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« April 2007 | Main | June 2007 » May 31, 2007
Gender and Fan Studies (Round One, Part One): Karen Hellekson and Jason MittellAs promised, we are going to be running a mega-event through my blog this summer -- an ongoing conversation among some of the leading scholars of fan cultures and cult media. This conversation has grown out of a perceived disconnect in the ways that male and female scholars are writing about this phenomenon, though I hope that it will evolve into something else -- a discussion of fan studies as a field, its theoretical groundings, its methodologies, and its most important insights. There has been an explosion in recent years of exciting new work on fan culture which is coming from an emerging generation of scholars -- male and female. I am hoping that this event will help introduce this work to a larger public and that this discussion can be seen as a sign that fan studies is really coming of age. Here's how it will work: Every Thursday and Friday, we will introduce a new pair of scholars, who will continue the discussion, seeking to explore commonalities and differences in the ways they approach the work. Jason Mittell and Karen Hellekson have gotten things rolling here with some thoughts about the nature of fannish and academic authority. Our hope is that this discussion will spill over into other blogs as well and I will try to post as many links to these other discussions as possible. So far, for example, Kristina Busse and Will Brooker have started a public discussion in anticipation of the series which Kristina is running over at her blog. I am also encouraging other participants to add their thoughts and comments here whenever something in the public discussion sparks their interests. Karen and Jason suggested the use of numbered units to make it easier for people to refer to parts of the exchange. So, let the fun begin. Authority 1. Academic authority [1.1] KLH: It seems that every discussion about fan studies somehow has something to do with authority - not only with establishing who has it (apparently not the fans, unless they appropriate it), but indicating the closeness of the relationship with the subject matter (apparently being an academic means you're inauthentic if you're a fan, and being a fan means you can't be a properly dispassionate, disinterested academic). My problem with this led to my coediting, with Kristina Busse, a recent volume of new essFays about fan studies, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, all by academics who are also fans, because I think that this connection is a useful and good thing. [1.2] Interestingly for this discussion, the academy does not employ me. I'm employed full-time as a copyeditor in the scientific, technical, and medical market - a good fit for me, because I prefer not to teach. My academic credentials include a PhD in English, with an emphasis in science fiction, and I've published some books and articles, some of which happen to be about fan studies. I write book reviews about SF titles for Publishers Weekly. However, I've found that a lack of an academic connection is terribly disenfranching. The simplest research project is fraught with annoyance and pain as roadblocks are thrown in front of me: it's ridiculously difficult to get the books and articles I need, thanks to all the limits placed on me by the library; and I don't have an affiliation to put on my abstract submissions, which results in their being kicked back to me for "completion." [1.3] My work in fan studies includes literary and historical readings of fan texts and/or the bits of the Internet given over to fan community. I'm currently interested in notions of authorship; of truth-claims, authority, and analysis; and ideas about constructing and editing reality (as, for example, editing blog posts to alter the historical trace). I've also done some work on the idea of fandom as a gift culture. I blog occasionally about my academic-type thoughts. [1.4] JM: My aca-identity is comparatively traditional - I teach Media Studies at Middlebury College, writing about television primarily in the forms of books (author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture [Routledge, 2004] and a textbook in-the-works called Television & American Culture), articles (essays on TV narrative, genre, discourses about television as a medium), and blog (JustTV, where links to many of my other writings can be found as well). I'm primarily interested in the intersections between television programming, industrial strategies, and viewer practices, and have recently been focusing these interests on the development of new forms of television storytelling emerging in the past decade or so in the United States.2. Fannish authority [2.1] JM: My fan-identity is a bit more muddy. While I'm an eager consumer of many types of media & popular culture (including TV like Lost, Veronica Mars, BSG, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, etc.; a lot of animation; much music; and a fair number of videogames), I would not self-identify as a fan per se. And to me, this cuts to the heart of the debate framing this discussion - what are the boundaries of being a "fan" and who is invested in the label as an identity? I'm interested in fans as part of my pedagogy, regularly teaching academic work about fandom and showing examples of fan creativity & engagement. I read fan studies, even blurbing the excellent new volume Fandom. [2.2] But I have no real personal investment in the fan label, or the practices and communities that tend to coalesce around the notion of fandom. For me, fandom centers around three main aspects: fan creativity (paratexts, fanfics, vidding, etc.), fan community (in-person and/or online), and fan self-identification (prominent self-branding through fashion, online profiles, behaviors, etc.). I don't really engage with any of these (save for wearing a Red Sox cap on bad hair days), so that's why I don't conceive of myself as a fan. (I realize that many people would argue that my notion of fandom is too narrow - I invite more discussion about those boundaries as they're crucial to the debate.) [2.3] KLH: I myself am an active fan, involved in newsgroups and blogs about my few primary fandoms. I write fan fiction under a pseudonym, and occasionally, I go to fan conventions. Although I'm a longtime fan - I was into Doctor Who first, in 1981, with a live-action fan club - I took some time off and got back into it in a big way in 2002, when I turned to fandom basically as a form of social engagement, because I live in an isolated, fairly rural area. I run a fanfic archive in my primary fandom. Within fandom, I do lots of large project type things - things that involve organizing the time and effort of others, because I can get such projects done. I spend fannish time in actor- and fan-specific newsgroups and in the LiveJournal blogsphere. Continue reading "Gender and Fan Studies (Round One, Part One): Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell" »
May 30, 2007
Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media (Part Two)Yesterday, we ran the first part of an essay written by Sloan MBA candidate Eleanor Baird about the current fate and future branding of network television. Baird's work calls attention to shifts in the ways that networks measure their audiences, shifts which are going to be played out in dramatic ways as the networks launch their new season this fall. A team of MIT students -- graduate and undergraduate -- will be monitoring closely the week by week fluctuations in viewership figures and the ways that the networks are adjusting their programming strategies and branding practices in response. Here's the description of the course, which would be open to students from MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, thanks to our various exchange programs. I hope to report on some of their findings here throughout the term. Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the Fall 2007 Television Ecosystem Now for Part Two of Baird's essay: Digital downstream Even if audiences are not planning to sit in front of a network television affiliate for hours on end, networks hope, as they probably always have, that the consumer will be at least be engaged with the some of the content and keep coming back for more. The interactive, on-demand nature of the Internet seems to make it a natural medium for audience engagement for a consumer who could access the content from a wide variety of channels at a variety of times. Network executives and programmers hope that enhanced and more interactive experiences through the "ancillary channel" of the Internet will increase retention, engagement and, time spent viewing the show and related content and ultimately, revenue going back to the original program source. With a network branded site, this strategy is another opportunity to have consumers interact with the meta brand Caldwell argues that television styled itself a "pull" medium, while bidding to make the Internet a "viable 'push' medium" . The relationship between television and Internet may seem natural and complimentary in this way, but it is problematic in others, requiring the interaction of content created by a few and consumed by many to adapt to a medium where greater participation in consumption and production of the content and flow are the norm. Moreover, this relationship has implications for a network trying to maintain a clear brand identity in an environment where users expect to be able to repurpose content in ways that the producers may never have intended. In contrast to television, this medium gives the network far less control of the image of both the sub-brand (the content) but also the meta brand, then context in which the sub-brand is experienced (the network). So, although consumption of digital content may engage the viewer more, there is no guarantee, given the nature of the technology and the norms surrounding it, that the engagement will be with the network brand, the show's sub-brand, a combination of the two, or other factors entirely. That said, a recent study suggest that, if presented through a number of media channels, network affiliation awareness seems to grow stronger, echoing multiple studies on marketing messages and consumer retention. Although there is certainly potential for branding and revenue generation online, interactivity is not the silver bullet that will save the networks from a consumer standpoint either. Various companies have tried to launch costly interactive television initiatives since the 1970s, all of which failed because they overestimated the audience interest in the service. The public's interest in interactivity does not seem to be much better for network websites. Even though the vast majority of homes have a television and Internet penetration in U.S. households is quite high, there are estimates that as little as 5% of broadcast networks' viewers actually watch streaming video, in contrast to the 15% of cable channel viewers who do. A recent study of cable network website users found that they enjoyed using the website, but did not see it as the "Internet brand of the network" or as a "functional alternative to television". In fact, the usage of the cable television websites was heavily dependent on if they had been mentioned on air - a factor that accounted for about two thirds of visitors - and, not surprisingly, the popularity of a cable network's website mirrors the popularity of the network's broadcasts. This raises the question of the utility of focusing branding efforts on these channels at all. If the users are highly engaged "content junkies" who usually learn about the site through watching television anyway, is network brand development online a worthwhile area to explore? Continue reading "Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media (Part Two)" »
May 29, 2007
Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media(Part One)In the June 1 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jensen asks the provocative question, "Are you killing TV?" The article starts with a discussion of how Heroes returned from a seven week hiatus to find that they had lost roughly 20 percent of their viewership, a jaw-breaking drop of 2.6 million viewers, from its September debut to its final few episodes of the season. Many other popular and cult series have experienced similar drops this season, including Jericho (as a result, the show was canceled), The Sopranos, Lost, The Shield, Desperate Housewives, and 24. The magazine offers a range of theories about why the networks are experiencing such dramatic drops in viewership including: The competition of American Idol which whips out pretty much all other competition. Creatively uneven seasons, which resulted in mis-steps and lulls in the dramatic pacing of some key series. The shift towards daylight savings time three weeks earlier this year. A loss of interest and attention due to the extended hiatuses (an experiment in having continuous blocks of programming followed by periods of downtime). The result of this factor has been the fact that Heroes is actually producing a second spin-off series, Heroes: Origins, which will be a placeholder or miniseries during the downtime between episodes of the original series. Shifts in the mechanisms by which fans access television series, ranging from timeshifting to downloads and waiting for the boxed sets. EW reports that 1.7 million viwers of Heroes do not watch it during its regularly scheduled time and an additional 2 million viewers watch Lost on DVR within seven days of its original airing. These numbers do not include those watching legal or illegal downloads of the series. About a third of the viewers of Lost don't watch during the regular series but catch up with it on DVD exclusively. Major shifts are occurring in how networks measure their audiences in response to these shifts in when and how we are accessing their content but in the short term, these shifts may leave some cult shows vulnerable. This debate about the viewership of cult television programs is part of a larger discussion about the fate of the networks in an era where methods of content distribution and access are shifting dramatically. Eleanor C. Baird, a Sloan MBA student, took my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods this term. She wrote a very solid analysis of the future of network television for the course, one which mixes modes of analysis common to business schools with those we teach through our media studies classes.
No matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise, the big four U.S. broadcast networks are, at their core, a mass medium that fits awkwardly into our newly democratic and participatory media ecosystem. Their marketing strategy follows the widely outmoded "push" model of consumer promotions and advertising to draw viewers. Even as they become increasingly integrated into the media industry's value chain, broadcasters are challenged by new cultural norms of consumption and engagement that are combining with technological change to create a "perfect storm", an environment where they are creating more value, but scrambling to capture it. What is happening? It is not that people are not watching network television or becoming engaged with the content anymore. New ways of consuming television content are challenging the old revenue generation models. Consumers are turning to DVDs, DVR, and digital alternatives on the web to fit more television viewing into their lives. Advertisers, enticed by the prospect of more affluent and targeted audiences on cable and online, are beginning to spend their budgets on content sponsorship along the long tail. Broadcast networks are consequently in the strange position of having a strong collection of sub-brands - the individual programs - under a relatively weak primary brand - the network itself. TV and the big four may not be going anywhere for now, but the future is becoming less and less certain. In this essay, I will explore how broadcast networks can respond to this changing and converging media environment by promoting themselves as distinct brands of television. To do so, I will address three questions. The first question is one of focus, if the primary role for a broadcast network in this environment is content production or advertising aggregation channel. The second question is one of consumer loyalties and identification, if the consumer's relationship to the content is stronger than their relationship to the channel through which they receive it. The third question is, can a channel such as a network be branded, and how can that be done successfully. In order to answer these questions, I will begin by defining the broadcast networks and then analyze the major issues at play for them today - advertisers and audiences, content, channels, metrics, and digital distribution. Then, using Raymond Williams' concept of flow, as well as the writing of John Caldwell as a framework, I will address the macro issues of the role of the medium and the impact of branding, and then proceed to an analysis of the strategies of the four networks. The paper will conclude with some preliminary answers to the three questions based on my analysis. What is a network? With what I am calling the network-mediated flow model, there is an implicit contract between the consumer and the network to provide some editorial control over the content, to choose which programs to broadcast, when, and in what order to provide a unified viewing experience. This experience can stem from engagement with the brand, but also with a need for a completely passive viewing experience, something that sets this medium apart from the Internet, which is intrinsically interactive. Networks, with a relatively wide variety of programs airing on a particular night, are uniquely suited to appeal to those habitual and/or passive viewers. Another defining feature of the network is that it uses a "hub-and-spoke" model of distribution; most content developed and chosen at the center then distributed by local affiliates. Although the interaction in the consumer's mind between the identity of the affiliate and the larger network are not heavily studied, keeping strong affiliates in major markets is a key priority for networks to secure viewers. A recent study also found that there was no evidence that a more media-rich environment weakened the branding of a network affiliate to the parent, meaning that the common use of new media did not affect the television stations association to the network. Yet another shared characteristic among the networks is their strong reliance on metrics, particularly some form of the Nielsen ratings, to entice advertisers to purchase time on air. Audiences and Advertisers - No more "monolithic blocks of eyeballs" Audience attrition is not a new problem for the broadcast networks, but it is still worrying for net executives, advertisers, and media buyers. Five percent of the share of the lucrative adult 18-49 demographic has slipped away from the broadcast networks in the last year (from 15. to 14.3). FOX leads the broadcast networks in ratings for this demographic with just fewer than 5 million viewers, ahead of ABC and CBS. NBC is by far the weakest in this demographic, with just under three million viewers. At the same time, ad-supported cable's share of advertising spend grew by 3% and continued to garner a higher rating (from 15.5 to 15.9). As early as 2004, Nielsen Media reported that cable owned a 52% share of the market in contrast to broadcast's 44%. In other words, there is a discernable trend away from mass media advertising. Part of the problem is that advertisers are seeking out more specific demographics, diverting advertising budgets to more specialized and targeted media channels. According to Eric Schmitt of Forrester Research, "[m]onolithic blocks of eyeballs are gone...in their place is a perpetually shifting mosaic of audience micro-segments that forces marketers to play an endless game of audience hide-and-seek."
