How We Help Spread Political Messages...

Today's entry is being cross-posted to our new website for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a joint venture between the Comparative Media Studies and the Media Lab. The website will regularly receive blog posts from all of us involved in the center, will showcase new projects developed by our researchers, and will otherwise offer a guide to the ways people are using new media technologies to strengthen civic engagement at the local level. Check it out and tell us what you think.

I'm scarcely "General Betray-us" yet Moveon.org has declared war on me!

Or so it seemed when I opened my e-mail the other day and discovered that a former student (actually, now multiple former students) had sent me this customized video from the leftward leaning political organization, suggesting what would happen if I didn't vote for Obama. Of course, the jokes on them! -- I voted early since I will be speaking in Eugene, Oregon early next week and then racing back to Boston to watch the returns. If you are depending on my vote to put the guy over, it's already in the bag. Trust me, America, I'm not nearly as bad as this attack ad would seem to suggest.

Of course, what I'm doing right now -- sharing this video with you -- is precisely what the organization was hoping would happen. This is a beautiful example of how spreadable media is contributing to this campaign season. In Convergence Culture, I described the efforts of True Majority, a political organization founded around the principle of "serious fun," and how they had built playful campaign videos (like one where Donald Trump fires W.) in the hopes that people would pass them along to their friends and family members. Research suggests that political messages are far more effective if they are delivered by someone you know and so the challenge is to get average citizens excited enough about political media that they will help to circulate it.

Four years ago, the activists were using the term, "viral media," and I suppose they still are. If I had my way, the term and "memes" along with it would be retired from our vocabulary of talking about how media circulates. There's something sick and unhealthy about the concept of viral media. The term, "viral" operates off a metaphor of infection, assuming that the public are unwilling carriers of messages -- yet I doubt very much that the students who sent me this video were in any sense unwilling or unknowing about what they were doing. The concept of "viral media" strips aside the agency of the participants who are sending along this video for their own reasons -- in this case, a mixture of political zeal and personal affection and probably some sense that I would find the video intellectually interesting. The term, "meme," implies that culture is "self-replicating" rather than actively reshaped by the choices made by individual consumers and subcultural communities.

So, the folks at MoveOn probably thought they had created "viral media." In fact, they created a powerful example of "spreadable media." What makes it powerful is that they made it easy for individuals to customize the content of the video to make it more personally meaningful or more important, to make it meaningful in specific social contexts, to make it meaningful in relation to their social networks. The content is playful and fun; there's a certain fascination with the mechanisms which imprint personally significant names over the repurposed video content; there's some delight in seeing myself praised by conservative pundits and even by George W.

As we pass this content along, it facilitates conversations among friends and it allows us to signify to each other our mutual recognition and respect for the civic rituals which surround the political process. When people send me this video, they intend it as a gift -- which is to say, they intend it to reaffirm the social ties we feel towards each other. Its circulation is certainly meaningful on Moveon's terms -- they hope that I will not only affirm its message but pass it along to someone else -- but it is also meaningful on our terms which may be quite different. I could, for example, construct and send one to my socially conservative brother (as a friendly ribbing from Blue America to Red America) and he might pass it along to his friends at work (expressing outrage against what left-wing organizations are saying about that closet socialist and Moslem). And so the process continues.

We've been spending a fair amount of time through the Convergence Culture Consortium reflecting on the properties of spreadable media over the past year. One CMS graduate student, Sheila Seldes, applies this concept to the free circulation of Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising over at the Convergence Culture Consortium's blog and we will be discussing the concept of "spreadability" at the Futures of Entertainment III conference Nov. 21-22.

The political use of spreadability is particularly interesting: while media companies are clearly ambivalent about our ability to take their content and spread it among our friends, political campaigns actively solicit our help in moving their message throughout our social networks. Indeed, much of the emerging literature on civic engagement suggests that such social networks may be replacing the kinds of social organizations which Robert Putnam saw as at the center of American civic life. Most political organizations rely on us to relay meaningful content to others in our friendship circle because they lack the money to launch an all-out media blitz around their message (Obama's "shock and awe" advertising strategies for the final weeks of the campaign is a notable exception.) I believe that if we study the circulation of political content, we may develop a better understanding of the mechanisms which encourage spreadability and the kinds of choices consumer/citizens make when they decide to pass a video along to their friends.

So, here's another fascinating example of spreadable media content. While it lacks the built-in capacity for customization, it has the added feature of a certain kind of "remember when" nostalgia. This video specifically reminds us of the original Whazzup Budweisser Beer commercial from 2000. I'm sure that it's still stuck in your head if you were at all conscious in 2000 but here's a copy if you want to go back and compare notes.

The original spot has a special place in the literature on "viral media." Aired during the Super Bowl, the spot became an instant classic, one that people spoke about, but more importantly, one which was widely parodied across a range of digital communities. And each time we saw the soundtrack of the video applied in a new context -- members of the Clinton Administration, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Superfriends, and so forth -- the core branding message got repeated. Bud certainly spent a lot of money for the initial exposure but then many people furthered their promotional aims by sending a succession of pastiche videos along to their friends.

So, part of the power of the new video is that it reminds us of our own role in spreading the original video. it helps that the original video came out during the 2000 campaign which George W. Bush in the White House and thus represents an ideal marker of the passing of time and of what has happened to America over those eight years. The soundtrack implicitly asks us whether we are better off now than we were eight years ago and demands to know what we are going to do about it. The frat boy humor of the original video evokes a more carefree time (suggesting "goofing off" with college friends) as a contrast to the adult responsibilities and dire consequences which confront these same characters today. Even our annoyance over being reminded of the "Whazzup" campaign also can be directed towards a president who famously uses fraternity style nicknames for the members of his administration, as Oliver Stone's W has brought back to everyone's attention. Nostalgia is often a spur for the circulation of spreadable media content but in this case, memories of the past are designed to provoke a particular kind of historical consciousness.

Or let's tackle a final set of videos which have been spreading over the final weeks of the campaign. The first is a video where someone re-purposed footage of John McCain for comic effect: in this case, the video draws a parallel between McCain's mannerisms and those of a particular super-villain much beloved by comic book fans. The analogy between McCain and the Penguin is one that I've seen surface many different ways in recent weeks, but never more effectively than in this video. And the video works because it gives us a new comic frame through which to interpret McCain's mannerisms.The video doesn't offer us a deep political analysis: at best it allows us to put a name on something which might have been unnerving us all along. Whatever meaning it carries comes, however, from the social transactions which occur around us, through the ways that circulating the video to others reaffirms our own political commitments and links them to deeper social ties.

The Penguin analogy, however, may also allow us to make sense of this other video which has been circulating without much explicit commentary -- an excerpt from the 1966 Adam West Batman series featuring a debate between Batman and the Penquin. For people of my generation, this video carries enormous nostalgic value. This is a much valued segment of our childhood imaginary. Yet, the repurposing of this footage right now forces us to read the scene through a totally different lens and in turn, the content of the video gives us layer upon layer of satirical commentary on the recent Presidential debates. Once again, this is content I've felt compelled to share with my students, my friends, my family, and now, my blog readers for a variety of different reasons. I am not an unwilling or unknowing participant in this process; this is not "self-replicating" culture; there is simply a powerful alignment between my social goals and the political agendas of those who have excerpted and recirculated this content.

Thanks to John Campbell, Kelly Whitney, and Joshua Diaz for calling these examples to my attention.

Framing the Candidates (Part One): A Closer Look at Campaign Biography Videos

George Lakoff's book, Don't Think About an Elephant, has been one of the most influential arguments about the nature of American politics to emerge in recent years. Lakoff, a linguist, turned his attention to the "framing" of political discourse. If you want to look more closely at his argument, "A Man of His Words" is an online excerpt which pulls out most of the ideas that are going to interest us here. Lakoff argues that the Democrats lose elections even though they often have the facts on their side because the Republicans typically frame the debate. Consider for example the ways McCain has transformed the current energy crisis from one which might deal with the environment or economics or alternative energy to one which rises and falls on the question of off-shore drilling. Or consider the ways that the Republicans have deployed terms like "maverick" and "reformer" to distance themselves from the Bush administration. To turn this around, the Democrats need to reinvent themselves -- not by shifting their positions but by altering the frame.

As Lakoff explains, "Reframing is social change.... Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense." Much of the early excitement around Obama was that he seemed to offer the most compelling new way to "reframe" progressive politics and thus offered a way out of failed rhetoric of the past. For some, this is about style over substance or a matter of "just words," but Lakoff argues that framing is about a structure of ideas that gets evoked through particular words and phrases but has its own deep logic that shapes how and what we think.

In a simple yet suggestive analysis, Lakoff characterizes progressive and reactionary politics in terms of what he calls the Nurturing Parent and the Strict Father frames. According to the Strict Father model, Lakoff writes, "the world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. ...Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right." The strict father "dares to discipline" his family and supports a president who will discipline the nation and ultimately, the world. According to the progressive "nurturing parent" scenario, "Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. ...The parents' job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others."

Swing voters share aspects of both world views. The goal of politics, Lakoff suggests, is to "activate your model in the people in the middle" without pushing them into the other camp.

We can see this as almost a reverse of old-style Christian doctrine in which the relation of a husband to his wife or a father to his child is supposed to mirror the relations of God to man. In this case, the family becomes a microcosm through which we can understand the relationship of the president to the nation and the world.

This is consistent with an argument that I put forth in the introduction to The Children's Culture Reader that the Republicans and the Democrats both use the figure of the child as a rhetorical device in talking about their visions for the future of the country, but they understand the family in very different terms. In an analysis of the 1996 GOP and Democratic national conventions, I contrasted Hillary Clinton's deployment of the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" with oft-cited Republican images of the family as a "fort" defending its members against a hostile world.

As a teacher, I've found that one of the best ways to introduce this important argument to my classes has been to engage in a critical comparison between the official campaign biography videos, shown at the national conventions, and intended to link the candidate's personal narrative with the larger themes of the campaign. Here, we can see very explicit connections between the ways that the two parties understand the family and the nation. These videos are easy to access on the web and bring into your classrooms.

Over my next three posts, I will look more closely at first the videos for the two Presidential candidates, then the bios for the two Vice Presidential candidates, and finally parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show. I am hoping that this will provide inspiration for educators who might want a way to talk about the campaigns, the differences between the parties, and the role of media in the process.

First, a few general points. Students often react to these videos when they first see them as if they were documentaries, straight forward presentations of the facts of the candidates' lives. If Obama and McCain tell very different stories, it is because they led very different lives. And this is of course partially true. The videos mobilize elements from the candidate's biographies to construct narratives about them which are designed to introduce them to the American people. For many votes, these videos and the acceptance speeches are the first time they are paying attention to these candidates.

Yet, keep in mind the role selectivity plays here -- we can't tell everything about their lives in a short video, so get students to think about what they decide to include and what they leave out of these videos. There's also the question of framing -- what gets said by the candidate, by the people in his or her family, by others, and by the narrator -- which helps us to understand this person in specific ways. And then there's the matter of technique -- what kinds of images do we see, what role does the music play in setting the tone for these stories.

I've found that these videos work best in a classroom setting where I show them side by side so that the students compare the differences in their approach. On one level, there's a well established genre here -- a general framing, followed by childhood experiences, early career, courtship and marriage, education, national service, early political life, fatherhood and family, and launch of the campaign. These similarities make it easy to see the differences in framing at work. If you are pushed for time, as I was in class the other day, you are better off showing the first 2-3 minutes of each, and then getting the discussion started, than showing one through all the way. It is through the comparison that we really understand how these videos deploy melodramatic devices and images of the family to shift how we think about the candidate's relationship to the nation.

Obama and the Nurturing Parent Frame

From start to finish, the Obama video is focused on constructing the ideal image of the nurturing parent who will insure the well being of all Americans. The very opening lines of the video already evoke the image of childhood: "It is a promise we make to our children that each of us can make what we want from our lives" and the climax of the video comes when we return to that opening statement and build upon it: "It was a promise his mother made to him and that he intended to keep." Think about the difference between talking about the "American promise" and the "American dream," and you know a great deal about the ideological differences between the two parties.

The idea of "empathy" is a central cornerstone of the family as depicted in this video. It emerges most powerfully in the story about Obama's mother urging him to "imagine standing in that person's shoes. How would that make you feel." and again, by the end of the video, this concept of empathy becomes a cornerstone of Obama's relationship to the nation, as he describes how he remembers his mother as he travels "from town to town." Empathy runs through the list of values Obama tells us that he and Michelle want to pass down to their children: "hard work, honesty, self-reliance, respect for other people, a sense of empathy, kindness, faith." And we can see this respect for nurturing and empathy when he talks about the death of his mother, who was "the beating heart" of their family. Indeed, moments when candidates talk about personal losses of family members and loved ones are often potent appeals to the viewer's own empathy, since many of us feel our common humanity most powerfully through our shared experience of mortality.

And this logic of empathy emerges through the suggestion that Obama knows first hand the suffering and anxieties felt by average Americans: "I know what it's like not to have a father in the house, to have a mother who's trying to raise kids, work, and get her college education at the same time. I know what it's like to watch grandparent's age, worrying about whether their fixed income is going to be able to cover the bills."

We can see this last comment as part of a larger strategy in the video to depict Obama's personal narrative as the "story" of America and his "search for self" as a quest to better understand the nation that gave him birth. As the narrator explains, "By discovering his own story, he would come to know what is remarkable about his country." And this is an outgrowth of the first thing we are told about his mother, that she knew her son was an American "and he needs to understand what that means."

This video works hard to combat images of Obama's background as exotic, as outside the mainstream. There is no reference here to Hawaii and only an implicit nod to the fact that he spent part of his life overseas, even though this last detail has been central to the candidate's appeal internationally. The focus is on the most "heartland" aspects of his family background -- a strong focus on his grandparents who come from Kansas, and their experience of the Depression and World War II. Obama got into trouble for suggesting that some people in rural Pennsylvania were "bitter," so the video is careful to say that his grandparents were not "complainers." When it comes time to capture his sense of pride in his country, he tells a story about sitting on his grandfather's shoulders and waiving a flag at the return of the astronauts.

The representation here of his marriage might be summed up with the old feminist slogan, "the personal is the political." Michelle describes the moment she fell in love with Barrack: watching him deliver a speech in the basement of a community center in which he spells out "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be." This story collapses Obama's hopes for his family and his hopes for his country in a sublime moment of utopian possibilities. Michelle emerges as the ideal arbiter of his political integrity because she can testify that he lives these values through his personal lives.

And the final statement of the "nurturing parent" model comes when Obama tells us, "One person's struggle is all of our struggles." The government becomes a mutual support system that looks after its weakest members in a world which is often unjust. The president's job is to insure that all of his children gets what they need and deserve and that the "American promise" gets fulfilled and transfered to the next generation.

McCain and the Strict Father Model

If the Obama video sets up issues of nurtering and empathy from its first images, suggested by the long panning shots across American faces and a voiceover about the "American Promise," the McCain video opens with us staring directly into the face of the candidate as a young naval officer, trying to read his character and understand the relationship of this national service to the "mission" ahead. The opening narration starts with descriptions of him as "a warrior, a soldier, a naval aviator, a Pow," before pulling us down to the family -- "a father, a son, a husband", then into his political career. And then we get that surprising moment when he is called "a mother's boy," one suggestion of softness amid a series of hypermasculine sounds, images, and terms. My students suggested that the reference to the mother helps him deal with issues of age and mortality, yet it also seems part of a strategy to manage the negative associations which many independents and Democrats may feel towards the repeated references to his toughness throughout the video.

Strength of character and conviction, coupled with physical toughness as proven through war, are the central virtues ascribed to McCain by the video and they are introduced here once again through the narrative of his family. As suggested by the gender specificity of the "Strict father" construction, the family here, except for the references to the mother, is represented almost entirely through patriarchal bloodlines -- again a contrast to the absent father and strong mother image in the Obama video. We learn about his grandfather who died the day he returned from World War II; we learn about his father who ordered the carpet bombing of a country where his son was held captive, even as he waited at the border hoping for his return. When we see him with his son in the opening series of shots, he is standing alone with his offspring on the side of a mountain. Fatherhood is an extension of manhood and it gets expressed through discipline and competition more than through images of cuddling and craddling.

The critical moments here, of course, deal with his Vietnam war experience which require a recognition of vulnerability and weakness even as the larger narrative centers around his toughness and will power. Consider this key description: "Critically injured, his wounds never properly addressed, for the next five and a half years, John was tortured and dragged from one filthy prison to another, violently ill, often in solitary confinement, he survived through the faith he learned from his father and grandfather, the faith that there was more to life than self."

So, again, we see the passing down of civic virtue through male bloodlines as a central motif in this video. There's no question that the video constructs these experiences as a form of martyrdom out of which a national leader emerged: "The constant torture and isolation could have produced a bitter, broken man. Instead he came back to America with a smile -- with joy and optimism. He chose to spend his life serving the country he loved." or consider the phrase, "he chose to spend four more years in Hell." Or the ways the video depicts his role in the normalization of relations with Vietnam -- "Five and a half years in their hell and he chose to go back because it was healing for America. That's country first." Note this is one of the few places where metaphors of "caring" or "healing" surface in the video and it is specifically in relation to the pain of wartime. A more complex metaphor emerges as Fred Thompson reads aloud a passage from McCain's autobiography about "living in a box" and ends with "when you've lived in a box, your life is about keeping others from having to endure that box."

This toughness and individualism carries over into the discussions of national policy. McCain doesn't believe that the country should care for each of its members but rather he has "a faith in the American people's ability to chart their own course." He is "committed to protect the American people but a ferocious opponent of pork barrel spending and would do most anything to keep taxes low and keep our money in our pockets." What is implied by that contrast between "protecting" the public and "pork barrel spending" and "higher taxes"? There is a clear sense that as a stern father he will give us what we really need but protect us from our own baser urges and desires.

While the Obama video distributed its points across a range of different voices, including a large number of women, the McCain video tends to rely on a voice of God narrator who speaks the unquestioned truth about this man and on comments from McCain himself. All of this creates a more authoritarian/authoritative structure where truth comes from above, rather than emerging from listening to diverse voices, and reflects this notion of stern responsibility rather than nurturing.

This centralized discourse is consistent with the videos focus on experience and its tendency to read McCain as "superior" to others -- "no one cherishes the American dream more," for example, but also no candidate has had his experiences in public service. There is an underlying suggestion here of predestination -- "McCain's life was somehow sparred -- perhaps he had more to do." In this case, the hint is that he is fulfilling God's plan for him and for the country. This issue of predestination resurfaces near the end when the video repurposes some of the core themes of the Obama campaign, including some that McCain has criticized and turns them around, "What a life, what a faith, what a family! What good fortune that America will chose this leader at precisely this time. The stars are aligned. Change will come. But change must be safety, prosperity, optimism, and peace. The change will come from strength -- from a man who found his strength in a tiny dank cell thousands of miles from home."

There's so much more that we could say about both of these videos and that's the point. They are great resources for teaching young people to reflect critically on the ways the campaigns are being "framed." Next time, I will look more closely at the Vice Presidential videos.

Teaching "Ahab": An Interview with MC Lars

Not terribly long ago, I made a blog post discussing the nerdcore performer MC Lars and his music video, "Ahab," as appropriations from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

We have been using Lars's video as a resource for our Teacher's Strategy Guide for "Reading in a Participatory Culture." I ended the post with a plea to help me get in touch with MC Lars and it's a tribute to the network which has emerged around this blog that a little later, I did hear from the performer (and ex-Lit major) who was excited to learn that we were deploying his performance in schools. Since then, MC Lars agreed to respond to a set of questions submitted to him by Rebecca Rupert's students from Aurora Alternative High School in Bloomington IN. It serves students who have not experienced success in traditional settings. Rupert's English Language Arts classes are part of the pilot program for our project. I added a few more questions in the mix myself designed to place the students' questions in a fuller context.

How would you define nerdcore?

To me, nerdcore hip-hop is a genre of music that has lyrical content of things "nerds" would typically be interested in: computers, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, Magic the Gathering, Lord of the Rings, etc. Culturally, nerdcore "trades on" the implied notion that "authentic" hip-hop artists from urban areas spend less time reading comic books and more time "doing drive-by shootings", hence the instanty novelty appeal of the genre to any one familiar with pop culture. One can also ascertain the implication that nerdcore is "4th generation hip- hop created by 3rd generation hip-hop's target audience", as a new generation of thousands of rappers who make beats on their computers can attest. Nerdcore can be viewed as hip-hop created by a generation of artists whose parents may have grown up listening to artists of the genre's golden age, such as Chuck D, KRS-One, and Eric B & Rakim (much like the punk generation grew up listening to the three chord progressions of the early Beatles and distilled it into a more distilled presentation). If one wants to be cynical and explore how hip-hop has transcended racial and class boundaries, there is an implication that nerdcore is "white hip-hop", in lack of acknowledgement of its African American cultural roots.

How did you get involved in the movement?

I started out playing guitar in punk bands as a teenager growing up on the Monterey Peninsula. When I started by undergraduate work at Stanford, I was drawn to KZSU, a station that proudly boasts having "the oldest hip-hop show on the West Coast". One of my projects was to alphabetize the vinyl library of thousands and thousands of records... and this gave me a quick education on every important performer in the first 30 years of hip-hop. I continued writing and performing my rap songs, and when I went to study in Oxford, I made friends with local indie rock bands who asked me to open for them. This led to me getting signed to a British label and everything else that followed. When "nerdcore" became an "authentic" genre in 2003/2004, I looked it up on Wikipedia and saw that I was officially part of the movement. Reading more about it I was happy to have the label as a description of part of what I do.

