The Conversation Never Ends: Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (Part Two)

The following is the second part of an exchange between myself, danah boyd, and Mimi Ito, intended to mark the occasion of the publication of our book, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, which is being released this month by Polity. Henry: All three of us are finding ourselves collaborating more and more with quantitative researchers, so in what ways might the findings of more humanistic research help to inform the kinds of data we collect and publish about young people and their media use?

Mimi: I’ve enjoyed increasing collaboration with quantitative researchers over the years, and I find it a useful corrective to contextualize my local, in-depth cases with broader trends that you see in national surveys and the like. And the stories that we tell from a qualitative and humanistic lens are often taken up as ways of putting a human face to the numbers. At the same time, I find it very challenging for the qualitative evidence to punch through some of the underlying preconceptions that are often reinforced by large scale surveys. For example, what gets categorized as “making” versus “passive consumption” is culturally defined, and how a young person might answer a question of this sort doesn’t necessarily track to what adults conclude based on a set of survey findings. For example, one of the case studies our team did of fan fiction on Wattpad showed that young people don’t necessarily describe their publication and writing on the platform as “writing” or “reading” because it doesn’t conform to the genre expectations of what gets called reading and writing in school. Reducing consumption and production to a binary set of participation genres misses the fact that the majority of what kids do these days sits between these poles of activity. These are an outdated set of metaphors in an era where even “consumption” involves searching, querying, downloading, rating, and sharing of media. This more youth-centered perspective is harder to communicate than a raw percentage number coming off a survey.

danah: I recently read Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American, which was a brilliant reminder of the politics that underlie all discussions of data and research. I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by researchers of all stripes who are really passionate about moving past methodology and theory to work collaboratively to understand what’s at play. But I also realize how rare this is. All too often, research is produced, disseminated, and framed for political agendas. One of the things that I relish about the scholarly community in which we operate is that when we disagree - which we sometimes do - we’re able to challenge each other in a productive and constructive way. But I’m definitely struggling with the ways in which research is positioned to mislead and fear-monger, especially statistical and quantitative research.

Henry: I have been lucky to spend a good deal of time over the past six plus years interacting with the members of the MacArthur Foundation’s Youth and Participatory Politics Network, a multidisciplinary group trying to understand the political lives of American youth. This research is discussed throughout our book, but is also the focus of another book coming out early next year. The focus of the work on my side was qualitative and ethnographic, but we worked in conversation throughout with researchers who were using more quantitative methods, including large scale surveys. By doing this work collaboratively, some of my team’s framings -- such as the emphasis on circulation as part of what it means to participate in the new media environment -- found their way into the agenda of questions for the survey research and has resulted in important findings, suggesting that there has been a significant increase in young people spreading political news through their social networks and that this process is an important part of finding their voices as citizens. Such results would have been invisible if participation was defined entirely on the basis of media production, for example.

The challenge of this kind of work involves the development of shared vocabularies, which works better if everyone sheds some of the established jargon, and the recognition of conceptual differences. For example, throughout the process, we kept bumping up against the focus of some of our home disciplines almost exclusively on individual agents and the emphasis of other fields on various forms of collective agency (or social constraints on individual action). We’ve reached a point where we are all aware of these different methodological starting points, acknowledge them, and try to incorporate them into our analysis. But this worked because everyone came in with mutual respect and was able to take the time to listen and understand where we each were coming from in our research.

Mimi: On the qualitative/quantitative axis, the other interesting development is the rise of data analytics, another thing we discuss in the book, and something that has become the focus of danah’s work. While there are a lot of new risks associated with the big data movement, I do find it interesting that it has broken the methodological linkage between quantitative and reductive approaches. Big data is quite unlike the sequestered and reductive methods you see in traditional surveys and psychometrics, and is more like ethnography and fieldwork in the sense that it is “in the wild” and about capturing behavior in context. I’m still early in incorporating data analytics in my own work, but I am finding it a fascinating space to play in.

danah: Most people who hear about “big data” don’t realize just how nuanced you have to be to do analysis in this space. Asking questions of data - especially semi-structured and unstructured data - is extremely hard. Cleaning data is hard. Analyzing and interpreting data is hard. As a result, doing data science is often more art than science. But the iterative nature of working with complex datasets - especially highly dimensional networked datasets - is so refreshing. It allows you to look at a problem from a radically different perspective.

Because I started out in computer science and came to anthropology and qualitative methods later, I always felt as though I needed to convince people that I was a “real” ethnographer. In seeking legitimacy in a scholarly world defined by method, I often downplayed the different technical work that I used in my research. I did a lot of large-scale random sampling of MySpace and a lot of network analysis of different social media services. Although I published a few papers on Twitter and Friendster analysis, most of what I did when scraping and using technical tools to analyze data was to help me better understand what I was seeing in interviews and observations.

In all the hype around “big data,” I hope to see more integration of qualitative methods with statistical and machine learning methods because it’s amazing how these can feed into each other. The key with both is learning how to formulate a question and be reflexive about what you’re seeing and what you’re not.

Mimi: I feel the book does a pretty good job of giving expression to our different disciplinary dispositions and generational identities, and the methods we have brought to bear to our research. All three of us have studied overlapping and related topics and trends, but have different lenses on the phenomenon. The book reminds me a bit about the proverbial blind men and the elephant, but with a more positive outcome. When the three of us are in conversation I do feel like we are able to piece things together into a still imperfect, but somewhat integrated bigger picture.

danah: As we dive into this conversation, emulating the kinds of conversation that we produced for our book, what do you hope people get from reading our book?

Mimi: Writing this book as a three-way dialog was a new experience for all of us, and I’m really curious what people will make of it. Although it was challenging to work through a new genre of book writing, in a lot of ways the process mirrored how the three of us have actually worked together over the years, sharing partially formulated ideas, arguing with one another, and putting things out there in public for broader engagement. I’d love it if this book gave folks a window into this kind of dialogic knowledge production. I hope people leave with positive view into the way that ideas and theories are socially and relationally constructed as other people and the changing world pushes up against our theories and preconceptions. This kind of openness and flexibility seems to me critically important especially for those of us who take up topics like technology and youth culture which are very dynamic, require us to be methodologically innovative, and collaborate across geographic and disciplinary boundaries.

Henry: There’s lots of core insights to be found in the book about the themes and topics we all care about. This really was an honest period of reflection for all three of us, looking back on the past few decades of change in a networked society, trying to assess what we believe to be true and important, trying to qualify early claims both by us and others that may have simplified our understanding of the current situation. I was struck rereading the book about how much we had to say about inequalities in access and participation, a theme which seems urgent for us to address, but was sometimes pushed aside by our excitement on new and emerging opportunities and the amazing things young people were doing within their online communities. We each bring in examples of the kinds of communities which we’ve focused on through our research and the comparison across those cases is illuminating.

But, like Mimi, part of what I really value about Participatory Culture in a Networked Era is the ways the book may illustrate the power of critical conversations, even among people like us who start with somewhat similar positions. Our thinking evolves over the course of the book, as we listen to and respect what we learn from the others. We need more of this kind of academic dialogue -- not reading papers to each other at high speeds at conferences, not throwing out messages in bottles (or journals, which can take even longer to reach their recipients), but in sitting down in real time, sharing thoughts, responding thoughtfully to others, and challenging established wisdom. I’ve recently been rereading a somewhat more contentious exchange between Cornel West and bell hooks about the role of the public intellectual and it has made me wish we had so many more scholarly works in this genre. What I’d love to see happen is for people to sit down with colleagues, across disciplines, across perspectives, with the book, and talk through together how they react to what we say there, or simply take the intersections of their own research trajectories as a starting point to see where this leads them. Such conversations do not happen enough.

danah: I think we’re all in agreement that the key value of this book is exposing how ideas become ideas.  I love “Advanced Reader Copies” or galleys of books because I like to be reminded of the imperfection that happens before we get a book in its completed state.  When I was first entering graduate school, everything about research seemed mysterious.  Ideas appeared to just come down on high and get magically polished by brilliant people. But as we all know, that’s not how scholarship happens.  It’s indeed socially and culturally constructed. More than anything, I hope that this book gives people an insight into the process and practices of research. This book is definitely the backstage of research into participatory culture and I hope it helps people see our work and struggles from a new light.

Henry Jenkins is Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California

Mizuko Ito is Professor in Residence and MacArthur Foundation chair in Digital Media and Learning, University of California, Irvine

danah boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, the Founder of Data & Society, and a Visiting Professor at New York University

In Search of Indian Comics (Part Two): The Politics of Indian Comics

Today, I continue to narrate some of my adventures in search of a better understanding of comics and graphic novels in Contemporary India. Last time, we considered the ways that contemporary artists are building upon India's folk art and mythological traditions. I ended with some reference to the importance of Amar Chitra Katha, a publisher that for some decades produced comics teaching Indian boys and girls about their legends and history. These comics helped to establish the public's expectations about what a graphic novel from India might be like. I also discussed Bhimayana: Expereicnes of Untouchability, which depicts incidents in the life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a civil rights leader who spoke on behalf of the Dalit people: this book taps the folk art traditions of the Gond people, as well as seeking to tell aspects of Ambedkar's life that are traditionally left out of the history books about the founding of the Indian nation, where Ambedkar is mostly known as the author of the country's constitution. Aparajita Ninan, part of the group of graphic artists who joined me in Dehli's Crafts Museum, worked on Bhimayana. She's best known for her work on A Gardner in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule's Fight for Liberty, written by Srividya Natarajan (one of Bhimayana's two co-authors) and also published by Navayana Press. Phule was another important critic of the caste system in India who wrote a key book -- Slavery (Gulamgiri) in 1873 -- who challenged Brahmanism and critiques the enslavement of the "lower" castes, a work inspired by and dedicated to the Abolitionist movement in the United States. Many of Phule's ideas remain controversial to the present day, including his sharp critiques of the ways that the Hindu tradition was structured to insure that the Brahmin caste continued to dominate over everyone else. Ninan's art  is rendered in an inky black and white style that has the brute force of agit-prop. She draws imagery and symbols from around the world in part to link Phule's arguments back to their historical roots, including his intense engagement with American abolitionism  and the French revolution. Here, for example, is a two page spread which links Phule to a range of other freedom fighters and Civil Rights leaders from around the world and across history, all of whom marched, the books argues, behind the cause of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality.

Another spread compares the brutal techniques deployed to keep the castes in place with the role that lynching in the deep American south.

And this page sums up the contrasting perspective that Phule brought to Hinduism.

Keep in mind that the current government actively promotes Hindu nationalism and conservative ideology and takes a dim view of those who critique or challenge those traditions.

Vishwajyoti Ghosh, another member of our little gathering, is the author and illustrator for Delhi Calm, a graphic novel about a group of rock musicians touring the countryside, and what happens when Indira Gandhi declares a national State of Emergency and imposes martial law on India.  Or perhaps not. The book works hard to establish a state of plausible deniability: "Nothing like this ever happened. If it did, it doesn't matter any more, for it was of no interest or relevance even while it was happening. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This is a work of fiction. Self-Censored."    The female dictator is described throughout only as Little Moon; her supporters are often depicted wearing happy masks, implying that a forced smile is really the only safe way to respond to the political turmoil that surrounds them.

Signs of propaganda, police violence, and political imprisonment run across the book, often in the background of panels. Paranoia infuses every social interaction in a world where the rights of citizens have been suspended and no one knows what is going to happen next. As an American reader, trying to process it with the help of Wikipedia entries,  I did not get all of the layers of allegory and allusion  here, but the work was nevertheless compelling.

Ghosh also curated an important anthology of "graphic narratives", This Side That Side?: Restorying Partition, convening a diverse range of South Asian artists, writers, illustrators, filmmakers, and other storytellers, to reflect on the political forces that separated off India and Pakistan. Ghosh writes in the book's introduction:

"Restorying Partition can never be easy. If one wants to avoid the usual revival of Mass Memory, one has to look beyond those maps lodged in our nervous systems that make nervous headlines on our televisions. To listen to the subsequent generations and the grandchildren and how they have negotiated maps that never got drawn. This Side, That Side is a tiny drop in the river of stories that must be told before the markers run dry."

The range of perspectives and techniques included makes its own political statement. Nina Sabnani, an animator, tells the story ("Know Directions Home?") of her family's displacement using stitch work, a technique she also deploys with great effect in her animated film, Tanko Bole Chhe (The Stitches Speak).

Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal contributed "The Taboo," adopting  a visual style that engulfs the page in intertwined art rather than break it down into panels.

"I Too Have Seen Lahore!", a collaboration between Salman Rashid (in Lahore) and Mohit Suneja (in Delhi), conveys some of the horrors and brutality of this historical upheaval.

The following comes from my travel diary:

After our lunch with the comics artist at the Crafts Museum, my host Parmesh Shahani takes us to Hauz Khas Village (which locals tend to call HKV or simply the Village). It is hard to describe the vibe of this place. On the outskirts there are dozens of little food stalls and carts, each selling street food, and a constant zip of the motorcycles and autorickshaws, which we have seen everywhere on this trip. As we pass through the gates, and past a local deer park, we enter an environment which represents a series of temporal and cultural layers. The original layer are ruins, going back to the 11th century (or there-abouts) of what was once a great Islamic university and a cluster of palaces. Much remains left behind – buildings with huge domes, crumbling columns, decaying steps, which stretch out for as far as the eye can see. Amidst them, people are sitting and having the street food, playing games with balls and rackets, posing for selfies, and otherwise getting on with the business of life.

On top of this was built an urban village – traditional houses and shops which could have been built at any point in the 20th century. We later learn that this area was a kind of criminal underworld in the early 20th century – a tribe of bandits were located here and the city constructed walls to keep them away from the rest of the population, assuming anyone who ventured into this space knew what they were getting themselves into. This is what gives the area its thuggish charm. And now, the area is undergoing a process we might describe as gentrification: it got discovered by hipster youth and has been transformed into their playground. So, they have built, without building permits in most cases (Parmesh says), cute little clothing stores, poster shops, record stores, bakeries, coffee shops, and night clubs, on top of the structure of the older village, often in a very ramshackled or haphazard fashion.

It’s dusk and music is already blarring out of speakers all around us. We pass young people with eccentric hairstyles and cool clothes, doing some early evening shopping, and looking forward to an evening of clubbing. We see more white youth than we’ve seen elsewhere – and almost all of them are wearing traditional Indian clothing – while the Indian youth are almost all wearing western garb. (I wonder if either notices that their cultural fantasies are not exactly aligned here.)

The whole effect is something from a cyberpunk novel – Neo-Delhi rather than Neo-Tokyo, with a healthy amount of the kipple and chaos of something like Blade Runner. Parmesh shares with us a few of his favorite shops including a really cool poster shop which has all kinds of brightly colored vintage paper products: I want, but there’s not enough time to look and process. As we are leaving, though, the manager gives us a business card and says you can order online and he will ship to the U.S. Big smiles.

And here, as elsewhere across India, there is spectacular street art, itself suggesting the graphic storytelling potential of this amazing country.

Next Time: Where, oh where, can you find comics in India?

The Conversation Never Ends: Participatory Culture in a Networked Era

Over the next few installments, I am going to celebrate the publication of a new book -- Participatory Culture in a Networked Era -- which I developed over the past few years in conversation with danah boyd and Mimi Ito, both names that should be familiar to regular readers of this blog. For those of you who don't know, Mimi Ito is Professor in Residence and MacArthur Foundation chair in Digital Media and Learning, University of California, Irvine and danah boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, the Founder of Data & Society, and a Visiting Professor at New York University. All three of us have been part of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative over the past decade. The key word here is conversation. Literally, we started our book with the three of us sitting down in Mimi's living room and having a several days long conversation about the intersections between our work, reflecting on the past several decades of digital and social change, considering what we know now that we couldn't have known a decade ago and how this might force us to rethink some earlier claims about participatory culture, connected learning, Web 2.0, the new activism, fandom, and a wealth of other topics we hold near and dear. As we did so, we solicited questions through various social media, and we made sure to address as many of them as we could. And then, we worked through the transcripts, again and again, clarifying our concepts, refining our arguments, shuffling the pieces to insure greater clarity and accessibility. And the result is a book, which is being released this month by Polity Press.

danah and Mimi were ideal thinking and writing partners for this ride. It wasn't easy since we are probably three of the busiest people we know and so coordinating time to make this work was challenging, and there were many points along the way when we almost pulled the plug. I am so glad we didn't because I am very proud of what we produced in the end.

Here's what danah had to say about the process of writing the book on her blog:

I couldn’t think of anything more awesome than spending time with two of my mentors and teasing out the various strands of our interconnected research. I knew that there were places where we were aligned and places where we disagreed or, at least, where our emphases provided different perspectives. We’d all been running so fast in our own lives that we hadn’t had time to get to that level of nuance and this crazy project would be the perfect opportunity to do precisely that...Truth be told, I never wanted it to end. Throughout our conversations, I kept flashing back to my years at MIT when Henry opened my eyes to fan culture and a way of understanding media that seeped deep inside my soul. I kept remembering my trips to LA where I’d crash in Mimi’s guest room, talking research late into the night and being woken in the early hours by a bouncy child who never understood why I didn’t want to wake up at 6AM. But above everything else, the sheer delight of brainjamming with two people whose ideas and souls I knew so well was ecstasy.

I didn't want it to end, either, danah. There were times when our exchanges felt like a tag team with each of us adding to what the person before had said as we made common cause against shared frustrations in the discourse about, say, "digital natives." There were times when our interactions were like Truth and Dare as we ended up pushing each other to spill the beans and address core criticisms of our work. And there are a few places where some fundamental disagreements surfaced -- such as an exchange about Mimi's term, Connected Learning, and my term, Participatory Learning -- which people might not have recognized from the outside. I think this book poses more questions than we can address, but it is intended as a conversation starter, so literally, the conversation doesn't have to end but may spark many subsequent exchanges with many more people. So, as they used to say on Saturday Night Live, "talk amongst yourselves."

So far, the book has been enthusiastically received by Howard Rhinegold, who had most flattering things to say about the project:

My single strongest recommendation to you: if you want the best and latest evidence-based, authoritative, nuanced, critical knowledge about how digital media and networks are transforming not just learning but commercial media, citizen participation in democracy, and the everyday practices of young people, my advice is to obtain a copy of the new book, “Participatory Culture in A Networked Era,” by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd. This book is the opposite of so much sound-bite generalization about “digital natives” and “Twitter revolutions.” Jenkins, Ito, and boyd seek to unpack the nuances behind the generalizations of digital media enthusiasts and critics alike, rather than to reduce them to easily digested phrases. And, they articulate their knowledge clearly. They not only know this subject matter as well as anyone on the planet, they know how to talk about it.

Here are a few more reactions to the book (these blurbs solicited by Polity, our publisher):

"Jenkins, Ito and boyd offer us all a wonderful gift in the form of this book — it’s as though one gets a chance to listen in on a great dinner party conversation between three brilliant scholars, reflecting on more than twenty years of trenchant scholarship on culture, play, identity, and the emergence of the digital world." John Palfrey, Phillips Academy

"These authors practise what they preach! To unlock the promise of participatory culture, Jenkins, Ito and boyd invite us to join their intellectual conversation as they puzzle over the dilemmas, insights and challenges of living in a networked era. This is an exciting way to engage with a fast-developing field of research, knowledge and experience." Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics

"The idea of scholarship as dialogue is one that lies buried deep within the humanities. In the pages of this engaging and accessible book, Jenkins, Ito and boyd have brought the ethos of dialogue very much to the surface. Their conversation is an entirely apt technique for reflecting on what is by now a sustained history of collaboration on questions of informal learning, participation and power in the evolving digital media environment." Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology

In the spirit of keeping the conversation going, danah, Mimi and I had a new exchange via e-mail this past week, tackling a few recent concerns around participatory culture, as a way of sharing a taste of the book.

