Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part One): Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington

C. Lee Harrington: Hi everyone. This has been an interesting set of discussions thus far -- Sam and I are happy to contribute. We'll follow the general norm by beginning with introductions. I've been engaged in audience/fan studies since the early 1990s, with most of my work co-authored with Denise Bielby. Our interest in fan studies grew out of our long term soap opera-watching habit. I don't remember how long Denise has been watching, but I started watching soaps in the late 1970s and have been an enthusiastic follower ever since (mostly ABC soaps, with some years watching DOOL).

When I was in grad school at UCSB in the late 1980s (Denise is on the faculty there), we went to a General Hospital fan club luncheon, were fascinated by the entire experience, and decided to study the soap fan culture. Our book Soap Fans was published a few years after Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon- Smith's Enterprising Women, among other important work of the late 80s/early 90s, which heavily influenced the way I thought about audience/fans.

We wrote the book in the pre-widespread-Internet-use era (some soap fans were on BBSs but not many), and soap fandom has changed a lot since then (as you write about, Sam). Since Soap Fans, I've done work on the Bianca coming-out storyline on All My Children and have recently worked on aspects of global fandom (with Denise and Kim Schimmel), among other projects. Inspired by Chris Scodari's work, I've also become interested in gerontological issues in soap operas, though my project is in the very early stages.

I have to say that Denise and I are of the generation of scholars who did NOT identify ourselves as soap fans in our work....I think we may have mentioned our own love of soaps to people we interviewed for our various projects (memory is hazy) but I don't think we've ever declared our own fandom in print (memory is hazy here as well, unfortunately). In part this is simply a generational issue, as Henry and others have written/spoken about, in part (for me at least) it's how I construct my own fan identity (as private, rather than publicly experienced/expressed). Denise and I DO have a picture of ourselves in our book though we don't identify who we are in the caption (it amused us at the time, I recall, though it seems less amusing now for some reason).

I also have to say, as Sean Griffin mentioned several weeks ago, that I have not personally encountered the gender issues that launched this discussion series. I'm not quite sure why....maybe because most of my work is based on soap opera, maybe because the gender neutrality of my name leads lots of people to assume I'm male rather than female (a gender issue in its own right, obviously, and one I've dealt with all my life), maybe because I keep a very low profile at conferences and am a miserable networker, so don't end up engaged in some of the firestorms of academia.

Sam Ford: I'm honored to be contributing to this conversation with Lee, who was among the scholars whose work I encountered regularly while working on my Master's thesis. I am a 2007 graduate of the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT, and I think my personal background is important in positioning me in this discussion of fan studies, since I have a much shorter duration as a fan studies scholar.

I graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree and four intersecting majors--English, mass communication, communication studies, and news/editorial journalism-- and a minor in film studies, in three separate departments (Department of English, Department of Communication, and School of Journalism and Broadcasting). As part of my undergraduate honors thesis, I was interested in tackling my own personal interest in professional wrestling as a self-professed fan through each of the three lenses that had been presented to me in these three departments.

My final project was primarily a collection of three essays on pro wrestling, each written through an advisor in a different department, and each with a different citation style and theoretical lens. One was a textual analysis of masculinity in relation to pro wrestling character/performer Mick Foley; another was an industry analysis of World Wrestling Entertainment and how the company diversified its output through multiple media platforms; and the third was a primarily qualitative ethnography of pro wrestling fans, gathered from interview 50 fans at five live wrestling events of various sizes. Each of those projects have been in various stages of publication during my time at MIT, since I came straight from undergraduate to graduate school.

When I came here, I decided to tackle another of my "lovemarks," so to speak, and the other side of perhaps the same gendered coin: soap operas. As those who follow the blog I run for the Convergence Culture Consortium or my guest posts here on Henry's blog in the past, I've found a variety of correlations between soap opera fandom and pro wrestling fandom, and the place of both in relation to both fan studies and questions of cultural taste.

I first encountered the CMS program here at MIT and Henry Jenkins' work through his essays on pro wrestling, which introduced me to Textual Poachers and the fan studies perspective from there. Henry served as a member of my thesis committee, and Convergence Culture was admittedly the major inspiration for my Master's thesis on the soap opera As the World Turns and soap opera fans, along with Nancy Baym's Tune In, Log On.

I have chosen in all my work to make my own fandom an explicit part of my writing, but that very much has to do with generational differences and the work that came before me. I struggled for a long time myself with notions of an "objective" and detached academic voice and my own need for expressing my fandom and my personal motivations for these studies. However, to be fair, Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise do admit to your own fandom in the introduction, even if it does not become infused in your writing as a whole.

Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise write, "Soaps are at the absolute bottom of the television hierarchy, lumped with game shows and professional wrestling in terms of their perceived moral worth" (5). You also write that you have not personally encountered the gender issues being raised in discussion here. I hope we will address these two issues, which I feel are quite related in greater detail, because I find that studies of pro wrestling fandom (and there are quite a few) and of soaps fandom have existed outside of the "mainstream" of fan studies research, and perhaps the gendered focus of both have colored their place in the history of fan studies.

Wrestling is at an interesting place between sports fan studies and media fandom, while being a male scholar studying soap opera fan communities has been illuminating. Of course, it's a farce that there is not a sizable female audience for pro wrestling, as well as a significant portion of male soap opera fans, but they are both quite gendered in terms of industry focus and the predominant fan base.

Finally, you mention your own lack of experience with many of the gender issues in fan studies that launched this series. I feel much the same way. Perhaps it's because I spent a significant portion of the past two years working within and looking at a predominantly female fan community and an industry in which women hold a number of key industry positions.

But I was fascinated, as I delved into these discussion of fan fiction and fan communities versus user-generated content and producer/consumer interaction that, in some ways, studying producer/ consumer interaction was considered by many to be a male perspective on fandom, as opposed to fan activities that are further removed from the commercial contexts of media production. Lee, I know that your book with Denise focuses on soap fans and their relationship with the industry and soap texts in a largely pre-Internet world, so I was curious about your thoughts on the gendered-ness of commercial and non-commercial examples of fan expression within fan studies.

C. Lee Harrington: Ah, so Denise and I *do* mention our fandom in the introduction of our book -- good! I guess I could have walked four steps and plucked the book off the bookshelves, but....thanks Sam. I think you're absolutely correct that studies of pro wrestling fandom and soap fandom have existed outside the mainstream of fan studies, and their gendered focus is an interesting question.

I've been intrigued by the various debates in recent fan studies about whether (or to what extent) genre continues to matter. I understand and agree that the fan experience (subjectively at least) can transcend the fan object but I also think genre still matters in shaping fandom. Twenty years into researching soaps, I'm still fascinated by how unique they are as texts (which you write about, Sam) and the kind of challenges that uniqueness presents both to the industry and to scholars (not to mention to fans).

To get to your question in a roundabout way, one of the unique aspects of open-ended serials is the relentless flow of the text, and I think soap fan expression has been constrained by that. The types of activities Henry and Camille and others were writing about in early 1990s -- fanfic, fan art etc. -- simply were not being practiced by soap fans. There was just no need. A new episode of the text was coming every day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. There was less need to "fill in the gaps," so to speak, so fans were engaging in other types of expression -- private fantasizing, gossiping with friends, reading mags, etc. The industry is in trouble in part because of this relentlessness.....Making time for a new episode every day (day after day etc.) is exhausting for people, even longterm fans like me. You do a

wonderful job with this topic in your thesis....The point being that in the early 1990s at least, soap fans' expressions had more to do with genre than gender (not to say the genre isn't gendered, of course). Has that changed, do you think?

I also wanted to comment on your observation that many in fan studies consider studying producer/consumer interaction to be a male perspective on fandom. One of the things Denise and I were fascinated by at the first GH fan club luncheon we went to was the level of intimacy between actors and fans -- some of it contrived, but not all of it.

I had just finished reading Josh Gamson's book on celebrity culture in which he uses a metaphor of the "hunt," which seemed entirely appropriate to the entertainment realm he was writing about and wholly inappropriate to the soap realm, where decades spent acting on soaps and decades spent watching the same soap lends to a different relationship between the production team and fans/audiences (with actors being in a weird middle realm). Producers have a different type of engagement with longterm Guiding Light viewers than they do with Lost viewers.....Perhaps the presumed gendered-ness of studying production/consumption relations is based on presumptions about the producer/consumer relationship, which might also be shaped by genre (gendered though it is)....?

And having typed this, I'm not entirely sure I addressed the question you actually asked.....

Sam Ford: Lee, I think the frequency and duration of soap opera texts certainly alters the fan experience significantly. Several of these debates about fan studies have centered on fan fiction in one form or another, but as you point out, fan fiction is not one of the predominant forms of expression within soap opera fandom. That's not to say that soap opera fan fiction does not exist at all, but most of the creative output of the fan community is centered on criticism, alternate storyline suggestions, parodies, speculation, nostalgia for prior storylines, contextualizing current events based on the collective memory of the fandom, etc. These are all creative activities, to be sure, but they predominate soaps fandom much more than fan fiction.

I think you may be right that genre has quite a lot to do with this, and primarily the frequency of the text. With 250 new hour-long episodes per year (for every soap other than The Bold and the Beautiful), there are much fewer holes to be filled into the text. Plus, while a lot of fan fiction served to humanize or explore the interpersonal relationships that were not the main focuses of many of the primetime shows that drew the most fan fiction, soap operas are explicitly about these relationships among an ensemble cast.

There are still gaps to be filled in, however, and soap operas are such immersive texts that they actively invite fans to do so, since they are what Robert C. Allen calls overcoded narratives. Since there are so many characters and parts of town fleshed out over the course of decades, but no explicit connections are made as to the geography of the town in many cases, fan activity and creativity often comes through group speculation about the fictional world rather than fan fiction or fan art. Fans make a collective effort in online forums to construct, maintain, and critique the writers' job of the most important aspect of soap opera storytelling to many fans--continuity. With such a massive text, the collective discussion of continuity takes up a significant portion of the creative energy of the fandom, much as they do in comic books and other immersive story worlds, to use a term from my thesis work.

You raise an interesting point regarding the producer/consumer relationship both in your book and in your response here, Lee. Perhaps because soaps are considered niche in terms of cultural taste, it helps shape this sense of camaraderie among fans and producers. That's not to say that soaps fans are not often quite critical of "the powers that be," or "the idiots in charge," and this aspect has probably become more pronounced and explicit now that the Internet facilitates discussions of the creative powers among a large group of fans who are more aware than ever not just of the on-air talent but the creative shifts behind-the-scenes.

Still, I have been to fan events in recent years and still agree that there is this sense of respect and familiarity between actors and fans at soaps events that does extend beyond that celebrity craze. Perhaps this is most true with actors, in that the actors on most soaps have been the constants, and fans are more connected to the actors portraying the roles, and the characters, than they are to the particular creative team, since many in the fan community may have been watching the show longer than anyone on the creative team has been involved with the program.

Thus, longtime characters, and their portrayers, share a veteran status with the show that even most of the creative staff does not have in many of these cases. And that probably explains why soap fans spend so much time guarding the continuity of their shows because of a perceived personal ownership of the text based, in part, on their own seniority in following and knowing the text.

But, speaking of these differences between gender and genre, I know that you have been spending a significant amount of time recently comparing media fandom studies with sports fan studies. Do you suppose many of the differences in sports fan studies to be based more on genre--"real" versus fictional, a higher level of cultural respect vis-a-vis soap opera fandom for sports, etc.--or on gender, since sports fandom has traditionally been considered predominantly male, in comparison to soaps fandom being traditionally considered primarily female?

C. Lee Harrington: Sam, I'm glad you brought up Allen's book -- it's such a fabulous exploration of both the literary and industrial aspects of soaps and seems under-cited in soap audience/ fan research these days. His observation that soap narratives are over-coded, and non-watchers assumptions that they're vastly under-coded, is one of the most interesting aspects of the genre, I think. It's always been difficult to explain to non-watchers how utterly complicated soap texts are, and because longstanding stylistic and production codes can make them appear simplistically plot-driven, their complexity often goes unrecognized. I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!! I really like your term immersive story

worlds in this context, by the way.

I agree with you that it's primarily actors and fans in concert who protect the continuity and integrity of the characters and communities, since production, directing writing teams change so rapidly.....I wanted to add that one of the interesting intimacies in the world of soaps (compared to other entertainment realms) is the place of academic critique within it. I have been surprised at times how welcoming the soap press is to academic commentary on storylines and issues. In part this helps legitimize the industry, of course, but to continue the metaphor of the family reunion which Denise and I used in our book, it allows academics (especially those sympathetic to the genre) to have a seat at the table.

In terms of your question re: sport/media fans, are we talking about the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fan studies or the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fandom? Or both? I have to say at the outset that I am NOT a sport fan scholar so anything I say here is my educated guess....and hopefully we have some readers here who can help us think this through (my recent work is very much from a media-not- sport perspective). Certainly in the West at least, sport fandom is historically male but contemporary fandom even of traditionally masculine sports no longer is, necessarily. Doesn't the NFL say that close to 50% of its fans are female? And I wonder what the gender breakdown is for fans of NASCAR vs. fans for indivdual NASCAR drivers.....? Maybe this is not so much about genre OR gender, per se, but about the increasing celebrification of sport stars....? Is celebrification generally understood as a feminine process (not in any essential way, of course)....?

MORE TO COME

Don't forget to check out the Live Journal site for active discussion of the contents of this post.

The Ethics of the Sociable Web and the Shifting Roles of Media Theorists

For those of you who have been enjoying our Gender and Fan Culture conversations on the blog, I thought I'd direct your attention to another very interesting scholarly dialogue taking place in the blogosphere -- an exchange between Mark Deuze and Trebor Scholz on "The Ethics of the Sociable Web." Both have been active participants in our Media in Transition conferences. Indeed, Scholz shared his critique of social networking sites as part of our plenary session on Collaboration and Collective Intelligence (Check out the podcast here). And Deuze spoke at the Media in Transition 4 conference about content and connectivity in contemporary storytelling practice. (You can check out the text of his remarks here.) You are going to be hearing more about both gentlemen in the months to come because they both have important new books coming out that speak to convergence and participatory culture. Scholz is co-editor with Geert Lovink of The Art of Online Collaboration and Deuze is the author of Media Work. Full disclosure dictates that I mention that Deuze and I are co-editing a special "Convergence Culture" issue of the journal, Convergence.

The long and the short of it is that these are two wickedly smart guys who have important things to say about the contemporary media landscape and its social/economic/political/cultural impact. Of the two, Scholz is more skeptical and Deuze more optimistic about the state of media today -- though both of them would balk at having their ideas reduced to such a simple ideological binary. In the course of this discussion, they touch on media literacy (as an essential social skill of the digital age), NewsCorps and MySpace, the "Facebook Rebellion," and various forms of online activism. Their discussion/debate cuts to the heart of our current rhetoric about Web 2.0, asking the questions we should be raising about the kinds of cultural labor which is being masked by the lofty rhetoric about "user-generated content."

Scholz's first question already points to what is at stake here:

Given all the efforts to make use of the affective labor of millions of users, do you think that we could reach a point where networked publics feel exploited (or at least used)? Today, there is little indication of that as people get much out of their online sociality; they gain friendships, dates, information, skills, and more. At the same time media giants rake in billions....Which ethical guidelines do you propose in the context of the social web?

Indeed, if 2006 was the year which marked the rise of "web 2.0," then 2007 has so far turned out to be the year where a series of controversies and disputes have forced us to reconsider the emerging relationship between media producers and consumers in this brave new world. As I read this, I find Scholz articulating my fears and Deuze my hopes about what happens next in the new media landscape.

Scholz emphasizes the power and concentrated wealth of the established players in the media industry, while Deuze responds by stressing the new power which consumers, individually and collectively, have gained in the emerging media landscape:

The key to understanding the currently emerging relationships between media consumers and producers, or between media owners and media workers (whether paid or voluntarist) for that matter, is their complexity, their reciprocity as well as animosity: their liquidity. Such relationships are seldom stable, generally temporary, and at the very least unpredictable. Yochai Benkler and others articulate in this context a hybrid or new mixed media ecology, typified by a global digital culture that can be understood in terms of what Lev Manovich calls a culture of remix and remixability, where user-generated content exists both within and outside of commercial contexts, and supports as well as subverts corporate control. So while one can indeed see the End User Licensing Agreements and Terms of Service of the major user-created content sites (including but not limited to game modding platforms, corporate citizen journalism initiatives, and viral marketing sites) as informal labor contracts, it would be a mistake to presume that the collective intelligence of the user community thus is "controlled" by the corporation (or vice versa). For example, as part of my research I talk with professionals throughout the news and entertainment industries (both in the U.S. and elsewhere), and many if not most of them express openly the fear that they have lost control over their own brands and properties as they get taken up and deployed by consumers and users in diverse, disorganized, decentralized, but very public ways.

Both of them soon circle around the issue of media literacy education -- what to consumers need to know in an era of shifting rules and unstable roles? As they do so, they seem to embrace a model of media literacy which emphasizes skeptical and informed consumption and which is framed primarily around the economic and legal relations between media companies and users. What steps do consumers need to take to insure that they understand the sometimes obscure terms of service they are signing with these media companies and can exert an appropriate level of control over their personal data? How do the users who generate the content protect their own rights as creative artists? Do we need a "labor union" for unpaid culture workers, as Deuze suggests half seriously at one point? Do we have the right to demand "transparency" in our relations to these powerful corporations, as both scholars argue at various points during the conversation? What are the limits of individual responsibility given the powerful players involved in framing these relations? Can people simply and easily "opt out" of social networks when such a large portion of their community belongs to one or another of the online services or is there now a social obligation of sorts to be listed through Facebook if you are a student or faculty member at a leading university? (It would be very interesting to read this discussion of obligatory membership alongside danah boyd's discussion of class and social networks that I referenced here last week.)

As I read through the exchange, I found that the two participants implicitly and sometimes explicitly embrace very different ideas about the role of the theorist during a period of media transformation. Scholz, on the one hand, adopts the role of a traditional cultural critic (i.e. "speaking truth to power," "questioning the dominant paradigm," and challenging the vested interests of media companies). Deuze embraces a newer and more unfamiliar role: the academic as someone who mediates between competing and contradictory interests at a moment when all sides are trying to make sense of the changes which are occurring. We can see these very different stances towards the value of theory in these two passages from the exchange:

TS: Education for participatory cultures is, no doubt, a key issue. Knowing how to navigate the corporate lawn is important. That does not, however, cancel out peer-to-peer alternatives and public, independent media.

MD: Indeed, my argument calls for a "not only, but also" perspective on the emerging media ecosystem. Within such a system there are constant struggles, between top down and bottom up, between independence and control, between professionals and amateurs, where opportunities to tell all stories in all ways are plentiful. I think it is our job to identify the necessary conditions under which such meaningful and open exchange can truly take place, while at the same time enabling culture creators to earn a decent living.

TS: While I concur that we should support cultural producers in finding novel ways of earning a living, it is important to recognize that the sociable web today echoes real existing capitalism. Most attention and influence is concentrated at the core where corporate entities are situated. Toward the periphery we find the artists, educators, non-profits, and hard-blogging citizens. There are exemptions but let's not mistake them for the myth of the garage entrepreneur or the American Dream gone wired.

The cost/benefit constellation of affective labor is, without question, complex, but that does not mean that we have to become corporate apologists. The question of ethics of participatory context-providing giants (companies that facilitate the social networked life of hundreds of millions of users) is related to transparency, privacy, and ownership of uploaded content.

At a moment when everything about the mediascape seems up for grabs, when companies and consumers are both being asked to rethink their historic roles and relationships, it makes sense that we as academic theorists must also re-examine our own roles and our relationships to the forces of change which we are analyzing. This is part of what I am trying to do with this blog -- move theory out of a purely academic environment, experiment with different contexts within which theoretical work can be done, provide a shared space where academic and vernacular theorists of all kinds can interact, and seeing if we can't create a dialog between all of those who are being impacted by this moment of profound and prolonged media in transition. Academics have an obligation to become engaged in public communication as we fulfill both the roles identified here -- as we ask hard and uncomfortable questions about the current configurations of wealth and power and as we seek to bridge between competing interests and try to understand what's at stake for all parties involved.

As we do so, the best way to get at the complexity of some of the issues we are raising and to break through old divisions among theoretical perspectives may be to embrace this dialogic format. Too often, we use blogs to hurl insults at each other across ideological and theoretical divides. Yet, where we can find a shared space for conversation and where we can listen and learn from each other, we can develop theories which are sophisticated enough to remain on top of the changes that are occurring around us. I applaud what Deuze and Scholz are trying to accomplish in this exchange.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Four, Part One): Will Brooker and Ksenia Prasolova

Fan and Academic Identities

Will Brooker [WB] wrote three books between 1999 and 2004, on stuff he loved as a kid: Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon; Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans; and Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. He is currently head of the Film and Television degree programmes at Kingston University, London. His most recent articles include "A Sort of Homecoming: Fan Viewing and Symbolic Pilgrimage" in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and Lee Harrington's edited collection Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York University Press, 2007), "Everywhere and Nowhere: Vancouver, Fan Pilgrimage and the Urban Imaginary" (forthcoming in the International Journal of Cultural Studies) and "Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows On Download", scheduled to appear in an edited collection on Lost. His interests include cities, superheroes, online communities and television overflow; he also writes fiction.

Ksenia Prasolova [KP] is a visiting student researcher from Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad). With financial support of the Fulbright Program she was able to come to MIT and use Henry Jenkins' vast expertise (and, to somewhat larger extent, Hayden Library's and CMS's vast collection of resources) to concentrate on writing her Ph.D. thesis on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. Apart from Harry Potter, Ksenia is also interested in translation and interpretation, Heroes, and arguing with Kristina Busse. As to her fannish engagement, until very recently Ksenia has been a champion lurker in Harry Potter, Heroes, Firefly and The Sims 2 fandoms.

Finally, Kristina (Nina) Busse was our invisible third interlocutor in the debate, at times performing the curious role of Greek Chorus. She was already talking with both Will and Ksenia when they started talking to one another and somehow she became both conduit and the representative of gender constructions they'd both argue against. In a way, then, the conversation is clearly a continuation of the discussion Will and Kristina had as well as the continuation of many debates Ksenia and Kristina have had about how fan fiction should or should not be studied (literature or cultural artifact), what role gender plays in fan studies (none or a huge role), all the way to the exemplarity or exceptionality of Harry Potter (and luckily the discussion below stayed away from that).

Gender Infiltration

[WB] Just for starters, I should say now that I have some issues with this whole idea of "there's a war between boys and girls, let's try to dialog from opposing sides!" I find the notion of a conflict between "boys" and "girls" quite saddening and reductive. I also have reservations about calling any adult a boy or a girl, and the whole stereotypical pink (or red) vs blue color-coding is also kind of problematic to me.