How do you see "Ahab" as part of the larger nerdcore movement?

There isn't an MC in the scene who raps about 19th century American literature. I

thought it was time to make waves, so to speak. Nerdcore is an important cultural

phenomenon because it gives voice to people who write songs about things they love, and nerdcore gives license to people to rap about very "un-hip-hop" topics. I enjoyed my literature studies in college and wanted to write a song about one of my favorite books, and because only people with a certain education and understanding will understand what I'm doing, that makes "Ahab" part of the larger nerdcore movement. My hope is to inspire kids to read more Melville and turn off their televisions (after watching my video, of course).

One of the students got very passionate in arguing that mc Chris was better at rapping than you. This raises the question: How do we evaluate appropriations and remixing of materials within nerdcore?

Great question. Chris Ward is a talented rapper with a strong flow whose success can be directly attributed to his voice work for Cartoon Network and his comedic blurring of the line between "real hip-hop culture" and "nerd culture". He trades on the notion, as mentioned in my response in your first question, that nerdcore is unique in its lacking of songs about "bitches, blunts, and 40's". But Chris surprises people with album titles like "Life's a Bitch and I'm Her Pimp" and songs about recreational drugs, to show that nerds can relate to comedic elements of gangsta rap culture in their own ways. One might argue that he is a better rapper than me because of this, but I would argue that his act plays on elements of mocking African-American culture and verges on being a minstrel show. His voice and grammatical choices emulate African American culture in a way that would make the typical person laugh, this being its primary selling point. We evaluate mc chris's appropriation of culture by his closeness to "authentic hip-hop" and his use of comedy in the blurring of lines between "gangsta" and "nerd" culture. Other elements for evaluation of appropriation and remixing include musical craftmanship in constructing "beats", vocabulary, and originality in subject matter in writing lyrics.

Can you share some of your own experiences as a reader of Moby- Dick? When did you first read the novel? Do you consider yourself a fan of Moby-Dick?

I first read Moby-Dick as a Junior in college. My professor Jay Fliegelman taught a class on Melville, and we read Moby-Dick and some of Melville's shorter stories. I remember being frustrated at first with the slow pacing of the novel, but found myself being drawn into it one chapter at a time. I love the metaphor of the Pequod as a cross section of 19th century American life, with all of the racial and class diversity of American society at the time, and the depth of the characters who reflected different elements of American life during that time. The layers of metaphor and allegorical references are dense, and the footnotes to the Norton Critical Edition were very helpful in discerning the meaning. I am definitely a fan of Moby-Dick, especially because of the overarching theme of mankind's hubris in the face of Mother Nature's sublime indifference.

You've sung about the so-called "iGeneration" in ways that are very similar to our concept of new media literacies. What do you think this generation is bringing to the culture and what do you see as the relationship of these new ways of thinking to the things we've traditionally taught through school?

The iGeneration is the generation that grew up with an innate familiarity with the

internet. Kids can instantly access music by any band, old or new, and can find

information and background info on any film or book ever written through any medium they want. We are used to hyper-stimulation, chatting on AOL instant messenger while

emailing friends while watching a movie while download torrents while updating our

websites. We are used to creating our own niches within the subcultures through which

define ourselves, through Myspace pages of our local bands, or YouTube videos of our

local comedy troupes. But technology has shortened our attention spans as well, to the

point where if we can't "Wiki" something and understand it instantly, we move on.

Students can now comprehend the world a lot faster than the previous generation, because we are used to old technologies and are adept at using new technologies more quickly. We are used to processing many streams of information at once and are more discerning about the sources and intentions of those preventing the information (.com, .org, .gov etc.). Basically the "iGeneration" is the "information / internet" generation who is bringing new technologies and creative ways of implementing them and has the

responsibility of using their powers to leave the world a better place when we go. With

all of the technology at their disposal, the iGeneration could come together and find

cures for AIDS and for global warming, if we put down the Wii controller and log off of

Myspace for an afternoon. It's an exciting time to be alive and affecting culture.

What follows are the student's questions and his responses, including Lars's advice to teachers who want to engage the "iGeneration" with excitement about traditional literature.

Why did you want to make this video?

To retell Moby-Dick in an engaging and exciting way and to promote my 2006 release The Graduate. With our media-saturated culture, videos are an important way to promote albums and "Ahab" was a fun single from the last record.

How long did it take you to make this video?

I was on tour in Australia for most of June of 2006 when preparation for "Ahab" began, but the set designers and artists spent three weeks creating the sets, ship, and fish costumes. When I got back, we rented a warehouse in Brooklyn and filmed for two hot summer days, from 6 am to midnight. The post-production lasted another two weeks, compositing such scenes as the boat floating in the sea, the transition between the sailors on-deck and below the ship, and and exiting of the whale's stomach to reveal a cast of students taking bows. The entire project took 6 weeks of very hard work.

Why was it so cheap?

We had a finite video budget of $3,000, which is why the aesthetic differs from a Kanye West video. That's why it looks "cheap", or quite conveniently, like a school play.

Why did you put people in fishy costumes?

I made the video to show students how books can help us explore worlds we've never been to before. I wanted to bring the world of Herman Melville's dark tale to light, as done through the eyes of a 4th grade production. Our aesthetic for costume design was that of the feel of 80's-era PBS learning programs, such as Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow, where the fantasy world of imagination and the real world were brought together with color costumes and low budgets. The entire video was shot in just a few conjoined takes, to give the feel of a live performance. Having kids reenact every aspect of the novel was a pivotal part of the framing device of the presentation is a children's play for adults, which is why the choreographed dancing in the fish costumes was a key part in the design and presentation. The charm of a grade-school production is meant to help emulsify Melville's weighty prose.

Why is the whale limpy?

I'd like to have an erudite, complex answer for you, but the truth is that we had a

relatively small service elevator we had to use to get the Moby Dick model up to the

third floor of the warehouse where we shot. Moby was carried by three very patient PA's on the set, who walked around with walkie talkies and listened as the director Sean

Donnelly shouted directions to them. The tail was originally designed to move up and

down by the people in the costume, but it was snapped in half when we crammed the

costume into the elevator. Hence its unintentional "limpy-ness" - giving it a relaxed,

limp appearance, and perhaps more charm.

What point were you trying to make--were you trying to make fun of Moby-Dick or what was the point behind it?

As a writer, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope are big influences on my work. Swift

reveals mankind's shortcomings through his portrayal of the human condition and Pope was a master of the satirical verse and social commentary. Both of these writers were

influences on me as I worked to retell Moby-Dick for a younger audience to remind us that hubris can be deadly, and until we learn that the sublime power of nature is nothing to be tempted, we will be doomed to repeat Ahab's fate. When I wrote the song in 2005, the Iraq War was in its relatively early stages and many people in the media were comparing Bush to Ahab, a crazed leader in search of the white whale of terrorism, seeking justice in a confused and self-destructive way. It made me think about how relevant the story still was, so I decided to retell the book for a new audience,

updating it with modern references (Steve Wozniak, Supergrass, etc.) and compressed it into a Wiki-Wiki version, the cliff notes version of the cliff notes. It serves as a

warning for future politicians who may become crazed with power, presented in a fun,

catchy way.

How would you teach Moby-Dick to make it fun for students?

Young people have been brought up in a postmodern cut-and-past culture, replete with pop culture references and media saturations. A steady beat and cadence draws listeners in, as they are used to hyper- stimulation. Hip-hop is a very, very effective way to pique students' interest, in any topic, since it is the platonic manifestation of postmodern culture. I am intrigued by the lineage between Chaucer and KRS-One, a tradition of verse that reflects our struggles and victories as human beings.

As a lesson plan, I would encourage students to read Moby-Dick and find characters with which they identify. I would encourage students to keep an eye open for some of the less famous characters, such as Daggoo or Tashtego. I would then ask them to each write an 8 to 16 line verse that interprets their characters' experiences in the novel, and ask them to explore how these characters could be translated to a modern context.... either through their similarities to modern celebrities or how they reflect struggles of notably personalities in current events. For instance, Fedallah's stowaway experiences could shine light on immigration policies, while Pip could shine light on child labor laws or the class struggle.

I would then have students get into groups of three to four people each, bringing their verses together and create a song. I'd ask them to find similar themes between themselves to find a "hook" for the chorus song. They could then think of a lyrical chorus that reflects these similarities between character, and perform the "rap" for the class. Some instrumental beats that could convey the cadences and rhythms of such a translation are as follow:

Hip Hop by Dead Prez

Shook Ones Part II by Mobb Deep

MC's Act Like They Don't Know by KRS-One

This would show students how the plights of the characters in Moby-Dick relate to current events, and through an updated presentation of the form, this exercise would also inspire them to find more similarities between works 19th century literature and postmodern life in the 21st century.

Speaking of Geeks

A little while ago, I mentioned that the CMS grad students had been reading The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in anticipation of a conversation with its author, Junot Diaz. Given the interest this generated for some readers, I wanted to add a pointer to the podcast version of that exchange. Diaz offers a masterful account for why he thinks comics, science fiction, and horror may speak truths that are excluded from official histories or from "serious literature" and explains how his novel was structured in part around borrowings from The Fantastic Four and Dune. Enjoy.

DJ Le Clown Rocks the Total Recut Contest

A while back, I posted an interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher to publicize their video competition around the theme, "What is Remix Culture?" I had been asked to join a panel of judges ranging from intellectual property expert Lawrence Lessig to fan vidder Luminosity in assessing the finalists in the competition. This weekend, Total Recut announced the winners of the contest and I wanted to give a shout out to the finalists here. The First Place prize went to DJ Le Clown for his haunting and hypnotic Xmas in New York City. In his artist's statement, the DJ writes:

I'm a perfect product of the TV generation. I was raised with TV; through it I discovered cinema and music. I think cinema is now old enough to become an international langage - maybe the strongest one, along with music and painting.

Hazards of life led me to be a musician, and each song or piece of music I created brought images into my mind. Then came the computers time, that gave anybody - through the screen again - the opportunity to create whatever they could imagine.

3 years ago I started to work on "Mashups" ; it consists of melting songs from differents horizons together. I must confess that I first considered "Mashups" or "Bootlegs" as the most vulgar form of music possible, before I realized - trying it myself - that it was another way of giving songs a kind of second chance...A second life.

Songs (especially since they're recorded) are like Movies - somewhere a kind of lifes trap, and the good one always survive their creators...so as I decided to make videos for each of my tracks to play them live, it was natural for me to use any image sources I wanted - movies, the artist's images, of course, but also TV series, shows, commercials - well all bits of what I consider like our common cultural backup, and that you can now find easily on the web!

I really think that all of these belong to us - from Popeye the Sailor Man to David Vincent and Dracula or Dr Mabuse; it's now part of our culture ; like a bank of symbols anyone can use to express his own ideas.

His video starts with fairly comforting images of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sharing egg nog and talking about the Yuletime season. Before the video is over, Sinatra's "Santa Clause is Coming" begins to feel more like a warning than a promise. The soundtrack samples and remixes Sinatra with AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, Benzio and the Pogues while the visual track creates complex layers and juxtapositions drawn from music videos, old Christmas specials, and disaster films. There is an unnerving suggestion of dystopian or appocalyptic futures awaiting us as Santa descends on New York City, such that the snowflakes normally associated with Christmas carry hints of nuclear fallout or cataclysmic climate change, depending on what your generation is and what you've been taught to fear. As one of the judges notes, the video may go on a tad too long but it never the less creates its own aesthetic through both sound and images which suggests how we may plow through the image banks and sound files of the past to give them new life through remix culture.

The Second place winner, Jata Haan's Composition, is perhaps even more original and provocative in its approach, but it is not as self contained and depends more heavily on its written statement to achieve its full effect. As she explains:

For my first experiment in remix video I wanted to create a short work entirely from creative commons licensed media, with an aim to simply illustrate the vast amount of this content that is available online, and the potential for using it in creative ways. I was also very interested in demonstrating the opportunities that remix culture combined with the Internet present for collaborative work, which for me reflects exciting new ways of communicating and interacting globally. I chose the Sydney Opera House as the subject of my piece not only for it's connection with my homeland, but also for it's iconic appearance and the amount of material available online. This short video was made possible through the use of creative commons content (with an attribution or attribution share-alike license) from more than 100 individuals, which when remixed together brings to life this beautiful building in a unique composition.

This is a fascinating experiment in collaborative authorship: the filmmaker is able to integrate snap shots produced by a range of photographers to create a continuous flow of images of the Sydney Opera House seen from many different angles. The use of retro sounds of slide and super 8 projectors adds to the effect of a home movie, although in this case, the film is actually a composite of snap shots taken by a range of amateur photographers. It suggests the way remix allows us to bridge between personal and collective memory.

Many of the other videos in the competition are worth visiting as well. Each of the finalists has something to recommend them and taken as a whole, the videos give us a snap shot of the current state of remix culture. When I agreed to judge the competition, I had expected to see documentaries which explicitly addressed the politics and poetics of remix culture -- and some of the finalists do that more or less -- but in the end what impressed me about the top place videos was how they embodied the expressive potential of remix and suggested rather than stated the opportunities for collaborative production embodied in these practices.

Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File

During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. These images often got passed along via e-mail or posted on blogs as a way of enlivening political debates. Like classic editorial cartoons, they paint in broad strokes, trying to forge powerful images or complex sets of associations that encapsulate more complex ideas. In many cases, they aim lower than what we would expect from an established publication and so they are a much blunter measure of how popular consciousness is working through shifts in the political landscape. Many of them explore the borderlands between popular culture and American politics. I called this "Photoshop for Democracy" and the ideas got expanded in the final chapters of Convergence Culture. I thought back on my arguments there this past week as I've begun to search out some of the images being generated in response to John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Given the intense flood of news coverage around this decision, the ways that it has shaken up the terms of the campaign, and the ways that it challenges gender assumptions surrounding the Republican leadership, it is no surprise that it has provoked a range of response. And I thought it might be interesting to dissect some of these images here.

Some of the first images that circulated around the Palin appointment were, in effect, frauds. They sought to tap into the media feeding frenzy and the blogosphere's search for any incriminating evidence. Some of these images were probably already in circulation in Alaska before the announcement, while others may have emerged quickly as the nation started to learn who this woman is. Here are two examples. Both suggest the ways that Palin doesn't fit our expectations about what a female politician looks like. For the first time, we have a vice presidential candidate who is young, feminine, and well as she is one of the first to acknowledge, "hot." She was after all a runner up for the Miss Alaska competition and this couldn't be further removed from our current Vice President or for that matter, the tough matronly style adopted by America's most successful female politicians. Camile Paglia celebrates Palin in a recent Salon article: "In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment." Needless to say, Palin's appearance and persona provokes strong reactions, ones which struggle to separate anxieties that she may be a Stepford Wife or a Barbie from a more generalized dismissal of attractive women. This first image plays on the fact that Palin did pose for photographs for Vogue by constructing a mock cover of the magazine.

This second plays with the contradiction between the sexy mom] and the rough and tumble Alaskan. She's a "babe," in this case, a Bikini-clad "Babe," who also knows how to shoot and skin her own meat. This image was deemed sufficiently plausible that it needed to be discredited at the Urban Legends site.

Those of you who watched the televised convention no doubt caught the disconcerting images of 70 something male delegates bearing buttons bragging about how "hot" Governor Palin is. Given the actual buttons circulated at the convention, this mock button is not as far fetched as it might seem, though now we are moving into the space of political humor rather than anything that was meant to deceive the viewer.

This next one juxtaposes erotic images of Palin with the very real anxieties about mortality raised by McCain's age. One of the most powerful arguments against the Palin appointment has been the concerns about what would happen if McCain were to die in office. And before he announced her pick, pundits had said that he needed to choose someone who would reassure voters that the VP would be prepared to move into the top office and stabilize the country.

This Photoshop collage also calls attention to the vast age difference between the 70-something McCain and his 30-something running mate -- in this case, by reading the pairing in relation to the Anna Nicole Smith case. This is a classic example of how grassroots political humor maps politics onto popular culture, thus allowing us to mobilize our expertise as fans or simply readers of People magazine to make sense of the complexities of American politics.

Several images in circulation read Palin as a superhero. Indeed, I was struck when I first saw her that she had adopted many of the stylistic choices of female superheroes in their alterego disguises -- her hair up in a bun, big librarian glasses. These "serious" trappings no more mask the beauty queen underneath than Clark Kent's glasses hide Superman and in the real world, they can come across as inauthentic. You add that with the stories of her braving the elements and slaughtering Alaskian wildlife and you can imagine the Amazon underneath the librarian disguise. I have been imagining that moment which would be inevitable if this were a movie where she takes off her glasses, lets out her hair, and gives a sultry look to the American voters.

This next image pushes the conception of Palin as superhero in an entirely different direction -- this time, she's Batgirl. Here, she fits into an ongoing series of popular images which depict McCain as Bush's "sidekick," one of the ways that the idea that McCain represents a continuation of the Bush administration, a constant refrain at the Democratic convention, is entering the popular imagination. So, she's now the "sidekick" of a "sidekick," who will likewise continue the Bush Administration's policies for "four more years."

Given the ways that Palin's announcement has been intertwined with debates about teen pregnancy, it is no surprise that the poster for Juno has become a basic resource for people wanting to comment on these issues. Many feminists have already critiqued the film for making teen pregnancy and adoption seem like the only viable option for its protagonists. And of course, it doesn't hurt that Juneau is one of the larger cities in Palin's home state.

I couldn't resist throwing in two additional examples surrounding the McCain campaign. This first links McCain himself to Doctor Strangelove as a way of conveying the fear that the candidate may be a war-mongerer.

The second playfully reworks an Obama poster, one of the most vivid visual icons of the campaign to date, and in the process, sets up the contrast between Obama's politics of "Hope" and McCain's politics of "Nope."

We can expect to see many more such images produced and circulated as the campaigns intensify even more over the coming two months.

Most of these examples are taken from the Political Humor site which regular collects such Photoshop images. You can find many more examples here.

What Happened Before YouTube?

G'day Mates. The following op-ed piece, which I co-authored with John Hartley, appeared yesterday morning in the Sydney Morning Herald. The text is a mash up of two pieces -- one by me, one by Hartley -- which will appear in a forthcoming book on Youtube being written by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green and due out by the end of this year. I am here in Brisbane, Australia this week participating in a conference being hosted by Queensland University of Technology's Center of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. The conference's theme is "Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons." And this editorial is a pretty good representation of the core themes of my talk. I want to place YouTube in a larger historical context and in the process, to call attention to the conscious decisions being made by a variety of groups to Youtube or not to Youtube, rather than treating YouTube as the origin point for participatory culture and as the inevitable hub around which all amateur media making orbits. The plentitude of YouTube can leave us with the sense that everything and everyone is there, not inviting us to ask questions about which groups have opted out or been excluded and why, or to question whether YouTube represents the best possible model for supporting participatory culture. The longer version of this piece contains an extended discussion of some of the choices being made in the fan vidding community around these issues and describes some of the concerns that the history of women's role in remix video may be written out of the history of YouTube. All of this was informed by conversations I've had in and around USC's DIY conference earlier in the year.

I have long regarded the Creative Industries program here as a sibling of what we are doing in Comparative Media Studies. I have featured a number of QUT folks in the past through my blog -- Alan McKee, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess. They are doing extraordinary work in the areas of civic media, new media literacy, participatory culture, intellectual property law, globalization, and creative industries, that is, on many of the themes which also animate our own work at MIT. It's been great to be here so far, getting to know more of the researchers at the Center and what they are doing, and cementing relations with long time friends and colleagues.

YouTube: home port for lip-syncers, karaoke singers, trainspotters, birdwatchers, skateboarders, hip hoppers, small time wrestling federations, educators, third wave feminists, churches, proud parents, poetry slammers, gamers, human rights activists, hobbyists. It gets 10 hours of new content every minute.Where did all that come from?

There is much that is new about YouTube, but there is also much that is old. The emergence of `Do-It-Yourself' cultures of all kinds over the past several decades paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of new media. YouTube has gone from nowhere to cultural ubiquity in a couple of years because we already know what to do with it.

Among its precursors were the zines of the political and cultural avant garde of the 1970s and 80s, closely tied to the growth of punk rock and the emergence of `Riot Grrl' feminism. They were also part of a much larger history of amateur publishing. In the case of the science fiction fan community, this could be traced back to the 1920s.

And these DIY or DIWO: `do it with others' impulses spilled over from print zines to include the production of mix tapes and home videos.

Modern cyberculture can trace its roots back to the 1960s, with `people's radio,' early video activism, underground newspapers and comics; all efforts to deploy low cost media tools and practices towards alternative ends.

Many early netizens explicitly embraced the value of participatory culture. These utopian pioneers would greet YouTube's amateurs not as mindless kids but as the fulfilment of their own hopes and a validation of their predictions.

The rhetoric of the `digital revolution' has assumed that new media displace the old. But YouTube exemplifies what Henry Jenkins calls a `convergence culture,' with its complex interactions and collaborations between corporate and grassroots media.