Henry: Last week, Common Sense Media announced a new report, based on a survey with 2600 tweens and teens, that they say depicts the current state of media usage in the United States. Among their findings are several which are likely troubling to one or another of us:

"Low-income kids lack access. Children growing up in lower-income homes are far less likely to have access to computers, tablets, and smartphones than their wealthier peers, but when they do have access, they are more likely to spend more time on their devices....

Social media use is big, but maybe not very enjoyable. Social media is an integral part of most teens' lives (45% use “every day”), but only 36% of teens say they enjoy using social media "a lot" compared to 73% who enjoy listening to music “a lot,” and 45% watching TV.

Everyone can be a maker, but not many are. The vast majority of children’s engagement with media consists of consuming media, with only a small portion devoted to creating content."

So, first, are these findings consistent with other current research you've seen? If so, should we be concerned about these findings? How do they fit within our own accounts of the ways media is impacting how youth learn and live today? And if these are indeed problems, what do we see as effective steps forward from these situations?

danah: Let me begin by tackling the middle finding on social media. When I interviewed teens, they repeatedly told me that they’d *much* rather get together face-to-face but then went on to cite all of the reasons that they couldn’t get together in person. It was deeply frustrating to them. They saw socializing through social media as less ideal than hanging out with their peers in person, but didn’t feel as though they had a choice. But that’s the comparison for them - social media vs. face-to-face. Music and TV are a totally different category and should not be compared to social media. Music and TV can be used socially (and you’ll often find teens listening to music or watching YouTube videos when then get together in person). They can also be used passively, to veg out at the end of a long day. As Henry often argues, there are active ways of consuming media, but the reality that I see on the ground is that there are many times when teens simply want to be passive consumers of media that makes them feel good. Then again, same is true for adults.

Mimi: I’ll jump in on the first finding and like danah also try to add some perspective on this that nuances the broad quantitative findings. Our team has also found important gaps in access and participation, but the differences are quite nuanced and aren’t about a straightforward “digital divide.” Access to computers, tablets, smartphones, and Internet connectivity don’t always go hand in hand, though privileged kids might have access to all of the above. One example is that we found that for low income teens in LA, they may have access to an Internet connected computer or laptop through shared device at home or at a library, but they but lack smartphone-based Internet access. What this means that they are not able to use mobile app based social media like Instagram and Snapchat. Many of the teens said they “don’t use social media” because they are not part of today’s dominant social media platforms. They use text messaging, and may dip into Facebook, because it is more accessible through shared devices like computers and laptops, but they are non-participants in the mobile social media space. And because these patterns tend to track along peer groups in schools, when they attended majority low income high schools, even the kids who did have smartphones were not heavy social media users because their peers were not part of the ecosystem.

Henry: I will tackle the final finding here. All of us have been excited at one time or another by the recognition that an expanding number of American youth have access to the means to produce media and we've contributed to projects designed to encourage young makers and hackers to find their voice and develop skills at producing new content. But, we need to recognize that participation in the new media environment can take many different forms and that measuring media making by itself creates a very high bar for mapping the public's changing communication capacities. Making media may be a special event for many youth -- part of a school project, for example -- but contributing to the media environment in other ways may occur much more commonly. So, for example, we need to recognize that much more casual acts, such as forwarding or retweeting or otherwise spreading a piece of media content or signing an online petition may, in fact, have an impact on larger societal debates; often local acts of contributing to social media don't count as "making" media, but do impact the local community where a discussion is taking place, representing forms of participation that would have been hard to achieve in another historical era. In many ways, forms of media participation have become so mundane and everyday that they do not "count" and are often taken for granted. Yet, when this broader range of activities are taken into consideration, it is clear that more young people are "participating" in the media environment than ever before and even if we narrow our focus to things like political and civic participation, there are signs of steady increases, and not just restricted to the "usual suspects" of white suburban middle class kids.

danah: One thing that bothers me about how we talk about media is that we tend to lump it all together. We treat TV as equivalent to video games, social media as equivalent to music. All because it involves electronics at some level. At best, we talk about passive versus active engagement but as y’all know, that’s fraught. I’m curious how y’all would break out different types of media so that people don’t always compare apples to oranges.

Henry: I would start by identifying specific functions and the choices people make about what media tools and platforms are the most appropriate ways of achieving them. So, in The Breakup 2.0, Ilana Gershon asks young people how they would "break up" with a romantic partner, and she gets a wealth of different stories that show choices people are making about when and where certain forms of media are appropriate and useful. Chris Evans, as part of the Youth and Participatory Politics Network research, has asked young people what strategies they would follow to address particular community problems. There, she can chart their movement across a range of different tools and platform, though she notes that many young people do not immediately think of digital media in this way, even though they use it often for other everyday functions. So, I would love to see research that asks about a) a broader range of forms and genres of participation and b) the range of tools and platforms used to achieve everyday social functions.

Mimi: I agree that it is very challenging to make general statements across media types and genres of participation in an era when the defining trend is towards niches and personalization of media environments. We talk about the various gaps and diverse genres of participation at some length in our book. I feel like in different ways, we have each taken on the challenge of adding some texture to blanket proclamations about “kids these days.”

Tap, Click, Read: An Interview with Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine (Part Three)

What do you see as some of the benefits or pitfalls of “interactive hotspots” in today’s e-books? You discuss the difference between forms of interactivity which are there as independent sources of pleasure or as means of allowing the reader to feel some sense of control over the reading process versus those which are “on the plot” and reinforce key learnings.

As I was reading this section, I found myself thinking back to some of the very earliest Sesame Street segments, where they would do a countdown, ending up with a man carrying an armload of pies, who would trip and fall. How might we understand the pleasures and pedagogies of a moment like this in relation to today’s interactive books?

The research on ‘hotspots’ that we get into in Tap, Click, Read--including popular print ‘distractors’ in pop-up books-- shows that emerging readers do not in fact benefit in developing key skills such as complex vocabulary development, comprehension and fluency. You can see the tradeoffs that often occur in a print vs. a highly (enhanced) interactive book experience in this experiment the Cooney Center carried out. That said, the interactivity associated with hotspots, as well as the comedy and musical interludes introduced by Sesame Street 2 generations ago are certainly a boon to engagement and extended learning when well deployed by knowledgeable adults. Our work with your group at USC illustrates the key prospects for moving beyond the more traditional framing of the advantages of print vs digital by creating a deeper understanding of the potential power of transmedia.

Throughout the book, there is some question of the concept of “screen time” which runs through much policy discourse on children and media. Yet, as you note, we use screens for so many different kinds of activities; there are so many different ways of engaging with screens; and we use screens in relation to many off-screen practices that lumping everything together into the category of screen time is more apt to be confusing than helpful. Meryl Alper in a recent MIT Press publication also considers what the anxiety about screen time means for families with disabilities where children rely on adaptive and assistive technologies that use screens for even the most basic daily tasks. So, surely there’s a need to shift the focus from how should we limit the amount of time children spend with screens towards what uses of screens are beneficial to children and how do we achieve a better balance in the range of different media practices they deploy. If so, are there some common sense answers to those basic questions we could provide parents?

We agree! It is time to strike the all encompassing term screen time from our vernacular--it just isn’t a helpful construct at all. The field of early learning is beginning to come around with recent guidance for educators and parents being much more nuanced and helpful. The National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center crafted a technology position statement in 2013 that stresses the importance of early educators using technology in developmentally appropriate ways.

And two recent statements--one from Zero to Three and the other from the American Academy of Pediatrics give much more direct and helpful guidance to parents, focusing more on the content, context and needs of the developing child. In fact in its recent statement The AAP hit the nail on the head when it wrote: “In a world where “screen time” is becoming simply “time,” our policies must evolve or become obsolete.” We need to address how learning can and should be happening in every place children congregate, regardless of the device.

Many of my readers are librarians, so I would be remiss if I did not ask you what roles librarians and libraries could and should play in the new literacy context you are advocating. Many school districts are cutting back on library staff, arguing that they are less important in an age when young people can find more and more information online. What arguments might librarians make to the contrary as they struggle to save their jobs?

We argue that librarians will become more necessary, not less, in the digital age. But as most know well, their jobs will need to adapt and we hope grow even more important. We came across several successful initiatives in public libraries that involved working with parents and educators inside and outside the physical library. The librarians had transformed themselves from being focused almost entirely on print books to being able to vet and critique digital media too, including e-books, apps, and videos.

In addition—and this is crucial—they were more than just curators. They were what we describe as “media mentors,” providing guidance to parents and teachers through workshops and one-on-one relationships with parents and teachers on how to use digital media in interactive storytimes and other moments of joint engagement with children. This summer, the Association of Library Services to Children (an arm of the American Library Association) released a white paper on media mentorship that described how librarians for children and youth were uniquely positioned to take on this role. “A commitment to media mentorship in every library,” the paper’s authors wrote, “is a firm commitment to the full spectrum of being a supporter and champion of literacy.”

This kind of mentorship is a must for children from low-income families whose parents may be least likely to have the resources, time, or preparation necessary to learn how to use digital tools well and model that use for their children. The more that librarians can provide support and guidance to parents and teachers around the use of literacy tools and media, the more essential those librarians will be.

Lisa Guernsey is director of the Early Education Initiative and the Learning Technologies Project in the Education Policy Program at New America. She leads teams of writers and analysts to tell stories, examine policies and generate ideas for new approaches to help disadvantaged students succeed. Prior to her work at New America, Lisa worked as a staff writer at The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has also contributed to several national publications, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Slate, and USA TODAY, and she is the author of Screen Time: How Electronic Media – From Baby Videos to Educational Software – Affects Your Young Child (Basic Books, 2012). She won a 2012 gold Eddie magazine award for a School Library Journal article on e-books and has served on several national advisory committees on early education, including the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Science of Children Birth To Age 8.

Michael H. Levine, PhD, is the founding executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The Center conducts research, builds multi-sector alliances, and catalyzes industry and policy reforms needed to advance high quality media experiences for vulnerable children. Levine serves on the senior team at Sesame Workshop where he focuses on educational initiatives and philanthropic partnerships for the global nonprofit. Prior to joining the Center, Levine was Vice President for Asia Society, managing interactive media and educational initiatives to promote knowledge and understanding of other world regions and cultures. Michael previously oversaw Carnegie Corporation of New York’s groundbreaking work in early childhood development and educational media, and was a senior advisor to the New York City Schools Chancellor, where he directed dropout prevention and afterschool programs.

Tap, Click, Read: An Interview with Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine (Part Two)

Frequently, media and reading are pit against each other in what amounts to a zero-sum game. Time spent doing one comes at the expense of the other. Yet, you are suggesting that these do not have to be seen as opposing forces. How might they best work together? You are right--the debate between technophiles and technophobes is driving us down the wrong road. In our book we talk about the need to find a ‘third way,’ that is using media and technology in the service of early literacy development. We call this concept readia. Let us explain.

In developing the thesis for our book, we had an abiding worry that our thinking about early literacy was locked in a time warp. While the science behind early reading development has never been stronger, our capacity to make progress has been constrained, we fear, by a large elephant in the room—the ubiquitous force represented by multiple forms of media in almost every young child’s life. We wondered: might that force be tapped in a more balanced and purposeful way? But we also knew that without pushing for better quality, and more access to diverse learning environments for low-income families, we might be deepening, not closing existing divides.

Just last week, early literacy activists may have gotten an unexpected ally in crafting a modern response: the American Academy of Pediatrics announced changes to its recommendations on “screen time.” For years the Academy has been telling parents to refrain from or sharply limit use of screen media. The new guidance takes a more realistic approach, acknowledging that even young children are using tablets and other technology every day, and that parents and teachers should use new tools more intentionally and collaboratively.

This is a moment perhaps where the important connections between media and reading can be brought to light among educators,’ parents, and in the public’s imagination. If guidance from professionals is more nuanced and evidence-based, we think it’s possible to escape the polarized debates between technology as harmful (it’s nothing more than distractor or electronic babysitter!) and technology as savior (apps will somehow fix everything). Our book documents research and innovations on the ground that are pointing to a third way. In short, let’s maintain a human-centric approach to early literacy by empowering and mentoring parents and educators to see their role as primary. But let’s also see technology as a powerful complement.

Our key takeaway: today’s toddlers -- the class of 2030 -- will still need to be able to read in the traditional sense. But they will also need a new blend of skills-- to speak, listen, write, be able to discern an author’s motivation, and to look for evidence in books to inform their opinions. The new blend is something we refer to as “readia” -- media in service of reading, and reading conducted via media of all kinds.

I have heard many parents and even some educators argue that we should keep digital and other media out of schools, that children get too much exposure to this beyond the school day, and that school time should be a time of quiet contemplation such as that traditionally associated with book culture. How would you respond to that argument?

First of all we do not advocate that very young children are left in front of a screen or that ambient use --”always on” media--is effective to promote the rich literacy skills that a developing child needs to get ready for a life of learning.

But keeping digital media out of school is a mistake. The argument works if you are a tech entrepreneur or highly skilled in scaffolding media and tech usage at home because you have the time to do so as a parent. But for a child who is growing up with limited means and parents who might be working 2 or 3 jobs, we need to create normative use of technology beginning in the preschool years. There is no reason at all that children cannot have both quiet and reflective time and be adept in the use of the modern technologies that can be a great ally in personalizing and globalizing their learning possibilities!

We should not be surprised that the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is deeply invested in understanding how children learn to read in a digital age given how much Sesame Street contributed to fostering a deeper understanding of how children might learn to read during the television era. So, what lessons from Sesame Street carry over into this new context and in what ways might we need to rethink that model for the age of networked, mobile, and interactive media?

The book explores the rich history of educational media, and imagines a new, more highly networked and mobile form of public media as a national asset that could be better positioned to connect home and school The origins of Sesame Street and other public media pioneers are the basis--in many respects-- to understanding the impact of new technologies on young children. The book offers an analysis of the role that ‘joint media engagement’ (where adults and children learn from media together), might play if we were to intentionally design in-school and out-of-school literacy programs for such interchange.

Let us illustrate. Many of our peers (and we are of slightly different generations!) would sit together watching Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as “co-viewers” when their kids were preschoolers. The music or sketch comedy or wholesome life lessons appealed to parents who saw the benefits of engaging their children to “learn beyond the tube.” Research in the 70’s and 80’s showed that parents would often use the teachable moments and displayable skills they were co-viewing to later ask kids to point out the letters on a Stop sign or say numbers like ‘The Count would.”

Today’s kids and parents are still co-viewing, but our research indicates that there is less ‘intentional viewing’ of educational media: parents and kids are more likely to be watching telenovelas or American Idol together. But the ubiquity and mobility of interactive digital media make it possible to expand the reach of ‘learning together’ moments in a new way. For example, rather than constructing the “family hour of coviewing” that often took place in the 60’s and 70’s, today’s parents who understand the benefits of blending literacy and media experiences will spend ten-fifteen minutes in shorter bursts of activity scaffolding and guiding their kids learning in different settings--in the car or on a bus, at the grocery store, after a park or museum visit, to make a new discovery!

Lisa Guernsey is director of the Early Education Initiative and the Learning Technologies Project in the Education Policy Program at New America. She leads teams of writers and analysts to tell stories, examine policies and generate ideas for new approaches to help disadvantaged students succeed. Prior to her work at New America, Lisa worked as a staff writer at The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has also contributed to several national publications, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Slate, and USA TODAY, and she is the author of Screen Time: How Electronic Media – From Baby Videos to Educational Software – Affects Your Young Child (Basic Books, 2012). She won a 2012 gold Eddie magazine award for a School Library Journal article on e-books and has served on several national advisory committees on early education, including the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Science of Children Birth To Age 8.

Michael H. Levine, PhD, is the founding executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The Center conducts research, builds multi-sector alliances, and catalyzes industry and policy reforms needed to advance high quality media experiences for vulnerable children. Levine serves on the senior team at Sesame Workshop where he focuses on educational initiatives and philanthropic partnerships for the global nonprofit. Prior to joining the Center, Levine was Vice President for Asia Society, managing interactive media and educational initiatives to promote knowledge and understanding of other world regions and cultures. Michael previously oversaw Carnegie Corporation of New York’s groundbreaking work in early childhood development and educational media, and was a senior advisor to the New York City Schools Chancellor, where he directed dropout prevention and afterschool programs.

Tap, Click, Read: An Interview with Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine (Part One)

Too often, computers are pitted against books in the mythology of contemporary education reform. Computers are often understood as fundamentally transforming and disruptive technologies irreversible in their effects -- for some, those effects are liberating -- the magic box. For others, these devices are threatening -- the reason why Johnny (or Mary) can't read, the reason why we can't have meaningful conversations with our kids. So, how do we move beyond these polarizing frames? Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens offers us one compelling model for what a middle-ground response to these issues might look like. It's authors Lisa Guernsey from New America and Michael H. Levine from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, are trusted voices on issues of children and media; they've done serious research and they've written about it in a public-facing way. They are very good at translating academic findings into something that can be processed by educators and parents who are concerned about the young people in their lives. They avoid alarmist or celebratory framings and get down to what's working, and what isn't, about the contemporary media environment. As this interview makes clear, we can no longer make simple decisions about how much screen time is okay for children when so many vital processes of the culture are now taking place within digitized environments. We can not lock down classrooms as computer-free zones in a world where many young people still lack access to both technological infrastructure and mentorship outside of school. We can't easily separate out what it means to read printed texts from what it means to engage with digital media at a time when more and more of us are reading books on our Kindles and other tablets.

Tap, Click, Read makes valuable contributions to our understanding of what constitutes literacy in the 21st century, contributions directed at parents, teachers, policy makers, technology designers, and fellow researchers. If you fall into any of these categories, you probably need to engage with their arguments.

I am very happy to be able to offer some glimpses into their thinking through this three-part interview. And they were nice enough to provide a range of links to other cutting edge research in this space. So, don't be afraid to follow one of those links, as long as you come back and finish reading the interview. :-)

If you want to learn more about this project, you should definitely visit their rich web site which also helps connect interesting parties to an array of different resources they can use to apply these insights or take action in support of educational reforms. So, in this case, read, then tap and click.

You begin the book with a very noble statement: “We cannot allow technology to exacerbate social inequality instead of opening more opportunities for everyone to succeed.” So, break this down for us. What do you see as the heart of the problem? Is the concern with access to technology per se or something more than that, whether understood in terms of literacies or mentorship or opportunity? And what might be some positive steps we can take -- as parents, as educators, as a society -- to address those concerns?

Great question! There has been a good deal of discussion about a “digital divide,” in education and youth development circles. Because the focus is often on hardware and software, we believe that this focus largely misses the mark. While equitable access to technology is still a worry, especially in the lowest income households, access to quality professional development, programs that train “media mentors” or provide opportunities for adults and children to engage jointly in media production is in our view a more important priority.