However, from my conversation with Kristina, I'm finding I tend to identify more with the "girl" side of this gendered approach to fandom -- if that side means an interest in creativity, confession, autoethnography, autobiography and community -- with a particular focus on slash, genfic and films. Those are the things I'm most interested in, in terms of fandom. So if that's the "girl" angle, it's fine by me but I think a lot of my work, in that case, challenges the perceived gender boundaries that are supposedly dividing aca-fandom.

[KP] As it was already mentioned in discussion to the related post in Kristina's blog, 'fanboys' and 'fangirls', 'blue' and 'pink' etc. are signifiers of the going-ons in fandom - it is a fact that males tend to side with 'collecting', as it is a fact that females tend to side with 'creative' in fandom. I am not sure 'fanboys' and 'fangirls' are the most suitable terms in this case, but those are certainly the most handy ones to refer to a whole set of gendered assumptions and practices that are still very firmly in place. Or are they?

You say that you identify more with the 'fangirl' side of approach to fannish scholarship despite being a male, and I would argue that no matter which side you identify with as an individual, it is the fact that you are able to see these sides more or less clearly and label them as gendered that is relevant. I am sure both of us can give examples from our fannish and academic experience of what I would mockingly call 'gender infiltration' , but by providing these examples and thus challenging the rigidity of gender divide, wouldn't we reinforce the very same divide by acknowledging it?

[WB] I identified with what I was being *told* in these ongoing discussions was the "fangirl" side. When I talked about it with Kristina, I was actually quite surprised that the things central to my work on fandom - communities, discussion, slash, films, the way a text bonds people and provides them with a shared culture - are being grouped on the "pink" side. I've never thought of myself as being interested in "fangirl" stuff before. I felt it was ironic and amusing that on the evidence of my research, that seems to be the side of the divide I'm on - *according to the terms and territories I'm now being presented with*.

[KP] Somehow the *terms* that are in place, the structure of society, the dominant discourse or something else brought about the curious statistical fact - more women like the 'creative' aspect of fandom than men do, more men like the 'collecting' aspect of fandom, and both genders are more or less equally involved in canon debates. It would stand to reason that the academics who come from within a certain practice (more likely, female scholars when it comes to fanvids, or male scholars when it comes to comic books) would feel comfortable using autoethnography to discuss the practice, and would probably occupy the stance of 'impartial observer' (who cannot help but objectify the study subject-matter) when they need to discuss practices they are not personally engaged in.

[WB] It's true that you'd probably have to be a long-term comics fan to write reflectively and personally about them, and that as such, you'd probably be male. However, my own experiments with autoethnography (I am using this grand term for it... really I saw it as a kind of personal and reflective creative writing) can be found in my work on Blade Runner's city locations, Lewis Carroll's grave and Vancouver's streets, as well as the more obviously male-oriented Batman comics and Star Wars films.

Also, though slash seems still to be a predominantly-female activity, before I wrote my chapter about slash, I wrote some slash. I wrote it anonymously and had it discussed on a slash community. It's not impossible to at least try to seek some experience of and personal engagement with the thing you're writing about, although this won't compensate for years of committed immersion. You don't have to be obliged into an "impartial observer" role about certain topics -- you can choose to become more of a participant. But maybe that was a kind of gender infiltration again. I didn't intend it that way.

[KP] Likewise, Nina keeps on accusing me of not being a "good" fangirl. I've tried bunches of shows and disliked most of the ones that came highly recommended--even the ones that seem to have male and female audience appeal, like Buffy.

[WB] Well... what we have here then is me, not a good representative for fanboys because my work is about creativity and community, and Ksenia, not a good representative for fangirls... doesn't this question whether the categories are of any use? Are Ksenia and I gender infiltrators, or gender traitors? Are we exceptional?

[KP] I'd like to know, myself. While I can clearly see labels and gendered behavior etc. among fans (myself included), I still fail to see how fan scholars display the gendered behavior in their scholarly activities apart from falling into the obvious 'traps' of writing about what they know/like best, while their readers are falling into the obvious traps of thinking that the scholar has presented the situation objectively and in its entire diversity. I wonder if the fact that men were almost absent from the academic accounts of Star Trek fandom means that they were actually that absent from fandom itself.

What I have written above is myself - as an academic - describing my fannish behaviors. It is not myself - as an academic - thinking of how my gender influences my work as a scholar who studies fan fiction (I don't study fandom, not really). While I can talk about myself being a misfit fandom-wise, I am not sure how that applies to my academic practices apart from the fact that I'd love to avoid using any methods that have to do with ethnography or social science.

For instance, there is a part of my dissertation that is about slash, but I only mention in passing that most of the writers are female and that slash is thus the most studied and controversial topic in fan scholarship. What I concentrate on is the kind of literature slash is and how it relates to other genres in general and specifically to other genres in fan fiction. I think this stance has less to do with my gender than with my academic background, which is firmly in humanities... Academically, I am simply not that interested in the social dimension of the phenomenon, although it does not mean that said dimension is not important.

Gender and Slash

[WB] Getting back to the discussion as it began on Nina's blog, I think it was being suggested that, in contemporary fan-scholarship, women were studying more localized creativity, and men were more concerned with big economic alliances... and that the former - the fans, the fan-scholars writing about them, and the fan activities in question - were being overlooked or neglected.

[KP] Is that so? Maybe it's more of a field of study question? Not a gender one? As for overlooked and neglected - well, this comes down to a) who hangs out with whom at conferences; b) who references whose work and c) what's one's area of interest. Surely everybody references Penley/Bacon-Smith/Jenkins, but what about more recent stuff, or things that are published by independent scholars? They hardly get noticed, or do they? And I also wonder to which extent the blogosphere serves as a connector between the male and female academic networks now.

[WB] Interestingly, and perhaps depressingly, I got the impression last week with Round 3 of this summer event that Henry's blog was assumed to be a male space, and Nina's LJ mirror of it to be far more female-oriented: the comments section included the observation that "given that LJ tends to be not an acafannish male space, I'm not sure Sean will actually respond here. *shrugs*"

[KP] Also, the first studies of fandom that I have seen (mostly regarding Star Trek) tended to concentrate on 'female' activities in fandom and it sure looks as if we are given to understand that fannish communication network used to be predominantly female. Most of other studies of fandom also tended to single out female domination and female creativity. Your book on Star Wars is a very visible and interesting exception: and surely Star Wars fans can not be the only ones who watch the films together, for instance, or collect action figures?

Or is it not a fannish practice? Is it too mundane and obvious to document, not as exciting as researching slash, for instance? Is it where autoethnography fails us because we go for depicting what we, as fans and only after that - academics, like and understand and enjoy and find fascinating, and leave behind other bits that we think are not as interesting or controversial?

[WB] I am not under the impression that most academic writing about slash is by slash writers - that is, I don't think most writing about slash is autoethnographic.

[KP] I suspect my definition of 'autoethnography' is wider than yours. I don't think one has to be a writer of slash in fandom to write about slash in academia; it is positioning self as an insider as opposed to outsider in the academic study, and the increased level of reflection that make a difference. Basically, I'd say that while autoethnography means that the writer is also the subject of research, it does not necessarily follow that the very same writer must also be the doer of all actions that fall under academic scrutiny. Also, I'd argue that anybody who 'reads' slash extensively for pleasure is a slasher themselves, and that includes a fair number of academics who write about fandom - I'd call myself a slasher because I am a fan of the genre, but I'd never written as much as a word of a slash story in my entire life in fandom. I have translated one story, but that hardly counts.

[WB] By that logic, maybe someone who reads a lot of novels is a novelist; but OK.

[KP] I'd argue that even by reading slash one makes an effort to accept the often subversive and queer reading of the source text, and thus is participating in the process of creating a slash narrative.

[WB] Well, every reader of a novel is participating in its meanings and arguably helping to create the text, but I'm not going to give them the Booker prize for it.

I suspect slash has been so visible in writing about fans (eg. more than films and genfic) because it's creative, it's controversial, it involves issues of censorship, and it's about sex.

[KP] It is interesting how slash has become a somewhat comfortable ground to talk about fandom and the subversive in its readings and interpretations of source text, and at the same time a showcase for fannish creativity. It is so heavily advertised as 'The Thing to engage in' that I'd be really surprised to hear that there are fans in the known (female?) fandom who have been around for a while and haven't tried reading it. And because it's so vastly popular and, well, commonplace (and here, again, the popularizing studies have played their role) that many (female?) fans tend to appreciate new source texts through 'the slash lens'...

Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

The following is adapted from remarks I made at the International Communications Association conference in San Francisco this past week. I was asked to be part of a plenary session organized by Fred Turner, "What's So Significant about Social Networking?: Web 2.0 and Its Critical Potential," which also featured Howard Rheingold, Beth Noveck, and Tiziana Terranova. We had ten minutes to speak so I took this as a challenge and offered nine big ideas about the place of YouTube in contemporary culture. Many of these ideas will be familiar to regular readers of this blog since most of them have evolved here over the past year, but I thought you might find them interesting distilled down in this form. (For those who may be joining us from the ICA crowd, I've included links back to the original posts from which these ideas have evolved.) 1. YouTube represents the kind of hybrid media space described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks -- a space where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and activist content co-exists and interacts in ever more complex ways. As such, it potentially represents a site of conflict and renegotiation between different forms of power. One interesting illustration of this is the emergence of Astroturf -- fake grassroots media -- through which very powerful groups attempt to mask themselves as powerless in order to gain greater credibility within participatory culture. In the past, these powerful interests would have been content to exert their control over broadcast and mass market media but now, they often have to mask their power in order to operate within network culture.

2. YouTube has emerged as the meeting point between a range of different grassroots communities involved in the production and circulation of media content. Much that is written about YouTube implies that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled the growth of participatory cultures. I would argue the opposite: that it was the emergence of participatory cultures of all kinds over the past several decades that has paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of platforms like YouTube. But as these various fan communities, brand communities, and subcultures come together through this common portal, they are learning techniques and practices from each other, accelerating innovation within and across these different communities of practice. One might well ask whether the "You" in YouTube is singular or plural, given the fact that the same word functions for both in the English language. Is YouTube a site for personal expression, as is often claimed in news coverage, or for the expression of shared visions within common communities? I would argue that the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration.

3. YouTube represents a site where amateur curators assess the value of commercial content and re-present it for various niche communities of consumers. YouTube participants respond to the endless flow and multiple channels of mass media by making selections, choosing meaningful moments which then get added to a shared archive. Increasingly, we are finding clips that gain greater visibility through YouTube than they achieved via the broadcast and cable channels from which they originated. A classic example of this might be the Colbert appearance at the Washington Press Club Dinner. The media companies are uncertain how to deal with the curatorial functions of YouTube: seeing it as a form of viral marketing on some occasions and a threat to their control over their intellectual property on others. We can see this when Colbert and his staff encourage fans to remix his content the same week that Viacom seeks legal action to have Colbert clips removed from YouTube

4. YouTube's value depends heavily upon its deployment via other social networking sites -- with content gaining much greater visibility and circulation when promoted via blogs, Live Journal, MySpace, and the like. While some people come and surf YouTube, it's real breakthrough came in making it easy for people to spread its content across the web. In that regard, YouTube represents a shift away from an era of stickiness (where the goal was to attract and hold spectators on your site, like a roach motel) and towards an era where the highest value is in spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active agency of consumers in creating value and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content.)

5. YouTube operates, alongside Flickr, as an important site for citizen journalists, taking advantage of a world where most people have cameras embedded in their cellphones which they carry with them everywhere they go. We can see many examples of stories or images in the past year which would not have gotten media attention if someone hadn't thought to record them as they unfolded using readily accessible recording equiptment: George Allen's "macaca" comments, the tazering incident in the UCLA library, Michael Richards's racist outburst in the nightclub, even the footage of Sadam Hussein's execution, are a product of this powerful mixture of mobile technology and digital distribution.

6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple's "1984" advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of

people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality

and truth but perform and amplify it.

Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.

7. YouTube helps us to see the shifts which are occurring in the cultural economy: the grassroots culture appropriates and remixes content from the mass media industry; the mass

media industry monitors trends and pulls innovations back into the system, amplifying them and spreading them to other populations. Yet as they do so, they often alter the social and economic relations which fueled this cultural production in the first place. We will see increasing debates about the relations between the gift economy of participatory culture and the commodity relations that characterize user-generated content. There is certainly a way that these sites can be seen as a way of economic exploitation as they outsource media production from highly paid and specialized creative workers to their amateur unpaid counterparts.

8. In the age of YouTube, social networking emerges as one of the important social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to become meaningful participants in the culture around them. We need to be concerned with the participation gap as much as we are concerned with the digital divide. The digital divide has to do with access to technology; the participation gap has to do with access to cultural experiences and the skills that people acquire through their participation within ongoing online communities and social networks.

9. YouTube teaches us that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. As John McMuria has shown us, minorities are grossly under-represented -- at least among the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube, which still tend to come most often from white middle class males. If we want to see a more "democratic" culture, we need to explore what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within the new participatory culture.

Chris Williams Responds to Our Questions about FanLib

As of a few minutes ago, I have received Chris Williams' response to the questions we collected here. I promised him that I would run his answers in full and I have accordingly made no changes here except to format this in a way that will make it readable on the blog. I should warn people that I am tied up with a conference this afternoon and this evening. I will put through comments from readers as quickly as I am able to do so but I may be off line for extended periods of time, so please be patient. As always, if you get an error message, send your comments directly to me and I will post them myself. THE ANSWERS

Dr. Jenkins,

Thank you for the opportunity to address the questions and share the unedited answers in full with your readers. I would like to apologize to the fan fiction community for creating confusion, being insensitive, sending some inappropriate communications, and acting in an unprofessional manner. I acknowledge that some of my answers below are repetitive but I wanted to make sure the answers are complete and in context for those readers that may only be interested in certain questions. Now to the answers...

BASIC BACKGROUND

What is your own background in fandom? Have you had a history of involvement in this community? More generally, are there people working for your company who come out of the fan fiction world and have an understanding of its traditions and practices?

I am a complete media junkie. I love stories and since 2003 I have involved over 100,000 people in online fan fiction events. Because of my involvement in these events I've definitely spent the most time with Harry Potter and L Word fan fiction. As you see from my response in the forums, I am not a great writer.

Several people in our small company come out of the fan fiction world. All of us are now involved in the community.

What led you to create this site? What first gave you the idea and why did you carry through with it? What are you hoping to achieve? What sold your investors that this was a good idea and that this was the right time to move forward?

I was deeply involved with the ongoing online revolution at Yahoo for a long time and I have always had a passion for film. In 2001, my friend and I had an idea, inspired by many people we knew with creative movie ideas, who didn't have the means or access to realize them. So we tried to create a collaborative event for fans to write an original script and produce a feature film from it. It quickly became apparent to us that online storytelling was about more than script writing: entertainment fans were also looking for venues to showcase their talent, and media companies were wrestling with how to best operate in a changing world. So we started by testing the waters with fans by running special online storytelling events and found that many of the participants loved fan fiction. We went to the media companies, talked to them about how they wanted to work with online communities and found that many wanted to connect with fan fiction readers and writers. FanLib started running special events in partnership with media companies and publishers in a moderated, controlled environment. These events were so successful with both fans and the media companies that we decided to create a venue for online storytelling based upon fan fiction.

In this broadly changing landscape FanLib (the company, not the website) is meant to be a positive agent of change for fans, media companies, and rights holders. I want FanLib.com (the website) to become a venue for fans who want to showcase and share their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in creative storytelling events.

Our investors recognize the tectonic shifts taking place in the digital/media/consumer/entertainment landscape. I won't fill space here with the facts and research about media convergence, user generated content (UGC) and personal media consumption and I certainly recognize fan fiction is not your "vanilla" UGC. I know you and your readers are very well aware of these modern media phenomena and changes that are occurring everywhere. Our investors believe FanLib can play an important role.

What is the basic value proposition you are making? Who is making money here? Why are the fans not being compensated for the work they produce? In what other ways might fans receive benefit from their participation in your site?

The value proposition for fans is a free venue where they can pursue their passion by creating, showcasing, reading, reviewing, sharing, archiving, discovering stories, and by participating in fun events in a community with similar interests. For those that are interested, they can also get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms through official special events we create with media companies, like we just did with the TV show Ghost Whisperer.

The value proposition for media companies and publishers is to connect, engage, and entertain fans of their media properties in a new online storytelling environment.

Right now, in the early stages, no one is profiting. We are on the leading edge of the changes, and this is an evolving model. Media companies pay us to create the special events that I've described and advertisers pay to sponsor them. Like many sites on the web, users don't pay us and we don't pay them. We want to introduce fans to online storytelling, where fan fiction plays an important role and where they can share in a particular experience provided at the website.

What does FanLib offer a fanfic writer that other ad-free sites run by people from within the fanfic community do not?

FanLib offers four things:

First, we provide a venue for people who want to showcase and share their stories, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events.

Second, for people who want it, we provide the opportunity to be recognized and discovered by a wider audience and by our media partners. For example:

- FanLib has run two online storytelling events resulting in twelve winning authors being published in e-books distributed by HarperCollins.

- FanLib is currently running an event where authors have their parenting stories produced into short video episodes with major stars that are distributed on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and online. These videos have already been viewed over 2,800,000 times online, and we are only on the second episode with three more to go.

- FanLib launched the first ever collaboration between a television creator and their fans resulting in an original episode screenplay for The L Word. One of the winning authors secured literary representation as a result of the contest.

- FanLib has given away more than $50,000 in prizes to winning participants in our online storytelling events.

- FanLib has secured local and national press coverage for winning authors of FanLib events.

We have many more special fan events coming. You'll see us shortly announce and launch: a fan event with a major media company around one of the most popular fandoms, a collaborative feature film screenplay and movie, a partnership with a major talent management company to identify star writers from the FanLib.com community and create opportunities for them.

Third, we have highly responsive customer support.

Lastly, no other site - whether they have ads or not - offers all of the features listed below. Our beta site also actively solicits member feature requests and implements them.

Features:

+ Massively scalable, reliable archiving platform (backed up daily)

+ Easy submission creation and editing, including:

o WYSIWYG editing

o Import from another website

o File Upload with support for .doc, .txt, and .rtf formats

o Auto-save (i.e., your work is safe if your connection drops or computer crashes)

o "Make Private" option (your fic will be completely hidden from all but you)

o Add chapters over time

o Easily assign up to three fandoms to each submission

+ Advanced searching and filtering tools: Easy to add multiple criteria and build a filtered query with simple clicks

+ Featured Fanfics and Members: They will appear on the site homepage as well as at the top of searches

+ Syndication and Sharing Tools: Including RSS feeds, invites, and the ability to easily embed customized promotional badges on other sites

+ Customizable Member Profiles: You can build your profile with your fanfics, favorites, descriptions and feedback, deciding which elements will be public

+ Story Views:

o Paginated with bookmarking

o Single-page (printer-friendly) and ad-free

+ QuickLists (save a fic for later viewing)

+ Favorites

+ Subscriptions (see the latest from your favorite fandom or author)

+ Fandom FastFind: The ability to type a few characters from the name of a fandom, hit return and go directly to a page with only stories from that fandom

+ Tagging of fanfics

+ Customized Fanfic themes and images (with the ability to disable themes when browsing and searching)

+ Auto-Recommendations

+ Private messaging

+ Full Featured Message Boards

+ Content blocking based on age ratings (e.g., mature-rated submissions may be completely hidden)

+ Star Readers and Writers

+ Rate submissions (1-5 stars)

+ Leave multiple comments

+ Strong search engine optimizations

And, coming soon:

+ Email notifications

+ Multiple Author submissions

+ Banning individual members from leaving you comments

+ Ability to associate other media (e.g., video, more images)

+ Social networking tools

To our knowledge FanLib.com is the only site with ALL of these features. Our site is designed so that you don't have to use all these features - in fact it's also a great private archive.

Who is the target audience for the site? Did you do a market survey and identify who they wanted, and what is the demographic breakdown of that audience?

The site is for people who want to showcase and share stories, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun online events. Let's call that the "site mission". Our market research showed that the site mission has great potential in a surprisingly broad demographic range. So the site design was not principally driven by a specific demographic, it was much broader than that and was designed for those people who like to use the new online tools and services. Obviously, anyone can use the site and we recognize that it is definitely not what the traditional fan fiction community is used to. Many of the features are a result of requests specifically from our ongoing beta test.

COPYRIGHT ISSUES

What rights is your site claiming over the fiction that gets posted there? What rights remain with the authors? Can fans post the same stories on other sites, for example, or are you claiming an exclusive right to the material? Fans note that the original terms of service implied you had the rights to edit the material or republish it in other places. Is this true?

FanLib.com members do not give up any ownership rights when they use the website. Neither do they acquire any additional ownership rights to characters and settings owned by someone else. FanLib does not own any rights to a member's content; the members only authorize us to share it on our own website and allow other members to make use of it for their own noncommercial purposes. By submitting a story on FanLib.com, they do not give up any rights to post it on any other website. FanLib imposes no restrictions on what you do with your content outside our website. The old beta terms of service (TOS) did have the word "edit," which caused a lot of confusion and has been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community.

Fanfic remains in a legal gray area because there has yet to be a precedent set stating that it is or is not, legal. Many fans worry that FanLib changes the terms by which fan fiction is being produced and circulated by charging money and pushing it further into the public eye and that this increases the risk of legal action against it. A court battle could adversely impact the entire fan community by basing case law on the most commercial rather than the least commercial forms of the practice. How might you respond to this concern? What risk analysis have you done here?

We have done an extensive risk analysis and are comfortable with supporting fan fiction through our website. As some of our members have already acknowledged, the landscape is changing. Fan fiction is already on the radar of media companies and publishers. For example, Lucasfilm, which has traditionally been conservative about fan-generated content, has even added, this year for the first time, a fan fiction category to their annual "Official Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge," and NBC has invited fans to submit their theories around the TV show Heroes.

We want to be positive agents in this change by working with fans, media companies and rights holders. We are going to do whatever is feasible to assure people that posting on FanLib.com does not somehow add to their liability. Our goal is build a great venue, open to everyone, that allows people to showcase their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events. We think that by building a collaborative model, we will positively impact the fan community and will avoid needless litigation. We believe that we will be seen as an online community that goes to great lengths to protect everyone's rights in a positive, collaborative way. For those members or prospective members who are worried, I encourage them to look at our new TOS, which we feel are very fan-friendly. FanLib.com is a free service for users, and we do not charge fans to read or post fan fiction.

Statements in the original FAQ and comments from FanLib representatives that "we assume fanfiction is legal fair use" and "it's not in the copyright holder's interest to sue" have many fan authors concerned. In some cases, you are publishing stories in universes where there have been explicit statements made by creators that they do not consider fan fiction to be fair use. Have you researched the individual fandoms involved or are you treating them each the same?