YouTube does not so much change the conditions of production as it alters the contexts of circulation and reception. Amateur, activist and avant garde works now reach a larger public. Yet, many of those earlier advocates remain skeptical that a commercial firm like YouTube can truly enable alternative politics. If we want to see a more democratic culture, they argue, we need anti-corporate outlets, greater diversity among participants, more debate about whose work gets seen and how it is valued.

But as Geekcorps founder Ethan Zuckerman says, any medium sufficiently powerful to enable the distribution of cute cat pictures can also, under the right circumstances, be deployed to bring down a government.

Right now, people are learning how to produce, upload and circulate content. What happens next is up to us all. With YouTube, there is almost infinite scope for creative content and new ideas to be produced by just anyone, without the need for avant

garde leadership, expert filtering or institutional control. The so-called `long tail' of self-made content is accessible to anyone near a computer terminal.

While most people can read, very few publish in print. Hence active contribution to science, journalism and even fictional storytelling has been restricted to expert elites, while most of the general population makes do with ready-made entertainment.

But the internet does not distinguish between literacy and publication. So now we are entering a new kind of digital literacy, where everyone is a publisher and whole populations have the chance to contribute as well as consume.

We can certainly use the internet for daydreaming, mischief and time-wasting, but it is equally possible to move on to other levels of functionality, and other purposes, including science, journalism and works of the imagination. You can already find all this on YouTube.

If we see YouTube as operating without a history, we erase the politics behind those struggles to prepare the way, and we may end up accepting far less than what we bargained for, or what might be possible if we participate.

By reclaiming what happened before, we will have a basis for judging how well YouTube really is serving the cause of participatory culture and the growth of knowledge among all sections of society. We may also find openings for `a critique, a goal, a community, and a context' of the kind that motivated earlier DIY media-makers.

As they say in The Matrix: `I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.'

Professor Henry Jenkins co-directs the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tomorrow he will speak at the Australian Research Council Centre for Creative Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology, where Professor John Hartley is the research director.

YouTomb: Monitoring the Limits of Participatory Culture

While we have been focusing lately on issues of remix culture, it seems an opportune moment to give a shout out to a very worthy project of the MIT Free Culture organization. Known as YouTomb, the project seeks to monitor which videos get taken down from YouTube and why. As the FAQ for the site explains:

When a user-submitted video is suspected to infringe copyright, the rights holder is contacted and given the option to take down the video in question. In addition, rights holders can submit DMCA takedown notifications at any time that cause YouTube to immediately remove alleged infringing content.

MIT Free Culture became especially interested in the issue after YouTube announced that it would begin using filtering technology to scan users' video and audio for near-matches with copyrighted material. While automating the takedown process may make enforcement easier, it also means that content falling under fair-use exceptions and even totally innocuous videos may receive some of the collateral damage.

As YouTube is not very transparent with the details surrounding this process and the software used, YouTomb was conceived to shed light on YouTube's practices, to educate the general public on the relevant copyright issues, and to provide helpful resources to users who have had their videos wrongfully taken down.

The data being collected by this team of student researchers should prove extremely useful in future legal battles over whether currently filtering technologies violate fair use provisions and thus constitute a form of unjustifiable censorship of participatory culture.

Keep up the good fight!

"What Is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part Two)

What criteria should we use to evaluate good and bad remixes?

I think that, as with any work of art, the criteria for judging whether a remix is 'good' or 'bad' is largely subjective and what some people passionately love, others will think is a complete waste of time. I believe there is no artistic work in existence that everyone on planet earth would unanimously agree is 'good.'

Having said that, for the purposes of the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, I have set some general criteria for the public and for the judges to use as guidelines when rating the videos. These are overall impact, which will account for 50% of the marks, creativity for 25% and communication for the remaining 25%. If you were to analyse a video remix that is generally accepted as being 'good', for example Titanic 2: the Surface by Robert Blankenheim, we can see that the video is exceptionally well produced, so much so that you could easily believe that is a genuine trailer for a new Titanic movie! The basic idea behind the piece is very clever and well executed on every level. Personally, I think that believability is a recurring theme in many of the most popular and well received video remixes. For these types of remixes, it is a huge challenge to convince the viewers that what they are watching is real. There is a long history of people messing with media channels to communicate a message effectively, e.g. Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast and I feel that speaking to an audience in a language that they are intimately familiar with, e.g. movie trailers, is an excellent way to communicate a message. The Adbusters movement have been 'culture-jamming' for decades, mostly in the medium of print, but I expect a lot of video remixed work to emerge in this niche in the future.

But what about 'bad' remixes? Well, it is fantastic to see that so many amateur video makers are trying their hand at producing video remixes, however, as with every art form, the ratio is usually about 10% quality, 90% garbage. The ratio holds true in the case of video remixes. Here is an example of a particularly poor effort, but hopefully the creator will stick at it and improve as they produce more work. Having said that, production skills are not necessarily the be all and end all. Sometimes, the idea is strong enough to bring the video popularity even if the production values are not 100%.

An interesting debate has sprung up around so-called 'YouTube Poop' videos. To some people, these types of videos seem to make no sense, are offensive and are even difficult to watch. People said similar things about punk. Personally, I think that YouTube Poop videos are some of the most potent examples of remixed videos out there, and although they may not be attempting to communicate a particular underlying message, bearing more resemblance to stream-of-consciousness poetry, they have their own artistic merit. But I am certain that many people would consider them to be 'bad' remixes.

The statement above implies that you think the current influx of remixes and recuts is a product of shifts in the technological environment. Yet, we could point to a much older history of cut-ups, collages, montages, scratch video, fan video, running back across much of the 20th century. Remix was part of 20th century life well before digital tools and platforms arrived. What factors do you think have given rise to our current remix culture?

I agree with you that remix itself is by no means a new phenomenon. In fact, it dates back as far as we can trace human history. The earliest example I am aware of is the anagram, which is essentially taking the building blocks of a word, i.e. the letters, remixing them into a new order that creates a new word and a secondary meaning and association by connecting the first word to the newly formed second word. There have been examples of remix in every creative art since time immemorial. For example, in art, the obvious one is collage. In music, folk music was spread by word of mouth, and so when one person would learn a new song from someone else, they would often apply their own variations to it, essentially remixing it to suit their own style.

In more recent times, in the history of recorded music, music remixes date back at least to the 1950's, when Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman remixed Orson Welle's War of the Worlds with various musical snippets. In the world of film and video, recuts and remixes have been in existence since the art of editing was invented. Some of the most well known filmmakers that experimented in the field of remix and montage as far back as the 1920s include the Russians, Sergei Eisenstein and his mentor Lev Kuleshov. Joseph Cornell and Hans Richter also experimented in the genre in the early part of the 20th Century.

The distinct difference between the work that was produced by these masters and the video remixes that we see today on Total Recut and YouTube, are that now the tools of production have been democratized. What was once an art form confined to professionals who could afford expensive film-making equipment and distribution companies with established networks and connections, is now affordable to the majority of creators in the western world. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection today can produce and distribute their work for costs close to zero. Every new computer comes shipped with editing software, video content is widely available on video sharing networks like YouTube and the Internet Archive, and it is easy to reach a potentially large audience by uploading your video to one of these sites.

The net result is that the medium is evolving. Video remix includes everything from movie trailer recuts, political parodies, music mash-ups, subvertisements, fan made vids, machinima, overdubs and many others. There is no doubt in my mind that many other sub-genres will evolve as more and more people begin to experiment in this area.

In your thesis, you suggest that video recuts are "stifled by overzealous copyright owners who are over-protective of their work." What can you tell us about current legal responses to the remix community? Are there any signs that the studios are becoming more accepting of remix culture as remixes become more widespread on sites like YouTube and are finding their way back into commercial media channels?

Of recent times there has been a serious crackdown on video sites like YouTube where copyright owners have made claims of copyright infringement and the videos have been taken down, in compliance with the DMCA. Unfortunately, many remixed videos that legitimately make fair use of copyrighted content are being caught in the crossfire of outright piracy. I feel it is very important to highlight the distinction here as this is possibly the number one reason why the remix community gets targeted and bullied by 'overzealous' copyright owners. If somebody rips an episode of Lost from DVD, for example, and uploads five ten minute segments of the episode to YouTube unchanged and without permission, this is piracy and should definitely not be condoned. ABC Studios would be completely within their rights to request that YouTube remove these infringing videos from their site. However, if someone were to sample small clips from various episodes of Lost, recut them, add effects and overlay a soundtrack from the classic 80's TV show The A-Team, this would clearly be a fair use of the copyrighted material.

Unfortunately, the filtering technology that has been developed to track copyrighted material cannot distinguish between these different types of videos, and fair use video remixes are being wrongfully taken down from YouTube every day. One of the problems here is that the creators of these ingenious videos are unaware that they are within their rights to file counter notifications against copyright infringement claims that they believe to be false. In my own case, I had three of my remix videos removed by the BBC, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, which led to my YouTube account being disabled. Three strikes and you're out. Each of the videos were less than three minutes long, and the use of copyrighted material in them was clearly fair use. I filed counter notification claims with each of the allegators through YouTube, which is a relatively straightforward process. The BBC conceded that my video was a fair use and the other two companies did not respond within the DMCA time limit and so my three videos were put back up and my account was reinstated.

I am certain that there are many other people out there who have had similar experiences but did not realise they could do anything to get their videos put back up. I would encourage anyone who feels that their work is fair use to file counter notifications and to make sure that their videos are put back online. Alternatively, they can upload them to Total Recut!

On a more positive note, I have noticed a trend among some of the larger media corporations that suggests that they are becoming more accepting of user generated remix videos that sample from their copyrighted material. Some, including Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and Warner Bros have even dabbled with remix contests of their own to coincide with the release of their movies including School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly and Rambo. We have also recorded a significant exponential increase in the number of video recuts being uploaded to the web every day and less being taken down, which suggests that more people are getting interested in the area and that copyright owners are beginning to realise the potential benefits of allowing, and possibly even encouraging their fans to play with the content they produce.

In my opinion, video remixes are a free form of advertising for copyright owners and also create more devoted fans of the original work. In a few years, we will all look back and it will be mind boggling to think that big media companies tried to stop fans of their content from creating remixed videos that actually served to promote the original work, as well as being entertaining pieces in themselves.

Your site features a space for political remixes. Do you see remix as an important form of political speech?

I personally feel that remix is one of the best ways for people to voice their opinions and increase their chances of being heard. What better way is there of communicating how you would like George Bush to act than to literally change the words that come out of his mouth? With the current build up to the presidential elections in the United States, we are seeing and hearing a lot of media surrounding the actions and words of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. A plethora of remixed videos have sprung up with Obama , Clinton and McCain as the subjects. I think that having the tools to be able to create videos like these and express personal opinions to a wide audience is extremely empowering for individual users in the digital age. Members of Obama's campaign realise the potential power of grass roots creativity and a video contest has been hosted this month by the folks at moveon.org with a view to creating a 30 second spot for the presidential candidate that will air on national television. No doubt, many of these will be video remixes and we look forward to seeing the finished pieces.

Many people use political parodies as a way to highlight the issues that particular politicians are facing and suggesting courses of action. When Tony Blair was considering his resignation as Prime Minister, a fantastic remix appeared illustrating Blair's internal debate. Another classic video that has done the rounds is the Blair Bush Endless Love remix. This video is interesting in that it pokes fun at the perceived notion of the apparently odd relationship between a submissive Tony Blair and a dominant George Bush.

I have tried my own hand at one or two political remixes in the past. Being from Ireland, I decided to poke a little fun at the two candidates for the Irish General elections last year, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, the two candidates for Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the country at the time. One video showed Enda Kenny as if he was auditioning for American Idol and coming up against a decidedly unimpressed Simon Cowell. The other clip showed Bertie Ahern as if he were pitching a business idea in the Dragons Den I think it is very important that citizens of a country can air their views about their political leaders, and I feel that video remix is one of the most powerful ways to do this.

What are your hopes for the future of remix culture? How do remixes relate to the larger Free Culture movement?

I see remix gradually becoming more mainstream and more widely accepted as a creative form in its own right. Ever more examples of commercialised remix are appearing on our TV and computer screens every day. Many people involved in remix culture detest the idea of the commercialisation of this type of work as they see it as a grass roots, perhaps even rebellious movement, and one that gives a voice to the individual. I don't see this going away. Even if a lot more commercial remix work is created, the tools that enable individuals to transform and recreate the media and culture around them and the new channels of free distribution that enable their work to reach huge audiences are here to stay. My hopes for the future of remix culture would be for this type of work to seep into all walks of life. I would love to see even more educational institutions adopting it as a technique of learning, for example, asking students to create a remixed video about George Washington rather than handing in a written report. In the professional arena, I would love to see more video remix artists being headhunted by studios based on the remix work they showcase online or being commissioned to create new work.

Before this can happen, however, remix artists need to stop being afraid of frivolous legal threats. A large number of remix artists are very careful about revealing their true identities online and use anonymous alter-egos for fear of being sued. I would hope that remix artists will eventually feel as though they don't need to do this anymore, as it could be stifling potential opportunities for them. The copyright issues surrounding remix work are a headache for everyone interested in freely expressing themselves using digital media. Of course, fair use enables the use of small samples of copyrighted material for non-commercial purposes, but I envisage new business models emerging around copyright cleared remix work in the not too distant future.

In terms of the larger Free Culture movement, there are many people and organisations doing fantastic work to help combat the ongoing problem of corporate greed that has seen the copyright term extended to a ridiculous degree in the latter half of the 20th century. Organisations such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Social Media, the Convergence Culture Consortium and FreeCulture.org are all doing incredible work to prevent the scales from tipping too far in the wrong direction and of course individuals, such as our judging panel for the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, provide invaluable insights through their written and spoken words that help to raise much needed awareness of the issues surrounding remix culture.

We are hosting the Total Recut Remix Challenge primarily to the same end, and we invite anyone with an interest in this area to enter the contest and help us to raise awareness of the changes that need to take place so that we can build a society where copyright owners are fairly rewarded for their artistic labours and artists can freely express themselves by drawing inspiration from the culture around them. Every voice counts.

"What is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part One)

Several weeks ago, I announced here that I was serving as part of a panel of other "remix experts" as judges for a video competition being hosted by the website, toralrecut.com. Participants are being asked to submit videos which address the question, "What is Remix Culture?" The contest is intended to help educate the public about the debates surrounding remix, copyright, and fair use. As someone currently developing a teacher's strategy guide for teaching remix in the context of high school literature classes, I am very interested to see what kinds of materials emerge from this competition. The submissions will become visible on the site soon and the public is being encouraged to help rank the submissions. In the spirit of sparking further conversation around the issues the contest is exploring, I asked Owen Gallagher, the mastermind behind TotalRecut, if he would respond to some questions about the contest and about remix culture more generally. Alas, his responses got lost in my dreaded spam filter and are just now seeing the light of day. In this two part conversation, he explains why he created the site and sponsored the contest, identifies some of his favorite videos, and offers some insights into the politics and aesthetics of remix video.

Here's a brief bio Owen shared with us:

Owen Gallagher (28) is a graphic, web and digital media designer, an accomplished musician and a graduate of the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland with a first class honours Masters degree in Design Communications. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he has been travelling around the United Kingdom and the United States for the past 12 months as part of the NCGE / Kauffman Foundation Global Scholars Entrepreneurship Program. Gallagher is the founder of TotalRecut.com, an online social networking community for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups that facilitates online collaboration between video artists. Total Recut has been shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards including the Golden Spiders Awards, the NICENT 25k Awards and the BBC Innovation Labs.

Gallagher is the CEO and Creative Director of GDG Interactive, a web design and development business based in Ireland. In his spare time, he dabbles in video art and has created a number of political video remixes that received significant media attention in his home country. He is an avid piano and guitar player and has composed and recorded over 100 songs as well as performing in various bands since he was 16. He is a qualified music teacher and has taught piano and guitar to a number of students. He has also acted as a part time Assistant Lecturer of Design at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland teaching web design, flash animation and digital video production.

Gallagher is passionately involved in remix culture and has a particular interest in Intellectual Property law as it applies to creative content. His Masters thesis, entitled 'Video Recuts and the Remix Revolution: Whose Rights Are Being Infringed?' explores some of the issues surrounding the appropriation of previously published content, focusing on the delicate balance between copyright and freedom of expression.

What can you tell us about your new contest? What are its goals? What kinds of videos are acceptable?

The Total Recut Video Remix Challenge is a contest that we are hosting to try to encourage people to think about the issues around remix culture and creating remixed media. We want people to create a short video remix that uses footage from any source to communicate the message: 'What is Remix Culture?' The video can be anything from 30 seconds to 3 minutes long. The idea of the contest is to produce a series of videos that raise awareness and help people to more clearly understand what is going on in the world of digital content creation, remix and intellectual property. Ideally, the videos will be educational and will communicate a clear message but we essentially want our entrants to be creative and portray what remix culture means to them. The prizes include a laptop computer loaded with all of the software needed to create high quality remixes, a digital camcorder, a digital media player and lots of Total Recut goodies.

The contest began taking entries in May and judging will begin in June. We have an exceptional judging panel of some of the elite thought-leading personalities involved in remix culture today including yourself, Larry Lessig, Pat Aufderheide, Kembrew McLeod, JD Lasica and Mark Hosler. The contest is open to everyone so I would encourage anyone who is even slightly interested in video remix to put a video together and enter the contest in May to be in with a chance of winning.

The Video Remix Challenge was an idea that developed out of my Masters project at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, which was very much focused on Remix Culture and intellectual property issues as applied to the digital creative arts, in particular, online video production. As part of the project, I developed a basic version of the Total Recut website and set up a small scale video remix contest where the idea was to create a 60 second PSA commercial using found footage to portray a particular theme e.g. Environmental Issues, Safe Sex or Drug Abuse. At the time, I was also working as a part time lecturer, teaching an interactive design class to undergraduate students at the University of Ulster, so I decided to use the students as guinea pigs and get them to produce a remixed video for their project, which had to be entered into my contest, as a requirement of their design brief. It worked like a charm and the end result was over thirty highly creative remixed videos on a diverse range of socially conscious issues which the students themselves rated and commented on, before a small judging panel decided on the final winners. Following the success of this contest and the ongoing development of Total Recut as a whole, I decided that I wanted to try and host a larger scale contest. My original idea was to try to open it up to other Universities in the U.K. and Ireland and build from there, but it has now scaled to the point where it is open to anyone who wants to enter. The basic premise of the Video Remix Challenge is to create a short form video remix that portrays what 'Remix Culture' means to you, using found footage from any source.

The reason this is such an interesting theme to pursue is because of the ongoing debate about copyright and freedom of expression in the developing landscape of user generated digital content. This is a debate that a lot of people feel very strongly about. There are extremists on both sides, some advocating the complete freedom of all content and others fighting tooth and nail to extend copyright terms and protect their assets. Then there are those who are trying to seek a middle ground - a balance between these two opposing views. This is where Total Recut and this contest reside.

The current landscape places too much emphasis on the copyright owner's control over how their content is used and leaves little room for new artists to exercise their rights to freedom of expression. However, a free-for-all where all content is free would result in no compensation for copyright owners, which would mean less incentives for people to produce new creative works. The balanced approach enables copyright owners to make money from their work, but also enables other artists to freely use samples from the entire pool of creative works to express themselves. This contest encourages people to draw inspiration from the culture around them, from the culture they grew up with and to use these images and sounds to produce something innovative with a brand new meaning.

The goals of the contest are to generate a number of creative video pieces that will help to raise awareness of these issues and perhaps help to educate people about the true nature of copyright, which is to promote the production of new creative works for society at large, by providing creators with a degree of protection over their work for a limited time. This message has been twisted and distorted almost beyond recognition by the likes of Disney and some of the larger corporations that own the copyrights to most of the content out there. Instead of creative works existing to benefit society, some of the corporations feel that creative works exist to make more money for them, for as long as possible. That is why they lobby for copyright term extensions and unfortunately, they have historically been successful in these attempts.

Ironically, many of Disney's most successful works are based on Public Domain stories, which they would not have been able to create in the first place, had the original copyright owners tried to exercise the kind of control that Disney now displays over their works. There is an excellent educational remix video created by Eric Faden of Bucknell University, that uses short samples from Disney movies to communicate messages about copyright and fair use. Here's the link.

In terms of the types of videos that are acceptable in our Video Remix Challenge, we are encouraging our entrants to be aware of, and exercise their fair use rights. The Center for Social Media at the American University of Washington have some excellent resources and guidelines. We are also encouraging people to use Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed material in their work, many of which can be found at the Internet Archive and Creative Commons respectively.

The videos will first be rated by the public and whittled down to the ten best videos, which will then be given to the judges to decide on three winners. We are very excited to see what kind of work will be produced. Going by my previous contest, there will be quite a mix of quality in terms of production skill, but sometimes the best ideas simply shine through.

Tell us more about Total Recut. How did this site come about? What are your overarching goals? What kinds of resources does it offer the remix community?

I remember very distinctly when I came up with the idea for Total Recut. I was lying out in the sun in Portugal, contemplating what I might consider putting forward as a proposal for my then upcoming Masters Degree, and the idea came to me. I wanted to create a collaborative environment for artists to be able to take existing media, remix it in some way and produce something completely new.