Recent work by scholars such as Susan Neuman and Vikki Katz on the phenomenon you first coined as a “participation gap,” are showing that children in their pre-school and primary years need engaged adults--parents, relatives and educators to provide normative experiences in the mastery of digital content and tools. In our book, especially in the concluding chapter, we lay out a series of action steps that parents, educators and communities can take to help prevent new divides. Among the most important ones are to invest more in community assets where technology can be more seamlessly connected to children’s natural passions such as libraries and afterschool centers. We also need a massive effort to prepare teachers of young children with the latest techniques to embed in their practice and centrally to invest much more heavily in high quality early learning and parent education programs.

Let’s start with a deceptively simple question: What do you mean by reading? What is it that we want young people to be able to do that they are not able to do under our current configuration of schooling?

Not simple at all!

Reading and more generally, “literacy” as a construct is getting more expansive with every passing year. Someone who is not steeped in early literacy research might think that literacy means reading print. But even the traditional definition of literacy has always meant more than that: It means reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Children need help in becoming skillful at all four of those skills and they can use media tools of all kinds to do so. And in addition, as children grow up in a world of information overload and constant messaging, they will also need to learn media literacy and critical literacy. Those two concepts are still relatively new in elementary education, but if you think about it, those ideas go hand in hand with teaching a child about what it means to be a writer or media creator and why it is important to look closely and ask questions about what a writer is trying to say.

A number of groups have done important work defining what a new set of 21st Century literacies and skills should look like for children and youth (The National Council of Teachers of English,The National Association of Media Literacy Educators, Asia Society and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills are among the best known groups). A common thread across the groups is that learning and knowledge development is now highly networked, socially constructed, and globally applied.

Educators of young students have always understood the need to consider the ‘whole child’s’ growth and development: a challenge moving forward is to prepare teachers to teach critical thinking and inquiry skills using new and old forms of media. Kindergarten teachers doing real-alouds commonly ask students "What do you think happens next?" But they do not always ask the corollary question that builds students' media literacy skills: "How do you know? Where in the story do you see signs or evidence of what you suggest?

Often critiques of the impact of media on learning and reading make a series of normative assumptions, frequently grounded in norms of middle class, white, suburban family life. But you cite recent research which factors a more diverse range of families into the equation. What does this research change in our understanding? How might schools shift from seeing bilingual families, for example, in terms of the cultural assets they provide children rather than what are often perceived as “literacy deficits”?

This is a fundamental question that every educator and advocate for a more diverse and sensitive educational system must urgently ask. Both the Cooney Center through its Aprendiendo Juntos Council and New America through its Dual Language Learners Work Group have new research initiatives underway to delve into the deep cultural assets that reside within language learning communities and especially in the diverse families who have recently immigrated to the US.

In Tap, Click, Read we explore the overlooked assets that reside in both the language and culture of low-income Hispanic-Latino families as seen through the lens of contemporary research on the uses of digital media for learning purposes. We include findings from a national survey conducted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Stanford University on how Hispanic-Latino families define educational media use in the home, as well as an analysis of research by our team and scholars at Rutgers University on the role that national policies on low cost broadband access are playing in getting modern technology to low-income homes. Our book includes recommendations based on this research on ways to improve parent engagement programs, school-home links, media design, and new public-private partnerships to more effectively meet the needs of ELL’s.

And one of our key messages is that Spanish-speaking families have real strengths and assets to share with their children: By having conversations with them in Spanish about the world around them, they are building a base of knowledge and literacy that will make it easier for their children to learn English as well. This is the case, of course, not only for Spanish-speaking families but also for any family that speaks a non-English language at home. We should be helping families enable their children to become truly bilingual, not just in speaking but also in reading and writing.

Lisa Guernsey is director of the Early Education Initiative and the Learning Technologies Project in the Education Policy Program at New America. She leads teams of writers and analysts to tell stories, examine policies and generate ideas for new approaches to help disadvantaged students succeed. Prior to her work at New America, Lisa worked as a staff writer at The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has also contributed to several national publications, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Slate, and USA TODAY, and she is the author of Screen Time: How Electronic Media – From Baby Videos to Educational Software – Affects Your Young Child (Basic Books, 2012). She won a 2012 gold Eddie magazine award for a School Library Journal article on e-books and has served on several national advisory committees on early education, including the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Science of Children Birth To Age 8.

Michael H. Levine, PhD, is the founding executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The Center conducts research, builds multi-sector alliances, and catalyzes industry and policy reforms needed to advance high quality media experiences for vulnerable children. Levine serves on the senior team at Sesame Workshop where he focuses on educational initiatives and philanthropic partnerships for the global nonprofit. Prior to joining the Center, Levine was Vice President for Asia Society, managing interactive media and educational initiatives to promote knowledge and understanding of other world regions and cultures. Michael previously oversaw Carnegie Corporation of New York’s groundbreaking work in early childhood development and educational media, and was a senior advisor to the New York City Schools Chancellor, where he directed dropout prevention and afterschool programs.

A Visit with Feminist Filmmaker Paromita Vohra

Today, I continue to share excerpts from my diaries during my travels across India. Consider each of these entries an impression - one slice through the complexity of contemporary Indian culture. My focus is often on the new -- on popular culture and media change -- but it is hard to separate out the new from older cultural traditions. I am no expert on India but I am trying to share here my evolving understanding of what I learned as I was guided through this rich and diverse country by my former student, Parmesh Shahani, director of the Godrej India Culture Lab in Mumbai. Today's entry describes a visit to the home of an amazing activist and filmmaker whose work deserves to be much better known here, since it speaks to so many issues we discuss with our students. I know that I often struggle to find non-American examples to help students think about how some of these concerns play out in other contexts, and the videos embedded here are potentially great starting points for such discussions. I know I will be sharing some of them with my students once I get back into the classroom next year. The big event of the day was a visit in the home of Paromita Vohra, who is a major cultural player here – a documentary filmmaker, an actress, a feminist and queer icon, a columnist for a major newspaper, a reality television producer, a comic book writer, and as it turned out, the perfect person to give me a master class on Indian popular culture and politics. We spent the afternoon around her computer, pulling up and discussing clips from her various documentaries, as well as my sharing some videos from the database of activist youth media we’ve been assembling around the By Any Media Necessary book. Paro, as she is called informally, is brilliant, thoughtful, warm and gracious, and down to earth in equal measures. You can get a sense of her from this video interview on gender politics I found online.

She also has a campy sense of humor and has performed a recurring cult role as Aunty 303 for a promotional campaign used by one of the television networks here.

We struck it off from the start and found many common interests.

For example, she was very interested in my early work on vaudeville and film comedy, and shared some reflections on popular theater traditions in India – specifically Parsi theater which she described as offering a series of “numbers” or specialties, a strong sense of improvisation and topicality, and a mixing of broad melodrama and even broader comedy. She traced how this eclectic mix of performance specialities fed into the evolution of the Bollywood (and other popular film genres in India) creating the unique mix of genre elements that we know today. But she also expressed concern that the popular Indian cinema was under much stronger pressure to adopt the linear three act structure used by Hollywood and she saw this change as having very negative effects on the culture here.

She blamed it in part on the Indian film industries response to globalization and the new generation’s sense of shame over some of the kitsch aspects of the Bollywood movie; she sees these films trying to break into film festivals or multiplexes with mixed responses and she sees increased co-productions with Hollywood partners dictating a closer adherence to Hollywood storytelling models. She also though saw these shifts as reflecting the pressure from the Hindu Nationalists currently in power towards what she sees as a monoculture – one true way to be Indian – as opposed to the contradictory, even incoherent, sprawl associated with the popular film traditions here.

Later, she talked a bit about bahurupia, a kind of clown, which traveled around the country, impersonating particular types, and seeing if they can fool the locals into believing that they are who they claim to be. I tried comparing it with Borat, which they felt was an interesting analogy, but they also pointed towards the Yes Men as another western counter-part to this kind of performance. This video is in Hindu, but it provides some pretty compelling images of a range of different local clowns at work.

She talked a bit about how all of these traditions had informed her own style and techniques as a documentary filmmaker: she likes to mix and match genres throughout her work, resulting in a more fragmented, nonlinear, and multivocal style of storytelling. She mixes a range of fictional and even musical segments into her documentaries, often drawing on popular culture genres to help frame things. For example, Unlimited Girls uses a fictional chatroom as a kind of greek chorus to explore a young woman’s struggles as she tries to engage with the contemporary feminist movement, but it also represents patriarchal responses to feminism through mock commercials (including one featuring a Vampire in a Superhero cape, who appears magically when teen girls start thinking about feminism to put them back into their place).

Where’s Sandra? explores a particular cultural type here – middle class, westernized, Christian, suburban girls (“Sandra from Bandra”) by combining interviews with Indian women named Sandra with clips from vintage movies where this type appears and more ironic musical numbers (including a spoof of “Look at Me – I’m Sandra Dee” from Grease).

In our correspondence, Ritesh Mehta, another of my former students from India, mentioned that he felt Persis Khambatta, an actress known to Americans for her performance in Star Trek: The Motion[less] Picture, was something close to a "Sandra" type in Indian films, despite her Parsi background. I was bemused since her introduction to America really played up her exotic, "alien" qualities rather than seeing her as someone who was highly westernized in her mother country.

Another of her films – Cosmopolis -- deals with food politics in India, but is framed in terms of the mythological tradition as a battle between two Godesses – one who embodied “plenty” and food, the other “wealth” and “luxury.”

The film's central topic concerns efforts by vegetarians to ban meat eaters from specific housing complexes or even from whole neighborhoods, much as we have child-free, pet-free, or smoke-free spaces in the United States. They argue that they hate the second hand smell of meat and that meat eaters bring their own shops into communities which are doing things the vegetarians find distasteful. She gave me DVDS of some of her longer films, including Q2P (the title took me a while to work out but when I did, it was brilliant) which deals with gender inequality in terms of access to public toilets in India.

Partners in Crime deals with copyright, piracy, and capitalism in the local film industry.

Morality TV and the Loving Jihad deals with the ways news focuses on moral rather than political issues in depicting cities and the ways street mobs end up acting out against people identified for their moral lapses.

We also spoke about her recent experience producing a nonfiction series (some would say reality series) for Indian television, Connected. Connected was inspired by an Israeli series of the same name and format. Basically, they identified a group of “average” Indian women of different generations and backgrounds and gave them a camera with which to document their lives over a year as they lived out some kind of transition – including getting jobs, moving, falling in love, getting divorced, and so forth. Then her team edited the footage to construct narratives. She described the process of watching all of these incredibly intimate videos each day and often trying to anticipate what would happen next for each of these women. She talked about the very different ways they approached the filming but also the way they became more and more saavy about what her team needed in terms of coverage in order to construct the program. This material has not been translated from Hindi yet so we could only really absorb the visual style and some moments she translated on the fly, but it seemed to be really interesting material I hope to learn more about down the line.

She is currently working on a range of projects, one exploring sex and sexuality in the lives of young women, and another dealing with “excessive” fans of older Indian film songs. As you can imagine, the fan culture theme led to some great comparisons between us, as she talked about these older fans who still perform the vintage songs for each other, collect all kinds of artifacts and older films, and are convinced that no good film numbers have been created since the 1950s. We shared some of our own experiences as being amongst the youngest people to go to Cine-Con each year and what we’ve learned about the older generation of film fans and collectors in the United States.

As the hours ticked by, we were joined for dinner by Anusha Yadav and Parmesh. Anusha has been master-minding what sounds like a great project – the Indian Memory Project – which has crowdsourced old photographs and the stories that go with them from hundreds of Indians, as a way of preserving and examining culture memory. She is also working on a project which will collect “love letters” across generations and across media – from handwritten notes to text messages.

This turned out to be a long, sprawling, evening marked by lively conversation and great food, and gave me yet another glimpse into the social life of artists and intellectuals in Mumbai.  Our session went from 4 in the afternoon until well after 11 pm, and we dropped off quickly once we got back to the room and are waking up slowly this morning.

As an added treat, and as another illustration of a camp aesthetic at work in contemporary Indian popular culture, I wanted to share this spoof of a classic Bollywood number, "Dreamum Wakeupum " from the recent film, Aiyyaa. The clip was shared with me by the film's director, Sachin Kundalkar, who I met at several of the Godrej India Culture Lab events. Listen carefully to the words, which are often nonsense -- English phrases made to sound Hindi -- as a play on the country's language politics. As for what the dance number does to gender and sexual politics, well... In any case, this segment was too great not to pass along but I didn't know where else to put it except at the end of this segment, given the focus on comedy and cultural politics.

Behind the Scenes at Indian Idol Junior

 

I have been running a series of blog posts sharing some of the experiences I had during a five week tour of India this summer, thanks to the hospitality of Parmesh Shahani and the good folks at Godrej India Culture Lab.  Since I have much to share, I have been breaking up this travel narrative with other segments, but I wanted to pick up again today with a segment describing what we saw when we were able to attend a taping of Indian Idol Junior. The following is adopted from my travel diary.

Today’s main event was a trip to Studio City, which was nearby, for a taping of Indian Idol Junior. We drove down meandering roads through Studio City, where there are a number of smaller studios, some of whom seemed to be shooting things on their front lawns, all involved in film and television production. My favorite because of the cultural incongruity was Swastick Studios, which used the local variant on the Swastika as its brand logo. (It is a traditional good luck sign in Hindu and other local religions, which the Indians have refused to cede to its 20^th century associations.)

We pass through multiple levels of security and some degree of confusion before we find our way to the studio where they are shooting Indian Idol. We are the guests of the program’s creative director, who is a family friend of the woman who runs the media program at Sophia. We are immediately ushered upon arrival onto the sound stage and given a seat of honor.

The studio space is surprisingly small, even compared to its American counterparts.  Cynthia and I have never gone to an American Idol taping but we have been to a Survivor finale and to a taping of So You Think You Can Dance. A key difference is that both are taped lived before a very active studio audience.

Here, they are taping two episodes back to back on a Sunday which will air across the coming week: a result show is taped in the morning and aired last night; we are there for the taping of the performance competition (the top ten) which will air the following Saturday night.  Parmesh says this is required to accommodate the judges, one of whom Sonakshi Sinha is a Bollywood glamour queen, second or third generation superstar. So, we are directly in front of the performance space and we have a good view of the area where the contestants sit when they are waiting to go on, of the judge’s table, and an area where the parents of the contestants sit. And above us, there is a small ring of enthusiastic fans who cheer wildly during each segment. We seem to be sitting in an area for friends and family of the producers.

Before the production starts, we are able to watch the contestants mill about, getting last minute advice or touch ups from their parents. One of the contestants, who we will call Red Dress, was working the crowd and we posed for a selfie with her. She’s also playing up to the judges, bringing around a local sweet from her region and passing it out to the judges and the announcers, even the production grips, on the pretext that it is her birthday. As we observe her throughout the performance, it is clear that she is the one to beat in the competition – she’s got incredible vocal skills – but she also knows it, and she’s a bit of a prima donna, who tends to boss the other children around. She’s apparently been adopted by a number of Bollywood stars who tweet out their support around each episode.

The children are dressed in a wide array of clothes, some very westernized, some traditional, all brightly colored to pop on the camera. The songs they sing are Bollywood standards, and unless I am fooled by the less familiar patterns of these songs, they are much more challenging and vocally complex than the songs typically sung on American Idol. And we are dealing with contestants who range in age between 9 and 14-15. The stress on these contestants must be intense (We saw the tail end of last night’s result show when we got back to our quarters, and the contestant voted off weeped with enormous intensity.)

The conventions of the show are universal, so even without knowing a word of Hindi, we can follow more or less what goes on. But because this is taped, not live, there’s a lot of set up and primping between numbers. It’s also got a different rhythm with much more time devoted to the male and female hosts. The male host with fluffed up hair is the Indian equivalent of a baggy pants comic who performs broadly; his female counterpart – in a lime colored pants suit and high heels – also plays broadly but is a more reactive character. They do a lot of prop humor setting up each segment.

Then, the singer’s perform, always in one take, and near the end, the cameraman do a sweeping pan around them, pushing the camera almost into their face, and then, the judges judge.

The judges are speaking Hinglish – a mix of English and Hindi. Parmesh says that these elite Indians are used to speaking in English and their Hindi is not especially strong. In between takes, the judges are always on their cell phones, texting, but they are also getting made-up by their personal staff and they are brought food. We watch one of the judges plow through a meal of chicken and salad in about two minutes between takes, as if this was the only food he was going to get. We were amused that the judges have cups displaying their sponsor, Horlicks, a hot milk-based drink, in front of them, but we saw a staffer pour Coke Zero into each cup between takes.

Then, the contestant offers their pitch to the public – which moves between Hindi and whatever local language they speak. Indian Idol taps intense regional pride and rivalries, often with massive rallies and voting drives in local areas to insure that support gets directed towards contestants who are the source of enormous pride for parts of the country that are rarely represented on television.

There’s often also a segment involving one of the parents, full of stories of sacrifice and determination. The parents mostly come from working class backgrounds, often from rural areas, and so they may speak only their local languages, but they are coached to be able to speak in Hindi or English for the national television audience.

Finally, there may be some sketch involving the contestants and the judges which are designed to further define their characters. So, one of the contestants came out in a traditional tunic-based outfit, which the announcer rips away to reveal rocker clothes underneath, for what turned out to be a show-stopping, defining performance (perhaps the best of the night coming from a young man who had been in the bottom three in last week’s results). Another young boy pulls a lizard (or what we hope was a toy lizard) out of his pocket and sticks it into the hand of the female host who shrieks on cue and drops it on the ground. There’s a dance-off between the Bollywood Glamour Queen and the Female Announcer, both in high heels. A village boy shares that he misses playing marbles with his friends, so they bring out a blanket and marvels, and the male announcers and judges play marbles with him. I am not sure what use is going to be made of this material, since everything is running so much longer than an American show would, and Indian Television is if anything heavier on commercials than American broadcast television is. Taping this episode took a full four hours.

We all have our favorites. Despite her bossiness, I can’t help but root for Red Dress, just because she really has amazing vocal chops, and for the boy who transformed into a rocker, for much the same. But there is the “Drama Mama,” the youngest contestant, who dances – not especially well, but its more movement than most of the others; there’s a boy who wears a turban and traditional clothes; and a range of others. Right now, it’s 3 boys and 7 girls, so we are betting one of the girls goes home this week. She seemed flatter than the others; looked really dejected afterwards, and while the judges were kind, they were much less effusive than they had been with the other contestants. Our sense was she knew it was her turn to go, but we will have to wait till next Sunday to see the results.

We did watch the episode when it aired the following weekend. It was fascinating to see what made it onto the air. Having gotten rid of liveness, the program also got rid of any pretense of “real time.” The footage is tightly, almost abruptly, edited, with only the highlights of the responses aired. This helps to explain why they shot so much more than was aired. In the studio, everything seemed to be much slower than on the American version. On the air, much faster. It has that feel of cutting from highlight to highlight. Aesthetically, it is a very different experience of the program.

Most of the sketches I described ended up on the cutting room floor. They did use the segment of the village boy’s marbles game – which Parmesh did not think they would use because the judges were so bad at marbles, but this becomes the focus of the editing. They did not use what we saw as a more successful segment where the boy sticks a lizard in the hand of the female announcer. I wondered if some of those segments were shot for distribution online.