First, I want to apologize for our poorly written FAQ and our old beta terms of service (TOS), all of which resulted in an understandable uproar in the fan fiction community. We have posted a new FAQ [http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=faq.html] and new terms of service (TOS) [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do]

Our policy is to not accept submissions in fandoms for which the right holders have explicitly stated they do not consider fan fiction to be fair use. Since we don't actively police the site, as stated in our TOS, we will remove any such stories that come to our attention.

Yes, we have researched the individual fandoms, and no, we are not treating them all the same.

Your previous efforts around The L Word and The Ghostwhisperer involved working directly with production companies to authorize certain kinds of fan fiction. Why have you shifted strategies with this new initiative? And can you reconcile the two models?

The premise of this question is 100% false. We have not shifted strategies. As noted above, fan fiction is already on the radar of media companies and publishers and being pushed into the public eye. We want to be a positive agent in this changing environment by collaborating with fans, media companies and rights holders. We've already experienced significant success on this front through our series of special storytelling events, and we intend to build on that success with the FanLib.com venue where all the parties can participate in fan fiction. We believe we can help reconcile the two models, but changes are coming with or without us.

How is the site planning to deal with the (inevitable) first complaint from a copyright holder?

FanLib complies with the DMCA. Please see our http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=dmca.htm> for more details.

Your TOS requires writers to "defend, indemnify and hold harmless FanLib" in the case of legal action. What efforts do you plan to take to inform writers about the risks they are taking? Many fans are concerned that your company will make all of the money here while leaving fans to take all the risks. How would you respond to this criticism?

Again, our old beta terms of service (TOS) was not a good expression of our intent. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community, including this issue. Indemnification clauses are a standard part of most website TOS. For your convenience, here is the language from our new TOS:

"You agree to indemnify and hold harmless FanLib, its officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney fees) arising from any violation of the Terms. This indemnification obligation will survive these Terms and your use of the website for 12 months."

Our new FAQ also helps address some of these issues. [http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=faq.html] This is an ongoing process, and we know there is more work to do.

So, how would I respond to this criticism? I would respond by asking if you truly think that the fans are the only ones taking the risks. To accomplish the mission I've described above and be positive agents of change for all parties involved requires enormous commitment, investment and substantial risk for us. To some extent we've tried to mitigate the risk for fans by being extremely flexible in our new TOS, but we'll never be able to make everyone happy and there are always some risks.

CONTENT ISSUES

FanLib allows adult content under an "ADULT" rating, but the Terms of Service say that the website must not be used to publish any material "obscene, vulgar, or indecent." Isn't there an inherent conflict there? What happens when a parent finds his-or-her child reading an ADULT-rated Harry Potter fic?

These words, which were included in our old beta TOS and caused understandable confusion, have now been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects the input of the fan fiction community, including this issue. Naturally, we will do whatever we must to abide by law.

First of all we know that in the past J.K. Rowling has expressed her disapproval for certain kinds of adult Harry Potter fan fiction. We don't presume to know her boundaries about what may be acceptable or unacceptable in a Harry Potter fic, but if she notifies us we will take down the story. As it relates to the situation where a parent finds his-or-her child reading ADULT-rated Harry Potter fic, I can't speak for the parent. What we've done on the site is completely hide all adult content so that the user must actively seek it out by changing filter settings with explicit warnings. This far exceeds what a lot of other sites do, and our process will continue to evolve.

In your marketing brochure --

http://www.my2centences.com/my2c_new/FanLib_info.pdf -- you assure the copyright holders that FanLib is "managed and moderated to the max," and that "as with a coloring book, all players must "stay within the lines." Can you explain what you mean by that statement? One of the reasons so many fans write fanfic is so that they can deliberately step out of the "lines" and do their own creative thing without any interference from the copyright holders.

I'd like to clear up some confusion around the FanLib brochure you're quoting from. First, it was produced three years ago - in 2004. Second, as a company, we have two distinct parts:

1. The beta site, FanLib.com (launched in March 2007); and

2. Official online storytelling events. In this second part, which we actually started years ago, we work with other companies and sponsors to create special online fan events. Each event is governed by its own clear rules and terms of service that are separate from those for the FanLib.com beta site referred to above. This is necessary because contests, sweepstakes, prizes etc. need their own rules and regulations. The brochure that people are referring to was written for potential companies and sponsors and relates only to these special events and not the FanLib.com beta site. At the time we published the brochure, our URL linked to a site that essentially described the events for companies and sponsors in more detail. These special events are managed and moderated and "missions" are provided so that players "stay within the lines." This brochure has NOTHING to do with fan fiction submitted on the FanLib.com site, where we provide a venue for anyone to be as creative as they want as long as they don't violate our policies. We totally understand that general fan fiction doesn't fit in the process described in the brochure, which is ONLY for certain special events we create.

I hope that addresses the confusion.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS ISSUES

Fans note that someone named "Naomi" was used to send out the original invitation letters to fan writers, but fans have been unable to find out who this person is. Is it a real person or a sock puppet? Why was a female name used for this purpose, when the board of directors for the company seems to be all male? Why has the initial advertising with its play on the Charles Atlas bodybuilding campaign adopted such a masculine metaphor for what has been and remains an overwhelmingly feminine cultural practice?

I acknowledge the way we sent out certain invitations was flawed. Our objective was to invite fan fiction authors to participate in our beta test and, if they chose to, join our beta team testing the site and providing feedback. As I hope you can appreciate, I am not going to publicly discuss personal details about our employees. We do not use sock puppets, no gender criteria were taken into account during the process and nobody at FanLib is pretending to be of a different gender.

The advertisement you mentioned was one of four that we tested during the beta, and we ran it on a site targeting a younger audience where it performed very well. We also put the ad in a general rotation on our beta site as a "house ad." In my considerable experience in online advertising unless you do some profile related targeting you're going to expose an ad to people for whom it isn't suitable. Because this ad was in a general rotation unfortunately this is what happened. We pulled the ad in order to be sensitive to some of the complaints. We are acutely aware that fandom is predominantly female, just like the users of the FanLib.com beta site, who seem to like its design and features.

Many fans feel that the company has done a poor job so far in community relations. What steps are you taking to turn this around? Are you rewriting the terms of service and FAQ based on the feedback you've received? Are you planning to develop an advisory board composed of members of the fanwriting community?

I'll be the first to admit we've done an awful job with community relations. I think the good news for us is that we have lots of feedback from the beta site and community, far more than we expected. As a result we have rewritten our terms of service and FAQ. We've taken some extraordinary steps to make our policies more fan-friendly and we are currently putting together final plans for a fan advisory board, which will be published on our beta site shortly.

What, if anything, do you think you can do to enhance the credability and responsiveness of FanLib to the people who have invested their energy into fan fiction in some cases for several decades?

First, I want to apologize for my own idiotic post across multiple blogs and for my offer to open a dialogue that I was unable to follow through on due to overwhelming community response. As a first step, based on the feedback from our current beta test, we have rewritten our terms of service and FAQ, revised some of our policies, and are creating a fan advisory board. We are in this for the long term to make FanLib.com a venue where anyone who wants to, can showcase and share their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun storytelling events,

This last question is a bit awkward for both of us but it has come up a number of times and so I feel I need to ask it: Isn't it somewhat symptiomatic of FanLib's problems that the spokespeople are more willing to talk to a man with credentials rather than some of the female fan writers who have approached you?

I do think your question is a bit unfair, but I'll answer anyway. I am here because you hold dual citizenship in fandom and academia, you maintain credibility and integrity in both worlds, and you told me I you would get a fair hearing and you would share the unedited results of our interview in its entirety with those interested in the matter. Meanwhile, we've been listening to the many comments we've received from the community and taking action. For proof check out our new TOS and FAQ on our website.

We intend to continue the conversation with the fan fiction community through our developing fan advisory board and, as time permits, by responding to other inquiries, comments and requests that we receive from interested individuals - obviously, regardless of gender.

Thanks again for your willingness to be interviewed.

Thank you for the opportunity.

What MIT Students are Learning about Communicating Science to the Public

One of the truly remarkable things about teaching at MIT are how many of our best students are crossing over from the sciences or engineering programs to take classes in media studies. They hope to use what they learn in our courses to improve their capacity to communicate scientific ideas with the general public. Here are two examples:

For the past few years, the Comparative Media Studies Program has been partnering with Terrascope, a freshman year program run by faculty from Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Terrascope students spend the year focusing on one of the world's leading environmental problems, pooling together research, talking to experts, and taking a trip to the site to see for themselves the nature of the problem. Historically, they have learned to translate their findings not only into research papers but also into museum exhibits designed to communicate with the general public. A few years ago, Ari Epstein, a faculty member in the program, approached me to see if our students might be able to help them teach the Terrascope participants how to use radio as a medium to convey their ideas to an even larger public. This year, CMS Masters student Steve Schultze served as a teaching assistant in the class. This year's focus was on how New Orleans should deal with the consequences of Katrina. The result: "Nerds in New Orleans."

The other was a paper I received from one of the undergraduate students in my Media Systems and Texts class which manages to combine his passion for climate issues with some of the things we've been learning this term about YouTube and participatory culture. The issues are ones which I have addressed here before -- the controversy which emerged as Al Gore's Penguin Army was revealed to be astroturf, but the student connects this debate to the larger context of media coverage of global warming issues in a way only a MIT science geek could.

Analyzing the Role of Media in the Climate Change Debate Through the YouTube Video, "Al Gore's Penguin Army"

by Garrett Marino

Climate change, or long-term changes in average weather conditions, signifies an important issue impacting the contemporary media landscape. The two-minute YouTube video criticizing Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army, now viewed over 500,000 times, offers a compelling example to analyze the role of media in the climate change debate. A framework of questions can be asked around this video, with the intent of progressively working outward to link media with broader cultural trends on climate change: What can be learned from this video? How does it critique An Inconvenient Truth? What were the motives and goals of the video's producer(s)? Why use YouTube to respond to the movie? How do the contents of the YouTube video fall within broader efforts to discredit climate change science? The information presented in An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore's Penguin Army that individuals digest and the opinions developed through related media will arguably impact policy during the coming decades.

Released on May 24, 2006, the same release date for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army serves largely to discredit Al Gore and his movie. In the video, Al Gore is dressed in an outfit reminiscent of Batman's enemy Penguin, who could be described as a gentleman of crime. The crime being committed by Al Gore, according to the video, is his promotion of climate change science and dictating what people should do to combat this problem. The video opens with penguins assembling into an ice cave to listen to Gore's global warming slide show. On the wall of the ice cave, a sign depicts a part human, bear, and pig figure with a slash through it titled "Manbearpig." The poster references a South Park episode where Gore speaks at South Park Elementary about the Manbearpig, a monster who roams the Earth. Gore begins his talk and quickly the penguins lose interest at the illegible charts and fall asleep. Gore continues his discussion, apparently oblivious to his audience's indifference, and shows outrageous material, such as blaming the skinniness of Lindsey Lohan on global warming. At the end of the video, Gore says that "you must take action to stop global warming!," and immediately a list of "things you can do to stop global warming" appears, including "stop exhaling," "become vegetarian," "walk everywhere (no matter the distance)," and "take cold showers."

In addition to barraging the viewer with material despicable for a critique of a serious climate change movie, Al Gore's Penguin Army has no roots in reality throughout. The opening quote in the video supposedly quoting Newsweek editor Eleanor Clift as saying, "If you liked March of the Penguins, you'll love An Inconvenient Truth," was fabricated, although she did interview Gore a month before the film's release on April 28, 2006, the same date given in the video's quote (Clift).

Another misrepresentation in the video was the penguins themselves. They were all created to resemble Tux, a Linux mascot that does not accurately portray any known species of penguin. Even seemingly credible weather facts in Al Gore's slide show were also grossly exaggerated or untrue, such as "Coldest Day in NYC (January 2005)" and "Record rain in New England (May 2006)." In no day during January 2005 did the temperature at New York City's Central Park (the official site for National Weather Service observations since the 1800's) fall below 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while the all-time record low for NYC was minus 20 degrees set in February 1934. In May 2006, some areas such as Newburyport, Massachusetts did receive all-time May monthly rainfall records, but this record is far-surpassed by rains that occurred in 1936, 1938, and 1955.

Now that the video has been discredited, there needs to be an analysis of the motives and goals of the producer(s) of Al Gore's Penguin Army. The video's YouTube page shows the poster as a member by the name of "Toutsmith," who identifies himself as a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills. An email exchange between Toutsmith and the Wall Street Journal enabled the paper to originate the email to a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm whose clientele include Exxon Mobile Corp. When contacted by the Journal, DCI Group refused to say whether or not they had a role in the release of the anti-Gore video: "DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients' behalf," said Matt Triaca, DCI head of media relations. Despite their denial, DCI has a history of raising doubts about the science of global warming, placing skeptical scientists on talk-radio shows and paying them to write editorials. DCI client Exxon Mobile announced that they did not participate in the creation of the video and did not help release it, according to the Journal article.

Despite the denial of both DCI and Exxon Mobile, the motives behind the producer(s) of the video are clear: cast suspicion on climate change science and confuse the public, prevent people from seeing the movie, and make those who dislike Gore hate him even more. Digging back to the original response to the video, most people who replied believed climate change is real and people are largely responsible for it. There were a few, however, that took the opposite stance, as YouTube member Bear182 writes: "People get real...global warming has been around for millions of years...do your own research . . . Real scientific research is out there for anyone to find. This is all part of a natural cycle. Al Bore is a dummy duh." To quote Bear182 exactly, all typos remain, notably Gore's last name spelled as Bore. Bear182's remark represents the fundamental leap not yet taken by most climate change skeptics: they believe that global warming is occurring, and has occurred in the past, but are not yet willing to accept that humans cause it.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gores presents a trend known as the Keeling curve, a fact that should dispel the lingering myth that the climate change occurring now is part of some natural cycle. The Keeling curve, named after Dr. Charles David Keeling, depicts the nearly constant rise in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past fifty years. Incorporating these direct atmospheric measurements with various proxy records available from ice cores, scientists can recreate carbon dioxide concentrations over the previous tens of millions of years. The record indicates that in no point during the foreseeable past have carbon dioxide concentrations risen at such a fast rate, and if current trends were to continue, by the year 2100 carbon dioxide will exist in the atmosphere at levels unseen over the past 30 million years.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes this point vividly, by projecting the Keeling curve along with about the past million years of carbon dioxide concentration data on a large screen. He proceeds to raise himself on an automated escalator to near the top of the screen. He then projects the future century of predicted rises in carbon dioxide, and the million-year trend is startling: it appears as a nearly constant flat line with an upward spike at the end twenty feet tall.

Despite this overwhelming trend with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, videos like "Al Gore's Penguin Army" still surface and represent a critic that will not go away easily. An interesting difference between Al Gore's Penguin Army and previous anti-climate change propaganda was its release through YouTube. According to the YouTube web site, its founding mission was to become the place to watch and share videos on the web, enabling its users to become the broadcasters of the future. YouTube is less than two years old, but the site has already become a place to promote songs and upcoming movies to its nearly twenty million unique daily visitors. The Gore penguin movie also shows that YouTube and online video in general have become a large political experiment designed to change and confuse public opinion and alter the public's perception of the world.

Politics has migrated onto YouTube for several reasons. YouTube does not fully contextualize the circulated material on its site; the creator indicates the content of his or her video(s) through keywords and generic categories such as 'entertainment' and 'sports'. Also, the open-ended aspect of YouTube enables anyone to post content and remain anonymous. With amateur-looking animation able to capture people's interest without producers resorting to professional methods, astroturfing becomes even more widespread, as apparently the case with Al Gore's Penguin Army. Astroturfing is a term used to describe a disguise of a client's agenda as independent public reaction by one or a group of individuals. In this case, a large company can mask its power and use a technology associated with less powerful groups.

With the wide selection of material now uploaded and available through YouTube, it would be hard to come across a video like Al Gore's Penguin Army.

To further support the notion that the anti-Gore video was a product of astroturfing, from May to early August of 2006, when Google searchers typed "Al Gore" or "Global Warming," the first sponsored link on the side directed users to the video. The ads were removed only a few days after the Wall Street Journal contacted DCI Group in August 2006. Diana Adair, a Google spokeswoman, said to the Journal that they do not allow advertising text that "advocates against any individual, group or organization", and will not release the identity of any advertisers (Regalado). However, the Google policy does not apply to sites associated with ad links, the loophole that enabled the link to exist.

On the other side of the climate change debate, Al Gore's team has also employed the Internet. Paramount Classics, the distributor of An Inconvenient Truth, along with Gore's consent, created its own YouTube video titled, Al Gore's Terrifying Message, which depicts Al Gore talking to the robot from the cartoon show Futurama about global warming. This video has been even more popular than Al Gore's Penguin Army, registering 1.6 million views as of April 24, 2007 compared with Penguin's half million, an indicator that the pro-climate change camp is winning the media "war" surrounding this issue.

How do the contents of Al Gore's Penguin Army fall within the broader efforts throughout media to discredit global warming? Climate change skeptics typically cite and exaggerate unanswered questions in the science, and produce long lists of scientists who dispute global warming, without stating that the list only contains a few percent of the scientific community. Given, scientific consensus has not always proved to be accurate, e.g. with the Biblical version of Earth's history taken as fact before Darwin, or continental drift theory laughed at before the 1960's. However, climate change science is based on harder evidence than the supposed evidence in the past for a six thousand-year-old Earth or stationary plates on Earth. Science has progressed immensely since those periods, although given it is not perfect. Agreed, there are open issues in climate science, but with the climate changing, ignoring the threat until every question is settled is like refusing to run from an incoming tsunami along the east coast of the United States simply because no tsunami has hit that region in the past.

Television is another medium that at times also appears to be siding with the anti-climate change camp, discrediting global warming. For example, in December 2004, delegates gathered in Argentina to discuss ongoing problems with the Kyoto Treaty. The media, and particularly television, during this period only briefly mentioned this meeting, but jumped on covering Michael Crichton's then-new novel that dismissed global warming as a scheme cooked up by scientists looking for funding. A Crichton interview by John Stossel on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 began with, "He's concluded [that global warming] is just another media-hyped foolish scare. And many scientists agree with him" (Linden 228).

Stossel's irresponsible reporting was exacerbated by an article that appeared the same week in Science, which reported that not one scientific paper published on climate change since 1993 challenged the issue that people are changing the climate. So where are these scientists that agree with Crichton? They exist in small numbers, but keep their ideas out of publication.

Entire corporations can also employ various media outlets to discredit global warming science. They thrive on public fear of the government playing a larger role in their lives during a future era of climate consciousness. Al Gore makes a compelling statement in his interview with Eleanor Clift of Newsweek:

The behavior of Exxon Mobil is disgraceful. They finance in whole or in part forty organizations that put out disinformation on global warming designed to confuse the American people. There has emerged in the last couple of decades a lobbying strategy that is based on trying to control perceptions. In some sense it's not new, but it's new in the sophistication and the amount of resources they devote to it. It's not new in the sense it's the same thing the tobacco industry did after the surgeon general's report of 1964, and that is a major part of the reason why the Bush administration doesn't do anything. The president put their chief guy in charge of environmental policy in the White House.

During the first years of the Bush administration, innumerable investigations mostly analyzed if people were to blame for climate change. Now that scientific consensus has converged, even the President has admitted that we are changing the climate. The next phase of the debate needs to focus exclusively on policy and its social, economic, and political impacts. The mainstream media needs to take a reality pill and direct their efforts to covering and promoting policy changes and not an unfounded debate.

The YouTube video Al Gore's Penguin Army served as a case study that provided the focus of this paper: the role of media in the climate change debate. Despite the negative role that media has contributed to confuse the public on the climate change issue, the messages of Al Gore and climate change scientists appear to be gradually gaining public awareness and acceptance. The country is on a tipping point beyond which, with the help of modern media, the problem will be faced seriously and politicians from both parties will begin offering solutions to combat climate change.

Bibliography

Burt, Christopher C. Extreme Weather: A Guide & Record Book. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Fleming, James R. Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998.

Linden, Eugene. The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Meyer, William B. Americans and Their Weather. New York: Oxford, 2000.

Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso, 1991..

From an early age, Garrett had a fascination with the weather and in understanding the

science behind weather and climate issues. While in high school, Garrett performed

research in fluid dynamics that earned him recognition, including a semifinalist in the

prestigious Intel Science Talent Search. After graduating from High Technology High

School in New Jersey in 2004, he entered MIT and immediately joined the Weather

Forecasting Team. Garrett recently created the Weather and Climate Club at MIT which

provides an opportunity for MIT students with interests in day-to-day weather and in

long-term climate issues to deepen their interest and to enrich their MIT educational

experience. Garrett is expected to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Earth,

Atmospheric, and Planetary Science in June 2008. He then hopes to stay at MIT for

graduate work.

Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of FanLib

You say "User-Generated Content." We say "Fan Culture."

Let's call the whole thing off!

The differences between the ways corporations and fans understand the value of grassroots creativity has never been clearer than the battle lines which have been drawn this weekend over a new venture called FanLib.

FanLib -- "Where the Stories Continue"

I first learned about FanLib's latest plans about a week ago when Convergence Culture Consortium analyst Ivan Askwith reported on their efforts in our blog:

FanLib.com launched as hub for "fan fiction" writers. The idea is to provide a home for creators of one of the first "user generated" genres, fan stories written using popular movie and TV characters and storylines. Members can upload stories, embed promos and build communities around their favorite shows. FanLib, founded by Titanic producer Jon Landau, Jon Moonves and former Yahoo CMO Anil Singh, is also currently sponsoring the Ghost Whisperer Fan Finale Challenge on the site asking fans to write their own conclusion to the show's two-part finale.

Ivan concluded his post with some concerns about whether fans were going to eagerly embrace such a project:

Since fan fiction seems to be one of the last traditional forms of fan creativity that hasn't been widely coopted and encouraged (within specific, copyright-friendly parameters) by the entertainment industry...My offhand guess would be that fan fiction, unlike mashup videos, tribute songs, and so on, are harder to 'control', and leave a lot more room for individual fans to take characters, or narratives, in directions that producers and executives aren't comfortable with.

FanLib started promisingly enough, courting the producers of programs like The L Word and The Ghost Whisperer, and getting them to run official fan fiction contests. Fans would be able to write in these universes, safe in the knowledge that they would not receive Cease and Desist letters. They even worked with a book publisher to try to put together an anthology of amateur romance fiction.