My interest in remix stemmed from an early age - I have always been into collage and mixed media and studied Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland before undertaking my Design degree in Donegal, but even before that, I always remember playing with toys as a young boy. My brother and I were the proud owners of many Star Wars figures and vehicles, Transformers, Thundercats, MASK, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Action Man and a whole host of other toys from various movies and TV shows. Our games always consisted of us combining these different realities and storylines, mixing them up and making up our own new narratives. It was not unusual to have Optimus Prime fighting side by side with Luke Skywalker against Mumm-Ra and Skeletor. So, from a very early age it seemed completely normal for me to combine the things I loved in new ways that seemed entertaining to me. I think that my generation and those younger than me have grown up expecting this sort of interaction with their media, on their own terms.

The idea that some corporation can tell you that you are not allowed to play with media seems ridiculous and wrong. Unfortunately, there are many who seem to believe that their control over how content is used should be absolute and unquestioned. I created Total Recut as a way to gather people together who believe that we, as a society, should be able to freely build on the works of the past. If this is successfully prevented by corporations, the practical result is that people will stop making new things out of old things for fear of being sued. Innovation will chill and the overall quality and quantity of new work being produced will be lower. Luckily, there are millions of people who refuse to accept the corporate line and they are continuing to produce new work, despite the veiled shallow threats by overzealous copyright owners.

So, when I was considering how to practically put a community of this nature together, my initial idea was to create a site for digital artists - I had the idea of taking public domain paintings and posting the images on the site, cutting them up into squares and then asking participants to choose a square each and reinterpret it in their own style. The remixed square would be uploaded to the site again and the end result would be a very interesting collaborative collage of styles inspired by the work of an artistic master.

Through my Masters research, I realised that one of the hottest technologies at the time was online video and so I decided to refocus the project to centre on remixed video work. I discovered a thriving underground community of video producers who were creating work as diverse as movie trailer recuts and machinima to remixed political parody and mashed-up music videos. One of the first remixed videos I saw was a movie trailer recut, created by Robert Ryang, of the Stanley Kubrick movie, 'The Shining', which casts the classic horror in a completely new light. Another amazing video remix that I came across early on was a political piece created by Chris Morris where segments of George Bush's State of the Union speech were recut to create a new narrative. Some of the most technically accomplished and entertaining remixes I have seen were created by a Parisian remix artist called Antonio da Silva, known online as AMDS Films. He created a number of remixes, one of the best of which is Neo vs Robocop.

So, I set about creating a site 'for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts and mash-ups that provides resources and collaborative opportunities for video remix artists in a social networking environment.' The end result was Total Recut, but the site is constantly developing. Each week, something new is added or changed based on the feedback from our members and advisors. The main focus at the moment is the Video Remix Challenge but we have a plethora of new ideas and potential directions of where we are going to steer the site in the future.

The site works on a number of different levels. Primarily it is a place where people can find and watch entertaining or thought-provoking remixed videos. Our current categories are Movie Trailer Recuts, Political, Machinima, Advertising, Educational, Music Videos and Others. This category list is by no means exhaustive and we are looking at adding to it in the near future.

Secondly, the site acts as a showcase for video remix artists, to enable them to put their work in front of the eyes of a receptive audience. We also provide a growing library of Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed video work for people to download and remix in their own projects. We are working on developing our Tutorials section, which will eventually become a 'Remix Academy' with courses and grades for people to learn everything they need to know to produce a video remix. Information and links to literature and websites about remix culture, intellectual property issues and key players in the scene are included in the Remix Culture section. We also provide remix tools where users can gain access to video editing software, conversion tools and video downloading software. The community section includes a blog, forums, user profiles and job opportunities. Virtually every aspect of the site is set up to be similar to a wiki environment, which essentially means that all registered members have the ability to add things to the site or update information about any of the content.

With regard to long term goals for Total Recut, we would love to build up the community to the point where we are considered the primary online location for people to find the very best in video remix work and talent. We intend to host more regular contests and provide links between our remix artist members and potential employers. As the site scales up, we intend to take it global and offer a multilingual version of the site to accommodate the Asian and European markets and eventually become a truly global community website for remix culture.

You write, "Video recuts...are a new art-form enabled by the convergence of emerging technologies." How do you respond to those who ask whether remixes and recuts are not creative because they build on the works of others rather than working with original material?

This is an area in which I have a huge amount of interest and have considered pursuing as a research area for my PhD - the origin of originality. It is of particular interest to me because I am what I consider to be an 'original content creator.' I write songs and lyrics using nothing but my mind, a pen and paper and a guitar. Are my songs original? If I use a combination of different chords and a variety of words to create sentences that rhyme, am I not using elements that have been used by other people in the past? What makes my songs original, in my opinion, is the unique way in which I composite the words, chords and melody. In this way, every song is created using the basic building blocks of language and music, but combined in a slightly different way.

Coming from a Graphic Design background, I often come across other designers who are adamant that their work is completely original. The nature of a Graphic Designer's work is to combine elements from different sources in creative ways to produce new pieces of work. Similar to a collage artist who takes pieces of different photos, images etc and brings them together to create new meanings. Is the finished piece not original because it is made up of building blocks from a variety of sources? In the same way, when a video remix artist combines pieces of video from different sources in new ways to create new meanings, is this not original and innovative?

Yes, remix artists build on the works of others. But do so-called creators of 'original material' not build on the works of others also? Would you consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to be an original piece of work? Even though the idea was based on a story by William Painter, which was based on a poem by Arthur Brooke? No matter how far back you go in the origin of a piece of work, you will find that the idea was built on or inspired by the work of someone else before it. I consider remixed videos to be original works. The finished piece is more than the sum of its parts.

From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (Part One)

I have long regarded the Creative Industries folks at Queensland University of Technology to be an important sister program to what we are doing in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Like us, they are pursuing media and cultural studies in the context of a leading technological institution. Like us, they are adopting a cross-disciplinary approach which includes the possibility of productive exchange between the Humanities and the business sector. Like us, they are trying to make sense of the changing media landscape with a particular focus on issues of participatory culture, civic media, media literacy, and collective intelligence. The work which emerges there is distinctive -- reflecting the different cultural and economic context of Australia -- but it complements in many ways what we are producing through our program. I will be traveling to Queensland in June to continue to conversation. Since this blog has launched, I have shared with you the reflections of three people currently or formerly affiliated with the QUT program -- Alan McKee; Jean Burgess

; and Joshua Green, who currently leads our Convergence Culture Consortium team. Today, I want to introduce you to a fourth member of the QUT group -- Axel Bruns.

Thanks to my ties to the QUT community, I got a chance to read an early draft of Bruns's magisterial new book, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), and I've wanted for some time to be able to introduce this project to my readers. Bruns tackles so many of the topics which I write about on the blog on a regular basis -- his early work dealt extensively on issues of blogging and citizen journalism and he has important observations, here and in the book, about the future of civic media. He has a strong interest in issues of education and citizenship, discussing what we need to do to prepare people to more fully participate within the evolving cultural economy. As his title suggests, he is offering rich and nuanced case studies of many of the core "web 2.0" sites which are transforming how knowledge gets produced and how culture gets generated at the present moment. He has absorbed, engaged with, built upon, and surpassed, in many cases, much of the existing scholarly writing in this space to produce his own original account for the directions our culture is taking.

In this interview, you will get a sense of the scope of his vision. In this first installment, he lays out his core concept of "produsage" and explains why we need to adopt new terms to understand this new model of cultural production. In the second part, he will explore its implications for citizenship and learning.

So, let's start with the obvious question. What do you mean by produsage? What are its defining traits?

Why coin a new and somewhat awkward word to refer to this phenomenon? How does Produsage differ from traditional models of production?

I'd like to answer these in combination if I may - the question "do we really need a new word to describe the shift of users from audiences to content creators?" is one I've heard a few times as people have begun engaging with the book, of course.

There's been some fantastic work in this field already, as we all know - from Yochai Benkler's work on 'commons-based peer production' to Michel Bauwens's 'p2p production', from Alvin Toffler's seminal 'prosumers' (whose exact definition has shifted a few times over the past decades as his ideas have been applied to new cultural phenomena) to Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller's 'Pro-Ams'. I think it's fair to say that most if not all of us working in this field see these developments as an important paradigm shift - a "leap to authorship" for so many of the people participating in it, as Douglas Rushkoff has memorably put it.

But at the same time, it's no radical break with the past, no complete turning away from the traditional models of (information, knowledge, and creative) production, but a more gradual move out of these models and into something new - a renaissance and resurgence of commons-based approaches rather than a revolution, as Rushkoff describes it; something that may lead to the "casual collapse" of conventional production models and institutions, as Trendwatching.com has foreshadowed it.

I think that ironically, it's this gradual shift which requires us to coin new terms to better describe what's really going on here. A fully-blown revolution simply replaces one thing with another: one mode of governance (monarchy) with another (democracy); one technology (the horse-drawn carriage) with another (the motorcar). In spite of their different features, both alternatives can ultimately be understood as belonging to the same category, and substituting for one another.

A gradual shift, by contrast, is less noticeable until what's there today is markedly different from what was there before - and only then do we realise that we've entered a new era, and that we have to develop new ways of thinking, new ways of conceptualising the world around us if we want to make good sense of it. If we continue to use the old models, the old language to describe the new, we lose a level of definition and clarity which can ultimately lead us to misunderstand our new reality.

Over the past years, many of us have tried very hard to keep track of new developments with the conceptual frameworks we've had - which is why even work as brilliant as Benkler's has had to resort to such unwieldy constructions as 'commons-based peer production' (CBPP), and similar compound terms from 'user-led content creation' to 'consumer-generated media' abound.

Now, though, I think we're at the cusp of this realisation that the emerging user-led environments of today can no longer be described clearly and usefully through the old language only - and produsage is my suggestion for an alternative term. It doesn't matter so much what we call it in the end, but a term like 'produsage' provides a blank slate which we can collectively inscribe with new meanings, new shared understandings of the environments we now find ourselves in.

Why does the old language fail us? Because we've been used to it for too long. When we say 'production' or 'consumer', 'product' or 'audience', most of us take these words as clearly defined and understood, and the definitions can ultimately be traced back to the heyday of the industrial age, to the height of the mass media system. 'Production', for example, is usually understood as something that especially qualified groups do, usually for pay and within the organised environments of industry; it results in 'products' - packaged, complete, inherently usable goods. 'Consumers', on the other hand, are literally 'using up' these goods; historically, as Clay Shirky put it almost ten years ago, they're seen as no more than "a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyor belt".

How do the (sometimes very random) processes of collaborative content creation, for example in something like the Wikipedia, fit into this terminology? Do they? Wikipedia may well be able to substitute for Britannica or another conventionally produced encyclopaedia, but it's much more than that. Centrally, it's an ongoing process, not a finished product - it's a massively distributed process of consensus-building (and sometimes dissent, which may be even more instructive if users invest the time to examine different points of view) in motion, rather than a dead snapshot of the consensual body of knowledge agreed upon by a small group of producers.

Similarly, are Wikipedia contributors 'producers' of the encyclopaedia in any meaningful, commonly accepted sense of the word? Collectively, they may contribute to the continuing extension and improvement of this resource, but how does that classify as production? Many individual participants, making their random acts of contribution to pages they come across or care about, are in the first place simply users - users who, aware of the shared nature of the project, and of the ease with which they can make a contribution, do so by fixing some spelling here, adding some information there, contributing to a discussion on resolving a conflict of views somewhere else. That's a social activity which only secondarily is productive - these people are in a hybrid position where using the site can (and often does) lead to productive engagement. The balance between such mere usage and productive contribution varies - from user to user, and also for each user over time. That's why I suggest that they're neither simply users nor producers (and they're certainly not consumers): they're produsers instead.

So having said all of this, let me get back to your first question: What do you mean by produsage? What are its defining traits?

I define produsage as "the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement", but that's only the starting point. Again, it's important to note that the processes of produsage are often massively distributed, and not all participants are even aware of their contribution to produsage projects; their motivations may be mainly social or individual, and still their acts of participation can be harnessed as contributions to produsage. (In a very real sense, even a commercial service like Google's PageRank is ultimately prodused by all of us as we browse the Web and link to one another, and allow Google to track our activities and infer from this the importance and relevance of the Websites we engage with.)

Produsage depends on a number of preconditions for its operation: its tasks must be optimised for granularity to make it as easy as possible even for random users to contribute (this is something Yochai Benkler also notes in his Wealth of Networks); it must accept that everyone has some kind of useful contribution to make, and allows for this without imposing significant hurdles to participation (Michel Bauwens describes this as equipotentiality); it must build on these elements by pursuing a probabilistic course of improvement which is sometimes temporarily thrown off course by disruptive contributions but trusts in what Eric Raymond calls the power of "eyeballs" (that is, involvement by large and diverse communities) to set things right again; and it must allow for the open sharing of content to enable contributions to build on one another in an iterative, evolutionary, palimpsestic process.

We can translate this into four core principles of produsage, then:

• Open Participation, Communal Evaluation: the community as a whole, if sufficiently large and varied, can contribute more than a closed team of producers, however qualified;
• Fluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc Meritocracy: produsers participate as is appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and knowledges, and their level of involvement changes as the produsage project proceeds;
• Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process: content artefacts in produsage projects are continually under development, and therefore always unfinished - their development follows evolutionary, iterative, palimpsestic paths;
• Common Property, Individual Rewards: contributors permit (non-commercial) community use and adaptation of their intellectual property, and are rewarded by the status capital gained through this process.

I think that we can see these principles at work in a wide range of produsage environments and projects - from open source to the Wikipedia, from citizen journalism to Second Life -, and I trace their operation and implications in the book. (Indeed, we're now getting to a point where such principles are even being adopted and adapted for projects which traditionally have been situated well outside the realm of collaborative content creation - from the kitesurfing communities that Eric von Hippel writes about in Democratizing Innovation to user-led banking projects like ,Zopa, Prosper, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank, and beyond.)

Of course such traits are also continuing to shift, both as produsage itself continues to develop, and as it is applied in specific contexts. So, these characteristics as I've described them, and this idea of produsage as something fundamentally different from conventional, industrial, production, should themselves be seen only as stepping stones along the way, as starting points for a wider and deeper investigation of collaborative processes which are productive in the general sense of the term, but which are not production as we've conventionally defined it.

Your analysis emphasizes the value of "unfinished artifacts" and an ongoing production process. Can you point to some examples of where these principles have been consciously applied to the development of cultural goods?

My earlier work (my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, and various related publications) has focussed mainly on what we've now come to call 'citizen journalism' - and (perhaps somewhat unusually, given that so much of the philosophy of produsage ultimately traces back its lineage to open source) it's in this context that I first started to think about the need for a new concept of produsage as an alternative to 'production'.

In JD Lasica's famous description, citizen journalism is made up of a large collection of individual, "random acts of journalism", and certainly in its early stages there were few or no citizen journalists who could claim to be producers of complete, finished journalistic news stories. Massive projects such as the comprehensive tech news site Slashdot emerged simply out of communities of interest sharing bits of news they came across on the Web - a process I've described as gatewatching, in contrast to journalistic gatekeeping -, and over the course of hours and days following the publicisation of the initial news item added significant value to these stories through extensive discussion and evaluation (and often, debunking).

In the process, the initial story itself is relatively unimportant; it's the gradual layering of background information and related stories on top of that story - as a modern-day palimpsest - which creates the informational and cultural good. Although for practical reasons, the focus of participants in the process will usually move on to more recent stories after some time, this process is essentially indefinite, so the Slashdot news story as you see it today (including the original news item and subsequent community discussion and evaluation) is always only ever an unfinished artefact of that continuing process. (While Slashdot retains a typical news-focussed organisation of its content in reverse-chronological order, this unfinishedness is even more obvious in the way Wikipedia deals with news stories, by the way - entries on news events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005 London bombings are still evolving, even years after these events.)

This conceptualisation of news stories (not necessarily a conscious choice by Slashdot staff and users, but simply what turned out to make most sense in the context of the site) is common throughout citizen journalism, where community discussion and evaluation usually plays a crucial role - and it's fundamentally different from industrial journalism's conception of stories as discrete units (products, in other words) which are produced according to a publication schedule, and marketed as 'all the news that's fit to print'.

And that's not just a slogan: it's essentially saying to audiences, "here's all that happened today, here's all you need to know - trust us." If some new information comes along, it is turned into an entirely new stand-alone story, rather than added as an update to the earlier piece; indeed, conventional news deals relatively poorly with gradual developments in ongoing stories especially where they stretch out over some time - this is why its approach to the continuing coverage of long-term disasters from climate change to the Iraq war is always to tie new stories to conflict (or to manufacture controversies between apparently opposing views where no useful conflict is forthcoming in its own account). The more genuinely new stories are continually required of the news form, the more desperate these attempts to manufacture new developments tend to become - see the witless flailing of 24-hour news channels in their reporting of the current presidential primaries, for example.

By contrast, the produsage models of citizen journalism better enable it to provide an ongoing, gradually evolving coverage of longer-term news developments. Partly this is also supported by the features of its primary medium, the Web, of course (where links to earlier posts, related stories and discussions, and other resources can be mobilised to create a combined, ongoing, evolving coverage of news as it happens), but I don't want to fall into the techno-determinist trap here: what's happening is more that the conventional, industrial model of news production (for print or broadcast) which required discrete story products for inclusion in the morning paper, evening newscast, or hourly news update is being superceded by an ongoing, indeterminate, but no less effective form of coverage.

If I can put it simply (but hopefully not overly so): industrial news-as-product gets old quickly; it's outdated the moment it is published. Produsage-derived news-as-artefact never gets old, but may need updating and extending from time to time - and it's possible for all of us to have a hand in this.

Dr Axel Bruns (http://produsage.org/) is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). He is a Senior Lecturer in the ,a href="http://www.creativeindustries.qut.edu.au/">Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has also authored Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005) and edited Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture which publishes M/C Journal, M/C Reviews, M/C Dialogue, and the M/Cyclopedia of New Media, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. His general research and commentary blog is located at snurb.info , and he also contributes to a research blog on citizen journalism, Gatewatching.org with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders.

Remix: A Contested Practice

While we are on the subject of Remix Culture, I wanted to call attention to a contest being run this month by the website, Total Recut, designed to get remix artists of all types reflecting on what remix and fair use means to them. If you don't know Total Recut, you should check it out since it is one stop shopping for a range of diverse and interesting examples of remix video -- examples which run from fan vids to political propaganda and includes both obvious and obscure examples. Here's some of the details of the contest:

Create a short video remix that explains what Remix Culture means to you. Using video footage from any source, including Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed work, we want you to produce a creative, educational and entertaining video remix that communicates a clear message to a wide audience. The video is to be no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer then 3 minutes in duration.

This contest is being run to promote awareness of remix culture in an educational capacity by encouraging the fair use of a wide variety of content and also to create a new pool of work that explains what remix culture is to the general public....

The contest will begin in May '08 and will be open for 1 month. Public Voting will begin in June and will remain open for 2 weeks, after which the best 10 videos will be put forward into the final and the Judging Panel will vote on each one. The winner will be announced in July '08.

Entries should follow the guidelines on Fair Use issued by The Center for Social Media, guidelines we discussed here a while back.

I was proud to be asked to be a judge for this competition, which emerged in part in response to a discussion with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher about the work our Project New Media Literacies has been doing focusing on the ethics and poetics of remix culture as we are supporting the teaching of Appropriation as a cultural competency through our curricular materials. We have, for example, been collaborating with the fine folks at Organization for Transformative Works who are producing videos for our learning library about vidding. And we are developing a whole curriculum around Moby Dick which centers on historic and contemporary examples of remix. So, I am personally very excited at the prospect of this competition leading to the production of new materials which might help students, teachers, parents, and the public learn more about remix, creative commons, fair use, appropriation, and participatory culture.

Total Recut has pulled together a truly diverse and interesting group of judges, including Pat Aufderheide (from the Center for Social Media), legal legend Lawrence Lessig, Darknet author J.D. Lasica, fan vidder Luminosity, Documentary filmmaker Kimbrew McLeod, and Negativeland's Mark Hosler. I hope that this range of judges indicates just how open the competition is to a range of different communities who are finding remix an effective mode of creative expression and social commentary. Even if you are not interested in the contest per se, you should check out this resource page which already includes a number of useful materials for explaining why remix matters in contemporary culture.

Children as Storytellers: The Making of TikaTok (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you an interview with CMS alum Neal Grigsby and MIT Media Lab alum Orit Zuckerman, two of the key players in a new startup company, TikaTok, which is working to encourage children to create their own books and share them with other young readers. This time, we get a bit more personal as the two share their sense of how their MIT education contributed to their current projects. Your site also seems to promote opportunities for collaboration between young authors and illustrators. Is this a way of introducing young people to the world of collective intelligence?

Neal: It certainly is, and although it was always on our road map to add this feature, necessity made us move it up the schedule. Our users demanded it. Drawing, and getting an illustration up on the site, can be a creative and technical challenge for many. The team went back and forth for a very long time about the possibility of providing a digital drawing tool before finally coming to the conclusion that it was a bad idea for several reasons. But if you could use the illustrations that other kids had already provided and pledged to the community, if only until a time that your own drawings would be ready, it would really help.