The soundtrack has also been juiced up – comic noises to prop up the mugging of the announcer, audience noises to amp up the responses of the somewhat meager studio audience, and especially a better sound mix for the performances than we heard in the studio. It’s hard to tell if they worked from the raw tracks or rerecorded the songs, which, of course, has serious implications for a singing competition.

They also had altered the sequence of the performances dramatically with the boy who rips off his traditional clothes and becomes a rocker as the starting point for the program and one of the first performances we saw ending up the broadcast. We’ve always suspected that American Idol structures their live shows based on who did the best job in rehearsal, but here, the actual editing of the content reflects this assumption as well.

If you'd like to read more about Indian Idol, check out this great essay by another of my former MIT students, Aswin Punathambekar, which deals with the local campaigns to support contestants as a kind of civic activity.

Engaging with Transmedia Branding: An Interview with USC's Burghardt Tenderich (Part Three)

What do you see as some of the ethical concerns that transmedia branding practice pose for industry leaders? Are there times when transmedia’s blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, for example, can be misleading or may cross established policies regulating trade practices? Like any other forms of marketing or branding, transmedia storytelling raises ethical considerations, some of which are not all that different from those that apply to any marketing discipline. Edward Bernays, considered by many to be the ‘father of public relations,’ was led the charge in applying the principles of political propaganda to marketing communications.

During the boom years following World War II, supply for many products and services suddenly exceeded demand, so Bernays and his contemporaries on Madison Avenue, on behalf of their industrial clients, built PR campaigns with the sole purpose of creating demand for things people had previously no idea they wanted. This was the birth of consumerism – based on the assumption, held by Bernays and others, that the masses are stupid and easily manipulated. I’m afraid we see a lot of this approach still today in the worlds of marketing, advertising and public relations.

More specifically to the ethics of transmedia is whether fictional storylines can be mistaken for reality in campaigns where the lines are blurred. Due to the prevalence of sarcasm, parody and humor in storytelling, the ethical standard is not as much determined by the literal truth of campaign content, but whether or not it is—or has the potential to be—deceiving. The notion of deceit is central to the discussion of transmedia branding because of one of the discipline’s key characteristics: many transmedia branding campaigns purposefully mix fiction with reality and playfully expose participants to a constant back and forth between the two.

The question is whether ethical boundaries are surpassed when brands use fictional content mixed in with actual events. For example, the campaign Art of the Heist stages a fake break-in into the Audi car dealership where actors shatter the store front window to steal an Audi A3. This is the kick-off to an online and offline transmedia campaign to solicit attention to the A3’s launch. The day after the theft, at the New York auto show, instead of seeing America’s first A3, attendees saw signs reporting the missing car. What if this campaign scared people in the real world? While we assume that most people can distinguish between fiction and reality here, some may not be able to.

Another form of ethical transgression is appealing to emotions in order to divert attention from distorted facts. This was masterfully done in Chipotle’ Scarecrow video, one of the most impressive examples of world building. The animated video shows a scarecrow who witnesses the unappetizing side of industrial food production and decides to ‘go back to the start’ by farming and selling organic vegetarian produce, including the red chili pepper from the Chipotle logo. The problem is that Chipotle’s food is not vegetarian and, at the time of the video release, mostly not organic. This triggered internet video publishers Funny or Die to extend the storyline with a brand jam: they recorded a video using the original footage and soundtrack, but imposed subtitles and changed the lyrics to expose Chipotle’s ethical transgressions.

You point to growth hacking as representing one future direction for communication strategy. How are you defining this concept and what are some examples of the ways this has worked to increase the visibility of brand messages?

Growth hacking represents principles and techniques designed for rapid adoption of a brand. Communication strategy is part of this, but growth hacking is a broader concept that includes product design and refinement as well as programming. It’s frequently used to promote web sites and consumer technologies, but its potential use is much broader. The basic idea is that a product or service is defined jointly with its intended users, mainly by soliciting feedback, analysis of user data and constant A/B testing. The communication strategies focus on spreadable or even viral components.

To illustrate, the original growth hack was Hotmail’s decision to print underneath each email the tagline “Get your free email at Hotmail.” At a time when free email accounts were unheard-of, this led to truly viral adoption of the new tool. Dropbox used a similar growth hack by setting up a member referral system for free cloud storage.

But the technical co-founders of Dropbox also demonstrated their impressive PR instincts by using communication growth hacks. For example, in order to recruit highly technical beta users, company founder Drew Houston posted a short video on Digg. The video was laced with hidden messages and jokes that only experienced software developers would understand. Called “Easter eggs” in developer lingo, these messages included references to Chocolate Rain, the movie Office Space and keys for decrypting Blu-ray disks. This nod to its technical audience helped the video rise to the top of Digg. This particular strategy – described in the Harvard Business School case on Dropbox – points to one of the key differences between mainstream PR and growth hacking: it’s about reaching the right people, not the maximum number of people.

Growth hacks can also be based on simple creative ideas, such as Apple’s decision to ship iPods and later iPhones with white headphones, so people in the street would know the person who just walked by wasn’t just listening to music on any mp3 player or smartphone, but indeed an Apple product. Apple also strategically featured the white headphones prominently in all its ads and commercials

And, of course, people created funny parodies, like the one below with the Spong Bob silhouette, when the iPhone 5 was launched.

Interestingly, while I was sitting at a window on the second floor of a café just outside an outdoor mall on Black Friday recently, I couldn’t help noticing that almost every other female shopper was recognizably carrying either a Lululemon or Victoria’s Secret bag. From my perspective, they were swarming constantly in every direction of the shopping area, serving the unintended function of brand ambassador.

Also, this summer we took a family trip to Berlin. The streets right around the Brandenburg Gate were packed with taxis that all prominently displayed the same ad, for Uber (!)

Berlin has banned Uber, which makes this form counter-cultural (commercial) activism even more noteworthy.

In summary, growth hacking comes in many flavors that pertain the central goal of creating engagement with a brand.

Burghardt Tenderich is a Professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles, CA, where he teaches and researches about strategic communication, transmedia branding, emerging media technologies and media entrepreneurship. He is the author of Transmedia Branding (2015) USC Annenberg Press, together with Jerried Williams. Burghardt is Associate Director of the Annenberg School’s Strategic Communication and Public Relations Center, and co-author of the Generally Accepted Practices for Public Relations (GAP VII).

Burghardt has over 20 extensive experience in communication and marketing in the information technology and internet industries and he holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economic Geography from the University of Bonn, Germany.

Engaging with Transmedia Branding: An Interview with USC's Burghardt Tenderich (Part Two)

Early on, Grant McCracken used the example of Mr. Clean to illustrate what might happen as existing brand icons are given greater backstory. But, even in the entertainment industry, there’s been some debate lately about whether Hollywood is providing too much backstory now and whether backstory can bring negative consequences in terms of narrowing rather than intensifying audience engagement. What insights might you share about how much backstory might be needed to build audience interest in a brand narrative and when the backstory is doing damage to the core goal of the advertisement, which is to sell product? I’m all for open-ended stories and for improvisation. In fact, two of the aforementioned campaigns, Old Spice Guy and the Most Interesting Man in the World, started off as a video and an advertising campaign, respectively, and over time, due to audience engagement, carried on and eventually morphed into transmedia campaigns. In a way, the less scripted and the less background provided, the more opportunity there is to take a campaign into previously unimagined territory.

There’s been much debate about the nature and value of brand communities. Does every brand need a community of brand advocates? Are some brands more likely to generate such communities than others?

In an ideal world, every brand would have its devoted brand communities -- iconic groups like those who followed Harley Davidson or Apple in the 1990s, when the latter was an underdog seemingly losing to Microsoft. In reality, this is not possible, simply because many products or services don't lend themselves to strong brand communities. Think for example about personal hygiene or cleaning products: who wants to strongly identify with a panty liner or a spray disinfectant? Hence, these brands are best served by what I call ad-hoc communities that rally around a specific campaign, either because of its relevance or entertainment value.

One example of that in the personal hygiene space is the iconic campaign – not product – around Unilever's True Beauty for the Dove brand of soaps.

The campaign showed regular women – as opposed to models – posing in underwear. This was almost cause-driven, empowering women to celebrate the reality of the female body over Madison Avenue's stylized ideal. The campaign was widely discussed offline and online and rallied people to consider real-life beauty, and accept the reality of our bodies with a sense of confidence rather than anxiety. The ad-hoc communities emerging from this discussion are not likely to have any staying power once the campaign is no longer on people's minds, but they've served a powerful commercial purpose while they were in existence.

True brand communities, one could argue, germinate organically as people become fans of a product, service or cause, and proactively seek out peers and information related to the brand. Ad-hoc communities, in contrast, seem to be primarily facilitated if not created by strategic communicators. This requires the ability to read and understand the culture of the people engaging in ad-hoc brand communities.

Your book notes several points where major brand campaigns have been targeted for parody or culture jamming tactics. What advice would you give to a brand manager if they were confronted by grassroots appropriation and remixing of their content? Are there examples where brands have responded well and turned these threats around?

Now that people have the ability to talk back so easily and effectively, marketers are beginning to realize that they've completely lost control over key elements of their brand. People may choose to make fun of brand messages, images, logos or other elements, and may even choose to defame them. This makes traditional brand managers and advertisers very nervous and frustrated, but it's actually easier for their public relations counterparts to deal with. PR has always been about negotiating relationships and optimizing activities to achieve intended outcomes, with full knowledge that they had little control over what journalists would actually write, or which customers, partners, competitors they might cite.

So control is gone. Forever. Brand communicators are forced to adapt to the new environment. For many, the default reaction to unwanted brand engagement has been calling the attorneys, who would issue a cease-and-desist letter. This raises a practical question: in a somewhat anonymous internet landscape, to whom do you send the letter? What if hundreds of people have participated in a brand jam – do they all get a letter? And the bigger issue is: what if legal actions backfire by creating a prolonged negative news cycle in the media and on the social web?

If brands become the target of a culture jam, as when Greenpeace attacked BP with a competition to redesign the BP logo in 2010, they need to first ask the question: can the attack on your brand be ignored, as the issue may simply fade away in a short period of time? This would be the easiest solution, but raises the second question: even if you can afford to ignore the attack, is it ethical to do so, or do you have a moral obligation to fix the underlying issues? This, of course, requires brands to identify the core of the problem. And once the core problem has been defined, can it be remedied? To stay with the BP example, if a brand was instrumental in creating a massive and prolonged oil spill, the underlying issue obviously can’t easily be remedied, and the brand has to deal the consequences.

On the other hand, a great example of a company that turned a brand jam into an opportunity was Domino’s Pizza. A few years back, videos appeared on the social web showing company employees purposely contaminating ingredients that they were placing in the pizzas. The spread of these videos led to an onslaught of negative comments about not only this particular disgusting incident, but the quality of Domino’s pizza overall.

Domino's "The Pizza Turnaround" Documentary from Andrew Lincoln on Vimeo.

In a case like this, most brands would have responded defensively or would have tried to divert the public’s attention. Domino’s actually did the exact opposite: they launched and chronicled an investigation into the perceived quality of their food, and the results were shocking. Many people apparently strongly disliked their pizza and even referred to the crust as tasting like cardboard. Remarkably, Domino’s embraced this feedback, reinvented their pizza for improved quality and taste, and then told the story of the entire journey across a variety of media channels, including TV advertising and social platforms. They launched the website Pizzaturnaround.com where they posted the “Pizza Turnaround” documentary.

Burghardt Tenderich is a Professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles, CA, where he teaches and researches about strategic communication, transmedia branding, emerging media technologies and media entrepreneurship. He is the author of Transmedia Branding (2015) USC Annenberg Press, together with Jerried Williams. Burghardt is Associate Director of the Annenberg School’s Strategic Communication and Public Relations Center, and co-author of the Generally Accepted Practices for Public Relations (GAP VII).

Burghardt has over 20 extensive experience in communication and marketing in the information technology and internet industries and he holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economic Geography from the University of Bonn, Germany.

Engaging with Transmedia Branding: An Interview with USC's Burghardt Tenderich (Part One)

Over the past few years, I’ve been helping to develop an innovative course for the Strategic Communication Program in Annenberg dealing with contemporary trends in branding culture, with a strong emphasis on transmedia, spreadable media, and crowdsourcing. I’ve now taught this class twice with Burghardt Tenderich and he has in turn co-taught the class with Darren Brabham. Each time, we’ve brought in some of the top “thought leaders” in advertising and public relations to share their perspectives on the changing media landscape. Tenderich, “B.T.,” as we call him, is an industry veteran who brings enormous insight into the teaching of the class, and he has also really dug deep into what it might mean to apply the insights from transmedia entertainment to think about how contemporary brand strategies seek to foster engagement with consumers across media platforms. B.T. recently wrote and published a new book, Transmedia Branding: Engage Your Audience, with Jerried Williams, who was one of the star students in the class the first time we taught it. This book, released in digital format from the Annenberg Press, offers a great option for those of you who teach strategic communications and an essential read for anyone who wants to understand contemporary branding practice. It’s chock-a-block with great examples of recent campaigns which adopted new approaches to reaching consumers, grabbing their interest, and building their loyalty. It is theoretically sophisticated, but also concrete, and applied, a rare combination of virtues.

In this three part interview, B.T. reflects about the changing nature of strategic communications, the value of transmedia branding, and the ethics of blurring between fiction and reality while making claims about real world products and services. Enjoy.

The term “transmedia” has been applied for most of its history to storytelling and entertainment media. What changes when we apply the term to talking about advertising?

If used in an advertising or public relations context, the term transmedia takes on a commercial meaning. The story is no longer at the center, but rather becomes more of a means to an end, where the end is – in most cases – primarily of commercial nature: to sell more of whatever you’re marketing.

But I don’t think that presents a problem as long as the brand storytelling is done authentically and the commercial nature is not disguised. This also doesn’t make the story any less important. For any campaign to catch on and be effective, the story needs to be relevant and well-told.

What are some of the factors that you see disrupting the field of strategic communications right now? In what ways are branding and public relations, for example, increasingly intertwined? What factors are reshaping how consumers relate to brands? And how are these changes, collectively, resulting in a new understanding of the communication environment? In short, if transmedia is the answer, what is the question?

The question is: how can you reach and engage with audiences in a communication environment that is saturated with media of all thinkable forms, and where people have the easy option to tune out of commercial messages? This is directly related to the two-pronged paradigm shift that journalism, advertising and strategic communication have been experiencing in the recent years: the rise of social media combined with the proliferation of cheap and easy-to-use multimedia production tools on the one hand, and the decline of mainstream editorial media on the other.

To start with the latter, while there has never been more editorial media in the history of journalism than we have now, collectively editorial media have lost influence, and they have yet to determine a new revenue model that will enable them to stay in business in the long run. Until recently, the barriers of entry were extremely high, as companies had to invest in expensive broadcast equipment or printing presses, distribution and personnel costs. In the past, due to these high barriers to market entry, once you were established, you had very little competition to face and were able to pretty much dictate pricing for advertising. And because people had so little choice for media consumption, your editorial content would certainly reach vast audiences.

Then came Google, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook. Due to their superior online advertising model, they took away massive advertising revenue from mainstream media. At the same time, blogs and emerging news sites created a so-called long-tail of various niche media, giving people unlimited options for consuming and sharing content. These two trends together have disrupted the 20^th Century business model for journalism, and with it the 20^th Century approach to advertising and public relations.

Risen from theses ashes is what many now call the PESO model for PR, marketing and branding, which is based on the assumption of strategic equivalency between Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media. ‘Paid’ is the new term for advertising, product placement, sponsoring, etc., while ‘Earned’ refers to a new and expanded notion of media relations, the traditional stronghold of public relations. But ‘Earned’ is not limited to pitching the New York Times or the Huffington Post. It includes being interviewed on Henry Jenkins’ blog (thank you for that!) or being mentioned in a post by any member of the LinkedIn community. So ‘Earned’ media itself has become much more granular and requires a better understanding of authors and audiences, and therefore requires more research than reading up on 10 established beat reporters, like back in the day.

‘Owned’ media refers to channels where the brand has editorial control. This includes news releases, corporate blogs and web sites, but also the emerging practice of brand journalism where corporations themselves produce journalistic content to reach audiences. ‘Shared’ describes media that can be paid, earned or owned, and practically speaking refers mainly to social media. For example, on networks like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, you can run ads or sponsored content (Paid), pitch media producers to be included in their stories (Earned), and publish your own content (Owned).

So, we’re operating in a completely changed media ecosystem, and it is noteworthy how many strategic communicators and advertisers have not yet evolved and still conduct their work in a 20^th Century media framework; they still bombard people with mostly unwanted ‘messages’ across all channels in integrated marketing campaigns that become increasingly less effective. This is where new approaches, such as Transmedia Branding, come in.

What lessons has the advertising industry taken from the entertainment industry in terms of the ways brands might foster greater engagement with their audiences?

It’s all about storytelling. Just a few short years ago, strategic communication was all about ‘the message.’ How do I make people remember ‘the message’? How do I make the media repeat ‘the message’? But as the visionary book Cluetrain Manifesto told us even a few years before the rise of social media, “there is no market for your message,” and instead “markets are conversations.” The human brain is wired to retain information better if it’s packaged as a story, rather than a peremptory ‘message.’

This is intuitive when we think about how humans evolved culturally. We’ve created and shared stories for as long as we’ve been communicating with each other as human beings; storytelling is central to the human race. And if done well, and/or with emotional appeal, this leads to conversations as people share stories, and frequently change or add to them. This is where engagement begins.

The other lesson marketers have learned from entertainment is that compelling stories are more likely to foster intense and enduring engagement. That’s why in transmedia storytelling we see so many cases of entertaining and humorous storytelling. For example, if you think about Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World campaign, it’s a highly amusing storyline that draws people in by encouraging them to participate interactive games and bounty hunts, and many become motivated to create related parodies or memes.

You draw a potentially generative distinction in the book between brands connecting themselves to existing stories and storyworlds and brands constructing stories and worlds to serve their own particular needs. Can you discuss a few examples of what these two strategies mean in practice?

In the context of transmedia branding, some marketers choose to develop their brand’s own story elements, while others decide to join existing narratives.

In terms of the first option, every brand has a story, even if a marketing team has never thought about it. A good example of a brand with a rich story is Levi Strauss. The company’s co-founders were Jewish immigrants from Germany who arrived in San Francisco just in time for the Gold Rush. Unlike most people, Levi and Strauss made a fortune not by digging for gold, but by selling work trousers, denim Jeans, to the onslaught of prospectors.

Incidentally, both of what we think of as very American words – denim jeans – are actually derived from French words: the misspelling of ‘de Nimes’ as in ‘from the city of Nimes’ and ‘Gênes’, the French spelling of the Italian city of Genoa. The background is that Southern French cowboys of Carmargue, a region close to the cities of Nimes, wore work pants that were precursors to what we now know as denim jeans, which were shipped to the United States from the port of Genoa. So, the emerging storyline is that of European immigrants bringing trousers worn by French cowboys to the United States and selling them to the pioneers of the West.

The company Levi Strauss never actually packaged this backstory in succinct ads, but did allude to this history in a campaign several years ago, which included one spot featuring an image of a little girl running around outside in jeans with the caption, ‘This country wasn’t built by men in suits.’ This ad captures the core concepts of the American experience, such as freedom, opportunity and wide-open land.

