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

Kristina Busse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy Baym

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

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

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

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

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

Flourish Klink

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

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

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

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

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

BIOS

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

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

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

Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters...

Yesterday, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame announced a bold new online venture called Pottermore which has sent shock waves through multiple communities which I follow closely and I've had more than a few people already ask me to weigh in on my initial thoughts about what's taking place. Keep in mind that, as Will Rogers used to say, all I know is what I read in the newspaper. I have no knowledge of what's taking place here other than what's already in the press and what I can speculate about from my knowledge of the announcement's fit within a range of trends impacting social media, transmedia entertainment, Web 2.0, and fan culture. Here's the video of Rowling's announcement, which you should watch, if you haven't already, so the rest of this makes sense.

Now, let's consider what this announcement means from several perspectives.

Pottermore as Transmedia Storytelling: This may be the most highly visible transmedia project to date -- after all, Harry Potter is as big a media franchise as we are likely to see anytime soon. I've blogged before about the paradoxical nature of Harry Potter fandom:

Harry Potter is a massive mass market success at a time when all of our conversations are focusing on the fragmentation of the media marketplace and the nichification of media production. There has been so much talk about the loss of common culture, about the ways that we are all moving towards specialized media, about the end of event based consumption, and so forth. Yet very little of it has reflected on the ways that Harry Potter has bucked all of these trends....But in many other ways, the success of Harry Potter demonstrates the power of niche media. Start from the fact that this is a children's book, after all, and a fantasy, two genres which historically have attracted only niche readerships. Scholastic surely wouldn't have predicted this level of popular interest when it chose to publish the original novel. By traditional industry talk, much of Harry Potter's success came from so-called "surplus consumers" -- that is, consumers who fall outside of its target demographic. Traditionally, much of fan culture involves these kinds of surplus consumers -- female fans of male-targeted action adventure series, adult consumers of children's media, western consumers of Japanese popular culture, and so forth. Indeed, it is this attraction to works that are in some ways mismatched to our needs that encourages fans to rework and rewrite them.

Relatively little of the official Harry Potter media produced to date has been transmedia in the sense that I use the term -- as an extension of the information we have available about the world rather than as a replication of the story from one medium to another. I've been suggesting lately that we might identify transmedia projects through the combination of two factors - radical intertextuality (that is, the complex interweaving of texts through the exchange of story-related information) and multimodality (that is, the mixing of different media and their affordances in the unfolding of the story). Pottermore works at both levels.

On the one hand, Rowling is making a commitment to provide fans with a large chunk of additional information about the world of Harry Potter, nuggets which, as she puts it, she's been "hoarding" during the writing process. We might think of this as a more interactive version of the kinds of "further stories" or notes on the mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien's estate has been slowly feeding Lord of the Rings fans in the decades since the author's death. Some estimates suggest that she's already got 100,000 words of new material which is going to be inserted into the interstices of the original novels -- that's more or less the length of a typical book (not as much as a Harry Potter book, but still) -- and she's hinted that there may be more where this comes from. During the Harry Potter lexicon case, it came out that she had been planning to publish her own encyclopedia which would expand our knowledge of her fictional universe. It is not clear whether this will supplement or replace that original conception.

By far, this is the aspect of the announcement which has caught fire with fans, especially those who have been worried that the intensity of the fandom will fade once the last film is released into the theaters. Trust me, there's been lots of mashing of teeth about this. No one thinks that Harry Potter fandom will go away completely -- we've seen many fandoms long outlast the production of new material -- but there is apt to be less intensity and visibility once the final film hits the theater. For these fans, Pottermore is a game changer. Here, for example, is some of how HPANA, one online Harry Potter fansite, responded to the news:

"Does this announcement and the looming launch of Pottermore hold enough weight to keep together a fandom that is showing signs of deterioration? To me, Pottermore will act as an integral part of the fandom for the next few years. Yes, years. If Jo were to have announced a print encyclopedia, the immediate impact would have been greater. But because of the interactive nature of Pottermore, and the fact that each novel's storyline will be released months apart (Sorcerer's Stone in October, Chamber of Secrets in early 2012), the Pottermore storyline may not conclude for at least two years - extending active fandom discovery until the end of 2013 at the earliest....What does this mean? The Harry Potter fandom is on the verge of embarking on a new, monumental journey, something which has never occurred and probably will never happen again, as Rowling has been famously private about her writings in the past. Pottermore will be truly a one-of-a-kind experience where fans will have the opportunity to dictate what they want to see come out of it, both from Jo and fellow fans....I believe the whole fandom discovering brand new canon together is the most important aspect of Pottermore. The ingenious sorting, play-along aspects and digital store with the first ever Harry Potter e-books? That's merely icing on an already delicious cake."

Those are high hopes for the author to meet.

On the other, there is the promise of multimodality represented by what's been described as interactive "moments" introduced around the books -- including a sorting hat process and a wand shop -- which allow fans new ways of interacting with the story. For literary critic Lev Grossman, who has been a key enthusiast for the books, this aspect of transmedia causes him to pause:

When publishers mix reading with other media, the way Pottermore does (or the way that The 39 Clues, another Scholastic creation, does), I find it confusing. Every time I see more of the Potterverse realized in other media, as video or audio or even still images, it undoes the work I did by reading about it. It takes away from the marvelous, handmade Potterverse I've got going on in my head and replaces it with something prefabricated.

Those of us who are more enthusiastic about transmedia see it differently: we see these materials as expanding our knowledge and deepening our experience of the story (at least in so far as they are done well and everything about Potter has been done well) by allowing each medium to do what it can do best. There's been lots of talk about whether there has been a killer demonstration of the potential of transmedia -- this may well become that killer demo, for better or for worse, and I for one am going to be watching closely to see what happens next.

Pottermore as eBook: The Wall Street Journal has read the Pottermore story through the lens of ebook publishing and the future of authorship, and it's a pretty significant story from that perspective also. Here's part of what they speculate:

While her publishers and major online book retailers will continue to sell her physical books, Ms. Rowling has reserved for herself the digital editions, the fastest-growing segment in the book world. The move could inspire other authors, large and small, to pronounce themselves independent agents in hopes of tapping more lucrative paydays. Ms. Rowling refused for years to release her books in electronic format, retaining the digital rights for herself. While most other authors have already handed over their digital rights to their publishers--most recently, John Grisham--Ms. Rowling's deal could prompt them to self-publish when their deals come up for renewal or demand higher royalty rates than the 25% of net sales that most publishers offer today on digital editions. Some may even choose to forgo all traditional means of book publishing and set up their own bookstores, reaping 100% of everything they sell.

I am following the world of epublishing closely these days, thanks to my affiliation with the Annenberg Innovation Lab which is launching its own epublishing division. Few authors at this point can exert such power over their own publications and few have the ability to set new terms of professional compensation. Read through this lens, it may be a comparable to when George Lucas took a smaller salary on Star Wars in return to a percentage of the revenue from ancillary products, a decision which helped paved the way for Star Wars as a ur-text for transmedia storytellers and entertainers.

Rowling recognizes that it is not enough to offer a digital offset of the books via Kindle but that ebook publishing represents its own kind of event, which enables her to further expand the reader's experience through new content and new ways of interacting with the material. Her continued involvement with the social network of her fans moves the ebook from a product to a process - not a one time thing, but something which can draw back people who have already read the seven books and watched the eight films to have a new set of relationships with the story. So, again, the announcement is big news.

Pottermore as fan relations: This is where things start to get a little more complicated. I've been mapping this fandom for years and there are many different kinds of Harry Potter fans who have different expectations and different relationship to the material. So, as critics such as Suzanne Scott and Julie Levine Russo have noted, transmedia practices tend to priviledge some kinds of fans over others, constructing model fans and thus seeking to set the terms of how fans relate to the material.

This has become increasingly true for Rowling, who has shown many signs that she wants to continue to shape and control how fans respond to her work well after she finished writing it. We can see this in the epilogue to the last novel, which seems to pointlessly map out futures for all of her characters, including shaping the "ships" (relationships) between them, in what amounts to spraying her territory. Many fans would have preferred a text which was more open ended on that level and allows them more freedom to speculate beyond the ending. She decided to "out" Dumbledore not through the books but via her own discourse around the books. She tried to shut down the Harry Potter Lexicon. So, it is abundantly clear that she likes some of her fans more than others and that any effort to facilitate fan interactions also represents an attempt to bring fandom more under her control.

Two key phrases stood out for me in the announcement: "digital generation" and "safe," both of which require some glossing here. Harry Potter has attracted a very strong adult readership, many of whom would not conventionally fall into the digital generation. Even among those who come from the digital generation, many of those who grew up reading the books, are now young adults, even in some cases, parents on their own. And then, there are the children readers who were the targeted audience for the books. The most active fans, as noted above, are often a "surplus audience," and may well not be children. This doesn't matter when the book can be purchased at a range of different locations, read in a variety of contexts, but if you try to bring that readership together online, then the tensions are apt to become more of an issue.

That's where the term, "safe," is a red flag. In this case, it can mean two things -- first, a space where you can read the stories without encountering any of that dratted "pornography" that some (many actually) of the adult fans have been producing. I remember talking to Warner executives when I was working on Convergence Culture who kept saying they wanted to distinguish between the "fans" and the "pornographers," and I couldn't bear to tell them that most of the erotica is produced by the fans and is part of what it means to them to be a fan. So, "safe" in those terms means censored, regulated, or policed. So, the promise is that "You," "Us," will help shape the future of the franchise but only in terms specified by Rowling and by the companies involved in overseeing this site.

Here enters a second potential meaning of the word, "safe," which is that the site will comply with the Children Online Privacy Protection Act (or its British equivalent) which sets restrictions on the exchange of personal information, especially by minors. (For a useful discussion of how the desire to protect children may also restrict their ability to meaingfully participate, check out this recent post by Anne Collier.) So, does this mean that Pottermore will become the literary equivalent of Club Penguin, social media without the potential for off-line social interactions, and how does this fit within the larger framework of social relations upon which Harry Potter fandom, like all other fandoms, depends.

Moving beyond the word, "safe," there's the potential that this follows the logic of Web 2.0 more generally which seeks to capture and commodify participatory culture. There are multiple concerns here, which I need to know more to be able to address. While the language of the video hints at a more open-ended structure of participation, wherein fans share their thoughts, speculations, and creative works with each other, the only features specifically described constitute preprogramed interactivity -- such as the Sorting Hat -- which sets the terms of our engagement with the storyworld. I might note that Harry Potter fandom has been among the most innovative in helping fans make the transition to the era of social networks -- having developed their own platforms and practices since the book was first published -- including several very sophisticated versions of the Sorting Hat. Which house you identify is deeply personal to Harry Potter fans. I strongly identify with my affiliation with Ravenclaw, so why should I cede to Rowling and Sony the right to decide which house is mine! So, in this case, Rowling is offering fans what they already have on their own terms and using the release of information as a bribe to pull them into her walled garden. (Keep in mind that the information is going to get spoiled and leaked the moment it is posted.)

If, on the other hand, she does allow for more creative and participatory engagement of the material on the site, that opens other questions already hotly debated along the borders between Web 2.0 and Participatory Culture. Abigail DeKosnik, for example, has described the bargain fans often are forced to make -- ceding all rights to their own intellectual property in return for the promise, easily revoked, of corporations not suing them for their efforts. Others have described this in terms of issues of fan or free labor -- people are doing creative work for free which benefits corporations without getting any revenue in return. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to describe this as a modern form of "sharecropping." This is a complicated issue and we have a lot to say about it in my forthcoming Spreadable Media book.

I am not prejudging the terms that Rowling and Sony are offering here. I am just saying that the platform as described raises these questions and we need more information before we can really weigh whether Rowling is treating her fans fairly here. She's been surprisingly supportive of fan culture in the past, but on a selective basis, which does not give us much guarantee on how this one is going to shape out. The devil is going to be in the details here and those are going to be rolled out over the next few months.

Could Rowling's "gift" to her fans turn out to be a Trojan Horse? Hell yes, but it may also open the door for some other creative opportunities along the lines discussed in the earlier sections of this post.

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

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

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

Karen Hellekson:

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

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

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

Henry Jenkins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Hellekson:

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

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

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

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

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

Erica Rand:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Jenkins:

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

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

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

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

Karen Hellekson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIOS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasure/Politics; Twirling/Defence -- Erica Rand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affect and Interpretation-- Karen Hellekson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIOS

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

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

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

Going Beyond the Ending: A Wrap Up

This week, this blog has been using the debate about Smallville's ending to raise some larger questions about how cult series ends and how producers might deal with fans who are disappointed or frustrated or enraged or betrayed or... with the outcomes. Seeking to place this debate in a larger context, I reached out to Flourish Klink,who graduated with a Masters from the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (where I was her proud mentor) and now, alongside teaching at MIT, works as the Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, advising this transmedia company about fan relations and participatory culture. She always has interesting things to say about the interplay between producers and fans, so I wanted to give her a chance to weigh in on this discussion. Cult series always seem more satisfying to fans in the middle than at the end. How do you think producers should deal with the expectations which have built up over the run of the series? Are there classic mistakes which producers make in trying to respond to fan frustration with the ending of a program?

One of the most important aspects of dealing with expectations is to be honest about the situation, the possibilities, and the fact that not everybody is happy. One of the most classic mistakes that producers make is to become very defensive about their own work, suggesting that the way the show (or book, or...) ended is the only way it could have ended. Obviously, producers and writers and actors get just as wrapped up in their own long-running projects as fans do, so sometimes they become very certain that they're doing the right thing!