Now we are seeing writing and illustrating as potentially two separate modes of participation, and it is quite exciting. Of course there will always be children who enjoy writing more than illustrating, and vice versa, and this gives both groups the ability to engage deeply on the site and not feel like they're missing a big part of the experience. I also suspect that for many users their first experience with collaboration will be almost accidental: they will use someone's illustration, or someone will use theirs, and the system will automatically attribute the illustration credit. And then once those two kids see the power of this passive collaboration, it may pave the way for a more deliberate collaboration like co-authorship of the text, which the site also supports, or even "massively multiplayer" co-authorship with a large group.

It is certainly possible that we will provide even more modes of participation in the future--one could easily imagine introducing analogs to the traditional roles of editor, copy editor, layout and design artist, and even publicist--but we haven't determined yet which of these would be the most meaningful to our community.

In a "Mother's Welcome," Sharon Kan suggests that this project emerged from the experience of "two mothers who wanted to create a place where children can write, illustrate, publish and print their own books." What specific experiences did you have as mothers which pushed you to start this company?

Orit: As mothers you see your children grow and their brains develop. It is one of the most fulfilling experiences to look at the world from a child's view. From very young age children try to express themselves in pictures and in stories. When I sat with my daughter and we created a story together, she knew exactly what she wanted to say and draw; she enjoyed creating a story and was very happy when it was presented to the world by her proud parents. Even though it wasn't storytelling as we see in books that are written by adults, the ideas that come out and the simplicity of the storyline was very interesting. I also noticed that through kindergarten she was always encouraged to draw, but when she went to first grade the emphasis went to reading and writing only, and all that talent of telling stories by pictures was neglected. Then I looked at my daughter's bookshelf. She loves books, yet all of her books were written by adults, edited by adults, and published by adults with adult priorities in mind. Why aren't there books for kids by kids? They clearly tell stories differently but no one publishes it? This is what led us to think that creating a platform where kids can tell their stories, bind them into real books, and be active in a community of book lovers would be a great thing to build.

Neal, you are in the process of becoming a father yourself. How is that impacting your perception of this project? What would you say in a "Father's Welcome" to the site?

Neal: In an interesting coincidence, the day that I learned I was becoming a father was the same day that we launched the private alpha release of the site. So you could say that both baby and website have been gestating for about the same amount of time. As you might expect it has been an incredibly busy and exciting time, and I approach the future with a sense of deep responsibility but also optimism.

Since learning of my impending fatherhood, I have been following blogs like Parent Hacks and GeekDad, and have been inspired by the ways those sites integrate this resurgent DIY culture with parenthood. From the stereotypes, one might expect a geeky parent to be particularly disengaged or self-absorbed, but these blogs almost show geek parents as the best hope for our future; they show passionate and caring parents who involve their children in projects of investigation, exploration, and invention.

If I were to write a "Father's Welcome," then, I would express my hope that the families who use our site embrace the opportunities it provides for parent and child to share a creative experience together. I am fully aware that, especially when he becomes a teenager, computers and the Internet will become tools of autonomy for my son. The old man will be embarrassingly uncool, as it is my destiny to become, and he will forge his online identity largely outside my direct supervision. Many sites for young children already reinforce this model, requiring the parent only for his blanket permission or his credit card. I hope on Tikatok a parent can hone a different facet of his relationship with his children: he can assist, collaborate, and inspire.

Orit, you recently completed a degree at the MIT Media Lab. Can you describe the work you did through the lab and what you learned there which has contributed to the current venture?

Orit: Part of my research in the media lab was creating a unique communication system for kids to involve remote relatives with their daily routines. Communication systems as we know them were designed for business use, later on they were adapted to home use, but without any changes to the basic design. Looking at what children need to communicate led to the development of a very unique video system that created contextual video correspondence between relatives. For example, a grandmother would read a story to her grandchild on the other side of the world; and then the grandson would get that message when he went to bed. The system would know the right time to connect between the relatives and thus create a more meaningful connection between them. Looking at things from the user's point of view creates a different product all together. With Tikatok, I tried looking at storytelling from a childs point of view and create something that would be easy and fun to use.

Neal, you recently completed a Masters through the Comparative Media Studies Program. Can you describe the work you did with us and how it has contributed to the current venture?

Neal: All of my work at CMS was united by the program's commitment to multidisciplinary thinking, and for putting theory into practice. It was really invaluable experience to me as I began work on Tikatok.

The research project I worked most on was the Project for New Media Literacies. As your regular readers well know, it is a project very much created to address the challenges of participatory culture. As a graduate student researcher it was my responsibility to create educational media and associated curricula that would illuminate media production practices for a youth audience. I produced materials around blogging and science fiction authorship (using BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow as an exemplar), public art and graffiti, Wikipedia, and video games. The project forced me to think of creative ways to teach both the practical and ethical dimensions of media production, and that experience has certainly come in handy for designing materials that engage and instruct our users. The project also trained me to see these processes of creation and expression not only as individual processes, but as social process that occur within a context. This perspective has frequently come in handy when, as a team, we discuss new features and priorities for the company. The community illustration database is the perfect example. Do we solve the problem of illustration uploading with a tool that allows individual children to create digital drawings instantly? Or do we provide a more powerful way for kids to work together and take advantage of their unique abilities? My work with NML helped me provide an informed opinion on this decision and others.

I also worked briefly at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab as the design lead for a team of Singaporean and MIT students charged with creating a multiplayer video game for mobile phones. GAMBIT really prepared me for the kind of rapid, iterative product development within a small team that is characteristic of many startups, including our own. My GAMBIT experience also gave me a heightened appreciation for the extreme importance of user interface design and QA. I believe that video games really have some of the best user interfaces of any interactive media. There are design principles common to video games that designers of websites and virtual worlds should ignore at their own peril. The multidisciplinary approach I learned at CMS has allowed me to recognize relevant connections between these different media modes.

Finally, there was my academic work. My thesis explored "Narrative of Adolescence Across Media" and its final chapter, which imagined video games as a platform for a new kind of player co-authored coming-of-age story, articulates many of the same goals that we are trying to meet with Tikatok. For someone whose thesis was inspired by Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, in which a young girl is aided in her development by, essentially, a digital platform for collaborative storytelling, it has been exciting to bring my research to bear on one of the closest real-world examples of such a platform that I have encountered.

What has been the biggest surprise as you've explored the intersection between these two MIT-based approaches to media?

Neal: The biggest surprise to me, I suppose, is how compatible the two approaches have been. If I were to believe the Media Lab stereotype, it would be that the folks there put too much faith in technological solutions. Certainly there is a huge technological optimism behind projects like the One Laptop Per Child, and it's important to peel away the layers of hyperbole to assess its potential impact. In starting a new company, it puts you in the position of having to promote yourself and your ideas, and it can be tempting to let your high aspirations get the best of you and let the hype flow unchecked. But I have never found myself battling Orit over unrealistic expectations. I think because the project is so grounded in her commitment to making something cool and worthwhile for her children, it makes her a sharp judge of what really works vs. what we want to work. She's not making something for "the children," she's making something for her children.

And while Orit works on a very intuitive level, the CMS approach has allowed me to bring a multitude of theoretical frameworks to the project, and helped me articulate what we are trying to achieve, sometimes to people on the outside, but sometimes even to the team. In that sense it is a nice marriage of a more bottom-up, creative approach with a top-down, analytical approach. But even that is a simplification - I think we both bring creative and analytical skills. As MIT media scholars I think we definitely speak the same language.

Orit Zuckerman - Co-founder and CTO

Orit has designed online communities since 1996, when she worked for Gizmoz Networks. In 1999, Orit co-founded uTOK Inc., a San Francisco-based Internet startup that created a "decentralized blogging community." She designed the community product, and supervised the R&D team. Most recently, Orit earned her Master's Degree from the MIT Media Lab, where she designed and implemented an innovative communication system for children. Orit has also exhibited her interactive portraiture installations in Milan, Monaco, Boston, British Telecom headquarters, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

Neal Grigsby - Director of Online Community

Neal Grigsby worked for seven years at LookSmart.com, where he managed volunteers on a user-generated Web directory, co-managed partnerships and developed content for FindArticles, and designed education-themed search verticals. Neal recently earned his Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where he produced educational media for the Macarthur-funded Project for New Media Literacies, and

designed video games for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Neal also

holds a BA from UC Berkeley.

the following post is [about] anonymous

The following blog post was prepared by a CMS graduate student who, appropriately enough, wishes to remain anonymous. S/He has been watching with some interest the emergence of the Anonymous movement, a grassroots effort to protest against the Church of Scientology organization, which has adopted a range of references and models from popular culture to further its goals. It offers a rich reference point for those of us in better understanding the ways that participatory culture can offer a spring board for civic engagement. It seems like an appropriate followup to the interview I ran earlier this week with Witness's Sam Gregory in that it represents another example of how video sharing might contribute to civic discourse. The author closes the post with a call for academic discussion of the implications of this phenomenon. S/he and I offer this post as a resource for further study.

On March 15, 2008, over 9000^* people worldwide took to the streets to protest practices of the Church of Scientology organization. Without any clear leadership, masked individuals descended upon local organizations with signs and flyers. They stood outside, chanting phrases like "tax the cult" and "why is Lisa Dead?" They gave speeches, recruited new members, and granted press interviews. Then, they sang and danced to Rick Astley's epic 1987 hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Hi, We're from the Internet

The protesters call themselves "Anonymous" and their movement originated on several loosely affiliated web sites. The long-standing site Something Awful had built a community through its forums and a popular image manipulation competition called Photoshop Phriday. Other sites spun off of or grew up in parallel with Something Awful, including the always-offensive image posting site 4chan.org. The most popular "board" on 4chan was "/b/", which featured doctored photos, inside jokes, and porn. Through 2007, the community was pulling online pranks like taking down web sites and defacing Myspace pages. Their culture grew out of the pursuit of these sophomoric "lulz" and spawned several internet memes. Perhaps most well known is the LOLCats. Their language became filled with sarcastically self-referential bastardizations of English.

The community began coordinating "raids" against various sites, online games, and people that they deemed idiotic (or, in their words, had broken "teh Rules of teh Internetz"). They successfully shut down a white supremacist's page, lashed out at a site that copied one of their images, and flooded virtual games that they considered inane. They coordinated these efforts through several sites, but most prominently through a collaboratively maintained wiki. Plans would form as a result of many proposals, one of which would gain a critical mass of support. There were no leaders. At some point, the group decided to start calling itself "Anonymous," inspired by the largely anonymous web-posting tools they used. On July 26, 2007, KTTV Fox of Los Angeles did a news report on the group, calling them "hackers on steroids" and "domestic terrorists." The Fox report was quickly spread, parodied, and made fun of. It also formed the foundation for the group's ironic self-identity, and cemented the "Anonymous" moniker for months to come.

Throughout, Anonymous maintained a rough edge. Their "raids" often seemed more like cyberstalking or bullying. Their image boards continued to feature mostly porn, gore, and insults. Their conversations were peppered with what sounded like hate speech -- constant references to "fags" or "niggers". To be sure, it was a community made up largely of young white males acting somewhat immaturely. On the other hand, there have emerged more subtle undercurrents in their behavior. To some extent this language is used ironically and critically. Anons are equal opportunity offenders, and they seem to value free speech far more than they feel true hatred. They also use this harsh language when referring to each other just as much as when discussing the targets of their attacks. In a way, the phrases have been removed from their contextualized meanings in standard English discourse and reappropriated as part of the memetic language of the group.

On January 15, 2008, the online gossip site Gawker posted an internal Church of Scientology video featuring Tom Cruise riffing on the wonders of Scientology. The church had already successfully used legal tactics to remove the video from other sites, but Gawker claimed, "it's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it." Lawyers for the church claimed copyright infringement, and Gawker claimed fair use. At some point, some members of Anonymous became incensed at what they saw as an attempt to silence free speech and violation of internet principles. Debate ensued, and one member stated:

"Gentlemen, this is what I have been waiting for. Habbo, Fox, The G4 Newfag Flood crisis. Those were all training scenarios. This is what we have been waiting for. This is a battle for justice. Every time /b/ has gone to war, it has been for our own causes. Now, gentlemen, we are going to fight for something that is right. I say damn those of us who advise against this fight. I say damn those of us who say this is foolish. /b/ROTHERS, THE TIME HAS COME FOR US TO RISE AS NOT ONLY HEROES OF THE INTERNETS, BUT AS ITS GUARDIANS."

Scientology had thrown down the gauntlet, and Anonymous awoke. In a YouTube video addressed to the church, Anonymous explained that, "for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment, we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." Anonymous promptly took down Scientology's web sites, endlessly faxed them black sheets of paper, and called their public phone numbers with loops of... you guessed it... "Never Gonna Give You Up."

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the LULZ

The initial objective of the campaign was a success. By all accounts, Anonymous was frustrating the Church of Scientology and generating amusement for Anonymous. The church replied publicly, counter-attacked Anonymous sites through legal (and, allegedly, technical) means, and was forced to move its servers to a more robust and costly provider. Soon, long-time Scientology critics began to take notice. Some of these critics had worked to expose the organization's practices for decades, and the massive influx of energy was both exhilarating and frightening. One critic, Mark Bunker, replied via YouTube:

"I think it's incredibly exciting to have an army of young, passionate people wanting to do something about Scientology's fraud and abuse. However, I think you're making some major mistakes that are going to hurt in the long run. They're going to make you look bad, they're going to get you in trouble... they're going to get us in trouble, those of us who have been long-time critics of Scientology. Scientology is good at tar-and-feathering us with other people's actions. It may seems like fun and games, but Scientology is serious, you have to be prepared... I'm mainly concerned because you shouldn't be doing things that are illegal. You just shouldn't. It's not morally right, it's not right when Scientology does it, and it's not right when we do it... a better way to get at them would be to try to get rid of their tax-exempt status... now I know that doesn't sound anywhere near as interesting as attacking their websites. It sounds dull, but that's going to hurt them. Going out and protesting, that's wonderful. I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but please please please reform your movement the way we want Scientology to reform their movement."

Bunker later commented that "I thought they'd lash out at me." Instead, they celebrated him and named him "Wise Beard Man." In his video, he sounds like an earnest and concerned parent. It's hard to imagine such an uncouth and authority-hating group taking him seriously. But, they did. They began to educate themselves about Scientology's various alleged abuses, including the 1995 death of Lisa McPherson who was under the care of the church at the time she died. When someone posted a YouTube video claiming to speak for families that had been torn apart by Scientology, one Anonymous replied:

"Fucking rise up, sons and daughters of the Internet. Rise the fuck up and stay up. Let 'em know we'll take the fight to them, and that we'll help every single person that wants to leave the cult. We have lawyers and social workers and therapists in our ranks, and we can, and will, give aid to those who want out. We are Anonymous. For the lulz, but moar than that now. For teh most epic win. Revoke Scientology's tax-exempt status. Great Justice for Lisa McPherson."

Nearly overnight, Anonymous shifted focus. The Anons began planning for a worldwide protest, they compiled research, started a lobbying campaign, and cranked out flyers and informational pamphlets. On February 10, they staged their first major protest with several thousand participating. Many Anonymous donned "guy fawkes" masks, made famous in the film "V for Vendetta", as a symbol of their resistence to oppression and their commitment to anonymity. There is a long history of Scientology protesters allegedly being harrassed and otherwise attacked by the church. When anonymous translated its digital anonymity into real-world anonymity, Scientology faced something it had never before experienced.

Nevertheless, just before the second wave of protests on March 15, the CoS began agressively pursuing members of Anonymous that it had managed to identify. In some jurisdictions, local anti-mask laws had actually made it difficult for Anons to protest anonymously--a sharp contrast to their accustomed protections online. The church posted videos "outing" members and accusing them of hate crimes and terrorism (Anonymous responded by cloning the site and replacing the videos with Rick Astley). The CoS claimed to have filed criminal complaints at federal agencies, with these allegations. It tried to get an injunction against protestors in Clearwater, and failed. The worldwide protests grew, and Anonymous declared March 15 a success. The protests had been timed to coincide with the birthday of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Anonymous donned birthday hats, ate cake, and danced to a cheesy song with the lyrics, "When it's time to party we will party hard."

After the March protests, CoS sent nastygrams to some de-masked Anons via at least two law firms, which in themselves constituted no legal action. In a couple of limited cases, CoS actually took demonstrable legal action. It accused LA-based Sean Carasov of making death threats, and the LAPD dismissed the charges. It also filed a complaint of Trespass and Criminal Harrassment against Boston-based "Gregg" who knocked on the door of the local CoS and attempted to give them fliers. Gregg has yet to be heard in court, but Anonymous feels confident that the legal merit is weak and that the actions were filed solely as an attempt to intimidate.

By all measures, the intimidation isn't working. The next protests occur on April 12th, and are focused on bringing attention to the families that have been "disconnected" by the CoS. Anonymous plans monthly protests for the forseeable future.

An Academic Opportunity

Anonymous presents an array of opportunities for interesting scholorship. It is a cultural community, a political movement, a legal battleground, and more. It straddles between internet and "real world" existence. We need to study Anonymous... and to study hard.

Academics from cultural studies, media theory, and anthropology might seek to better understand what holds this unique community together. How have they appropriated anime and internet culture into the core of their identity and used it to unify their movement? How do neighbor communities like cosplay and video gaming cross pollinate with Anonymous? How does Anonymous connect with the earlier Internet vs. Scientology effort? What do we make of their obscure and offensive language?

Legal academics also have a great deal to consider when it comes to Anonymous. How do our laws regarding online vs. real-world anonymity differ? For example, should a Kentucky bill banning anonymous online posting pass or should a New York statute banning anonymous protesting in real life be overturned? Is the CoS using official-looking lawyer letters to intimidate and chill free speech? What can be done to defend Anons who claim that they are the target of fair-gaming through the legal system? What about the larger questions of Scientology's tax-exempt status and their controversial 1993 settlement with the IRS?

Political scientists studying movements and agenda-setting might want to consider how this group organizes and affects political change. What has made Anonymous able to grow and adapt so dynamically? How can such a decentralized, leaderless collective maintain potency in the long term? What are the means that the group is using to lobby and advocate anonymously? How is the movement gaining newcomers while staying on message and not becoming fragmented?

Some academics have already begun to take notice, but their work is preliminary. PBS's digital news project "Idea Lab" recently posted a thought-provoking article on the Anonymous transition from the Internet to the "real world." Anonymous demonstrates the principles of digital learning as they translate their online skills into collective action. They leverage viral-like promotion strategies through efforts like youfoundthecard.com. They use language and tactics from the video game world. They have developed a decentralized news making and gathering service in support of their cause. What can academics learn from this?

Rise up, sons and daughters of the academy.

More About Anonymous

A Sample of Anonymous Media Coverage

• Radar Magazine, April Issue: Cult Friction
• City Paper (Baltimore), 4/2/08: Serious Business: Anonymous Takes On Scientology (and Doesn't Afraid of Anything) [and yes, that's intentional]
• Christian Science Monitor, 3/17/08: Anonymous Activists Gaining Strength Online
• The Guardian (UK), 3/19/08: Taking The Rick

Anonymous-related Sites

• Why We Protest
• Reconnect.org (April 12 Protest Site)
• Enturbulation Forums
• Ex Scientology Kids
• You Found The Card
• Operation Clambake

From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with human rights advocate Sam Gregory, who I met at USC's DIY Media event earlier this year. In this second part, Gregory explains why Witness is creating its own video distribution site, discusses the role of remix in the realm of human rights activism, and explores what it might mean to "do it with others" rather than "do it yourself." Tell us more about The Hub. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of creating a platform specifically for distributing human rights videos as opposed to tapping into the power of shared or general portals like YouTube?

The Hub, WITNESS' most recent project tries to address what's missing in the online media sharing ecosystem for human rights activists. It's in Beta at the moment, and launched on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2007. In our first four months of quiet beta, we've had in the region of five million views of media, and going on eight hundred items of media uploaded.

It's envisioned as the human rights channel for the online community, as a place where anyone can upload human rights-related footage, share it with others and self-organize into affinity groups, comment on material there, and most importantly access online tools for action, and guidance on how to turn their video into compelling advocacy material. It places a strong emphasis on security both for the uploader and for those filmed, on providing contextualization for imagery wherever possible, and also seeks to provide normative leadership around the impacts of participatory media creation and distribution in oppressive contexts. For me, that option to act is critical. There's nothing worse from the activists' point-of-view than risking your life to film a piece of footage, and to then to have that experience dismissed. From the viewer's point-of-view there's nothing worse than being exposed to scenes of misery, and to have no way to take action. It's deeply draining and de-motivating for people to watch and not be able to act, it misses the opportunity to engage support, and it contributes to the compassion fatigue that we all already experience.

We're not in favor of walled gardens, and to create something like that would be to waste so much of the potential of the networked online environment. So why not just use YouTube? (or Daily Motion? LiveLeak? etc.). In fact, many of the videos on the Hub have also been placed by activists on YouTube (it is possible to use YouTube or any other commercial or non-commercial site to host content, and then embed it on the Hub), and in many cases we can see real value in drawing on the mass public reached by YouTube. The power of YouTube is that it is increasingly becoming the most prominent platform (at least in the global North, and for English-language media) for video online - although finding an appropriate human rights video can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. From an advocacy perspective, we can see how IF a video achieves either prominent placement, or takes off virally on YouTube it can take off in terms of public prominence. Similarly for many non-governmental advocacy organizations that are trying to engage a general public either with a single video or via a channel, YouTube is likely to be the first place that public will look. And we also recognize that YouTube is a pushing-out point for footage that finds homes in many other subculture-specific media systems, including human rights, where it is embedded and re-contextualized - I particularly appreciate Michael Wesch's commentary on this.

