30 second spot is about 18- 20 per cent and virtually no one is able to provide any form of playback without some form of recall stimulate.

The number of brands and messages competing for consumer attention has exploded, and consumers have changed dramatically. They show an increasing lack of tolerance for marketing that is irrelevant to their lives, or that is completely unsolicited. Traditional marketing methods are diluted by a hurried lifestyle, overwhelmed by technology, and often deliberately ignored.

One has to start to question the value of traditional marketing communications, which is further supported by Glen L.Urban. Professor at the Sloan School of Management. MIT, who argues that:

Marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the last 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.

On top of that we are witnessing the emergence of a new socio-economic model as Yochai Benkler explains in his book the Wealth of Networks:

We need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviours and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere their own patterns. what has changed is that now these patterns of behaviour have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship amd mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organising productive behaviour at the very core of the information economy.

And lets not forget TRUST. According to the World Economic Forum, Trust is at its lowest level for Governments, Global Brands and even the UN since tracking began in 2001. Trust plays a key role in any interaction, and the media and business have done a great job in destroying that trust.

For example Sony being sued for the pernicious use of spyware on 24million music CD's it sold, without the buyers consent. Or Verizon promoting Bluetooth capability in its ads and then turning the Bluetooth functionality off. Which resulted in a class action against the company. the lawsuit against Verizon Wireless - and the way it came about - highlights the challenges that weblogs pose to corporations.

Verzion advertised the Motorola V710 with Bluetooth this made it possible for file sharing between the mobile device and a computer. Verizon However turned the bluetooth functionality off.

This case has been identified as being possible purely through the power of the blogosphere and the millions that provide such overwhelming force via "word of mouth"

And how about Fake TV news?

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)--a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population.

The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

So, once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job. In this instance, the day job is the consumer as an; uninformed, unconnected, passive, ignorant, non-participative, controlled individual that will happily consume and not question what is put in front of them.

The point is that neither the media, nor brands are in control, and we are not waiting for them. We see image advertising as junk mail and by default irrelevant, we don't believe the hype, and we have learnt to question the motive. We the people formerly known as the audience are no longer content to be good foot soldiers.

So the upshot of all of this is the people taking control and creating their own media platforms like OhMyNews . Founder and Editor Oh Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine "With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."

The article goes on further to say that the Guardian has described it as the world's most domestically powerful news site and a South Korean diplomat was quoted as saying that the no policy maker can now ignore OhMyNews.

What does this mean? It means we are redefining what journalism is, what media is and who controls it. If this is the case we are redefining what advertising is, what business is and who benefits. It means we are redefining how we communicate and to whom.

We are witnesses at the birth of a new socio-economic model.

The Silent Cinema analogy suggests less a fundamental break than the reconfiguration of the system to reflect a new technological environment. Your book talks a lot about what needs to change. What lessons will these new marketers carry over from the era of conventional marketing and advertising?

What can they carry over?

Well - not a lot as I can see.

It's a new set of rules and a new language.

I think there is a great deal that can be left behind. The worse thing that can happen to you is irrelevance which is always the precursor to obsolescence. And that is a one-way street.

With TV audiences in decline, globally what is the model for the future?

Your book describes a shift from a Networked Culture to a Connected Culture. Explain what you see as the difference between the two. How does this distinction map onto the distinction people are starting to make between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0?

Web 1.0 is representative of a networked culture. We're all plugged in, and can be defined as Metcalfe's Law.

But a connected culture is a world of hot media, of Current TV, peer production, collective intelligence, Second Life, the world of Warcraft, Pop Idol, Citizen Journalism, Myspace, Bebo, YouTube, mobile social networking, new business platforms which is about utilising digital technologies to radically challenge the status quo of our industrialised world. It is all about persistent conversation and extended narrative.

A connected culture is one that can be better described as Reeds Law and Group Forming Networks

(GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. They allow small or large groups of network users to connect and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal.

GFN's have an exponential effect and significantly out perform either Sarkov's Lawthe law of the mass media and Metcalfe's Law which is the Law of the internet.

Connected culture is about Commons based peer production as a third model of production that relies on decentralized information gathering and exchange and more efficient allocation of human creativity.

For example Yahoo talk about better search through people. Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo talks about User generated content that is Tagged, Described, Organized and, Discovered not by editors but by the users.

Yahoo talks about: User Distributed Content, and, User Developed Functionality

And they talk about F.U.S.E. = Find - Use - Share - Expand

Another illustration of a connected culture is >em>The Elephant's Dream, the world's first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world .

All mobile/web technologies are designed around social interaction of one form or another. It's a world of Social Media not Mass Media. Niche mass audiences - forming around passion based interests that are not geographic specific.

Get a (Second) Life!

Clay Shirky has been a longtime pundit about digital culture: sometimes he gets it right (or at least, more accurately, sometimes I agree with what he writes) and sometimes he doesn't. For example, he was one of the first journalists to really think hard about the emergence of participatory culture as something different from the same old consumer culture; he also took what I see as the wrong side of the debate with Scott McCloud about micropayments (though the jury is still out on that one.) I always respect what the guy has to say -- even if he tends towards the cynical side and I tend to the more optimistic. He is someone who asks the right questions -- even if he doesn't always come up with the right answers -- and that's all you can ask of anyone who writes regularly and sticks his neck out about emerging trends in a still developing medium. Lots of folks are dismissing Shirky right now without knowing the range of insightful and provocative essays he has posted in the past. Check out his homepage Agree with him, disagree with him -- as I said, I've done both through the years -- Clay Shirky's no idiot.

Right before Christmas, Shirky posted a critique of the media hype around Second Life, which has been stirring up a lot of fuss among my various friends and neighbors. The piece is worth reading as a corrective to some of the more breathless prose which claims that Second Life is "Web 3.0" and will totally change the world as we know it.

Basically, Shirky's arguments boil down to the following:

1.Claims about Second Life's user base have been dramatically overstated because the focus has been on the number of people who try out the multiverse rather than on those who return regularly. As he explains, "Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer."

2. He argues that the hype around Second Life simply repeats earlier waves of enthusiasm about virtual worlds, none of which have turned out to be the "next new thing" claimed for them by their most ardent supporters. He concludes, "If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City."

3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.

Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived."

This story has already generated some smart responses from people I know and trust. Here, for example, is my MIT colleague Beth Coleman:

Second Life may turn out to be the Friendster of the "metaverse"--the first to disseminate the signal strongly but also fast to disappear once the My Space of this format appears. Last winter there were 200,000 who visited SL. Today there are somewhere around 2 million who have at least stepped in to use the interface, to see for themselves what this is all about. WoW has already demonstrated a mass scale of technical application and popular interest for MMORPG. SL, Multiverse, and the growing numbers of virtual world platforms beg the question of future network use. It's not like real life. Not by a long shot. One is animating a proxy through multilayered terrains of information. Some of them might take the shape of cliché singles bars, but the procession toward ever more complex simulation in computing is there. Not every user can code, but certainly more users will learn to script (or edit video or stream media) as Flilckr and Youtube have made clear. It also seems incorrect not to recognize exponential user growth in regard to 3d virtual worlds. Let's not look at the U.S. for a moment but Asia, specifically the Korean Cyworld that is a 3D world massively used for social-networking in the way that My Space functions for American youth. The all-encompassing metaverse that Philip Rosedale promises Second Life will become may be a fiction of the CEO's own virtual world fantasy. The potential of 3D search engines do not trump text-based and 2D formulations. But it seems short-sited to says that 3D imaging and spatial representation do not open doors for emergent use of communications networks. At the very least, the qualities of 2D social networks are mutated, amplified, and animated by these real-time moving image worlds. VW platforms, including SL, can claim the following qualities:

1. Community building of social networks that reach on and offline

2. Communal projects that span systems designs to educational, business, and activist organization

3. Avatar proxies are not minor. Yahoo avatar, Wii's Miis, Facebook....every place where users are able to created multi-media profiles they do. The puppet show of virtual worlds speaks very strongly to a collective desire to play in this way.

We are still in the beta stage on this, a continuing beta from the 1990s I suppose, but the tipping point from niche to popular use seems to have arrived.

Here's danah boyd:

Lately, i've become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions i've been getting. In particular, "will Web3.0 be all about immersive virtual worlds?" Clay's post on Second Life reminded me of how irritated i am by this. I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

Maybe i'm wrong, maybe i'll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.

There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don't think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there's a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn't be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments....

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

GSD&M thought leader Joel Greenberg spells out what matters to him about Second Life and does some pretty interesting analysis of the same numbers Shirky has been working from:

SL has two interesting charactistics: 1) SL is a community; until you start participating with other people, you haven't really experienced it to its fullest, and 2) Linden Lab does not spend money on traditional advertising, so much of the growth can be attributed to community marketing and PR.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Shirky's column has sparked a long overdue discussion about what Second Life is and why it matters which moves us beyond the first flirtations with virtual life and gets to the heart of the matter. I've written a lot here about Second Life, including describing in some detail my own first steps into this new terrain. There's a lot about Second Life that really fascinates me -- starting with Linden Lab's enlightened views about user-generated content as well as the range of different groups that are using Second Life as a site for running what I have described here in the past as thought experiments.

For me, Second Life is a powerful embodiment of what Yochai Benkler has been talking about in The Wealth of Networks: a place where commercial, educational, nonprofit, governmental, and amateur groups co-exist and interact. It is a playground where we can try on new identities, test new products and practices, explore new ways that core institutions might operate.

Second Life is NOT web 3.0.

Second Life is NOT the future of the web.

We will NOT abandon physical reality for virtual life.

Immersive realities are NOT the primary way we will interact with information environments in the future.

But it IS important as a social experiment -- even if the user numbers were in the tens or hundreds of thousands as opposed to the millions. This isn't about statistics; it's about cultural innovation and social experimentation. If Second Life didn't exist, we -- those of us who care about grassroots creativity -- would have to invent it because it is a vivid illustration of the trends towards participatory culture which are springing up all over the place.

Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there.

I got asked the other day to predict which of the current hot new websites will survive a decade from now. The answer is probably none of them will survive in anything remotely like their present form. But, if I had to make a guess, I'd guess that Second Life will outlast YouTube and MySpace even though -- or maybe precisely because -- its user base is smaller.

We have seen rapid churn with social network sites; teens don't want to hang out where their older siblings hung out and they certainly don't want to hang out where their parents hung out. So, as long as MySpace gets defined around its teen user base, it will quickly be, as Clueless put it, "so-so twenty minutes ago." Social networking as a practice will continue and grow but MySpace is toast.

YouTube is going to face an uphill battle to make money for Google on the scale anticipated and almost every choice they make to generate revenue -- from charging subscriptions to incorporating advertising or selling content -- is going to alienate large chunks of its users. Some other site will offer the same services for less money and the amateur media makers whose culture is larger than YouTube will go to whichever media sharing site offers them the best deal.

Most multiplayer games will have a life-span of four or five years: sooner or later, the producers who are generating the content will run out of creative energy, will set the wrong policy, or will simply fail to keep up with their competitors, and they will lose their marketshare to the new game in town.

But Second Life may outlive them all for several reasons: people feel a deeper investment in Second Life as a community because they have built it in their own images, because they have invested time in constructing the physical artifacts and social processes which constitute this multiverse. The core users of Second Life will be there as long as Linden Lab is there and the folks at Linden Lab seem to have a pretty realistic understanding of what it takes to support the diverse kinds of communities who are embracing this technology.

I suspect Second Life's numbers will always be lower than those of World of Warcraft or its descendents: more people want to have master entertainers construct their fantasy lives for them than want to build them from scratch. I have been surprised by how many are trying Second Life -- suggesting that there may be some hunger out there for at least testing the waters with virtual reality -- but I am also surprised how intimidated even my MIT students are of trying to build something in virtual space. So, I don't know that this will represent the tipping point in terms of multiverses -- simply that it will be an important community that has the potential to sustain itself for an extended period of time.

Shirky's column has sparked an important conversation, has caused us all to catch our breath and examine our assumptions. For that, I am personally grateful, even if this is one of those times when I think he's probably more wrong than right.

I can't say the same about some of the company he is keeping. Shirky's article appeared on a site called Valleywag, which bills itself as a "tech gossip rag." Another Valleywag reporter, no doubt inspired by Clay's critique, decided to crash a press conference being held in Second Life and act, frankly, like a wild boar. Here's the reporter's own description of what happened:

The sex is less satisfying, the money meaningless, but in one regard, at least, Second Life has matched the real world. Political events in Linden Lab's overblown virtual environment are carefully controlled, lacking in authenticity, and mind-numbingly tedious. Valleywag sent along a video reporter to the opening session of Congress, or rather an online discussion of the day's momentous events in the virtual world. The event, sponsored by marketing consultancy, Clear Ink, and has-been computer maker, Sun Microsystems, was as sparsely attended as a New Hampshire at-home with a no-hope candidate. Those attendees not from the press were Second Life publicists making sure the participants stayed in their seats. So much like the meatworld. It's uncanny. Valleywag's reporter ran into trouble with the virtual world's flacks after he floated up and spoiled the photo-op by getting into the frame. "They were really freaking out. Dude, I was laughing so hard I was crying when they finally kicked me out." Well, at least someone enjoyed themselves.

Whatever the value of your criticism of Second Life may be, acting like a jerk in a virtual world is no different than acting like a jerk in the real world. This suggests the actions of someone who imagines virtual worlds as simply a playground where individuals can do anything they want and not expect any social consequences. It suggests the actions of someone who has contempt for anyone who takes what's going on in such a space seriously and wants to show his contempt by bearing his rump to the world. Here's hoping that we can debate the issues surround virtual worlds with a bit more civility and maturity in the future.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part Two)

Over the past six months, I have been closely following the debates regarding the Deleting Online Predators Act. danah boyd and I issued a collective statement at the beginning of the summer based on our research on social networks and participatory culture. I also ran a post here describing some of the ways that banning youth from accessing MySpace and other social network sites in schools and public library might slow the potential use of blogging and other network software for pedagogical purposes. Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series focused on NetFamilyNews and its editor, Anne Collier. Collier's site has helped parents address their fears about MySpace and has kept all of us on top of the latest developments regarding governmental policies that might restrict young people's access to online space. These policies, and the fears that motivate them, play an important role in today's installment.

Many parents express an anxiety that they can not realistically control the flow of media into their homes, let alone know what their young people are doing when they are outside of their supervision. How would you respond to that concern?

I understand that concern and the frustration many parents have about diminishing control over what their children are exposed to. It isn't just parents who are experiencing diminishing control. Schools, corporations, and governments at all levels of society worldwide are too. This is an unnerving, fascinating shift we're experiencing, and I think it's calling upon all of us to think it through together out loud, bringing a whole lot of skill sets into the discussion. Because the situation seems to be requiring us to figure it out together as we go along. Problems in a participatory medium like Web 2.0 are calling for participatory solution development.

At the family level, as I suggested above, the life and tech skills of parents and kids are both needed to find solutions to Net-related problems. In schools, challenges involving defamation or cyberbullying in blogs or social sites need the best thinking of a bunch of people - students, administrators, counselors, network administrators, school-safety experts, teachers, and sometimes First Amendment legal advisers and law enforcement people. In a way, that's really exciting. It used to be that school-safety people, techies, and counselors, for example, had their spheres and hardly ever talked, much less hammered out solutions together. Now the pooling of those areas of expertise is being demanded, and I can't imagine that there won't be some creative and very positive outcomes because of it. Think, for example, about what we're all going to be learning about free-speech rights. Maybe not since the Constitutional Convention has the First Amendment been such a prominent topic in American schools!