But, FanLib didn't emerge bottom-up from the fan culture itself. It wasn't run by people who knew the world of fan fiction from the inside out. It was a business, pure and simple, run by a board of directors which was entirely composed of men. This last point is especially relevant when you consider that the overwhelming percentage of people who write fan fiction are women -- even if there has been some increase of male writers as fandom has gone on line. To give you a sense of scale, there were more than 700 people who attended the Harry Potter fan convention I wrote about yesterday -- most of them readers, many of them writers of fanfic set in J.K. Rowling's world. By my count, there weren't more than 20 men in the group. That's about 18 more men than would have been there if this was a fan fiction oriented convention 16 years ago when I wrote Textual Poachers! To suggest how out of touch with this community they were, their original ads featured the transformation of fandom from a 90 pound weakling to a more robust and muscular form, leaving many women to wonder if this implied a move towards a more masculine conception of the practice. The company later did produce a female spokesperson who expressed confusion about why gender was an issue here in the first place.

Historical Background

Keep in mind there's a history here of previous attempts by companies -- some affiliated with the production companies, some not -- to create a commercial space for the promotion of fan culture. Most of them have ended badly for the fans.

Consider, for example, this story in Salon in 2000 which describes a company called Fandom.com ("by fans, for fans") which asserted a claim to have trademarked the word, "fandom," and then tried to use its corporate control of the concept to try to shut down any amateurs who wanted to share their public via the web. Salon reported on a cease and desist letter that Fandom.com had sent out to a fan named Carol Burrell. As Salon reported at the time:

Fandom.com serves as an umbrella site for numerous "fandomains" -- formerly independent Web sites dedicated to popular, merchandise-friendly topics such as Star Wars, The X-Files and Lord of the Rings that now run under the Fandom.com banner. Each site contains the same structure and design, and there's a large copyright disclaimer placed at the bottom of every page....

The initial premise of Fandom.com was straightforward: to protect individual fan site owners from studio censorship (and sell a lot of nifty merchandise and advertising in the process) ....Fandom.com seemed to make sense -- by joining together the little guys, it would create an institution that could defend itself from the heavy hitters. But Fandom.com's letter to Burrell appeared to indicate something entirely different. Fandom.com was accusing Burrell of trademark violation -- a fact that was ironic on at least two levels. First: Fandom.com may not even own a trademark for the word "fandom." Second: A company whose individual sites flourished by pushing copyright laws to the legal limit was now turning around and itself playing the role of intellectual property bully.

Which leads to the question currently raging in the fan community: Who will protect the fans from Fandom?

Or consider another such effort which Lucasfilm created to "protect" Star Wars fans, one which was described in more detail in Convergence Culture:

In 2000, Lucasfilm offered Star Wars fans free Web space and unique content for their sites, but only under the condition that whatever they created would become the studio's intellectual property. As the official notice launching this new "Homestead," explained, "To encourage the on-going excitement, creativity, and interaction of our dedicated fans in the online Star Wars community, Lucas Online is pleased to offer for the first time an official home for fans to celebrate their love of Star Wars on the World Wide Web." Historically, fan fiction had proven to be a point of entry into commercial publication for at least some amateurs, who were able to sell their novels to the professional book series centering around the various franchises. If Lucasfilm, Ltd. claimed to own such rights, they could publish them without compensation and they could also remove them without permission or warning.

Elizabeth Durack was one of the more outspoken leaders of an campaign urging her fellow Star Wars fans not to participate in these new arrangements: "That's the genius of Lucasfilm's offering fans web space -- it lets them both look amazingly generous and be even more controlling than before....Lucasfilm doesn't hate fans, and they don't hate fan websites. They can indeed see how they benefit from the free publicity they represent -- and who doesn't like being adored? This move underscores that as much as anything. But they're also scared, and that makes them hurt the people who love them."

As far as long-time fans were concerned, the announcement that FanLib was going to create a commercial portal to support the publication of fan fiction was read as more of the same. Under the circumstances, there was going to be healthy skepticism within the fan writing community no matter how the company approached them, but so far, the company has approached the fans in all of the wrong ways.

What Went Wrong

There's an excellent summary of the issues surrounding this venture written by a fan. I don't want to repeat all of the details here. But here's how Icarussancalian summarizes the company's initial pitch to the fan community:

The founders of FanLib.com saw no reason they couldn't cash in on the internet traffic. Formerly from Google, Chris Williams, the CEO and co-founder of FanLib, has an impressive resume. FanLib has corporate backing and $3 million of venture capital invested into the site.

"My colleagues and I want it to be the ultimate place for talented writers like you," Naomi of FanLib wrote to fan fiction writers. "In case you're wondering, FanLib's not new to fan fiction. Since 2001, they've been producing really cool web events with people like CBS, Showtime and HarperCollins to bring fan creativity into the big leagues."

FanLib did their homework. "We scouted for serious fan fiction authors on various sites and invited only a few hundred based on their writing and impact in the community," co-founder David Williams says, and fans agree that their search focused on popular writers. What's a "serious" fan fiction writer? A serious fan fiction writer could have anywhere from 30 to 100 stories, with upwards of 700 regular readers subscribed to their blogs or LiveJournal accounts. Currently, fan fiction writers do their own marketing through networking with other fans, posting in blogs, fan-run archives, and various fan fiction communities targeted to their readers.

Unfortunately, FanLib did little more than ask the writers to hand over the product.

FanLib's creators immediately ran into trouble with fans critical of FanLib's plans to turn profits on their freely provided fan fiction with no compensation to the authors, beyond t-shirts and prizes. Fan fiction writers were also unhappy at a clause where FanLib owned the rights to any fiction they posted...

This post also notes that FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel for all legal actions that might be taken against them by any production companies that felt that fan fiction was in violation of their intellectual property rights. Fans were going to take all of the risks; the company was going to make all of the profits, all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives. (Taken at face value, the company was trying to "cherry pick" the top writers from the amateur realm. At worst, they were imposing their own aesthetic judgments on the community without any real regard for existing norms and hierarchies.)

To add insult to injury, the company surrounded itself with self congratulatory rhetoric about taking fan fiction into the "major leagues," which showed little grasp of why fans might prefer to operate in the more liberated zone of what Catherine Tossenberger, an aca-fan who spoke at Phoenix Rising this weekend, calls the "unpublishable." Or the producers talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream." This is a debate which has long surrounded fan fiction. Some seek to legitimize it by arguing that it is a stepping stone or training ground for professional writers as if commercialization of creative expression was the highest possible step an author could take. Others -- myself among them -- have argued that fan fiction should be valued within the terms of the community which produces and reads it, that a fan writer who only writes for other fans may still be making a rich contribution to our culture which demands our respect.

FanLib had done its homework by the standards of the VC world: they had identified a potential market; they had developed a business plan; they had even identified potential contributors to the site; they had developed a board of directors. They simply hadn't really listen to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction.

Fan Fury

Well, if they hadn't listened to fans before, they were starting to hear from them by this past weekend. Fans were rallying where-ever fans gathered, constructing arguments, deconstructing the company's FAQ, proposing alternative models for how this might be done right, writing letters to the managers, and trying to hold them accountable for their actions. You can get some sense of the intensity of their arguments by checking out some of the many posts found at Metafandom, a site where fans gather to discuss the politics and poetics of fan culture or as they would put it, just "wank."

As one reads these fan voices, one hears some of their deep ambivalence about the ways that the corporate embrace of "user-generated content" may be endangering the grassroots culture they have created for themselves. Here, for example, is almostnever:

This is the reason I have been involved recently in arguments about whether our community should accept the monetization of fan fiction. Because I think it's coming whether we accept it or not, and I'd rather it was fan-creators getting the benefit of the $$$, not some cutthroat entrepreneur who doesn't care about our community except as a market niche.

I don't think FanLib is the one that's going to change things, but I do see change coming. There's a lot of happytalk in the entertainment industry about the money to be made by bringing your audience in under your corporate wing, the better to do market research, sell to them, and make $$ from their conversations about your product.

But if, say, Paramount brings Star Trek fan fiction in-house, it wouldn't be smart for them to allow competition from fan-run archives and sites. If Star Trek fans' only choice was to post to a site like FanLib or get a C&D, then things could get lonely for Trek fans, if only from people dropping out of fandom or going underground to avoid the hassles.

These comments suggest two debates which are currently brewing in fandom:

1. the issue of whether amateur creators should be compensated for the work they contribute to for-profit sites like YouTube. This is an issue I've raised here before and won't discuss in depth now.

2. the concern that as companies construct a zone of tolerance over certain forms of fan activities, they will use them to police more aggressively those fan activities that they find offensive or potentially damaging to their brand. Fans have long asserted their rights to construct and share fantasies that may not be consistent with the ideological norms of media companies. In an argument which parallels debates in the queer community, they argue that as long as some of their fantasies are being policed, none of them have the freedom of expression which drew them into fan culture in the first place.

Angiepen, another fan, walked through a detailed critique of the site's terms of service, showing both the ways that they over-reached in asserting their rights to control and edit what fans produced and how they might threaten the uneasy zone of tolerance which surrounds fan fiction as far as at least some of the Powers That Be (the media companies and their executives) are concerned.

Almost everyone I meet in the media industry imagines we are moving towards a more participatory culture but the dispute surrounds the terms of participation. More and more media producers are adopting what I call the "collaborationist" model -- embracing fan creativity as a way of enhancing engagement with their properties. Others have adopted a stance of benign neglect -- willing to turn a blind eye to the proliferation of fan fiction online as long as people aren't making money from it.

As fans note, however, FanLib's efforts to commercialize fan fiction represented the worst case scenario: a highly publicized, for profit venture which left fan fiction writers even more exposed than they have before. Fans have long noted that there is no case law to determine what if any fan fiction constitutes fair use. They realize, however, that the "wrong case" could easily bring about the wrong kind of legal judgement on this entire space. Some, like AngiePen, went even further:

You know, this is probably just me being paranoid here but since the TOS prohibits any posting of material which violates someone else's copyright, they could in theory have set up this site to draw in as many fanfic writers as possible with the intention of turning around and smacking all of them for copyright violation, whether that means direct prosecution of people who are writing fics based on properties whose owners are represented on the FanLib board, or sending notification with names and e-mails and copies of stories to the copyright holders who are not associated with the site. I'm just saying.

How Not to Handle a Controversy

And so the debate continues. As icarusancalion notes in her summary, the company only made things worse for itself by responding to the criticism in ways which fans considered haphazard and patronizing and then trying to erase previous posts once they came under fire. For example, when fans systematically critiqued the FAQ for the site, the FAQ disappeared from public view, one hopes so that it could be reconsidered and rewritten but potentially to simply hide the history of the company's less than friendly interactions with fans. She quotes FanLib executive Chris William's post to the community as an example:

"hey everyone, I'm Chris one of the founders of FanLib. it's really late and i have been working on the site all day. I'm exhausted but i just realized what was going on here and all of the commentsts are making me sick. we're a small company with 10 emplyees who work 16 hours a day to try and make a great website. we're real people! with feelings and everything! we have been working on this and dreaming about it for a long time and you are just here to shit on it without giving us a chance. i care deeply about what you think but this is crazy. we're good people here and you make us sound like we're an evil corporation or the govt. sending your kids to war or something. we really are all about celebrating fan fiction and fan fiction readers and writers. im sorry this is so short and please excuse the fact that i am cutting and pasting this across a bunch of ljs but i gotta get some sleep."

Those of you in the media business will understand the frustration expressed in this post but it also can come across as sounding like the student who wants a good grade because they worked really hard on the assignment and not because of the results. Williams ignores the fact that a significant number of the fans involved in this dispute had worked for a decade or more, some for many decades, to generate a community around fan fiction and that's precisely why they didn't want outsiders moving in and trying to turn it into a revenue stream for their companies.

Alternative Models

As the conversation continued, fans began to come up with their own proposals for ways that they could achieve the value of this venture -- a central hub for fan fiction -- while keeping the cultural production under the control of the fan community itself. Here's part of one such proposal for "an archive of our own" by astolat which is starting to get some real traction among the fans I've spoken with the past few days:

We need a central archive of our own, something like animemusicvideos.org. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people's IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it.

I think the necessary features would include:

* run BY fanfic readers FOR fanfic readers

* with no ads and solely donation-supported

* with a simple and highly searchable interface and browsable quicksearch pages

* allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult -- with a registration process for reading adult-rated stories where once you register, you don't have to keep clicking through warnings every time you want to read

* allowing the poster to control her stories (ie, upload, delete, edit, tagging)

* allowing users to leave comments with the poster able to delete and ban particular users/IPs but not edit comment content (ie, lj style)

* code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories

* giving explicit credit to the original creators while clearly disclaiming any official status

It's not hard to see the contrast between what these fans want and what the company is offering them. Given the speed with which this debate has grown and the skills held collectively within the fan community, I wouldn't be surprised to see such a site emerge from this fray.

What's Wrong with the "User-Generated Content" Model?

I have focused here on the fan's side of the story. It is worth keeping in mind that there may be, almost certainly is, a considerable gap between the ways that FanLib's directors see their venture and the ways that it is being perceived within the fan community. If FanLib is smart, they will take seriously these complaints which come from people who are at the center of the existing fan communities and will be trying to rework their plans to respond to this feedback. It is not clear to me that they can avoid some fundamental problems in the ways that their business plan intersects with the grassroots communities which they claim they want to serve and which some fans fear they want to exploit.

I hope that other groups entering the space of what the industry likes to call "user-generated content" study this story closely and learn from FanLib's mistakes and missteps. Perception matters. Community relations are make or break. You can't serve a community if you don't understand their existing practices and their long-standing traditions.

Let's start with the concept of "user-generated content." The industry tends to see these users in isolation -- as individuals who want to express themselves, rather than as part of pre-existing communities with their own traditions of participatory culture. FanLib's rhetoric seems to be caught between these two conceptions of the "user," talking about fan traditions but dealing with fans as isolated individuals and not respecting the community as a whole.

Second, the industry tends to think of "content" as something which can be commodified and thus isolated from the social relations which surrounds its production and circulation. Yet, fan culture stresses the ways that this material emerges from a social network of fans who have their own aesthetics, politics, and genre expectations. And for many fans, the noncommercial nature of fan culture is one of its most important characteristics. These stories are a labor of love; they operate in a gift economy and are given freely to other fans who share their passion for these characters. Being free of the commercial constraints that surround the source texts, they gain new freedom to explore themes or experiment with structures and styles that could not be part of the "mainstream" versions of these worlds.

Of course, there are already a large number of fans who are deciding to participate in the FanLib site, for whom its services do seem to represent what the corporate world would call "added value," and we probably need to develop a better understanding of why they are making that choice. I don't mean my discussion here to suggest that fandoms speak with one voice on this or any other matter. I only want to suggest that FanLib is bucking long-standing convictions within the fan community when it seeks to move fan fiction into the commercial realm.

A Public Invitation

That said, I would welcome response from the executives at FanLib. I would love to conduct an interview with them on this site in which they actually responded to the fan criticisms of their ventures. So, Chris Williams, if you or anyone else at FanLib is reading this, get in touch.

Update: Chris Williams has accepted my invitation to be interviewed in the blog. We are still working out the details. In the meantime, I wanted to solicit from my readers questions you would like to see addressed in such an exchange. My goal is to allow him to tell his side of the story and to speak to the concerns which fans have raised. Either send me your questions via the comments section here or via e-mail at henry3@mit.edu. Thanks. As always, my spam filter can be a little wonky so if you are getting error messages, send your questions directly to me.

When Fan Boys and Fan Girls Meet...

There's an old joke that by the time a phenomenon gets the attention of one of the major national news magazines, it is probably already over. A few weeks ago, Time ran a story on the rising influence of "fan boy culture" and then this week, Entertainment Weekly used this same angle to talk about the success of the new Spider-Man movie. I've been so busy trying to wrap up the term that I haven't had a chance to comment before now. Time's article, in particular, was explicit about the gender-dimensions of its claims, titling the article, "Boys Who Like Toys," and opening with the following description:

He's one of the most powerful taste-makers in Hollywood, the guy behind the record-breaking success of 300, the hit status of NBC's Heroes and the reign of the Xbox 360 gaming console. He enjoys invitations to the Skywalker Ranch and hangs out with guys like Nicolas Cage and Quentin Tarantino at conventions. He's zealously loyal, notoriously finicky and often aggressive with those who dare to disagree with him.

Oh, and occasionally he likes to dress up as Spider-Man.

He is the fanboy, the typically geeky 16-to-34-year-old male (though there are some fangirls) whose slavish devotion to a pop-culture subject, like a comic-book character or a video game, drives him to blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos, go to comic-book conventions and, once in a while, see a movie on the subject of his obsession. And he's having his way with Hollywood.

Nope, there's no accident that all of the pronouns here are masculine. In part, this is because the article is focused on the San Diego Comic-Con, superhero comics, and their media spinoffs, not to mention a number of high profile fanboys -- Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Kevin Smith, and the like -- who are exerting power and influence within the Hollywood establishment. The article can't avoid the usually cliches -- coming back in the end to the idea that "fanboys" are "outsiders" who may not adequately predict box office revenues except in the case of those films which are already targeted at niche or cult audiences. The other governing myth here is that fans are fickle and unpredictable; that one can go crazy trying to understand their tastes or listening to their criticism.

Entertainment Weekly hits that second point especially hard. (Sorry but that article is only accessible to subscribers to the magazine and I bought my copy on the newstand, so no links.) EW writes about Spider-Man III:

The opening also proves the studio can successfully premiere a movie that was scrutinized and dissected on the Internet throughout its entire production, probably more so than any other film in history. Such is the new reality for filmmakers behind high-profile comic-book adaptations and blockbuster sequels, who increasing depend on the Net as a vital marketing tool -- but must also contend with fans who rabidly pick apart, analyze, and leak early peeks at upcoming projects online. "I'm at a loss to know how to deal with that," says Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi, "But it's the world we live in. I just have to adapt."

The article describes how studios have made their peace with the spoiling community, actively courting influential fans as grassroots intermediaries the way they once courted powerful gossip columnists in the Golden Age of Hollywood -- because they can help you if they like you and destroy you if they don't. EW calls it "befriending the enemy," a phrase which preserves the separation between consumers and producers, even as it describes the process by which that distinction is starting to break down.

It's interesting, though, that EW describes fan culture entirely in terms of the consumption and circulation of information about commercially produced works and has nothing to say about the things that fans themselves create through their appropriation of the raw materials that commercial culture provides them. At least Time wrote about fans who "blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos."

This media attention on "fan boy" culture comes at a moment of increasing debate within the aca-fan community about the gender dimensions of fan research. I wrote briefly about this topic a while back in response to some comments which got made at the Flow conference about the segregation of fan boy and fan girl scholars who are writing on similar topics but through different language, around different topics, and more often than not, on different panels. And I followed up a few days later with a second post on this topic. The discussion of topics such as the complexity of cult media narratives, transmedia storytelling, engagement, and convergence are being discussed seperately from long-standing work around fan fiction and fan culture more generally. There is some risk of taking up the industry's own atomistic conception of the fan rather than embracing the more collective vision represented by the concept of fandom. More generally, as I have written here before, phrases like "the architecture of participation" that surround web 2.0 suggest the degree to which network culture is really fan culture without the stigma.

At the same time, some of these shifts may reflect growing pains in the ways fan culture gets studied as more men begin to write about their own experiences and interests as fans. We certainly do not want to lose the important insights which feminist scholarship contributed to our early understanding of fan culture -- and indeed, the consciousness-raising tradition of feminist scholarship made it possible for us to write about our own experiences as fans. Yet, if fan studies is going to remain a viable area of research, we necessarily need to broaden the range of theoretical and methodological perspectives which get brought to bear upon it. We need to expand the range of fan cultures we study and the kinds of fan productivity we talk about.

It is also worth noting that this work is being produced in a larger context, one where at least some aspects of fan culture are gaining real visibility and influence, while others remain largely hidden from view. This is in part why I opened this post with a nod to Time and Entertainment Weekly, both of whom seem to understand the rise of fan influence in Hollywood along gender specific lines. Fan scholars may simply be reproducing, unconsciously in many cases, the dividing lines which structure the general culture's response to fan culture.

A heated and yet highly productive discussion of these issues has been raging over at Kristina Busse's blog, where her somewhat angry response to the discussions of these issues at the Media in Transition conference has so far generated 83 responses from a range of leading fan girl and fan boy academics. I can't begin to do justice to this multi-layered discussion here. If you haven't been following it yourself, you should check it out.

But I am concerned about the prospect that male and female scholars may be talking past each other rather than engaging with each other's work. The past few years have seen a range of new books on fan culture, including several important anthologies, that reflect the work of a new generation of fan scholars.

So, earlier this week, I wrote to nearly 30 of the key researchers in this field and ask them if they would be willing to participate in what I am jokingly calling "Fan Boy/Fan Girl Detante." Throughout the summer, this blog will be hosting a series of conversations among male and female researchers doing work on fan productivity, participatory culture, cult media, transmedia narratives, and so forth, designed to try to better understand the common ground and gender differences in the ways they are approaching their topic. Kristina and I have been working together to select researchers from a range of disciplines and national contexts, whose research spans not simply science fiction and fantasy, but also soap operas, Bollywood, popular music, games, and a range of other forms of media.

The entertainment industry loves big summer events: well, consider this to be a big summer event for those of us who are studying popular culture. While I will be spotlighting two scholars each week, many of the scholars have agreed to jump in both through the comments section here and through their own blogs to expand the conversation. I certainly hope that other fan researchers who have not been contacted about this first phase of the project will get in touch and let us know about the work they may be doing on these topics.

Earlier this week, Sibauchi, a media studies graduate student from South Korea, wrote to ask us about the value of fan studies. I am hoping that this series of exchanges will provide many valuable answers for Sibauchi and anyone else who wants to enter into this thriving area of research.

I am still hearing back from the scholars I contacted (so some of your favorite scholars may not be included here), but so far, the following folks who agreed to participate.

For the Red Team:

Nancy Baym, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of

Kansas

Rhiannon Bury, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, University of Waterloo

Kristina Busse (PhD) Independent Scholar

Melissa Click, Assistant Professor, Communications, University of Missouri-Columbia

Francesca Coppa, Associate Professor, English, Muhlenberg College

Abigail Derecho, Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literary Studies and Radio/Television/Film,

Northwestern University

Catherine Driscoll, Chair, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

Karen Hellekson, (Ph.D.) Independent Scholar

Lee Harrington, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Miami University in Ohio.

Deborah Kaplan, (M.A.) Independent Scholar

Anne Kustritz Ph.D. Candidate, American Culture, University of Michigan

Lisa Morimoto, Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University

Roberta Pearson Chair, Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham

Ksenia Prassolova Ph.D. Candidate, University of Kaliningrad

Julie Levin Russo Ph.D. Candidate, Brown

Robin Anne Reid, Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, Texas A&M

University-Commerce

Louisa Stein, Assistant Professor, San Diego

Rebecca Tushnet, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University Law Center

Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager disability and media technology blogger

Cynthia W. Walker Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, St. Peter's College

Editor's Note: I originally identified this as the Pink team but have changed it by popular demand.