But fans also have a perspective on the series, and if the producers are too staunch that the series ended the right and correct and only way possible, it can be very insulting to fans. It is much better to frame discussion about the end of a series in a more open way. "We decided to make character X and character Y together, because that's what everybody in the writer's room was feeling... Character Y and character Z might have a romance in an alternate universe, for sure, but we could only tell one of a million possible stories about these people."

An example of a writer who dealt with this very badly is J.K. Rowling (OK, she's a writer, not a producer - but it's a similar idea). Many fans viewed the epilogue to the final book as a slap in the face, intended to shut down any speculation about what might happen to the characters in their adult life. It would have been very easy for Rowling to mitigate some of those frustrations with a few well-placed words!

What roles can/should transmedia play in shaping the future of a cult series?

Transmedia can provide a wonderful way to explore the future of a series that ended too soon - but it can also play a wonderful role in exploring alternate universes, alternate ideas of how characters could be. That's an old idea in fanfic, but it's a new idea for Hollywood. (Here, we ignore the Star Wars extended universe - it's been doing this for years, but very quietly.) On its simplest level, changing media can allow fans who liked the ending of a TV show to enjoy that ending and consider the new medium "noncanonical" - but it can allow fans who didn't like the ending, especially an ending that centers around a romantic pairing, to continue the story until it reaches a place they find more satisfying.

What roles can/should fan fiction play in allowing fans to "repair the damage" done by the "Powers That Be" when they end a series on what some fans feel is the wrong note?

It seems silly to me to ask questions about "should" when it comes to fan works. Fan works are not really the kind of thing that "should" or "should not" exist - they do exist, and there we are. That said, I think that fan fiction is vital for this purpose. Fans are extremely invested in their shows, and fan fiction can be a way to put your money where your mouth is: instead of just saying "damn, why didn't they do X, Y and Z," you can write it yourself instead. By that stage of a show, fandom is often as much about frustration as it is about fascination; fan fiction gives one a way to work out both those emotions.

What franchises do you think have done the best job in resolving the competing expectations that surround the final episode of a favorite series?

Even though lots of fans disliked the final season, I think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a very good job - and it did a good job of using multiple shows and multiple media to let fans choose what view of the universe they wanted to take. Fans can choose to only watch Buffy - or also watch Angel - or also read the Season 8 comic books. Depending on what they chose to do, what they choose to consider their own personal "head canon," they can enjoy their own ideas about the series. What's more, whether you liked or disliked the final episode of BTVS, nobody was able to say that it wasn't climactic. BTVS somehow managed to have an apocalypse every season and still raise the stakes every season. If that's possible, no other show has an excuse for not having a climactic final episode!

For those who want to have a better understanding of how one can be a fan, even a very loyal fan, and actively seek to write around or think around disappointing elements in the original series, I'd recommend checking out my chapter on Beauty and the Beast in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Here was a series that many, though not all, fans thought took a wrong turn which violated the genre contract the producers had made with their viewers and many chose to disavow an entire series and proceed with the fandom as though it had never existed as part of the canon.

Now, I want to share two letters I received from other fans who wanted to share their thoughts on the ending of cult series. I would be happy to see more such letters at hjenkins@usc.edu and will publish more if they come. Do let me know if you intend your letter for publication.

Dr. Jenkins,

The ending of series can certainly be a challenge for everyone involved, especially the fans. I remember well when the original Star Trek television series moved to less-favored time slots and eventually went off the air. It is probably fortunate that they did not have the inclination at the time to do a major "wrap up" episode, which left fans and professional writers alike the opportunity to continue the storyline and expand it into many other series set in the universe that Gene Roddenberry built.

I was, by the way, one of those fans who continued the series in dreadful, typed fan-fic stories that circulated in small eddies, a practice that also got me through the long dry-spells between Star Wars movies. I'd never be rival to Timothy Zahn, but my own imaginings and characters satisfied my desire to know what happened in a way that did not detract from what became the official story line. My friends and I enjoyed our now-online "alternate universe" versions, and the challenge of creating believable plots and character development arcs gave me new sympathy for professional writers.

This is not to say that I do not understand the sense of disappointment and loss when a series - or character - is terminated before I am ready. I still consider Firefly the best series that should never have ended. The movie Serenity explained many of gems Josh Wheaton had hidden in store for us, but I will always grieve that we did not see the interplay between those 9 superb characters (and actors!!) beyond the first season. But I also wonder if, in the need to turn out an episode on schedule, the cast and crew would have started moving in directions that disappointed me and the rest of its many fans. As it is, we have our memories, favorite lines, and our mental model of who these characters would have become.

Art, after all, is a cooperative enterprise - while the television presents us with episodes in our favorite characters' lives, the audience also fills in and extrapolates for itself meaning of whom these people "are" to us. For some of us, myself included, they can be more than entertainment. If we follow them for years and invest them with importance to us personally, then they do have deeper meaning. They may be role models or exhibit a part of our personalities that we do not or cannot express in the "real world" of our socio-cultural reality. Watching them gives us an opportunity to play with identity, perhaps in ways not open to us normally. We might not have a strong, professional woman in our "real" lives, but seeing that character on the screen can help us imagine being one ... and then becoming one in a case of a projected identity becoming actual.

In retrospect, considering all the series and characters I have followed, I wonder if cult series should avoid conclusive wrap up episodes. The last episode (heck, the last season) of Lost, for instance, felt like a cheat - not answering the questions that I did have while also not advancing the characters in a way that felt authentic, to me. While, at the time, a series' sudden end (as with the very uneven Odyssey 5) leaves me with questions, it also leaves me freedom to imagine for myself what would have been if only the series had continued. And in many ways, the audience's own imagination - as Hitchcock demonstrated - is more powerful than laying it all out on the screen in vivid, authoritative, bound-to-disappoint-someone conclusion.

Barbara Z. Johnson

From Eugenia:

WHY THE FINALE TO BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (2003) DIDN'T WORK FOR ME

POSSIBLE RESOLUTIONS TO THE SERIES

Sometime during Season 3, I had decided that there were three types of resolutions to this series. These were:

1. Everyone dies.
2. Most of the main characters survive.
3. The postmodern non-ending ending.

1. Everyone dies

According to the laws of narrativium and story logic [1], this was the most likely resolution. Hints, or what other writers call "foreshadowing", in this direction were themes such as humanity wasn't fit to survive and children didn't come into their own until their parents were eliminated. Minor plots centered on schisms in the population leading to violence, characters suffering fatigue both mentally and physically, and characters becoming addicted to mind-altering substances. Logically these actions would have led to depleting resources to the point the fleet would be unable to defend or sustain itself.

2. Most of the main characters survive

Given Moore and Eick's manifesto [2] which described their "re-imagining" as "Naturalistic Science Fiction" and which stated, "Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series", something resembling an optimistic ending was the least likely resolution. After several seasons of "gritty realism", bleakness, and despair, the reversion to something resembling a traditional ending where the "good" guys win would be tantamount to an admission of failure of their "re-imagined" series.

Rationalizations of following the original series are mere excuses. Moore and Eick never felt obligated to follow anything in the original series beyond the title, the character names (even then demoted to "call signs" or last names), and the general design of the eponymous spaceship. It's absurd to even bring up Galactica: 1980 to justify the ending; that series wasn't titled Galactica: 148,000 BC.

3. The postmodern non-ending ending

In light of the "critical acclaim" of the series in the first two seasons, this conclusion to the series was possible if Moore and Eick sought to reinstate their favoured position with the critical intelligentsia.

The typical ingredients of postmodern works are evident in the series: style over substance, juxtaposition of different elements, references to past works, combination of the "lowbrow" and "highbrow", ambiguity, nihilism, and self-awareness of the artificial contrivance involved in creating the "work". Frequently accompanying postmodern literature or art is the author's stated intention to make it "difficult" for the reader or viewer. Not only difficult in interpreting it, but also even reading or looking at it due to the revolting subject matter.

These traits were evident in the series with its use of documentary (cinema-verite) camera work, the "re-imaging" of a "cheesy, 1970's TV show" into something "complex" with "layers of meaning", the disjointed narrative which frequently shifted time frames leaving gaps in the storyline, the monotone colour scheme of the costumes and sets making it difficult to distinguish characters, and viewers constantly being referred to deleted scenes and podcasts to fill in the gaps. Adding to the difficulty in understanding the storyline was demanding the viewer to shift frames of reference in quick succession. At times it was space opera, at others it was contemporary drama, and at still other times abstract symbolism. A frequent trait in postmodern literature is the author making an appearance in the story itself, so Moore's cameo in the final scenes was not unexpected.

What is claimed as sophisticated and erudite is merely confusing as the postmodern approach repeatedly disrupts the "suspension of disbelief" which narrative fiction relies on. The conclusions of such works are often self-referential or circular in that they return to the beginning.

WHAT DID WE GET?

Basically the conclusion was a traditional "happy" ending in which most of the main characters survive and a quick addendum of the postmodern self-referential with a few final swipes at the original series.

Moore and Eick just couldn't resist making the "Guardians" (old-school Cylon centurions) all on the "evil" side and obliterated. They just couldn't resist pitching the whole fleet into the sun accompanied by the original 1978 series title music played at the tempo of a dirge [3]. They just couldn't resist one last potshot regarding the original Baltar's beheading/non-beheading [4].

WHY IT DIDN'T WORK FOR ME

It contradicted the underlying assumption of the science fiction genre. Underneath the spaceships, lasers, funny-looking makeup, etc. is the ideal that the scientific method enables progress through a greater understanding of the physical world. As such, it allows humanity to determine its own destiny by surviving threats of extermination from disease, natural disasters, and predators.

The finale succumbed to the romantic notion of the "noble savage" living in harmony with nature by giving up material possessions, advanced technology, and accumulated knowledge. In essence, these Colonials sentenced their direct descendants to ignorance and a minimal existence. This is the antithesis of the science fiction genre's foundation. The series conclusion reveals that the "optimism" that Moore and Eick criticized as unrealistic in Star Trek was actually a lack of understanding on their part of the values inherent in the scientific method and Western civilization.

The cyclical "what has happened before, will happen again" typifies Eastern traditions. Destiny is preordained meaning when it come right down to it, an individual or civilization having no "free will". References to the "Head" people as angels who are acting in accordance with God's instructions is actually in direct opposition to the original series "Beings of Light". The "Beings of Light" represented the possibility of humanity's evolution to a higher state yet they could not "interfere with freedom of choice [5]", unlike the "re-imagined" series "Head" people who directly interfered and acted in the capacity of fate or destiny.

Various comments regarding comparisons of the original series to the "re-imagined" series indicate that some viewers weren't paying attention or were not able to recognize recurring themes without a character pontificating at length. When the original series mentioned that Kobol's [6] civilization migrated and abandoned technology, it stated: "And when they settled the Colonies, they turned on the very technology that could have saved them had they used it properly [7]". This theme is later alluded to in dialogue referring to the Cylons as "a race of beings who allowed themselves to be overcome by their own technology [8]". Technology wasn't considered evil in and of itself, but that it could be misused either intentionally or through over-reliance.

The original series connected the themes of "free will" and the use of technology. These themes are intertwined in the episode "War of the Gods" and complement the surface mythic storyline. In being seduced by technology, there is the danger of losing one's humanity or soul. To retain "free will", and thus humanity, it was deemed necessary to maintain family, community, and knowledge through religious, educational, political, and military structures. To submit blindly to another power is to lose "free will" and the ability to determine one's future. This point was again visited in the episode "Experiment in Terra" with the words: "I came from a world where the people believed the opposite of war was peace. We found out the hard way that the opposite of war is more often slavery. And that strength -- strength alone -- can support freedom [9]".

[1] The force that holds the story together as defined by Terry Pratchett.

[2] Ron Moore, Battlestar Galactica: Naturalistic Science Fiction or Taking the Opera out of Space Opera 2002

[3] Has this series ever used the 1978 Stu Phillips title music theme at the original tempo in all of its orchestral glory? Especially the trumpet fanfare?

[4] That one was for me, wasn't it, Ron?

[5] Being of Light, "Lost Planet of the Gods, Part II"

[6] Incidentally, the Akkadian word for planet or star is kakkabu, which doesn't take much effort to transform into Kolob or Kobol.

[7] Adama, "Lost Planet of the Gods, Part II"

[8] Baltar, "War of the Gods, Part II"

[9] Apollo, "Experiment in Terra"

Learning from Hollywood: Voices from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Conference

I spent the first part of the week participating in a conference, hosted by the USC Cinema School and organized by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Learning from Hollywood: Can Entertainment Media Ignite an Education Revolution?" This was the kind of event that warms my radically undisciplined heart and mind -- a gathering of people from many different backgrounds (educators and academics, media industry people from both the commercial and public media worlds, activists and nonprofits, foundations, librarians and curators) to talk about the potential intersection between education and entertainment. In the course of the two days, we heard a lot about the value of stories and storytelling to incite the imagination, to provoke curiosity, to convey our collective memories and wisdom, and to inspire more acts of creativity.

This was perhaps best brought alive for me through a performance by The Story Pirates -- a group of actors, improv comedians, and otherwise kooky and creative people, who go into schools around the country, help young people construct their own stories, and then incorporate them into their performances. In this case, they brought a class of Latino/a elementary schools with them, both performing one young man's previously written stories, and soliciting elements from the kids for a story performed live on the spot.