Then I look at what's happening in other parts of the world where people are using the participatory Web. I just blogged about a report in The Guardian that, even though the Iranian government "remains a staunch opponent of Internet freedoms ... Farsi has made it into the top 10 languages on the Net." There are 70,000-100,000 active blogs in Iran, The Guardian article said. Then there's the social site ChinaKids with 800,000 registered preteen users and sponsored by the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party. The Wall Street Journal reported that the site encourages kids to speak

out, "sometimes against authority"! The question of how to control the flow of media into homes, schools, cybercafes, and kids' mobile phones is being eclipsed by what to do about the media that flows out from those places and devices!

You have readers from around the world. What similarities and differences do you see in the concerns raised by parents in different parts of the world?

I do have readers in more than 50 countries, but I don't get email from many readers outside North America, interestingly - only some in the UK. So I mostly rely on English-language news-media coverage of technology in other countries to know what the general concerns are. It does appear that parents' concerns are fairly universal, but there are degrees of differences. For example, European parents seem to be less concerned than American parents about blocking nudity and more concerned about hate speech on the Web. But cyberbullying is a big issue everywhere. In the UK, Europe and Asia, so far it has been happening more on mobile phones than in IM and social Web sites, as we're seeing here. People are being impersonated and defamed in social sites everywhere. I did hear from a colleague in Portugal about harassment in a US-based social site popular there, one case involving a co-worker and another a teenager whose dad contacted him for help. Someone who said he was a teenager in India emailed me recently about his concern that he was accessing porn too much online, that it would hurt his future prospects. I've seen and linked to news reports of "videogame addiction" in South Korea and counseling centers established to help addicted players. Just a few examples.

One thing's for sure: Social networking sites and all the good and bad happening in them are certainly international. India has nearly a dozen social-networking sites and 1.2 million bloggers (compared to China's 19.9m, Japan's 10m, and the US's 50m), India's Economic Times reports; Japan's Mixi recently had a $1.8 billion IPO; Cyworld has saturated the teen and 20-something market in South Korea and its diaspora, so it launched a US version this past summer; LunarStorm reached the saturation point in Sweden (reportedly 90% of Swedish h.s. students) and launched a UK version - and on and on. So all the stuff that's causing worries here in the US, from bullying to piracy to PC security, is causing similar ones in other countries.

You've written a book specifically addressing adult concerns about MySpace. Why do you think social network sites like MySpace have sparked such anxiety? How real are the dangers that are being claimed?

For grownups, MySpace kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn't just for teenagers, of course (only around 20% of its users were teens), but to any parent who knew about it, it was a teenage thing, and my guess is teenagers weren't inclined to tell their parents about this new hangout if they didn't have to. So I don't think it was really on the radar for parents until it was all over the news media as a dangerous place where "predators" could contact their kids. An AP story out of Connecticut last February reported that "at least seven" girls 12-16 had been "sexually assaulted by men they met through the popular Web site MySpace." As far as I could tell following the news coverage closely, parents were hearing nothing about MySpace or social networking that wasn't at least negative, and some of it was really scary. It was that combination of a totally new thing adults knew virtually nothing about and very negative news coverage that sparked such anxiety, I

think. Then, too, there was the '06 election; politicians stood to benefit from saying they would act on those fears. It was, you might say, a "perfect storm" of parental-concern creation. By May, when our publisher, Peachpit Press, asked us to write the book ( My Space Unraveled ), there simply was no balance to the public discussion. We wanted to offer some balance - share the views of teens, researchers, children's advocates, and law enforcement people who understood social networking; encourage parents to check MySpace out themselves with simple step-by-step instructions; and explain the actual risks and the research.

How real are the dangers? There are dangers in social sites for out- there, risk-seeking people just as there are for them in "real life." As Janis Wolak, one of the authors of both of UNH's studies about child online victimization, told me last spring, "Basically, what puts kids at risk is when they talk about sex with people they meet online, and the vast majority of them don't get involved in that kind of situation." The first study was the widely misrepresented one about "one in five children" being sexually solicited online that, when actually read, said that "none of the solicitations led to an actual sexual contact or assault" and many of those solicitations came from other teens. The second study found the number of solicitations had gone down, to one in seven, but - though published this past summer - the survey was conducted before social networking took off. So even the second study from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH wasn't about social networking. What these researchers have found in other studies, though - as Janis indicated - is that it's the young people responding to and seeking out sexual contacts with strangers who are at risk.

Most of the research we have so far - or the most publicized research - is about exploitation of online kids by adults. That's important research to have, but it's only part of the picture. We know almost nothing yet about child and teen behavior on social sites, good and bad, or about the impact of online socializing, media-sharing, social-producing, or creative networking. In our book I call it "collective self-expression," this social aspect of all the mashing-up and remixing that's going on with digital media, and I think it's fascinating. I think it's kind of in its infancy, and we have so much to learn about and from it. In any case, a much more complete picture is needed before any conclusions can possibly be drawn, I feel.

But I digress. ;-) There are other "dangers," depending on a person's definition. Certainly some parents would define exposure to nudity or sexually suggestive content as a danger, and there is definitely greater risk of that than sexual predation in social sites. MySpace says it's deleting x-rated content as it finds it, and it has both scanning technology and staff dedicated to finding and deleting it, but users are posting and finding it. The general Web itself, though, is known to have much more hard-core content than anything I've seen on MySpace, if kids are seeking it out.

The risks that I suspect will affect most young social networkers, though, fall under the very large category of bullying, or social cruelty, which parents and kids have probably always dealt with and always will. Since school social life has moved online, so have bullying, gossip, harassment, etc., and they can be particularly insidious online because the behavior can go on 24x7 and be anonymous. Kids and teens often don't think about the implications of their actions because that part of the adolescent brain, the prefrontal cortex, is still in development, so they can impulsively post text and other media about themselves and others and not be able to control the outcome (see my comment above about the teenage girl emailing sexually explicit photos of herself to a boyfriend). Digital media, parents too need to know, can be cut and pasted into Web pages, attached to IMs and emails, and shared on file-sharing networks - they usually can't be taken back. This, to me, is a real risk that I've been telling parents about in NetFamilyNews for years.

Your site monitors legislation designed to "protect" youth from various perceived dangers of the new media landscape. What do you see as the most pressing trends in this area as we enter 2007?

Better-written laws that reflect understanding of the Internet and its users! Most disturbing to me was the now-defunct Delete Online Predators Act, written before hardly any research had been done on the impact of the social Web on the people it was purportedly written to protect.

The metaphor that occurred to me as I was writing a chapter of our book was Penn Station in New York. A tourist walks into that giant, confusing, fast-paced, populated space at rush hour and feels a sudden urge to look for the nearest exit. That's most adults' first experience of MySpace. But like a MySpace user going straight to his or her page, a commuter just heads to his usual platform, gets on the train and goes home. He doesn't remotely see what the tourist finds so daunting. This is changing now, I think, but when we were working on the book last summer, the tourists were in charge of the entire public discussion; legislation was being written by the tourists! For a balanced picture and sound solution development, we've got to have the commuters' perspective too, I think.

Some parents argue that when in doubt, they should simply prohibit social networking sites. What's wrong with this approach? What do you see as positive about social networking sites?

I don't think prohibition is possible, at least it'd be even harder now and with the Internet than when it was given a serious try in the 1920s and '30s. I talk about this above - it's too easy for kids to "go underground" online, with all the free accounts available to them in sites parents have never heard of, proliferating wired and wireless access points, and new Net-enabled products constantly arriving on store shelves.

We're only just beginning to see the positives, with research like that funded by the MacArthur Foundation. But I think we'll discover many positive developments involving digital media and socializing online. I think of how the Rock for Darfur profile got started on MySpace (see this on "Powerful Change Agents ); of a woman I just met in an airport whose teenage granddaughter first started publishing her poetry on MySpace and has since won a prize for her work; of the ski videos my son shoots, edits, and posts at Newschoolers.com and YouTube.com; of the html and other software code kids are learning while embellishing their pages in social sites; of the youth social activism being fostered at YouthNoise.com; of all the future professional writers who got their start vying for and trying to hold their peers' attention in their daily blogging; of the garage bands that wouldn't otherwise be finding fans and signing record deals.

I often receive letters expressing concern about addiction to digital media. Is this a realistic concern and if so, what steps should parents take if they fear that their teen may be addicted to games, social networks, or other digital media?

I'm not really qualified to answer that, but the question of whether there is such a thing as Internet addiction is getting more and more attention in the medical field (and coverage in the news media). In November the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the subject , reporting that an international neuropsychiatric medicine journal published a study that "claimed to be the first large-scale look at excessive Internet use," and "the American Psychiatric Association may consider listing Internet addiction in the next edition of its diagnostic manual." I just talked with a 16-year-old in New York State who loves playing World of Warcraft (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and says he spends 3 hours a night on school nights and 5 a day on weekends playing it, but - from communicating with both him and his librarian mom (who sounds like a great mom) - it doesn't sound like he's addicted. His mother says she's not thrilled by the amount of time he spends in WoW and his grades have gone down a bit, so there will probably be some repercussions, but there are things about his experience with the game that she likes too.

"Game addiction" is coming up more and more. South Korea opened its first game-addiction treatment center in 2002, and the Washington Post reported last June that the country had just launched a game addiction hotline. Europe's first game addiction clinic reportedly opened last summer in Amsterdam (here's an item I ran on it last June last June ).

How much should parents know about the online lives of their youth? Is there a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive?

I do think parents need to know enough about the online part of their children's lives to feel assured that it's safe and reasonably constructive. The best gauge is probably how much parents feel they need to know about their kids' offline social lives. The online part is just as individual. And it changes as young people mature, right? The responsibility for staying safe and assessing risk increasingly shifts from parent to child as the latter grows; that's no different in their online lives, I'd say.

I think there can be a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive, but it's different for every child. Some parents seem to want to remove all risk from their teenagers' lives. So - having heard from a couple of researchers that risk assessment is one of the primary tasks of adolescence and having quoted them in our book - I later asked a prominent pediatrician what he thought about this risk- removal tendency, and he very definitely said we're doing our children a disservice if we don't let them do that assessment work that helps develop their brains.

Much of the legislation that seeks to "protect" youth gets argued on the basis of protecting childhood innocence and yet gets applied to regulating the conduct of adolescents. What role should an understanding of child development play in developing meaningful response to the online lives of our offspring?

My co-author Larry Magid recently quipped that the Delete Online Predators Act was more like the Delete Online Kids Act - in the sense that it would've done nothing to "delete" predators but rather focused on banning kids from social sites in schools and libraries. The legislation that Sens. McCain and Schumer just announced they would be introducing this year is clearly aimed at keeping out predators, because it would require sex offenders to register email addresses and other online contact information in addition to offline data such as phone numbers. This makes sense if it succeeds in extending existing child-protection law into cyberspace. It seems based on what is already known and understood, but I still think more child-development expertise needs to be folded into the public discussion and lawmaking. These have been dominated so far by law enforcement and research on criminal behavior online. There are some wonderful cops out there doing fine child-protection and online-crime-prevention work, but we do badly need to broaden and balance the discussion. For example, state attorneys general have called for age verification of minors in social-networking sites, but they haven't seemed inclined to entertain a full discussion about the implications for children's privacy, and the subject of social networking became so negative and associated with predators late last year that social-networking companies were reluctant to take any position on best practices that might counter-balance politically based regulatory efforts.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part One)

I've spent a fair amount of time in this blog talking about the challenges of educating the next generation of youth so that they acquire the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the emerging media culture. Much of this discussion inevitably centers around what happens in school-based or after-school media literacy programs. But, as I wrote in Technology Review some years ago, media literacy begins in the home. Parents have an essential role to play in helping their young people make sense of the new media landscape and giving them the ethical foundations they need to make meaningful decisions when they go on line. Unfortunately, we offer parents very little guidance on how to perform those roles. Indeed, most of the advice literature can be reduced to a simple message: the less media your kids consume, the better off they are. I don't think this is very good advice for a number of reasons: it reduces media consumption to a social problem rather than recognizing the pedagogical benefits of actively participating in media culture. Such advice, which often talks about media in terms of "screen time," produces enormous anxieties, anxieties which in turn get fed by sensationalistic news reports, shoddy research, and culture war rhetoric from political leaders, until parents are left terrified of this online world that they often know little about and totally uncertain where to turn for thoughtful advice. I often speak to groups of MIT alum as I travel around the country and inevitably, no matter what the topic of my talk is, the questions circle around the anxieties these highly educated and thoughtful adults feel about their children's relaitons to mass and digital media. In many cases, even a little bit of information will calm their fears and offer them another way of thinking about these issues. One of the best places for parents to turn for information about the world young people are encountering and creating for themselves online is a site called NetFamilyNews.com. Here's how the site describes its beat:

* Online safety and privacy news and tools

* New technologies and Web resources for kids

* Research about the impact of digital media on kids

* Legislation affecting children's online experience

* School and library Net-use policy

* How Web-literate kids, parents, and teachers are using the Internet.

Today and tomorrow, I am going to be sharing an interview with Anne Collier, who identifies herself as a journalist and children's advocate. Collier offers a sensible middle ground perspective on the issues which concern contemporary parents: she recognizes both the risks and potentials of these new media, helping parents to see past the sensationalism and focus on the matters they need to really be concerned about. Collier also recently published a significant book dealing specifically with social network sites and young people, MySpace Unraveled: What It Is and How to Use it Safely, and so many of my questions here are designed to draw her out about the specific issues surrounding children's involvement with Web 2.0.

I am excited to call this important online resource to the attention of this blog's readers. I hope you enjoy her down to earth perspective on youth and media as refreshing as I do.

What led you to create Net Family News? What needs do you think it fills for your readers?

A couple of colleagues actually thought of the idea of a monthly email newsletter for parents in mid-'97 and asked me to write it but lost interest in the project after a while and moved on. I felt strongly it needed to continue because it was the only "community newspaper" I knew of serving an increasingly important interest community, so I renamed the newsletter NetFamilyNews, made it a weekly, and incorporated it as a nonprofit organization in '99. Later I added a daily blog and RSS feed to increase accessibility. But it was really just a blog before there were blogs - annotated links to news of tech-parenting relevance.

As for needs being filled: NFN is a news filter for busy parents, educators, children's advocates, etc. I feel it's helpful for people working directly with tech-literate kids to know what's going on "out there," have a sense of context and maybe solidarity. It's almost a cliché now that young people are more tech-literate than their parents. That's true in many cases, but it's also true, and apparently less obvious, that adults and young people use the same technologies differently, and adult Net users make incorrect assumptions about teen Net use. IM at the office is a different experience than IM among middle schoolers. So all these teen tech "anthropology" stories in newspapers and magazines around the world about how teenagers are using Lunarstorm, Bebo, MySpace, Cyworld, IM, mobiles, There.com, and World of Warcraft are, I hope, frequent reminders of and insights into a perspective that can help adults intelligently negotiate this part of parenting and policymaking.