Another example of a company building out its own storyline is the iconic ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ by Old Spice. The brand team realized and owned up to the fact that the Old Spice brand had become dated and stodgy. What’s so remarkable about this example is that they chose to tackle the stodgy image head-on, with taglines such as ‘If your grandfather hadn’t worn Old Spice, you wouldn’t be here,’ and by incorporating the original imagery—the old-fashioned nautical theme—into their transmedia campaign. This created the basis for the tongue-in-cheek persona of the ‘Old Spice Guy.’

What’s interesting is that you don’t need to be a billion-dollar brand to build a story that people will care about. One of my favorite recent examples is MegaBots, a tiny pre-funding start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area which, as of this writing, is working on its first round investment, a $750,000 Kickstarter campaign.

For a total budget of $175 plus a friend with a camera, they created a story that has been viewed on YouTube over five million times, and picked up extensively on both social media and mainstream media. Here’s why: their story is super cool! Basically, three twenty-something robot enthusiasts got together and built a 15-foot, 6-ton giant robot equipped with paint guns, as a prototype for their ultimate vision: to create an international professional sports league for gigantic fighting robots.

As it happens, there’s only one other mega robot currently on this planet, Kuratas, built by the young Japanese robotics company Suidobashi Heavy Industry. The MegaBots guys reached out to their counterparts with an opportunity too good to resist: they would create a video challenge that would stir up interest on a global scale.

So with some pre-warning, MegaBots shot a video of two of its three co-founders wrapped in American flags, using patriotic language, music and imagery, to challenge Kuratas to the ultimate win-or-die robot fight. A few days later Suidobashi posted its video response, in Japanese with American subtitles, flashing Japanese patriotic images and showing CEO Kogoro Kurata dissing MegaBots for the ‘ugly’ design of its robot, and then accepting the challenge.

A few weeks ago MegaBots followed up with another patriotic video to launch their Kickstarter campaign. This is the gambit to a great transmedia campaign ready to unfold.

For an example of a brand joining an existing story, we can look to New Zealand Air and their production an the air safety announcement video titled“An Unexpected Briefing,” all done in the style of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies.

The crew and passengers all appear dressed in-character of the film creatures. The video was posted to coincide with the premier of The Hobbit I, and at the same time, Air New Zealand painted all its planes in major airports with imagery form the Lord of the Rings franchise.

Note the trade-off between these two strategies: building a campaign with your own story is generally less expensive, but you don’t benefit from the exposure of an existing franchise. If a brand joins a big story, the investment is much greater, but visibility is almost guaranteed.

Burghardt Tenderich is a Professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles, CA, where he teaches and researches about strategic communication, transmedia branding, emerging media technologies and media entrepreneurship. He is the author of Transmedia Branding (2015) USC Annenberg Press, together with Jerried Williams. Burghardt is Associate Director of the Annenberg School’s Strategic Communication and Public Relations Center, and co-author of the Generally Accepted Practices for Public Relations (GAP VII).

Burghardt has over 20 extensive experience in communication and marketing in the information technology and internet industries and he holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economic Geography from the University of Bonn, Germany.

Geeking Out About the Comics Medium With Unflattening's Nick Sousanis (Part Four)

One of my favorite passages in Unflattening is on the bottom of p.40 where you try to convey through images alone the information dogs gather from their environment via their sense of smell. This is a classic problem -- how to communicate one sense through forms of representation that operate on an entirely different level. Can you walk us through your thinking process as you tackled this problem?

Whereas I see the trunk, perhaps tracks around it – the dog encounters the tree and “sees” through his highly nuanced sense of smell, everything that passed upon this spot in the last week or so. The dog has access to layers of experience, we could say higher dimensions, in this regard, that we don’t. I may not be able to draw smell, but I can visually represent the concept of layering. I thought of an exploded view of overlapping panels – again, fitting more space into it than is there – and that they would all emanate from the trunk of the tree using curvy balloon tails – which I think can be read as meaning smell or back in time (cue “Wayne’s World”!). Definitely their curviness indicates something different than straight tails would. That cue, along with the fact that each picture has some bit of the trunk in it make it clear that these animals he is smelling all were at this same spot but at earlier times – and not all at once.

The most avant-garde or independent comics producers sooner or later find ways to insert superheroes into their work if for no other reason to create a contrast with what their comics are doing differently. In your case, you include your adolescent superhero character, Lockerman. What role does this figure play in your argument? Is it legal to produce a comic in the United States that does not have a superhero lurking in it somewhere?

Ha – that’s a great observation! I certainly didn’t feel any compulsion to put in a superhero, and they don’t show up in my other comics. (Though having said that, Superman changing in a phone booth is also in this chapter, and if not for space issues, Batman would’ve shown up as well on the page with da Vinci’s flying man, after which Bob Kane is said to have modeled the caped crusader.) I wouldn’t hide it either – I grew up with and still read superhero comics (and still tend to observe a Wednesday comics shop ritual), even if that’s not the kind of work I make or teach now.

Lockerman is in there for the same reason I included a number of personal stories along the way – my dog, my wife’s commute, my shoe troubles – to ground the theoretical in something more visceral. Here, I was very much thinking about the idea of curiosity as an opening, a kind of threshold. This sent me to the stories I’d read that feature a prevalence of doorways of some sort – Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and my brother’s stories about the mysteries inside our kitchen cupboard.

Thinking on all these spaces for imagination made me think of my own creation, and how his ability to use doorways to move through space/time had its roots in all of these stories – which hadn’t occurred to me when I was originally drawing his adventures. These pages are followed by a reference to Hermes – the messenger who presided over boundaries – and that so fit all this talk of crossing disciplines, of image-text, of imagination. I think we turn to our familiar mythologies for support – both cultural and personal – and that’s primarily what drives me here.

If text and image work together here to expand what we can think and say, does the logic follow that a form which included other senses -- which was tactile or haptic, which used sound, which conveyed taste or smell -- would further expand the human capacity for thought. Or do we reach a limit point? In other words, what is the value of setting limits on what channels of communication we use? Are their virtues in constraint or economy as values in writing? Scott McCloud, for example, has posed critiques of motion-comics as a form which loses much of what makes comics distinctive as a medium. Would you agree with that critique or is multimedia (in all of its permutations) the logical extension of the argument you are making here?

I think including other senses definitely would expand how we can think – and that speaks to the point of the inclusion of my dog. We need to encourage those other modes of sense-making as part of what learning looks like.

That said, I’m sure we can, perhaps not take this too far, but reach a limit point in how we put them together. It’s why Ang Lee’s Hulk experiment where he played with multiple screens ala comics all at once didn’t work. You don’t know where to look and can’t keep up with it all.

Motion comics fail on a different front – they are bad at being animations and lack the simultaneous experience that comics offer – all the artifice that we can ignore in the forms it straddles become impossible not to see and it doesn’t work. I know McCloud talks about the potential of GIF comics, and I agree – pretty neat works from Boulet and Lilli Carré offer great examples. And I think with the GIF, while the separate images per panel move – their cyclical nature allows them to function much like the static nature of a traditional comic. We can move at our own pace, we can read back up the page and aren’t lockstep in time as in animation.

Chris Ware talks about the relationship between comics and memory – how both are collections of frozen fragments. But the GIF may be even closer – say we remember a smile, not as static, but the action of it. GIF comics provide a vector without crashing through the architectural nature so essential to how comics do what they do.

As far as constraints more generally, I’m a big believer in how rules can generate creative possibilities. I think about Bernard Suits’s treatise on games in The Grasshopper, where he calls them “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” It’s within them where all the excitement happens. If I can serve from anywhere I want on the tennis court, rather than staying behind the baseline – the game breaks down, the dynamic of competition is disrupted. The best games find the right balance between the madness of Alice’s Caucus Race (or perhaps a more contemporary example, ‘Calvin-Ball’) and being stuck in too much red tape.

The space of a comics page is such a constraint, as are things like font size – to ensure it’s readable, means having to find ways to say more with less. I really enjoy this game I see myself playing with the constraint of the page – how to make meaning, how to ensure things flow – all these factors come together and result in the unexpected.

Will Eisner, who was very interested in juxtaposition between sequential images, was also very interested in what he called “the shape of the page.” That is, he spoke about the ways that the moment readers turn the page, they begin to form a picture of the new set of images based on their over-all pattern. His best work often used the gestalt of the page (as well as the particulars of individual images) to convey his meanings. What relationship might we posit between the “shape of the page” and what you are calling here “the shape of our thoughts?”

I think I’m very much talking about the same thing as Eisner. The idea of “the shape of our thoughts” came from an earlier piece done for an academic journal (parts of which I reworked for the third chapter that carries the same name).

In that piece I was thinking of my own penchant for speaking in parentheticals and connected that to my grandmother’s stories that always seemed to have more detours than destination. It occurred to me how well her stories might have been represented in the sort of comics that Chris Ware makes – with the sort of tangential directions they go.

My compositions were already quite varied before this, but I think the experience of making this piece that directly reflected on comics, made me much more conscious about how much I could convey at the level of composition. When people ask me how long it takes to make a page – they’re usually responding to the complexity of the drawing. But the truth is, it’s figuring out how to orchestrate the elements and the movement/shape of the whole that I spend the most time with – continually trying to find a shape that best captures the feeling of the idea at hand. Original version of same comic.

Today’s textbooks, as Gunther Kress has suggested, are often multimodal, reflecting the idea that different kids learn best through different kinds of sensory inputs. Yet, the textbook mixes words and images in a different way than comics do and still often depends on the primacy of the text. So, what do you see as the advantages of the strategies for combining words and images in comics over the ways they are combined in a textbook which makes an extensive use of charts, graphs, images, maps, and illustrations to communicate its meaning?

This overlaps somewhat with the debate about the relationship between picture books and comics. Are they the same thing, related, does it matter? In the case of textbooks, it’s clear that the visuals are being used to support the text and aid in comprehension – they are illustrations. The text could stand on its own with the illustrations removed altogether. So the pictures are additive.

But I think in comics, the effect is multiplicative – text speaks to image, image influences text and meaning is compounded. And you most certainly could not remove the images and retain the meaning. The interplay is key and as is the text becoming a visual element (and this is something less present in picture books – though not exclusively).

It was important to me to make a work that wasn’t simply illustrating what I wrote in text. The artwork, the image-text interaction is the work period. I think as comics take hold in more places – and perhaps become a more commonplace skill/literacy, we’ll see more imaginative use of them as textbooks – not to simplify the text, but to really make something that can stand on their own and get at ideas as richly, if not more so, than what came before.

You've discussed in interviews your goal not to include a persona representing the writer and not tell an extended story or include a stable story world. What does this suggest about the pull within comics towards storytelling and away from more associative or essayistic forms of presentation?

Let me start by briefly mentioning some additional influences. David Mazzucchelli’s comic adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass, which came out around the same time as Understanding Comics, had a big effect on me. Rich with symbolic representation, he employed all sorts of things that even though it was ultimately a narrative, brought out what visuals could do besides depicting characters doing stuff. Brilliant.

Sometime later, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s short comic “This is Information,” part of a comics 9/11 tribute anthology, really opened new pathways for me. It was all visual metaphors intertwined with verbal metaphors. As no doubt a play on its title, here was information sans characters or narrative.

My full-on return to comics-making came with two political comics I made for a two-part art exhibition before and after the 2004 election. My first one has the certainly McCloud-influenced author avatar of myself narrating the story. For the second one, I dropped that entirely in favor of visual and verbal metaphors and that approach has stayed with me since.

In my non-comics writing, I lean towards being an essayist. In doing similar things in comics, I didn’t really think about it as a departure from comics as primarily a storytelling forum, it just continued the way I was working with a different set of tools at my disposal. But I do see that now.

Not only is Unflattening an academic comic, it is also a non-narrative comic – which is perhaps more atypical than the former, especially with so many comics coming out of an explanatory sort. (Though I had one great review of it in which the author did draw a narrative thread together, following one of the sleepwalking characters through various stages of transformation ending up as a newborn at the end ala 2001. I really liked that interpretation, even if I didn’t mean it at all!) I really can’t say why this hasn’t been explored more before, though perhaps as you said about Eisenstein, it is more difficult to do. But I think this is an important avenue to pursue in comics – one that I firmly believe they’re particularly well-suited for and hope that my work helps foster further explorations.

Nick Sousanis received his doctorate at Columbia University, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comics form. Titled Unflattening, it is now a book from Harvard University Press. He’s presented on his work and the importance of visual thinking in education at such institutions as Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, and Microsoft Research, along with keynote addresses for the Visitors Studies Association’s and the International Visual Literacy Association. He has taught courses on comics as powerful communication tools at Columbia, Parsons, and now at the University of Calgary, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies.

Nick’s website: www.spinweaveandcut.com

Geeking Out About the Comics Medium with Unflattening's Nick Sousanis (Part Three)

People who do not read comics with any frequency ask me for advice on the best way to read them. My usual advice is left to right, top to bottom. But in your case, you have consciously set out to design at least some pages which can be read in multiple directions at once. I take it this has to do with your argument that text and images capture (encourage?) different modes of thought. So what advice do you give readers about the choices they make in how to read those images? As we think about how the reader moves through the page, there is the typical pattern, left-right, row by row from top to bottom not unlike how text unfolds. Because the ideas didn’t necessarily move like that, I wanted to move the reading in a multitude of directions: at times sliding backwards, occasionally upwards (very difficult), sometimes snaking, hopscotching about, and in a few cases, where I wanted it not to matter which way you read – and that mirrored the idea at hand.

The organization of the text elements was as crucial a decision as the layout of the images. If the reading was intended to be different from the expected, I had to be very precise about each element to ensure the reader went in the way I wanted and didn’t get confused. I used the text boxes a bit like pinball bumpers to carom the reader in the right direction. As for the instances where there wasn’t a single right direction – I feel this in some sense destabilizes predictability in the same that changing drawing styles and radically different compositions does. But I think our thoughts do this, and I think our creative process works in this way and can be cultivated by trying to similarly break form.

You write, “Perhaps, in comics, this amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments -- we have such a form. A means to capture and convey our thoughts, in all their tangled complexity.” Janet Murray has made a similar argument (in Hamlet on the Holodeck) about the potentials of interactive and nonlinear digital media. She is often asked what are the new ideas we need to express which do not fit within the limits of traditional text. How do you answer that question?

I think it’s hard to say what new ideas can be expressed until we start doing it. New tools to organize our thinking seems to me not only to be a new vehicle to communicate them but a way to better understand ourselves. I’m certainly biased toward the form, but I find that organizing ideas in comics continually facilitates new connections – it’s made me think in new ways and go in directions (with the research) I wouldn’t have otherwise. And that’s powerful. Comics may appear static and flat, but I think that conceals just how much can be going on within a single page – a way to contain that ‘tangled complexity’ – that I think we are still only beginning to explore.

I am intrigued by your metaphor of comics as an “amphibious” medium -- “text immersed in image, pictures anchored by words.” Barthes and others have written a lot about how text, especially captions, can anchor the meaning of images, but I’d love to hear you say more about what happens when text gets “immersed in image.”

That “anchoring” is a direct reference to Barthes, and (in the way I was describing above) “immersed” came about by responding to the image itself. It’s not a one-directional relationship in comics – words and images affect each other, for the reader and the maker. Here, I’m keeping the reader adrift through the image by the placement of the words – they’ve become an essential visual element, which is quite unlike magazines and art museum labels, where words and pictures are kept quite separate. We have leave one domain to go to the other. While I do a lot with the placement of text to orchestrate specific reading flow, I had also wanted to do more with letterforms and the expressive nature of fonts themselves – and how drawing words brings a whole other dimension to the means for expression.

Let's discuss some of the repeated visual motifs -- shoes and feet, spirals and circles, the cat’s cradle, etc. -- which occur many times across the book. To what degree are you using these repeated patterns to create links between ideas that operate primarily if not entirely on the visual level?

I’ve heard comics scholar Kent Worcester describe print comics as having “flippability” – that is we can flip back and forth across the book and quickly find passages because images stay with us so strongly. David Mazzucchelli uses this to great effect in Asterios Polyp, where scattered throughout the book he depicts the main character’s living room five different times. Same room, same angle, same panel size – only the contents in the room have changed in the periods of the character’s life portrayed.

I think even if we might not consciously recognize that it’s happening, we still feel it – and as we become more aware of it, his decision to do this prompts the reader to flip back and forth – and likely notice similar instances (like his inclusion of a tiny image of an airplane in the background of all the dream sequences…). Comics let us play with that visual recall without ever having to explicitly announce it.

In the case of the feet, I knew I was going to something about my shoe problem from the very start of the project (though not the larger crowdsourcing project I ended up doing), so it was important to seed the idea at the outset. There’s a pun with the word “tracks” in the first chapter with a baby up on its feet for a first time. Perseus’s winged sandals show up in the interlude following, and more instances spring up from there, so by the time it’s front and center, the significance of feet/shoes should be, umm, kicking around in reader’s heads by then.

Much like learning a new word and then hearing it three times the next day, I’ve found something strange happens when I have in mind some thematic symbol to incorporate throughout – it starts to proliferate and rear its head in places I didn’t expect. In an earlier work, I made a page that uses rabbits as the theme for each panel. Prompted by seeing a t-shirt with the Trix rabbit, led me to the White Rabbit, and all of a sudden I started seeing rabbits everywhere.

So in some sense, I feel like these motifs take on a bit of a life of their own. In the case of the unflattening symbol – the stylized side-view of an open eye – it’s hinted at in my very first sketch for the project (reproduced in the back of the book), where I paralleled the opening of a door with the opening of the eye – this doorway to the world. It first shows up in the book as I diagrammed Eratosthenes’s measurement of the earth – and that ended up being the place where I defined “unflattening,” in words at least, and so it made sense for it to reappear at other points where I was more directly addressing the concept.

I started noticing other drawings I made that could be transformed into this ‘eye’: the profile view of me drawing at my desk in the fourth chapter, the open door in the fifth, Artemis and her bow, even the side view of a person looking at their own reflection. I feel like each instance of this visual can’t help but draw you back to the others – consciously or not, and that starts to ravel the whole work together – linking it all in rhizomatic fashion.

So now not only are images affecting other images upon any single page, they are starting to speak to one another across the entire book! We take in so much about our world visually that we’re not even aware of, and we can employ this in comics to compound meaning. It’s possible some of this never gets caught by a reader, and that’s okay. But maybe on a second pass it does – and then they’re reading it with different eyes, encountering it from a changed perspective – which is the point.

Nick Sousanis received his doctorate at Columbia University, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comics form. Titled Unflattening, it is now a book from Harvard University Press. He’s presented on his work and the importance of visual thinking in education at such institutions as Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, and Microsoft Research, along with keynote addresses for the Visitors Studies Association’s and the International Visual Literacy Association. He has taught courses on comics as powerful communication tools at Columbia, Parsons, and now at the University of Calgary, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies.