My own remarks at the conference centered on what the practices and logics of participatory culture might bring to the paradigm of "entertainment education" which I have been learning a lot about since coming to USC. Under the classic version of this model, experts consult with script writers to get information about health or social concerns integrated into the fictional programs and sometimes to get tags or bumpers which help link viewers to the groups working on these issues. I really respect the commitment behind such work and know that it does make a difference for many people. But increasingly, I've wondered what would happen if these same projects got taken up by the fan communities around the show, if the messages were not simply embedded in the program but designed to be acted upon in more creative and public ways. I used the example of what's happened around Harry Potter to describe a movement from inspiring reading to inspiring writing to inspiring activism, remarks which build upon the work my Civicpaths research group has been doing for the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations.

Scott Traylor from 360KID, who I knew from back at MIT, was nice enough to capture my remarks and those of several other speakers via his cellphone camera and has given me permission to share some of these segments with you through this blog. Thanks, Scott. So, this first bit is my talk on Harry Potter and the potential of a more participatory model of entertainment education.

Scott also captured some of the highlights from a panel on Monday night on "Storytelling and the Art of Engagement," hosted by Betty Cohen, the former President of the Cartoon Network and the Lifetime Network, and including film producers Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) and Doug Wick (Gladiator, Memoirs of a Gesha) and television producer Marcy Carsey (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Third Rock from the Sun), sharing their insights on Hollywood's craft and speaking about their desire to see the work that they do more fully incorporated into both formal and informal education. Getting these kinds of glimpses into the behind the scenes production processes is one of the great joys of living so close to Hollywood.

Here are two highlights Scott captured -- showing Carsey talking about the need to "respect the audience"...

And Wick talking about how he draws inspiration from the work of Bruno Bettelheim:

The event was also a place for demonstrations by some top digital designers and developers, including this segment on Sifteos by a Media Lab alum Jeevan Kalanithi.

On Tuesday morning, we heard from Linda Burch from Common Sense Media and Frank Gilliam, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, talking about the challenges of overcoming existing frames parents and teachers have for thinking about the relations between digital media and schooling. Scott captured Gilliam's remarks, which offer some real insights into how and why some of the messaging around digital media and learning may be falling on deaf ears.

Unfortunately, Scott had to fly back to Boston so we do not have some of the other highpoints of the conference, such as a presentation by Participant Media's John Schreiber on their Waiting for Superman documentary;

an interview with Kari Byron, the charming host of Mythbusters, about their new Headrush initiative, to help inspire girls to think about STEM; and closing remarks by media mogul Peter Gruber.

All told, my head is exploding from new insights and beyond that, new connections, many of which I hope to build upon through this blog in the weeks ahead.

Special thanks to Cooney Center Director Michael Levine who has helped pull together this phenomenal event.

Shall We Play? (Part Two)

Because of the importance we place on play, we call the professional development program Project New Media Liteacies is developing PLAY (which in this case stands for Participatory Learning and YOU!) (We usually accompany this definition by pointing our finger at the person we are talking to, itself a playful ritual which surrounds our collective discussion of this work.) You can read more about the core concepts underlying our PLAY approach through a series of blog posts being developed by Vanessa Vartabedian at the Project NML blog. For the moment, I will simply offer this one paragraph explanation of our general approach:

Participatory learning is characterized by:

• Heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation;
• Learning that feels relevant to students' identities and interests;
• Opportunities for creating using a variety media, tools and practices;
• Co-configured expertise where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning;
• An integrated system of learning where connections between home, school, community and world are enabled and encouraged.

While there is no one-to-one mapping between the 6 Ps of Play and these principles of participatory learning, I hope it is clear that these two frameworks have informed each other in significant ways. What we are describing as participatory learning can and often is linked to new media tools and platforms but it does not have to be. We stress the value of low-tech and no-tech versions of these processes, even if we also try to model ways that state-of-the-art tools can be integrated into this kind of learning environment. The principles of participatory learning emerge from our close examination of what I call participatory culture, a topic which surfaces often here on the blog.

Blake Anderson, a student in my New Media Literacies class made this video to explain the concept, which I had to share. This graduate student was motivated by a series of YouTube videos to make a puppet for the first time, as he sought ways to translate my conceptual model for a new audience. As you will see, the protagonist of the video is The Professor who bears an uncanny resemblance to the actual instructor of his class but was also a tribute to a childhood spent in the company of Muppets. This deflation of academic authority was received with great pleasure by all involved, especially by me.

What does participatory learning look like in practice? Well, one example might be the workshops in interactive design which I ran for many years at MIT in collaboration with the late Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. We formed teams of students with many different educational backgrounds and interests. Each team was to chose an existing media property and began to develop a plan for how to expand it into interactive media -- most often, how to translate it into the vocabulary of contemporary video games. Students in this intensive class broke their time between hearing lectures on aspects of interactive design by faculty and industry people and working in teams, brainstorming, refining their ideas, and working towards a presentation. By the end of the week, the students "pitch" their game ideas to a panel of people from different parts of the entertainment industry, pretending to be a start up company trying to get a contract, and they got feedback on both their ideas and their presentation styles.

The result was always memorable -- a rich array of imaginative ideas which showed a deep understanding of the core concepts and information running through the class. Students listened with the idea that they would be applying what they learned in this creative and playful process. I plan to adapt this approach for the Transmedia Entertainment and Storytelling class I am offering through the Cinema School in the fall.

Participatory learning might also look like what we have been doing through an after school program which we launched at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools this semester, a program focused around themes of digital citizenship. The RFK schools (six altogether, each with different focuses and philosophies) launched this fall and they are still trying to work through their identity and norms as a community. We sought ways to get students focused on the process of defining who they were as a community through play and creative activities. Vanessa Vartabedian ran the program, with strong support from Erin Reilly and Laurel Felt, and in the end, it involved all of the current Project NML students and staff, as well as students from my New Media Literacies graduate seminar.

One activity had the students taking photographs of "invisible borders or boundaries" which shaped their social interactions, whether borders based on gender, class, or the line between student and teacher or the line between the different schools using the shared facility. This focus on norms of inclusion or exclusion was enhanced by the challenge of using photography, normally a medium for capturing the visible, as a means of representing things which are understood but often not explicit, often not seen or observed.

Another activity, developed by the Rossier Schools' Stefani Relles sought to get students to construct an anthem for their school, using very open ended modes of visual orchestration, and then, using simple instruments, trying to produce meaningful noise together. The goal was not only to get students to articulate what their schools meant to them but also to experience music-making as a creative process, one which was structured to free them from anxieties about performance.

Another activity, developed by Meryl Alper, got them to focus on the history of the school, which had, among other things, been the site of the Coconut Grove nightclub, which has been partially preserved as a drama facility, and was also the site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. In fact, the media lab where the after school program meets is the kitchen where RFK died, something which students had not fully understood until Alper explained it. Alper shared with them a photograph of the Latino bus boy who prayed with and comforted RFK in his final moments, and asked them to think about their own place in the history of the school. Using an app which pastiched a range of different film stocks, she asked them to go out and stage images which conveyed something of the history of the school, and again, they were invited to creatively explore and document their physical surroundings. These are simply a few of the forms of participatory learning activities we've incorporated into our work at the RFK schools. Most of these activities are playful and creative, but they are not in and of themselves games.

So, let me close with the invitation to all of the educators who read (or hear) this talk: Shall we play?

Shall We Play? (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I delivered one of the two keynote addresses at the USC Teaching with Technologies conference. This year's theme was "The Connected Mind." I chose to spend my time talking about the value of play, a theme which has surfaced several times in my recent talks, so I wanted to share the core ideas from this presentation with you here. SHALL WE PLAY?

In many ways, I am speaking to you today under false pretenses. This talk is not primarily about teaching with technology. After spending two decades of my life at MIT, I have almost reflexively become that guy who challenges claims about technological determinism and who stresses the importance of the culture which informs the design and deployment of tools.

These themes are explored more fully in the white paper which I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on Learning in a Participatory Culture. New media tools and platforms have affordances which support new kinds of learning, but those forms of learning are also very strongly informed by participatory practices, many of which have a history far older than the web. Today, in focusing on play, I am going to be drawing heavily on ideas that emerged prior to the introduction of digital games, but which continue to be relevant in rethinking our pedagogical practices. If we embrace the values of play, we may find ourselves toying with new technologies and insofar as these participatory practices are closely associated with some of the new platforms of the Web 2.0 era, we may also find that in working with these tools, we are drawn towards a reappraisal of the value of play in our teaching.

This is also not a talk about games-based learning. Through the work I did almost a decade ago at MIT with Kurt Squire, Philip Tan, Eric Klopfer, Alex Chisholm and others on the Games to Teach Project, I have been an early and frequent advocate of games-based learning. I both share James Paul Gee's belief that good game design is also good pedagogical design and have worked to model what games for education might look like. But in talking always about games, we may under-estimate the value of more open-ended forms of play and of play as a general disposition in the educational environment. These are the themes I want to explore more fully today.

This is also not a talk about gamification, a term which is being used far too often today, as if it could adequately sum up the larger movement towards games for change. To me, gamification as a concept grossly simplifies what research on games-based learning has shown us over the past decade or so. When the Games to Teach team worked with content experts, we sought ways to embed information from the curriculum, knowledge from the text book, into activities in the games. We asked each expert what knowing this allowed people to do and then we sought to capture those activities through the game design and mechanics so that they provided deep motivation for the learner to master these concepts.

At the heart of this model was intrinsic motivation. The power of games is in part that they provide such clarity in defining the roles and goals, that they helped us to know what to do and how to do it, and as such, they motivate deeper forms of learning. Gamification, at its worst, rejects a theory of intrinsic motivation in favor of one based on extrinsic motivation. That is to say, it attempts to motivate "proper" or "desired" behavoirs through attaching points to otherwise mundane and uninteresting activities. For example, Foursquare represents a gamification of consumer loyalty programs.

One might argue that this version of gamification does not in any significant way break with current educational practices which may be why it has been easier for schools to embrace than the more challenging kinds of learning games which were proposed in the past. Our students learn NOW in schools not because they value what they are learning but because they have been taught to value grades. And where their grades are not strong, they plead for extra credit points, which represents another way of adding points as rewards or incentives to behaviors valued by their teachers. I do believe we can learn much from games but I sure hope that what we take away from them goes deeper than most current models of gamification.

But, for the moment, I want to push games aside and talk about play. The distinction I am making here comes from an essay by the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Here's what Bettelheim tells us:

'Generally speaking, play refers to the young child's activities characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules (which are changed at will), by free-wheeling fantasy involvement, and by the absence of any goals outside the activities itself...'

Bettelheim thus links play to freedom, experimentation, personal investment, and process, all values to which I will return later in this talk.

"Games, however, are usually competitive and are characterised by agreed-upon, often externally imposed, rules, by a requirement to use the implements of the activity in the manner for which they were intended and not as fancy suggests, and frequently by a goal or purpose outside the activity, such as winning the game."

We might think about the game, Candyland, as an ideal transitional device -- a game which teaches young players the basic mechanics of board games, one which often plays a key role in socializing us into the world of games. For Betteiheim, learning to play games represents an important step in the socialization process -- learning to accept outside and sometimes arbitrary constraints on one's behavior for the purposes of social reciprocity and delayed gratification.

"Children recognize early on that play is an opportunity for pure enjoyment, whereas games may involve considerable stress."

So, while learning to play games is a step forward, it also is accompanied by some kinds of losses -- in terms of personal expression and immediate pleasure. People cheat at games, for example, as a way of coping with the anxiety of competition in ways that they do not generally find it necessary to cheat at play. Indeed, it is not clear what cheating at play would look like given the lack of social constraint on individual expression it entails.

By that same token, institutions find it much easier to incorporate games, which preserves the notion of rule-driven activity, rather than play, which is often understood as a kind of anarchic freedom from any and all constraints. So, schools often treat most forms of play as minimally a distraction, more often a disruption, of school practices, hence the concept of "class clown" which runs through educational literature. In other cultures, the clown is an educator who invites us to re-examine existing hierarchies and structures, taking the world apart and putting it back together again, where-as the clown in our schooling is seen as an unwelcome rival for the classes attention, a challenge to discipline and a disturbance of learning.

In part, this is because our puritan culture maintains a world view in which play is the opposite of work. We have decided that schooling should be about work rather than play, and as such, we are driving down the creative impulses of our students. No wonder that many are seeing a crisis of creativity in contemporary America!

Interestingly, though, when we work with teachers in professional development programs focused on learning and teaching the new media literacies, they consistently gravitate to play out of the 12 social skills and cultural competencies we've identified through our work. Here's how our white paper defines play as a literacy: "the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem solving." Today, we are pushing beyond play as a skill to think about play as a disposition -- a way of seeing oneself and the world through new creative lens which depend on suspending real world consequences and encouraging a process of innovation and creativity.

Educators are sometimes drawn to play for the wrong reasons -- because they seek to entertain their students. I sometimes hear various lay theories of "stealth learning," the idea that we can smuggle in learning disguised as play into schools and students will have so much fun that they will overcome their resistance to the schooling process. In many ways, I see this as like that moment in Tom Sawyer where Twain's protagonist sells others in his cohort into helping him white wash the fence by convincing him that doing so is great fun. This is perhaps the same kind of trap that we fall into when we talk about gamification -- a confusion between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Play is not disguised learning; play IS learning.