In cases where parents are intimidated by child tech literacy, information is empowering. When I started doing this I saw parents as a "silent majority" in a vital public discussion. I don't think that has changed much, actually. They're still a silent majority, and people are writing laws that would affect their children, the implications of which I think neither the legislators nor the constituents fully understand. So, I figured, people need information before they can have a voice and become active participants, and parents are essential parties to this particular discussion. So "community news" was a start. The next step was our forum, at the moment called BlogSafety.com (we're working on a more enduring name), where people could talk about all this publicly at their convenience. I wrote the mission statement for it back in 1998 but couldn't find funding until social-networking sites saw too that parents needed a place to air their concerns and get answers other than their customer- service departments.

How well do you think the mainstream media covers the issues which concern parents about Web 2.0? What do you gain by addressing these issues through the web?

I think the mainstream media, particularly the big names and mostly print (but also some broadcast) - the New York Times, the Associated Press, USATODAY, the Boston Globe, Business Week, WSJ, NPR, the BBC, etc. - have been doing a great job of covering Web 2.0 developments but not so much Web 2.0 where youth is concerned. I try to alert parents to the implications for kids and families of what tech journalists cover. For example, the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry recently took a thoughtful look at virtual communities as another kind of "third place," or hang out, as first considered by Prof. Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Jason wasn't writing about what these places mean to teenagers, but I thought parents might be interested in a piece about how important they have long been to people of all ages (online hanging out is really not a big leap), so I linked to it. That's just one example. There are zillions of topics - recent ones include reports and press releases all over the Web about new social-networking sites and "niches"; a New York Times report on how police are incorporating social sites into their investigative work; coming state and federal about barring sex offenders from social sites; the BBC on how a third of 8-to-13-year-olds in the UK already swap tunes on their phones ; and MTV's "The N," mobile social site Mbuzzy.com, and a market research firm teaming up to turn teen users into "a panel of 10,000 young people for immediate feedback about their lifestyles as well as network programming, advertising, events and other information."

As for what I gain from this project: I'm basically a beat reporter, given (or choosing) an interesting assignment and getting increasingly interested and invested in it as time goes on. Youth and the Internet is the assignment of a lifetime. I got my MA in East Asian studies, focusing on China, and did some TV and print reporting from Asia - which would've been a fascinating, beat right now - but in the early '90s the story that I found truly compelling was the Web. It seemed clear to me it was going to be a story about every part of life - "human interest," education, law, media, business, politics.... I wanted to follow this story for the long term in a way that might be useful to other people too.

Much of the existing advice literature for parents implies that the best advice is to minimize the amount of media children and youth consume and to keep screen technologies out of their bedrooms. What do you see as the limits of this approach?

That second basic bit of advice isn't all bad. My own common sense as a parent suggests to me that keeping screen technologies in high- traffic parts of the house is a good idea if it helps parents to be more aware of and engaged in their children's online experiences. I doubt anybody disagrees that awareness and involvement are good things, where kids' social lives are concerned, online and offline.

General safety tips - like keeping connected computers out of kids' bedrooms - have their place and usefulness (because of the simplicity they suggest, and adults need to know parenting online kids is not rocket science!), but I think anything that suggests parents can completely control their children's media exposure or Internet access is getting less realistic or practical. As the number of access points, devices providing access, and kids' workarounds multiply, we probably need to think more in terms of communication and guidance. "Just say no" and kids can simply go into stealth mode (e.g., set up a new, harder-to-find account from a friend's house or at some drive- by wireless hot spot in the neighborhood), which is increasingly easy for them as access points proliferate; delete an account and six more profiles or blogs can appear in its place in the same or any of hundreds of other social sites.

Another limitation of rules and tips is that they really only reach those who want to comply with them. It has gotten very easy to be noncompliant. I mentioned workarounds above, and there are all kinds - from proxy services that allow kids to visit sites blocked by filters to friends' houses with different Internet rules or absent parents to accessing the Web from anywhere on Web-enabled cell phones. So more thought needs to be given to how to protect kids not reached by safety tips and rules - how to educate them to protect themselves.

What kinds of things worry parents the most about web 2.0? How legitimate are those concerns?

My guess is that, if they aren't talking with their kids about their Net activity and are relying on local TV news or Oprah, they're worried about "predators" on the social networks. They're a factor to be aware of but way over-hyped, politicized, and reported out of context. I'm aware of no comparative research on this, but my close observer's take on the risks of online socializing is that cyberbullying or online harassment and negative self-exposure will affect a great many more young people than sexual predation.

About a year ago a youth officer and detective in Connecticut emailed me about a story that hadn't made it into the local paper, and he felt parents would want a heads-up. A 13-year-old girl in his community had emailed sexually explicit images of herself to a boyfriend. The boy soon became an ex-boyfriend who had shared his account password with a friend, who in turn proceeded to find and post those images on a Web page, then to share the URL with students at their school. The page was shut down, but not before "everyone" had seen it. It's that kind of age-old awful teenage "prank" that can now be so damagingly public in online digital media. Mild versions of that story - basically everyday middle and high school life, happening all over the Web - are being eclipsed by media like Dateline's endless Predator series, which isn't even about the Internet but is reflexively associated with misrepresentations of statistics like the "1 in 7 kids sexually solicited online" out of the University of New Hampshire (people who study that data say most of those solicitations are coming from peers, and none of the "1 in 5" of the original 2000 study on the subject resulted in sexual assaults).

Another risk that has gotten almost no reporting but I think will be getting more attention is what I'd call negative online reinforcement of risky offline behavior, such as eating disorders, self-mutilation, and substance abuse - young people finding support on the social Web for their harmful behaviors. We increasingly need to fold a great deal of offline expertise into the "online safety" discussion - adults who work with youth who have expertise in these behaviors. Actually, the term "online safety" will probably soon go away, as the online/offline distinction collapses. Also, our children the digital natives will be parents before long, right? So they will naturally be thinking more holistically about safety and privacy than we adults are right now.

One other thought: We really don't know how much of the (to parents) disturbing teenage behavior we're seeing on the social Web is really new and how much of it has always been a reality but is just more public all of a sudden. This exposure is probably mostly good. Parents, researchers, psychologists, and child-development experts have a lot more material to work with and learn from; suddenly they can be flies on the wall like never before (for a while, anyway - some teens are aware of this and using privacy tools more, others don't really care). Some school crises reportedly are being prevented because of threats found online. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us last June that, since it established its profile in MySpace, that site's users have become the hotline's largest source of calls - lives are being saved because of its presence in MySpace.

All this exposure itself probably also affects individual and social behavior in some ways, maybe a little along the lines of the Heisenberg theory with all those observers out there affecting the "experiment," and it'll be very interesting to see what coming research tells us about that.

Are there some general principles parents should apply in making decisions about their youth's relations to new media?

Really just the one about how the line between online and offline is blurring for young people, so it makes great sense to apply a family's ethics and values and what one has always known about plain old parenting to the online part of children's lives. The same goes for academic ethics and citizenship. For example, discussions about plagiarism and respecting copyrights (as we watch copyright law evolve!) need to embrace online media use. We want our children to use good judgment about who they socialize with on Friday night; the same goes for who they spend time with online, who's on their friends or buddy lists, right? We ask them questions like who's driving them home, or whether there will be hundreds of people at that party; we can ask them things like whether they know all 375 people on their friends lists, if they're careful about what they click on in IMs, emails, and Web pages, if they use privacy features, and what music they use in the videos they upload to media-sharing sites.

It's getting harder to generalize. Sites like MySpace on Web 2.0, the participatory Web, the user-driven Web - whatever people want to call it - are really whatever any user wants or creates them to be. The profile is a reflection of its owner, is his/her online "self," as is each user's experience in virtual worlds such as Second Life or There, I've learned from researchers such as danah boyd at Cal Berkeley and David Huffaker at Northwestern. So family rules and school policies more tailored to the individual or, at most, to the community are more effective than general rules or federal laws, I think.

In talks, I tell parents that this is about life, not technology. Of course there are some general principles that make all of life better (in fact, they're probably even more important in the more anonymous environment the Net represents), such as the ethic of reciprocity in virtually all the world's faith traditions, or the Golden Rule, as Christians call it. We're all talking about the First Amendment and intellectual property a lot now, which I think is great; maybe Web 2.0 is also presenting us - all the Web's participants - with a prime opportunity to be talking about behavioral ethics and citizenship.

Many parents worry that their children know more about new media than they do. What advice might you have for such parents?

Not just about new media! A friend and educator in the L.A. Unified School District said recently that kids know so much more about just about everything than we did as kids that teachers' jobs are changing. As much as giving students information, they're helping them figure out what to make of it. He said it better than I can, but I think he was simply stating the new reality. Adults have street smarts or life literacy, youth has tech smarts or literacy - one could see these as complementary skills, presenting an opportunity to strengthen parent-child communication and mutual respect. Ask them what they know, turn them into the family CTO, set the preferences in IM software together, ask questions that aren't about confrontation and control but are instead aimed at understanding their online experience and helping them use good judgment online in it.

It's also important to tell our children our concerns and why we have them - not constantly, but clearly and effectively (calmly). I understand if that sounds ingenuous to parents who have uncommunicative teenagers - that has always been a challenge - but I don't think parents can afford to view teenage tech competency as purely negative. If they do, there is a risk of marginalizing themselves even more, from a teen's perspective.

He's Back....!

Didja Miss Me? This week, I am blogging from Singapore so the dates and times of posting are going to be all over the map. When I write will have more to do with my state of jet lag than anything else. I am here, as regular readers will have predicted, doing some ground work for the launch of the MIT-Singapore Games Lab this summer -- as well as giving a big public lecture about Convergence Culture.

I haven't blogged in a little over a week -- it feels like much longer. I can't tell you how deeply blogging has gotten under my skin over the past six months. I am coming back from even this brief break bursting with new ideas which I want to share with my readers. I spent a good hour on the flight just scrawling out some notes about what I might talk about over the next month. And I had already lined up four or five new interviews which I will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

For a long time, I had resisted the impulse to blog out of fear that it would take over my life. It has certainly filled a number of very important needs for me both personally and professionally. My eyes start to roll and fire sparks out of my mouth -- like Mr. Toad in Disney's version of The Wind in the Willow -- whenever anyone starts to talk to me about blogging.

I know when I started this blog some people misread me to suggest I was only going to do this for a short while -- as a publicity stunt for Convergence Culture. I hope by now I have convinced you -- and me -- that I am in this for the long haul. I am still struggling with whether I can maintain the five days a week pace I kept over the academic term. But I am going to keep doing this for a long time to come.

Let me begin the year by congratulating You (us?) or being chosen as Time Magazine's Person of the Year!

Time closed the year with two issues in a row which more or less summed up the themes and ideas we've been discussing here since June. First (December 18), they did a cover story on "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century." The central focus of the story is the release of the report, "Tough Choices for Tough Times," by the New Commission on Skills in the American Workplace. The report argues that American schools have not kept pace with the times and are not preparing young people to be competitive in a global economy where creativity, innovation, media literacy, and social networking skills represent the edge needed to succeed. In many ways, I was struck by the close parallels between what Time identifies as key themes in this report and the kinds of social skills and cultural competencies we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation.

Here are a few excerpts from Time's story:

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy--the ones that won't get outsourced or automated--"put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that's been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations--design and technology, mathematics and art--"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

In other words, the report places a new value on being able to access and meaningfully process new sources of information, being able to participate in social networks and knowledge communities, and being able to think creatively and act globally.

One can't help but note that these are the same skills which are emerging through the kinds of activities which Time documented the following week in its cover story naming You the Person of the Year:

Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos--those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms--than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses--its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses--but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Our schools are failing to teach these skills -- indeed, these are the kinds of meaningful activities that are being killed off as schools are facing increased pressure to insure that their young charges perform well on the standardized tests which are the legacy of No Child Left Behind. But these are the kinds of skills that many young people are acquiring outside of school through their engagement with MySpace and Facebook, YouTube and Second Life, Wikipedia and Flickr, and all of the other kinds of web 2.0 activities that Time is celebrating. Time does a pretty good job identifying the different strands of contemporary social computing -- though it still has a tendency to focus on expressive individuals rather than on grassroots communities, despite its opening rhetoric about moving us from a focus on great men to a focus on the creativity of a democratic culture. It's odd, under the circumstances, that Time didn't do more to draw attention to the link between the two stories -- the idea that these informal learning cultures or what James Paul Gee calls affinity spaces might be the seedbed for the new educational culture which is being advocated by the big Washington think tanks.

Of course, recognizing the value of these various activities is only the first step because then we have to confront what I have been calling the participation gap -- the gap in experiences (and the social connections and cultural knowledge which comes along with those experiences) between those who have easy access to new media technologies at every moment of the day and those who have restricted access through schools and public libraries. If we accept that the world of tomorrow will require those skills we are learning through playing around on web 2.0, then we need to figure out how to insure that every child in America has a chance to explore and develop those skills inside and outside of school. I have said it before and I will say it again: if the key debates in American culture in the 1990s seemed to circle around issues of privacy, the key debates for the 21st century will center on participation.

On my flight over to Singapore, I finally caught up with a great documentary produced by Zoe Silver and hosted by Alan Yentob for the BBC 1, herecomeseveryone.co.uk, which covers much the same ground as the Time magazine cover story -- including thoughts about Wikipedia, blogging, MySpace, YouTube, and Second Life, among other topics and featuring a who's who of the key thinkers on social media, including Clay Shirkey, David Weinberger, Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, the Arctic Monkeys, Chris Anderson, and ahem, Henry Jenkins. It is the kind of documentary that I wish would get produced for American television -- and barring that, I wish would get aired on public broadcasting here. Oddly enough, it hasn't left much of a trace on the web -- though the blog, Feeling Listless has created a pretty comprehensive resource page about the people who get interviewed or discussed in the program. I am mostly featured talking about blogging, which brings me back to where I started this.

Not surprisingly, the BBC picked up on an analogy I drew between what is today a little known social movement in England during World War II, The Mass Observation movement, and the role which blogs play in contemporary culture. There's surprisingly little about the movement in Wikipedia but here's what they tell us:

Mass-Observation aimed to record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires. They also paid investigators to record people's conversation and behavior at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events.

The early prime movers behind Mass Observation were anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and the film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Collaborators included the critic William Empson, the photographer Humphrey Spender, the collagist Julian Trevelyan, and the painters William Coldstream and Graham Bell.

Mass Observation has a special place in the history of participatory culture and in the politics of everyday life. As Wikipedia tells us, the goal of the Mass Observation movement had been to record, in as much detail as possible, the everyday lives of Brits in the period during and following the Second World War. They took copious notes on what people ate, what they had in their closets, what they talked about, and these records have become an incredibly valuable resource for social historians. One of the challenges of the mass observation movement was scale - even with more than 500 untrained volunteers contributing, how can you really sample the diversity of life even within a single culture. There was also a methodological concern raised by academic researchers about subjectivity -- can untrained people really chronicle their own real life practices?