May 28, 2007
Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTubeThe following is adapted from remarks I made at the International Communications Association conference in San Francisco this past week. I was asked to be part of a plenary session organized by Fred Turner, "What's So Significant about Social Networking?: Web 2.0 and Its Critical Potential," which also featured Howard Rheingold, Beth Noveck, and Tiziana Terranova. We had ten minutes to speak so I took this as a challenge and offered nine big ideas about the place of YouTube in contemporary culture. Many of these ideas will be familiar to regular readers of this blog since most of them have evolved here over the past year, but I thought you might find them interesting distilled down in this form. (For those who may be joining us from the ICA crowd, I've included links back to the original posts from which these ideas have evolved.) 1. YouTube represents the kind of hybrid media space described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks -- a space where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and activist content co-exists and interacts in ever more complex ways. As such, it potentially represents a site of conflict and renegotiation between different forms of power. One interesting illustration of this is the emergence of Astroturf -- fake grassroots media -- through which very powerful groups attempt to mask themselves as powerless in order to gain greater credibility within participatory culture. In the past, these powerful interests would have been content to exert their control over broadcast and mass market media but now, they often have to mask their power in order to operate within network culture. 2. YouTube has emerged as the meeting point between a range of different grassroots communities involved in the production and circulation of media content. Much that is written about YouTube implies that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled the growth of participatory cultures. I would argue the opposite: that it was the emergence of participatory cultures of all kinds over the past several decades that has paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of platforms like YouTube. But as these various fan communities, brand communities, and subcultures come together through this common portal, they are learning techniques and practices from each other, accelerating innovation within and across these different communities of practice. One might well ask whether the "You" in YouTube is singular or plural, given the fact that the same word functions for both in the English language. Is YouTube a site for personal expression, as is often claimed in news coverage, or for the expression of shared visions within common communities? I would argue that the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration. 3. YouTube represents a site where amateur curators assess the value of commercial content and re-present it for various niche communities of consumers. YouTube participants respond to the endless flow and multiple channels of mass media by making selections, choosing meaningful moments which then get added to a shared archive. Increasingly, we are finding clips that gain greater visibility through YouTube than they achieved via the broadcast and cable channels from which they originated. A classic example of this might be the Colbert appearance at the Washington Press Club Dinner. The media companies are uncertain how to deal with the curatorial functions of YouTube: seeing it as a form of viral marketing on some occasions and a threat to their control over their intellectual property on others. We can see this when Colbert and his staff encourage fans to remix his content the same week that Viacom seeks legal action to have Colbert clips removed from YouTube 4. YouTube's value depends heavily upon its deployment via other social networking sites -- with content gaining much greater visibility and circulation when promoted via blogs, Live Journal, MySpace, and the like. While some people come and surf YouTube, it's real breakthrough came in making it easy for people to spread its content across the web. In that regard, YouTube represents a shift away from an era of stickiness (where the goal was to attract and hold spectators on your site, like a roach motel) and towards an era where the highest value is in spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active agency of consumers in creating value and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content.) 5. YouTube operates, alongside Flickr, as an important site for citizen journalists, taking advantage of a world where most people have cameras embedded in their cellphones which they carry with them everywhere they go. We can see many examples of stories or images in the past year which would not have gotten media attention if someone hadn't thought to record them as they unfolded using readily accessible recording equiptment: George Allen's "macaca" comments, the tazering incident in the UCLA library, Michael Richards's racist outburst in the nightclub, even the footage of Sadam Hussein's execution, are a product of this powerful mixture of mobile technology and digital distribution. 6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple's "1984" advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy: Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it. Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House. 7. YouTube helps us to see the shifts which are occurring in the cultural economy: the grassroots culture appropriates and remixes content from the mass media industry; the mass 8. In the age of YouTube, social networking emerges as one of the important social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to become meaningful participants in the culture around them. We need to be concerned with the participation gap as much as we are concerned with the digital divide. The digital divide has to do with access to technology; the participation gap has to do with access to cultural experiences and the skills that people acquire through their participation within ongoing online communities and social networks. 9. YouTube teaches us that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. As John McMuria has shown us, minorities are grossly under-represented -- at least among the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube, which still tend to come most often from white middle class males. If we want to see a more "democratic" culture, we need to explore what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within the new participatory culture.
May 25, 2007
Chris Williams Responds to Our Questions about FanLibAs of a few minutes ago, I have received Chris Williams' response to the questions we collected here. I promised him that I would run his answers in full and I have accordingly made no changes here except to format this in a way that will make it readable on the blog. I should warn people that I am tied up with a conference this afternoon and this evening. I will put through comments from readers as quickly as I am able to do so but I may be off line for extended periods of time, so please be patient. As always, if you get an error message, send your comments directly to me and I will post them myself.
Dr. Jenkins, BASIC BACKGROUND I am a complete media junkie. I love stories and since 2003 I have involved over 100,000 people in online fan fiction events. Because of my involvement in these events I've definitely spent the most time with Harry Potter and L Word fan fiction. As you see from my response in the forums, I am not a great writer. Several people in our small company come out of the fan fiction world. All of us are now involved in the community.What led you to create this site? What first gave you the idea and why did you carry through with it? What are you hoping to achieve? What sold your investors that this was a good idea and that this was the right time to move forward? I was deeply involved with the ongoing online revolution at Yahoo for a long time and I have always had a passion for film. In 2001, my friend and I had an idea, inspired by many people we knew with creative movie ideas, who didn't have the means or access to realize them. So we tried to create a collaborative event for fans to write an original script and produce a feature film from it. It quickly became apparent to us that online storytelling was about more than script writing: entertainment fans were also looking for venues to showcase their talent, and media companies were wrestling with how to best operate in a changing world. So we started by testing the waters with fans by running special online storytelling events and found that many of the participants loved fan fiction. We went to the media companies, talked to them about how they wanted to work with online communities and found that many wanted to connect with fan fiction readers and writers. FanLib started running special events in partnership with media companies and publishers in a moderated, controlled environment. These events were so successful with both fans and the media companies that we decided to create a venue for online storytelling based upon fan fiction. What is the basic value proposition you are making? Who is making money here? Why are the fans not being compensated for the work they produce? In what other ways might fans receive benefit from their participation in your site? The value proposition for fans is a free venue where they can pursue their passion by creating, showcasing, reading, reviewing, sharing, archiving, discovering stories, and by participating in fun events in a community with similar interests. For those that are interested, they can also get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms through official special events we create with media companies, like we just did with the TV show Ghost Whisperer. What does FanLib offer a fanfic writer that other ad-free sites run by people from within the fanfic community do not? FanLib offers four things: First, we provide a venue for people who want to showcase and share their stories, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events. Who is the target audience for the site? Did you do a market survey and identify who they wanted, and what is the demographic breakdown of that audience?