Jean Piaget captures this sense of the value of play when he tells us that "play is the work of childhood." He rejects any simple opposition between play and work, suggesting that play is the most important work children perform, because it is through play they acquire basic knowledge and skills fundamental to their culture. A kitten plays at stalking. In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. And in an information society, people play with information and interfaces.

We can rehearse and acquire core skills and knowledge through play because play lowers the stakes of failure. One of the activities we've developed through Project NML for thinking about play is called "Fail and Fail Often," and it uses the casual game, Bloons, to get people to reflect on the strategies of experimentation and calibration they apply in solving problems in games. This is a totally addictive game in part because it is so simple and the way you move forward through the game is to try different strategies, most of which will not work. Through this process, we learn basic things about the physics of the game and how different materials respond to us. We can compare this with the role failure plays in schools: children are afraid to fail and teachers are afraid to tell their students that they are failing. As a result, students do not take risks which might push their performance forward and they do not get the feedback they might need to better calibrate their efforts.

Lately, as I've talked about the value of play for learning, I have started to identify a series of properties which help us to better understand the core principles of play. I call them the Six P's of Play (though this remains a work in progress and may end up with fewer or more Ps before all is said and done).

1. Permission. Before we can play, as adults, as students, we have to give ourselves permission to do so. This is of course different for many children who play often and only stop playing when they are prohibited from doing so. The concept of permission is closely linked to what game theorists call the "magic circle," that is, a mental bracket which we put around our activities which changes their affect, their meaning, and most of all, their consequences. Within that magic circle, we lower the consequences of risks; we agree to engage with each other with good humor; we try hard but do not take the outcome as seriously as we would if we performing the same activities outside of a play context. I love the example of the little girl who is sweeping the floor -- we would understand her activity differently if she were doing chores or playing house, even though the actions would be the same. In a school culture, where there is a long history of prohibiting play, we must work very hard to give signals when play is an acceptable mode of engaging with the activities and we have to build up trust with our students that we are not going to retrospectively count their play against them.

2. Process -- Play values process as much or more than product. Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens make the point that the most efficient and effective way to play golf is to walk right up to the hole and plop the ball into it. But we would not see that as a very fun way of playing golf. Instead, we create as many obstacles as possible -- we use strange implements, we move far away from the hole, we create sand and water obstacles, we slope the landscape to give us less effective control over the outcome. In an education system now focused so heavily on how students perform on standardized testing, performance based on product completely displaces performance assessed based on process, yet play's value is focusing our attention on the experience itself, in the moment, in the process. It asks us to be aware of how we do things as much as on what we do. This is why play can be helpful in supporting the acquisition of basic skills which can be rehearsed and valued on their own without regard to the finished product.

3. Passion --The Gates Foundation has found that an increasing number of young people are dropping out of school not because they are incapable of performing what's expected of them but because they are bored. Work in the Digital Media and Learning Field tells us that we need to recognize the rewards of passion-based learning, of students pursuing those topics which they care about most deeply and using these interests to motivate and sustain other kinds of learning. Mary Louise Pratt has a great story she tells about her son's baseball card collection and how talking with him about it pushed him to learn more about history (as a backdrop to the key games in baseball history), geography (as a context for where the teams come from), architecture (as a way of discussing different stadiums), and math (as a way of playing around with batting averages.) This brings us back to Bettelheim's notion of play as open-ended, free-flowing, self-determined, and thus as something which is experienced as a site of freedom and passion.

4. Productivity -- Play is highly generative, despite or perhaps even because of its focus on process rather than product. I am very fond of the photographs which Martha Cooper took in the 1960s and 1970s of children's street play in New York City. These images show the imaginative ways that children transform their geographic environments through their play, claiming space even in relatively inhospitable environments where they are free to explore and interact; these images also show them taking up everyday materials around them as raw materials for their own play, transforming them from their mundane functions through a clever recognition of their underlying properties and affordances. And of course, they do the same thing with their bodies and with their social relations, performing new roles, trying out new structures, redefining old situations. This is the sense in which play can be linked to creativity. While in the spirit of play, old rules and structures are suspended, allowing us to look at the world in new ways, and allowing us to transform and transcend our environments.

5. Participation -- Play occurs in a social context which invites us to enter into the fun. We do sometimes watch others play, to be sure, and this represents what educational theorists call "legitimate peripheral participation." We watch with the anticipation of future participation. We watch to observe how others perform, to learn new skills, to appraise our own performance, or simply because we do not yet feel in the right spirit to play. But watching in this case is also a form of learning and is of a very different kind than watching which occurs when we know we will never be able to participate, when we feel that our participation is not welcome, when we anticipate not being able to do what's expected of us. As we sit in classrooms where no one offers up answers and no one is engaging with the learning process, we could learn a lot by going back to the ways that young people are introduced to a new kind of play and the ways that ideally they are encouraged to participate. (Of course, I don't want to romanticize this. As someone who often was not picked for teams in school, I know that the promise of participation can become cutting if we experience exclusion rather than engagement.)

6. Pleasure -- Pleasure is the byproduct of play. The search for pleasure is often what motivates play. This takes us back to Bettelheim's point about the stress around winning a game versus the relative freedom of participating through play. The game remains an operationalization of play, it represents a stress on the outcome that undercuts play's focus on process. And thus, a game may offer pleasure to some but with no guarantees and often a strong threat of displeasure if we lose the game. Thus, while it is very valuable to bring games into school, it is also important to provide contexts for more free and open-ended forms of play, which can offer pleasure to all who participate, rather than offering rewards to those who win.

(MORE TO COME)

"Critical Pessimism" Revisted: An Open Letter to Adam Fish

A few weeks ago, Adam Fish called me out through his blog, Savage Minds, for what he saw as a harsh and unfair representation of the Media Reform movement in the final paragraphs of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He did so for the most part by simply reprinting my own words to frame a story he wrote about the recent Media Reform conference. I was a bit surprised to find myself singled out as an enemy of the Media Reform movement. If I am the biggest obstacle to your success, you are much closer to victory than I had previously imagined. :-)

The experience was uncomfortable for me, but in a very constructive way, in that it has forced me to revisit my own words and reflect on how much my thinking has changed since I wrote them. It also hit at the end of the term so I am only now able to share some of these reflections with you.

Much of this change has been provoked through conversations with Eric Klinenberg, who I have gotten to know through several summers together at the Aspen Policy Institute, and through my participation in the Verklin Media Policy and Ethics Conference at the University of Virginia shortly before I left MIT. I have since written in my blog about some of these shifts in my thinking, making the argument that there is such urgency in the need for media reform right now that there is no longer any room for the usual infighting between critical and cultural studies perspectives.

Through these experiences, I have had a chance to get to know some of the young leaders who are pushing the Media Reform movement in significant new directions, including a deeper embrace of the potentials of digital media and networked communication and a willingness to partner with fan activist groups in ways which moves them away from a history of dismissing popular culture and scolding those of us who are engaged by it. When I wrote the passages for Convergence Culture which critiqued some aspects of the media reform movement, I was speaking about a very different generation of leaders and a very different set of rhetorics and practices. Even so, my caricature was inadequate and inaccurate, but perhaps even more so now.

Given these shifts in my thinking, I had very much hoped to attend and participate at the media reform conference this year, but was unable to do so because of a personal commitment. When I read Fish's post, I felt a need to speak out less my absence be misinterpreted. It still remains to be seen to what degree someone who comes with my theoretical and political commitments will be welcomed into the ranks of the media reform movement, all the more so because I am clearly going to be forced to eat my words. But I remain eager to revise even more my picture of the reform movement.

There remain, as there have been, very real differences in emphasis and perspective. Many of those academics featured at the Media Reform conference come from critical studies and political economies backgrounds which have often dismissed the cultural studies traditions that inform my work. These traditions bring different things to the table, to be sure, and look at the world through very different lens, but what the world needs now is an approach to media reform which combines critical studies' focus on structural inequality and cultural studies' focus on agency and empowerment. We need to embrace the potentials of participatory culture even as we critique the exploitative practices of web 2.0. We need to understand the ways that digital media does and does not transform the terrain upon which debates about media policy are occurring.

At the heart of Fish's account of Free Press's gathering was a question which has haunted my own recent work as well: "Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet - by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized - becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?" And there is in this piece a celebration for "ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites," which for him is embodied through the work of Free Speech TV. For the record, this "open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet -- by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized" is what I mean by participatory culture and Free Speech TV is participatory culture.

We share common goals in providing the American public with the resources needed to sustain democratic citizenship, with a commitment to insuring diversity of perspectives, with a desire to expand the ranges of voices which can be heard, with a push to put the potential for media production in the hands of those who have historically been excluded and marginalized.

My own way forwards towards these goals has been to promote what I call participatory culture, to expand opportunities for people of all backgrounds to produce and share media with each other. I work to promote media reform through advancing the cause of media literacy and defending opportunities to participate through new media channels. My initial frustration with the media reform movement stemmed in part from my disappointment that some of its leadership have historically dismissed media literacy and new media practices as meaningful contributions to the media reform movement, which is why shifts in the movement rhetoric starting with the "Save Our Internet" campaign and the struggles over Net Neutrality represented a significant improvement from my point of view over earlier media reform formulations.

For many in the media reform movement, their strategy starts with a focus on concentration of media ownership. I certainly care about concentration issues, but see them as part of a much larger context of struggles over the nature of our communication and information capacities. The decline in journalism can only partially be understood as a byproduct of media concentration and has to also be understood as a product of other economic and technological shifts. I would, in any case, be as concerned if media was concentrated in the hands of governments, nonprofits, educational institutions, or the media reform movement itself as I am with the fact that it is corporately controlled. The goal should be to insure a world where media power is spread as widely across the culture as possible.

The defense of participatory culture and the critique of media ownership are two sides of the same coin -- two flanks in a battle to democratize and diversify media in this country. One starts with a focus on agency (participatory culture), the other with a focus on structure (media concentration); one starts with an emphasis on the new world we are trying to build, while the other focuses on the system we are trying to dismantle; one is focused on what we are fighting for and the other what we are fighting against.

These are the differences I was trying to get at in making a distinction between critical utopianism and critical pessimism. "Critical pessimism" is at least as accurate a description of what I see as the limits of the critical studies perspective as phrases like "cultural populism" and "techno-utopianism" have been at describing the limits of a cultural studies perspective. Neither set of terms is totally fair, yet they also have descriptive value in helping us to understand where our approaches, taken to their logical extremes, may lead us.

For me, the term, "critical pessimism," captures the distinction between cynicism and skepticism. My hope is that a viable media reform movement will embrace skepticism, asking hard questions of government policy, corporate actions, and, yes, its own assumptions and beliefs. We are not served, though, when skepticism becomes cynicism, when the rhetoric forecloses any meaningful change, when all corporate action, say, is treated as equally repressive and reprehensible. And we are not served, on the other side, by rhetoric which sees digital media as inevitably democratizing and thus does not feel the need to struggle for social justice and media reform, which sees grassroots media as somehow adequate in taking on the concentrated power of mass media. A naive celebration of contemporary digital culture denies the need for struggle and a cynical perspective on grassroots change denies the value of struggle. These are the blind spots which we need to work together to overcome in our work.

So, critical pessimism is not a bad term to describe certain forms of critical studies and political economy work at its worst, but I was wrong to imply that this is the only thing going on here, to conflate critical studies and the media reform movement, to simplify the media reform movement to a small number of highly visible figures, or to suggest we can dismiss the importance of the media reform efforts as a result of our disagreements in disposition and tactics. I have been struggling in some of my own recent work, much of it still not published, to try to work through a critique of Web 2.0 which combines the concerns for structural inequalities and the exploitation of free labor which comes from the critical studies camp with a defense of participatory culture (perhaps the best basis for such critiques) which reflects work from the cultural studies tradition.

I hope we can find ways to bring these two camps together through political activism as well, and my own current work is focused on understanding how the mechanisms of participatory culture can be deployed to foster greater political participation and civic engagement, work partially inspired by watching how the "Save Our Internet" movement was able to bridge between different sites of participatory culture and use grassroots media as the basis for critiquing corporately-controlled media.

Where my comments in Convergence Culture went too far was in my hyperbolic description of certain kinds of media reform advocates as seeking to "opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses". This was frankly sophomoric and beneath the standards I set for myself. Fish writes, "This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production." I agree.

So, let me now publicly apologize for stooping to this kind of stereotype. It was a really dumb thing to say. I am, I'm afraid, still a work in progress on these issues.

At the time I wrote this passage, I was frustrated by the recurring descriptions of popular culture as "weapons of mass distraction," as "bread and circuses," etc. I see popular culture as a much more complex terrain and respect those who would mobilize it for their own ends -- whether in the form of fan culture or Free Speech TV. I have been delighted to see many images now emerging from the Media Reform movement which are not anti-media or anti-popular culture, but rather raise legitimate concerns about the distribution of media power and in particular the decline in substantive journalism, issues very close to my own heart.

I am sometimes struck that many critical studies writers are far more idealistic than critical utopianists insofar as their embrace of the ideal often does not allow them to recognize partial victories or contradictory advances. My own work talks often of "negotiations" between different forms of cultural power, of gains and losses, of progress made even if bigger battles remain to be fought, and for me, the recognition of the good, even when we can still imagine something better, is a necessarily fuel for media reform. To describe oneself as a "utopianist" is often to be accused of imagining that this is the "best of all possible worlds", but in fact, as Stephen Duncombe has been reminding us in some of his recent writing, the construction of utopias has historically been a vital form of social critique, one which can both focus attention on the ways current conditions fall far short of ideal and allowing us to imagine alternative structures that might better meet human needs.