We might see Live Journal as continuing this tradition of Mass Observation. Taken as a whole, it is an incredible social document of our thoughts, our everyday lives, our sexual practices, our fantasies, our conversational topics, etc. at the dawn of the 21st century. One can scarcely call LJ a movement. It's hard to imagine a future Wikipedia essay telling us who its leaders were or even what its goals were in the way that it is possible to recount who led the Mass Observation movement. The issue of scalability has shifted in the other direction: the problem isn't collecting enough data; it is processing the sheer volume of information which has been recorded. A researcher could spend their lifetime simply trying to mine the amount of data produced on Live Journal in a single day.

I think about Mass Observation, though, whenever I hear people protest about whether anyone is really interested in reading hundreds of people describe their relationship to their cats or whatever else the pundits want to reduce LJ content to. In fact, there has been a long tradition of efforts by everyday people to document their own experiences as part of a historical record for future generations -- as a way of preserving and remarking upon the details of everyday life and ordinary existence. What blogs do, what LJ does is, in that sense, not new -- though what is remarkable is the scale on which it is occurring.

So, congratulations, You, for becoming Time's Person of the Year. Time's cover suggests just how central the idea of participatory culture has been to popular discourse in 2006. Let's hope that we continue to push to reform society to defend our right to participate.

When Fandom Goes Mainstream...

The most recent issue of Flow includes a range of different responses to the Flow conference, which I referenced here a few weeks ago. One of the articles would seem to be of particular interest to readers of this blog, because it refers to the panel on "Watching Television Off-Television" which I helped to organize, because it addresses the shifting nature of fan engagement with contemporary media, and because it was written by Kristina Busse (co-editor of the book, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, which was previously discussed here). Previously I have contrasted the context in which I wrote Textual Poachers (a world where fan culture was largely marginalized and hidden from view) and the context described in Convergence Culture (a world where fan participations are increasingly central to the production decisions shaping the current media landscape).

Busse's question, though, is whether we are really talking about the same fan culture in the two instances. Here's part of what she has to say:

Throughout the panel "Watching Television Off-Television," the emphasis was on how such behavior has become mainstream: casual media users now can engage with a universe that exceeds the television show via cross-media, cross-platform texts, thus creating a synergistic "overflow" experience. Thus, Jason Mittell offered the examples of Alternate Reality Games and additional online-only available footage, Will Brooker presented various fully immersive web sites that invite viewers into the shows' diegetic spaces, and Henry Jenkins commented on the current ease of streaming or downloading television shows. The mainstreaming of fannish behaviors is thus seen as advantageous even if (or maybe even because?) the industry clearly attempts to create such behavioral patterns in order to sell their products and/or supplementary materials....My central question is: How alike or different is such a commercially constructed position when compared to the space media fans have traditionally eked out for themselves?

At least some fans have gained power and influence in the context of convergence culture. As I suggested here the other week, there are more fan friendly shows on the schedule. Shows which attract strong fan interests have a somewhat stronger chance of surviving. Producers interested in engaging with fans are generating more additional material which expands the fictional universe. We are seeing a thawing of the relations between media producers and fans as the studios are reassessing their attitudes towards even some of the more controversial aspects of fan culture. (We saw some signs of this détente during the Fan Culture panel at the Future of Entertainment conference.) And fannish modes of engagement with popular texts are spreading at a dramatic rate across more and more segments of the population.

And that's part of what concerns Busse:

What ultimately separates "fans" from casual TV viewers who engage fannishly? Or, more specifically, how can we define fans without invoking a category so expansive that it includes all media audiences or one so narrow that it excludes large numbers of individualist fans? How can we create a continuum that acknowledges the more intense emotional and actual engagements of many TV viewers today without erasing the strong community structures which have developed through media fandom?

What gets lost as some of these fannish values and reading practices spread across the entire viewing public? Is there still a value in understanding fandom as a distinct subculture with its own cultural hierarchies and aesthetic norms, its own forms of social engagement, its own traditions of interpretation, its own system of genres for cultural production, and perhaps its own gender politics? Is this just another case of a subculture fearing a loss of "authenticity" as it moves into the mainstream? Or read from another angle, what happens to fan studies when it moves from the study of subcultural practices to the study of dominant or at least widespread forms of media consumption?

To some degree, fandom has already started to lose some of its distinctiveness as a subcultural community. Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic expansion in the amount of fan fiction being produced, for example, with many of the newcomers entering the space not through social interactions with other fans but rather from reading fan fiction online. In some cases, old time fans would argue, some core norms of the fan community have been shredded and old taboos have been violated as these "unsocialized" fans have pulled fan fiction in their own directions. Communities which might have been separated geographically and culturally have been brought together online, resulting in a series of flame wars and feuds over disagreements about how texts should be interpreted or rewritten in a "fannish" way. As many of these reading practices spread further, reaching fans through commercial channels who have had no real direct contact with fandom as a subculture, further changes are likely to occur.

Busse links this shift in what it means to be a fan to what seems destined to become an important conceptual debate in the field of fan studies -- between a focus on fan cultures (which runs through my own work) and the emphasis on the emotional experience of the individual fan (best embodied by Cornel Sandvoss's Fans. Sandvoss seems to want us to return to the idea of the isolated, individual fan at the moment where most of the rest of the world is discovering the power of social networks, embracing an "architecture of participation," and recognizing the importance of the kinds of knowledge communities that have always been central to the concept of a fan culture. Yet, Sandvoss is correct to argue that a great many people who call themselves "fans" have no direct engagement with the larger social community which fandom represents and our research paradigm privileges the most visible and distinctive fans over the more "causal" fans who can be difficult to locate or document. For these people, being a fan becomes a form of media consumption but not necessarily a kind of social affiliation.

This leads Busse to suggest we make some basic distinctions in our discussions of fans and fan culture:

I want to suggest that we distinguish between fan and fandom as well as acknowledge that there are different trajectories that combine into levels of fannishness. In other words, an intense emotional investment in a media text that is wholly singular may create a fan but does not make the individual part of a larger fandom, whereas a person enacting fannish behavior may not define him- or herself as a fan. It thus might be useful to consider the overlapping but not interdependent axes of investment and involvement as two factors that can define fannish engagement. Moreover, we need to consider models that can differentiate between people who are fans of a specific text, those that define themselves as fans per se, and those that are members of fandom.

This last bit seems particularly important to me. From the start, media studies has been most interested, it seems to me, in the study of fans of particular texts. My early work on fans keeps getting described as a study of Trekkers (if I am lucky) and Trekkies (if I am not), even though the idea of nomadic reading was absolutely central to Textual Poachers account of fandom. Whatever Poachers was about, it wasn't about the fans of a single series (Star Trek or otherwise), though I do spend a chapter talking about the fans of Beauty and the Beast and tracing their shifting relationship to the series. Rather, I would have said that the book was much more about a kind of cultural logic which shapes how fans read across a range of different texts and even more importantly, about a specific social and cultural community -- mostly composed of women -- which actively translates the experience of watching television into various forms of cultural production.

My second book on fans, Science Fiction Audiences (written with John Tulloch), suggested that there may be multiple fan communities with their own interpretive and creative practices which grow up around the same series. There, I am focused on Star Trek but try to show a larger context for the differences in the way the series gets read in the technologically-focused community at MIT, in the female fanzine culture, and among the members of the Gaylaxians, a queer fan organization.

Yet, still, my emphasis was on fan communities -- the shared social contexts within which fan reading and creative practices occur -- and not on fans per se. Indeed, most of fan studies has ended up being a study of fandom -- as in the practices and creations of a specific subculture of fans -- rather than the study of fans -- what we assume to be a somewhat larger, socially fragmented, group of people who feel a strong emotional investment in television content but who may never translate that attachment into the kinds of creative and social activities which we study. Sometimes, we get around this distinction by describing the most socially active group as fans and the more causal and isolated individuals as followers but this simply creates a misalignment between academic terms and popular usage.

Busse's essay, then, is dealing in part with how academics conceptualize fandom but I also think she is expressing concern over the mainstreaming of fan culture and I understand her concern. There has been a pretty long history of media producers nuzzling up to fans in the early days of a franchise when they need help attracting an audience or staying on the air and then creating more distance when the show reaches a certain level of commercial success. Fandom as a subculture seems closely associated with the idea of niche success, where-as a mainstream success may depend on a more diffused notion of what it means to be a fan.

Busse writes:

Commercially encouraged modes of engagement that employ modes of fannish identity do not create instafans; moreover, the types of engagement often vary, not only with intensity but also with creativity. In the end, I feel it is important to realize that playing a computer game or looking around a website may not be wholly the same as participating in a fannish gift exchange or contributing to a shared fictional universe.

Yes and No. In some cases, these commercial materials represent a point of entry into other, more elaborate forms of fan activity -- they represent one gateway among many into fandom and it is up to the individual participant whether they are satisfied with playing in the shallow end of the pool or whether they want a deeper immersion into fan culture. In some cases, such as the creation of immersive shared worlds around fictional programs or the deployment of alternative reality games, there may be more creativity and social engagement going on here that Busse is estimating from the vantage point of someone who comes at fan culture from a different point of entry.

There are also important gender distinctions here in terms of what activities count once fandom goes mainstream -- with the commercial industry finding it easier to absorb some of the collector or geeky aspects of male fan culture more easily than it can deal with the issues of emotion and sexuality that run through female produced fan fiction. I am struck in my own work that gender was much more central to Textual Poachers, written at a moment when fans were marginal, than in Convergence Culture, written at a moment when fan culture is more central to the ways the media ecology operates. Does this reflect a lack of segregation of interests in these newer fan cultures or the continued marginalization of interests and tastes that have historically shaped women's participation in fan culture?

We need to continually refine our categories of analysis and this essay makes a great contribution by bringing some of these questions out into the open.

A Few Links of Interest to Aca/Fan Readers

For those of you interested in science fiction...check out the webcast version of my conversation with Joe Haldeman on the Craft of Science Fiction which I publicized here a few weeks ago. I felt like it turned out very well with lots of insights from Haldeman about science fiction's place in contemporary culture and some interesting discussion of the representation of war in his own writing. One of my favorite moments came when he discussed the influence of Ernest Hemmingway on his work -- not exactly a common topic of the SF convention circuit. And he also reads from his forthcoming novel -- a time travel story set at MIT.

For those of you interested in Harry Potter... check out Episode 10 of Spellcast, a podcast created by the fine folks at Fictionalley.org. Gwen does an interview with yours truly about Convergence Culture with a particular focus on fandom and Harry Potter.

A Bit of Metablogging...

I have noted that there has been a decrease of late in the number of comments being posted to this blog despite a continuing increase in the number of people reading it. I have struggled for some time to think about the best way to address this when I spoke to a friend in Live Journal community who said there was some perception that there was no point posting comments here because they were being filtered.

Let me explain what's going on: This blog receives more than a hundred spam messages a day, most of them things that I really don't want going up on my site -- promises to expand the size of the various private bits of our variously gendered anatomies, footage of young women taking full advantage of their local menagerie, or promises of imagines of certain prominent media personalities engaged with what they would call in the world of wrestling, foreign objects. So far, even spam filter I have tried either lets significant numbers of these messages slide through or cuts out many of the most substantive posts and in most cases, both occur. I have moved away from a policy where things go up instantly on the site and then I have to take down all of the porn spam to one where everything goes into hold until I can filter through it manually.

I actually try to do this several times a day though when I travel or am running a conference or... there are days when I may only get to this task once every 24 hours. The only messages in the end, other than the unspeakable spam, that actually get filtered are those which are asking me to fix some bug on the site -- like a bad link (and there I just fix the problem) or those which clearly want to speak with me personally (and I just respond to the person directly).

Otherwise, it is my belief that every message I get is going up on the site within 24 hours of when it is posted. I know that is slower than most Live Journal entries which offer instant gratification but don't seem to face the same volume of spam. (I am told that the amount of spam is connected to the number of links to your site so the spam problem is a product of how successful we've been at generating more productive kinds of conversations. Ironic, isn't it?)

If for some reason your message doesn't go up within 24 hours, please ping me at henry3@mit.edu since I very much want to get your messages out there. We have created a really astonishing community of readers around this blog and I'd like to have you guys talking with each other more often.

I plan to continue to run periodic posts like the Pimp My Show one last week which are intended to generate a lot of traffic from readers but honestly, I'd love to get your reactions -- positive or negative -- to all of the posts here. Almost every given post seems to be generating discussion on other blogs targeted at some subset of the readership and I am grateful for all the shout outs. But it would be great, given the mix of industry folks and fans, for example, who read this blog to have more exchanges among you here. I see these posts as conversation starters, not the last word on the subject. I am not always able to respond personally to every comment but I am trying to use them to guide the content I put up here on the blog and they are extremely helpful to me.

Youtube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

My very first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts? (based on my dissertation at Wisconsin), explored the impact of American vaudeville on early sound comedy, seeing variety performance as an important influence on the films of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen, Jimmy Durante, Ed Wynn, Joe E. Brown, Wheeler and Woolsey, and a spate of other clowns and comics of the early 1930s. I confess that given my current research interests, I don't get very much demand to pontificate about the particulars of early 20th century popular theater. Yet, the other day, a journalist asked me to look at this OK Go music video, currently extremely popular on YouTube, as part of a story he was doing about the ways that digital distribution of content was impacting the recording industry. And I was suddenly struck by the ways that YouTube represents for the early 21st century what Vaudeville represented in the early 20th century.

Let me see if I can sketch some of the resemblances:

As the name suggests, the variety stage was based on the principle of constant variation and diversity. It represented a grab bag of the full range of cultural interests and obsessions of an age marked by dramatic social, cultural, and technological transformations. In the course of an evening, one might watch a Shakespearean actor do a soliloquy, a trained dog act, an opera recital, a juggler or acrobatic turn, a baggy pants comedian, an escape artist or magician, a tap dance performance, and some form of stupid human tricks (such as a guy with hammers on his shoes hopping around on a giant xylophone or an act where baboons play musical instruments). Similarly, YouTube brings together an equally ecclectic mix of content drawn from all corners of our culture and lays it out as if it were of equal interest and importance, trusting the individual user to determine the relative value of each entry.

Second, vaudeville performances were short modular units -- usually less than 20 minutes in length -- and much was written about how the demands of economy -- get in, score big, and get off -- impacted the aesthetic choices made. There was no time for elaborate characterization or plot development. Every element had to pull its own weight. Nothing that wasn't necessary for the overall emotional impact could survive. Again, one of the characteristics of YouTube has been this similar push to conciseness. In theory, content can be of any length. In reality, the stuff that gets passed around the most is short and streamlined. YouTube viewers get restless if anything lingers too long. And there is thus a similar emphasis on the immediate emotional impact.

Vaudeville was an actor-centered mode of production. There was no director who could build an ensemble piece. Actors chose their own material, refined their own skills, and lived and died entirely on the basis of their ability to connect one on one with the audience. It was a form which placed a high premium on virtuosity -- on the ability of the performer to impress the spectator with their mastery. Similarly, YouTube is a space of individualized expression. This video is about nothing if it isn't about the mastery and virtuosity of these young performers. We watch breathlessly to see what they will do next and if they can pull off a high risk performance.

As vaudeville goes to film, it encourages certain stylistic choices which preserve the integrity of individual performances -- so there is a tendency towards the long take so we can see for sure that the performer actually did what is being represented on the screen. Part of what impresses me about this video is that this elaborate set of stunts is performed in a single take so that any screw up will require the performers to start over from scratch. The newsman told me that it took fifty tries to complete this video.