COPYRIGHT ISSUES FanLib.com members do not give up any ownership rights when they use the website. Neither do they acquire any additional ownership rights to characters and settings owned by someone else. FanLib does not own any rights to a member's content; the members only authorize us to share it on our own website and allow other members to make use of it for their own noncommercial purposes. By submitting a story on FanLib.com, they do not give up any rights to post it on any other website. FanLib imposes no restrictions on what you do with your content outside our website. The old beta terms of service (TOS) did have the word "edit," which caused a lot of confusion and has been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community. Fanfic remains in a legal gray area because there has yet to be a precedent set stating that it is or is not, legal. Many fans worry that FanLib changes the terms by which fan fiction is being produced and circulated by charging money and pushing it further into the public eye and that this increases the risk of legal action against it. A court battle could adversely impact the entire fan community by basing case law on the most commercial rather than the least commercial forms of the practice. How might you respond to this concern? What risk analysis have you done here? We have done an extensive risk analysis and are comfortable with supporting fan fiction through our website. As some of our members have already acknowledged, the landscape is changing. Fan fiction is already on the radar of media companies and publishers. For example, Lucasfilm, which has traditionally been conservative about fan-generated content, has even added, this year for the first time, a fan fiction category to their annual "Official Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge," and NBC has invited fans to submit their theories around the TV show Heroes. We want to be positive agents in this change by working with fans, media companies and rights holders. We are going to do whatever is feasible to assure people that posting on FanLib.com does not somehow add to their liability. Our goal is build a great venue, open to everyone, that allows people to showcase their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events. We think that by building a collaborative model, we will positively impact the fan community and will avoid needless litigation. We believe that we will be seen as an online community that goes to great lengths to protect everyone's rights in a positive, collaborative way. For those members or prospective members who are worried, I encourage them to look at our new TOS, which we feel are very fan-friendly. FanLib.com is a free service for users, and we do not charge fans to read or post fan fiction.
Your previous efforts around The L Word and The Ghostwhisperer involved working directly with production companies to authorize certain kinds of fan fiction. Why have you shifted strategies with this new initiative? And can you reconcile the two models?
How is the site planning to deal with the (inevitable) first complaint from a copyright holder?
Again, our old beta terms of service (TOS) was not a good expression of our intent. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community, including this issue. Indemnification clauses are a standard part of most website TOS. For your convenience, here is the language from our new TOS: "You agree to indemnify and hold harmless FanLib, its officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney fees) arising from any violation of the Terms. This indemnification obligation will survive these Terms and your use of the website for 12 months." CONTENT ISSUES These words, which were included in our old beta TOS and caused understandable confusion, have now been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects the input of the fan fiction community, including this issue. Naturally, we will do whatever we must to abide by law. In your marketing brochure -- I'd like to clear up some confusion around the FanLib brochure you're quoting from. First, it was produced three years ago - in 2004. Second, as a company, we have two distinct parts: COMMUNITY RELATIONS ISSUES Fans note that someone named "Naomi" was used to send out the original invitation letters to fan writers, but fans have been unable to find out who this person is. Is it a real person or a sock puppet? Why was a female name used for this purpose, when the board of directors for the company seems to be all male? Why has the initial advertising with its play on the Charles Atlas bodybuilding campaign adopted such a masculine metaphor for what has been and remains an overwhelmingly feminine cultural practice? I acknowledge the way we sent out certain invitations was flawed. Our objective was to invite fan fiction authors to participate in our beta test and, if they chose to, join our beta team testing the site and providing feedback. As I hope you can appreciate, I am not going to publicly discuss personal details about our employees. We do not use sock puppets, no gender criteria were taken into account during the process and nobody at FanLib is pretending to be of a different gender. Many fans feel that the company has done a poor job so far in community relations. What steps are you taking to turn this around? Are you rewriting the terms of service and FAQ based on the feedback you've received? Are you planning to develop an advisory board composed of members of the fanwriting community?
What, if anything, do you think you can do to enhance the credability and responsiveness of FanLib to the people who have invested their energy into fan fiction in some cases for several decades?
This last question is a bit awkward for both of us but it has come up a number of times and so I feel I need to ask it: Isn't it somewhat symptiomatic of FanLib's problems that the spokespeople are more willing to talk to a man with credentials rather than some of the female fan writers who have approached you? I do think your question is a bit unfair, but I'll answer anyway. I am here because you hold dual citizenship in fandom and academia, you maintain credibility and integrity in both worlds, and you told me I you would get a fair hearing and you would share the unedited results of our interview in its entirety with those interested in the matter. Meanwhile, we've been listening to the many comments we've received from the community and taking action. For proof check out our new TOS and FAQ on our website. Thanks again for your willingness to be interviewed. Thank you for the opportunity.