Nick’s website: www.spinweaveandcut.com

Geeking Out About the Comics Medium with Unflattening's Nick Sousanis (Part Two)

Given the book’s emphasis on getting us to reflect on seeing (and other sensory perceptions) as part of the thinking process, I wondered about your choice to publish the book in black and white rather than in color. Does restricting the color palette force us to more actively work to fill in the blanks? Or would color have added another whole dimension to your argument? Hmmm… My choice was primarily based on economics. Since I print and give away copies of my work all the time, color printing would break me! Also, I think I’m more comfortable working in black and white. It is possible that working in black and white makes it seem more dignified – frequently the pages feel like woodcuts or etchings, and that may align it more with artistic traditions and proto-comics like Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward than the four-colored newsprint Ben-Day dots so negatively associated with comics. Though none of that was my intent.

That said – there were places I really wanted color and it would have helped me! Simple things like the two page sequence (p. 36-7) where I show the green glasses given to Dorothy and co. when they enter the Emerald City (in the book version).

That sequence continues as white light is split by a prism into the spectrum and spot color for it all would’ve been great. My page discussing multimodality (p. 65) would’ve been an entirely different concept had I been working in color.

Not having color forced me to invent more complicated analogies. I juxtaposed typewriter keys with an orchestra pit and all the different sounds that can emanate from it – all mapped to expressive fonts and symbols (emanata) we might use in comics.

When I give talks on comics and discuss their multimodal strengths, I always share a page from David Mazzucchelli’s beautiful Asterios Polyp. There he plays with color, artistic style, fonts, and balloon style to great effect. So I can imagine color both enhancing existing pages I did and then radically changing pages based on having a different means of working available to me from the ground up. And certainly given the Oz allusions, it might’ve been fun, if somewhat predictable, to go from the grey opening chapter to increasingly Technicolor pages moving forward.

Sergei Eisenstein once boasted that he could present the arguments of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital via a silent, montage film (but he never actually did so). This claim came to mind for me on several levels as I worked through your book: first, it reminded me that most comic books for instructive purposes focus on concrete elements which can be depicted easily, where-as you have sought ways here to communicate a much more abstract argument (much more like Das Kapital than like the themes that Eisenstein actually did depict through his work.

Second, you do not seek to communicate these ideas through images alone; rather, the work depends on the complex interweaving of words and images (a point you raise many times).

And third, many people have argued that while in a broad sense any idea can be communicated through any medium, there are some constraints and affordances which make some ideas easier to express than others. There are places here where it seems you purposefully set out to do nonfiction comics the hard way, pushing against what the medium did easily, to see where the affordances might break down. Responses?

On the list of things I wish I’d tried/had space/time for – an entirely wordless chapter is near the top, and it is something I intend to do in a forthcoming project. But as far as doing things the hard way – ha! – yeah, I suppose that’s true.

Long before I’d come to the doctoral program, I’d abandoned having a visible narrator to carry my discussion. Using one comes with certain advantages – you always have something to draw! But I felt there was much more to be explored with comics – and making use of the range the medium offers. I think that a visible narrator can often serve as a simple placeholder for the text – and so it becomes a way of making words more easily digestible, more approachable – all of which are certainly good things – but it doesn’t necessarily add something to the words.

I wanted to make comics that present ideas as complex as we form them within our bodies – with all the layers, the uncertainty, etc. I never start with text or a script and then come up with pictures for it. I begin with an idea I want to convey, a question I have, and then try images and text that help me get at it.

The hardest thing here is I never know what I’m going to draw – there is nothing to fall back on. Some ideas suggest images right away and some go through many, many iterations before I arrive at a suitable arrangement of visuals (the initial concept for that aforementioned page on multimodality was of an omelet and all the ingredients mixed into it! I think it would have been productive, but it kept not working for various reasons).

And what’s also key here is that I don’t know what I’m going to say until the whole comes together. For instance, on the page with the tightrope walker/cats cradle (p. 91) – I ended up calling imagination “both binding agent and action” spanning “gaps in perception” – and that was because the visuals suggested that text (a cats cradle binds even as it serves as an active bridge between moments), which ended up being just the right way to talk about what I was doing around imagination.

It is hard, this not knowing what you’re going to do, but it’s exciting. It’s generative. The pages that finally emerge out of the sketching/thinking process so often come as a surprise to me – I really relish that!

Throughout Unflattening, there were the shifts in representational style throughout and often on the same page -- between naturalistic and iconic/stylized images, between concrete and abstract images, between representational and diagrams and maps, between idiosyncratic and shared cultural symbols, and in some cases, between a full page of text and pages much more centered on images. To what degree are these shifts part of your strategy for getting people to think about how and what they are seeing?

Yes, the shifts are entirely intended to do just that! As the central core of this book is seeing from multiple perspectives – literally drawing from multiple perspectives was key throughout. The extreme cases of this were when I altered drawing styles entirely from panel to panel on the faucet and rose pages. What does that mean for me as the maker to draw differently? And how does that affect the reader?

The page of all text is meant to come across as jarring, and reinforce my point. The first chapter is the most consistent in style – dense, almost etched-linework, clearly laborious and involved drawing. I wanted to ensure a possibly skeptical academic audience that I could indeed draw and it’s further designed to be pretty straightforward compositionally for someone with even the most limited experience reading comics.

From there I could, as with the concept itself, start to open things up, and play with more conceptual approaches. Early on, as word of my work was getting out, there was some understandable misconception that it was entirely on comics. It is very much an argument for its own existence and for that of things like it, but only a small part of it is explicitly about comics. However, the whole thing is intended to be a demonstration about what comics can do – so I was very conscious of wanting to highlight the diversity of ways comics can organize and present ideas – in style and composition.

As I said above, the creation of each page begins with an idea, guided by this question – what does the idea feel like? Perhaps even more so than the style of drawing, I want the composition, the reader’s movement to be part of the meaning, and I think in that regard I’m thinking about the connection between comics and architecture, and maybe even comics and dance – how do you move through it, how does it move you?

So each page has an aesthetic style (or range) and a particular flow that feels appropriate to convey the idea. My thoughts to greatly vary my compositions were reinforced early on by a comment from my wife, where she kept looking at pages over my shoulder and saying ‘I’ve never seen a page like that before.’ And so I made a point of not having any compositions repeat in the book!

It’s important to me that comics aren’t simply what we put in the panels (which is why “guided view” comics apps don’t make a lot of sense to me in terms of how I work), but the assembled whole of visual elements. So sometimes I do lean more towards information design because that’s how the idea takes shape. I’m quite interested to study more of information visualization, and see how I can bring that back to comics (in my current course, I have several information visualization students, and I’m excited to learn from them). I think there is much to be gained for comics artists to see what’s going on in these related forms as a way of expanding what comics can be. Why not use every tool at our disposal? And why not make scholarship that is beautiful?

Nick Sousanis received his doctorate at Columbia University, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comics form. Titled Unflattening, it is now a book from Harvard University Press. He’s presented on his work and the importance of visual thinking in education at such institutions as Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, and Microsoft Research, along with keynote addresses for the Visitors Studies Association’s and the International Visual Literacy Association. He has taught courses on comics as powerful communication tools at Columbia, Parsons, and now at the University of Calgary, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies.

Nick’s website: www.spinweaveandcut.com

Geeking Out About The Comics Medium with Unflattening's Nick Sousanis (Part One)

About a year ago, I was asked by the Harvard University Press to be a peer-reviewer for a remarkable book -- Nick Sousanis's Unflattening. I had heard rumors that a PhD candidate had written his dissertation entirely in the comics form and I was intrigued to see what the finished product looked like, perhaps skeptical that it could be good on both levels -- good scholarship and more importantly, good comics. So, I was unprepared by what I was sent -- this was not simply good comics, whatever that might mean, but transformative comics, comics that stretched the medium in all different directions, comics which made us think about comics were in new ways. On one level, it reminded me of my experience first reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, but it also got me thinking about those comics artists whose expressive use of the medium taught us to rethink what comics are implicitly if not explicitly -- Chris Ware, Will Eisner, David Mazzuchelli, David Mack, Richard McGuire, Art Spigelman, etc.

So this is what I ended up writing (and after several more reads, I stand by it):

“An important book, Unflattening is consistently innovative, using abstraction alongside realism, using framing and the (dis)organization of the page to represent different modes of thought. The words and images speak for themselves and succeed on their own terms. I couldn’t stop reading it.”

So, when the book appeared, I reached out to its author and asked Sousanis if he would subject himself to an interview. Again, he has surpassed my expectations. What follows is a four part interview where the two of us really geek out about comics as a medium and about its unfulfilled potentials. He has interesting things to say about specific pages in Unflattening, but beyond that, we take up what comics may do to expand human perceptions and thoughts (yeah, heady, thinky stuff!) and beyond that, about the potentials and limits of multi sensory expression. Fastening your seat belts, dear reader, for a bumpy ride. And as Nick noted, he ended up putting almost as many words on the page here as appears in the book itself. What follows is not just for comics fans, though, but for anyone who is interesting in exploring how media work.

You write, “a changed approach is precisely the goal for the journey ahead: to discover new ways of seeing, to open spaces for possibilities, and to find ‘fresh methods’ for animating and awakening.” To what degree are these goals you are setting for comics as a medium? To what degree are these goals you are setting for academic writing more generally?

As with most things in the book, my intention was two- or more-fold. The choice to work with metaphorical language and imagery let me address something at once specific but leave it open to other interpretations. Here, I definitely wanted to make the claim that changed approaches for academic work and institutional approaches to learning were possible and necessary. That the visual, among other things, had a place in being a part of what thinking looks like and that by embracing such methods, we might arrive at a changed place in how we do our thinking. I do, of course, taking up comics specifically at some point. And so, I think in this way, the work itself is very much setting out to reframe the perception of comics. Even if we had known comics can handle serious stories for a long time now, I wanted to say with this work – comics can handle anything in any domain.

Your opening critique of life lived within confined and preset grids can be as much a critique of many contemporary comics as it is an analogy for the limits of human expression and experience more generally. Clearly, your work has been inspired by Scott McCloud’s call for us to think of comics as a more generalized mode of expression which can convey a variety of ideas and concepts, not simply a limit number of genres and formats. So, in what ways did McCloud’s Understanding Comics pave the way for a project like this one?

While I hadn’t intended for that talk of boxes to directly reference comics, I appreciate the irony of discussing moving outside of boxes even as I work in a form that tends to be defined by organizing within boxes! J (Though I have in the past made comics that played with the concept of boxes using the literal nature of comics panels to make that point.)

Understanding Comics certainly had and continues to have a significant impact on me, as has McCloud’s inspiration as a champion of the form more generally. I think you’re exactly right, it pointed out that comics could tackle all kinds of subjects and not be limited to narrative genres, and really it showed both how much thought went into making comics and how much thinking could be conveyed through them. That inspired me, and certainly emboldened my own explorations. And Understanding Comics is an obvious thing to point to as precedent when making the argument for my own work – as I hope Unflattening might be for scholar-artists to come.

You’ve said in a number of interviews that you wanted to use Unflattening to help broaden the circuits through which academic ideas travel, so that these conversations were able to reach people who would not otherwise encounter scholarly or philosophical works. What is it about comics which seems to open up those possibilities and based on what you’ve observed so far about your book’s reception, have you found a general reading public ready to think of these levels? Does this link your book to other contemporary projects, such as work to convert ideas about film analysis into videos that circulate on YouTube?

Certainly comics offer the appearance of approachability. Pictures are inviting and the prevailing attitude around comics are that they’re easy. I see this as a means to subvert expectations – you pick up one of my comics assuming it will be simple and light, and yet because of how much information can be conveyed through images, through page composition, and through the interaction between image and text, they can be deceptively complex. While the title “Unflattening” must seem like it came about as a reference to Flatland or Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, works I do draw on heavily, it actually came to me as a way to describe what comics could do, and how they could fit more density of information than seems possible in a small space and offer an expansive dimension for communicating ideas. It was only as I got deeper into my work that the notion of unflattening merged with the broader philosophical concerns I was after. The inclusion of Flatland at all was almost an afterthought, because I figured given the title I should do something with it, and then it ended up becoming a central metaphor!

In addition to blogging my work as I went, all through my doctoral program, I printed up and gave away excerpts of it to anyone I encountered long enough to have a conversation about what I do. People read it. And they got it. And that has continued. I’m thinking I couldn’t have done the same thing with a more traditionally formatted scholarly article! (The looks I would’ve gotten handing out a typed paper with APA formatting on it…)

But again, that doesn’t mean any of this was simplified. I made a conscious choice early on to not use domain specific terms or what felt like loaded language, and keep the work deeply in the realm of metaphor. This to me was a way to make it more accessible while maintaining depth of content. It was not about dumbing down but providing a means for readers to come up and find their own way into the work. And again, I’ve seen that happen.

And now that the book is out, I’ve had the curious experience of having people tweet me pictures of their children – one as young as six – reading it! That caught me by surprise. I expected it to be read by advanced high school readers and upward (and along with college and graduate courses, it is already being used in high school situations). But I think this speaks to the ways that we can read images – even when the words aren’t yet in our vocabulary.

I have seen my work listed alongside the “dance your dissertation” and other such phenomenon of academia made fun or easy. I like these – anything that communicates the ideas to broader audiences seems positive to me. But it was central to me that the work be the work – not some watered down version of the real thing. If the means of communication are truly up to the task – as I was certain that comics were – then it’s essential to let them stand on their own.

Nick Sousanis received his doctorate at Columbia University, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comics form. Titled Unflattening, it is now a book from Harvard University Press. He’s presented on his work and the importance of visual thinking in education at such institutions as Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, and Microsoft Research, along with keynote addresses for the Visitors Studies Association’s and the International Visual Literacy Association. He has taught courses on comics as powerful communication tools at Columbia, Parsons, and now at the University of Calgary, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies.

Nick’s website: www.spinweaveandcut.com

My Talk at the Godrej India Culture Lab

 

What follows are some selections from my travel diary describing the major talk I gave at the Godrej India Culture Lab, the most significant address I gave during my time in India. This was a total head rush experience, as is reflected by the somewhat giddy and a bit braggy tone of this narrative.

Parmesh is working up the crowd, personally welcoming everyone who arrives. The 250 seat auditorium is starting to overflow the seats. People are sitting on the stairs, standing in back, even sitting on the floor directly in front of the stage. U.S. fire marshals would have shut much of this down, but in the end, I am told that some 400 people turned up for the talk.

Parmesh has been pumping it everywhere we’ve been; it’s gotten a significant amount of media coverage, and the people turned out. There’s a whole group of students from Sophia who were the ones I went rice planting with. There are a number of individuals who have hosted us at various stops along the way. There’s a former MIT student who came down to tell me how The Film Experience had changed her life. There are some nervous fan girls who are afraid to ask me to autograph battered copies of Textual Poachers. A number of people have shown up wearing superhero-themed clothes: everything from Batgirl themed T-shirts to plush minions dangling from their purses.

Parmesh is wearing hand crafted leather Bat-ears; several women are wearing traditional tunics – one with Hulks, another with Bam, Pow, Zowie, prints.

It’s clear that my talk is giving the crowd permission to geek out. Parmesh introduces me, pouring on the hype. No pressure there.… And then I bound on stage, shouting out “Hello Mumbai” in my best rock star impersonation, and the crowd goes wild.

They could not have been more engaged or enthusiastic; they laugh at the jokes; they clap at multiple points during the presentation; they are taking notes, and they are with me every step of the way through a talk that was a bit longer than the one hour promised. Then, we get another hour of questions from the playful (“what super-powers would I like?") to the thoughtful (questions about inequalities of access and participation, about freedom of expression and net neutrality, about Twitter mobs, about how we develop standards of excellence for digital expression or norms of behavior within online communities).

And then, the talk ends, and for the next two hours, people are crowding around me, wanting Selfies, wanting autographs (one person has brought a copy of Convergence Culture that I had signed in 2006 and he wants me to sign it again), asking me questions. There are students and academics, some of whom have driven half-way across the country to be there. There were novelists, playwrights, artists, fashion designers, filmmakers, recording artists, game designers, brand executives, transmedia producers, activists, journalists…. Here I am with the group of Sophia students.

Overwhelmingly, they are young (more than 50 percent of the population of India is under 30) but some of the most enthusiastic supporters in the crowd are “of a certain age.” There was such eagerness in their eyes to engage more deeply with these ideas, and many said I gave them a framework to articulate things they have been trying to say for a long time.

When we get back to the room, I lay awake for a while reading through the social media response –  several hundred tweets  and they are being retweeted and retweeted. I slip off to sleep and wake up again at 4 a.m. and another 50 or so tweets went out while I was sleeping. I lay awake for a while, adrenaline pumping through my body, and then doze back off. This morning there’s another 50 or so tweets or retweets popping up and there’s no signs of it slowing down just yet.

So here's the video of the event released by the Godrej India Culture Lab.

Transplanting Rice in Rural India

Early in the trip, we paid a visit to Sophia Polytechnique, which runs the Social Communications Media program, considered to be one of India's best communication and journalism programs. Sophia has historically been an all-women school, but has started to branch out in recent years to include more male students. The school had been founded in the 1970s with the goal of empowering and training women to enter the professional realm. They run a professional program for journalists, which runs 10 months, 2 semesters, and includes 10 courses – roughly the pace of the Journalism masters program we offer at USC. The program places a strong emphasis on experiential learning (learning by doing) and doing work out in the community with the goal of developing strong social commitments and civic engagement in their students. One of the things they do early on in the term is to take their mostly urban students out into the country side where they get to muck about in rice paddies transplanting rice. It turned out that they were going to be doing one of these field trips a few days later and  I decided to join them for the experience. They shared with us a range of their student projects, many of which deal with issues of rural and migrant labor and problems of urban poverty. What follows is my diary entry for this day of the trip.

Early rise today – I am being picked up at 6:45 a.m. for our trip to the Kamshet rice fields with Sophia students and faculty. By the time I get to the bus stop, it’s clear I’ve started to corrupt my own field work, since word is getting around town that I am interested in Superheroes, so a number of the students are turning up wearing t-shirts with Spider-Man or Super-Man or Captain America. I later learn that they had been assigned to read the Fusion article about Superman and Immigration politics, and I get asked questions about it throughout the day.

My favorite shirt of the day mashed up Iron Man and the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones – I want that shirt!

The students are excited about the trip. Most of them grew up in urban areas and many have never been to a farm before, let alone worked with rice. Some of the faculty say their fathers are a bit ashamed that their daughters are going to work in the field for class or caste reasons. We are visiting a farm which belongs to Dinesh Balsaver, the father-in-law of Sunitha Chitrapu, the head teacher for this expedition, an alum of the Comm program at University of Indiana-Bloomington. She jokes that she has a PhD from America but her father-in-law is still making her work in the rice fields. Her father in law bought the farm land when he was in his 20s but only really started to work the land after he retired in his 60s. He spent his life selling chemical fertilizers, but he is now an outspoken advocate of organic farming processes (as we will hear later in the day). He is now in his 80s. The students have been full of anxieties about what might be lurking in the water – creepy crawlies, leaches – but I am happy to report that we confronted no such hazards.

The bus drivers are having a grand old time honking their horns back and forth amongst the truckers and other bus drivers they pass along the road. I am told this is a ritual to keep them all awake during long cross-country drives. But at one point, they all perform a song on their horns, which was pretty masterful, actually. At one point, a group of policemen try to pull the buss over. Sunitha suggests that they are going to try to shake us down for some bribes before they will let us pass. Much to her astonishment, the driver gives the cop one of these characteristic head woggles (which I read as something close to an eye roll) and then drives off without bothering to stop. The cops do not pursue us – as an American cop almost certainly would have.