Filmed vaudeville performances were also performed directly to the camera with the performers actively courting the attention and approval of the viewer. Again, there is no question of the camera here being part of an invisible fourth wall unobserved by the people on screen: these guys are performing for us and working their pants off to get our approval.

In a context of constant variation, the individual performer tried above all else to be memorable, which typically meant a strong reliance on spectacle and a desire to intensify emotional effects. Similarly, the YouTube performer wants to be so spectacular that you feel compelled to pass their content along to your friends. It depends upon extreme spectacles, shocks, and stunts (the Jackass side of the platform) to produce content that will move virally across the blogosphere. The best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared.

One of the tropes of the vaudeville stage was the interrupted act: i.e. the performer would fake a series of disruptions and distractions which threatened to destroy the carefully constructed performance, thus giving a sense of spontaneity which played up the liveness of the staged experience. Similarly, though clearly different, the YouTube performer courts a sense of the amateurish which also places a high emphasis on seeming spontaneity -- many videos are carefully staged so as to look unrehearsed. There is not necessarily a push towards liveness, but there is a push towards "realness" -- towards the idea that you can't believe what you are seeing really happened -- and as we are increasingly recognizing, we are often right. The YouTube performer stages "realness" and in the process, much that is "fake" passes as real.

The vaudeville act might also strive for a pattern of theme and variation -- choosing some everyday space or activity and then playing with all different permutations of it. As a good example of the vaudeville aesthetic, consider this juggling routine by W.C. Fields made available again, ironically enough, thanks to the magic of YouTube. It is this principle that shapes the OK Go treadmill video and left me thinking about the connections back to vaudeville.

Of course, vaudeville was not simply about human performance. During an age when new technologies were being invented and diffused at a rapid rate, vaudeville was also a site of technological virtuosity. Many of the new inventions of the period were first introduced to the public on the vaudeville stage -- most famously, in this country, cinema itself. The magician was an early adopter and adapter of technologies, using the sense of wonder that surrounded new mechanisms to astonish and baffle their patrons. Not surprisingly, then, something like vaudeville is resurfacing during another moment of rapid technological development and deployment.

Some YouTube content also involves spectacular use of technology, as in this video which I received from one of my students. Here, the basic mechanics of the racing game are hacked, producing a spectacular and sublime display of movement, which very much recalls the fascination with escalating chases which was part of the early cinema. The film historian Tom Gunning has talked about cinema at the turn of the century as a "cinema of attractions" and that term seems very apt for what draws us back again and again to YouTube.

Finally, vaudeville served a particular function during a phase of colonization and immigration. It brought people and traditions from exotic parts of the world to America and it staged the cultural differences which shaped the immigrant experience. By the same token, YouTube is a product of our current moment of globalization, where we are fascinated to discovery that young men in China are lip-syncing to American boy bands or where the openings to Japanese children's programs, otherwise unknown in the American context, may fascinated removed from their original context.

In the not too distant future, social historians will want to examine the current contents of YouTube as a microcosm of contemporary culture, much as vaudeville's popular performances still yield rich insights into the culture of the last turn of the century.

Taking the You Out of YouTube?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOOGTUBE: TV 2.0, OR BUBBLE 2.0?

By: Geoffrey Long

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

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

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

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

GOOGTUBE. BECAUSE SOMETIMES HUMANS ARE STILL BETTER THAN MACHINES.

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

GOOGTUBE. NOT JUST MENTOS AND DIET COKE!

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

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

GOOGTUBE. ADWORDS FOR TV.

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

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

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

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

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

1.65 BILLION CHANNELS AND NOTHING ON?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part Two)

What follows is a second excerpt from the white paper which I authored, along with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, for the MacArthur Foundation. The report is intended to offer a provocation for educators at all levels to think about how our pedagogical practices need to shift to reflect the demands of a more participatory culture. In Part One, I outlined some of the changes that are taking place in the media landscape and the ways they impacted young people. In Part Two, I make the case for why adult intervention is needed and why youth will not be able to make these adjustments all on their own. My hope is that the release of this report will stimulate reflection and discussion among educators, parents, and students about the ways media education is or is not being taught through school and after-school programs. I hope this discussion will also be of interest to the many other groups who read this blog -- many of whom are helping to shape the participatory culture we are discussing here and thus have some responsibility for thinking about how we insure that every youth is given a chance to participate.

As always, I welcome questions and comments. I am going to try to respond to any questions I receive once I have rolled out all of the parts of this report via the blog. While I have excluded sources from the blog version to insure ease of reading, you can see a full bibliography in the downloaded document.

Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Three Core Problems

Some defenders of the new digital cultures have acted as though youth can simply acquire these skills on their own without adult intervention or supervision. Children and youth do know more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers. In fact, we do not need to protect them so much as engage them in critical dialogues that help them to articulate more fully their intuitive understandings of these experiences. To say that children are not victims of media is not to say that they, any more than anyone else, have fully mastered what are, after all, complex and still emerging social practices.

There are three core flaws with the laissez faire approach. The first is that it does not address the fundamental inequalities in young people's access to new media technologies and the opportunities for participation they represent (what we call the participation gap). The second is that it assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn from their participation (what we call the transparency problem). The third problem with the laissez faire approach is that it assumes children, on their own, can develop the ethical norms needed to cope with a complex and diverse social environment online (the ethics challenge). Any attempt to provide meaningful media education in the age of participatory culture must begin by addressing these three core concerns.

The Participation Gap

Cities around the country are providing wireless Internet access for their residents. Some cities, such as Tempe, Arizona, charge users a fee: others, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Cambridge, plan to provide high-speed wireless Internet access free of charge. In an interview on PBS's Nightly News Hour in November 2005, Philadelphia mayor John Street spoke of the link between Internet access and educational achievement:

Philadelphia will allow low-income families, families that are on the cusp of their financial capacity, to be able to be fully and completely connected. We believe that our public school children should be--their families have to be connected or else they will fall behind, and, in many cases, never catch up.

Philadelphia's Emergency People's Shelter (EPS) is ahead of the curve; the nonprofit group's free network access serves shelter residents and the surrounding neighborhood. Gloria Guard of EPS said,

What we realized is if we can't get computers into the homes of our constituents and our neighbors and of this neighborhood, there are children in those households who will not be able to keep up in the marketplace. They won't be able to keep up with their schoolmates. They won't be able to even apply for college. We thought it was really important to get computer skills and connection to the Internet into as many homes as possible

However, simply passing out technology is not enough. Expanding access to computers will help bridge some of the gaps between digital haves and have nots, but only in a context in which free wi-fi is coupled with new educational initiatives to help youth and adults learn how to use those tools effectively.

Throughout the 1990s, the country focused enormous energy in combating the digital divide in technological access. The efforts have ensured that most American youth have at least minimal access to networked computers at school or in public libraries. However, as a 2005 report on children's online experience in the United Kingdom concluded:

No longer are children and young people only or even mainly divided by those with or without access, though 'access' is a moving target in terms of speed, location, quality and support, and inequalities in access do persist. Increasingly, children and young people are divided into those for whom the Internet is an increasingly rich, diverse, engaging and stimulating resource of growing importance in their lives and those for whom it remains a narrow, unengaging, if occasionally useful, resource of rather less significance

What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high bandwidth, and continuous connectivity. (Current legislation to block access to social networking software in schools and public libraries will further widen the participation gap.) The school system's inability to close this participation gap has negative consequences for everyone involved. On the one hand, those youth who are most advanced in media literacies are often stripped of their technologies and robbed of their best techniques for learning in an effort to ensure a uniform experience for all in the classroom. On the other hand, many youth who have had no exposure to these new kinds of participatory cultures outside school find themselves struggling to keep up with their peers.

Wartella, O'Keefe, and Scantlin reached a similar conclusion:

Closing the digital divide will depend less on technology and more on providing the skills and content that is most beneficial....Children who have access to home computers demonstrate more positive attitudes towards computers, show more enthusiasm and report more enthusiasm and ease when using computers than those who do not.

More often than not, those youth who have developed the most comfort with the online world are the ones who dominate classroom use of computers, pushing aside less technically skilled classmates. We would be wrong, however, to see this as a simple binary: youth who have technological access and those who do not. Wartella and coauthors note, for example, that game systems make their way into a growing number of working-class homes, even if laptops and personal computers do not. Working-class youth may have access to some of the benefits of play described here, but they may still lack the ability to produce and distribute their own media.

In a 2005 report prepared for the MacArthur Foundation, Lyman finds that children's experiences online are shaped by a range of social factors, including class, age, gender, race, nationality, and point of access. He notes, for example, that middle-class youth are more likely to rely on resources and assistance from peers and family within their own homes, and thus seem more autonomous at school than working-class children, who must often rely more heavily on teachers and peers to make up for a lack of experience at home. The middle-class children thus seem "naturally" superior in their use of technology, further amplifying their own self-confidence in their knowledge.

Historically, those youth who had access to books or classical recordings in their homes, whose parents took them to concerts or museums, or who engaged in dinner conversation developed, almost without conscious consideration, skills that helped them perform well in school. Those experiences, which were widespread among the middle class and rare among the working class, became a kind of class distinction, which shaped how teachers perceived students. These new forms of cultural participation may be playing a similar role. These activities shape what skills and knowledge students bring into the classroom, and in this fashion determine how teachers and peers perceive these students. Castells tells us about youth who are excluded from these experiences:

"Increasingly, as computer use is ever less a lifestyle option, ever more an everyday necessity, inability to use computers or find information on the web is a matter of stigma, of social exclusion; revealing not only changing social norms but also the growing centrality of computers to work, education and politics"

Writing on how contemporary industry values our "portfolios" as much as our knowledge, Gee suggests that what gives elite teens their head start is their capacity to:

pick up a variety of experiences (e.g., the "right" sort of summer camps, travel, and special activities), skills (not just school-based skills, but a wide variety of interactional, aesthetic, and technological skills), and achievements (honors, awards, projects) in terms of which they can help to define themselves as worthy of admission to elite educational institutions and worthy of professional success later in life".

They become adept at identifying opportunities for leadership and accomplishment; they adjust quickly to new situations, embrace new roles and goals, and interact with people of diverse backgrounds. Even if these opportunities are not formally valued by our educational institutions or listed on one's resume when applying for a job, the skills and self confidence gathered by moving across all of these online communities surely manifest themselves in other ways, offering yet another leg up to youth on one side and another disadvantage to youth on the opposite side of the participation gap.

The Transparency Problem

Although youth are becoming more adept at using media as resources (for creative expression, research, social life, etc.), they often are limited in their ability to examine the media themselves. Turkle was among the first to call attention to this transparency problem:

Games such as SimLife teach players to think in an active way about complex phenomena (some of them 'real life,' some of them not) as dynamic, evolving systems. But they also encourage people to get used to manipulating a system whose core assumptions they do not see and which may or may not be 'true'.

Not everyone agrees. In an essay on the game Sim City, Friedman contends that game players seek to identify and exploit the rules of the system in order to beat the game. The antagonistic relationship between player and game designer means that game players may be more suspicious of the rules structuring their experiences than are the consumers of many other kinds of media. Conversations about games expose flaws in games' construction, which may also lead to questions about their governing assumptions. Subsequent games have, in fact, allowed players to reprogram the core models. One might argue, however, that there is a difference between trying to master the rules of the game and recognizing the ways those rules structure our perception of reality. It may be much easier to see what is in the game than to recognize what the game leaves out.

This issue of transparency crops up regularly in the first wave of field reports on the pedagogical use of games. Shrier developed a location-specific game for teaching American history, which was played in Lexington, Massachusetts; her game was designed to encourage reflection on competing and contradictory accounts of who fired the first shot of the American Revolution. The project asked students to experience the ways historians interpret evidence and evaluate competing truths. Such debates emerged spontaneously around the game-play experience. Yet Shrier was surprised by another phenomenon, the young people took the game's representation of historical evidence at face value, acting as if all of the information in the game was authentic.

Shrier offers several possible explanations for this transparency problem, ranging from the legacy of textbook publishing, where instructional materials did not encourage users to question their structuring or their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game, Civilization III, into world history classes. Students were adept at formulating "what if" hypotheses, which they tested through their game play. Yet, they lacked a vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history, and they had difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in different terms. In both cases, students were learning how to read information from and through games, but they were not yet learning how to read games as texts, constructed with their own aesthetic norms, genre conventions, ideological biases, and codes of representation. These findings suggest the importance of coupling the pedagogical use of new media technologies with a greater focus on media literacy education.

These concerns about the transparency of games, even when used in instructional contexts, are closely related to concerns about how young people (or indeed, any of us) assess the quality of information we receive. As Hobbs has suggested, "Determining the truth value of information has become increasingly difficult in an age of increasing diversity and ease of access to information." More recent work by the Harvard Good Works Project has found that issues of format and design are often more important than issues of content in determining how much credibility young people attach to the content of a particular website. This research suggests some tendency to read "professional" sites as more credible than "amateur" produced materials, although students lack a well developed set of standards for distinguishing between the two. In her recent book, The Internet Playground, Seiter expresses concern that young people were finding it increasingly difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial content in online environments: "The Internet is more like a mall than a library; it resembles a gigantic public relations collection more than it does an archive of scholars" .

Increasingly, content comes to us already branded, already shaped through an economics of sponsorship, if not overt advertising. We do not know how much these commercial interests influence what we see and what we don't see. Commercial interests even shape the order of listings on search engines in ways that are often invisible to those who use them. Increasingly, opportunities to participate online are branded such that even when young people produce and share their own media, they do so under terms set by commercial interests. Children, Seiter found, often had trouble identifying advertising practices in the popular Neopets site, in part because the product references were so integrated into the game. The children were used to a world where commercials stood apart from the entertainment content and equated branding with banner advertisements. This is where the transparency issue becomes especially dangerous. Seiter concludes, "The World Wide Web is a more aggressive and stealthy marketeer to children than television ever was, and children need as much information about its business practices as teachers and parents can give them". Children need a safe space within which they can master the skills they need as citizens and consumers, as they learn to parse through messages from self-interested parties and separate fact from falsehood as they begin to experiment with new forms of creative expression and community participation.

The Ethics Challenge

In Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work, Fischman and coauthors discuss how young journalists learn the ethical norms that will define their future professional practice. These writers, they find, acquired their skills most often by writing for high school newspapers. For the most part, the authors suggest, student journalists worked in highly cohesive and insulated settings. Their work was supervised, for better or worse, by a range of adult authorities, some interested in promoting the qualities of good journalism, some concerned with protecting the reputation of the school. Their work was free of commercial constraints and sheltered from outside exposure. The ethical norms and professional practices they were acquiring were well understood by the adults around them.

Now, consider how few of those qualities might be applied to the emerging participatory cultures. In a world in which the line between consumers and producers is blurring, young people are finding themselves in situations that no one would have anticipated a decade or two ago. Their writing is much more open to the public and can have more far-reaching consequences. The young people are creating new modes of expression that are poorly understood by adults, and as a result they receive little to no guidance or supervision. The ethical implications of these emerging practices are fuzzy and ill-defined. Young people are discovering that information they put online to share with their friends can bring unwelcome attention from strangers.