I have often heard critical studies writers accuse us of "not being at all critical," and I agree that this is a charge worth examining, but I want to challenge critical studies writers to be equally concerned with the charge that they are "not at all celebratory." There is something important at stake in our struggles to defend the Internet and if you can not recognize progress made, how can you realize what's at risk? Again, it comes back to the idea that any reform movement needs to be as concerned with what it is fighting for as what it is fighting against. But either way, we should not be fighting with each other, whether in the form of my original critique or Fish's more recent provocation.

So, let me end by celebrating the strong ongoing tradition of media reform in this country as represented by the recent conference and let me urge all of us to work across artificial divides which may get in the way of us working together towards shared goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE TO COME

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

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

Your most recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, moves us from a focus on the kinds of learning which occurs inside the game as we play towards the kinds of learning which takes place around the game as people build upon it through the mechanisms of what you would call affinity spaces or what I call Participatory Culture. You describe this as "gaming beyond gaming." What has motivated this shift of emphasis?

Women and Gaming is no longer our most recent book. Language and Learning in the Digital Age has just appeared (another book I did with Betty). My focus of late on passionate affinity spaces was caused by the influences of my son Sam (who claims correctly to have taught me everything I know about games), Betty's wonderful work on her tech-savvy girls clubs, and, of course, you.

The first thing I ever wrote on passionate affinity spaces was motivated by a request that I write a paper about my take on "communities of practice", a notion that has become very popular in a great many areas. In my view, this powerful notion has become attached to so many different things that it is in danger of losing any real meaning. When talking about such notions I think it is necessary to name what you mean very specifically and name it in such a way that it clearly indicates what you value. This is what you have done with "participatory culture" and what I did with passionate affinity spaces.

So why did I choose that term? First I wanted to argue that "interest" gets someone in the door but not out the door to any deep place unless it leads to lots and lots of practice and persistence past failure. To get such practice and persistence past failure an interest has to be kindled into a passion and an affinity space needs to be organized to help people to do this.

I use "space" rather than "community" because the word "community" carries a rather romantic connotation which it should not have. I also use the word "space" because the notion of "membership" is very complex in modern Internet spaces. People are "in" the space even if they are just lurking, but what makes them "members" is a much harder and, in some cases (though not all), a more flexible and fungible notion.

Passionate affinity spaces tend to follow the Pareto Principle (20% of the people produce 80% of the outcomes, 80% produce 20% of the outcomes), while school classrooms tend to follow (enforced) bell curves. I want to stress not just multiple forms and routes to participation, leadership, and mentorship in passionate affinity spaces, but also the opportunity for all people in the space to become producers, designers, and creators, as well as mentors to others.

All passionate affinity spaces are organized first and foremost around a specific passion that is not necessarily shared by everyone (some only have an interest), but is the "attractor" in the space around which norms, values, and behaviors are set. The book Women and Gaming is about different forms passionate affinity spaces can take and some forms we applaud. The form we applaud most is not age-graded (young and old are together); allows newbies and experts to be together; and engages in supportive interactions because people in the space accept a theory of learning that says that expertise is not in a person but in the affinity space and that no matter how good you are there is always something more to learn and someone else from whom to get help and mentoring.

Tell us more about the Tech Savvy Girls Clubs. What were the goals behind this initiative? How did these experiences inform Women and Gaming?

The following is from Elizabeth Hayes:

TSG grew out of my interest in differences among how girls and boys engage with gaming more broadly. Not only do girls and boys tend to play different sorts of games, they also do different things with games. In particular, boys are much more likely to mod games, to create content for games, and otherwise to engage with games and other gamers in ways that support their development of technical skills and identities as content creators. The Sims is one of few games in which girls and women actually predominate as content creators and modders.

I wanted to give girls who otherwise would not participate in such practices greater access, social support and encouragement to participate. We started TSG, though, with a pretty limited understanding of the learning that takes place through fan communities, or affinity spaces. We initially saw fan sites as sources of information (i.e., tutorials, examples of content) rather than as spaces where the girls could develop identities, interact with other players, and be mentored (as well as mentor others).

A crucial turning point in our perspective was conducting interviews with adult women content creators, described in Chapter 5 of the book. These women kept pointing back to the Sims player community as crucial to their interest in content creation and modding, as well as to their mastery of technical skills. Talking to these women made me realize that I had started TSG with a deficit perspective towards women's gaming practices. That is, I'd assumed that we needed to help girls engage in modding practices similar to what boys are doing, rather than starting with an appreciation for what women were already doing.

This change in perspective led us to further investigations of the fan practices already taking place around The Sims, and this research became a very important component of our work. One of my research assistants is just completing her dissertation on The Sims Writers' Hangout, a site where players post and discuss Sims stories, a form of multimodal storytelling that requires composing images in the game and combining them with often lengthy narrative texts. Another student is investigating the learning of specialist language that takes place in Mod The Sims, another fan site devoted to game modding.

This is why discussion of the social spaces around The Sims is so central to Women and Gaming. We wanted to help others see that what women are doing with games is already exciting and important, and also to shift the lens a bit, in order to encourage people to look at male-dominated game spaces in new ways.

A key theme running through the book is the importance of becoming a designer rather than simply being a player of games. What accounts for the growing emphasis on design literacies in the 21st century?

I think that the importance of design, design thinking, and design literacies today follows from the shape of the world. We live amidst complex systems of all sorts, systems which are risky and dangerous and which interact with each other to create yet more risk. Furthermore, such systems are rarely now just "natural" or just "human made".

I live in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is a dessert. Like desserts from time immemorial, Sedona is cold at night even if it is hot in the day time. This is not so for Phoenix, which is also a dessert. It is hot at night when it is hot in the day time. This is so because of a heat-island effect. The massive amounts of concrete in Phoenix absorb the heat all day and radiate it out all night. So the temperature in Phoenix is a joint venture of "Mother Nature" and humans.

Solutions to problems involving complex systems demand multiple sorts of pooled expertise, including even the wisdom of crowds. Single minded, single focused experts are dangerous, since they undervalue what they do not know and their actions can and do create massive unintended consequences when they intervene in complex systems (as we found out in the 2008 worldwide recession and as Alan Greenspan pretty much admitted in front of Congress).

So people--citizens--need to learn to think of systems as designed or as things that act like they are designed. They need to know how themselves to produce designs as "models" to think with (and model-based thinking is the core of science).

The United States today is politically polarized and comes at all problems as if they are political or ideological, when in fact most of our problems are complex, the solutions to them are going to be compromises with tradeoffs, and we need to continuously question our expertise, values, and goals. We are so polarized today that a core goal of schooling, in my view, ought to be teaching kids to see arguments as designed and as inherently connected to evidence and perspectives and not just ideology, self-interest, and desire.

Of course, the focus on design has also come about because so many digital tools--and other tech tools--developed by and for professionals can be used today by "everyday people" to design, build, and create for themselves. There has always been the danger with any technology--most certainly including books--that people will get divided into two classes: "priests" who are experts and know the deep secrets inside the technology (or make them up) and the "laity" who consume the technology, but do not understand it enough to transform it. The potential of much digital learning today--as well as many passionate affinity spaces--is to allow more and more people to be priests. But this sort of potential has always in human history been opposed and resisted by elites, who ever seek to constrain and tame it.

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

A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part Two)

Aesthetics RG:

Serendipitously, I, too, had been thinking of a video that might help delineate the distinction between transmedia and remediation--the Hype Williams video for "Gold Digger," the Kanye West song featuring Jamie Foxx.

For me, the video's remediation of the look and style of pin-up magazine covers as live videos is a clear example of an instance of remediation that I would see as distinct from transmedia. On the other hand the now longstanding practice of refashioning songs as music videos might be able to be seen as an example of both remediation and transmedia. Would you agree with this?

HJ:

I would agree that the "Gold Digger" video is an interesting example of how one could have remediation which does not necessarily become transmedia. It is also, as you note, a music video and thus as an amplification of the recorded song a form of transmedia. I would call it transmedia performance in this case rather than transmedia storytelling. My own early writing emphasized the storytelling functions of transmedia, but storytelling is only one function which is now conducted across media platforms. Performance seems the more pertinent category for thinking about music, though a series like Glee might send out some extensions which are primarily about performance and others that are about narrative.

We could, however, imagine a version of this music video that with very little changes would be pulled towards transmedia narrative (or transmedia play). Right now, the magazine covers function to comment on the situations being described in the song lyrics, but they also seem to construct a kind of world where the song takes place. Let's suppose we built more of a plot into that world -- not simply the story the song offers of failed relationships, violated trusts, and sexual tension. Can we imagine extending those core plot elements into a melodramatic plot and imagine the magazine covers perhaps referring us to other media where we learned more about these people and their relationship? Can we imagine the magazine covers as functioning as clues which led to a kind of alternative reality game, which then led us down a rabbithole where we started seeking out more information elsewhere on the web? This would pull us much more fully into a transmedia logic.

RG:

Yes, I suppose we could and I suppose it would. Your inclination to actively remediate or transmediate existing media forms is much stronger than mine. I see myself more as a cultural critic or media theorist than as a creator of new forms. Still I would be interested in you defining even further how you see transmediation differing from or extending remediation.

HJ:

Well, I think I intended this as a thought experiment at most, but your point is well taken. My work on transmedia has taken me into much closer dialogue with the creative community than I had expected and as that happens, I become much more likely to imagine other possible configurations of media that have not yet emerged in much the same way that Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck sought a kind of predictive or anticipatory aesthetics, mapping what could be done with the affordances of digital media she saw starting to emerge. And do not overlook the fact that Remediation has surely inspired many designers and artists, even if you have not yourself chosen to explore the creative practices implicit in your argument.

RG:

True enough. I like the way you describe your and Janet Murray's work as imagining or anticipating new media futures. It reminds me that, in the context of my most recent work, premediation was already quite active in the 1990s. And yes, it has been very gratifying to see how Remediation was taken up by designers, artists, and other creative people--not to mention by new media scholars like you, especially in relation to transmedia.

Immediacy and Hypermediacy

HJ:

One of the ways I often think about your work in relation to transmedia is the different modes by which transmedia elements are constructed. On the one hand, they often present themselves as documents or documentaries, seeking forms of immediacy. We look through them to see into the world being depicted and the world of, say, District 9 becomes more real to us insofar as such materials adopt forms we associate with nonfiction. The early ARGS often insisted on there being nothing that signaled to players that they were playing a game and thus sought to blur the fake documents being produced back into reality. They were fictions which denied their status as fictions.

On the other hand, more and more, transmedia extensions represent themselves as advertisements for imaginary products, such as True Blood. They show us what the mediascapes of these fictional societies might look like, and so we achieve a kind of access to the fictional world through an heightened awareness of processes of mediation.

We can see how the immediacy and hypermediacy come together by looking at something like MNU Spreads Lies , one of the websites created to help promote District 9. The website proports to be the home page for an Alien Rights organization. Much of the text is in an alien alphabet, though we can convert it to English. My favorite entry is one called "I'm Speechless" which is halfway down the page. Here, we have a mocked up government video on the aliens reproduction system, complete with imitation grain and scratches, clearly intended to achieve a certain degree of immediacy, though the focus on the buggyness of the footage uses properties of mediation to allow us to achieve that level of immediacy. The text around it shows a fake resistant reading of this fake documentary -- the alien rights organization has captured this footage from the government and is offering a shocked and outraged reaction to what they are seeing. Here, we are invited to be aware of the processes of mediation and contestation that have emerged around the video -- for me, this would seem to represent a kind of hypermediation. As you note in the book, at a certain point, as our everyday reality is shaped by our interactions through media, the lines between immediacy and hypermediacy blur. We achieve immediacy by way of hypermediacy.

Interactivity and Participation

RG:

The Tru Blood commercial is fantastic! It is an exemplary example of a kind of faithful or respectful remediation of a Budweiser commercial. But it is even more interesting, as you suggest, as an example of how the urge to transmediate deploys strategies of remediation in constructing new, participatory mediations of imaginary worlds.

But as the District 9 promotions make evident, transmedia isn't always fan-based or participatory, right? It is increasingly a technique of corporate infotainment media, whether in fictionally remediating participatory media like blogs or in distributing elements of specific media narratives or worlds across multiple media formats. What makes the MNU Tells Lies site different (and especially interesting) is that it continues the documentality of the District 9 film into the blogosphere. This is, I think, an advance on the transmediation of the Matrix franchise, which I have discussed in terms of the concept of a "cinema of interactions." The distribution of the narrative of The Matrix across the Enter the Matrix video game and some of The Animatrix contributions (particularly the archival pseudo-documentary about the back story of how the machines took over Earth), while interesting in terms of the continued decline of medium specificity, does not trouble the border between fictionality and reality in the same way that the MNU Tells Lies site does. But in both of these examples, I would agree that your robust concept of transmediality (or my more sketchily developed notion of a cinema of interactions) is more useful and informative than the concept of remediation. That being said, one could certainly (as you do above) approach either of these from the perspective of the double logic of remediation.

HJ:

Both the True Blood and the District 9 materials were generated by the producers (or those working for the brand) rather than the fans. They certainly are responsive to genres and themes which may have originated within fan culture. (We are just beginning to theorize how fan productions might or might not be understood as part of the transmedia system around a given media property). Transmedia is part of a larger shift in the logic of the media industries to place a greater emphasis on engagement, which in turn values fans as the ideal audience for their productions. Part of what first drew me to look at transmedia storytelling was the ways that it seemed to represent a commercial response to key aspects of fan culture: such as the desire to extend the world, to construct backstory, to focus on secondary characters, or even to construct alternative versions of the original characters. But ultimately, these materials claim the status of canon and not fanon, and that has consequences for how they are read.