However, we see some significant current limitations on YouTube as a platform for human rights activism. For some publics - namely concerned citizens on a global scale concerned about security, looking to ensure that their footage galvanizes action, and suspicious of corporate and government surveillance, it may not be the best choice. These issues of concerns include questions of being a small fish in a big pond raised by the Center for Social Media's report last year, opportunities for meaningful community and to generate action, and the dilemmas raised by the Transmission network and others of commercial exploitation of human rights imagery, safety and security for the uploaders and filmed, surveillance by corporations and state, inflexibility in redistribution, downloading and sharing, and where editorial control is vested.

To illustrate one of these points, human rights video is generally among the least-viewed content on YouTube amidst the proliferation of music videos, parodies and commentary. A March 2007 Center for Social Media study found (though this was before the launch of the YouTube Nonprofit Channel which has increased slightly the visibility of social issue videos, and the pro-active work of the Citizen Tube editor at YouTube), public-issue videos find themselves 'small fish in a vast sea' . The most popular social/public issue video in the Center for Social Media study had 150 times less viewers than the most popular video on YouTube, and the terms on which they must compete for the public audience are the co-option of the characteristics of humor, celebrities, popular culture touchstones and music that are most common in the top-ranked YouTube videos. You yourself talk about the vaudevillian aesthetic of online video in which 'the best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared'. Some human rights video can play in this field. A powerful example is the 'Waiting for the Guards' video developed by Amnesty UK for their Unsubscribe-me campaign that feature a recreation of the stress position enhanced interrogation technique used by the CIA, as the center-piece of a web 2.0 campaign focused on action via social networking sites. But with some exceptions much human rights material is not immediately powerful performance, and may not be most effectively or honestly presented in that mode.

Another aspect is what happens to grassroots human rights video on YouTube if it does secure viewers. WITNESS' own experience with YouTube has included two videos that were very fortunate to be picked as Editor's Picks - 'Shoot on Sight,' produced by partners Burma Issues documenting military attacks on ethnic minority civilians in eastern Burma, and picked during the height of the crisis in Burma in autumn 2007; and 'Awaiting Tomorrow' highlighting lack of access to HIV/AIDs treatment in Democratic Republic of the Congo, produced by locally-based partners Ajedi-Ka, and placed on YouTube's homepage on December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day. Both videos received reasonably high viewer levels (approximately 380,000 and 225,000 as of now) and significant levels of comments ('Awaiting Tomorrow' ranks among the top forty most-discussed ever videos in the Non-Profit and Activism Channel with almost 1,400 comments before comments were disabled preventing further belligerent commentary). These levels of viewership are great in terms of reaching an audience that would know little about ethnically-targeted violence in eastern Burma, or access to anti-retrovirals in the Congo. However, the comments ranged from the constructive to the racist, and conspiracy-theory obsessed, and the framework of the YouTube page does not lend itself to using individual videos to focus action of the type WITNESS or local human rights advocates seek, or to foster discussion.

From the point-of-view of human rights advocacy, it was very hard to turn a transitory audience into an engaged public, or to measure the transition from viewing to action or impact. For human rights activism you want a community oriented towards action, recognizing also that online environments where no-one 'listens' to others and responds constructively are the opposite of the empowerment of voice that grounds WITNESS. As Howard Rheingold has observed in relation to youth participation online, in an analogy that could easily be extended to over-stretched, marginalized human rights advocates, "it isn't "voice" if nobody seems to be listening". Our experience illuminated the need for a channel dedicated to human rights and related action.

Recognizing that YouTube should not be viewed solely as a single site, but as a nexus of content that circulates in more detailed, niche contexts, I should note that the most effective uses of the YouTube version of 'Shoot on Sight' were in blog postings where it was embedded in additional context, commentary and recommendations for action, and in its use by venues such as the Facebook 'Support the Monks in Burma' action group.

As additional factors to consider -- in contrast to many commercial platforms -- the Hub carries no advertising, does not track IP addresses and advises users on how to avoid surveillance, and will soon include functionality allowing downloads so that people can use it in the most appropriate setting to generate action. Although we do currently have an editorial process to ensure fit of videos to guidelines, our hope is that the community will eventually monitor, rate and control the content that is on the site; and WITNESS does not claim ownership on the footage and allows the user to choose a Creative Commons license that will exactly lay out how they would like their work to be used

What, if any, kinds of remixing are appropriate in the space of human rights video? How can we reconcile this mash-up aesthetic with the evidentiary claims made for traditional documentaries?

Remixing is one of the most powerful aspects of the new participatory culture. From a human rights advocacy point-of-view, the positive dimensions of this are clear: the narrative possibilities of remixing footage are extensive and build on an increasingly reflexive contemporary media literacy, and there is a possibility to benefit from the creativity and capacity of a distributed network of peer production which can rework the 'raw' audiovisual material to appeal to diverse communities of interest, and within which the opportunity to be a 'co-'producer rather than just a user may promote sustained engagement.

Some of the most powerful political commentary in the US over the past 5 years has featured powerful remixes of news, archival and user-generated footage, especially around President Bush and his actions in Iraq, and groups WITNESS have worked with at a local and regional level around the world have used karaoke remix formats to communicate effectively around human rights issues. One example of the karaoke remix style I've seen in Southeast Asia is a video by one of our Video Advocacy Institute alumni, Dale Kongmonts's from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers. The rub is in how this remix culture relates to a human rights culture that is concerned for the dignity and integrity of victims and survivors, and the role of ethical witnessing. We love seeing George Bush remixed, but where would we draw the line? For me, that's a bigger concern than the evidentiary aspect. I think we have to recognize that the process of narrative creation is always subjective.

The remix question raises the underlying problem that bothers many human rights advocates when they consider visual imagery. WITNESS has wrestled for years with how to try and ensure that people filmed in human rights contexts understand how the video will be used, and the implications both positive and negative (we produced a whole chapter on 'Safety and Security' in our recent 'Video for Change' book), emphasizing model that relies on presenting worst case scenarios for impact, to enable genuine informed consent to be given. Simultaneously, human rights culture emphasizes the value of the integrity and dignity of the individual survivor of abuse on the basis of the first principle that every human being is possessed of 'inherent dignity', a concept which runs through every right articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A particular concern in the victim and survivor-centered human rights model is to avoid re-victimization either directly or indirectly (as can happen when an image is distributed and exploited inappropriately). The most graphic issues - of violent attacks, or at the most extreme, sexual assault - is seen as the material that most easily translates into a loss of dignity, privacy, and agency, and to the potential for real re-victimization. Individuals featured in videos who are not victims or survivors, but bystanders or witnesses, are also understood to be in positions of vulnerability and risk.

But that's a practice that's difficult enough to promote in the 'professional' documentary world, and impossible to sustain in an online participatory media culture of user-generated citizen media. How do we support emerging norms in the emerging online culture that, promote respect, tolerance and an understanding of risks? Over at Internet Artizans Dan McQuillan talks about "propagating an online culture pervaded by a sense of fairness & justice" and suggests "writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in to all web 2.0 Terms of Service". I think this is really one of the key tasks ahead for a concerned community online, only brought home more and more as we increasingly experience global human rights crises - Burma, Tibet - via imagery circulated online. The urgency of this normative work is clear if we think about the implications of increasing live eventcasting from cell-phones facilitated by technologies like Flixwagon and Qik. These technologies will have powerful positive implications for sharing footage and engaging constituencies immediately, but at the same time consent and security norms become even more critical once more video is streamed immediately rather than edited/uploaded after the fact?

You are an advocate of a "DWO" (Do With Others) approach to video production.

Explain. What value does collaborative production and distribution bring to the field of advocacy and activism?

The biggest concern for human rights activists is how video can be deployed to create real change. Alongside renewed opportunities for individual production and targeted advocacy both online and offline, I think collaborative production, distribution and advocacy offer powerful new possibilities for a network-centered video advocacy.

This DIWO (Doing It With Others) recognizes the advocacy possibilities of drawing on some "audiences" as collaborating publics both between themselves and with you, and as co-producers and not just as consumers or passive distributors of advocacy video. This means attention to how to facilitate meaningful and responsible ways in a many-to-many environment for people to speak to each other and create locally-specific and contingent media.

Collaborative production, distribution and advocacy allows for the possibility of drawing on all the potential resources in a given advocacy community. At the most simple format, it includes efforts like the video collages created by campaigns including 24 Hours for Darfur, which gathers expert, citizen and refugee voices to speak out on the situation in Darfur and join an online montage of voices, that was also screened at the UN. It also includes the YouTube and MoveOn.org approaches to user-generated or citizen-generated video contests, and what Greenpeace did last year in the environmental community, where it provided a stock of footage to supporters and encouraged them to "... Download our footage from the e-waste yards in China and India to edit and use in your video. Use it to make your own video about e-waste and how Apple should be a leader in helping tackle this problem...only limitations are please use the logo provided, a positive campaign message and the website URL somewhere in your video"

What is often most effective in advocacy are trusted voices, and often advocacy videos are blunt weapons in terms of finding a trusted voice that will speak to a broad and divergent audience. You either do it by finding a powerful story of a non-famous individual and find ways to engage your audience emotionally, or you take a default option of going with figures with a broad-based of 'authority' or just plain recognition, such as a celebrity. But with collaborative production of advocacy video you can go beyond that - you can mix together, say the footage from Burma or Darfur with the most trusted voices for a specific audience, to create locally-specific advocacy videos.

As a concrete example of this approach, I am currently working with the US Campaign for Burma, which has student chapters across the country on how to facilitate student action around divestment campaigns in universities. One idea in involves collaborative video editing, in this case using a software called Kaltura. At an online editing site they will find a set of stock clips of what is going on in Burma, including some interviews and visual footage as well as tips and advice from the coordinators and their peers about how to construct an effective advocacy video. They will then shoot their own material (for example, someone at University of Iowa could include a clip from a supportive academic or community leader) and create a localized video. All these clips, as well as the contingently finished films are shared online for all the student groups, so that another group has the option to borrow a useful video from others in the campaign, use it straight or remix it, or if they like just one of U-Iowa's local-specific clips borrow it for their own.

This is an example of a situation where collaborative production produces a range of advocacy videos, each locally-specific and targeted. We see the potential here for pressuring at a local level, by using shared footage and adding material that taps into local power dynamics - drawing on influencers and authority figures with specific resonance, or who have the 'ear' of a key person - and by making calls to action as specific as possible. You could also imagine collaborative production being used to produce one product that drew on the capacity and collective knowledge of many to create a more effective advocacy strategy

This approach - which relies on dense information connections to allow individuals to draw on and act with networked, shared resources has been termed 'network-centric advocacy' by Marty Kearns. As he defines it, network-centric advocacy differs from traditional advocacy in the strategy used to 'form and deliver an argument as well as the methodology used to build alliances across stakeholders'. Where traditional advocacy involves the advocate organization picking and packaging an argument for delivery to an audience, a network-centric approach 'asks the network to find, package and select the arguments (think MoveOn Bushin30Seconds example). The network picks the message.' Similarly whereas a traditional advocacy campaign has a core communications team at its center 'managing' the campaign, a distributed network campaign trains 'many spokespeople to speak their own voice'. We're seeing this in political campaigns in the US - see for example the excellent analysis by Connect US (which is doing work on doing network-centered advocacy here in the foreign policy community in the USA) of Obama's campaign.

From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part One)

I came back from the USC DIY Media Event with a whole range of new contacts. One hallmark of this outstanding conference was that it brought together people from very different social networks -- people who are working in parallel across different communities to explore the potentials of participatory culture. I've already featured through this blog an extensive interview with independent filmmaker and critic Alex Juhasz exploring her efforts to teach through and about Youtube. Today, I want to showcase another participant in the USC event -- human rights activist Sam Gregory. Gregory's comments about the strengths and limitations of Youtube as a site for media activism were eye-opening to me and I hope you will find them equally illuminating. In the interview which follows, Gregory describes the evolution in the thinking of his organization, Witness, from the aftermath of the Rodney King video, to the recent use of Youtube as a platform for the Burmese democracy movement. Drawing a phrase from Jamais Cascio, Gregory speaks here about the "participatory panopticon," the potentials of a world where citizens can use light weight portable cameras, including those built into their cellphones, and video distribution platforms to alert the world about human rights violations in their country. The past decade plus of DIY activism has taught veterans to be skeptical about some of the more utopian claims of the previous generation, even as they are learning to be more effective at exploiting every available opportunity to capture and distribute harsh realities that much of the world doesn't want to watch.

Sam Gregory, Program Director, is a video producer, trainer, and human rights advocate. In 2005 he was the lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007 he lead the development of the curriculum for WITNESS' first ever Video Advocacy Institute. Videos he has produced have been screened at the US Congress,the UK Houses of Parliament, the United Nations and at film festivals worldwide. In 2004 he was a jury member for the IDFA Amnesty International/Doen Award. He was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where his Master's in Public Policy focused on

international development and media. He has worked as a television researcher/producer in both the UK and USA, and for development organizations in Nepal and Vietnam, and holds a BA from Oxford University in History and Spanish. He is on the Board of the US Campaign for Burma, and the Tactical Technology Collective. He speaks fluent Spanish, conversational French and basic Nepali.

Can you tell us something about the thinking which led to the creation of WITNESS? How has your organization's vision shifted over time in response to shifts in the nature of participatory culture?

In the late 1980's, our founder, Peter Gabriel had been participating in the Amnesty Human Rights Now Tour, travelling the world and meeting human rights activists at each concert stop. And in many cases, it struck him that their stories were not being heard, and that new tools like the consumer video-camera could perhaps change that. Fast-forward a couple of years, and the Rodney King incident brought the possibilities home. From the window of his apartment George Holliday filmed a sequence of graphic human rights violations that generated massive media attention. That provided the impetus for the creation of WITNESS - founded in the assumption that if you could place cameras in the hands of the people who chose to be "in the wrong place at the right time", i.e. human rights advocates and activists around the world living and working with communities affected by violations, then you would enable a new way to mobilize action for real change.

For the first decade of our work we wrestled with how best to operationalize this idea. In the early 1990's we were focused on the technology. We distributed hundreds of cameras to human rights groups around the world, assuming that they would be able to gather footage that could get on television or be used as evidence -two polar extremes of usage, one very specialized and targeted at a judicial fact-finder or jury, the other playing to a vast, undifferentiated court of public opinion.

In those first years we learnt that without technical training, you could shoot raw video but you could not create the finished narratives that matter in most advocacy contexts outside of providing raw footage to the news media. We evolved to a strategy of working intensely with a select group of 10-12 'core partners' - human rights groups on the ground who approach us to collaborate in helping them integrate video into their campaigns; as well as doing extensive trainings, producing online training materials like our Guide to Video Advocacy and writing books like 'Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism' to promote effective ideas in our community. And most recently we embarked on a new project, the Hub, which is the most DIY part of our work - a participatory media site where individuals and organizations can safely upload footage of abuses and finished advocacy videos, share it, learn how to deploy it in their campaigns, and present clear context and links to more information, groups working to address the issues, and actions that viewers and supporters can take.

Over the past fifteen years, a number of factors came to characterize the WITNESS approach. We focus on the empowered voices of those who are closer or closest to rights violations - including victims, survivors, community members and engaged advocates on behalf of affected communities. And until recently we've generally sought to use "smart narrowcasting" rather than "broadcasting" to reach key audiences. So for example, the video 'Bound by Promises' was framed for and used in screenings to government officials and legislators in Brazil to push them to prioritize concrete programs to reduce rural slave labor. Our work has also always blurred the line between amateurs and professionals in terms of using video -we are training human rights workers, and now concerned citizens, to use video as an everyday facet of their work, rather than to turn them into documentary film-makers.

We've seen a progressive expansion of the participatory possibilities of video: first, increased access to cameras, the increased access to editing capacity, then the dramatic growth of online video-sharing for distribution. And in the past three years we see the possibilities for increased collaboration in editing and production, for online distribution, and for more immediate and widespread filming - all facilitated by a digitally-literate youth, by mobile technology with still image and video capability and by new online tools.

What role does do it yourself video play in heightening public awareness of human rights issues around the world?

I would identify three spheres of usage of DIY video in raising awareness of human rights issues around the world: advocacy videos, witness documentation and perpetrator video. All three are facilitated by ubiquitous technology for documentation (via video-cameras, digital still cameras with video functionality, and cell-phone cameras), by increasing digital literacy, and by increased opportunities for sharing, remixing and re-circulating.

To date most of our focus has been on advocacy video and on working to find the spaces where bringing the visual story into the virtual or real room can make a difference. Here we're trying to change the vernacular language of human rights advocacy, to make a space for the voices from outside, and to push a new way of communicating around rights abuses.

Frequently we've promoted an approach that's all about smart narrow-casting, speaking to a particular audience at a particular time, and seeking a distinct change in policy, behavior or practice. Videos are always part of a continuum of action -- and a strategy -- rather than stand-alone. Here we're working in the middle ground between the extremes of undifferentiated mass media attention and direct evidence in the courts. This could include showing video to an international or regional tribunal (we've been involved in a precedent-setting case to present video before the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, on land rights in Kenya), it could involve bringing to the voices of victims and the visual evidence of abuses in Burma into a Congressional briefing or a meeting of Security Council representatives, and it can involve engaging communities themselves to take action on a rights issues, for example by showing a video on voluntary recruitment of child soldiers in villages across eastern Congo. Videos always provide a 'space for action' by the audience, encouraging them to participate in solving the problem.

The scope of this use of video is increasing by the day, alongside more traditional human rights documentaries. We can see it on the Hub, where many of the videos uploaded are produced by NGOs, both at a national and an international level - for example, Video Volunteers' 'Stop the Privatization of Water, films by Amazon Watch, and 'Drying up Palestine.

The two modes that we're seeing now in increasing prevalence are witness documentation and perpetrator footage. Both are circulating increasingly in online video sharing contexts, and in the blogosphere. It's partly in response to the radically increased possibilities for participation in creating human rights video online that we've created our Hub project. In some senses with both witness documentation and perpetrator footage you're revisiting a Rodney King moment - only this time, there is a potential global audience of both activists and publics who can have access to the footage, and there are distribution options to get it to them, and knowledge about how to frame action around them. It's an exciting moment as people experiment with what can work with this radically expanded access to production and distribution.

Our founder, Peter Gabriel talks sometimes about "little brothers" and "little sisters" watching Big Brother, and this world of the 'participatory panopticon' as Jamais Cascio calls it - is one filled with emancipatory potential as long as we can make sure that the footage that circulates helps facilitate voice and change, rather than enable repression.

You've written that the project was initially shaped by assumptions about the "transparency" of the video medium. Explain. What happens to human rights video as we become more self conscious about the properties of the medium and the ways that it can be manipulated?

Our starting point was what the scholar Meg McLagan has succinctly termed a moment of "1990s technophilia and (with a) model of change based on the transparency of media". So it was very technology-focused and grounded in a perhaps naïve belief in the indexicality of the image - a firm conviction that 'seeing is believing' and that seeing would create action, in the same way that the Rodney King had seemingly inspired mass outrage and in the same way that at first.

Our initial assumptions about audience and how footage would be perceived and used, were not correct. In those days before widespread online video sharing, the modes to access broad publics were ineffective. We focused on video in judicial processes, and sharing video with the mass media - both of which are premised on the 'evidentiary' value of human rights footage. Yet both news media and evidentiary settings were challenging to access. The Rodney King experience was anomalous. Although George Holliday's footage permeated the mass media and was used in the subsequent state and federal trials, the overwhelming majority of human rights video cannot and does not reach those venues. And if it does, as many marginalized groups have experienced in their media advocacy, it is often presented in ways that are contradictory to the desires and intentions of the communities affected by the rights violations. The reasons for this - of course -- vary. But the result is the same. In some countries it may be that media is government, or corporate-controlled, or won't screen graphic imagery -- or is only interested in screening graphic imagery. And in many cases news media focuses on episodic framing that emphasize individual actions, victims and perpetrators, and is less interested in structural violence, systemic challenges or the ongoing problems that characterize many of the most pernicious abuses, and especially violations of economic, social and cultural rights. So, for example, a group I work with in Papua, Indonesia documents the systematic, ongoing and pervasive exclusion of indigenous Papuans in an economy dominated by migrants from other parts of Indonesia, and in a justice system that moves rarely against the powerful. In seeking widespread media attention they will face the triple barrier of government censorship, popular neglect and an issue that is not easily reduced to blow of a security force baton.

Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence frequently does not work. The rules of evidence are hard to navigate. And even if the evidence is admitted, we need only see how the Rodney King footage was flipped around and manipulated both to prove that the Los Angeles Police Department officers were following the training they had been provided to deal with a resisting suspect, and to demonstrate the grotesque abuse of power evident in the fifty-six strikes delivered on Rodney King.