In professional contexts, professional organizations are the watchdog of ethical norms. Yet in more casual settings, there is seldom a watchdog. No established set of ethical guidelines shapes the actions of bloggers and podcasters, for example. How should teens decide what they should or should not post about themselves or their friends on Live Journal or MySpace? Different online communities have their own norms about what information should remain within the group and what can be circulated more broadly, and many sites depend on self-disclosure to police whether the participants are children or adults. Yet, many young people seem willing to lie to access those communities.

Ethics become much murkier in game spaces, where identities are assumed and actions are fictive, designed to allow broader rein to explore darker fantasies. That said, unwritten and often imperfectly shared norms exist about acceptable or unacceptable conduct. Essays, such as Julian Dibbel's "A Rape in Cyberspace", Henry Jenkins's "Playing Politics in Alphaville", and Always-black's "Bow Nigger" offer reminders that participants in these worlds understand the same experiences in very different terms and follow different ethical norms as they face off against each other.

In Making Good, Fischman and coauthors found that high school journalists felt constrained by the strong social ties in their high school, unwilling to publish some articles they believed would be received negatively by their peers or that might disrupt the social dynamics of their society. What constraints, if any, apply to in online realms? Do young people feel that same level of investment in their gaming guilds or their fan communities? Or does the ability to mask one's identity or move from one community to another mean there are less immediate consequences for antisocial behavior?

One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others. We may, in the short run, have to accept that cyberspace's ethical norms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when one lowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape. For the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the different assumptions that guide their behavior.

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three core concerns:

• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?

• How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perceptions of the world?

• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities?

To address these challenges, we must rethink which core skills and competencies we want our children to acquire in their learning experiences. The new participatory culture places new emphasis on familiar skills that have long been central to American education; it also requires teachers to pay greater attention to the social skills and cultural competencies that are emerging in the new media landscape. In the next sections, we provide a framework for thinking about the type of learning that should occur if we are to address the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenges.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One)

I spent Thursday in New York speaking on a panel with the University of Chicago's Nicole Pinkard and the University of Southern California's Mimi Ito as part of the public launch of the MacArthur Foundation's exciting slate of new initiatives in the area of youth, learning, and digital media. People interested in understanding the full context of this initiative should keep an eye on the Foundation's new blog. The event was simulcast on Second Life and on Teen Second Life.

This is the context in which we have been pursuing our own Project nml (New Media Literacies) initiatives which I have been discussing from time to time in this blog. The New York City press event was the launching point for a white paper which I wrote for MacArthur identifying what we see as the key social skills and cultural competencies which young people need to be full participants in convergence culture. In Convergence Culture, I devote one chapter to thinking about the impact of participatory culture on our current understandings of education. Here I -- and my collaborators Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison -- have been able to dig much deeper into the pedagogical implications of the world I discuss in the book as well as to lay out some of the key insights from contemporary research on informal learning, games-based pedagogy, online communities, and participatory culture.

My hope is that this white paper will spark conversations among educators at all levels -- in schools and in after school programs, in public institutions, and in churches and other community centers -- about how we need to change our practices to reflect the new ways that young people are engaging with the world around them.

In hopes of sparking such a conversation, I am publishing the white paper in installments through my blog. This first installment sets the stage, describing some of the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of our young people.

For those of you who are impatient and want to read the whole report at once, you can download it here.

The Needed Skills in the New Media Culture

"If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life."

-- New London Group

Ashley Richardson was a middle-schooler when she ran for president of Alphaville. She wanted to control a government that had more than 100 volunteer workers and that made policies that affected thousands of people. She debated her opponent on National Public Radio. She found herself in the center of a debate about the nature of citizenship, about how to ensure honest elections, and about the future of democracy in a digital age. Alphaville is the largest city in the popular multiplayer game, The Sims Online.

Heather Lawver was 14 years old. She wanted to help other young people improve their reading and writing skills. She established an online publication with a staff of more than 100 people across the world. Her project was embraced by teachers and integrated into their curriculum. She emerged as an important spokesperson in a national debate about intellectual property. The website Lawver created was a school newspaper for the fictional Hogwarts, the location for the popular Harry Potter books.

Blake Ross was 14 years old when he was hired for a summer internship at Netscape. By that point, he already had developed computer programming skills and published his own website. Frustrated by many of the corporate decisions made at Netscape, Ross decided to design his own web browser. Through the joint participation of thousands of other volunteer youth and adults working on his project worldwide, the Firefox web browser was born. Today, Firefox enjoys more than 60 times as many users as Netscape Navigator. By age 19, Ross had the venture capital needed to launch his own start-up company. His interest in computing was sparked by playing the popular video game, Sim City.

Josh Meeter was about to graduate from high school when he completed the claymation animation for Awards Showdown, which subsequent was widely circulated on the web. Meeter negotiated with composer John Williams for the rights to use excerpts from his film scores. By networking, he was able to convince Stephen Spielberg to watch the film, and it was later featured on the Spielberg's Dreamworks website. Meeter is now starting work on his first feature film.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are the future politicians, activists, educators, writers, entrepreneurs, and media makers. The skills they acquired--learning how to campaign and govern; how to read, write, edit, and defend civil liberties; how to program computers and run a business; how to make a movie and get it distributed--are the kinds of skills we might hope our best schools would teach. Yet, none of these activities took place in schools. Indeed, many of these youth were frustrated with school; some dropped out and others chose to graduate early. They developed much of the skill and knowledge through their participation in the informal learning communities of fans and gamers.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are exceptional individuals. In any given period, exceptional individuals will break all the rules and enjoy off-the-charts success--even at surprisingly young ages. But, Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are perhaps less exceptional than one might at first imagine.

According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project, more than one-half of all American teens--and 57 percent of teens who use the Internet--could be considered media creators. For the purpose of the study, a media creator is someone who created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Most have done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create online with others, 22 percent have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19 percent remix online content.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, these activities are not restricted to white suburban males. In fact, urban youth (40 percent) are somewhat more likely than their suburban (28 percent) or rural (38 percent) counterparts to be media creators. Girls aged 15-17 (27 percent) are more likely than boys their age (17 percent) to be involved with blogging or other social activities online. The Pew researchers found no significant differences in participation by race-ethnicity.

If anything, the Pew study undercounts the number of American young people who are embracing the new participatory culture. The Pew study did not consider newer forms of expression, such as podcasting, game modding or machinima. Nor did it count other forms of creative expression and appropriation, such as music sampling in the hip hop community. These forms are highly technological but use other tools and tap other networks for their production and distribution. The study does not include even more widespread practices, such as computer or video gaming, that can require an extensive focus on constructing and performing as fictional personas. Our focus here is not on individual accomplishment but rather the emergence of a cultural context that supports widespread participation in the production and distribution of media.

Enabling Participation

"While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games-- and here they are already content producers. Too often neglected, except as a source of risk, these communication and entertainment focused activities, by contrast with the information-focused uses at the centre of public and policy agendas, are driving emerging media literacy. Through such uses, children are most engaged-- multi-tasking, becoming proficient at navigation and manoeuvre so as to win, judging their participation and that of others, etc.... In terms of personal development, identity, expression and their social consequences-- participation, social capital, civic culture- these are the activities that serve to network today's younger generation." -- Sonia Livingstone.

Participatory Culture

For the moment, let's define participatory culture as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others

3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

4. Where members believe that their contributions matter

5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

In such a world, many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community. The community itself, however, provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation. Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable on its own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or herself through words, sounds, and images, even if most will never write, perform, or draw professionally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth think about themselves and alters the way they look at work created by others.

Most public policy discussion of new media have centered on technologies--tools and their affordances. The computer is discussed as a magic black box with the potential to create a learning revolution (in the positive version) or a black hole that consumes resources that might better be devoted to traditional classroom activities (in the more critical version). Yet, as the quote above suggests, media operate in specific cultural and institutional contexts that determine how and why they are used. We may never know whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest with no one around. But clearly, a computer does nothing in the absence of a user. The computer does not operate in a vacuum. Injecting digital technologies into the classroom necessarily affects our relationship with every other communications technology, changing how we feel about what can or should be done with pencils and paper, chalk and blackboard, books, films, and recordings.

Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them. The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.

That is why we focus in this paper on the concept of participatory cultures rather than on interactive technologies. Interactivity is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.

We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship. Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture. Many young people are already part of this process through:

Affiliations -- memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

Expressions -- producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving -- working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Circulations -- Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)

The MacArthur Foundation has launched an ambitious effort to document these activities and the roles they play in young people's lives. We do not want to preempt or duplicate that effort here. For the moment, it is sufficient to argue that each of these activities contains opportunities for learning, creative expression, civic engagement, political empowerment, and economic advancement.

Through these various forms of participatory culture, young people are acquiring skills that will serve them well in the future. Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate. A growing body of work has focused on the value of participatory culture and its long-term impact on children's understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Affinity Spaces

Many have argued that these new participatory cultures represent ideal learning environments. James Paul Gee calls such informal learning cultures "affinity spaces," asking why people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks. Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, and because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others. For example, Rebecca Black finds that the "beta-reading" (or editorial feedback) provided by online fan communities helps contributors grow as writers, mastering not only the basic building blocks of sentence construction and narrative structure, but also pushing them to be close readers of the works that inspire them. Participants in the beta-reading process learn both by receiving feedback on their own work and by giving feedback to others, creating an ideal peer-to-peer learning community.

Affinity spaces are distinct from formal educational systems in several ways. While formal education is often conservative, the informal learning within popular culture is often experimental. While formal education is static, the informal learning within popular culture is innovative. The structures that sustain informal learning are more provisional, those supporting formal education are more institutional. Informal learning communities can evolve to respond to short-term needs and temporary interests, whereas the institutions supporting public education have remained little changed despite decades of school reform. Informal learning communities are ad hoc and localized; formal educational communities are bureaucratic and increasingly national in scope. We can move in and out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education.

Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments, from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge Andrew Blau's 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation:

The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers...A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.

Blau's report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy. Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced.

David Buckingham argues that young people's lack of interest in news and their disconnection from politics reflects their perception of disempowerment.

"By and large, young people are not defined by society as political subjects, let alone as political agents. Even in the areas of social life that affect and concern them to a much greater extent than adults--most notably education--political debate is conducted almost entirely 'over their heads'"

Politics, as constructed by the news, becomes a spectator sport, something we watch but do not do. Yet, the new participatory culture offers many opportunities for youth to engage in civic debates, to participate in community life, to become political leaders, even if sometimes only through the "second lives" offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities.

Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learn the skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand the choices we make in political terms. Today's children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later. The challenge is how to connect decisions in the context of our everyday lives with the decisions made at local, state, or national levels. The step from watching television news and acting politically seems greater than the transition from being a political actor in a game world to acting politically in the "real world."

Participating in these affinity spaces also has economic implications. We suspect that young people who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greater comfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navigating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions about the quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. These claims are borne out by research conducted by Beck and Wade into the ways that early game play experiences affect subsequent work habits and professional activities. Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to taking risks and engaging in competition but also more open to collaborating with others and more willing to revise earlier assumptions.

This focus on the value of participating within the new media culture stands in striking contrast to recent reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation that have bemoaned the amount of time young people spend on "screen media." The Kaiser reports collapse a range of different media consumption and production activities into the general category of "screen time" without reflecting very deeply on the different degrees of social connectivity, creativity, and learning involved. We do not mean to dismiss the very real concerns they raise: that mediated experience may squeeze out time for other learning activities; that contemporary children often lack access to real world play spaces, with adverse health consequences, that adults may inadequately supervise and interact with children about the media they consume (and produce); or concerns about the moral values and commercialization in much contemporary entertainment. Yet, the focus on negative effects of media consumption offers an incomplete picture. These accounts do not appropriately value the skills and knowledge young people are gaining through their involvement with new media, and as a consequence, they may mislead us about the roles teachers and parents should play in helping children learn and grow.

How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part Two): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation

Last time, I introduced readers to the Luther Blissett movement and to two of its principle architects, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2. Across the interview, they described how the group drew inspiration from Slapshot and Star Trek, not to mention Raymond Carver, Joseph Campbell and Jorge Luis Borges, They discussed a range of creative and expressive activities which included the writing of novels and manifestos as well as the staging of elaborate pranks designed to quell some of the moral panics being sparked by local media. They offered a perspective on culture which is one part avant garde theory and one part fan politics, categories which only rarely mix in the American context. Today, we continue this interview with some more reflections on the ways Luther Blissett related to the emergence of digital culture, how they interacted with their readers, and how this emerged from their appreciation of popular culture.

The Luther Blissett movement has transmogified into the Wu Ming Foundation and the group has been publishing a range of genre-busting, collaboratively-authored novels, which are compared by critics who like them to the work of Umberto Eco and called by those who don't, "novels for multitaskers." To give you some taste of their work, here's part of what Publisher's Weekly has to say about 54:

The midlife crisis of Cary Grant, the founding of the KGB and the Neapolitan years of mafioso Lucky Luciano are just three of the plot lines woven into this dense, playful and always surprising literary behemoth set mostly in the year of the book's title, at the height of the Cold War. Anchoring the tale with a relatively conventional narrative is a young Bolognese man named Robespierre (Pierre), who embarks on a transcontinental odyssey to find his father, Vittorio Capponi, a former Mussolini loyalist who left the Italian army to join the Communists in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Britain's spy agency MI6 approaches Cary Grant (who's in a career slump) with a bizarre proposal: the role of Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito in a propaganda biopic. It seems impossible that the multitudinous names and story threads could converge, but, deliciously, they do--in Yugoslavia, where Grant meets Tito, Pierre finds his father, and Luciano's driver Steve "Cement" Zollo tangles with the KGB, which is about to pull off a big hit. The latest joint effort (after the novel Q) from Wu Ming--a collective of five Italian intellectuals who named themselves "anonymous" in Mandarin--offers political commentary-cum-complicated escapism for the brainiac reader.

In some ways, the Luther Blissett movement and the Wu Ming Foundation novels might be seen as working in parallel with what critic Mark America has called "Avant-Pop," a new aesthetic sensability which refuses to remain firmly within any given category of cultural production, choosing to play with the contents of popular culture in ways that reflect an avant garde sensibility. America writes:

The artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them)....Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A-P artists have had to work hard at not becoming so enamored of the false consciousness of the Mass Media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives. The single most important creative directive of the new wave of Avant-Pop artists is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. By sucking on the contaminated bosom of mainstream culture, Avant-Pop artists are turning into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is....Our collective mission is to radically alter the Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesturing that grows out of the work of many 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Raymond Federman, William Burroughs, William Gibson, Ronald Sukenick, Kathy Acker, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), art movements like Fluxus, Situationism, Lettrism and Neo-Hoodooism, and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Tackhead, The Breeders, Pussy Galore, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Ministry, Jane's Addiction, Tuxedo Moon and The Residents.

In what follows Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 offer their own perspective on the ways their project intersects both the historic avant garde and popular culture. I fully confess that I am much more a creature of popular culture than of the avant garde, yet I find myself really connecting with a lot of what they have to say about their poetics and politics here.

HJ3: You wrote, "A vast, transnational community of people surrounds us and interacts with our books in a creative way, we encourage all kinds of sharing, reappropriation, derivative works etc." What can you tell me about your relationship to your readers and the forms of appropriative works they produce?