May 25, 2007
Cartoons -- Modern and PostmodernHaving spent much too much time this week setting up the Fan Boy/ Fan Girl Detante and getting involved in the debates surrounding FanLib, I hope I will be forgiven for a post which is mostly a series of interesting links that I have had stumbled on recently, all surrounding one of my favorite topics -- comics and animation. Modern I recently had the pleasure of introducing CMS graduate student Andres Lombana to the astonishingly original cartoons which came out of UPA studios in the 1950s, including my personal favorite, Gerald McBoing Boing, or their highly stylized version of The Tell Tale Heart or their adaptation of James Thurber's The Unicorn in the Garden or the oft-neglected Christopher Crumpet and Family Circus or... Andres returned the favor by introducing me to a really interesting blog that author Amid Amidi has created around his book, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. The blog is a treasure trove of classic commercials and cartoons, often obscure early works by important animators, as well as storyboards, sketches, promotional materials, and the like, surrounded by interesting critical commentary. I strongly recommend this site to anyone who shares my interest in 50s animation or who is simply interested in understanding the intersection between modern art and popular culture. Postmodern 1 Have you seen A Fair(y) Use Tale? It's a provocative video circulating on YouTube and where-ever else fine mash-up videos can be found which explains core concepts in American copyright law, including, of course, fair use, through the appropriation and re-contextualizing of segments from classic Disney movies. The film was produced by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. The video is being distributed by the Media Education Foundation. (I don't always like the films produced by the MEF, which often seem to be heavy-handed and pedantic and tend to demonize both media producers and consumers, but this seems like an especially valuable contribution to our teaching about the current copyright wars and came just in time to be a welcome relief from grading papers.) As the closing moments of the film suggest, Disney as a company has been the big bad wolf of American copyright law, bullying everyone from local daycare centers to the Academy Awards which seeks to quote images from their films. Some have gone so far as to describe the current copyright statues as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because it essentially keeps expanding the period covered by copyright to insure that the rodent never falls into public domain. So, it seems only fair that Disney sounds and images be used to help the public understand its rights and responsibilities under current intellectual property law. That said, I'd watch this one now before the Cease and Desist letters start to fly. Postmodern 2 The Apple vs. PC advertising campaign has become one of the most quoted themes in contemporary popular culture. Not since the "Whazzup" madness of a few years ago have we seen a commercial which provided such a rich and recurring template for grassroots appropriations. So, it is not surprising that fan boys are using it to comment on the ever-green debate about the relative merits of DC vs. Marvel superheroes. You can see the results in two very different videos making their rounds these days -- the first focuses on the two companies and their products, the second pits Batman against Spider-man, suggesting that Peter Parker has a way to go before he can match Bruce Wayne's record for pain and personal trauma. Enjoy!
May 24, 2007
CMS and Media Lab Get Knight Grant to Start a Center for Future Civic MediaThe John and James L. Knight Foundation announced today that the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Media Lab would receive a grant of $5 Million over the next four years to create and operate a Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM). The money comes as part of a new initiative the foundation has launched to deploy new media technologies to foster greater civic engagement. Here are some excerpts from the press release announcing the award: MIT, MTV, top young computer programmers and bloggers are among the 25 first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, announced today at the Editor & Publisher/ Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Miami. I am personally looking forward to the partnership with the MIT Media Lab. I have joked through the years that I should have "outside reader, Media Lab" printed on my business cards because of all of the times I have served on thesis and dissertation committees within the Lab, starting within days of my arrival at MIT 16 years ago. I co-edited From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games with Justine Cassell when she was part of the Lab's faculty. But this will be the first formal research collaboration between the two groups. It gives me a chance to work closely with Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Mitchell Resnick, two faculty members in the Lab, who I have known and respected for many years. Together, we are going to create a new research center which will host events designed to showcase the best practices among community leaders and educators working in the emerging field of civic media and transmit their perspectives via blogs and podcasts; we will be drawing on those insights to inform the design and deployment of a range of new technologies and practices which are designed to help people in communities learn more about their local governments, get to know their neighbors, and form new social relations; we will be taking those technologies and practices into the field to test them in communities across the country; and we will be running training programs to help spread these ideas even further. By civic media, we don't simply mean citizen journalism, though clearly that is part of what Knight sees as our mandate. We mean all kinds of practices which bring community members together and give them a reason to interact with each other. We have ideas for projects that effect groups as diverse as high school journalists, senior citizens, and new immigrant populations. We are very grateful for the support of the Knight Foundation which will give us a chance to put some of our ideas about civic media into action. We hope we can make a difference on the ground -- where people live -- and through these efforts, further realize the vision of "applied humanities" that has been a core ideal of the Comparative Media Studies Program since its inception. There's a great deal more to tell about this new initiative and I will be sharing information here in the weeks and months ahead.
May 23, 2007
What MIT Students are Learning about Communicating Science to the PublicOne of the truly remarkable things about teaching at MIT are how many of our best students are crossing over from the sciences or engineering programs to take classes in media studies. They hope to use what they learn in our courses to improve their capacity to communicate scientific ideas with the general public. Here are two examples: For the past few years, the Comparative Media Studies Program has been partnering with Terrascope, a freshman year program run by faculty from Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Terrascope students spend the year focusing on one of the world's leading environmental problems, pooling together research, talking to experts, and taking a trip to the site to see for themselves the nature of the problem. Historically, they have learned to translate their findings not only into research papers but also into museum exhibits designed to communicate with the general public. A few years ago, Ari Epstein, a faculty member in the program, approached me to see if our students might be able to help them teach the Terrascope participants how to use radio as a medium to convey their ideas to an even larger public. This year, CMS Masters student Steve Schultze served as a teaching assistant in the class. This year's focus was on how New Orleans should deal with the consequences of Katrina. The result: "Nerds in New Orleans." The other was a paper I received from one of the undergraduate students in my Media Systems and Texts class which manages to combine his passion for climate issues with some of the things we've been learning this term about YouTube and participatory culture. The issues are ones which I have addressed here before -- the controversy which emerged as Al Gore's Penguin Army was revealed to be astroturf, but the student connects this debate to the larger context of media coverage of global warming issues in a way only a MIT science geek could.