On the return trip, the professors are more emboldened. One of the toll stops we encounter was supposed to be shut down on June 1. There had been a protest against the toll because it was illegally close to the others; the protestors vandalized the station. The government chastised them for the violence but agreed to shut down the toll by June 1. But it is clearly in operation. When one of the professors asks the toll booth operator about the situation, he waves us on through without charging, but then continues to collect money from all of the other vehicles in line behind us. But it’s a bad idea to do this for a bus full of journalism students, since they plan to write a follow up story.

We stop for breakfast at a kind of massive truck stop with many small shops and eateries. Except for the scale on which it is operating, it reminds me very much of similar roadside stops you could see along the road in the U.S.. For example, there are stands selling ice cream, popcorn, and especially dried fruit and various nut products. On the return trip, we pick up what is essentially peanut brittle to bring back to Cynthia.

From here, we are going higher into the Western Ghats mountains, which are breathtaking: not like the rounded hills of the Blue Ridge or the jagged and arid peaks of the West Coast chains. They do remind me of the images I have seen of the Himalayas but not nearly as high. They are lush right now. I am told that the monsoon season turn hills that are brown most of the year into something really lush with plant life, and that all of the cars we are seeing are driving north to enjoy the waterfalls which are formed from the rains. We do see some really beautiful ones from the bus. We also spot a few monkeys sitting along the side of the road watching the cars drive past. Every so often we see what seems like a massive apartment complex in the middle of nowhere. These are for people who drive up from the city for a country experience but expect to live precisely as they live back home. I’ve certain seen this tendency in the North Georgia mountains but never to such a literal degree.

As we get closer to the farm, we start to see a shift in attire – the men are now mostly wearing white, from the creased cap on the top of their heads down through their pressed jackets and creased pants, and riding motorcycles, because at a certain point, the bus is no longer able to make the turns on the winding country roads. The students walk, but the father-in-law insists on taking me by car out of respect for my age. (I was told by the way that when we had met the Sophia principal, she had been astonished that I knew so much about digital media because, “well, you know, he’s a gentleman of a certain age.”) You can imagine how well this privilege goes down with me, but I take it all in good humor. What are you going to do!

Since we arrive by car, we arrive a good deal earlier than the others, so I am taken on a tour of the farm. First, we visit a little three room school house.

All of the walls are covered by texts of various kinds, including elaborate charts of the alphabets and numbering system (with numbers identified in English, Hindi, and Marathi (the language of this region). There is a picture of Gandhi hanging over the blackboard. And there’s a television in the corner from which they receive educational broadcasts from the state. There are three rooms – one for preschool, one for the younger students, one for the older.

Outside the top two grades there are pictures and accounts of national leaders, including Nehru (another Prime Minister) and Ambedkar (the leader of the untouchables and author of the constitution, the subject of the graphic novel).

Outside the preschool classroom there are a series of cartoon characters. There are two that are clearly intended to resemble Mickey Mouse, one in western garb, one a bit more distorted in Indian clothing. And then there is a tall lanky fellow with a dog-like face and a tall cap who may or may not have been intended as Goofy. It is really hard to judge in this context since the localization process has been more extensive here.

Zhumber, the head laborer – a woman (more about her in a moment) – shows me her house. It is much more spacious than those we visited yesterday in the slums (and we are told that her son has gotten a high paying job in the city so this is not typical of a laborer’s house in the country). She has a massive salt water aquarium. I am most interested in her shrine – the television set is right in the middle, in a place of privilege, in an area set aside for the worship of her gods. We are also go out back to a shed where she has a massive black water buffalo which is used for farm labor.

By this time, we are all assembling, so I go with the others out to the rice fields, and we are given a lesson in how to transplant the rice. Apparently, rice grows better if it is uprooted and replanted during the growth cycle, so we are each handled several bundles of rice plants with dangling roots. Our job is to wade out into the water and press a cluster of three rice plants down into the mucky soil, pressing down with our fingers, not the roots. The water is actually warm since it is fairly shallow and thus gathers heat from the sun. The bottom of the river has some pebbles but is mostly oozy mud mixed with cow dug and compost veggie matter. The area where we are doing the planting is not quite solid so that the dirt spreads easily around your fingers.

We are moving out in shifts and each of us has about twenty minutes to experience the planting process under the supervision of the head laborer.

Zhumber is extremely dark skinned and withered, she walks barefoot at all times, and she wears very traditional pants that are swaddled around the back so as to avoid getting into the water. She lays down the plants machine-gun fast, even as we are still struggling to understand and repeat the process. I am sure she could have done everything the whole class did in roughly the same amount of time but she is very patient and smiling. I am told that she is the one who oversees all of the other laborers on the farm.

The teachers are urging the students to sing traditional farm labor songs, but none of them seem to know any, so one suggests they sing songs from Lagaan.

While we are working in the paddies, a male farm laborer comes up with a plow, which he surfs on top of, pulled behind two buffalo, as he is processing the field. Traditionally, men do the plowing and women do the planting. After our turn in the paddies, we go off to the pump where we wash our feet, hands, and legs of the mud, and then we walk down to the banks of the Indrayani river when we wait on a dam for the others to complete their tasks. As we are standing there, a woman and her daughter below are washing their clothes in the river and beating them out on the rocks.

After the time in the field, we go back to the school house where we are served cups of hot Chai and some pastry-like cookies, given a packet of the locally produced rice, and Dinesh Balsaver lectures us about the virtues of organic farming of rice. He explains basically that you pay a little more in the store, but that this process is much better for India, which has produced enormous poverty because it has done such damage to the soil over time, both because of the hot sun and the use of chemicals and salt-based water. These kinds of traditional farming methods are gradually restoring the quality of the land and making it possible to produce more crops and as a result, they are bringing more jobs to Indian farmers. The pitch for organic foods in the U.S. are very much pitched towards the health of the consumer, but this is about the health of the land and of the nation.

Digital Culture in Dharavi

One of the many fascinating people that Parmesh Shahani, our host from the Godrej India Culture Lab, introduced to us was Dina Mehta, who is a trained ethnographer who works for corporate clients here in India and around the world. In the course of conversation, she asked whether we would like to visit one of India's slums. There has been a rise in slum tourism in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire, which interests me very little, but she and her team of ethnographers maintain ongoing relationships in this community, and she offers to set up some interviews for us so we can develop a better understanding of how people live there and especially how they relate to media, old and new.  The photographs used here are a mixture of those taken by Cynthia Jenkins and by Shubhangi Athalye, a member of Mehta's team. What follows are my field notes from my experiences that day. Today, we met Dena Mehta at her apartment, since she was taking us out into the field to do some ethnographic work in Dharavi, which she describes as Asia’s biggest slum. Along the way, Dena points out to us the Chawls, which are old tentament structures which were established in the mid-century to house workers at the local textile mills. Each of the buildings are 4-5 stories tall and have 10-20 apartments per floor: each apartment is one room for sleeping and then shared public areas and bathrooms. The Chawls are the focus of some nostalgia here as they have come to stand for a particular communal lifestyle, but they are vanishing rapidly as gentrification hits these areas (see my earlier discussion of the ways that the Mills are being repurposed for corporate office space, etc.)

We are met on the outskirts of the slum by an elected representative from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) , which is currently the ruling party of India and is known to be very right-wing, Hindu nationalists, but also deeply rooted in the poorest urban areas of the country. Narendra Modi, India's current head of state, came from this party and he rose to power in part on the basis of his promise to bring more toilets to India, which John Oliver did some comic riffs on, but having visited here, it is no joke. Sanitation is one of the biggest challenges facing this community. Individual quarters do not have toilets; people tend to go to public facilities to wash or do other things, which can be some blocks away from where they live, and are massively crowded. They may also go in buckets which get dumped, along with the trash, in the open sewer which runs along the outskirts. The streets of Mumbai are densely populated and chaotic, but that was just a dress rehearsal for what we encountered here.

We are told that something like 1.2 million people live in this tightly packed area of the city, many of them stacked on top of each other, and that this area has become a kind of refuge camp for migrants from other regions, with the result that they are dealing with enormous cultural and linguistic diversity. Even to our still uninformed eyes, it is not hard to spot real differences in dress and speech. As we are arriving, a group of Muslim men are kneeling on blankets beside the road as they begin their prayer, and we hear the sounds of the prayer in the background for much of our first round of conversations here. We pass many women wearing Burkas. But we also encounter brightly dressed women in Saris passing alongside them in the streets.

The area is a maze of narrow, winding streets, and we walk along one of them to discover a colony of potters, whose family have been making clay pots for generations.

The women are sitting on the ground, slapping and pounding the clay and starting to shape it. A few buildings down we see the clay pots sitting in coals as a kind of kiln.

We spoke with one local family inside their home, and learn that they have been able to gradually improve their quality of life thanks to loans from a local support system: different groups, based on their unions, their religions, and their ethnicity pool money for mutual support and they are able to take out low interest loans. The political leader also tells us that families can get government loans but that this program is still not very well understood.

These large Indian families live in households which on average are 180 square feet, though the politician claims that their goal is to increase this to 279 feet in the coming few years. These homes, as we observed, mostly consist of an entry area, a sitting room where people work by day and all of the family members sleep at night, and sometimes, a separate kitchen. In some cases, the space is split between a shop downstairs and a living quarters upstairs, which is reached by climbing up a rather steep ladder. We were able to visit in three different homes during the day – in each, the furnishing are sparse, with people sleeping on mats on the floor, and perhaps a few seats, but all of the homes we visited had television sets. We were told that their daily life is structured, in part, around water: water runs through the pipes from 4-7 A.M., which is when they do their housework and also store water for the rest of the day in jugs or bottles for further use.

As we walk down the street, it is clear that most of these people are involved in either some form of craft or are shopkeepers. There are many stalls along the way selling fresh fruits and veggies. We are also told that much of the illicit goods that circulate in Bombay come from this area – including bootleg copies of dvds and CDs, but also, for example, knock-off Gucci bags, but even knockoff versions of simple household items, for example Life Buoy soap or brand name crackers.

The politician works the neighborhood like an old Ward politico in the states: he stops along the way to talk to his constituents by name, and they all seem to know him. He has a degree in Print-Making from an arts school, but his child was born with Autistic and so he went back to learn special education and now works part of each day at the local schools. But he spends 4-5 hours a day walking through the neighborhood to resolve disputes and help connect people to government services. We are told that he is also involved with RSS which he described as an organization which “looks after our Indian culture,” but which others described to us as borderline fascist. He told us that the police simply can not handle all of the problems of this area so they have created a diverse counsel of senior citizens who are called upon to work through conflicts on a local level and not involve the cops unless it is totally necessary. As we are talking standing on a street corner, I am watching over his shoulder as more and more people start to gather around us, some staring openly, some coyly trying to pay attention to something else, many glaring at us, and all trying to figure out why this white guy is taking so many notes. Just as I am afraid we are about to get completely mobbed, there are horns blaring, and the politician realizes we are blocking the street and we move along.

As we are standing there, a Muslim man, Shaikh Fakhrul Islam, approaches us.

He is a local doctor and social worker but more interestingly, he is a journalist who runs a news organization, C24 news. The group engages citizen journalists all over the ghetto who send him photographs and reports via What’sAPP, which is a kind of social media platform.

He and a few other writers consolidate the information into news reports which go out over their website and their Facebook page. He is able to use the site to advocate on behalf of his community. He specifically mentioned that he has women come to him and say “I can not fight my own battle. Will you help me fight my battle,” and he stands up against domestic abuse and rape culture in this community. He also has been able to focus attention on local problems and get faster government response – for example, flooding caused by the monsoon. As we leave, he turns to us and says “remember me in your prayers.” The politician takes a more skeptical view of the whole operation. He believes that the doctor is a decent fellow and well meaning, but he wonders where the money is coming from to support the operation and what interests he may be serving.

We travel to another section of this community and are met by Adrana, an adolescent girl, who is wearing what seems to be clearly her very best dress, her younger cousin also in a festive dress tagging along behind her, and she shows us the way back to her family home. We climb a rather steep ladder up to their living quarters, and find her mother and father, a sister-in-law and her husband, another girl, and two more boys waiting for us, (adding to the five members of our ethnographic expedition) in what is a one room home.

The father is a tailor and he has shoved his sewing machine into the corner to make room for the guests. We focus our attention on Adrana, who has agreed to the interview, but we end up engaging with the whole family, including the younger sibling, who periodically ask us such questions as “What gods do you worship?” or “What is in America?” and we do our best to answer. From the shrine in the corner, this is clearly a Hindi home. Adrana is in 12^th Grade and goes to a local commerce college; she was accepted into a credit-bearing educational institution based on her test scores but her family could not afford to send her to a college which charged for tuition. She is studying economics and she tells us she hopes to go on and get a PhD and then become the CEO of a company. Everything she tells us places a strong emphasis on her studies, and it is clear she is smart and ambitious.

Much of this and the other interviews are in local languages, which Dena’s team is helping to translate for us but every so often she breaks out into English. My thought was that she wanted us to know she could speak the language and she does so beautifully: she said that she is taught in English but that her friends and family do not speak it outside the classroom. Dena later suggested that she spoke in English when she did not want her mother to understand what she was saying. So, for example, she told us at one point that boys did “bad things” on the net but girls did not, so I asked what “bad things,” and after some evasion, she finally says “blue movies.”

She said she would have preferred to go to the Credit-bearing school, because they did not require her to dress in traditional Indian clothes, and she would prefer to dress in western clothes, such as jeans or shorts. She gets up, she said, at 5:56 every morning, helps her mother with the housework and bathes, then goes to school at around 7 and returns around 4 pm. We had learned from the politico earlier that the local schools run on shifts because they cannot seat all of the students from this community at the same time. She says with some pride that she is becoming a good cook just like her mother.

We talked a lot about her media consumption. She points with pride to the flat screen television on the wall, but also says that the set is brand-new, replacing one that gave out a year or so back: it still has packaging around it that lists its price, etc. Asked about what she watched on television, she identified only Hindi-language Indian-made shows, most of them dramas about high school and college life. Her younger brother announced that he especially liked WWE wrestling. When asked what movies she likes, she again identifies Hindi stars and films, with a strong emphasis on those which involve dance. She specifically mentioned wanting to see Disney’s Any Body Can Dance 2 (or ABCD as it is called). She said that she liked to do Bollywood dance but they could not afford lessons, so she practiced along to the music videos she saw on television.

She has internet access primarily at her Uncle’s house, who lives nearby and is an accountant, so he needs to have a computer at home. For the most part, she accesses the web through her mobile phone, which she about a year and received for her birthday from her father. She says she uses it to access Facebook: “All my friends use Facebook so she needs to use it.” She also likes to download images of actors and actresses, which she uses as her profile picture, since she is told that it would be dangerous for her as a young woman to publish her picture on the web. She also likes to collect quotes, words of inspiration and wisdom from famous people, which she exchanges with her friends and uses to model her life.

She also uses her phone to download songs and exchange them via Bluetooth with her friends. Dena told us that they pass the phones around with all of the members of the family so there is essentially no privacy about what they download, and she mentioned gathering around the computer at her Uncle’s house with four or five other female relatives, all working on Facebook at once. When asked what she looks up, she used as an example “who invented the selfie stick” and said she was especially interested in science facts and discoveries.

I tried to get a sense of her model of the civic by asking how she would deal with a problem in her community. She said first she would bring the problem to her mother and father, to her high school friends or to the tutor she works with (who seems to play an important mentor role on all aspects of her life). At school, if you brought a problem to the principal, they would yell at the students and then fix the problem. In the neighborhood, she would rely on the council of elders or if needed, a local representative like our initial guide. She also described how her circle of friends, from different backgrounds in the community, worked together to insure they all did well in school, helping weaker students, learning from stronger students.

She seemed very interested in the fact that I am author and wanted to know if I was going to write about her in one of my books: she loves to read and it turns out that she mostly likes one writer who does thick stories about college life in India. She asks for my autograph and wants to take her picture with me, and she follows us down the street as we leave, still asking us about America.

We drove to another location, past some Quonset Huts which had been left here by the British during World War II. They are semi-circular buildings with corregated metal roofs (or in some cases, now, with blue plastic tarps stretched over gaping holes in the roof).

We walked past a group of young men gathered around a game board and we were told that they were playing Carrom. It is played on a flat game board with pockets on the four corners. It is something close to pool except that it is played with flat game pieces of varied sizes which you slide across the board. So at the start, the smaller pieces are all on the center, and the goal is to use the bigger pieces to push them into the pockets. The game seemed to involved 5-6 players, though I could not tell how many of these were just watching and waiting their turns.

We are here to visit Nitesh, a young man 3-4 years older than Adrana. He lives with his father and his elder brother in this house; his elder sister is married and lives elsewhere; his grandparents live in the adjacent house. For several generations, they have lived in this area. He works in an office where he collects and documents checks for local workers. We ask whether he likes to work there, and he says “It’s OK. It’s What I do.” He works 9-6 six days a week with Sundays off and commutes via train which gets him home around 7 pm. Later, we asked him about his aspirations. He wants to own a Royal Enfield motor bike; but for now, he is saving money.

He plans to get married when he has saved enough. He tells us “nowadays everyone is doing love marriages” but his mother comes from the village and she will expect him to accept an arranged marriage and “I will need to listen to her.” We ask what he wants to do in the future and he has no professional goals: “they pay me well and I don’t want to leave. “ So, he imagines working in this job for as long as they will have him, but he does acknowledge the job is “Pakau” which is slang for boring. He says he would like to marry a woman who has a job: men used to resent working women, but now they need the extra income.

We ask him about his engagement with media and he shows us his phone, which he uses to maintain contact with his friend and help organize local cultural festivals (his role in the local community) but also to download music and engage in social media. He has little interest in Facebook but prefers What’s Up, which allows him to participate in groups. As he listed what kind, he mentions sharing “non-veg” content with his friends, and it turns out he is referring to a group called “All About Sex.” Asked what kinds of videos he likes, he says he likes to warch videos of people playing Carroom or Cricket; he’s a big sports fan and also cites games on television among his favorite and, oh yes, the WWE. Asked about Indian wrestlers in the WWE, he says “nice to see our people but they do not perform as well as the American wrestlers.” He said the WWE performances have inspired him to go to the local gym and work out.

Asked if he had ever produced video, he mentions a project he did with his friends when a boy their age died of malaria: a tribute video which set a series of dissolves of photographs with the boy and his friends to a somber pop song, and he shows us the video on his phone.

On television, he likes sports and dance competition reality series. He says his mother likes to watch serials, but he doesn’t even know their names, even though he is in the same room as she views them. He doesn’t watch Bollywood songs on the web but downloads clips directly onto his phone and trades them with his friends. He specifically mentions liking the songs from the ABCD movies, but he deletes songs when he gets bored and nothing stays on his phone for long. He says that the people he knows who own computers are educated: they acquire these skills by working in offices – typists, for example – and they end up doing projects more because they want to improve their skills than because they want to express themselves.

Asked about how he would deal with problems, he mentioned again the elders committees which arbitrates disputes. When they need action, they pick up the phone and call local officials, who they all know personally. He said they respond more quickly when more people call so they go around beginning friends to call in reports about problems. He would not use social media because it is less direct than calling the officials directly on his mobile phone.