For the Blue Team:

Will Brooker, Senior Lecturer, Film Studies, Kingston University

Sam Ford M.A. CMS, MIT

Jonathan Gray, Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

Sean Griffin, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television Studies, Southern Methodist University

Matt Hills Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies Cardiff University

Mark Jancovich, Professor, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia

Derek Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Robert Jones, Ph.D. NYU

Dereck Kompare, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television, Southern Methodist University

Robert Kozinets, Associate Professor, Marketing, York University

Christian McCrea, Lecturer in Games and Interactivity, Swinburne University

Jason Mittell, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Film & Media Culture, Middlebury

College

Martyn Pedler, Independent Scholar

Aswin Punathambekar, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Bob Rehak, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College

All joking about Pink/Red and Blue teams, aside, my hope is that we will discover that there's more common ground and shared interest here than might first seem apparent to those reading this work in isolation. I hope we all learn things that will inform our work and pushes us in new directions. By pairing scholars on the basis of gender, we insure two things that are often missing from this discussion: we insure that gender remains central to the discussion throughout and we insure absolute equal numbers of male and female participants. I am personally hoping that one of the things which will come out of the discussion, however, is some challenge to the essentialism which can run through discussions of this kind. I don't think all of the work here is going to break down clearly into Red and Blue Teams at all.

I welcome further suggestions about people who should participate actively in this discussion. I note, for example, that while this list is very inclusive in terms of gender, it does not yet feel very inclusive in terms of race and ethnicity. I'd love to find some more scholars of color who would like to join this conversation and am very open to suggestions.

We will start the conversations here in a few weeks. I will post more details once they are known.

By the way, I am posting this tonight from my hotel room in New Orleans where I am attending Phoenix Rising, a major conference of fans and academics who love Harry Potter. I hope to write more about the conference in my post later in the day tomorrow. If you happen to be here at the conference, say hey! I'd love to meet you.

Slash Me, Mash Me, Spread Me...

A while back, I mentioned that Jonathon Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and Men and Cartoons, had poached a passage from Textual Poachers in an article he wrote for Harpers about copyright and creativity. Since Lethem, along with Michael Chabon ( The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), has emerged as one of the poet laureates of fanboy lit, I was delighted to discover that my work on fan culture had made it onto his radar screen. But it just keeps getting better. Annalee Newitz was interviewing Lethem for Wired and asked him directly about his relationship to Textual Poachers, as she reports in her blog:

Lethem, always a fan of art that exists in a copyright gray area, is eager to encourage fanfic writers of all stripes. He admires Henry Jenkins' seminal book about fanfic, Textual Poachers, and champions the creative appropriation of pop culture icons. "Fanfic is a beautiful allegory of appropriation," he said. "But that doesn't mean the exact gesture is the most aesthetically promising one." Translation: Fanfic rules because it tweaks copyright law, but it's not always good art. Maybe Lethem just hasn't read some of the fantastic Harry Potter fanfic that's out there?

Moreover, Lethem has laid down a challenge to the fan writing community, which I am happy to help publicize here:

The award-winning nerd novelist revealed that he'd love to be in a slash fiction story. Whom would he want to be paired with? "I want to be surprised! I want to see ones I wouldn't think of!" he enthused, eyes wide with anticipation -- or possibly fear. Lethem believes he's been "slashed" only once, paired with fellow geek novelist Michael Chabon in a "sublimated homoerotic comic by Patricia Storms that was just an inch away from being Kirk and Spock."

Lethem may well be the first celebrity in my memory who has publicly campaigned to be the subject of a slash story. I can certainly think of plenty of examples where stars and writers not to be subjected to the slash treatment. (Personally, I am rooting to see Lethem climb into bed with The Goatman, the aptly-named character from one of his short stories, but then what do I know...)

I became aware of the Lethem effort to encourage people to slash him about the same time that I learned about the latest efforts of Steven Colbert to encourage his own brand of grassroots creativity. As his website at Comedy Central explains:

For Your Editing Pleasure

It all started when House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel told freshmen Democratic congressmen not to appear on the Colbert Report. The complaint? That Stephen gets final cut on interviews. So in the interest of playing fair, Stephen has decided to put it all out there for you. And by "it," we mean footage of an interview with Stephen that you can edit any way you like.

Download the footage at www.colbertnation.com. The knife is in your hands, Americans. Wield it wisely.

So, at a time when other producers are sending out cease and desist notices to shut down mashups of their content, Colbert is encouraging you to re-edit and recontextualize incriminating statements from his show (and believe me, what made the sketch so funny when it first aired was the whole series of potential meanings behind seemingly innocent statements once he planted the idea in your head.) Of course, none of this has stopped Viacom from trying to get Colbert Show segments removed from YouTube in what is surely a classic example of a media company speaking out of both sides of its mouth at once.

And all of this recalls the contest launched awhile back by A Ok Go, the pop group which has risen to fame primarily on the basis of some pretty compelling videos distributed on YouTube. The group used YouTube to launch a contest to have their fans do their own version of their "A Million Ways" video, again encouraging their fans to have their way with them.

Of course, not everyone gets a clue. For several months now, I've been hearing about a short-lived Veronica Mars preview competition launched by the production company: fans were to make their own shorts promoting the series but one small catch, for copyright reasons, they weren't allowed to use any actual footage from the show. Supposedly, the competition died a quick death when very few people submitted videos, feeling justly frustrated by the mixed messages involved in that particular set of rules.

So, we now have celebrities from literature, television, and pop music who want us to slash them, mash them, but above all, spread them. Indeed, we can see each of the above as reflecting the sensibilities of a generation of popular artists who have grown up in an era of cult media and participatory culture. They know what fan creativity can accomplish and they want to be part of the game rather than sitting on the sidelines.

At the same time, we can see this as reflecting the growing appreciation within the media industry of what often gets called "viral marketing": that is, they recognize the buzz that comes when grassroots intermediaries embrace a property and pass it along to their friends. C3 research associate Joshua Green and I have begun exploring what we call "spreadable media." Our core argument is that we are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. In a world of spreadable media, we are going to see more and more media producers openly embrace fan practices, encouraging us to take media in our own hands, and do our part to insure the long term viability of media we like.

Indeed, our new mantra is that if it doesn't spread, it's dead.

Contra the Snacks Hypothesis

Last month, Wired Magazine ran a special issue defined around the theme of "snack media." At the heart of the issue was the following proposition:

We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).

In a sense, this is a return to a very old idea that television of the future will be designed for zappers, that it will be designed in very small units which can make sense outside of any narrative context and that can be consumed whenever we want. In Convergence Culture, I explore how a contemporary television show like American Idol is designed to balance the fragmented interests of Zappers (or snackers) with the gradually deeper levels of investment represented by casuals and loyals. On a superficial level, much of popular culture looks as if it is designed for this kind of fragmented and short-term attention. So, it is not hard for Wired to find film producers, say, who are skeptical about whether the feature film will continue to be the central form of cinema:

It's not written in the Bible, "A movie shall be two hours." Somebody made that up to sell theater tickets. With technology, the very definition of a story has changed. It used to mean an actor and a script. Now a story is a 15second, no-dialog clip of somebody running across the street. An artist used to be the person who could get the studio to finance, manufacture, and distribute a story. Today an artist is somebody sitting in Des Moines in front of his computer - and his audience isn't a million folks at once, but one person a million times over. I now look to GoFish and YouTube to get ideas, to see what's going on. They show me not only what people are posting, but also what people like. It's a much better metric than a Nielsen rating system.

We are all scrambling to construct a new model to profit from these bits and pieces, but there's so much out there, it's like trying to harness a tornado and getting spat out the top. I definitely don't have the answer yet. I don't even understand all the questions. But if people are thinking this is the end of Hollywood, they're wrong. This is a whole new beginning.

-- Peter Guber, CEO and chair of Mandalay Entertainment Group and host of AMC's Sunday Morning Shootout

Or to find radio programmers who think people are too antsy to sit still for an entire song:

Why climb the "Stairway to Heaven" when you can take the elevator? That's the logic behind Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), an experimental radio protocol currently in development that takes classic tunes and whittles them down to about two minutes. "People's patience for music - even the stuff they like - is thin," says founder George Gimarc, a veteran programmer and former DJ from Dallas. "Twelve songs per hour won't cut it." Gimarc and his team of editor-musicians use what he calls "intuitive editing" to trim pop songs to their catchiest crux, pruning seconds from a guitar solo here, lopping off a chorus there.

Or television critics who think that the previews are more entertaining than the programmes:

Even if you're a regular viewer, labyrinthine shows like Lost and Prison Break require full concentration and are best consumed in marathon viewing sessions aided by TiVo or DVD. But you can still drop in on complex dramas midseason - just make sure you catch the "previously on..." recaps before each episode. These mini montages have become a captivating subgenre for both regulars and channel surfers. Back in the early days of narrative dramas, in the '70s and '80s, bare-bones recaps for serials like St. Elsewhere rarely topped 30 seconds. Fast-forward to Lost or Prison Break, and recaps of a minute or more are common, with some lead-ins for season openers or finales taking nearly two minutes to bring viewers up to speed - and bear in mind that each shot in those recaps now lasts less than two seconds on average. Sometimes editors rescue scenes from the cutting-room floor, if those bits tell the story in a tidier form. It's a new kind of TV serial, distinct from both the hour-long episode and the season-long arc.

So, what's wrong with this picture?

Well, for one thing, it describes one aspect of a much more complex media ecology based on different modes of attention within the same individual and different styles of consumption across different segments of the population. The short form of the YouTube video or the "previously on" segment is no more representative of our current relationship to media than the 10 plus hours at a sitting marathon of friends watching a favorite television series on DVD, the 100 plus hour computer game, or the 700 page plus Harry Potter novel (itself one of seven novels that will be required to understand the full narrative, once the series is completed). Indeed, what we are seeing is that people are learning to skim media to find the stuff they really care about and then dig down deeper, anticipating that there will be enough there to sustain them for extended media experiences. This is a point which Steven Johnson makes in the Wired issue:

Snack culture is an illusion. We have more of everything now, both shorter and longer: one-minute movies and 12-hour epics; instant-gratification Web games and Sid Meiers Civilization IV. Freed from the time restrictions of traditional media, we're developing a more nuanced awareness of the right length for different kinds of cultural experiences. You don't need an hour and a half of Saturday Night Live when you can get two minutes of "Lazy Sunday" or "Dick in a Box." For that kind of humor, the older, extended format turns out to be excessive. On the other hand, if you're craving a really satisfying, complex crime narrative, two hours is too short. Yes, it sometimes seems as if we're living off a cultural diet of blog posts and instant messages - until we find ourselves losing an entire weekend watching season three of The Wire. The truth is, we have more snacks now only because the menu itself has gotten longer.

But there's a second problem with the snack analogy: a snack is something that is pure pleasure and for the most part, utterly without redeeming nutritional value and indeed, in many cases full of things that are out and out bad for us. Of course, there are "healthy snacks" -- carrot sticks, celery stalks, and so forth -- but I doubt that this is what leaped to very many people's minds when they read the comparison between YouTube and media snacks. The reality is that these so-called snacks are themselves complex bits of content which often compressed or condense even more complex media experiences. It takes a fairly sophisticated knowledge of popular culture to decipher these little bits and therefore I think the experience is much more like wine tasting that grazing the desert bar. Think about the amount of information that gets compressed into an average fanvid and the ways that it gets reactivated at the site of consumption whether as a means to introduce a newbie to a favorite series and its mythology or to allow a veteran to take a trip down memory lane.

Moreover, as human beings, we rarely engage in activities that are meaningless to us. Just as good things can come in small packages, rich cultural experiences can and often do come in bite-size clusters. And so, even at the small scale, these are not trivial, random or capricious activities: we are involved in the production and circulation of meaning.

I am the wrong person to talk about the value of brevity, clearly. I often joke that I am a marathon runner and not a sprinter when it comes to intellectual matters. If I get criticized for this blog, it is most often because I am long-winded compared to many other bloggers. That isn't the way you are supposed to blog, people tell me. Well, stop and listen to yourselves for a moment, people. For me, the whole point of blogging should be to create alternative media channels where people can exchange ideas and express thoughts that might not fit comfortably within the structures of mainstream media. It should be a space where we try new things, test new models, and create new experiences. If we reduce blogging to a formula, how is this any different from any of the other formulas that shape commercial media? In my case, I am experimenting with a new relationship between the academic world and the rest of society. I am trying to create a space where serious ideas about media can be made accessible to a broader public and where different groups who care about popular culture can interface with each other. So, my blog represents a different modality than many blogs which are out there.

That said, there is nothing about the short form which would prohibit serious and reflexive engagement. Indeed, I have become a big fan of In Media Res website which has enabled a range of media scholars to share their impressions on contemporary media. The format of the site is deceptively simple: every day, someone posts a very short clip from recent television on the site and then offers a few hundred words of critical commentary designed to spark discussion with the readership. I was one of the first to contribute to the site and found it really hard to fit my ideas into such a small space. But many of the younger scholars who are contributing to the site are raising very important questions inside what we might see as a "snack media" format. There has been a great deal of stuff produced for In Media Res which will be of interest to regular readers of this blog -- in the past week, there's been discussions of the representation of New Orleans on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, analysis of the British Big Brother, the deployment of comic book aesthetics in Heroes, and the crossover between The Guiding Light and Marvel. Going back further in time, we could find interesting discussions of Buffy, Project Runway, Supernatural, The Sarah Silverman Show, and a German spoof of StarTrek

As the last example suggests, the site's contributors have access to global television and often present materials which we would otherwise have more trouble accessing, including, as well, archival materials from television's past. All of this feels more meaty than snacky -- more like beef jerky, satay, or Vienna sausages, depending on your frame of reference.

So, who says snacks can't also be good for you?

What's Coming Next? Self-Definition and Accomplishment through the Construction of the Netflix Queue

In my graduate proseminar on media theory and methods, I spend a great deal of time getting students to think about how they can draw on their own personal experiences and interactions with media to inform their scholarship. This was a central theme in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, which I co-edited with Jane Shattuc and Tara McPherson, which urges scholars to address the "culture that sticks to your skin," (a phrase inspired by Bruce Sterling's reference in Mirrorshades to "tech that sticks to your skin.") By this, we meant culture that is part of our everyday life, culture which provokes us either positively or negatively. The goal is to move cultural studies away from a language of distanced observation and towards an engagement that is up front and personal. It doesn't mean that we want only writing from fans (though of course it's no secret that I value the kinds of perspectives which fans bring to a topic.) It could also be a perspective that is antagonistic but open about its antagonism. It means being honest about where you are writing from and using a language which reflects your personal stakes in your topic. Popular culture is defined in part by its immediacy and it is not clear that one can meaningfully understand how it works or what it does without stepping at least temporarily into the realm of the proximate and the passionate. But it is not an easy thing to combine autobiography and theory effectively. I want to have my students struggle with what it means to balance these two pulls, to learn to reconcile these different languages and genre expectations through their writing. The students tell me that this is often the most challenging assignment they confront in the course. I have been grading these papers this weekend. Today, I wanted to share with you one of the papers to emerge from this assignment, with the permission, of course, of its author -- Debora Lui, who is a first years masters student in the Comparative Media Studies Program and one of the filmmakers working on the Project nml exemplar library. I felt that this particular essay would be of interest to my regular readers.

What's Coming Next? Self-Definition and Accomplishment through the Construction of the Netflix Queue

Debora Lui

In the midst of two extensive knee surgeries in 2003, I discovered Netflix. Pumped up on painkillers, feeling groggy and uninspired, I went online one day to check out the service. I had vaguely heard of Netflix before, but had never been motivated to join. At the time, I had just graduated from college and was too busy with my "real" life to let my usually rampant movie-watching aspirations tie me down. When I moved back home in the Fall following graduation however, I was in a totally different situation. I had just injured both of my knees (tearing both Anterior Cruciate Ligaments - an amazing feat, I assure you) and my parents convinced me to move home in order to have the surgery I required. I was unemployed and living in the suburbs; watching movies suddenly became appealing again. I received my first Netflix DVD shortly after my first knee operation.

To this day, I have still remained a loyal subscriber of the service despite the rise of stronger competitors like Blockbuster (with its coupons for free in-store rentals) and the more hip GreenCine (with its Indie movie lists and user blogs). But what was it about that particular time and situation that allowed Netflix to become such an intrinsic part of my life? The website provides a very simple, yet seemingly generic service. The basic gist of Netflix (according to the simple "instructions" listed on their website) is that you create list of DVDs you want to watch online, you wait for them to be sent to you, watch them, and then return the DVDs through the mail. It is not apparent, then, why I felt such an attachment to Netflix in particular or why the service had such an exceptional hold on me. After closer examination, however, I realized there are three aspects of Netflix that allowed it become such an integral part of my life, my constant guide and companion. First, Netflix provided me a source for continuous escapism; second, it gave me a never-failing sense of accomplishment; and third, it allowed me a platform for on-going identity construction and reconstruction.

Continuous Escapism

The first rental I received was the first disc of Dennis Potter's BBC series, The Singing Detective. Day and night, I was curling up with Potter's onscreen alter-ego Philip E. Marlow. I had not realized the irony at the time, of course. It would an understatement to say that Marlow wasn't the most loveable of characters, but there were some obvious similarities between us so I identified with him. I, too, was home-bound and bed-ridden, constantly feeling as if I was unable to participate in the world. Marlow created stories in his head to help him escape, and I watched Marlow create stories in his head in order to help me escape. It was a vicious cycle. Whether it was Marlow, the cast of characters for Cowboy Bebop, or Gregory Peck's character in Spellbound (respectively, my second and third rentals), I lived vicariously through their trials and travails.

Of course I wanted to escape - I was jobless, in post-surgery pain and just wanting to forget it all. Films were the perfect outlets through which I could continuously run away. The best thing about Netflix, though, wasn't that it provided me just one avenue for fleeing, but rather a continuous stream of raw material within which I could lose myself. I enjoyed all the conveniences that were initially advertised by the company; the three-at-a-time DVD plan was perfect for me. Unlike the far inferior one or two-at-a-time plans, where I might end up with nothing on hand while waiting for the next DVD in the mail, my plan allowed me nonstop opportunities for watching. One disc could be in the player, one on deck, and one could be sent back in expectation of another. In that way, anticipation of upcoming DVDs became as important as the experience of watching a movie itself. Browsing through Netflix's 75,000+ titles eventually became almost as satisfying as watching the movies themselves.

Through browsing occupied much of my time, my ability to compile the effort of these searches into a Netflix queue was what really drew me into the service. I had always been attached to making and checking things off lists (as many people are, as evidenced by the superfluity of "best of" movie guides these days), but Netflix technologized (and in a way, concretized) this interest by giving me tools to manage these lists dynamically. Unlike other static lists (such as the one in The A List: The National Society of Film Critics' 100 Essential Films which I bought shortly before I started subscribing to Netflix, incidentally), my personal queue on Netflix was constantly changing. It was an active list that morphed and transformed itself according to my mood and inclination. If I was suddenly feeling down and noticed that my next film was the soul-crushing Dancer in the Dark, for example, I could easily move The Triplets of Belleville and There's Something About Mary to the top of my list if need be. In a way, tightly controlling the list felt like self-medication of sorts. I could give myself larger or smaller doses of happiness, romance, or sobering reality based on what I added or removed from the list. The power to alter my mood and outlook became extremely addictive to a person in my post-operative position.

Sense of Accomplishment

While the queue gave me a no-fail method through which to transform my emotional experience, it also had the added advantage of providing concrete opportunities through which I could feel a sense of accomplishment. As I mentioned previously, watching DVDs somehow allowed me to live vicariously through fictional characters. Though I wouldn't personally be touring through 1950s San Francisco solving the mystery for who poisoned me, for example, I could feel like I was when watching the film noir, D.O.A.. However, this sense of accomplishment was not only gained through my vicarious experience of watching, but also the real feat of checking DVDs off my unending list of must-see movies or TV shows. Before I joined the service, I had previously started several aborted attempts at watching The Singing Detective. Netflix finally forced me to watch the series in full, something which had long been on my list of To-Dos.

Along the same lines, I also used to keep up with media "trends" through Netflix, watching the entire first seasons of Survivor and Lost (shows that I either shunned or inadvertently missed when they first aired on network TV). Thus, I felt as if I came to know what was happening in the world. Perhaps all of this seems trivial, but from my perspective, my inability to do "real" things in my post-operative state was made somehow less paralyzing when I knew I could watch DVDs and check them off my lists. The process of constructing my Netflix queue not only became just a matter of choosing what DVDs I was going to see, but also the DVDs I aspired to see. In that way, the compiling of this list seemed accomplishment in and of itself. It represented all the effort I had put into the process of learning what was available, what I could use to expand my knowledge, or what I could use to educate myself.

Identity Creation through the Netflix Queue

If creating the perfect Netflix queue helped me feel a sense of accomplishment, this is as much a matter of identity creation than preserving the list itself. It seems commonplace these days to imply that a person's favorite list of movies contributes heavily to their identity. This is clearly evidenced by the way in which social networking sites like Facebook prominently feature users' favorite books, music or movies as a part of their profiles. While this may seem limiting, many users are perfectly happy listing their favorite media properties in personal profiles as shorthand, surrogate identity markers.

This identity-creation aspect of listing movies definitely bleeds into the creation of my Netflix queue. As I previously mentioned, much of my effort on Netflix was put into searching for the DVDs that I could use to educate or cultivate myself into a "better" person. Of course, I often add movies that I simply want to see but these are usually impulse additions that don't fit into the larger matrix of my cultural education. So the actual process making the list becomes not just about movies I'd like to watch, but also about movies that contribute to my identity creation. I recognize, of course, that my categorization of the "right" kinds of films that give me the proper cultural capital is totally arbitrary, but my point here is that Netflix gives you tools with which you can easily create your own hierarchy. In this way, Netflix allows me continuously create and recreate my identity through my movie choices. This might seem strange in light of the fact I do not share my Netflix queue (though the feature of sharing your queue with your friends and family certainly affirm what I am saying here), but as I mentioned previously, the Netflix queue stands as an aspirational benchmark. That is why I can get away with leaving titles on my queue for many months at a time (Taxi Driver and Bonnie and Clyde have been on my queue for years, for example). Even though I'm not watching these films right now (or maybe ever), the fact that I aspire to see them and add them to my list is somehow significant and relevant. It means something.