WM2. Since the beginning of our career as professional storytellers we have exhorted our readers to get in touch with us and become a sort of collective "sixth member", in constant osmosis with the original group. To be part of the Wu Ming's "democratic republic of readers" does not mean to have a seat in the front row or a privileged access to our output. It means to take part, in a more or less direct manner, to a process of collective intelligence and creation that we usually compare with the relationship between community and storyteller in old folk culture.

It must be said that this co-operation does not take place only on the Internet, there are also many face-to-face moments, there's warm physical participation, which we deem as absolutely necessary. We're "on line" but we're also "on the road".

The Internet allowed us to skip intermediates such as the publishers' press office and PR department, our presentation tours are completely self-organized. Being a group of five people, Wu Ming is almost ubiquitous, two or three delegations can discuss our work in different places simultaneously, hundreds of miles apart from each other. We go to places that are usually snubbed by mainstream authors, such as tiny bookshops, public libraries in small villages, squats, sometimes even private apartments - we literally deliver the presentation at home, if there's a group of friends willing to get together one night and listen to what we have to say.

There's constant interaction between us and the readers, they send us comments, suggestion, and criticism. The female characters in our novels have had a positive evolution thanks to the harsh critiques expressed by some female readers. Our newsletter, titled after general Vo Nguyen Giap, has about 10,000 subscribers and regularly features the readers' feedback: reviews, comments, and pieces on various subjects. We don't rely on any open forum or blog -- we tried, but it took too much time to get rid of trolls. We prefer to receive a lot of stuff via e-mail, and make a quality selection.

Having said this, I think that the most explicit invitation to appropriate our work is the "copyleft notice" included in all our books, which can be copied, xeroxed, or downloaded straight from our website. We encourage people to use our works. Our novel Q was deconstructed and rewritten as a very original theatrical drama. 54 became the inspiration for an album by folk-rock band Yo Yo Mundi...

WM1... not to mention the use of our characters in role play games. I'll say a few things about this later.

WM2. Even more explicitly, we have launched several collective writing projects. The first one was "I Shall Call You Russell", and it bordered on the commonplace: we wrote the first chapter of a sci-fi novel, and anyone could write and send the following ones. The selection of chapters took place in public, on a temporary blog run by us. A jury selected the three best versions of any chapter, and people could vote their favorite one, which became the next chapter in the "official" (i.e. collectively approved) sequence, though all the other versions remained available as sources of inspiration, creating a web of plot "bifurcations" and "dead end streets". There was no "official" last chapter, all the versions were published ex aequo.

The most important result of this experiment was the birth of another collective of novelists, Kai Zen (Japanese for "Constant improvement"). Kai Zen themselves have launched more and more projects like that, and their debut novel will be published in a few weeks by the biggest Italian publisher.

The second project was an experiment in "open source literature", as in "open source software". The main difference between storytelling and software programming is that almost everybody can work on the sourcecode of a story. The sourcecode of a story is the story itself. We wrote a short story titled "The Ballad of Corazza" and we put it on line. We asked readers to work on it, be it to change an adjective or rewrite a whole paragraph, or insert a new character. We received alternative versions of the story, do the revision accordingly, and make the result available.

After a couple of months, we released "The Ballad of Corazza 2.0", which was a consistent synthesis of all suggested modifications. This version was also edited collectively until we had the (potentially) definitive text. The more open nature of this second project managed to stir creativity with greater effectiveness, as "The Ballad of Corazza" has become a graphic novel, a theatrical act (based upon one of the alternative versions), a two different reading performances, one of which with live musical accompaniment, and the score was the result of a similar "open source" process.

Last but absolutely not least, there's the kind of interaction generated by the novels or short stories written by our readers, with no direct connection to our work. Back when we started, we publicly stated that we were willing to read unpublished stuff. Call it "talent scouting" if you like. Well, we received so much stuff (poetry, fiction, scripts, whatever) that we had to wave the white flag. We couldn't possibly read all those novels and short stories, no way.

Our community's collective wisdom solved the problem for us: fifteen Giap subscribers responded and volunteered for reading anything submitted by other readers. These people formed a collective on their own, iQuindici [TheFifteen, even if they are about thirty people now]. They have their own website and their own e-zine (Inciquid), they organize public readings of the best stuff they receive and select, and promote the adoption of open licenses (creative commons,copyleft, you-name-it) in the Italian publishing industry. Several new authors were "discovered" by publishers thanks to iQuindici.

HJ3: More recently you drew a comparison between your projects and ARGS. What similarities do you see? What might ARG designers and players learn by studying what you did a decade ago?

WM1 What you had was a huge number of people from different backgrounds and geographical areas, all interacting with each other in order to introduce ever new elements into a legend they were constructing in real time and telling all together. It is important to point out that these people didn't know each other personally, some of them never met, never talked or wrote to each other, not even on the phone, not even via e-mail, for the whole duration of the project. I never met the majority of people who operated under the Luther Blissett pseudonym in other cities, not to mention people calling themselves Luther Blissett in other countries. Since the beginning, the Bolognese collective (which was more tight-knit than other informal groups springing out all over Italy) labeled itself "the only central committee whose aim is to lose control of the party".

Yes, there was some sort of coordination between the different local groups, and a few things were explicitly prohibited: the Luther Blissett could not be used to spread racist, sexist or fascist material, and no Luther Blissett material could have a copyright. That's all the "organization" we had.

Most of the time we ended up taking each other by surprise, we heard the news about a prank pulled by Blissett in Southern Italy and immediately claimed co-responsibility by playing a similar one or by giving a completely different motive for the prank! We enjoyed leaving clues for other Blissetts, and give wild interpretations of the clues left by them. In several cases the same hoaxes or actions were given different interpretations by different Blissett "coopeting" with each other. It was all grist to the mill, or as we say in Italy, "tutto fa brodo", everything adds to the soup.

And it was transmedia storytelling taken to its extreme, clues were left on BBSs, websites, fanzines and other DIY media, pieces of mail art sent all around, restroom walls, Hertzian waves, and even classified ads on local newspapers. Sometimes we used Luther Blissett stickers in order to leave clues and give hints on how to take part in a hoax.

I think there are many similarities between what we did, RPGs, ARGs, and other storytelling games, in spite of the fact that our experience was and is very peculiar. These similarities were acknowledged many times by the communities playing RPGs in Italy. When our novel Q was published in 1999, some of the characters were immediately introduced into ongoing RPGs. More recently, in Pescara (Central Italy) dozens of people played an RPG inspired by one of our novels called Free Karma Food. It seems that our fiction is so multi-layered and "centrifugal" that it incites continuation on other platforms.

I really don't know what the ARG community might learn by studying what we did. Certainly they might have fun reading about it.

HJ3: Typically avant garde work frames itself in opposition to popular culture. Yet it is clear that you are in some senses a fan of popular culture. How would you descrive your relationship to the entertainment texts which you draw upon in your work?

WM1. I grew up reading sci-fi pulp books, my room was choke-full of tons of Marvel and DC comics, as well as Italian comics which you probably never heard of. I spent days watching soccer matches, spaghetti westerns, Bruce Lee movies (or even worse/better, "Bruce Li" movies and other crap cashing in on Bruce Lee's death), Star Trek (every afternoon on a local tv station), British series like Space 1999, and funky detective series like Baretta and Starsky & Hutch. I was a raving fan of Japanese anime, like every other kid I knew. In the late Seventies UFO Robot Grendizer, Great Mazinger and Steel Jeeg took Italian television by storm, episodes were watched by millions of kids. I always listened to all genres of popular music from Italian singer-songwriters to Frank Zappa to LA punk acts like the Germs of Black Flag, through to Tony Bennett and Brazilian Hip Hop. I used to play soccer games on my Commodore 64. I went to the movies as often as I could. I played table games like Monopoly and Scrabble.

In short, I started to expose my brain and body to all kinds of popular culture at a time when the Internet didn't exist. I've always been in love with pop culture. All the other members of Wu Ming have similar backgrounds: sci-fi, comics, martial arts, rock'n'roll - two of them played in punk rock bands, one of which was fairly famous in the Italian underground. I think that if you don't know pop culture, you don't know your culture, thereby you don't know the world around you. If you don't know shit about pop culture, how can you be on the cutting edge of anything? If you don't soil your hands with pop culture, if you snub and sneer at today's participatory culture, you can't be "avantgarde", no matter how hard you try.

By the way, what does "avantgarde" mean? "Avantgarde" is French for "vanguard", it is a military connoted term. "Avantgarde" means being at the front point of the battle. Too often, the avantgarde turn around and find out there's no rearguard, nobody's following them. That's because they marched too fast, or in the wrong direction. This is the common problem of artistic and political vanguards. It didn't happen to Luther Blissett because Luther Blissett was about spreading a disease, plus there was an "educational" aspect. Once a prank had been played successfully, we claimed responsibility and explained it in detail. Explain: that's what the avantgarde never do, indeed, they enjoy being obscure, they mistake obscure for radical, they don't want to give the people access to their work. They are enemies of the people. We never acted like that: the more people understand what we're doing, the happier we are. From that point of view, we're not exactly "avantgarde".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God Things and Small Sizes: Convergence and Ganpati

As we have stressed here before, the changes described in Convergence Culture are occurring on a global scale, though the rate of change differs from country to country. Everywhere, we are seeing convergence as working on top of existing layers within the culture -- old practices continue, old media survives, yet both are transformed by the emergence of new media technologies and new sets of cultural practices. Convergence is marked both by continuity and transformation. I was reminded of this play between old and new recently when I received the following e-mail from Parmesh Shahani, a CMS alum who recently returned to his native India after spending three years in the United States. Shahani had been a key player in the development of our Convergence Culture Consortium and continues to be involved in our activities -- offering us a view from Asia on the trends in consumer culture we are monitoring.

This essay describes some of his impressions of the ways that new media technology is transforming Ganpati, one of the key religious and cultural festivals in Bombay. Western observers might want to compare it with the ways that new media has or has not been embraced by various religious groups in our own countries. I asked Shahani if I could share the following field notes with you.

God Things and Small Sizes

By: Parmesh Shahani

God is Everywhere

Greetings from Bombay, India. I have come back here right in the middle of the Ganpati (Lord Ganesh) festival fervor - a ten-day spectacle that begins with millions of people in the city bringing statues of the elephant god to their homes and community pandals (lavishly decorated statue stages, erected on almost every street corner in the city) - and culminates in the immersion of these statues into the ocean, accompanied by street processions, fire crackers, color, and noise, noise and more noise.

It is the final day of the event, and I am walking to Chowpatty beach near my home, the biggest immersion site in the city. It's been several years since I've been in India during Ganpati time and one of the changes I notice is that each pandal I pass is 'sponsored'. The one on the street corner near my house sports banners from Silver House (a local jewelry shop in the adjoining market) as well as ICICI bank and Britannia Tiger biscuits (huge pan-Indian brands). Just then my cell phone beeps; it's a text message from my cell phone service provider (Hutch) about Ganpati ringtones and wallpapers that I might wish to download. This is again something I hadn't experienced before.

Flashback to one week ago. I am on a 6 am flight to Calcutta, and each TV screen in the Mumbai airport departure lounge is tuned in to Star News (Murdoch's Indian news channel), beaming the early morning Ganpati aarti (ceremonial ritual based on the lighting of oil lamps) live from the city's Siddhi Vinayak temple. I visit the temple website and am quite impressed. They have a live darshan (viewing of the aarti) webcast, online booking of pujas (prayer rituals) and prasad (sweets consumed by devotees after first being offered to the deity) delivery both within India and abroad (via FedEx or other courier services). There are several ways that patrons can make donations to the temple: Union Bank of India, IndusInd Bank, BillDesk, ICICI Bank NRI Services, Remit2India, Itz Cash, Wallet 365... There is also a service to process donations and prasad requests via SMS, or text messaging. The temple has tie-ups with most of the major cellphone companies in the country for SMS alerts of prayers and aartis, downloads of Lord Ganesh wallpapers, ring tones, logos, e-cards, and so on.

Siddhivinayak is by no means the only temple to provide such extensive and intensive digital devotion possibilities - different versions of the above model are being adopted by other temples in the country (for eg: Tirumalai in south India). And it's proving to be immensely popular. Siddhivinayak's online darshan, for instance, has 4 million hits per month. In contemporary India, it seems God is not just in the details, but in the detailed choices that one has to access him with.

My mother is surprised that I want to walk all the way to the beach to see the immersion. It's so much better on TV, she urges. And she is probably right - almost every TV channel - local or national, cable or terrestrial (over 500 in the country now, and still counting) is beaming out assorted Ganpati images. Sahara News has a 4 way split screen, - showing live immersion-casts from 4 major immersion points in Maharashtra state (of which Bombay is the capital), other channels have reports from other parts of the country or abroad; there are celebrity pujas, interviews, talk shows, Ganpati teleshopping and Ganpati dance contests... I switch to MTV hoping for some variety, only to see Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan vigorously shaking his hips to the Ganpati song from his forthcoming film - Don, just as my cellphone beeps and offers me the very same music video download for 9 rupees.

I enjoy my walk, feeling the cool monsoon sea breeze on my face. In a few days, the city will become boiling hot once more as the rain season subsides. Several processions pass me by: small handcarts with baby Ganpati statues on them, being guided by 10 or 12 family members, and large trucks, with 50 and 60 foot tall statues surrounded by their giant entourages, security guards and private videographers.

Just opposite the large Times of India billboards at Chowpatty beach, (featuring humongous images of Ganpati, what else?) there is a VIP entrance where special guests can view the beach proceedings from a raised platform, and on plush sofas, while sipping on delectable non alcoholic beverages. Alas, I don't have an invitation. Instead, I am squashed and squeezed with the general population (and we're talking hundreds of thousands here) as the crowd inches its way to the beach, and chants of Ganpati Bappa Morya (Lord Ganpati, come back again) fill the air. It is claustrophobic and stinky but there is electricity in the air and beaming smiles all around and I realize that despite my discomfort, I am smiling too.

No, Bombay's devotion for Ganpati has not changed in the few years that I have been away. (It might have even become stronger... and the presence of such a huge mass of people, just two months after terrible bomb blasts have ripped through the city's trains, must surely be read as an act of defiance as well as devotion.) But what has certainly changed is the experience of Ganpati.

The array of choices made possible by media in the Bombay of today has enabled a qualitatively different experience of the spirit of Ganpati: a transmedia experience that is more complex, more extensive and more intensive than ever before. Secondly, all these different levels or touch points at which the Ganpati narrative can be experienced by individuals merge in and out of and influence and are influenced by what was essentially conceived as a communal spiritual experience by Indian freedom fighter Lokmanya Tilak about a century ago. The experience is thereby transformed into something that more personal, more portable and more pedestrian (in both senses of the term), to borrow language from Mimi Ito. This personalization of the communal is what I find especially exciting, more so in the light of our existing C3 research, where we are studying the reverse phenomenon - the communalization of the personal - through our work on college dorm culture. In both instances, I reckon, we will find that what Grant Mcracken calls multiplicity, is taking place. People are able to experience something personally as well as communally at the same time. It is never a case of either/or; always a case of bothness, or rather, severalness.