Climate change, or long-term changes in average weather conditions, signifies an important issue impacting the contemporary media landscape. The two-minute YouTube video criticizing Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army, now viewed over 500,000 times, offers a compelling example to analyze the role of media in the climate change debate. A framework of questions can be asked around this video, with the intent of progressively working outward to link media with broader cultural trends on climate change: What can be learned from this video? How does it critique An Inconvenient Truth? What were the motives and goals of the video's producer(s)? Why use YouTube to respond to the movie? How do the contents of the YouTube video fall within broader efforts to discredit climate change science? The information presented in An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore's Penguin Army that individuals digest and the opinions developed through related media will arguably impact policy during the coming decades. Another misrepresentation in the video was the penguins themselves. They were all created to resemble Tux, a Linux mascot that does not accurately portray any known species of penguin. Even seemingly credible weather facts in Al Gore's slide show were also grossly exaggerated or untrue, such as "Coldest Day in NYC (January 2005)" and "Record rain in New England (May 2006)." In no day during January 2005 did the temperature at New York City's Central Park (the official site for National Weather Service observations since the 1800's) fall below 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while the all-time record low for NYC was minus 20 degrees set in February 1934. In May 2006, some areas such as Newburyport, Massachusetts did receive all-time May monthly rainfall records, but this record is far-surpassed by rains that occurred in 1936, 1938, and 1955. Now that the video has been discredited, there needs to be an analysis of the motives and goals of the producer(s) of Al Gore's Penguin Army. The video's YouTube page shows the poster as a member by the name of "Toutsmith," who identifies himself as a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills. An email exchange between Toutsmith and the Wall Street Journal enabled the paper to originate the email to a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm whose clientele include Exxon Mobile Corp. When contacted by the Journal, DCI Group refused to say whether or not they had a role in the release of the anti-Gore video: "DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients' behalf," said Matt Triaca, DCI head of media relations. Despite their denial, DCI has a history of raising doubts about the science of global warming, placing skeptical scientists on talk-radio shows and paying them to write editorials. DCI client Exxon Mobile announced that they did not participate in the creation of the video and did not help release it, according to the Journal article.
May 22, 2007
Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of FanLibYou say "User-Generated Content." The differences between the ways corporations and fans understand the value of grassroots creativity has never been clearer than the battle lines which have been drawn this weekend over a new venture called FanLib. FanLib -- "Where the Stories Continue" I first learned about FanLib's latest plans about a week ago when Convergence Culture Consortium analyst Ivan Askwith reported on their efforts in our blog: FanLib.com launched as hub for "fan fiction" writers. The idea is to provide a home for creators of one of the first "user generated" genres, fan stories written using popular movie and TV characters and storylines. Members can upload stories, embed promos and build communities around their favorite shows. FanLib, founded by Titanic producer Jon Landau, Jon Moonves and former Yahoo CMO Anil Singh, is also currently sponsoring the Ghost Whisperer Fan Finale Challenge on the site asking fans to write their own conclusion to the show's two-part finale. Ivan concluded his post with some concerns about whether fans were going to eagerly embrace such a project: Since fan fiction seems to be one of the last traditional forms of fan creativity that hasn't been widely coopted and encouraged (within specific, copyright-friendly parameters) by the entertainment industry...My offhand guess would be that fan fiction, unlike mashup videos, tribute songs, and so on, are harder to 'control', and leave a lot more room for individual fans to take characters, or narratives, in directions that producers and executives aren't comfortable with. FanLib started promisingly enough, courting the producers of programs like The L Word and The Ghost Whisperer, and getting them to run official fan fiction contests. Fans would be able to write in these universes, safe in the knowledge that they would not receive Cease and Desist letters. They even worked with a book publisher to try to put together an anthology of amateur romance fiction. But, FanLib didn't emerge bottom-up from the fan culture itself. It wasn't run by people who knew the world of fan fiction from the inside out. It was a business, pure and simple, run by a board of directors which was entirely composed of men. This last point is especially relevant when you consider that the overwhelming percentage of people who write fan fiction are women -- even if there has been some increase of male writers as fandom has gone on line. To give you a sense of scale, there were more than 700 people who attended the Harry Potter fan convention I wrote about yesterday -- most of them readers, many of them writers of fanfic set in J.K. Rowling's world. By my count, there weren't more than 20 men in the group. That's about 18 more men than would have been there if this was a fan fiction oriented convention 16 years ago when I wrote Textual Poachers! To suggest how out of touch with this community they were, their original ads featured the transformation of fandom from a 90 pound weakling to a more robust and muscular form, leaving many women to wonder if this implied a move towards a more masculine conception of the practice. The company later did produce a female spokesperson who expressed confusion about why gender was an issue here in the first place. Historical Background Consider, for example, this story in Salon in 2000 which describes a company called Fandom.com ("by fans, for fans") which asserted a claim to have trademarked the word, "fandom," and then tried to use its corporate control of the concept to try to shut down any amateurs who wanted to share their public via the web. Salon reported on a cease and desist letter that Fandom.com had sent out to a fan named Carol Burrell. As Salon reported at the time: Fandom.com serves as an umbrella site for numerous "fandomains" -- formerly independent Web sites dedicated to popular, merchandise-friendly topics such as Star Wars, The X-Files and Lord of the Rings that now run under the Fandom.com banner. Each site contains the same structure and design, and there's a large copyright disclaimer placed at the bottom of every page.... Or consider another such effort which Lucasfilm created to "protect" Star Wars fans, one which was described in more detail in Convergence Culture:
As far as long-time fans were concerned, the announcement that FanLib was going to create a commercial portal to support the publication of fan fiction was read as more of the same. Under the circumstances, there was going to be healthy skepticism within the fan writing community no matter how the company approached them, but so far, the company has approached the fans in all of the wrong ways. What Went Wrong There's an excellent summary of the issues surrounding this venture written by a fan. I don't want to repeat all of the details here. But here's how Icarussancalian summarizes the company's initial pitch to the fan community:
This post also notes that FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel for all legal actions that might be taken against them by any production companies that felt that fan fiction was in violation of their intellectual property rights. Fans were going to take all of the risks; the company was going to make all of the profits, all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives. (Taken at face value, the company was trying to "cherry pick" the top writers from the amateur realm. At worst, they were imposing their own aesthetic judgments on the community without any real regard for existing norms and hierarchies.) To add insult to injury, the company surrounded itself with self congratulatory rhetoric about taking fan fiction into the "major leagues," which showed little grasp of why fans might prefer to operate in the more liberated zone of what Catherine Tossenberger, an aca-fan who spoke at Phoenix Rising this weekend, calls the "unpublishable." Or the producers talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream." This is a debate which has long surrounded fan fiction. Some seek to legitimize it by arguing that it is a stepping stone or training ground for professional writers as if commercialization of creative expression was the highest possible step an author could take. Others -- myself among them -- have argued that fan fiction should be valued within the terms of the community which produces and reads it, that a fan writer who only writes for other fans may still be making a rich contribution to our culture which demands our respect. FanLib had done its homework by the standards of the VC world: they had identified a potential market; they had developed a business plan; they had even identified potential contributors to the site; they had developed a board of directors. They simply hadn't really listen to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction.