If they are participatory, it is on the level of reception and circulation rather than on the level of production, though we are seeing some kinds of transmedia production which apply crowd-sourcing or user-generated content models to build out the fictional world further. So, yes, these are part of a new commercial logic. My argument, though, is that they are not simply commercial products; they are also creating new opportunities which gifted storytellers and artists are exploring in ways that deepen our possible engagement with these fictional universes. You could read both the District 9 and True Blood examples as promotional: they are designed to spread word about their affiliated media properties. But they are both expansive (adding to what we learn in their respective works) and expositional (helping to inform our experience once we see their affiliated works) in ways which go beyond what we would expect from a movie trailer. We go into District 9 with different expectations (even a different moral orientation or emotional identification) and have a different experience if we've visited the MNU Spreads Lies site than if we have not. Given this, I don't think we can simply dismiss them as promotional materials.

RG:

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that promotional materials should not be dismissed out of hand. Kracauer wrote that we can learn much about any historical moment by making sense of what he called its "surface phenomena." But where Kracauer explains how these ornamental surface phenomena are of a piece with the structure of monopoly capitalism in the 1920s, you treat transmedia surface phenomena as creative opportunities for artists and designers which deepen the 21st-century consumer experience. Kracauer is making a claim about history, while you are making a claim about how transmedia enhances the creation of fictional universes.

Richard Grusin is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and four books, including (with Jay David Bolter) Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999) and most recently Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010).

The Political Lives of Black Youth: An Interview with Cathy Cohen (Part Two)

You write near the end of the book, "While the Obama Administration and other black officials are attempting to avoid discussions of race, members of the Republican Party and the Far Right have escalated their racial and racist talks and attacks. These contrasting trends have meant that racial discouse is increasingly being shaped by, or at least framed by, the right wing." Clearly, you have in mind something like the Tea Party movement. How would you explain the expanding support that the Tea Party has received? What impact do you think such a movement has on the political lives of the black youth you've studied?

I don't think it is a coincidence that recent polls show that only about 17 percent of black youth support the Tea Party, compared to 34 percent of white youth and 15 percent of Latino youth. Black youth understand that the policies advanced by Tea Party candidates and members will mean a more limited role for the government in the lives of everyday Americans. And while many believe that the reach of the government has extended too far, black youth realize that many of the opportunities secured by the mobilization of Blacks and others from the Civil Rights Movement through the election of President Obama have only been implemented and protected by an activist and expanded federal government.

Thus, a significant part of the Tea Party agenda, that which would repeal recently won health reform or pursue deficit reduction by slashing needed safety net programs or reduce funding for public education, or generally reduce and constrain the work of the government, would detrimentally impact the lives of black youth, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Beyond the specific policies of the Tea Party, I believe that their exaggerated discourse, especially as it targets President Obama and attacks him not on the terms of just his policies but also engages in a racial baiting, will reinforce the idea held among black youth that racism remains a major issue in this country and that black people are treated as second-class citizens in the political community. These young people have watched as the Tea Party held rallies in which President Obama has been demeaned and depicted as other, an unspeakable evil on par with Adolph Hitler. They believe that while some of the objections to President Obama are based on the political agenda he has pursued, other motivations for their challenge to President Obama has everything to do with the fact that he is black.

In response to such actions on the part of some members of the Tea Party, it seems that President Obama and his team has made a decision to try and stay above the fray of racial politics, adopting or letting stand a color-blind approach to race in the United States. My concern as you quote in the question is that the absence of leadership by President Obama on the topic of race and racism has allowed the right wing and some more extreme Tea Party types to step into the gap and promote their decidedly pre-civil rights movement view of the ideal racial order.

In contrast to the continued activity of the right on questions of race and racism, those public officials that might traditionally be mobilized to fight for and articulate a political agenda meant to improve the opportunities and lives of black youth, specifically black and progressive politicians like Barack Obama, are exceedingly reticent to make and defend an explicitly racialized agenda. And so black youth are left to fend for themselves on issues of race and racism, again learning the lesson that politicians are not to be trusted and that even in an environment where expansion of our political community is promised, some will fight the equal rights and inclusion of black youth seemingly forever!

As you've noted, the perspectives of black youth are rarely discussed as part of our understanding of contemporary politics. What do we understand differently about the current political scene if their views are factored into our analysis?

I think it is hard to understand and think effectively about the issues that confront us without thinking about the perspective and lived experience of black youth. As I discussed in a different question, black youth are at the center of many of the most troubling issues confronting the country. Issues ranging from the decline in public education to the rise in incarceration and the dominance of the prison industrial complex all disproportionately impact black youth. So it will be hard to develop effective and inclusive policies, programs and approaches to these issues without seriously considering the perspectives and including the insights of black youth.

However, it is more than just a simple gesture of inclusion when thinking about how black youth help us to understand and imagine differently the political scene. We have to acknowledge that young black people often have a different take on issues than others groups of young people that necessitate different policy choices and political collaborations. For example, if we take the issue of whether we are currently or even approaching a post-racial state, black and white youth think very differently about this issue.

Since the election of Barack Obama, much has been made of the generational divide in the populace. Some have suggested that once the so-called millennials come to dominate the political domain, many of the thorny social issues that have caused great debate and consternation among the American public will be resolved. This line of reasoning implies that young people who embrace and personify a more inclusive society will eventually take over policy-making and thought leadership, moving both areas in a more liberal direction. Commentators point to the significant differences in opinion registered among various generations on topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion as evidence of the more inclusive worldview held by the majority of young people.

The promised harmony around social issues that is presumably evident among younger Americans extends beyond the confines of sexually infused social policy to the prominent and always simmering issue of race. An article published in The New York Times suggests that much of the problem of race and racism found in the Tea Party and the NAACP has to do with the fact that they both are largely comprised of older members who grew up as the targets or beneficiaries of Jim Crow. Columnist Matt Bai writes, "The Tea Party and the N.A.A.C.P. represent disproportionately older memberships. And herein lies a problem with so much of our discussion about race and politics in the Obama era: we tend not to recognize the generational divide that underlies it."

As evidence of this substantial generational divide, Bai cites pre-midterm data from the Pew Research Center indicating that "there is nearly a 20 point spread between Mr. Obama's approval ratings among voters younger than 30 and those older than 65." Perhaps Bai's most important observation is one that he seems to add almost as a throwaway: his comment that "These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations." I show in the book that significant and profound differences in how young whites, blacks, and Latinos think about such topics as racism, citizenship, and gay and lesbian issues still exist today and that these differences are a defining feature of American politics as practiced by the young today, even in the age of Obama.

Far from the generation of millennials signaling the end of race or even the beginning of a post-racial society, I present data in the book that suggest that deep divides still exist among young people, with black youth particularly skeptical about the idea of a post-racial anything. I note in the book that on a survey we administered seven months after the 2008 election, we asked 18-35 year-old respondents if they believed racism was still a major problem. The divide between black and white young people was stark: 68 percent of black youth stated that racism remains a major problem, compared to 33 percent of white respondents and 58 percent of Latino respondents

A similar split was evident when we asked if blacks had achieved racial equality. A near majority of whites (48 percent) thought blacks had achieved equality, compared to 15 percent of blacks and 39 percent of Latinos. As we know the racial landscape is far more expansive than one that accounts for just blacks and whites. When asked if Latinos had achieved racial equality, support for this assertion dropped among whites. In fact, only 29 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Latinos believed that Latinos had achieved racial equality.

In the many articles written about the generational shift in attitudes on social issues, such as gay marriage or even race, few, if any, take the time to disaggregate the data by race and ethnicity to determine whether there might be divergent trends among the many groups comprising "youth." When researchers disaggregate their data (that is, if they have sampled enough people of color to pursue statistical analysis of different racial and ethnic groups) they often find that there are significant differences in how young people from the various racial and ethnic groups that make up the American populace think about not only same-sex marriage and abortion, but also race. If leaders continue to make policy and academic insist on writing articles with data assuming that the ideas of white youth represent the attitudes of all young people, they are all in for a rude awakening.

As the demographics of the country continue to move from one dominated-in population and power-by whites to one increasingly populated by individuals of color, our analyses must start paying attention to the ideas, attitudes, and actions of young people of color. Making the experiences of black and Latino youth central to our understanding and "work" around race provides a very different perspective in terms of what we must do. In the realm of race, the experience of black youth and, at times, Latino youth is that race still figures prominently in their lives, shaping where they can live, if and where they work, and how state authorities, such as the police, treat them. For these young people, racism still blocks their access to full citizenship, in particular the psychological aspects of believing that one belongs to and is valued in the larger political community. In the book I use the experiences of black youth to underscores the necessity of not just including but highlighting the voices and experiences of black youth if we are to bolster democratic practice in the 21st century.

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. . She is also the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part Three)

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is my interview with Ryanne Hodson, author of The Secrets of Videoblogging.

Let me ask the painfully obvious one first just to get it out of the way. Many of those who dismiss YouTube and other video sharing platforms as exhibitionistic are probably visualizing something like the classic video blog. How have these charges been confronted within the videoblogging community?

In the beginning, a majority of the videos being shared were people talking into the camera, or showing a day in their life, so there were a few critics who called videoblogging narcisistic, self centered and boring. Basically 'Who wants to see that?'. The reaction the community had was two fold. First of all, we wanted to see that, so that's what we were making for each other. And we challenged anyone who didn't want to see that, to make something else. If you have a camera and an idea, make it happen. There were no limits to what you could make. The best defense to criticism of any online media is the choice not to watch or participate. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it. It's really that simple. To take that a step further, maybe it will even inspire you to make something that you think is better. In fact, that's why a lot of us started- because several had been television producers and editors and wanted to make something different.

What has been the response within the videoblog community to projects such as Lonelygirl15 which have sought to imitate the visual rhetoric of the videoblog in order to create "fake" or fictional materials?

The initial reaction to Lonelygirl15 within the community was fear that a wider audience would now question the authenticity of our videos as well. It was the first project that really called into question wether what we were saying was real or not. Several of us were trying very deliberately not to be produced or written like a television show, but to simply share genuine, personal and creative moments. Eventually the buzz about the Lonleygirl project died down and they moved onto to more obviously fictional interactive project but the fear of having your genuine voice questioned was a real one that has stuck with a lot of creators.

As you've emphasized here, these video blogs are part of an ongoing regular series of communications. To what degree can they be viewed and understood outside of the sequence of their original production?

The context of the videos could never be fully controlled on the web, that's true now more than ever with videos being shared on facebook, twitter, etc.

A lot of the original videos from 2004 were part of a series of conversations, but could be viewed as their own individual moments as well. I feel like the videos we made back then weren't meant to be as portable as they are now, but we didn't have video on phones or wifi on planes then either. A lot of us have moved from strictly editing video for a blog and distributed through RSS to shooting moments on our iPhones, emailing to flickr and automatically posting to Twitter.

You also suggest that these videoblogs constitute a system of communication between multiple people who have gotten to know each other as friends. Does this suggest something significant is lost when we view the work of one videoblogger without looking at others with whom they are communicating?

This was more true in 2004-2005. There is so much video online right now, it really depends on what you're watching. I find that some communities online are very exclusive and are often making videos for very specific people, maybe mentioning them by name and referring to previous conversations. But there are so many micro-communities happening at this point, that it's truly like the wild west. Watching a section of a conversation could mean just as much to you as the people it was intended for. That's why I love video on the web. Everyone has their own interpretation of the importance or coolness of one single video. If you want to trace the conversation back to it's beginnings, most likely, you can. If you just want to enjoy one piece or one part of a meme, you can do that too.

How has the videoblog changed with the rise of a range of other social media, which also allow for and support these communications within a community?

As I've mentioned before, for me personally, Twitter changed the way I videoblogged dramatically. I felt i could share ideas and have conversations more quickly and fluidly, whereas on my videoblog, it would take a lot more time and effort. With the introduction of video on the iPhone and video hosting on places like Flickr and Facebook, several videobloggers have all but abandoned their blogs for the instant gratification of shooting to sharing in the same 5 minutes. This is not to say that creators have forgotten about making more complex content. Using these tools to sketch and have conversations and collaborations has opened up the flood gates of creativity, in my opinion. Making ideas flow faster and further breaking down the barriers to media access is nothing but good for everyone- creators and participants alike.

You suggest that the videoblog is becoming more visually sophisticated as some veterans have sought to move beyond to face in camera approach. As this happens, are they looking towards other kinds of media production for inspiration in how to create more experimental modes of expression?

A lot of us were media producers before we were videobloggers. And every one of us has been influenced by television and films since birth. As the tools get smaller, cheaper and the quality gets higher, people expand what they feel they are capable of. I have a small, DSLR HD camera with a relatively inexpensive lens and mic. I have seen, in the last 6 months, several independent films and a couple TV shows shot with almost the same equipment. If you have the idea and the gumption, the distribution exists, there should be nothing stopping you from making something just as compelling and creative as what comes out of Hollywood.

Ryanne Hodson (RyanEdit.com, RyanIsHungry.com) co-author of the first published vlogging book, The Secrets of Videoblogging, started her career as a video editor at WGBH PBS Boston and in Boston public access television. From Bangkok to Delhi, Amsterdam to San Francisco, Ryanne has taught diverse audiences the hows and whys of videoblogging. With partner Jay Dedman, she produces RyanIsHungry.com featuring stories of individuals hacking everyday life and exchanging notes on survival.