So what this boiled down for us - alongside some re-thinking on audience --- was the need for framing and narrative to create effective advocacy videos. This framing can come both within the video and in the way it is presented within a campaign. Rather than relying on the 'visual evidence' in and of itself, you have to place this in a rhetorical framework that explains it, and offers ways to act. Seeing may be believing, but it may also lead to pessimism, and compassion fatigue in the absence of opportunities to act. We're not promoting a journalistic model of studious neutrality - our experience is that marginalized voices are excluded enough, without the need to balance their voices in a one-for-one ratio to the voices of authority or perpetrators. So most advocacy videos do have a point-of-view and an outcome in mind, but the best do this with clear respect for the facts of the situation.

You've argued that some of the most effective videos for dramatizing human rights issues have come not from activists but from the oppressive regimes themselves. Can you cite a few examples? Why were these videos produced in the first place? What new significance has been ascribed to them as they move into new contexts?

The futurist Jamais Casco has suggested that the 'Rodney King' moment of the digital camera era may hav e been the Abu Ghraib photos, and I would argue that the analogue for cell-phones was the footage of Saddam Hussein's execution. Yet both sets of images were filmed by perpetrators or by insiders, not by concerned citizens, advocates or observers. More broadly we can see a proliferation of images, particularly of torture by police, security force and military personnel.

One of the most viewed videos on the Hub is a redacted version of footage shot by Egyptian police in which they humiliate a Cairo bus driver by slapping him repeatedly. These and other more graphic videos that include the sodomization of another driver were filmed by the police themselves. They were then used to humiliate the victims - including by sending the images to other drivers-- and to intimidate other people by demonstrating what would happen if they didn't follow police orders. They share many similarities with the psychology of happy-slapping: adding for the victim the humiliation of the act of filming, as well as the humiliation of the probability of preservation, and allowing the perpetrator to relish the memory, and share it with their friends. Similar cases have galvanized debate in Greece, Malaysia (the notorious Squat-gate incident) and a number of other countries. And of course, footage is also shot increasingly by government to document and apprehend protestors and dissidents - here in the US, there has been the contentious suit around the NYPD and activists filming at the Republican National Convention in 2004, while most recently we can see official cameramen in the footage of protests from Burma and Tibet (for example, at 00:32 in this clip).

What happens is that these videos then circulate beyond the circles for which they were intended - and are re-ascribed new meanings. For example in Egypt, bloggers and journalists lead by Wael Abbas and Hossam el-Hamalawy circulated leaked cell-phone videos to challenge repeated denials of accountability for police brutality and torture by the government. By circulating the videos, and connecting online to both a local and international audience, they were able to generate media attention, and force an official response. Although the government initially tried to discredit the activists, it was very hard to deny the truth of the images, and for the first time, there was an investigation into the conduct of police officers in two of the leaked videos leading to a prosecution.

One issue that does arise is around the re-victimization of individuals featured in the footage. They are often doubly humiliated in the first instance - by what happens to them in custody, and by the act of filming, and then they are further exposed as the footage achieves widespread circulation. We've tried to address this in our own practice - for example, by respecting the victim's wishes in the Squatgate case and not re-posting the video on the Hub pilot project, but I think the most important thing we can do institutionally is to support the growth of norms in the online video community that are respectful of individuals' dignity and rights (the Transmission community has been leading on this concept)

Human rights videos, you've claimed, need to be thought of as "transnational stories." What are the implications of that statement? What factors insure that the video will achieve its desired effect as it encounters alternative audiences?

Much human rights activism is still about speaking to distant audiences, often to generate a 'boomerang' effect in your home country. In these cases you are telling transnational stories that must speak to an audience inevitably less grounded than you in the everyday realities of the oppression. So, the footage in the video produced by our partners working undercover in Burma 'Shoot on Sight' must speak to activists not only within Asia, but to government officials, decision-makers and solidarity supporters in North America and Europe. Most human rights situations are embedded in contexts of structural complexity, long histories of repression and reaction and many actors with different agenda. As activists and concerned citizens create human rights advocacy videos they face a dilemma. They want to resist a globalization of local images stripped of their meaning, by keeping intact local voices in local contexts, and in a way that is faithful both to the direct visible violence of a situation as well as the underlying structural causes. But at the same time as you move testimony and images between different advocacy and media arenas it often 'helps' to strip out some of the markers of specificity. From experience, I know that with many audiences too much analysis of the particularity and nuance of a testimonial story may undermine it as an advocacy call.

You are balancing the ethical demands to be true to the people who speak out, a recognition of the real complexities and the desire to make viewers genuine ethical witnesses, against the need to convince, shame or horrify a distant audience with a medium whose power often lies in directness both visually and in narrative. You also have to make tough choices in balancing the visceral power and problems of raw visual evidence (for example, of graphic violence) with the use of testimony.

Now as human rights video circulate increasingly unmoored from its original location - i.e. embedded, shared, remixed - it becomes key to place context and ways to act within the video and imagery itself rather than outside it since no sooner has your video been forwarded from YouTube, the Hub or elsewhere it becomes de-coupled from options to act unless those are built into the video itself, and unless your message comes through loud and clear.

If You Saw My Talk at South By Southwest...

On Saturday, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You) and I delivered the opening remarks at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. Conference organizers told me that we were heard by around 2000 people, including those in the large auditorium and in various overflow rooms. So, I've got to figure that a certain percentage of those people are going to be visiting this blog for the first time in the next week so I am pulling together a guide to where they can read more about some of the topics we discussed. For the rest of you, you might want to check out this very elaborate chart which was "live drawn" during our discussion and which does a reasonably good job of mapping out some of the core topics. For those of you who want to learn more about the New Media Literacies, you might want to check out the white paper my team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation which identifies 11 core skills and cultural competencies which we think young people need to acquire to become full participants in this emerging media culture. The MacArthur network has generated a series of books on key topics surrounding digital media and learning which can be downloaded for free.

If you'd like to read more about the politics of fear and the ways it blinds us to what's really going on as young people engage with media, you should consider this blog post and this document which danah boyd and I co-authored in response to the push to regulate school and library access to social network software.

I discussed the concept of collective intelligence in relation to Wikipedia in this post, which is an early draft of an article which will appear soon in The Journal of Media Literacy. For the distinction I raised between "collective intelligence" and "the Wisdom of the crowds," you might read this post which considers how both might be tapped through serious games.

Steven and I chatted a bit on the relative merits of The Wire (which I described as one of the best shows "inside the box") and Lost (which I characterized as one of the best shows "outside the box"). Here's an earlier discussion of Lost in relation to shifts in how we process television content. For a fuller consideration of Lost as a new form of television, you might check out CMS alum Ivan Askwith's Masters Thesis on engagement television. For an interesting take on The Wire, see Jason Mittell's essay here. And of course, Johnson's own Everything Bad is Good For You brought the debate about complexity in popular culture to a much larger public.

I spoke at some length about Harry Potter fandom. These ideas are more fully developed in the "Why Heather Can Write" chapter of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I expanded my thinking on Harry Potter fandom this summer here at the blog. The remarks on Harry Potter were inspired in part by the fact that I appear in a new film (which I still haven't seen), We are Wizards, which was premiering at the South by Southwest film festival.

I've had several people ask me about what I meant when I suggested that the amount of energy and creativity that surrounds fan culture might be understood, at least in part, in the context of a culture which fails to tap the full intelligence and creative energies of its citizens. I suggested that many of the women I had met in the fan fiction writing community, for example, held jobs, such as those of a librarian, school teacher, nurse, or nanny, which require high level of education for entry but often do not tap that knowledge as regularly as might be ideal. Many of these women use fan fiction as an outlet for their surplus creative energies, as a way of getting recognition for their accomplishments outside of the workplace, and as a means of forming community with others who share the same frustrations and fantasies. The same is true for fans of many other types: they are able to do much more outside of the workplace than they are allowed to do in their jobs. Someone asked me if I had meant women. Well, women are certainly as a group devalued and under-utilized in our society and this may account for why such a large number of them are participating in online communities of all kinds and accomplishing extraordinary things. But the same would be true of many other groups, including a larger number of young men. The point is that we look in the wrong direction when we pathologize fans for finding creative outlets through participatory culture rather than asking why America is not more actively cultivating that intelligence and creativity through every aspect of our society. (None of this is to suggest that fan activities are meaningless in their own right or need to be justified by appealing to more 'serious' values. As I also said during my remarks, humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.)

We talked about the Obama campaign and its relationship to collective intelligence and social networks, a topic that I explored in my blog very recently. From there, we extended to talk about the concept of civic media, a topic which allowed Steve to talk about his new project, Outside.in, and for me to talk about the work we are doing through the newly launched Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

In response to a question from the audience, I spoke about the newly created Organization for Transformative Works, a project by and for fans, in response to the commercial exploitation and legal threats surrounding their culture. It's a good example of how we can use the mechanics of participatory culture to exert pressure back on other institutions.

And if you want to hear my conversation last year with danah boyd, you can find it here.

For those of you who are new to this blog, welcome. Explore the backlog of posts. Stick around for more conversations on participatory culture, collective intelligence, and new media literacies.

Learning From YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first installment of a two part interview with filmmaker, activist, and cultural critic Alex Juhasz. In the first part, we focused primarily on a course she taught this fall on YouTube, describing some of the pedagogical issues she encountered, and some of the ways her course got distorted through mass media coverage. Today, she is focusing more fully on some of her concerns about profoundly "undemocratic" aspects of YouTube, concerns which her teaching experience brought into sharper focus. While Juhasz and I start from very different perspectives, I see her critique as a valuable starting point for a conversation about the ways that YouTube does or does not achieve our highest goals for a more diverse and participatory culture.

You've expressed concerns about the blurring between education and entertainment in the Youtube environment. What concerns does this pose for you?

We are clearly living in a time where conventionalized methods must be re-thought because of the increased functions of the media. Teaching and learning are two conventions that will adapt in the face of web 2.0. Now, I've been an advocate of critical pedagogy my entire career as a professor. In particular, I have been keen on refiguring power, expertise, and objectivity in the classroom attempting instead to create more collaborative, imaginative pedagogic interactions where there is a self-awareness about how embedded structures of power (race, class, gender, age, expertise) organize classroom participation, and access to learning. That said, while trying to learn through YouTube, there were significant challenges posed to the traditions of teaching that both my students and I experienced as obstacles. So maybe I'm not as radical as I pretend!

Before I enumerate these, I would beg your readers to consider whether these are hold outs to a lost and dying tradition, and good riddance (as some of my students believe), or whether there are certain tried and true approaches that were developed and nuanced over time because they work: methods of teaching and learning we don't want to lose even as technology brings us new possibilities.

We found that just what defined YouTube as good entertainment -- its compelling lack of depth and expertise, and its all but disappeared procedures of coherence, order, and forced attention -- made it poor for education. Of the many surprises and challenges of this class, it was most dumbfounding for me to find how resistant my students were to the loss of discipline, authority, and structure in the classroom. They hated the amount of process this demanded; disliked that I wouldn't just tell them stuff; were reluctant to do course work in a new format in which they lacked training; and generally wanted me to take control so that they could attend to other things and know what they needed to do to satisfy me.

Why, we might ask, do they enjoy the aimlessness and devaluing of authority on YouTube, but still want it in their education, even as any student would say, in a heartbeat, that they wish school was less boring, more fun, more entertaining? We found that the rigorous, controlled, contained, and rationale argument is key to learning; not the flow, but the building of knowledge. Meanwhile, ease of acquisition, while comforting, and perhaps numbing, to my mind can never meet the sheer joy of a challenge, and the prize of the steady, often communal and hard work of growing complexity. While its nice to wast time on YouTube, people want to get something (hard) from a class!

Your students pointed towards a fairly limited range of representations of race and gender in YouTube content. Why might such stereotypes persist in what is in theory an open and participatory channel? More generally, what factors do you think limits the cultural and ideological diversity of current digital culture?

I ended up learning a lot from this class (particularly from its unique YouTube-like structure) and even more from its students (which is where I started, I did believe correctly that on this subject they could educate me). Their keen observations about the down-side to user control were a revelation to me, lefty media activist, who has made a career around expanding media access. YouTube uses its users for almost everything: they create content, sort it, judge it, and censor it, all the while producing the revenue which runs the company by producing both its content and its consumers. There are incredible opportunities this affords us as a society: primarily unparalleled access to the thoughts, experiences, interests and documents of the daily life of real people, as they wish to be seen and heard. However, two other key results are less beneficial, especially if we want to think of YouTube as a democratic commons, which is certainly how it sees itself and is broadly understood. First is the idea of mob-rule, and how it functions for censoring.

Currently, on YouTube, if a few people flag a video as being objectionable, down it may go, within an opaque system and with no recourse. My students have learned that controversial opinions, outside the norms of the society, are often so flagged and censored. This is not a commons, where everyone has a right to a voice.

Furthermore, my students found that the system of user-ranking, or popularity, has the effect where normative or hegemonic ideas rise to the top of YouTube. The society's already accepted opinions about race, or politics, are most highly valued, receive the most hits, and thus are the easiest to see.

Meanwhile, there is a lively world, just under the surface on YouTube, where opinions counter, or critical, to those of the mainstream are articulated. However, given that the search function relies first upon popularity, this niche-tube is hard to locate, and is currently playing a small role in the conventionalizing standards of this new form. As I've said before, access is only one part of an equation of liberation. In this case, I'd highlight education in media literacy, aesthetics, theory and history as equally formative.

Many critics have praised the role of confessional video in the hands of feminist and avant garde filmmakers (the works of Sadie Benning for example) yet you seemed critical of the ways that this mode gets deployed on YouTube. What differences do you see between the two?

Patty Zimmerman's Reel Families traces the various factors which have historically turned amateur media content into "home movies," locked away in the domestic sphere, ridiculed as uninteresting to anyone beyond the immediate family. Whatever else one may say about Youtube, however, it has

brought amateur media content into broader public visibility, allowing it to circulate well beyond its communities of origin and in ways that allow greater control for contributors than found in, say, America's Funniest Home Videos, an outlet Zimmerman ridiculed. Would you agree?

These two questions are closely linked in my mind. Of course I agree that YouTube has opened access to video production and distribution, and that many of these newly allowed videos appear in either the home or confessional mode (a sub-set of the YouTube staple, the talking-head or rant). But this is where my particular project interfaces with, or perhaps veers from, that of the study or use of the home movie (or mundane, or DIY media) rather than the activist or art video. I am less interested in the fact of who produces, as much as I am how she does so and in what context. I am most interested in media cultures that allow regular people not simply to document their lived experience, not merely to reflect their experience through and to the norms and values of the dominant culture, but to create art and/or opinions about their lives and culture, in the name of a stated goal (of world or self-changing), and to an intended community.

Learning From YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz (Part One)

What does it mean to learn from YouTube and what would it mean to treat YouTube itself as a platform for instruction and critique? Alex Juhasz taught a course about YouTube last term at Pizer College, a small liberal arts school in California. As she explains below, Juhasz and her students adopted novel strategies for not simply engaging with YouTube content but also for using the YouTube platform to communicate their findings to a world beyond the classroom. In doing so, they took risks -- inviting outside scrutiny of their classroom activities, bringing down skepticism and scorn from many in the mainstream media which itself plays such a central role in the cycle of self promotion and publicity which surrounds the platform and its content. They became part of the phenomenon they were studying -- for better or for worse.

Earlier this month, I served as a respondent on a panel at USC's 24/7 DIY Video Event on a panel during which Juhasz shared her experiences. I felt that both her pedagogical approach and her critical perspective on Youtube would be of interest to readers of this blog. I should warn you that Alex Juhasz comes at these questions from a very different perspective than I do. For those used to my blatherings about the virtues of participatory culture, you will find her skepticism about much of the content on YouTube a bit bracing. But she raises many of the concerns which we will need to address if we are to achieve a truly participatory culture. Over the next two installments, she raises important questions about whether a participatory platform necessarily insures diverse, meaningful, or innovative content. Juhasz approaches YouTube from the perspective of someone who usually writes about independent, avant garde, and documentary film practices, from someone who speaks from the vantage point of an activism and an experimental filmmaker. She is reading YouTube against both the goals and the accomplishments of other movements to foster greater democracy through media production and finds YouTube lacking in many regards.

Be sure to try out some of the links here. Many of them will take you to work that Juhasz and her students have produced for distribution on YouTube. These videos offer some interesting model for the forms that critique might take in this new media environment.

What can you tell us about how you approached the challenges of teaching a course about YouTube? What methods of analysis did you apply to its content? How did you select which materials to examine given the vast scope and diversity of Youtube's content?

I decided to teach a course about YouTube to better understand this recent and massive media/cultural phenomenon, given that I had been studiously ignoring it (even as I recognized its significance) because every time I went there, I was seriously underwhelmed by what I saw: interchangeable, bite-sized, formulaic videos referring either to popular culture or personal pain/pleasure. I called them video slogans (in my blog where I engage in reflections on YouTube and other political media): pithy, precise, rousing calls to action or consumption, or action as consumption (especially given how much on the site is made by or refers to corporate media). I was certain, however, that there must be video, in this vast sea, that would satisfy even my lofty standards (although search words couldn't get me to it), and figured my students (given their greater facility with a life-on-line) probably knew better than I how to navigate the site, and better live and work with this recently expanding access to moving and networked images.

Thus, Learning From YouTube was my first truly "student led" course: we would determine the important themes and relevant methods of study together. I had decided that I wanted the course to primarily consider how web 2.0 (in this case, specifically YouTube) is radically altering the conditions of learning (what, where, when, how we have access to information). Given that college students are rarely asked to consider the meta-questions of how they learn, on top of what they are learning, I thought it would be pedagogically useful for the form of the course to mirror YouTube's structures for learning--one of the primary being user, or amateur-led pedagogy. So, the course was student-led, as well as being amorphous in structure within a small set of constraints, for this reason of mirroring, as well. As is true on YouTube, where there is a great deal of user control within a limited but highly limiting set of tools, I set forth a few constraints, the most significant being the rule that all the learning for the course had to be on and about YouTube (unless a majority of the class voted to go off, which we eventually did for the final). While this constraint was clearly artificial, and perhaps misleading about how YouTube is actually used in connection with a host of other media platforms which complement its functionality (which is really nothing more than a massive, easy to use if barely searchable, repository for moving images), it did allow us to really see its architecture, again, something that the average student would not typically be asked to account for as part of the content of a course. Thus, all assignments had to be produced as YouTube comments or videos, all research had to be conducted within its pages, and all classes were taped and put on to YouTube. This immediately made apparent how privacy typically functions within the (elite liberal arts) classroom setting, because YouTube forced us to consider what results when our work and learning is public. This produced several negative results including students dropping the class who either did not want to be watched as they snoozed or participated in the class; or did not want their class-work to be scrutinized by an unknown and often unfriendly public. Furthermore, students realized how well trained they actually are to do academic work with the word -- their expertise -- and how poor is their media-production literacy (there were no media production skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). It is hard to get a paper into 500 characters, and translating it into 10 minutes of video demands real skills in creative translation of word to image, sound, and media-layers.

This is all to say that the methods and materials for the course were selected by the students, who were forced by me to be atypically creative and responsible, and that they ended up inventing or recycling a wide range of methodology for academic research and "writing." Surprisingly, the themes of the course ended up quite coherent: looking first at the forms, content of videos (see research projects and mid-terms), then the function of popularity (see popularity projects), and finally the structures of the site (see finals). Furthermore, and quite impressively given their lack of skills and deep initial qualms, the students devised a series of methods to do academic assignments in the form of video. I would briefly characterize these styles of work as: word-reliant, the illustrated summary, and the YouTube hack, where academic content is wedged into a standard YouTube vernacular (music video, How To, or advertisement).

Finally, it seems important for me, at this earliest stage in the interview (and I hope this will not alienate some of your readership), to identify myself as someone with a very limited interest in mainstream or popular culture, even as I am aware and supportive of the kinds of work you and your readers have done about the complex and compelling (re)uses of dominant forms. While I, too, focus on the liberating potentials of people's expanded access to media, I have specialized in (and made) alternative media connected to the goals and theories of social movements. This is a lengthy, and formative history within the media (what I call Media Praxis) that includes some of the best media ever made, like early soviet cinema, Third Cinema, feminist film, AIDS activist video, and a great deal of new media. I continue to be concerned about why I am not seeing more on the site that is influenced by, and furthering this tradition, and my orientation in the course was to push the students to consider why serious, non-industrial, political uses of the media were not better modeled or supported on the site. Another way to say this is through a concern I have articulated about the current use of the term "DIY." I think it is being used to identify the recent condition of massive user access to production and distribution of media. My concern is that the counter-cultural, anti-normative, critical, or political impulses behind the term (as it came out of punk, for instance), drop out of the picture--just as they do in most DIY YouTube video--when access to technology occurs outside other liberating forces. I believe that for engagements with the media to be truly transformative, the fact of expanded access to its production and exhibition is only one in a set of necessary conditions that also include a critique, a goal, a community, and a context. I'll get to more about this in my later answers, but one of my great fears about YouTube is that it consolidates media action to the video production and consumption of the individual (this, of course, being a corporate imperative, as YouTube needs to get individual eyeballs to ads).

You also sought to use Youtube itself as a platform for pedagogy. What limitations did you discover about Youtube as a vehicle for critique and analysis?