Similarly, Netflix provides an opportunity for users to rate movies that they have either rented from the service or seen previously in an effort to provide better recommendations. That is the secret to the system of course. Recommendations are yet another feature of Netflix which allows for a form of identity creation. Based on what Netflix suggests for me, I can somehow gauge what the system (and maybe the general public at large) thinks about me and my movie choices. Netflix themselves recognize the power of their recommendations system, though this appreciation is mostly economic (their year-long competition for creating a better computerized recommendations system seems to prove this). According to some statistics, about two-thirds of rented movies on the service come from recommendations. Hence, a user's experience on Netflix is not just about single-time watching experiences, but instead the creation of a personalized matrix of media preferences and consumption.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Netflix's significance in my life seems more about my personal connection with films and TV shows than my relationship with the service in general. I am 100% sure that a Blockbuster or GreenCine account would have been just as satisfying as my subscription with Netflix. However, because I began with Netflix (as many people have) it becomes more and more difficult for me to leave. I have a relationship with them; ever since the beginning they have kept a list of my rentals and ratings, as well as a record of my ever-growing, ever-changing queue. I'll admit this attachment is slightly troubling; some people might say that our dependence on these lists of favorites signals the increasing shallowness of our society, wherein our personalities become less about personal characteristics than what commodities we like to consume. However, with the increased availability of all these cultural artifacts, aren't we creating more complex categories that help us define who we are? Some may say there is a fine line between being a fan of The X-Files and a fan of Star Trek, but that difference does matter to many people. Perhaps, in the end, I would say that Netflix has enabled me to look more closely at my relationship with certain cultural artifacts. In looking more carefully at these connections, it seems that we are better able to articulate who we are, where we came from and what parts of us truly matter.

Notes from a New World: An Interview with Wagner James Au (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Wagner James Au, a longtime reporter on games and games culture, who is currently finishing up a book about his experiences as an "embedded journalist" in Second Life, New World Notes. Yesterday,he shared some of his thoughts about the nature of Second Life and about how he came to become some involved in this story. Today, I have asked him to respond to some of the issues which have surfaced in recent debates about the "value" of virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular. I first met Au some years ago when he was writing a engaging little fantasy spoofing the news that Julia Roberts was a closet gamer (a fan of Halo, in fact). He had decided that "Professor Jenkins," the mild mannered protagonist who appears in accounts of my testimony before the U..S. Senate Commerce Committee and my savaging on Donahue (see Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers for the sordid details), might be an ideal figure to make an appearance inside the story and help account for Julia's fixation on violent entertainment. In his original draft, he even included a brief sexual encounter between Prof. Jenkins and America's Sweetheart (well, he had her plant a loving kiss on the top of my bald head, to be more precise) which got "censored" from the version of the story that finally appeared in Salon. All that was left was a reference to my surely uncontroversial claim that Julia Roberts is a "hotie," something I would never say, of course, but which does reflect my long-standing fascination with her screen career.

As it happens, he had come to the right place, since one of my first claims to fame was that I was a student teacher for American History at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia and that Julia Roberts, then a young drama geek, was a student in my class. If memory serves me correctly, I sent Julia to the principal's office for talking during class and barely missed out on the chance to see her in a high school production. So, when he heard the news, Au asked me to write my own version -- still tongue in cheek -- about the truth behind the story of Ms. Robert's fixation on Halo:

Can we blame her if she slips home at night ... and blasts evil minions to hell and back -- something else she never gets to do in her movies? Shouldn't we feel bad for the way our culture exploits her grace, charm and beauty in vehicles which amount to little more than shameless and gratuitous displays of niceness and appeals to our prurient interest in innocence and levity ... Mr. and Mrs. America, don't let your daughters give themselves over to the light side ... the best thing to cure them of all that pent-up purity may be a really bloodthirsty video game...

I have served as a source off and on for other, more weighty stories that Au has covered in the games space and we were lucky enough to have him speak about his perspectives on multiplayer games and learning during one of the Education Arcade conferences, which we hosted as part of E3. I consistently find him one of the most informed reporters covering games today and so I am delighted to get a chance to share this interview with you.

You have, of course, been following the ongoing debate about the "value" of Second Life. How much weight -- positively or negatively-- should we place on the issue of subscriber numbers in terms of evaluating what is going on in Second Life? Are there other measures or criteria we should be using?

The numbers do matter. The growth of Second Life will determine whether it becomes an important but relatively niche platform, or evolves, as some (including myself) have suggested, into an essential part of the Net's next generation.

The question to ask is what happens to Second Life if it continues to expand at its

existing growth rate of 23% monthly

--.what Clay Shirky himself (rather conservatively) calls "healthy growth". At the current velocity, the number of active SL Residents will easily be over a million by the end of 2007. ("Active" defined as a unique user who logs into the world at least once a week, 3 months after account creation.)

Even assuming that Second Life growth somehow stalls toward the end of 2007, it will still wind up a moderately successful niche MMO of some one million active users. (See this graph, by my blog's demographics expert, Tateru Nino.)

Given the world's current activity, the number of companies and institutions investing in it, growth of EU users (who now outstrip Americans), imminent localization to the the Asian markets, continued expansion of broadband, this outcome is actually the *least* plausible scenario. However, it's worth contemplating for awhile, at least for the sake of skeptics who insist Second Life is not a phenomenon worthy of heightened attention. For even then, we will still be talking about an online world that has been fostered and sustained entirely through user-created content, comprised of a million regular participants from around the world, existing in a diverse ecology of commerce, art, entertainment, technological, educational and scientific pursuits, most of them homegrown, some of them financed by corporate and non-profit concerns from around the globe. I fail to see how this would not be a unique and important Internet phenomenon, and how it would not remain an important contributor to Net culture.

And recall again that this is the *pessimistic* scenario. The far more plausible scenario is that the existing growth rates will continue into 2008, meaning we'll then begin to approach active user numbers in the several millions. Most likely, the network effect will continue this growth, especially as the open source initiative shows progress in improving Second Life's interface and user experience (the main culprit for its poor retention numbers) and as the servers themselves are open sourced (more on that down the way), making it feasible to talk about user numbers in the tens of millions. And beyond.

The conclusion of your book deals with the future of Second Life -- which might be seen as a core concern of the debate. How would you respond to Shirkey's argument that World of Warcraft represents a much more viable model for online experience than Second Life?

The important thing to keep in mind is that Clay has little or no first-hand experience with Second Life (unless that's changed since last December, when he acknowledged as much to me) and therefore, it's important to separate out his entirely valid comments about uncritical press coverage of total user-signups, and any of his speculations about the Second Life experience which are either second hand, or depend on inferences which don't map to Second Life as it's actually experienced.

Take the argument that a traditional role-playing game is more compelling than a social game. In regards to Second Life, again, this is where Clay's *a priori* kung fu fails him. With Second Life, it's not an either-or proposition. There are numerous user-created roleplaying games *within* Second Life, actually, many with substantial followings. The first, Dark Life, an old school mini-MMO in the World of Warcraft mode, was created by a professional game developer back in 2003, and still has a following. In the last few weeks alone, my games correspondent has covered several-- here , here and

here . I'd estimate that 25% or so of Second Life's active users regularly play one or more of the world's mini-MMOs, or engage in other RPG/gamer activity. The quality of these games have gone up tremendously, in recent months, so I expect those numbers to grow.

The other question is, "Viable how?" If by viable we mean "popular", that distinction probably belongs to CyWorld of South Korea, not World of Warcraft. With a reported 20 million unique users in 2005, CyWorld's nearly 3 times as popular than WoW. And CyWorld is not an RPG, but a social/chat space for avatars. It's also worth mentioning Habbo Hotel , the European social world with a reported 7 million unique regular users last December, roughly equivalent to WoW at the time.

By "viable", do we mean experientially? Because World of Warcraft actually runs through thousands of shards (i.e. separate copies of the same world) largely divided by global region, with Europeans shunted to their own servers, Asians to theirs, etc. As a combat-oriented genre game with few outlets for pure socialization, it attracts far less women than Second Life. (In Nick Yee's demographic analysis, 16% of WoW players are female; by contrast, in Second Life, about 40% of Residents are women.) And, of course, WoW is a leading revenue source for its parent corporation, Vivendi. So I guess

my question is this: how exactly is a male-dominated fantasy violence simulator which effectively segregates its players by national origin and is part and parcel owned by one of the world's largest multinational media conglomerates supposed to be the most "viable model" of the online world experience? (Except, of course, for Vivendi shareholders.) I'm just not seeing it.

There is right now one web with many participants, yet there are competing worlds in the multiverse space and there are apt to be even more competitors. Doesn't this fragmentation of worlds pose a challenge to those who might imagine something like Second Life as a future for the web?

Yes, this threatens to lead to a fork in the metaverse, where user base for online worlds remains divided into numerous, incompatible worlds according to interest/preference:

Google Earth, Multiverse, Croquet, Areae, traditional MMOs, revamped Asian online worlds,

and the recently announced worlds from Sony and MTV. The one which succeeds most, I suspect, will be the one that's most like the Web, with open standards and interoperability. SL is heading in that direction, as is Areae and Croquet. Most likely, there will be portals between several of these open- sourced worlds, suggesting a kind of multi-metaverse where individuals maintain several avatars and a universal substrate identity.

Notes from a New World: Interview with Wagner James Au (Part One)

I have been using this blog, off and on, across the past few months, to focus attention and generate debate about Second Life as a particularly rich example of participatory culture. Those who have followed this blog over time will have read my response to Clay Shirkey's critique of Second Life, my conversation with Peter Ludlow, the editor of the Second Life Herald and the co-Author of a new book on virtual worlds, and my response to questions about the relationship between Second Life and real world politics. Today, I want to continue this consideration of Second Life with an interview with Wagner James Au, the author of a forthcoming book, New World Notes, which describes his experiences as an "embedded journalist" covering the early days of Second Life. Au had contacted me in response to some of my earlier posts on this topic and I asked if he'd be willing to share some of his thoughts to my readers. Here's what his online biography says:

Wagner James Au is the author of New World Notes, and is also a game designer and screenwriter. He reviews computer games for Wired and has covered gaming as an artistic and cultural force for Salon. He has written on these subjects for the Los Angeles Times, Lingua Franca, Smart Business, Feed, Stim, Game Slice, Computer Gaming World, and Game Developer, among others. He's spoken about his work at South by Southwest, Education Arcade, and State of Play II. He is now developing New World Notes into a book.

Today, we open the interview with some discussion of his experiences covering Second Life and his general perspective about the mix of factors which is pushing this particular corner of the multiverse into the center of discussions about virtual worlds. Tomorrow, he will weigh in more directly on the three way debate between Jenkins, Shirkey, and Beth Coleman. For those who'd like to read more of his thoughts on Second Life, I'd recommend checking out "Taking New World Notes" which appeared in First Monday.

Can you tell us about how you came to become an "embedded journalist" in Second Life?

In the spring of 2003, Linden Lab gave me a demo of SL, then in early Beta. They brought me in, I think, because I'd recently written for Salon about the potential of user-created content in the "mod" culture of games, and Will Wright's emphasis on that (subsequently discarded) feature for The Sims Online. But during the demo, Linden Vice President Robin Harper suggested something else. What if I wrote *for* them, within the world, as a journalist-- an embedded journalist, as it were? (I had full editorial

control on the stories I pursued and wrote about, I should add, with the only prior restraints asked of me that I be scrupulously fair when reporting on disputes between Residents.) In early 2006, I left to write my book about Second Life for HarperCollins, and continue my reporting on my own independent blog, New World Notes .

Can you give us some sense of the shape of your forthcoming book? What are the

key questions you try to address?

It'll track the develop of Second Life both as a world and a Web 2.0 phenomenon, weaving a lot of the stories I've written for New World Notes into a broader and expanded narrative.

Why do you think Second Life has generated such interest (some would say Hype) in recent months? How does this hype distort the actual nature of the experience? Is there any aspect of Second Life that you think has been underhyped and under reported?

Right now there are two conversations about Second Life going on. The first involves all the numerous real world companies setting up shop in SL, coupled to mainstream news reports about the world that are, of course, introductory, and focus fairly consistently on the money-making opportunities. This is almost entirely the source of the backlash and hype in the pejorative sense. It's also the surface narrative which, while part of the SL phenomenon, does more to occlude the deeper activity going on. The second conversation, by contrast, involves all the grassroots user-created content which is merging the world with the broader web, creating a more robust world in a roleplaying sense, while also evolving it into a platform for real world applications. That's the main story, in my opinion, the one I try to tell on New Worlds Notes, and the one which accounts for Second Life's consistent, steady growth. It's not a function of media and corporate interest. The Sims Online was featured on the cover of Newsweek, was a spinoff to the most popular computer game franchises of all time, and attracted several major corporations who wanted to promote their brands within it, but without Second Life's user-created content or IP rights policy or robust virtual-to-real economy, growth stagnated months after launch.

Is there a tension between the corporate colonization of Second Life and the "gift economy" which underlies a vision of the space as a new kind of participatory culture?

For the most part, there is no tension, because the native participatory culture hardly knows the corporations are even there, or care all that much that they are. Residents have scant or limited interest in their "colonization", which is a strong word for what's really going on: big name brands on dozens of private islands that few visit for any extended period of time. Consistently, grassroots, user-created events and sites are far more popular.

What do you see as the long term implications of Linden Lab's decision to open

up the source code of Second Life?

The decision is monumental. Recently, for example, CBS committed $7 million so a metaverse development company could make worlds like Second Life more accessible to mainstream users. Much of this development will almost certainly take advantage of the open source initiative. The decision, I should add, applied only to Second Life's viewer software. However, just last week, Linden's Technology Development VP announced that the company will open-source the back end so servers can run anywhere on any machine . "SL cannot truly succeed," Joe Miller told an audience of executives, "as long as one company controls the Grid." Again, this is a vision of a world that is not a niche product, but the Web in 3D.

Dissecting a Media Scare

Shortly before I went on break, someone e-mailed me a segment from WDAZ News (Grand Forks, North Dakota) focused on the "newest youth trend" -- "Emo" (or as the reporter helpfully explains, "emotional people.") It struck me as a textbook example of the ways that youth subcultures get misrepresented on television news and the ways that adult anxieties about kids who don't look, dress, and act "normal" get turned into hysteria by misreporting. I have long argued that we need media literacy for adults far more urgently than we need it for kids, so I figured we might use this space to collectively dissect this video and the various ways that it constructs Emos* as a threat to public safety. So, dear viewers, let me invite you to join me in a game of what's wrong with this picture?

1. Look closely -- there were no actual Emos consulted in the production of this segment. The reporter spoke with a local police officer who emerges here as the expert on this youth trend (despite the fact that he knew nothing of the subculture before his daughter told him about Emos) and then went to the local high school, talked to a few "average" students about what they think about those "other" kids who are all "emotional" and stuff. This means one of several possibilities: the reporter couldn't find any actual Emo in Grand Fork; the reporter has no idea what an Emo looks like; and the reporter couldn't care less if there are any actual Emos who might have a point of view in this story. (Of course, given how subculture members most often get treated on news segments like this one, this may be a blessing in disguise!)

2. Literal mindedness is the hallmark of most coverage of youth subcultures. Subcultures adopt often hyperbolic style to express their resistance to dominant culture but it is not a simple matter to understand what that style means and one should be highly reluctant to ascribe any single meaning to the style. In this case, though, the reporter isn't even responding to any actual subcultural practices: they are responding -- let's assume unknowingly-- to parodies of the subculture created by outsiders who themselves know little about what's going on. I took a look at some of the sites which flash quickly across the screen during the segment -- Insta Emo Kit -- for example and it is clear that they are as close to a checklist of what you have to do to become a good little Emo as George W. and his classmates red the Preppy Handbook to figure out how to get through Yale. We fill out check lists for a great many reasons. As a native Southerner, I am sucker for checklists that start with "15 reasons you may be a redneck" for example. But most of them are not exactly a guiding set of principles by which we organize our existence or rank ourselves. Subcultures don't typically come with membership cards and instructional manuals and if you think you found one, I'd be looking for the little emoticons that demonstrate that more than likely the author is smiling at you.

Consider, for example, this passage from the site:

The height of achievement for an emo boy is to live to forty while mooching off his parents and clutching their inheritance. This will allow the emo boy to go to emo concerts in the future and listen to the same old derivative music that got its start in the punk movement back in the 70's. Ah, we mean the 90's. If any emo music you listen to has its roots in anything before 1998, then you're old school and therefore not emo.

Does this sound like something that was written by a leader of the Emo movement? Or for that matter, by anyone even remotely sympathetic to the Emo subculture? Is it possible that the reporter didn't bother to read the website that the story suggests is the key to understanding Emos?

3. The next step is to remove the subculture from any larger historical or cultural context. Maybe there were no Emos in North Dakota until a few months ago. Maybe the reporter is looking for that extra-timely factor that gives a story like this one a sense of urgency and might even push us towards a crisis mentality. Nothing like this has ever happened in North Dakota before and by jiminy, we've got to put a stop to it right away.

4. The next step is to link the subculture to some risky behavior -- in this case, the reporter makes literal the old journalist story, "If it bleeds, it leads" by equating being an Emo with cutting. There is no actual evidence beyond a few sketchy websites to demonstrate any direct links between the two. There's no attempt to figure out how common such practices might be within this community. There's no recognition that cutting is a symptom of clinical depression which occurs across many different segments of the population. It is simply taken as given that if your son or daughter goes all Emo on you, there's a high likelihood they are going to be looking for a way to cut themselves up.

5. Recanting is always helpful. Pay attention to the rather gothy girl in this segment who starts out trying to offer some sympathetic account of why these kids act the way they do and then uses every trick in the book to disassociate herself from being seen as an emo. If even your friends won't stand by you, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you, or at least that's the logic the newscasters are using. Note also the opportunistic use of quotations: does this girl really think that cutting yourself is just another form of creative expression or was that a slip of the tongue that the journalists are using here to create a through-line for their piece?

*I should warn you that I have had very little exposure to Emo culture myself but you don't have to know much to see how badly they are being misrepresented here. A reader notes that they are usually called Emo or Emo Kids, not Emos. I have left the text as is so it doesn't render the comment senseless but know that you probably shouldn't trust me on the plural form. I haven't gone back to check the video but I am pretty sure they do use Emos throughout.

So Why Should We Care?

A little while back, reader David A. wrote a response to my blog post about the Politics of Fear, saying what a number of others have suggested -- that I take all of this too seriously.

Here's what he had to say:

I am always amused by our politician's efforts in regulating the internet, for our own good of course. I think you take them way too seriously, Henry. Efforts to rein in violent video games will have no more effect on their sales than the CAN-SPAM Act had on the amount of spam I get in my inbox. It's all a dog and pony show. The reason they can make propose such irresponsible, and quite possibly unconstitutional legislation, is that is that they know it will have no effect on anything -- for a wide variety of legal, technological and commercial reasons. Furthermore, they get the no-risk benefit of appearing to be "doing something" about the problem.

What the politicians fail to realize is just how foolish and ineffectual it makes them look from the prospective of up-and-coming generations of voters. How is anyone going to take them seriously in the future?

All of this sounds reasonable. We can fall prey to a moral panic about moral panics. But here's why I remain concerned:

1. Governments have no legitimate business holding hearings on matters to which they have neither the authority nor the resolve to pass actual legislation. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, I reprinted my account of testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee investigation into youth and violence after Columbine. The hearings were described by one of the Senators who participated as a "ritual humiliation" of the American entertainment industry and were intended to create a chilling effect around popular culture, intimidating the media industry into making decisions which they could not be legally compelled to make otherwise. Such hearings, in and of themselves, do damage to the range of ideas in circulation in our society, precisely because the hearings themselves can not face legal challenges, and because they invite us to take likely the protections of free speech in the Federal Constitution, undermining respect for what should remain solid walls against government constraints on expression.

2. Political leaders and newscasters, alike, can lead moral authority to thugs who operate outside of government constraints and at a much more local and immediate level. Even if no laws get passed, or the laws that get passed are overturned through the courts, they have given moral authority to parents who are over-reacting to their son or daughter's thrashing about trying to define their identities, to principles and teachers who pass policies at the most local level that can make it a utter hell to receive a public education in this country, and to bullies who want an excuse to beat up any kid who looks, acts, or thinks differently than the fine folks in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In the case of Columbine, there were any number of horrors committed at local levels by people who wanted to protect their teens from the horrors that the folks in Washington DC were warning them about and they went further than Sam Brownback or Joseph Lieberman would have ever imagined but I didn't exactly see either Republicans or Democrats standing up and suggesting that these people were abusing their authority in this matter.

Having staked out a position in opposition to DOPA, I now receive a steady stream of angry letters from yahoos of this ilk. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter we received from a concerned parent:

Teens need to live genuine lives, not virtual lives. And your position that by monitoring teen use of the Internet we risk the trust of our teenagers is completely indefensible. The overwhelming majority of teenagers are untrustworthy almost by definition. Anyone who accepts at face value what a teenager says is either an idiot or a teenager or both.

The unfortunate reality for those who, like you, abandon reality in preference to its digital approximation is that as parents of teenagers we are legally bound to the activities of our juvenile dependents. If one of our teenagers violates the law, we, the parents, will be served a summons along with our child. And make no mistake, a 16 year old is still a child. Hence, it is only prudent that as responsible parents we keep a close eye and a tight reign on our children as they enter the wonders and horrors of the Internet...

With all due respect, we really don't need another apologist for irresponsible

Teenaged behavior.

Hey, it's an improvement over what I usually get called! Sure, this guy was probably cranky about his teenage daughter before MySpace came along, but the last time we need is to give this guy more firepower.

3. Such laws do pass and do have some real impact on those youth who have the most to lose. While DOPA failed to pass the Senate, there are still very real risks that similar legislation (The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act) will sail through Congress this go around and even if it doesn't, at last count there were anti-social networking laws under consideration in more than 20 States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Many of these laws will pass. Some will be overturned in court. Many of them will make it harder for schools and libraries to provide instruction to students about rationale use of social networks. Some will block teens whose only access is through schools and public libraries from access to the online experiences which are formative for their classmates. There's something at stake here, folks, and most likely, it is at stake in your own state or local community.

Do such laws block the long-term development towards a more participatory culture? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But they can certainly inflect misery on the lives of an awful lot of young people along the way. We don't want to over-react but we can't afford to be complacent. Let's not panic but let's take action

Behind the Scenes: Super Deluxe

"We're Super Deluxe. And by God, We're going to make you laugh." -- taken from the Super Deluxe webpage. Super Deluxe is a new comedy site launched by Turner Broadcasting in January of this year. The site promises a mix of original professional content with community tools which will allow people to share amateur produced videos. It might be seen as one of the first of what are likely to be a series of attempts by major media producers to create their own YouTube like sites which combine authorized commercial content with fan generated materials. In this case, the site is targeting comedy as a genre that is likely to support both commercial and amateur produced material of high quality -- with their understanding of comedy including a fair amount of animation as well.