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part Two)

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection of video blogs was produced by Ryanne Hodson, author of The Secrets of Videoblogging.

As several videobloggers, myself included, have celebrated their 5th and 6th anniversaries of publishing video work online, we find ourselves wanting to show more than just our talking heads. With the creation of Twitter and Facebook, many of us have been able to stay personally connected on a daily basis, sharing what we used to share through our videoblogs. The need to create deeper and more artistic narratives has begun to shine through. Here are some of my favorites.

Wreck and Salvage- Shirts Get Dirty

talkbot.tv- Ep. 04 Lady Time

Mary Matthews- REM 30

Jennifer Proctor- Grand Rapids in Miniature

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman- Beijing, China: August 2008

Kerry Brogen- Seeing

Jay Dedman- Sure

Robert Croma- Night Impromptu

Ryanne Hodson (RyanEdit.com, RyanIsHungry.com) co-author of the first published vlogging book, The Secrets of Videoblogging, started her career as a video editor at WGBH PBS Boston and in Boston public access television. From Bangkok to Delhi, Amsterdam to San Francisco, Ryanne has taught diverse audiences the hows and whys of videoblogging. With partner Jay Dedman, she produces RyanIsHungry.com featuring stories of individuals hacking everyday life and exchanging notes on survival.

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part One)

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is a curatorial statement by Ryanne Hodson, author of The Secrets of Videoblogging. Videoblogging emerged as the bandwidth hogging stepchild of podcasting or 'audio blogging' in early 2004, a little over a year before YouTube. We can put media files in a blog and have it delivered right to people's computers as we update? This is it! This is what we as artists, filmmakers, cable access producers, frustrated television editors and moms and dads with camcorders have been looking for for so long. The big D, Distribution. We have all these ideas floating in our heads, now we can get them out and share them with no gatekeepers or higher ups telling us it's not 'broadcast quality' or 'green light worthy'. We're "making stuff up and...putting it on the internet, and you can't do shit about that " (Michael Verdi, Vlog Anarchy).

Technical note: In the beginning, videos were uploaded in the Quicktime format and not easily embeddable/sharable on other blogs like Flash (and soon the HTML5 video tag) is now, so I'm linking to the original blog posts for viewing. My second round of videos will be embedded for your viewing ease.

First Mantra- Kicked To The Head- Daniel Liss- 11/25/2005

there are so many kinds of videos to choose from made by videobloggers since 2004. For the first 24/7 DIY Video Summit in 2008 I chose a selection based on personal connections.

Excited- RyanEdit- Ryanne Hodson- 12/01/2004

Many of these people have become my close friends and collaborators over the past 5 years.

Vlog Anarchy- Michael Verdi- 2/20/2005

I've slept on their couches, I've played with their kids, I'm about to get married to one of them.

Became A Nurse- Miss B Havens- 3/10/2006

Videoblogging can be anything the creator wants it to be. Some say it's just simply video on a blog, or even broader, just video online.

This Cheese Sandwich- The Faux Press- Jan McLaughlin-7/17/2006

Most of us were video makers before we were bloggers.

Private Screening- Scratch Video- Charlene Rule- 2005

Blogging was just a way to distribute our creations free and wide- whether it was a conversation, a documentary, a political statement, a home movie or just a tiny moment that was recorded.

Mad As Hell- Twittervlog- Rupert Howe- 7/13/2007

These are people whose work from 2004-2007 inspired and changed me. All of them are still active videobloggers. Some, including myself, have morphed their methods to include more instant videoblogging through iPhones, flickr, Facebook and Twitter- our ideas scattered throughout the web.

Hand Carved Tusk- Hopper Video- Rob Parrish- 6/10/2006

For the most recent 24/7 DIY Video event, I explored these creators' evolution into more experimental endeavors. I will be sharing these in my next installment. Enjoy!

The End- Twittervlog- Rupert Howe- 6/11/2007

Ryanne Hodson (RyanEdit.com, RyanIsHungry.com) co-author of the first published vlogging book, The Secrets of Videoblogging, started her career as a video editor at WGBH PBS Boston and in Boston public access television. From Bangkok to Delhi, Amsterdam to San Francisco, Ryanne has taught diverse audiences the hows and whys of videoblogging. With partner Jay Dedman, she produces RyanIsHungry.com featuring stories of individuals hacking everyday life and exchanging notes on survival.

Manifestos for the Future of Media Education

A few months ago, I was asked if I might contribute a short essay to a United Kingdom based project to frame a series of arguments around the value of media education in the 21st Century. The project is intended to spark debate within the Media Studies field and beyond about the value of our contribution to secondary and post-secondary education. This week, Pete Fraser, Chief Examiner of OCR Media Studies & Jon Wardle, Director, The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University, launched a website which includes ten such manifestos, including mine, and which they hope will host ongoing discussions around these issues. Here's part of the rationale they provide for the project:

There are those who would dismiss the very idea of studying the media. The Daily Mail might argue that it is only on the national curriculum and available at degree level to ensure that the participation numbers for young people engaged in formal learning and gaining good qualifications remains high- the 'dumbing down' agenda. They might argue that studying Soap isn't a serious pursuit and will be frowned upon by University admission tutors and employers. Implicitly this argument is promoting a high brow / lowbrow divide; we can't remember the last time we read an 'angry from Tunbridge Wells' letter complaining that the tax payers money was being used to fund the teaching of metaphysical poetry instead of physics....

Twenty five years of scholarship have bought about broad consensus on the theoretical framework for Media Education - 1) that media is representation not reality, 2) that the media is produced by organizations and individuals and therefore can and should be read critically 3) that the media is now not only read and received, but reinterpreted by audiences. We would nonetheless argue that we are still some way from identifying a broader teaching and learning framework for media education and most critically - and the focus of this work - we are yet to articulate a clear purpose for the work we do. What is the point of media education? - whether it be media studies, media practice, media production, media literacy - what is the point?. You may argue the clue is in the title of each of these subsets of media education - as on the surface the differences between media production and media literacy seem pretty straightforward. However, the purpose of each still feels rather opaque.

Are we seeking to develop the media producers of tomorrow, or to nurture individuals capable of holding power to account, are we seeking to hold a looking glass up to society in order for society itself to better understand itself, or perhaps we are hoping to develop a more media literate society capable of protecting itself from evil media conglomerates?...

I used my own response to their provocation to reflect a bit on what we learned through the decade plus that I ran the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and especially how we might extend the thinking behind Project New Media Literacies to include more advanced studies in media. Here's part of what I had to say:

We should no longer be debating the value of media education. The real question is whether media education should be a stand-alone discipline or whether expertise in media should be integrated across all disciplines, just as the ability to communicate is increasingly recognized as valuable across the curriculum....

Beyond these core skills which need to be integrated into K-12 education [those in the MacArthur white paper], though, I might also argue for kinds of contextual knowledge which are vital in making sense of the changes taking place around us. All learners need to acquire a basic understanding of the processes of media change, an understanding which in turn requires a fuller grasp of the history of previous moments of media in transition. All learners need to acquire a core understanding of the institutions and practices shaping the production and ciculation of media -- from the Broadcast networks to the social networks, from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley....

Media education offers skills, knowledge, and conceptual frameworks we need in our everyday lives as consumers and citizens, members of families and communities, but they should also be part of the professional education of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, people entering a range of professions and occupations. At the present moment, there is a tremendous need across all sectors for what the industry calls "thought leadership" -- the ability to translate big picture change into language that can be widely understood and engaged -- as well as the capacity to deploy such media expertise to shape pragmatic and practical decisions.

Grant McCracken (2009) has argued that this hunger for insights into how media and cultural change impacts economic decision-making may lead many business to hire "Chief Cultural Officers," ideally people who can bring humanistic expertise on culture and society into the C-Suite. If this vision came to pass, we might imagine media educated students entering not only the academy or the creative industries, but business of all kinds, policy think tanks, arts curatorships, journalism, advertising and branding, and a range of other jobs, many of which do not yet have names. Current media education tends to focus on reproducing the professoriate, despite declining numbers of jobs, and treating the vast number of our alums who get jobs elsewhere as if this was a failure of the system, an unfortunate byproduct of the decline of higher education. What if we reversed these priorities and saw the expertise media education offers as valuable in a range of different kinds of jobs and presented these options to our students at every step in the process.

The kinds of media education required for such a context differs profoundly from what we have offered in the past. For starters, it requires a much more conscious engagement with the relationship between theory and practice -- not simply production practices (itself a big change given how often theory and production faculty sit at opposite ends of the conference table at faculty meetings) but the practices of everyday life. We need to compliment the current theoretical domains of media study with a more applied discipline, which encourages students to test their understanding through making things, solving problems, and sharing their insights with the general public.

The site's participants include some of England's top thinkers about media and learning, including David Buckingham, David Gauntlet, Cary Bazalgate, Natalie Fenton, and Julian McDougall. Having just spoken at a British media literacy conference in November, I came away with a deeper understanding of the caliber of scholarship and pedagogy emerging there and of the particular nature of the political struggles they are facing over education at the moment. I welcome the chance to learn more about their thinking through the ten remarkable essays the site assembles.

To whet your appetite for more, let me close by sharing a chunk of David Buckingham's manifesto. Buckingham notes that he often finds the rhetoric by which we justify our profession overblown and deterministic, so he labels himself a poor choice to write a manifesto. In fact, it is precisely because Buckingham is so cautious in the claims he makes, so skeptical in the way that he reads the world, that his work carries such weight and impact:

I have always felt that media education suffers from an excess of grandiose rhetoric. We have all heard far too many assertions about how media education can change the world, save democracy or empower the powerless. As a classroom teacher, I was always painfully aware of the gap between this sort of rhetoric and the messy realities of my own practice (and I don't think that was just about being a useless teacher). While it can be morale-boosting in the short term, this overblown rhetoric does not serve teachers very well: we need to cast a more dispassionate eye on what really happens in the classroom, however awkward or even painful that might feel.

In my view, we can make the case much more effectively by showing in concrete ways what and how children can learn about media. Most of the critics of media education do not have even the faintest idea of what it actually looks like in practice. Media education can be intellectually challenging; it can involve intense and rigorous forms of creativity; and it can engage learners in ways that many other school subjects do not. Even experienced teachers can be positively surprised by the quality and sophistication of students' thinking as they engage in media education activities - and by the forms of oral and written work that result from it. Like any other school subject, media education can also be undemanding and boring, and it can result in pointless 'busywork'. I am not calling here for rose-tinted accounts of 'good practice', of the kind that most teachers tend to find somewhat implausible. Rather, we need to come up with evidence that media education actually works - that it can engage, challenge and motivate young people, as well as enabling them to understand and to participate more fully in the media culture that surrounds them.

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part Three)

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is an interview with Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab. Your curator's statement sets up the opposition between the way game videos might be seen in the traditional art world and the ways they are perceived in the fan world. Yet, one could argue that the Machinima community in particular has been developing its own art world -- including festivals, exhibitions, critical authorities, and canons. What can you tell us about how this alternative art world functions and what role it plays in shaping the aesthetic evaluation of the videos you are sharing with us?

As artworlds, Machinima and Game Art have had different gestation periods. The former is actually younger - the first examples can be found in the mid-Nineties, but artists have been experimenting with games - at various levels - since the Eighties. Nevertheless, machinima - as an artworld - has reached a fascinating level of complexity. Although the vast majority of machinima productions are still self-referential - therefore primarily intended for the gaming community, i.e. the connoisseurs who possess the necessary gaming capital to recognize and appreciate the intertextual connections between the game and its visual commentary - there's also a significant production of machinima intended for different crowds and contexts - art galleries, new media arts festivals and even film festivals (mainly because for long time, film people thought of games as "interactive cinema" - an oxymoron, obviously, a contradiction in terms, a classic example of the "rearview mirror" syndrome, that is, they could only understand/relate to those elements of games that resembled film, which became the trademarks of the medium itself - a major strengths but also its Achille's heel (I'm just trivializing what Espen Aarseth said, much more convincingly, here).

Machinima thus represented a good trade-off since what we are dealing with here is basically (non-interactive) digital animation. If machinima is "an animated cartoon" then it can be featured - read: tolerated - alongside film festivals, media art events, retrospectives etc. That second order of machinima, the machinima that flirts with the Contemporary Art World rather than the Videogame world, includes artists like Frenchmen Benjamin Nuel and Yann Bauquesne.

Performance in Counter Strike from Foke on Vimeo.

The latter is the author of a series of performances in Counter-Strike that I find absolutely brilliant but most fans of the game would dismiss with an irreverent "Huh?/WTF?". Incidentally, Bauquesne is the same artist who created Violent Waste (2010), a sculpture of Super Mario entirely made of cartridges - pun intended.

Not too long ago, Salman Rushdie said that the best way to free Iran is to drop gameboys and bigmacs", basically comparing videogames and junk food to weapons of mass distraction/destruction. In this sense, Bauquesne's scultpures acquires another layer of meaning, both literal and allegorical. Anyway...

Again, the context is everything: it's interesting to see how the 'same" artwork is received, for example, by the readers of Kotaku and by the readers of Flash Art/Artforum etc...

To answer your question, Henry: I am afraid that if we over-emphasize the text over the con-text and the pre-text) we risk of losing sight of the real importance of machinima. That is, although the essence of a medium cannot be considered independently of its technical aspects, the question concerning technology is not exclusively technological. I'm more interested in understanding the ways people use, think and talk about a medium.