My hope that the students would be able to see and name the limits of this site as a place for higher education were quickly met. By the mid-term, we could effectively articulate what the site was not doing for us. Our main criticisms came around these four structural limitations: communication, community, research, and idea-building. We found the site to inexcusably poor at:

• allowing for lengthy, linked, synchronous conversation using the written word outside the degenerated standards of many on-line exchanges where slurs, phrases, and inanities stand-in for dialogue.
• creating possibilities for communal exchange and interaction (note the extremely limited functionality of YouTube's group pages, where we tried our best to organize our class work and lines of conversation), including the ability to maintain and experience communally permanent maps of viewing experiences.
• finding pertinent materials: the paucity of its search function, currently managed by users who create the tags for searching, means it is difficult to thoroughly search the massive holdings of the site. For YouTube to work for academic learning, it needs some highly trained archivists and librarians to systematically sort, name, and index its materials.
• linking video, and ideas, so that concepts, communities and conversation can grow. It is a hallmark of the academic experience to carefully study, cite, and incrementally build an argument. This is impossible on YouTube.

Given that the site is owned by Google, a huge, skilled, and wealthy corporation, and that all these functionalities are easily accessible on other web-sites, we were forced to quickly ask: why do they not want us to do these things on this particular, highly popular, and effective site? This is how we deduced that the site is primarily organized around and effective at the entertainment of the individual. YouTube betters older entertainment models in that it is mobile, largely user-controlled, and much of its content is user-generated (although a significant amount is not, especially if you count user-generated content that simply replays, or re-cuts, or re-makes corporate media without that DIY value of critique). The nature of this entertainment is not unique to YouTube (in fact much of its content comes from other platforms) but it certainly effectively consolidates methods from earlier forms, in particular those of humor, spectacle, and self-referentiality. As YouTube delivers fast, fun, video that is easy to understand and easy to get, it efficiently delivers hungry eyeballs to its advertisers. It need provide no other services. In fact, an expanded range of functions would probably get in the way of the quick, fluid movement from video to video, page to page, that defines YouTube viewing. Of course, this manner of watching bests older models of eyeball-delivery, which is not to even mention that users also rank materials, readily providing advertisers useful marketing and consumption information.

Your course drew the interest of the mass media. In what way did this media coverage distort or simplify your goals as a teacher? What advice might you offer to other educators who found themselves caught up in a similar media storm?

The mainstream media attention served as a huge distraction and energy-drain for the course, while also being highly informative about one of the main functionalities of YouTube: popularity/celebrity. I must admit, it was downright baffling to me how my students initially could not seem to see the systems of popularity or celebrity as constructed, as made to keep them distracted. No matter how I approached it, they would only understand the concept, "you do something to get more hits, to be seen by more people and become more famous," as innately and inherently true, the reason to be on YouTube, the reason of YouTube. When our pretty massive visibility led to prying cameras that took up a lot of classroom space and time, but never bothered to see or understand our project with any depth, and a media culture that ridiculed us without interviewing us, the idea of celebrity as an unquestionable good in itself was easily cracked open for the students. I must also add here that we were handled with much more sophistication in the blogisphere.

As for advice: I learned I'm glad I am a professor and not a pundit because I do best when I can talk in length, in context, and in conversation. While I've been critiquing YouTube for its inadequacies in these respects, mainstream television and radio pale in comparison, and remind us about how YouTube really does differ from these earlier corporate models. Outside innate skill, hiring a handler, or wasting all your time memorizing and practicing blurbs, I am not certain how a garden-variety professor like myself could make mainstream media attention really work for her.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies, Pitzer College, teaches video production and film and video theory. She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and has taught courses at NYU, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, Claremont Graduate University, and Pitzer College, on women and film, feminist film, and women's documentary. Dr. Juhasz has written multiple articles on feminist and AIDS documentary.

Dr. Juhasz produced the feature film, The Watermelon Woman, as well as nearly fifteen educational documentaries on feminist issues like teenage sexuality, AIDS, and sex education.

Her first book, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1996) is about the contributions of low-end video production to political organizing and individual and community growth.

Her second book is the transcribed interviews from her documentary about feminist film history, Women of Vision, with accompanying introductions (Minnesota University Press).

Her third book, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, edited with Jess Lerner, is recently out from University of MN Press. She is currently completing her first "book" on the web, Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics.

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part One)

I am posting tonight from the west coast, having flown out to California to participate in 24/7 A DYI Video Summit being hosted by the University of Southern California. The event brings together videomakers from a range of different communities -- everything from fan video producers to activists who use Youtube to get their messages out to the world. I am thrilled to be participating on a plenary panel on the future of DYI Video, featuring Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig, hosted by Howard Rheingold. As I was getting ready to head out to the conference, I conducted an interview for the blog with media scholar Pat Aufderheide (of the Center for Social Media) and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University. I've long been interested in the work Pat and Peter have been doing promoting fair use in relation to a range of different communities of practice -- including documentary filmmakers, media literacy instructors, and producers of online video content. We featured some of the work they were doing through the Media in Transition conference at MIT last year. You can hear a podcast of that discussion online. I wanted to check in with them because in the past few months, they've issued several major new studies on the impact of copyright confusion on our culture, work which is setting the stage for efforts to identify "best practices" and to negotiate "acceptable use" standards to broaden the protections afforded those of us who are tying to integrate media production activities into our classrooms or who are involved in mashing up content as a form of expressive practice. Today, I am running the first installment of this exchange.

A recent study by the Pew Center for Internet Research suggests that almost 60 percent of teens on line have produced their own media content and a growing percentage of them are circulating that content beyond their immediate friends and families. What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?

PA: A more participatory media culture is definitely going mainstream. While it's still true that many more people watch than make at the moment, you're right to point out that young people are growing up as makers, and seizing upon blogs, online video and social networks to express and even form their identities. There are DaxFlame aficionados, and there are dozens of take-offs on "Dick in a Box," and "Dramatic Chipmunk" has spawned "Dramatic Snake" and "Dramatic Squirrel" and even compilation and fan websites for the phenomenon.

Many practices enthusiastically being pioneered and developed online involve use of copyrighted material. That's normal for new cultural creation. It builds on existing culture. Our culture is markedly commercial and popular, and our current copyright regime features default copyright (your grocery list is copyrighted when you've written it down) and very, very long terms (meaning that nothing you'd want to quote ever seems to fall into the public domain). So quoting of copyrighted culture will continue to be a key tool of new cultural producers.

Those new cultural producers often today believe that they're doing something illegal by quoting copyrighted culture. That's partly because of relentless miseducation on the part of corporate owners of content. They are justifiably terrified of peer-to-peer file sharing and other digital copying that threatens their business models. Their response has been to demonize all unauthorized use of copyrighted material as theft and piracy.

At the same time, they're desperately trying to revamp their business models for a digital era, and are making the blanket assumption that all unauthorized copying could be a threat to some as-yet-unimagined or as-yet-unpracticed business model.

Well, you wouldn't want to be them at this moment, it's true. At the same time, when they ignore the right of fair use, they are ignoring a very vital part of the law.

They're now worried about online video as a kind of "DVR to the world." So content providers like NBC Universal and Viacom are working out deals with online video providers like Veoh and MySpace, for specialized filters and software to identify copyrighted material. These filters will be able to "take down" videos that are copies of copyrighted material. The trouble is, nobody has yet figured out how to protect online videos that may be using copyrighted material legally, under fair use. As Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, it's like going tuna fishing without a dolphin-safe net.

Until now no one has known how big the problem of accidentally suppressing legal work really is. Our study, called "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video," (available at centerforsocialmedia.org/recut) demonstrates that it could be a very big problem indeed.

Many online videos, we showed, use copyrighted material in one of nine ways that are eligible for fair use consideration. (We weren't saying that they all are examples of fair use, only that these kinds of uses can be seen and in some cases have been widely recognized as fair use.)

Many of the precedents concerning fair use could be read as protecting specific classes of users -- the right of journalists or academics to quote for the purposes of reviews or critical commentary, for example. To what degree can or should those rights be extended to include amateur media producers?

PJ: It's really not a question of extending rights, but of making users aware of the right they already have. Fair use has been around as a judge made doctrine since the mid-19th century, and back in 1976, in its (for once considerable) wisdom, the Congress came up with a formulation of the doctrine that was general in its application rather than specific to any area or areas of practice. The problem for any group of practitioners is knowing how fair use applies to them and having the collective courage to rely on it. Some groups (journalists and academics are good examples -- and commercial publishers are another!) have done well at this over the years, and as a result they enjoy use rights that are apparently more extensive. But the truth is that documentary filmmakers, K-12 teachers, and on-line video producers have the same entitlement to fair use as everyone else.

That's why the "Best Practices" approach that we've been working on over the past several years is so important. It's an effort to help practice communities claim their legal rights by formulating consensus statements of what kinds of unlicensed use of copyrighted materials are necessary and reasonable for the creative work they do.

YouTube's impact has directed much greater public attention onto the work of these amateur media producers. In your white paper, you walk through a range of different genres of media appropriation and remixing. Which of these are the most clearly protected under current law? Which seem most at risk?

PA: First, a note: Because we're at the end of the mass media era, and because the pioneers of participatory media have been end-users or non-commercial producers, we think of this as an "amateur" movement. But it won't be for long. It'll just be expression in an open digital environment. Some of that expression, whether it's produced by professionals or not, will be monetized; much of it, most of it, will be available to be monetized. So the neat distinctions between professional and amateur, and between non-commercial and commercial use, are getting a lot messier and will soon be unhelpful. One thing we're very sure of is that we won't solve this problem by creating a non-commercial, amateur zone. Now, everyone's a player.

In our study, we identified a wide range of kinds of practices -- remix/remash (Ten Things I Hate about Commandments), quoting of a whole work for online commentary (The Worst Music Video Ever), critical commentaries (analysis of Fox news bias for instance), tribute videos (Steve Irwin), diaries (Me on Stage with U2 -- again!!), to name a few. We also saw a wide range of actual practices within those genres. One of the things we didn't do was to pass any lawyerly judgment on the fair use of any particular instance. We stopped at identifying kinds of practices as fair-use eligible, which is all that the survey we did permits us. We think this is very valuable because the kinds of practices are all clearly eligible for fair-use consideration. We hope that the next phase of our work, creating a best-practices code, will provide guidance to help people make judgments for themselves about what is fair use.

You can, however, make some generalizations:

• It gets harder to claim fair use the closer people get to merely quoting the work without commenting on it, reframing it, or adapting it.
• It gets harder to justify fair use the closer the copier's purpose is to the original.
• It gets harder when the quotation is longer or more extensive than is justified by its purpose.
• It gets harder to claim fair use the more the copier is intending to monetize the original item in order to compete with the copyright owner.
• It gets harder when proper credit isn't given.

We also found that it's very easy for everybody to understand why it's o.k. to use copyrighted material for critical, political and social commentary. People understand that you can't critique something without referring to it, which in video would also involve hearing and seeing it. They also see critical speech as a great example of the First Amendment.

What's harder for people to grasp is that it's also o.k. to use copyrighted material to make new work that may be illustrative or celebratory or illustrative rather than critical, or may re-imagine the culture as remixes do, or may archive it, or may simply record reality that includes it. Why is that so hard to grasp? All this activity uses the same cultural processes, the building of new work and meaning on the platform of the old. We think it's because people have cultivated, in the mass media era, a cult of the author, a belief in creativity as the product of the genius of the individual creator. This of course flies in the face of everything we know about the creative process, which is a social, collective and iterative one. It also flies in the face of cultural evolution. After all, until very recently in the West, copying was homage, copying was learning.

Many of these amateur media makers know little about the law. Most of them lack the resources to seek legal advice about their work. What steps can or should be taken to protect their fair use rights?

PJ:We're suggesting that a "blue ribbon" panel of experts in law and communications should take on the task of developing a set of "Best Practices" for fair use in on-line video production. The first step would be to talk with a wide range of producers (and platforms) about what they regard as necessary and appropriate quotation. Then the panel would be in a position to craft a document that would be a useful reference for media makers themselves and for the platforms that make their work available – as well as for the content owners themelves. In particular, it would be a point of reference that platforms and content owners could use when they develop mechanisms (like filtering techniques or take down protcols) designed to block or disable infringing on-line content. Everyone seems to agree that mechanisms of this kind shouldn't interfere with fair use, but unless there is some consensus about what constitutes fair use in this new area of practice, these pious affirmations aren't likely to be translated into meaningful practice. In the extreme and unlikely case that an issue involving fair use and on-line video were to find its way to court, a "Best Practices" statement also would help to guide the courts. Following a long-standing (and sensible) tradition in fair use decision-making, judges in these cases pay close attention to practice communities' views of what is fair and reasonable. (More about tradition and its implications is at www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf),

And, of course, if a media maker working within the framework of a "Best Practices" document were to be sued or otherwise harassed, there would be a healthy supply of expert IP lawyers lining up to defend that person on a pro bono basis. IP progressives -- and there are plenty of them in the legal community -- always are looking for good "test cases" to demonstrate the reach of fair use. In fact, Stanford's Fair Use Project is actively looking for such cases, and would offer legal defense if it could find one.

Pat Aufderheide, one of American University's Scholar-Teachers, is a critic and scholar of independent media, especially documentary film, and of communications policy issues in the public interest. Her work on fair use in documentary film has changed industry practice, and she has won several journalism awards. She is the founder, in 2001, of the Center for Social Media, which showcases media for democracy, civil society and social justice. She recently received the Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation from the International Documentary Association.

Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. He was Pauline Ruvle Moore Scholar in Public Law from 1981-82; Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Awardee in 1982; and he received the AU Faculty Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Development in 1996. He is a member of the Selden Society (state correspondent for Washington, D.C.). Previously he was a member of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. trustee, 1992-94; International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property; National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., Animal Welfare Board, 1986-present; Library of Congress Advisory Committee on Copyright Registration and Deposit (ACCORD), 1993. He has written many chapters, articles and monographs on copyright, intellectual property, technology and other issues. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994 (with M. Woodmansee) (also published as a law journal issue, 10 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 274, 1992). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, Third Edition (Matthew Bender & Co., 1994).

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

Sometimes a class project takes on a life of its own. I asked the students in the CMS graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to work on teams and report on a contemporary media phenomenon, reading it against some of the theories about media change we have been studying so far this term. A team of our incoming graduate students -- Kevin Driscoll, Xiaochang Li, Lauren Silberman, and Whitney Trettien -- decided to focus their energy on examining the ways that Soulja Boy, a teenage hip hop phenomenon, used a mixture of social network sites and YouTube to push his way up into the top music charts.

A key to his success turns out to be his active encouragement of fans to sample, remix, mashup, and perform his "Crank Dat" song through whatever media channels they want. Our Convergence Culture Consortium is focusing this year on understanding what we call "spreadable media," arguing that the era when value was created by "stickiness" is giving way to one where media gains new value through grassroots circulation. If it doesn't spread, it's dead! And the best way to insure the spread of media is to give over greater control to the audience, to increase their emotional stakes in your success.

As the students discovered the vast array of different people out there who were performing "Crank Dat," they wanted to get into the act. And so they got a camera, borrowed some lab coats, used their social network accounts to draw people together, and staged their own music video, which now circulates via YouTube.

As it happened, I stumbled by between meetings, just in time to watch them lining up to dance on the dot. I stayed for a bit trying to master the for-me very challenging dance steps. I always seemed to be zooming like superman when I was supposed to be doing the pony walk. Unfortunately, the real Professor Jenkins doesn't have any of the moves that my avatar enjoys in Second Life. But, I enjoyed watching my students gamble and shake a leg.

To my pride, they showed their budding skills as public intellectuals, having managed to get the Boston Phoenix out to cover the story. Here's some of what the Phoenix reported on the unfolding scene:

In the summer of 2006, DeAndre Way, then 16, combated summer boredom in Batesville, Mississippi, by writing songs with Fruity Loops digital-audio software. He borrowed a cousin's video camera and filmed dances to accompany the music. Thanks to YouTube, Way's choreography quickly turned into a Southern dance craze -- particularly centered around a steel-pan-drum-fueled number called "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."...

This past Wednesday, a day after the release of Soulja Boy's debut album, Souljaboytellem.com, a dozen or so MIT grad students and professors gathered on a circular lawn beside Building 54 at 5:30 pm, blasting "Crank That" from a small gray CD player set on repeat. Some of the group were clad in lab coats and thick glasses as they repeated (and videotaped) the dance -- a crisscrossed jump in place, followed by a few shakes and stomps, a breast stroke-like arm spread, and four jumps to the left and right. "This will single-handedly transform the coolness factor for MIT," commented Henry Jenkins, co-founder of MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program, as he observed nearby.

The meeting of Soulja enthusiasts was organized by students -- including Kevin Driscoll, a/k/a Lone Wolf, a local DJ and former computer-science teacher -- from a CMS graduate course in media theory. Driscoll's lawn-dance party was more than just a way to add a video to the vast library of "Crank That" tributes. He hypothesizes that "Crank That" is a unique bullet point on the dance-craze timeline, symbolic of a shift in dances' virility and how they spread.

"It's by the power of the dance craze that [Soulja Boy] was picked up by a major label," says Driscoll. "It demonstrates how resources like YouTube and MySpace can be these enabling technologies, even for kids, really." The MIT Soulja Boy videos are now on YouTube (and up to about 400 views each, at press time) making them perpetuators of the very trend the participants are studying. At least it's not the Macarena.

Ever since, I've been talking up Soulja Boy as perhaps the most powerful success story we have so far of someone who taped the power of grassroots convergence to break into the commercial mainstream. Check out for example some of my comments about the phenomenon during my keynote address at our recent media literacy conference, organized by Home Inc., which were posted by Bill Densmore

One of the students on the project --xiaochang li-- wrote up her perspectives on "Crank Dat" and what she calls "Hustling 2.0" for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog and I wanted to pass this along to my readers. Next time, I will share her thoughts about how Soulja Boy's most recent music video might be seen as a textbook illustration for how convergence culture works.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

xiaochang li

A little while back, Kevin, one of my colleagues here at MIT, brought the Soulja Boy YouTube phenomenon to my attention while we were discussing an upcoming project.

Fast forward to October: Soulja Boy is fending off Britney Spears and Kanye West on the Billboard Top 100, and you can now watch a rag-tag team of MIT grad students, researchers, affiliates, and Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Movement, crank that. (CMS program director Henry Jenkins even joined in the learn the dance, but sadly had to run off to something undoubtedly important before the video was shot.)

A little bit of context for those who have somehow managed to miss this craze: Soulja Boy produced his own tracks and uploaded videos of himself performing the dance onto MySpace and YouTube. People everywhere started doing their own versions and putting up their own videos, and the whole thing snowballed until people like Beyonce started incorporating the dance into her stage show. By that point, everyone from underground rap magazines to The Atlantic was talking about Soulja Boy.

Beyond the novelty of seeing everyone from Winnie the Pooh to a bunch of vaguely coordinated MIT students doing the "Crank That" dance, the rise of Soulja boy is an interesting exploration of self-promotion in the digital landscape.

Many groups have taken to social networks and video sharing as a means to self-promote, but, as anyone who has ignored dozens of friends requests from bands on myspace.com knows, the effectiveness of all these efforts is inconsistent, at best.

Part of the problem is that there isn't a significant shift in the way in which the

content is presented. Bands produce the same types of videos and promotional materials, except now they're accessible through YouTube instead of MTV. There's little consideration of the unique expectations and practices within these spaces.

In that way, Soulja Boy, who has described computer access as the turning point in the

development of his career, was far better equipped to handle his own online promotion

than any major label executive. In a move that was described on Artist Direct as "Hustling 2.0," Soulja took advantage of the fact that people were already downloading material from other artists, renaming his files as popular songs in order to spread his content. He also has a number of videos which use the particular video blogging aesthetic of YouTube to help brand him as a personality.

This gap in understanding between major media and cultural practices of user-generated content channels is mirrored in the official music video for "Crank That," wherein rap impresario Collipark good- naturedly mocks his own ignorance of the flourishing Web 2.0 phenomenon around Soulja Boy. The whole video, in fact, runs almost like an advertisement for the age of convergence culture, as the dance propagates over multiple channels of distribution, morphing and evolving from streaming video to mobile devices and ultimately ending up in the "real," physical world, and Soulja Boy steps away from his Webcam and chat windows to accept his record deal.

As Kevin pointed out in his blog, he takes the sign of major label recognition more like an award instead of an opportunity, payment for a job already well-done. On that note, it's interesting how the spelling varies between "Crank Dat" on many of the fan produced videos and some of the marketing on Souljaboytellem.com and "Crank That" on the official record, like a linguistic marker to differentiate the D-I-Y phenomenon from the standardization of the song and its incorporation into the established entertainment industry.

Check out the range of videos in the Soulja Boy

universe:

Soulja Boy's YouTube

channel, where you can see the original dance video, the official video, and the

instructional video, in addition to a number of fan videos and clips of celebrities

doing their own versions of "Crank That."

A fairly comprehensive collection of all the audio variations on the song that have appeared. My favorite might be the Folgers Coffee version.

A blog devoted solely to videos of the many, many versions of the dance. Note how the spellings vary from video to video.

When Xiaochang's post appeared on the C3 blog, she generated some interesting responses from the hip hop blogosphere. Check out:

ttp://www.ohword.com/blog/852/crank-dat-white-girl-the-soulja-boy-lesson-plan

http://www.prohiphop.com/2007/10/to-understand-s.html?cid=87651522