As the press release announcing the service explained:

Original programming will range from short films and sketches to episodic series and more. In addition to being available online, SUPER DELUXE content will be available via cable VOD, wireless devices and personal media players.

Programming is just the beginning, however. SUPER DELUXE's community tools will allow fans to interact with artists and each other, adding an extra dimension of value for the consumer. Through these tools, fans can express their own unique sense of humor and interact with artists and others by creating their own profiles, uploading their own videos, rating and sharing content, making comments, sending messages and more. Fans can even join or create groups with other artists and users to share and discuss their favorite humorous topics, comedians or anything else that strikes their interest.

The featured content on the site at the moment is quirky, original, and engaging. Consider, for example, a range of shorts featuring somewhat fractured versions of American presidents, contemporary and historical (with the idea of failed presidents a strangely recurring theme across much of the content produced so far).

The Professor Brothers - Substitute (Brad Neely) depicts what happens when a professor trusts his American history class to a friend who warns him that he will absolutely make a mess of things and then proceeds to make these words a self fulfilling prophecy.

"Don't Recognize Me" depicts U.S. Grant, riding across the countryside on his motorcycle, hoping to meet some folks who don't know he was once a less than spectacularly successful president.

"President's Day," produced by the fine folks at Fark, shows us what happens when a bunch of the guys -- all former presidents -- help Lincoln celebrate his birthday at the local bowling alley. Along for the ride are Taft and Polk, who are perhaps not the A List of former presidents, but they know how to show a guy a good time.

W's World (Kyle Boyd) features George Bush and his side kicks, Condy "Brown" Rice and a pot-smoking baby elephant, as they seek to deploy the same principles to the oil lands in Alaska that have proven so successful in Iraq.

These videos give you a sample of the range of commercially produced content being showcased on the site.

James DiStefano and Erlene Zierke, two of the young masterminds behind Super Deluxe, agreed to answer some of my questions about the site. (I should disclose that Turner is a member of our Convergence Culture Consortium). In what follows, they discuss the nature of their site and its relationship to user generated content and the fan culture that is growing up around certain forms of comedy. Some people have described the site as an alternative to YouTube except that YouTube is a general interest site where-as Super Deluxe focuses on a specific genre of entertainment. That's where I decided to start the interview.

What do you see as the advantages of specialization over generalization?

The clearest advantage is the ability to create and maintain a brand. Sites that generalize lack a voice or a distinct feel. During our design phase, many of our potential users said they only went to these sites when guided by a link shared through email or IM. Many users cited a difficulty in separating the wheat from the chaff in such a large library of clips.

Early in the project, we decided to focus specifically on a certain type of comedy, and we decided to stay true to Turner's roots in aggregating and branding libraries of content by soliciting artists to produce material for us. We wanted to retain that open spirit embodied in the video-sharing sites, but we wanted to give our community something to talk about. Like this kind of content? Stay - we have a good sized and growing library to share.

Super Deluxe (http://www.superdeluxe.com/) is different in many ways because of this specialization. The artists producing content for Super Deluxe also give this site a distinct perspective. Our editorial staff does a great job of infusing the site with a voice, a feel, on a daily basis. We pick a mixture of Turner-produced content and user-contributed content every time we update the site, and this gives Super Deluxe a perspective on things that other sites lack. We're much more 'record label' than 'record store.'

And why this particular specialization?

Comedy is a genre that bends nicely to the constraints of the online medium. Short clips seem to work best on the Internet for a variety of reasons. If users don't like the video size, video quality, or content, they have the ability to move away to any other destination in the time it takes to click a mouse or search Google. With comedy, you can grab someone's attention in the first 10 to 15 seconds and have a pretty good shot of keeping them for the duration of a video. In other genres, it is difficult to establish compelling characters or interesting plot lines in the short amount of time we have to grab someone's attention.

What developments in the area of comedy are feeding into the development of Super Deluxe? Where is your content coming from? What trends in the culture are you tapping?

The culture we embrace places a premium on pursuit and discovery - it's part of an important ritual around this type of content on the Web. People trade funny videos, photos, comics and stories all the time. At launch, we emphasized the portability of online comedic content by including multiple tools to share and embed our video.

We're catering to the 'openness' of our audience's expectations and tastes. We encourage our artists by not imposing strict restrictions or lengthy approval processes; this approach lends itself to experimentation. In doing so, we've built a library of original and exclusive content unlike many other video sites. That's been an essential part of attracting interest in this space.

On Super Deluxe, it isn't necessary for our sensibilities to have broad appeal; we don't have to create a sitcom that appeals to the juicy part of the bell curve in order to gain an audience. A Super Deluxe viewer can construct their own path through the network, watch what they want, participate how they want, and discard what doesn't interest them.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that there is only a thin line that separates jokes and insults. How do you imagine Super Deluxe negotiating that line? Are there going to be occasions where you need to censor potentially offensive content? Are you giving the community ways to police itself?

We've already encountered these issues in the short period of time since launch. We've had situations where we've removed inappropriate content - videos that crossed the line from joke to insult (and, honestly, some videos went past insult and straight to offensive). It's not hard to see what fits with our ideals and what doesn't. Our editorial system allows us to promote like-minded content producers while still giving individuals the opportunity to define their idea of what's funny to them.

There is a flagging mechanism on Super Deluxe for our community to use. We review each flagged submission and decide whether it meets our standards or to to take it down. We retain an open dialog between us and our community. They help us police and message us or flag where appropriate. Our community helps Super Deluxe decide who we are and what we stand for. This level of openness helps us define the grey area, the thin line. Our sensibilities are strong but our policies are flexible.

Are you giving individuals ways to find content that reflects their own value systems?

We are. If we don't find something particularly amusing, well planned/executed, or indicative of the culture we have created within Super Deluxe, we don't promote it on any of our editorial pages; however, we still give the user several other outlets to publicize his/her creation. Our members can share their creation with their friends, embed it elsewhere for all to see, or direct people to subscribe to his/her RSS feed. While we may not find it particularly funny, there may be some users who will appreciate it.

There is starting to be a backlash against what some critics are calling the "cult of the amateur," arguing that mediocre content made by inexperienced producers is starting to push out professionally produced content made within systems of quality control because amateur content costs less to produce and distribute. How would you respond to this criticism?

When it comes to user-generated content, the medium is in the phase of experimentation. Every creative medium goes through a similar phase in order to establish norms around what's considered 'good' content. I couldn't cast out the "cult of the amateur" as invalid while it progresses through this phase. The distinction between user-generated video and independent film-making is only separated by a few degrees - not residing on opposite sides of the circle.

Recorded music is a medium that has professional, independent, and amateur productions co-existing in the same marketplace. Why couldn't Web-based video?

Can you give us a sense of the scale at which amateur content is coming into Super Deluxe at this point? What criteria are you using to decide which content to foreground on the site? What kinds of amateur content has impressed you the most so far?

Given that we're just finishing our 'soft launch' of Super Deluxe (a period with little or no promotion or marketing), we're extremely pleased with our level of viewership, of registration, and with our community participation. Our next phase is to roll out more original, exclusive content and expand the possible ways our community participates and interacts on Super Deluxe.

On Super Deluxe, when it comes to user-contributed content, we have a phrase that guides our vision: "created, not recorded." There's a huge difference between capturing a 'stupid pet trick' and writing/editing a script to produce a finished video. And while we accept submissions that encompass the former, we promote videos that encapsulate the latter.

We pick amateur content to promote based on a number of criteria. Does it fit with our voice, our theme? Will our users find it interesting? Does it have a shelf-life, or potential for future development? And, most importantly: as representatives of culture in this online world, do we find it funny or entertaining?

Cube is one video that met all these complex criteria. We love this video, and it got a great reaction from our community.

"Squirrel vs Marshmallows" is another one that really gets us excited about our users. It's well planned out and well executed, and I can't get the song out of my head every time I watch the video. It's a perfect example of what we're looking to promote on Super Deluxe.

Your blog has created a category called "Worst Damn Thing." Explain. Do you think the pleasure of user-generated content involves laughing with or laughing at?

We encourage our audience to upload the content that reflects them and their sense of 'the funny.' Some of it, though, tends to be more on the side of 'recorded' rather than 'created.' One particular piece uploaded to Super Deluxe was more appropriate for a standard video-sharing site than for an editorially-driven site like Super Deluxe. So we decided to give our audience a clear signal as to the kind of user contributions we'd promote while also having a little fun with it. We try to retain our sense of humor, both as creators of culture and as lovers of the genre.

We don't intend for "Worst Damn Thing" to stifle creativity; the designation is intended to help raise the bar for what user-generated content can be, in an effort to move the medium from experimentation to independent creation.

Sanjaya Malakar, Leroy Jenkins, and The Power to Negate

As a long-time American Idol fan, I am watching the current controversy about Sanjaya Malakar with morbid fascination. For those of you who are not following the plot, Malakar is a relatively untalented contestant who is surviving week after week as much more widely praised rivals are biting the dust. Simon Cowell this week went so far as to suggest that nothing which the producers on the show said about his performance would make any difference in the outcome of the voting: "I don't think it matters anymore what we have to say, actually. I genuinely don't. I think you are in your own universe and if people like you, good luck!" Elsewhere, Cowell has fanned the flames by threatening to quit American Idol if Sanjaya wins.

Regular readers of this blog will have already suspected some of the forces going on behind the scenes here to essentially "spoil" American Idol and can only imagine the choice words that Simon and the other judges are uttering behind the scenes. I reported here last summer about a group called Vote for the Worst which has adopted an interventionist stance towards reality television programs. The group has taken credit in the past for the surprising longevity of AI contestants, such as Scott Savol and Bucky Covington[See note at end of post], as well as having gotten a number of lackluster contestants onto Big Brother's All Stars series last summer. Here's what the group has posted over on their home page:

Why do we do it? During the initial auditions, the producers of Idol only let certain people through. Many good people are turned away and many bad singers are kept around to see Simon, Paula, and Randy so that America will be entertained.

Now why do the producers do this? It's simple: American Idol is not about singing at all, it's about making good reality TV and enjoying the cheesy, guilty pleasure of watching bad singing. We agree that a fish out of water is entertaining, and we want to acknowledge this fact by encouraging people help the amusing antagonists stick around. VFTW sees keeping these contestants around as a golden opportunity to make a more entertaining show.

They have a point: research suggests that American Idol attracts essentially two different viewerships. There are people who watch the first part of the series -- up until Hollywood -- enjoying the "gong show" like segments where bad singers get spotlighted. (That's why William Hung remains one of the most infamous contestants to ever appear on the show and why the producers consistently replay the footage of his mangled and tone-deaf performance of "She Bangs.") And then there are the people who tune in once the producers have gotten all of that out of their system to watch the talented few compete, get feedback, and try to win the hearts of the American public.

So, it is hard for the producers to claim that "vote for the worst" is not in the spirit of the show. The Vote for the Worst fans are simply acting out of turn, asserting their own right to pick which bad singers should get on the air and how long they should last.

Vote for the Worst, by itself, probably doesn't have the clout to really carry this very far, in the end, but this time around, the site has won the support of Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed "King of All Media," who is using his satellite radio program to encourage listeners to vote to keep Sanjaya on the show. Stern has drawn real blood in the past. In 1998, Stern ran a successful effort to get a regular on his program, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, selected as one of People Magazine's list of the most beautiful people in the world. This was an early experiment in the use of the web to encourage reader participation. Hank won over Leo DeCaprio, the pretty boy actor who was then riding high off his Titanic appearance, and the dwarf got a lot angrier and perhaps a little drunker when the magazine refused to feature him inside the print edition of their publication.

Of course, as with this earlier election, the whole process exploits several bugs in the system: first, it takes advantage of the fact that viewers can call in more than one vote. It is not just that a relatively small but determined number of people could indeed cast enough votes to keep Sanjaya at the middle of the pack but it is also the case that people can vote for Sanjaya and not sacrifice their ability to also vote for a favorite performer. So, it becomes a no cost gag vote, which can turn out to have bad consequences for individual contestants who have off weeks and end up going while Mr. Malakar remains. Of course, all of this might end quickly if viewers voted to eliminate contestants, rather than to keep them. Surely, there are more people who want Malakar off the show than want him to remain on the air. But the producers have consistently argued against having people vote to eliminate contestants, feeling that would bring a negative tone to the proceedings.

As this has occurring, there have been growing expressions of outrage among fans of the program. Vote for the Worst proudly posts a segment from The O'Reilly Factor during which civil litigator Danielle Aidala tries to argue that the fan's efforts to keep Sanjaya Malakar on the air represent speech that should be exempt from First Amendment protection -- comparing voting for the worst to inciting a riot. For once, O'Reilly comes across as the most rational voice on the program!

And check out the ways that YouTube is responding to the Malakar Matter, including what we can only hope is a tongue in cheek promise to go on a hunger strike to encourage people to vote him off the air.

So, what of the fairly sweet and relatively harmless young man caught in the center of this whole brouhaha? At first, it was pretty clear he was clueless about these efforts on his behalf, shocked when he stayed on the air in the face of seemingly inevitable elimination, seeming fragile in the face of the judge's withering comments. One news story quoted a family friend: "He's so young and so sensitive, it's hard for him to go out on that stage and not have that devastation affect his performance."

By this week, when he appeared in a campy Mohawk and mugged throughout his performance, it seemed to me that like William Hung before him, he had caught onto the joke being made at his expense and was willing to ride things out as long as it kept him in the spotlight. My wife thinks he is still playing to win and is under the mistaken belief that he really does have an army of teenyboppers behind him. Watch the clip for yourself and see what you think.

How might we make sense of all of this?

For starters, we are witnessing the public's periodic fascination with its power to negate. "America", as the Idol judges like to call us, at least when they are happy with our decisions, has a stubborn streak. There have certainly been cases when the public votes to keep someone on the program precisely because the judges were harsh to them and long-time Idol viewers have long speculated that the judges use this power to condemn tactically to generate public support behind certain contestants they want to keep on the air. The fans are also deeply suspicious of other efforts by the judges to game the system and there have been, as I outlined in Convergence Culture, ongoing controversies about the reliability of the voting system itself. In what other context would we trust the results of an election when no vote totals were ever released? And there are certainly cases where backlash emerges when the judge push a contestant too heavily and at the expense of fan favorites. It is telling that the winner of American Idol often sells fewer records than the also rans, suggesting that to the bitter end, the public wants to exert its ability to cancel out whatever the judges tell us to do.

I certainly saw Hank the Dwarf winning People Magazine's contest over Leo DeCaprio as a kind of populist response to the culture of glamor and celebrity -- as a push towards the anti-celebrity, the anti-heroic, the anti-glamorous, and the untalented as emblematic of a segment of the population that feels under-represented, under-counted, and under-appreciated.

In that sense, Hank and Sanjaya might be compared to LeRoy Jenkins, the hapless World of Warcraft player whose misadventures have developed a cult following among hardcore gamers. I was recently asked by a reporter to comment on the LeRoy Jenkins story -- assuming of course that I had to be a Jenkins expert (Can't imagine why?)-- and I suggested that we might see him as a new kind of American everyman, an embodiment of our collective feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. I remarked on the odd happenstance that the American everyman of World War II was Kilroy -- with G.I.s scribbling "Killroy was here" across the landscape as they recaptured Europe from the Nazis -- while the American everyman of the current war in Baghdad might be LeRoy, the guy who never had a chance. As I explained to the reporter, ""For the first time, we as a society get to decide who's famous. Having gained the right to project celebrities forward, we often choose losers, because in the past it was always success that connoted celebrity. If Leroy Jenkins can become a celebrity, anybody can."

Of course, the populist underpinnings of all this are tainted, I would argue, by the fact that this is being taken out of the hands of the grassroots Vote for the Worst campaign and transformed into a battle between two media powerhouses: Cowell vs. Stern.

And here's a question I have been struggling with. My sense is that Stern's listeners were laughing with Hank as he walked away to victory over the Hollywood hotshots, while they are laughing at Sanjaya Malakar as he remains uncomfortably caught in the spotlight, in way over his head, on American Idol. So, how do we account for the difference?

How long will all of this last? It's anyone's guess. My hunch is that it will last another few weeks in any case -- until the pack thins out a bit more -- and then the number of fans needed to stay on the program will grow well beyond the reach of Vote for the Worst and Howard Stern. There are probably a lot more people who want to see some of the other contestants win than want to see Sanjaya stick around but for the moment, the votes are split and so he will outlast many more worthy contestants. Could Howard Stern pull it off with American Idol as he did with People? Probably not. For one thing, the number of votes being cast on Idol far outweighs the number needed to win a web-based contest in 1998 and for another, Stern doesn't have nearly the reach he once did, given the lackluster revenue being generated by Sirius Radio at the present time. At the end of the day, Malakar is going down and Cowell will be able to once again play king-maker on his own program. And if he doesn't? Well, he won't be the first winner on American Idol whose record sales didn't reflect his standings in the competition. And even if Malakar won the contest, the producers would be able to make a mint off some of the other talent in the competition.

Editor's Note: Readers correctly point out that Bucky Covington was never a target of the Vote for the Worst campaign. I have left the original reference so that their comments would make sense and so that it would clarify a common misconception. I have read multiple news reports which did list Bucky as a VFTW target but I can't find any trace of him being so on the actual site. Sorry for any offense caused to his loyal fans. As it happens, I kinda like the guy myself.

How Second Life Impacts Our First Life...

After having written so much about Second Life during my recent exchanges with Beth Coleman and Clay Shirky, I swore to myself that I would not write about this virtual world for a bit and let reality catch up with some of my theories. No such luck. I recently heard from digital theorist Trebor Scholtz suggesting that there had been some interesting responses to the Shirkey-Coleman-Jenkins exchanges over at the iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) mailing list. Scholtz asked politely if I might weigh in on some of their arguments (always a dangerous thing since I am not on the list and not fully following their conversations) and clarify my position. I asked if I could cross-post my response here on the blog.

The question which Scholtz posed to me was deceptively simple:

My main question to Jenkins and all of you concerns the relationship between this virtual world and "first life." Do these virtual worlds merely provide an inconvenient youth with a

valve to live their fantasies of social change (elsewhere), or do they, in some measurable way, fertilize politics in the world beyond the screen?

The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to "escape" reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what's taking place online to what's going on in our lives off line.

Here, for example, is a link to the webcast of a session of the 2005 Games, Learning, and Society conference at Madison, Wisconsin. (Check out the session called Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything). It was one of the first places that I heard extensively about the kinds of educational uses of Second Life. One of the stories there which caught my imagination dealt with the ways people were using this environment to help sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to rehearse social skills and overcome anxieties that can be crippling in real world social interactions. (They call their island, Brigadoon). Those who are undergoing therapy in Brigadoon are able to interact through Second Life for several reasons, as I understand it: first, because it creates a buffer between the people lowering the stress of social interaction; second, because it reduces the range of social signals through the cartoonishness of the avatar, helping them to learn to watch for certain signs and filter out others. Ideally, participants then return with these new social skills and apply them to their interactions in their First Lives. But even if that is not possible for all of those involved, they have had a chance to interact meaningfully with other human beings -- even if through a mediating representation.

For me, Brigadoon offers both a demonstration of the value of having a Second Life that operates in parallel to your First Life and as a metaphor to think about the ways we can try things out, learn to think and act in new ways in virtual worlds of all kinds, and then carry those skills back with us to our everyday reality.

In some cases, the Second Life opens up experiences that would not be possible within the constraints of the real world. My former student and friend, John Campbell, wrote a book, Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Identity, and Embodied Identity . His research primarily centered on much earlier forms of chatroom technologies rather than Second Life per se, but much of what he found there is still very relevant to our present conversation. One of the things I took away from Campbell's book was the idea that these chartrooms played important functions for queers who lived in small towns or in conservative regions of the country where there were little or no chances to socialize with others who shared their sexual preferences. Entering into a virtual world (even one as simple as the early chat rooms) allowed them to begin to explore aspects of their sexual identity that they could not yet act upon in their First Lives. Through this process, they developed the self confidence necessary to come out to their friends and family, they felt some connection to the realm of queer activism, and they made a range of other life-changing choices. I wanted to bring this into the conversation because I see from time to time academic theorists who want to dismiss the kinds of sexual experimentation that occurs in Second Life as interactive porn. Such language shows a limited understanding of what such spaces can and often do mean to the people who participate in these sexual subcultures in virtual worlds.

Those who have read my blog know how much I respect the work that Barry Joseph is doing through his Global Kids organization in Teen Second Life. Joseph has a strong commitment to using the virtual world to educate and empower young people and redirect them towards dealing with problems in the real world. Consider, for example, their recent collaboration with the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum to make images of the genocide occurring in Darfur visible to young visitors to Teen Second Life. The Museum was already projecting these photographs onto its own facade in the real world. The Global Kids group worked to showcase these same images within the virtual world, in the process learning more about real world suffering, and using Second Life as a platform to educate their contemporaries about a world problem that might otherwise have escaped their attention. By all reports, this was a transformative experience for the teens involved, resulting in them putting greater energy into trying to change the real world. Perhaps, Barry, who is a regular reader of this blog, will share more about his experiences.

How far might we push this? Consider the case of Kristofer Jovkovski, one of the readers of this blog, who wrote me recently to describe his proposal to construct a Virtual Macedonia through Second Life. Jovkovski's argument appeared in a Macedonia Arts and Culture magazine, Art Republica:

Macedonia is country of spiritual and profound people, having its culture originating from a deep tradition and culture. However, by implanting extremely materialistic culture and values that even the most developed capitalistic countries are revising and varying, the country is gradually losing its spirit.

Radical virtualization of reality would turn us back to our own natural needs. That would be the final, strongest slap in our own face, as radical immersion into the cyberspace would produce the opposite effect, at the same time, along the immersion path, would make us integrate, instead of enforce, the democratic and open values of the medium, process which would finally lead to reconciliation between the spiritual (i.e. cyberspace) and material world

It is essential to make space for the young people to create their individual and collective reality....

Macedonian government would accredit Virtual Macedonia as a legal state extension in the cyberspace and would give rise to virtual institutions and legal rights to the citizens, thus recognizing the first virtual sovereign state act that would make precedence in the international politics and instant popularity. Promotion of the first virtual state would incite knowledge and information revolution, changing the face of Macedonia. Everybody willing to embody themselves with a virtual identity, or Avatar, would have rights and possibility to create, own and trade virtual objects, thus empowering himself. Virtual Macedonia would be introduced to the older Macedonians in a nostalgic manner that would evoke ideological enthusiasm from their youth. Young people would, of course, be riding enthusiastic energy wave of even greater intensity.

Virtualization of reality would help us relive traumatic politization and transformation of everyday life. Experiences from the virtual reality would affect our real reality. We could help ourselves, and maybe most important, by taking more proactive part in creation of their own reality, young people could break the karma of cynicism and pessimism of elders.