Example. When John Hillcoat, the director of The Road (2009) created Red Dead Redemption. The Man from Blackwater, a machinima based on Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, 2009) he was basically legitimizing the medium (machinima) in a broader context while simultaneaously promoting the game.

There was a time when several machinima practitioners believed that machinima was going to revolutionize digital filmmaking. It was around the time Tom Pallotta directed a video for Zero 7 in machinima-form, "In The Waiting Line". That scenario has not materialized (yet) and perhaps it does not really matter.

What matters is that right now there are many ideas of what machinima is and what machinima does - machinima as an artform per se, machinima as an inexpensive yet versatile alternative to digital filmaking, machinima as video commentary about gaming culture for gamers etc. All these ideas are competing with each other right now, but in the future one or possibly two may become dominant and redefine the perceived meaning of machinima. A Kuhnian paradigm shift, if you will.

In just a few months, MIT Press will release The Machinima Reader, edited by two scholars who have written extensively on this topic: Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche. I believe this collection of essays will simultaneously answers many questions about the nature of the medium and raise new ones.

Given these two parallel art worlds, is it possible to define an "avant garde" and "popular aesthetic" for thinking about the videos which have been produced through and about games?

I love to repeat myself, so I would simply say that the context matters more than the text. That is, the same artifact could be perceived as "avant-garde" or "popular aesthetics" depending on factors like "where", "how", "who", "why" etc. Think of Cory Arcangel's entire ouevre...

Moreover, a video distributed via YouTube prompts a certain response and attracts a certain crowd (also, for an artist to choose vimeo over YouTube as a channel of distribution has political rather than simply technical/design implications). But if I take the same exact video and show it in a physical art gallery, it will attract a vastly different feedback. Plus, cultural and social biases play a significant role as well in defining the nature of what we consume.

I'll give you an example. A friend of mine, let's call her D., recently told me about her experience at Leonard Cohen's concert in Oakland. D. was born in Poland but lived in the US most of her life. Nevertheless, she still has strong ties with her home country. Once Polish always Polish, so to speak. Anyway, the Canadian singer was playing at the Oracle Arena. His first concert in NorCal after a long hiatus. He's 77 - in great shape - but still, 77. Now, D., who practically worships Cohen, at one point took out her cellphone to take a picture of the living legend performing on stage. The man seated next to hear - yes, the audience was seated - yes, at a rock concert - tapped on her shoulder to tell her that she was "Being obnoxious and should be "Ashamed of herself". She also got the stink eye from many other attendees around her (average age: 50-60+) and felt mortified.

When she went home, the first thing she did was opening the browser to check out the videos from previous gigs - Cohen played in Poland as well. The European Eastern crowd (which ranged from twenty-somethings to fifty-somethings) was dancing like crazy, and everybody was taking pictures and recording videos that eventually found their way on YouTube. Thus one act that was considered "disrespectful" and "blasphemous" in one context, was perceived as a heartfelt manifestation of appreciation in another: the more videos and pictures the crowd captures of a performer, the higher the level of appreciation.

The point that I am trying to make is that although Cohen performed the same songs, the reaction from the crowds, the locale, the written/unwritten rules of conduct changed the very nature of the performance. In Oakland, the concert was a religious experience, in Poland a Dionysian party.

Another example. Last Saturday I attended the screening of Mahler on the Couch (Felix Adlon, Percy Adlon, 2010), a film about the life of the famous composer. The most interesting aspect of an otherwise forgettable/predictable story of love and betrayal is a somehow minor episode, that takes place at the very end [MINOR SPOILER AHEAD], when Mahler is fired after a ten-year tenure as the director of the Vienna Opera House. The crowd is outraged by the fact that the new director immediately changed the rules of attendance, forbidding the audience to clap and chat. "Opera used to be fun," one of the enraged spectator says, "Now it's only art".

One of the reasons why the new rules of conduct were imposed so abruptly has more to do with the changing media landscape of the early 20th century than with personal politics. Opera - which used to be a popular form of entertainment - was being challenged by film - a medium still in infancy, still perceived as a technical novelty, a childish, somehow juvenile pastime (Gunning's "Cinema of attractions"), deemed "artistically" inferior to theater by the intelligentsia of the day (Pastrone's Cabiria and Griffith's Birth of the Nation were still a few years away).

So in order to distinguish itself from the increasingly popular new medium, opera "changed" with the introduction of new rules of engagement, new behaviors, new codes of conduct. It became "only art". The ways we interact - or are expected to interact - with a text change the nature of the text.

Let me give you one last example: Second Life. Second Life looked like a videogame, behaved like a videogame, and yet it was not a videogame. You know why? Because gamers hated it. They found it pointless, cumbersome, boring. They checked out for about ten minutes and then left. This is exactly why the art community found it intriguing and exciting. Finally they had a playspace they could tinker with. Heck, even Chris Marker became a believer. And they did a lot of interesting things. Yet, in many cases, the kind of artists' performances/practices in Second Life were not essentially different from gamers' performances/practices in game-spaces. Example. Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101's "Synthetic Performances" (2007-) is a series of re-enactments of famous art performances (e.g. Marina Abramovic's Imponderabilia, Vito Acconci's Seedbed, Chris Burden's Shoot) in Second Life. How do they differ - conceptually - from gamers' remakes in LittleBigPlanet? I'm talking about Duckhunt, Pitfall and a million of others? Yes, it's a rhetorical question.

You seem drawn towards the expressive or performative dimensions of games-related videos rather than the narrative. There has been a long debate in game studies between approaches focused on narratives and approaches focused on game play. Can we see the aesthetic distinction you are making here as reflecting this larger debate about the nature of games as a medium?

I followed that debate from its inception which means that I am very old. It was a clever strategy to put game studies on the academic radar, a perfect example of agenda-setting. It worked well: the Ivory Tower discovered digital gaming, which means we could talk about games without feeling ashamed as long as we - the game scholars, another oxymoron, a lovely one - made the "right" connections with Deleuze, Guattari, Eco, Baudrillard and company. And we could also explore, and map, and colonize the new "virgin" territory, which is always fun.

And we laughed and cried and sat on the edge of our seats for years while the Scandinavian school of Ludologists fought its battles against the US Army of Digital Narratologists. I loved those conversations. (For some reason, I'm thinking of Bryan Ferry's "More than This: "It was fun for a while/There was no way of knowing/Like a dream in the night/Who can say where we're going?"). And we all cheered when the armistice was declared.

Although we now pretend to be looking at other issues, that seminal diatribe never really disappeared, like all major diatribes (e.g. "iconoclasts vs. iconolaters"). Mutatis mutantis.

Having said that, what I find exciting is that what we are seeing right now is the emergence of new game aesthetics, brought on by a new generation of designers and artists that use games as a form of expression, as raw material. Young, talented individuals that attended art/design schools and universities that have strong programs in digital media (both theory and practice). "Hands-on" students who read Roland Barthes alongside Judith Butler, Bill Moggridge & Andre Bazin, Michel de Certeau & Erwin Panofsky, Slavoj Zizek and Janet Murray.

Nobody is really surprised by the fact that several influential game critics awarded a tiny, independent production called Limbo, created by a Danish studio called PlayDead, as their favorite game of the year. On the surface, Limbo is a simple side-scroller action/platform game. Deep down, it is a reflection on the human condition, delivered with a black & white, sepia tone aesthetics, minimal soundtrack, etc. etc.

Equally interesting, but on the game criticism side, is the impressive work done by an art student from Washington State, Cory Schmitz, who was able to turn his school projects in some of the most exciting paper-based game/art criticism I've seen in a long while - EXP and The Controller. While everybody is hyping the iPad - tablets and e-reader - here we are, celebrating a cellulose-based lascivious fanzine about gaming! Ha! So, to make a long story short, the gaming as a medium is changing dramatically and it's not really about rules vs. stories anymore. Or maybe it is. Who knows. We are just beginning a new journey into gaming. "A journey which along the way will bring to you new colour, new dimension, new value."

Grassroots video making around games has, as your selection illustrates, been profoundly shaped by specific gaming platforms -- from Quake to Spore and LittleBigPlanet. What can you tell us about how the videomakers represented here work within or against the constraints of those platforms?

Today more than ever, the constraints are more political than technical. That is, while the PC is (still) a (relatively) open platform, consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii) are (still, relatively) closed systems, tightly controlled by the respective manufacturers, which can considerably influence/limit the creative efforts of the game community. The history of the PlayStation 3, for instance, is marked by the continuous struggle between the hackers - that jail-braking the console on a weekly basis - and the Japanese company, which is doing all it can to suppress such "illicit" operations (when the users get tough, the users get sued).

This perfectly exemplifies the dynamics between tactics and strategies described by de Certeau. And the struggles between the producers and the users, the way a company reacts to such creative/disruptive efforts, defines the very nature of that technology - the way you talk, or not talk, about a technology, a feature, etc. So, a hacker who tinkers with the Microsoft Kinect is a creative genius because Microsoft tolerates or even encourages such tinkering (within limits). A hacker who unlocks the PlayStation 3 is "a pirate" and a criminal. "Terrorists" vs. "Freedom fighters": reality is always defined by who gets to call the shots.

It's obvious that if I want to create something using LittleBigPlanet as my plaftorm/canvas I need to be aware that my creation could be erased overnight without any warning, that I might be censored by Sony for "copyright infringement", "offensive content" etc etc. whereas if I mod/hack a PC game, I can have multiple outlets for displaying my creations. I can do interesting and potentially controversial things like a first-person shooter starring Jesus Christ or simulate the battle in Waco, Texas and play a deathmatch game at the MoMa and elsewhere. Nevertheless, there are several levels of LittleBigPlanet that really pushed the boundaries - from the Little Big Cremaster cycle to the re-enactment of 9/11 - that are just waiting to be "discovered" by the Artworld.

Much of the early Machiniema content was focused specifically on the concerns of the gaming community. Yet, many of your examples here connect games-based videoing to larger internet "memes". What does this suggest about the relative porousness of the cultural communities represented here? What points of contact exists between these games-based video-makers and other kinds of grassroots cultural production in the era of YouTube?

There is a high degree of porousness between mainstream pop culture and the gaming community because today (almost) everything is one click away, instantly accessible 24/7, and content migrates easily from one platform to another, from one screen to the next. In the age of television flow, channel hopping, "500-channels and nothing to watch" etc., writers and artists invented cut-ups and similar techniques. Today such production is not limited to niches anymore.

In the era of convergence, media literacy has expanded considerably. Finally, thanks to Windows and Facebook geeks became powerful and respected within our society - their fashion, language, and idiosyncrasies/inferiority complexes migrated to the mainstream. Steve Jobs is a rockstar. Julian Assange is the man of the year...

To quote Jen from the I.T. Crowd (S01, e01), "Ideas are coming, things are happening here". To answer your question, we could certainly come up with a taxonomy of memes - scholars fetishize taxonomies - or a series of case studies - economists love case studies - to get a sense on how digital gaming is influencing other grassroots cultural productions.

Example:

Case one. All Your Base Are Belong to Us (1998). A game-based video that becomes an internet meme. By game-based I mean that its "materiality", i.e. the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" and game footage used came from a videogame, namely the the 1989 side-scrolling arcade shooter Zero Wing, itself rather niche within the game community dare I say.

Case two. The Downfall/Hitler Meme (2006). In this case, a Spanish game player appropriates a sequence of a film, namely Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004), to express his disappointment about a videogame, Flight Simulator X by Microsoft. The video spreads first within the game community - spawning other game-related spoofs/parodies/responses (my favorite, "Hitler Gets Banned from Xbox Live"), then goes "global", and, bingo!, next thing you know is that The New York Times is writing about it.

Case three. The Fail meme (2003?). Like "All Your Base Are Belong to Us", here's an example of a game-based term, "fail" (from the Engrish line "YOU FAIL IT" from the 1998 Neo Geo video game Blazing Star -also very niche) which was used - right from the inception - to illustrate, visually, examples of failures - failures tout court, not necessarily game-based.

...But we should also remember that there are memes in the Game Art world as well, but they are not necessarily called memes, but "homages". One recurrent theme among Game Artists to is to recreate a gallery or a museum in a game space with the explicit goal of destroying a) the space itself, b) the artworks it contains, c) eventually, the artists/curators/spectators. The origin of this meme, pardon, theme, can be traced back to ArsDoom (1995), Created in 1995 by Orhan Kipcak and Reini Urban, ArsDoom was shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz the same year. Using the Doom II engine and Autodesk' AutoCAD software, Kipcak and Urban created a virtual copy of the Brucknerhaus' exhibition hall and invited artists to create or submit virtual artworks that could be displayed in the new map. Armed with a shooting cross, a chainsaw or a brush the player could kill the artists and destroy all the artworks on display.

Others point to Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup's Museum Meltdown (1996) as the main culprit. These two enfants terribles - at that time art students in Scandinavia - created a mod of Duke Nuke'm 3D that allowed the "player" to destroy everything that moved - and did not move, like paintings - on the screen. This idea spread like fire in the Game Art community, and became an almost required practice. A playful subversion the rules of the Artworld by using videogames became a rite of passage among art students... Among the others: Chris Reilly's Everything I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference, Part II Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gallery(2006), Michiel Van Der Zanden's Museum Killer (2008) and Christopher Wyant's Team Fortress 2 Ceramics (2011).

In short, endless fun.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.