Small is Beautiful

Ganpati is the god of wisdom, of intellect and of logical solutions, and I am sure that he is very happy to note how intelligently marketers have adapted to India's fascination with smallness and customized their products and services accordingly. What works in India is the micro, the small, the miniature, the bite sized. Microfinance initiatives (small loans of less than US$ 200 to poor entrepreneurs, mostly women) from larger Indian commercial banks like ICICI are a hit. Consumer goods companies have realized that their biggest market often lies in single serve sachets, priced at between 1 cent to 5 cents, and shampoos, biscuits, tea, or mouth fresheners have all proven to be extremely successful in this format. (Companies like Lever and P& G have quickly capitalized on this).

A CK Prahlad note that today, the penetration of shampoo in India is 90% and about 70% of the shampoo sold in the country comes from single serve sachets. Similarly, the cellphone market in India largely operates on a pre-paid model - and this includes everything from monthly access and bill payment to value added services. Indians don't want the burden of regular monthly fees but are very willing to make tiny one off expenditures to try out something new. Some exciting experiments taking place in this space include:

- Ringtone scratch cards in different denominations (Users text message their pin number as well as preferred ringtone code to their cell phone company and the tone is downloaded to their phone)

- Astrology, feng shui, Bible on demand, personality tests, travel planning and other lifestyle services

- Reservation services like cinema ticket booking (where movie selection, ticket purchase as well as cinema theater entry, are all done using the cellphone screen and without any paper ticket involvement); railway ticket booking, etc.

- Creation of cellphone based communities such as book clubs

- 3D wallpapers, games of all kinds, especially based on cricket and Bollywood, videotones, text message tones, full movie trailers and videos, full songs, visual radio... the list is endless.

Fast Company

It may be productive for folks in the US to keep an eye on India's TV 18 group for a workable model of a 21st century media company that can successfully navigate the confusing waters of convergence. It's a interesting story - they began as a tiny content production house a little more than a decade ago, ramped up and launched their first cable channel via a joint venture with CNBC, and followed it up with an English news channel CNN-IBN (another JV that brought CNN to India), as well as Hindi news channels (Awaaz and Channel 7). Now they're getting into overdrive by integrating the internet into everything they do - they are the only ones to actually 'get' the spirit of citizen journalism in the country, and constantly integrate these reports within their regular programming. Their existing TV brands are supported by what I consider to be India's best news websites (live video streaming of the main channels, all kinds of interactivity and participation opportunities for viewers - check here for instance) and these sites all have robust communities present on them. More importantly, they seem to have realized that one can't think of convergence as something you add on top of your existing media efforts, it has to be at the very root of how you conduct your day to day operations. For example: a friend of mine - Rajeev Masand - is the Entertainment editor of CNN-IBN and he also anchors the weekend film review show called Now Showing. He continuously addresses his online community on the show... he checks the bulletin boards regularly and responds to the most interesting comments, both on the web as well as on TV. A lot of the innovations he's launched within the show format have come in as suggestions from the online community.

I'm pretty confident that these guys are going to give current Indian media giants - the Times of India and (Murdoch's) Star group - a pretty good run for their money. Here are some of the their latest moves:

- Launched a new technology site

- Launched a new travel site.

- Acquired edgy internet design company Urban Eye

- Acquired a cricket site

- Acquired a comparison shopping website

___

For coverage about its digital devotion activities, see this and this.

Several references in this note are from the Contentsutra blog, which provides an excellent converge of India's media convergence scene.

An interesting article on satchet marketing can be found here Also see 'The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid' by CK Prahalad.

I've borrowed the terms 'Personal, Portable, Pedestrian' from cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito's book by the same name. Check out her blog on digital media use in the US and Japan.

The World of Reality Fiction

In Convergence Culture, I included a sidebar about the remarkable fan fiction produced by Mario Lanza. Lanza is a fan who gets to consult with and often receive fan letters from the characters who populate his stories. Lanza writes fan fiction involving the contestants featured on Survivor -- a series of engaging, richly detailed, psychologically nuanced original "seasons" cast with "all stars" known to readers from their previous appearances on the series. At the time he started writing reality fan fiction, the idea of combining elements of reality television with narrative fiction might have seemed more than a little odd. Today, though, there is a growing body not only of amateur but also professional fiction which borrows elements from reality television. I asked my son, Henry Jenkins IV, to share with my readers some of his impressions about this emerging genre. Henry recently graduated from the University of Arizona where he studied media and creative writing. He has already published several essays of his own media analysis, including one in Nick Sammond's anthology, Steel Chair to the Head, which traces his experiences growing up watching professional wrestling, and another -- a father/son dialogue on Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- which is included in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. He has been very active in the spoiling and fan writing communities around Survivor through the years and so brings an insider's perspective to this topic.

What follows are his thoughts about reality fiction:

To the impartial observer reality television fiction sounds about as reasonable as tofu turkey. Both are wince inducing contradictions of an irreverently modern consumer culture in which seemingly clueless marketers cater to niche audiences with a cheeky disregard for tradition. The same literati crowd who rolled their eyes and sighed when CBS producers borrowed George Orwell's phrase to create the low culture Big Brother would probably sniff indignantly at me if I told them about my efforts to write an original Survivor novel. "Reality cannot be fictional. Please, go away."

But on the Survivor Sucks message boards, by far the most active for reality television fandom, dozens of amateur writers have tried their hand at penning the next great American Survivor novel. Only a few have produced novel length works of any real literary value but much like science fiction fandoms, for which zine trading has at times been a viable cottage industry, the interest is there and a cannon of great fan authors, archived works and literary conventions has been compiled by consensus.

The earliest Survivor fan fiction, not surprisingly, was badly written pornography. But Mario Lanza, a family man, computer programmer and aspiring comedy writer from Southern California, was the first to really popularize fan fiction in reality television circles. His four novels, All Star Survivor: Hawaii, All Star Survivor: Alaska, All Star Survivor: Greece and Survivor: Okinawa, were all of a Stephen King-esque length (about six hundred pages) and are still considered the gold standard by which all other authors are judged.

The All Star novels speculated about what might happen if the best and most memorable characters from the early seasons of the show were put into competition with each other. They were sort of the equivalent of comic book fans speculating "Who would win in a real fight, Batman or Aquaman?" They could also very easily be perceived as having generated the fan buzz producers' cited in their decision to try the concept out during their eighth season.

Mario's fourth novel, Survivor: Okinawa, cast real fans (including myself) in the role of the castaways, chronicling a month long game that took place online. The contestants competed in real time with the conditions mirroring those of the real competitions as closely as possible considering that we were all stationed thousands of miles apart. Daily reports were required explaining how we had contributed to the work around camp, strategy meetings took place off and on all day, a certain number of points could be allocated or reserved from each competition and most importantly the tribe that lost the Immunity Challenge would have to vote one of their members out of the game.

The mood of the game was surprisingly, at times almost disturbingly intense with real egos at stake. The knowledge that every word one said had the potential to be judged by the entire fan community put a lot of pressure on people to avoid being played for a fool and the result was a constant atmosphere of paranoia. Almost all of the contestants participating ended up with very mixed feelings about having done so. The ones who were voted out early were embarrassed and the ones who lasted the longest endured such prolonged angst that they needed a vacation by the end of it. Mario unflinchingly turned thousands of pages of conversation transcripts and emails into his most ambitious novel yet and the competing fans developed fans (and detractors) of their own.

As a side note, Mario was not the first to hold such a competition. He himself had only recently been a competitor in Survivor: Tonga, a game run by a Brown student named Rafe Judkins who would shock everyone when he himself was chosen as a contestant on the real life Survivor: Guatemala. Many both in the online community and the cast of the show consider Judkins the best strategist of his season and his online game no doubt allowed him to run an insightful simulation of what might occur on the island

Afterwards many tried to follow in Mario's footsteps but very few succeeded because no template was established for what Survivor short fiction would look like (nor for any other reality series) and the commitment and endurance necessary to write a six hundred page novel was simply beyond most of the amateur writers. Countless projects were begun and then abandoned a few chapters in (to a chorus of boos). A climate of cynicism reigned among readers who had been suckered in once too often and the low readership further discouraged fan authors.

One of the few truly successful efforts to follow Mario's was a series started by a young fan known only as GuatemalaFanfic or GF. He used a different template than the All Star model that many had attempted to emulate and instead of writing the story as literature he attempted to recreate the style of the show as accurately as possible. He wrote his episodes in sixty minute script format, throwing in moments of inaudible dialogue, background conversation and song cues. He also took careful analysis that other fans had done of the way that the producers told stories - when they focused on the characters that would succeed and when they focused on those who would fail - and challenged his readers to observe what templates his was using and how the game would play out. He also differed from Mario's formula in that instead of bringing together characters from different seasons of the show he used all of the characters of the season that was currently being broadcast, writing a kind of alternate history with a different set of storylines and outcomes.

Much like GuatemalaFanfic I had been an avid fan of Mario's All Star novels, enjoying them at times more than the actual series, and like GuatemalaFanfic I was determined to beat the master at his own game. So I began writing Survivor: Belize, a novel adhering as closely as possible to what I imagined the standards and specifications of original television novels to be, with the hopes of selling it for publication to CBS' publishing company. Because it would most likely have been perceived as slander to put words in the mouths of real life individuals I created a completely original cast of characters.

My biggest challenge came in introducing sixteen characters at the same time without the audience throwing up their hands in frustration. This is, of course, a challenge any reality series faces but I didn't have the benefit of using audio/visual clues such as contestants' faces and voices as memory jogs. I eventually decided on a two pronged approach for tackling these issues. First, I wouldn't try to familiarize audiences with all sixteen characters at the same time. I would take a page from the series' book and focus only on a manageable number of characters in each episode, working everyone in eventually as the numbers began to dwindle later in the story. Secondly, I would use visual clues by inserting a section of my contestants' headshots and biographies, mirroring the CBS.com website in style and content. Since most of the characters were based on people I knew, anyway, finding appropriate models wouldn't be hard.

I was in the middle of working on my project just before Christmas last year, toggling between my word processor and my online shopping, when I ran into a product line that made my jaw drop -original Survivor novels. There they were on Amazon.com, recently released. Not sure whether to be encouraged or discouraged I ordered a set to put under the tree.

This set of novels differed significantly from my own idea in that they were aimed at preteen readers and they followed a Choose Your Own Adventure format. Since I'd been a huge fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was in grade school these provided a charming bit of nostalgia but my concern that making the castaways all ten or twelve years old would really water down the story proved valid. Not only did the writers' take the teeth out of the game - providing the contestants with lots of kid friendly food, having them compete in little mock challenges and leaving strategy simple if explained at all - but the character development was wafer thin.

The most interesting thing about the books was easily the format, which allowed the reader to flip to one page or another depending on who they wanted to be booted from the game or which challenge they wanted the castaways to compete in. But because the writers tried to cram so many different possible routes into a 120 page book they had to cut each version of the entire game down to a miniscule number of pages that could not sustain a solidly built story. While aiming the series at younger readers is a surprising but not inherently stupid idea I feel like the series' editors choice to low ball the series was ill advised. A notable percentage of Mario Lanza's All Star novel fans were of the age that these books seemed to be aimed at but they never complained that they were overwhelmed by the difficulty of the content or bored by the grown up nature of the contestants.

A few weeks ago I ran into a book review in Time Magazine for Carolyn Parkhurst's Lost and Found, a literary novel about "an Amazing Race style reality show" which, we were told, explored the human condition in a way "crappy" reality series never could. Despite being annoyed at the anti-popular culture bias of the review and mildly disappointed that someone else had once again preceded me I was dying to pick up the book on my next trip into town. I wanted it to succeed where the young reader novels had failed, to capture the sense of excitement of great reality television, the immediacy and unpredictability. I wanted to see how Parkhurst tackled all of the questions I'd been working through in the first hundred and fifty pages of my spec novel. Would she capture the impression of reality with adverbs and imagination?

The answer? Only somewhat, but Lost and Found is a pretty good book anyway. Where it succeeds is in vividly portraying a small number of core characters' psyches, a crucial aspect of almost any story. Where it fails is in capturing the appeal of reality television as distinct from other forms of storytelling. There's virtually no suspense about the outcome of the game in the entire novel. A lot of the supporting characters are never so much as given a chance to speak. That obviously isn't a goal the writer sought and failed at, it's something they never tried to do.

The book's ambivalence towards the subject matter was fairly interesting and from my vantage point seems frank without being unfair even if it came across as slightly apologetic. Parkhrurst's reality television producers are cold blooded and opportunistic but her other characters understand that and, in all but one case, don't seem offended by it. They all have motivations of their own for taking part. Just like in real life some, such as the so-called 'ex-gays', compete in order to present a sociopolitical agenda before an international audience; others, such as the former child stars, do it to gain visibility in the entertainment world; while still others, such as the mother and daughter team, do it for the adventure and the escape from their ever day lives. In order to gain a sense of perspective on the industry Parkurst collected stories from two former competitors, Shii Ann Huang (Survivor:Thailand and Survivor:All-Stars) and Zachary Behr (The Amazing Race); and consequently some of the details, such as the camera operator who no one wants to work with because of his offensive smell, ring true.

One creative choice Parkhurst makes that seems a central issue of such novels is to focus on the mechanics of the production directly (and constantly) rather than avoiding the subject. Crew members such as camera people and handlers are supporting characters. The host is frequently described while she prepares for her next monologue. A production meeting is transcribed at one point. The Survivor Choose Your Own Adventure novels, by comparison, act almost as though there was no television production, focusing exclusively on the action 'inside' the TV box.

I myself found it useful at points to reference stages of the production that didn't appear on screen such as the casting interviews and the airing of the episodes but considered that level of self-reflexivity fair game because the show's host, Jeff Probst, talks openly about such things in media teleconferences and at the live reunion shows. Parkhurst tends to use descriptions of the production primarily in the pejorative sense to talk about the artifice of reality television where as I am more interested in the dual experiences of the castaways who are both experiencing some very real challenges such as hunger, exhaustion and the social game and at the same time going through the emotional mill of being put on display in front of seventeen million people.

At one point one of my characters is really torn between voting out a woman who shares her mother's cultural values or one who's everything her mother is against. She knows that her family and their entire neighborhood is going to one day be watching this play out on television and they're going to judge her for the choices she makes; and that leaves her sleepless at night. To me putting the game in such a context doesn't detract from the reality of the emotion, it adds to it.

Reality television fiction is at a really interesting point right now because the rules haven't been established yet. Does one use the same number of contestants as you would on a reality series or is that too many to keep track of? Do some shows work better for prose than others or not at all? If a short format isn't going to try to cover an entire game then what should it look like? How does one write a novel covering an entire game without exceeding a standard 350 page book length? Can new series be created for fiction and, if so, could a work of reality fiction ever be optioned for television production? With Battle Royal and Series 7 we're already starting to see how movies could recreate reality TV. But what other types of movies could be written that playoff of that idea? The opportunity to shape the conventions of the micro-genre is there for whoever steps up to the plate.

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

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

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

Technical Innovation and Grassroots Media

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

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

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

The Aesthetics of Fan Music Videos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recurring Images

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

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

Slash This

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Far to Pon Farr?

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

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

Ose and More Ose

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

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

Porn Again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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