Virtual Macedonia could be practical model of virtual state with its own territorial sovereignty, functional economy and community rights and regulations, opened to the world....

He has not yet tried to build a Virtual Macedonia. I don't want to get into this specific politics of the Macedonia situation but I was moved by this vision of how a virtual nation might revitalize a real one (which is in any case in the process of trying to reinvent itself after a complex history of struggles over national identity).

Might we imagine, for example, the construction of virtual homelands within Second Life that brought together disaporic communities and helped to cement their cultural and political ties to their mother countries? Might this result in new kinds of political alliances and affiliations that straddle between the real and virtual world? Could we use a similar structure to create a common space for interaction between groups which have very little face to face contact in the real world, even groups who have a history of conflicts over geographic space?

All of these examples work because Second Life does not perfectly mirror the reality of our First Lives, yet we could point to countless other more mundane and everyday ways that Second Life and other multiverses can and are being used to facilitate meetings in real world organizations, including those which result in all kinds of real world political effects.

That said, as Steven Shaviro notes on the iDC discussion list, there are some limits to the kinds of politics that can be conducted through Second Life at the present time:

Overall, Second Life is connected enough to "first life," and mirrors it closely enough in all sorts of ways, that we can pretty much do "there" the same sorts of things -- especially collaborative, social things -- that we do "here."...

A protest against the Iraq war in Second Life is little more than an empty symbolic gesture; but one might cynically argue, especially given the tendency of the media to ignore them, that

real-world protests against the war , however many people they draw, are at this point little more than empty symbolic gestures either.

On the other hand, I don't think that one could find any equivalent in Second Life of political organizing that takes place in "first life": if only because the people in Second Life are a fairly narrow, self-selected and affluent, group.

This goes back to the debate we've been having here about whether Second Life participants constitute a niche or an elite. Either way, the inhabitants of Second Life certainly are not a representative cross section of the society as a whole and there are many people who are excluded through technological or economic barriers to being able to participate in this world. These factors limit the political uses that can be made of SL: they make it hard for us to insure that a diversity of opinions are represented through the kinds of political deliberations that occur here; they makes it easy for participants to ignore some real world constraints on political participation, starting with the challenges of overcoming the digital divide and the participation gap; they make it hard to insure the visibility of online political actions within mainstream media.

That said, I don't think we can discount the political and personal impact that these online experiences may have on the residents of SL. We simply need a broader range of models for what a virtual politics might look like and need to understand what claims are being made when we debate the political impact of these virtual worlds.

Another list participant, Charlie Geer, goes a lot further in dismissing the value of Second Life. He takes issue with my claim that the participatory culture represented on SL is worth defending. Here's part of what he wrote:

It would seem to me obvious that trying to make some sense of and find ways of mitigating the violence and injustice in the complex world and culture we already necessarily inhabit, not least bodily, is far more pressing and considerably more worth defending than any supposed capacity to 'design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture'. This seems to me to be at best a license for mass solipsism and at worse something like the kind of thinking that undergirds much totalitarianism, as well as an evasion of our responsibilities to the world as we find it. Such a fantasy seems to be at play in both the relentless construction and assertion of identity', a drive that militates against proper social solidarity, and thus plays into the hands of those sustaining the status quo, as well as the fantasy entertained by the Bush

government that the Middle East can just be redesigned as if in some video game

Apart from anything culture is not something that can simply be constructed. It is something we are thrown into and which we can only at best try to negotiate our relationship

with. Culture necessarily involves other people and prior existing structures. Has Jenkins considered what it would mean if everyone felt free to 'construct their own culture'. Even if

such a thing were possible, it is certainly not desirable, especially if we have any hope to produce a properly participatory culture.

Frankly as far as I am concerned SL is really just a kind of cultural pornography, and is to the real business of culture what masturbating is to sex with another person. I like

masturbation as much as the next man, or indeed woman, but I don't make the error of mistaking for something it isn't. Apart from anything else it lacks precisely the element

that sex has, that of involving a proper, embodied, responsibility to someone else and to the potential consequences of the act itself.

There are lots of misperceptions embedded in these comments. To start with, I was not suggesting that we should be concerned with SL to the exclusion of concern with the real world. But I do see the struggle to preserve participatory culture as a fundamental political struggle in the same way that the right to privacy or the efforts to defend free speech are foundational to any other kind of political change. We are at an important crossroads as a society: on the one hand, we have new tools and social structures emerging that allow a broader segment of the population than ever before to participate in the core debates of our time. These tools have enormous potential to be used for creative and civic purposes. On the other hand, we are seeing all kinds of struggles to suppress our rights to deploy these new tools and social structures. Even as we are seeing a real promise of expanding free speech, we are seeing real threats to free speech from both corporate and governmental sources. We should be working to broaden access to the technologies and to the skills and education needed to become a full participant rather than having to defend the new communication infrastructure against various threats from government and business.

Gere understands what's going on in Second Life primarily in individualistic rather than collaborative terms. It would indeed be meaningless to describe a world where everyone constructs their own culture. Culture by definition is shared. But it is not absurd to imagine a world where everyone contributes to the construction of their culture. It is not absurd to imagine different projects in SL as representing alternative models for how our culture might work. Indeed, the virtual world allows us not only to propose models but to test them by inviting others inside and letting them consider what it might feel like to live in this other kind of social institutions. I think of what goes on there as a kind of embodied theory. And I think what is interesting is that these are intersubjective models that are indeed being taking up and tested by communities large and small.

In each of the examples I cited above, participants are learning how to work together with others through the creation of a shared virtual reality. We certainly need to spend more time exploring how we can connect what happens in these worlds back to our everyday lives but that doesn't mean that what occurs in a symbolic space is devoid of a real world social and political context.

Often, real world institutions and practices constrain our ability to act upon the world by impoverishing our ability to imagine viable alternatives. This is at the heart of much of the writing in cultural studies on ideology and hegemony. SL offers us a way to construct alternative models of the world and then step inside them and experience what it might feel like to live in a different social order. I think there are some very real possibilities there for political transformation.

Videoblogging, Citizen Journalism, and Credibility

Today, I wanted to show off the latest in the series of short documentaries on media production which we are producing through Project nml, a project funded by the MacArthur Foundation to foster new media literacies. Regular readers of this blog will recall that we are producing a series of short digital documentaries on various aspects of the new media landscape -- ranging from independent comics to graffiti -- which are designed to get students to reflect more deeply about their own potential roles as media makers and to think about the place of media in their own lives. We have been delighted so far by reports that these videos are starting to be used in schools around the country and we would like to encourage other educators to send us reports of how you might be making use of these materials. Our latest release deals with the growing phenomenon of video-blogging (and as such, compliments the segments we produced last year in which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow offered his advice to would-be bloggers.) The video was produced under the supervision of research manager Margaret Weigel and our recently hired production coordinator Anna Van Someren (who came to us from the Boston Based Youth Voice Collaborative); the primary author of the video was one of the CMS graduate students, Steve Schultze, who was also not coincidentally one of the key organizers of last week's Beyond Broadcast event. Among those featured on this video are Steve Garfield, who has been widely credited as the father of the videoblogging movement; John Barth from Public Radio Exchange; Ravi Jain, another former student of mine who has gone on to fame if not fortune as the host of Drive Time; Jason Crowe from Cambridge Community Television; and Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the producers of Four Eyed Monsters.

One of the high points of the series comes in Segment 2 where we get into the issue of citizen journalism and how it relates to professional reporting:

John Barth: On the Internet, you have this great possibility to compare and contrast among a variety of vetted sources of news.

Steve Garfield: Videoblogging is news. Of course it is. The cool thing about it is that people will all be telling stories, let's say, from an event. So something happens and you'll get five, ten, who knows... right now if you go to an event and you have fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, a hundred bloggers blogging about an event... if you read a number of them you'll get a good sense of what actually happened.

John Barth: So can you trust what you see in a videoblog? How do you know that that's true or accurate?

Steve Garfield: Or if you read a blogger frequently, you know what their biases are and you know where they're coming from. So they become a trusted source for you. With video blogging it's the same thing. Video bloggers will become a trusted source for people of news, and if you have a number of videobloggers out covering the same event, seeing their different perspective on the same event, when you look at all those different videos then I think you'll get the story.

John Barth: You know this whole notion of, "all of us as smarter than some of us", is true. Except, not all of us are videoblogging and not all of us are blogging and not all of us are doing what you're doing. So, all of us don't have the benefit of being equal participants in trying to determine what the story is, or being able to see your videoblog and compare it against someone else's....

John Barth: So what would be so bad if videobloggers rule and mainstream media goes away because they just can't stay in business. Well here's what I think would happen: right now most investigative reporting, for better or worse, is being done by mainstream media. You have really good reporters at newspapers, at major networks like ABC news, and they are really developing their sources and getting to stories that frankly I don't think you and I could with a handheld video camera. We don't have the time, we don't have the money, and we don't know where to go.

Steve Garfield: The cool thing is that videoblogging is not TV. That's what's so cool about it. You don't have to have an intro, a voiceover... you don't have to get both sides of the story. You don't have to do anything. You can do it however you want to do it.

John Barth: Trust is what you're trying to get to. You're trying to get to credibility. So, if you work in a traditional news organization, there are dozens, hundreds of people and they all have points of view - they all have biases. The thing that's supposed to weed out all of that so that all you have is accurate information and good storytelling is that you do have editors and competitors and other reporters who help frame a story and get it out there every day. If you're a videoblogger, it's maybe you and maybe one or two other people and that's all. So, how do people know that what you've put out is accurate? How do you develop that trust? Well, there are some real basic things to understand. If you're going to pursue certain stories, you don't have your conclusion before you begin. That's why you're asking questions. So, a lot of times we get interested in a topic because we're passionately interested in it, but you need to have enough self-control and self-discipline to distance yourself from the outcome and also what you're hearing from different points of view....I think in terms of training people to be good videobloggers, I would argue they should spend some time with traditional journalists and get a sense about how much time it takes to beyond just putting up home movies to really tell a story well and really check some things out.

For those of you who enjoyed my post about Four Eyed Monsters last week, there's a very good segment (Chapter Five) in which the filmmakers discuss the ways they have tapped audience participation to shape the distribution of their independent film.

Susan Brice: Making a film is a very one-directional thing because you make it and it goes out to the world and they watch it and who knows what they really think. But making the video podcast was a really dynamic part of the project because you put it up and immediately people are commenting. Some people are making video comments back. The feedback is instantaneous and it affects the next video. It affects everything really. It affects our whole process.

Throughout the film places a strong emphasis upon the communal dimensions of production and circulation in the videoblogging world, resulting in a strong explanation of the kinds of social networks that operate in the realm of participatory culture.

Steve Garfield: Big media looks at videoblogging as a way to distribute content. The cool and fun and interesting part about videoblogging is this part about community and connection and conversation.

Jason Crowe (Chapter 7) situates videoblogging within a larger history of citizen media in America:

Jason Crowe: The history of citizen media in the United States starts with Thomas Paine, and he handed out pamphlets. So, similarly, people today are able to have their own videoblog and kind-of hand out their own pamphlets. So the tradition of independent voices needing an outlet has always been there, but this is just a new way to do it....

When the telegraph was invented, people thought that with the world being totally connected via these wires, and now that people from disparate parts of the world could talk to each other, that we would create world peace. Well, similarly with the Internet connected all different cultures and people... and you can put your media out, we've seen people say, "Oh well this is going to revolutionize the way that people create media and distribute it." I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's a wonderful way to get your message out, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be the beginning of world peace.

Our hope is that this series of documentary segments will allow educators to generate valuable conversations with their students around some of the core skills we identified in our white paper for MacArthur: among them, collective intelligence, networking, and Judgment. In the coming weeks we will be rolling out the next generation of exemplar videos on topics such as "Big Games," DJ culture, Wikipedia, Cosplay, Documentary Production, and Animation. Our team will also be showcasing this work at a range of conferences focused on education and media literacy, including at a special event we are hosting during the Media in Transition conference which our program is hosting in April.

Four Eyed Monsters and Collaborative Curation

Attend the tale of plucky young independent filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley who have tapped every device available to them in the era of participatory culture to get their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters in front of an audience. Rather than waiting for the film to come out on DVD to offer director's extras, Buice and Crumley shot a compelling series of videos about the film's production and released them via iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube, where as of August 2006 they had been downloaded more than 600,000 times. As audience interest in the property grew, the team used their own blog/website to solicit support from their fans, promising that they would insure that the film got shown in any city where there were more than 150 requests. Indeed, they were able to use the online interest expressed in the film to court local exhibitors and convince them that there was an audience for Four Eyed Monsters in their community.

As Crumley explained in an interview with Indiewire:

Most theaters would normally avoid a project like ours because we don't have a distributor who would be marketing the film and getting people to show up. But because the audience of our video podcast is so enthusiastic about the project and because we have numbers and emails and zip codes for all of these people, we've been able to instill enough confidence in theaters to get the film booked.

As of today, the site has received more than 8000 requests from screenings. Fans can use their website to monitor requests and to help them to identify other potential viewers in their neighborhood. As Crumley explained,

We've learned that it's almost impossible to distribute your film to theaters the way the current system works, but their are loop holes, and they are building your own audience and then proving to theater owners you have that audience and that they are willing to show up to pay money to see your film that's something distributors don't have to do, but theaters would really benefit if they did.

The film and the web campaign behind it has drawn interest from the Sundance Channel which plans to broadcast it down the line but who used it to launch a series of screenings of independent films in Second Life, where once again it played to packed houses.

Based on their experiences, the filmmakers have started talking about what they call "collective curation" of content: a scenario where independent producers court audiences via the web, creating interest through clips and previews, and identifying where they have a strong enough following to justify the expense of renting theater space and shipping prints. They believe that such an approach will help other directors get their work before enthusiastic paying customers.

Seeking to support other filmmakers who want to follow in their footsteps, the Four Eyed Monsters team has posted a list of more than 600 movie theaters around the country which they think might be receptive to independent films and encouraging others to fill in relevant details.

The filmmakers will be sharing some of their experiences and perspectives to those attending the Beyond Broadcast conference this Saturday. As reported here earlier, this conference is being co-hosted by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law, and Yale's Information Society Project.

The Four Eyed Monsters team also play a prominent role in the newly released documentary on videoblogging which CMS graduate student (and Beyond Broadcasting organizer) Steve Schultz has helped to produce for the Project nml Exemplar Library. As I have mentioned here before, we are producing a series of web-based documentaries for use by schools and after school programs interested in getting young people involved in media production projects. I will be featuring more information about this documentary down the line but I wanted to call it to your attention in advance of the Beyond Broadcast conference since it provides such a useful overview of the implications of citizen-based media. This is the first of the documentaries produced under the supervision of our newly hired production coordinator, the talented Anna Van Someren.

In Defense of Crud

"Ninety percent of everything is crud" -- Theodore Sturgeon

I have found myself thinking a lot lately about the issue of quality as it relates to the emergence of participatory culture. Several things have raised the issue in my mind:

The first was reading a very interesting essay written by Cathy Young, a regular columnist for Reason magazine, debating the merits of fan fiction. In fact, Young outs herself as someone who has written and published fan fiction set in the universe of Xena: Warrior Princess. She is in turn responding to a diatribe against fan fiction by fantasy writer Robin Hobbs. She writes:

Hobb's indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness. Deriding the idea of fanfic as good training for writers, Hobb wrote, "Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else's world, characters, and plot....The first step to becoming a writer is to have your own idea. Not to take someone else's idea, put a dent in it, and claim it as your own."

Young works through some of the standard defenses of fan fiction (I won't go into all of them here, since I've delivered most of them in the past myself and am a little tired of the arguments.) But she ends with the following:

So is the growth of Internet-based fan fiction a cultural development to be wholeheartedly applauded? Not quite. The good news about the Internet is that, in a world without gatekeepers, anyone can get published. The bad news, of course, is the same. Much fanfic is hosted on sites such as fanfiction.net, where authors can get their work online in minutes--which means that professional-quality stories coexist with barely literate fluff, and reader reviews will sometimes congratulate an author on good grammar and spelling. Even sites that prescreen fanfic and encourage authors to use beta readers and a spell checker tend to be quite lax with quality control, and only a few fan fiction archives are genuinely selective.

For the more sophisticated fanfic lovers, the high crap-to-quality ratio can mean a frustrating search for readable stories. The real problem, though, is that less experienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story. It is frankly disturbing to encounter teenagers and young adults whose recreational reading is limited to fanfic based on their favorite shows, and there have been moments when I have felt like telling some of my own readers to put down the fanfic and pick up a book. It is even more troubling, as far as educational experiences go, that a teenager can wantonly butcher the English language at fanfiction.net and get complimented on a "well-written story."

Golubchik thinks that such concerns are exaggerated. "If anything," she says, "I think that fanfic teaches kids to be more discerning. The quality stuff does tend to percolate to the top; it gets recommended and popularized." Indeed, while the worst of fan fiction can make a Harlequin romance look like Charlotte Bronte, the popular stories are at least no worse in quality--and sometimes far better--than, say, The Da Vinci Code.

The mainstreaming of fan fiction is likely to raise standards further, bringing more educated people into the arena and perhaps encouraging some voluntary gatekeeping, such as contests with input from professional writers or editors...

Perhaps, as with other cultural products often dismissed as intellectual junk food, the answer to bad fanfic is simply better fanfic.

The second was reading a debate between Andrew Keen, the author of a forthcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur (which I am sure to be saying more about down the line) and Chris Anderson, the promoter of the concept of the "Long Tail."

Here's some of what Keen had to say:

Much of the euphoria and optimism about this latest wave of technology is suggesting that we, through these new technologies, are creating better culture. Better movies and music, for instance.

I am not convinced of that. Perhaps I am a reactionary here, defending an anachronistic culture, but my sense is that this latest, democratized culture, this user-generated content, is actually undermining many of our most valuable institutions, including movie studios, music labels, newspapers and publishing....I still think that the wisdom that I value -- the scarcity, to put it in economic terms -- is not in the crowd, but in people with talent and experience, whether they exist in political life, in economic life or cultural life. Rather than fetishizing this idealized crowd -- it seems tremendously abstract -- one can pick up so many examples from history where the crowd has not behaved in a very wise or gentlemanly way. I would rather focus on the value of expertise and the wisdom of people who are trained.

Keen's overtly and unapologetically elitist comments, frankly, get under my skin -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing if it forces those of us who believe in participatory culture to question and defend our own assumptions at a moment when the world seems to be moving more decisively in our directions. So, I find myself thinking a bit more about the vexing issue of quality. So let me offer a range of different responses to the issue:

1.We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process. Consider, for a moment, all of the arts and creative writing classes being offered at schools around the world. Consider, for example, all of the school children being taught to produce pots. We don't do this because we anticipate that very many of them are going to grow up to be professional potters. In fact, most of them are going to produce pots that look like lopsided lumps of clay only a mother could love (though it does say something about how we value culture that many of them do get cherished for decades). We do so because we see a value in the process of creating something, of learning to work with clay as a material, or what have you. There is a value in creating, in other words, quite apart from the value attached to what we create. And from that perspective, the expansion of who gets to create and share what they create with others is important even if none of us produces anything beyond the literary equivalent of a lopsided lump of clay that will be cherished by the intended recipient (whether Mom or the fan community) and nobody else.

2. All forms of art require a place where beginning artists can be bad, learn from their mistakes, and get better. A world of totally professionalized expression masks the apprenticeship process all artists need to undergo if they are going to achieve their full potential. A world where amateur artists can share their work is a world where learning can take place. If the only films you see are multimillion dollar productions by Steven Spielberg, then most of us will assume that we have nothing meaningful to contribute to the culture and give up. If we see films with a range of quality, including some that are, in Sturgeon's terms, "crud," then it becomes possible to imagine ourselves as potentially becoming artists. Bad art inspires more new artists than good art does for this reason: I can do better than that!

3. A world where there is a lot of bad art in circulation lowers the risks of experimentation and innovation. In such a world, one doesn't have to worry about hitting the marks or even making a fool out of oneself. One can take risks, try challenging things, push in new directions because the cost of failure is relatively low. That is why a participatory culture is potentially so generative. Right now, innovation occurs most often at the grassroots level and only subsequently gets amplified by mass media. Professional media is afraid to take risks.

4. Bad art inspires responses which push the culture to improve upon it over time. I have argued elsewhere that fandom is inspired by a mixture of fascination and frustration. If the show didn't fascinate us, we would not keep returning to it. If it fully satisfied us, we would not feel compelled to remake it. Many of the shows that have inspired the most fan fiction are not the best shows but rather they are shows with real potential -- the literary equivalent of the "fixer-upper" that real estate agents always talk about. Over time, bad art may become an irritant, like sand in the oyster, which becomes a pearl when it gets worked over by many different imaginations. Good art may simply close off conversations.

5. Good and Bad, as artistic standards, are context specific. Good for what purposes? Good by what standards? Good for what audiences? In some ways, one can argue that professionally published fiction about popular television shows is superior to at least most fan fiction -- in terms of a certain professional polish in the writing style, in terms of its copy editing, in terms of perhaps its construction of plots. But it is not going to be as good as fan fiction on other levels -- in terms of its insight into the characters and their relationship, in terms of its match with the shared fantasies of the fan community, in terms of its freedom to push beyond certain constraints of the genre.

6. Standards of good and bad are hard to define when the forms of expression being discussed are new and still evolving. This would apply to many of the forms of participatory culture which are growing up around digital media. The forms are too new to have well established standards or fixed cannons.

7. This is not a zero-sum game. It is not clear that the growth of participatory culture does, in fact, damage to professional media making. One could argue that so far most popular work by amateur media makers has been reactive to stories, characters, and ideas generated by mass culture. The two may exist in dialogue with each other. This is certainly true of the kinds of fan culture that Cathy Young is discussing.

We should be less concerned with the presence of "bad art" in participatory culture than with the need to develop mechanisms for feedback which allow artists to learn and grow, the need to develop aesthetic criteria which allow us to meaningful evaluate new and emerging forms of expression or which reflect the particular needs of specific contexts of cultural production, and the need to develop mechanisms which help each consumer to locate forms of cultural expression which they regard to be good.

All of this brings us back to Sturgeon's Revelation: If 90 percent of everything is crud, then we are playing the law of averages. If you increase the number of people producing culture, you increase the amount of good art even if you don't increase the percentage of good art to bad. This is debatable, I suppose, but what is not debatable is that you also increase the diversity of the culture. Many many groups of people have felt excluded by a system of professionalized art and storytelling that might have vital contributions to make to our culture. To embrace what they produce doesn't require us to "lower" our standards but it may require us to broaden them to appreciate new forms of expression that do not fit comfortably within existing aesthetic categories.