I mentioned that he helps to organize local festivals, and he mentioned two festivals in particular. The first is the festival of Ganesh, which is coming up soon. The other night we saw inside a warehouse as we were driving by: it was full of giant statues of the elephant-faced helper god, Ganesh, which looked to be made of paper mache. In this festivals, people all over the city take these statues into their homes, feed and care for them, and then they bring them to sea and watch them float away.

He also talked about the Festival of Krishna. Krishna was said to have an appetite for butter so his mother would put the butter put high up in the trees to keep it away from his reach. During the festival, they hang pots with candy and coins in very high places and festival goers form human pyramids, sometimes 8-9 bodies high, to get the pot down.

As we are leaving, I noticed something over the door to his house, next to the tiles depicting Hindu gods. There are several dried peppers, a chunk of lemon, and a block of coal, which I am told are used to keep the “bad eye” away.

India: My First Impressions

The following extracts from my travel journal describe the process of discovery and enculturation that occurred when I first arrived in Mumbai. These incidents occurred over roughly the first week of our stay. I have also included here some random street photography taken by Cynthia Jenkins or myself to capture some aspects of life here where seeing is better than reading.

We arrived here two days ago. The first day was, as always after such a long flight, spent in a state of utter stupor and I recall very little of it. I could not hold my eyes open and ended up sleeping for many hours. I do retain some blurry impressions of the drive from the airport. Everyone had warned me that Mumbai was an intense and overwhelming city, and after so much mythologizing, I had built up a certain degree of anxiety about what I would encounter here. The ride from the airport covered me in both directions – yes, it was intense and overwhelming but it was also oddly comforting because I did not encounter any deep culture shock or confusion, given my previous experiences in cities like Beijing, Tokyo, Bangkok, and San Paulo. I am still not sure I want to try crossing a street without locals to guide me, but I at least can take in the scope and frenzy of the activity here. And I think I know how to read much of what I am encountering – even if I am relying more on Bollywood movies to process things than might be ideal. And every so often, we encounter signs that are all too familiar – not just Starbucks or Subway, but even Krispy Kreme doughnuts (my personal favorite going back to my Atlanta childhood).

We are staying at a guest house on the Godrej campus -- very nice quarters, definitely a cut above most hotels where I stay. We’ve struggled with some cultural confusion here. We couldn’t figure out how to get hot water into the shower. We took a cold shower the first day but by the second, we were able to communicate with the housekeeper here the issue, and he showed us a switch on the wall in the bedroom which turned on the hot water heater in the bathroom. But, of course, why didn’t I think of that! I am having corn flakes for breakfast most mornings, but was surprised to find that they warm my milk, which makes it a very different dish....

I had a fairly restless night as I continued to adjust to jet lag, and so I was able to listen to the sounds of Mumbai (or at least the sounds of Vikhroli, the neighborhood where Godrij’s headquarters are located) as the city came to life. I could not help but think about the prelude which A. R. Rahman wrote for Bombay Dreams, which I was lucky enough to have seen in London’s West End some years ago.

In this case, the first sounds that really penetrated my sleep was the very faint sound of chanting coming from a nearby mosque. India is at this point a country dominated by its Hindu populations but I have been struck by how pervasive and visible the Moslem minority is here. Second, there was the sound of another wave of rain. We are in the monsoon season and so rain, mostly light, but very persistent, has been a constant since we came here, with only a few rare pockets of sunshine. The rhythm of the rain is constantly shifting. We’ve seen very few moments when the skies opened up and torrent rains fell down, which was more or less what I anticipated from a Monsoon, and many more moments where there was a drizzle or mist or simply a slow pitter-patter of rain on the roof. And then, as the sunlight begins to take hold, you start to hear the crows. There are massive flocks of them here on the campus, and there are times when it feels like we are in a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. I don’t know what I expected Mumbai to sound like, but the cawing of crows was not it! But they are loud and raucous and they make sure people hear them for miles around....

We saw so many cultural references to Crows running across Indian media and popular culture once we started to look for them. But Ritesh Mehta, one of my USC students, with whom we corresponded often during the trip, shared this segment from one of his Bollywood favorites.

We spent much of yesterday in Parel, which I understand was an old industrial section of the city – basically an area associated with Mills. Parts of the area has gone through a process of gentrification, so that the old mills have been converted into all kinds of office and residential spaces, preserving just enough of the industrial feel to give atmosphere, and representing some of the most expensive real estate in the city. On the other hand, the housing where the factory workers once lived has remained low income housing, and the offspring of those factory workers still live there. As a consequence, one encounters some of the deep contradictions of how class operates in Mumbai in this community. The working class sections have sprawling low-scale buildings, small shops and stalls, a great deal of visual clutter, and a frenzy of activity. We drove through a maze of winding alleyways to get to the places we were scheduled to visit. I was struck by the informality and intimacy of social interactions we observed through the windows of our car – lots of people walking around arm in arm, many people sitting around barefoot, shop keepers bartering over their wares. There is a density of life here, to be sure, but without romanticizing what I was seeing, there was also a sense of a vibrant public culture that I do not always see traveling through urban areas. I am not sure I can convey what street life is like here – beyond the people, there are many cycles (both motor-bikes and human-powered), there are big red public buses, there are trucks which have individualized, hand-painted, and brightly colored patterns all over them, and there are auto rickshaws which are used as taxis to navigate the narrow, winding streets.

I have been in other places around the world which are known for their dense populations – Shanghai and Tokyo come to mind – but somehow they seemed much more ordered to me, masses of people moving in patterns and flows along the streets, but the streets of Mumbai strike me as more chaotic, with people all moving along their own individual trajectories, and with much more social interactions between them. Certainly we saw some of that street culture when a decade or so ago, Cynthia and I were taken to the tenement communities in Beijing, but the streets of Tokyo have such a sense of everyone in their proper lane, everyone moving towards predestinations, that feel very different from what I have observed here so far....

I spotted a telling display on our drive today. We were once again fascinated with the street life we saw through the windows of our car. In a very low income section of the city, I saw a woman hawking what were either placemats or wall hangings, that were hanging on a clothes line against a wall. About half of the images being sold came from Hindu mythology and the other half were images of Disney Princesses, so you had an image of Sita hanging right next to an image of Cinderella. As we’ve been told many times since we’ve been here, everything is negotiable. And what gets absorbed from outside India gets incorporated into Indian culture in very distinctive ways. One person I spoke with shared a classic summation: “Everything you have ever heard about India is almost certainly true but so is it’s opposite.”,,,

We ended up visiting a ritzy shopping mall in the heart of the city, and as we were wandering around, we found our way into a British toy store. I loved the fact that there were various hands-on demonstrations of various toys and games, such as you see in old movies, but rarely encounter any more in American stores. And then, there he was, right in the center of the store -- Captain America. My first reflect was one of revulsion -- a sense of American cultural imperialism taking over the world, and of all of the icons of American popular culture, this one at this moment seemed the most American. But, at the same time, I had seen very few Americans, very few westerners in my time in Mumbai, compared to almost any other city in the world I have visited before. Is the monsoon season keeping everyone away or is it always this way? And there's suddenly a wave of the familiarity and comfort you get when you encounter a total stranger, but someone from your country or home town, when you are traveling overseas? And so I ran up to him and did the rabbit ear thing for a photograph -- a sign which somehow expresses familiarity and disrespect in one gesture. And it was only then that I noticed the massive Mumbai bus, with the crazy teddy bear behind the wheel, about to run us both over, which somehow sums up my impressions of the traffic flows here. This ended up being the perfect image of my entry into India and one I used in many of my talks here to talk about the ways we adopt popular culture to our own expressive purposes.

We tried to grab a quick bite to eat before plunging into the traffic again to head to our next stop. Parmesh decided to take us to get fast food and we had that Pulp Fiction kind of moment where you find that things that on the surface look just like home have odd little cultural twists as fast food chains localize to the tastes of the host country. So, first, we stumbled on a scene that would have made a world class photograph but would have been too awkward to consider taking. There was a park bench in front of MacDonalds. On one edge of the bench was a mature, stately Hindi woman in a sari and on the other edge was a Muslim woman wearing a full black Burka. In between the two women was a statue of Ronald McDonald with his arms stretched out so that they ran along the full back of the bench.  The effect was to see the clown, effectively, putting the move on both of these women. The image worked on so many levels to capture some of the contradictions we felt eating fast food in India.

For a long time, American fast food companies did not really know how to open hamburger chains in a country where there is a strong taboo against eating beef, but gradually they have adopted their menu, so that you can get a wide range of burgers made from various veggie substitutes, and BK is unique in offering a Mutton Burger for those who want to eat meat. The burgers give a good approximation in appearance to our Whoppers, but let’s just say it was not to my taste. Of course not – it’s been adapted to the tastes of Indian customers. But a big part of the pleasure of fast food chains is that the food tastes like home.  Another interesting detail: Mickie D delivers here...

We were driving through South Bomaby, along the waterfront, on the way to our first meeting. The traffic bogs down and a woman in a dingy Sari comes out to the car, clutching a toddler in her arms, and tapping on our windows begging for money. We have been told repeatedly that it can be dangerous to give in to such requests, so we are trying to develop thick skins and harder hearts. As I look up through the front of the car, trying to avoid her gaze, we see a horde of other mothers, all similarly dressed, all also carrying their babies in their arms, descending on cars all around us. This helped me to put the issue into perspective.

We paid a visit on a Sunday afternoon to Mount Mary Cathedral, a large Catholic church, in the heart of Bandra.

When we got out of the car, the first thing we encountered were a series of make-shift shops where people could buy wax offerings. I have seen such places outside, say, Notre Dame in Paris, where you could buy candles, and you can indeed buy candles here: not simply white as in Paris but in a range of bright colors. I ended up purchasing a few purple candles to use to pay my respect. But the candles are just the starting point: you can buy wax figurines that represent the things people have come there to pray for, so for those praying for the sick, there are, for example, wax hospitals or clinics but also various organs and body parts. For those who want to do better in their studies, there are schools and textbooks. For those who want to travel, there are wax versions of Indian passports. For those who want success, there are wax versions of piles of Rupees. And for those with relatives in America, there are wax Statue of Liberty figures.

We carried the candles with us into the cathedral, which was huge, and full of people at prayer underneath massive ceiling fans. The walls of the church are decorated with paintings depicting scenes from the New Testament, although the figures are brown and in some cases, wearing traditional Indian clothing (perhaps the counterpart of all of the European-style art we’ve come to associate with some of these same incidents). But, there was no place in the church to light the candles. To do this, we have to cross the street to a huge staircase: we were told that people climb and count the steps to represent the stations of the Cross.

On top, outside, there was a kind of BBQ grill, where you put the candles into leaping flames, and watched them melt. Climbing back down the stairs, we passed by another series of shops. Here, there were all kinds of crucifixes, rosary beads, and depictions of Christ and the Virgin Mary.

But, again, there was something unexpected and a bit confusing: they were also selling in the mix some necklaces depicting the ensignas of Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and Iron Man. I could not figure out what they might have to do with the church rituals!

We drove around the city a bit more: Parmesh and the D’Silvas showed me the home of some of the largest Bollywood stars. There were a large crowd of people waiting outside the home of Shah Rukh Khan, sometimes called “King Khan” or “the King of Bollywood” because of his rags to riches personal story. He has appeared in more than 80 movies. I found this highlights real on YouTube.

The crowds were gathering, waiting patiently, in hopes that he would stick his head out and say a few words. I have heard much about the devotion of Bollywood fans and the reverential attitudes they have to certain stars. I have been told that in South India, there are temples dedicated to the memory of certain stars who have become emblematic of national/regional pride and spiritual devotion.

What If Batman Was From Chennai? And Other Stories

One of the strands of my research I was sharing during this trip to India focused on the various political and civic uses of the superhero amongst young American activists. You can get a taste of this work from this video produced by Fusion to showcase the ways Superman has become an icon for the DREAMer movement. This work caught the imagination of many people I met in India and so everywhere I went people were bringing me examples of Indian appropriations and remixes of superhero stories. I will be sharing many such examples in future posts.  

One of my favorite examples are a series of YouTube videos, produced by a group called Culture Machine, which deal with what would happen if certain iconic cultural figures such as Batman and the Avengers, had been born in Chennai, a city in South India.

America's Bruce Wayne watched as his mother and father were brutally killed before his very eyes, and this is what made him into the Batman. But, his Indian counterpart has a much more troubling relationship with his father, whom he can never please, and more generally, with the social expectations of adult society. Everything is pulled down to Earth in this spoof video and we can debate what it means that the Indian superhero gets depicted in such an anti-heroic manner (not just here but across a range of different media incarnations). And the romance between Batman and the Catwoman takes on a life of its own, which gets developed even further in a sequel which got released more recently.

This other video shifts the focus onto the Marvel superheroes. Here, the Avengers are "heroes for hire," desperately marketing themselves for more mundane jobs, where no one expects to be invaded by aliens or over-run by super-criminals.

One did not have to look hard to spot other superheroes lurking in the heart of India's cities. My wife captured this image as we were walking through a ship-breaking yard in Mazagoan (on the outskirts of Mumbai).

We were able to visit Culture Machine's headquarters in Mumbai, where I was able to get a deeper sense of their strategies as a producer of highly spreadable media content. The following is taken from my travel diary.

Culture Machine, a new media company, set up shop in a old sari warehouse a few years ago, and has enjoyed such tremendous success that the staff now grossly overwhelms its capacity. All of the rooms are crammed with people, who feel like they are stacked on top of each other. The company is moving to a new headquarters in just a few more weeks much to everyone’s relief. We had read an article in Forbes India about our host Sameer Pitalwalla, who was identified as one of their 30 under 30 industry leaders. He is the former director of the interactive division of Disney India. He partnered with Venkat Prasad, a UCLA alum, and former Google Analytics engineer, to start Culture Machine, a company that now represents and helps to craft many of the country’s top YouTube stars.

Pitalwalla and Prasad took us through their perspective on how to design content which plays well to Youtube audiences in India. Their strategy rests on three kinds of content – Heroes, Hubs, and Hygiene. So, Heroic content would be unique and distinctive content designed to “smack you in the face” and create buzz; what we might call spreadable content which helps put a particular character or personality on the map. You can’t produce this kind of high impact content on a regular basis, so you have to develop content which keeps people coming back to the Hub on a regular basis, so this is a more serialized form of production. And finally when people come to the site, they want to find lots of content there so to fill out a channel they have an automated process which produces low impact, low cost, predictable content.

To help them develop this steady flow of content, they have developed an incredible analytics tool – probably the best big data platform for this purposes I have seen – which collects data around personalities, brands, genres, themes, etc., around the world, from both Facebook and Youtube, and allows them to predict the cycle of any given topic, so that they can rapidly produce and release content to feed rising trends, while back off from trends they see has reached its peak. They have production facilities right there, so they can transform insights into content at high speed. Here are some examples of the kinds of work which Culture Machine has been producing.

One highly successful series, Epified, involves an ongoing exploration of themes from classical Indian mythology. Here, for example, is a video which helps to explain the Polytheistic system of Hindu religion for those of us who come from a more Monotheistic background.

And here's a video which shows how the discussion of these classical stories can shed light on more contemporary debates.

The Epify videos are adopted from the work of Devdutt Pattaniak, who turns out to be a really fascinating figure. He’s billed on his book jackets as “India’s best-selling mythographer.” He started out life as a pharmacist, but he fell deep for his country’s classical traditions and began to write and talk about them more and more. He ended up styling himself as the “Chief Belief Officer” for a consulting firm: he basically works with Indian and American companies that do business in India to help them think through the rituals and mythological significance of their address to the Indian audience. At a time when the national government has embraced a particularly reactionary version of Hindu mythology, he has presented a progressive alternative, which he claims recovers the original meanings of these classical texts (debatable no doubt, but he seems pretty convinced). You can get a sense of his approach, if you are interested, from this TED talk he did some years ago.

I was able to meet with Pattaniak later in my trip. Early on, there is a certain amount of jockeying for position as he probed to see how many westerner traps I fell into and I work hard to side step them. We end up having a great discussion which ranges from Joseph Campbell to fan fiction. He was especially interested in the folkloric dimensions of fandom, a topic he had not considered before, but he got almost immediately the way fandom becomes a space for exploring multiple lives which the characters might have led. We have some debate about the ways fandom is and is not a religion and whether this might mean something different in an Indian context than it does in an American. Fair enough. He argues most American companies are especially paralyzed by religious difference while Indians live with religious contrasts all of the time. And yes, we have managed to encounter most of the world’s great religions co-existing side by side here and often working together for common survival, but we’ve also heard brutal reports of genocide directed against one or another sect here and signs that the most repressive aspects of some of these religions still exert a powerful impact on the day to day lives of people.

Here's an example of the kind of  video Culture Machine produced for a corporate client, in this case, the manufacture of home appliances, which adopted a “respect for women” theme. It is a brilliant example of an advertisement which follows many of our principles for Spreadable content.

Finally, the company is very much involved in producing video segments around music and especially fashion and cosmetics. We met one of the top stars in this space, Elton Fernandez, as he was starting to shoot a segment in their studios. He said that he had gotten complaints because his videos often used models that people did not think looked like the average Indian woman, so he had invited his housemaid into the studio and was going to give her a make-over for the cameras. Here’s his YouTube channel.

We talked with the CEOs and then they brought me into the central space in the office, where all of the company’s employees, or at least those on ground for the day, gathered around for a question and answer session which centered around issues of transmedia, world-building, and spreadability. The young creative workers seemed to have an enormous awareness of U.S. based developments in popular culture and new media.

We had some discussions of what transmedia might mean in the Indian context. I had suggested that we could think about Bollywood as a system that supports transmedia performance, with musical numbers being the segment that extended outward from the film, through music videos, song tapes, lip sincs, and dance classes, all of which help to heighten awareness of a new release and build up the careers of certain performers. The Culture Machine folks talked about the elaborate traditional mythology of India – these vast interlocking story cycles that were constructed in classical times and have fueled entertainment production ever since. The stories of the Hindu gods and goddesses have been drawn into all forms of artistic production. There are full on adaptations of some of the classical epics, but individual characters can spin off and be the basis for their own more focused narratives. Both have happened in recent years in Indian television. And they compared the recent cycle to the strategies Marvel has used to launch the Avengers movies.

So, this is world-building on a large scale that spans much of the country’s history. And they noted that many more contemporary and original drama series also relied heavily on stock types and conflicts that implicitly or explicitly reference moments from those epics, so these stories still provide the template for much of their drama. But because of this rich and still strong tradition, they argued the country had been slower to develop original IP that might do what Marvel’s universe did. They were very interested in what that might look and we talked a lot about what it might mean to create such a new mythology through YouTube videos rather than big screen or television stories. A second challenge they identified had to do with the Indian consumer’s expectation of larger-than-life entertainment, whether it was these epic stories of Gods and Goddesses (the mythological genre proper) or the kinds of genre-mixing and glamour-driven stories we associate with Bollywood. They said that this expectation had created some challenges in rolling out YouTube content, since YouTube in the states is associated with a DIY “Broadcast Yourself” trend, where-as even reality television in India depends less on “ordinary people” and more on minor celebrities already partially known to audiences before they turn on the first episode.