May 21, 2007
Everybody Loves Harry?The following comments are reflections upon a really intense and delightful weekend spent at Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter Conference held in New Orleans. Thanks to my hosts and to all of the other fans I met at the conference. I am sure that I will be having further reflections on what I learned this weekend in future posts. I got into my taxi from the airport and had the usual conversation you have with a taxi driver in a convention city. He asked where I came from and why I was in town -- as if following a script -- and then asked me what kind of conference I was attending. But when I told him I was going to a Harry Potter conference, his eyes brightened up, his voice grew more intense, and he told me how very very much he was waiting for the final novel to come out this summer. I checked into the hotel and went across the street for some late lunch and played out more or less the same conversation with the waitress. When she saw I had a conference program, she brought several of her friends around -- including some from the kitchen -- who wanted to flip through the program, who wanted to sneak across the street and attend a session or two, who wondered aloud who I thought might be killed in the final installment and whether or not Snape was an evil person. Some of them had stories of the lengths they had gone to celebrate their affection for and affiliation with these books. These folks weren't simply the readers of a best-selling book series; they had all of the passion and at least some of the expertise one associates with the most hardcore fans of any other media property, only they had no direct affiliation with any kind of fan culture or community. I tried explaining this to the television producer, worried that the final documentary, when it airs later this summer, will fall prey to the usual stereotypes of crazed and obsessive fans, totally outside of the cultural mainstream. But statistically speaking, the people who are not fans of Harry Potter are outside of the mainstream. According to Wikipedia, the six books have so far sold 377 Million copies and been translated into more than 63 different languages. Harry Potter will be widely recognized by people all over the world, including many who have not read the books but watched the movies or simply read a newspaper over the past decade. A fair number of those Muggles are very aware that the new novel is coming out in a matter of weeks and many of them will race out to the stores or put in an advanced order so that they will be sure to get a copy the moment it becomes available. More than 500,000 pre-orders had been placed at last count and those numbers are continuing to grow everyday. One can't help recall the stories of the mobs that swamped the docks awaiting the latest shipment of Dickens serials from London. And a fair number of them also know that the new film is coming out this summer and plan to wait in long lines to see it on opening day. Each of the films claims a place on the list of the top 20 money-earners of all time. All of this is part of the Harry Potter phenomenon which suggests the mainstream nature of its success. The conference brought together some of the people responsible for that mass market success including Electronic Arts' Danny Bilson who has helped to supervise the Harry Potter games.
May 17, 2007
When Fan Boys and Fan Girls Meet...There's an old joke that by the time a phenomenon gets the attention of one of the major national news magazines, it is probably already over. A few weeks ago, Time ran a story on the rising influence of "fan boy culture" and then this week, Entertainment Weekly used this same angle to talk about the success of the new Spider-Man movie. I've been so busy trying to wrap up the term that I haven't had a chance to comment before now. Time's article, in particular, was explicit about the gender-dimensions of its claims, titling the article, "Boys Who Like Toys," and opening with the following description: He's one of the most powerful taste-makers in Hollywood, the guy behind the record-breaking success of 300, the hit status of NBC's Heroes and the reign of the Xbox 360 gaming console. He enjoys invitations to the Skywalker Ranch and hangs out with guys like Nicolas Cage and Quentin Tarantino at conventions. He's zealously loyal, notoriously finicky and often aggressive with those who dare to disagree with him. Nope, there's no accident that all of the pronouns here are masculine. In part, this is because the article is focused on the San Diego Comic-Con, superhero comics, and their media spinoffs, not to mention a number of high profile fanboys -- Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Kevin Smith, and the like -- who are exerting power and influence within the Hollywood establishment. The article can't avoid the usually cliches -- coming back in the end to the idea that "fanboys" are "outsiders" who may not adequately predict box office revenues except in the case of those films which are already targeted at niche or cult audiences. The other governing myth here is that fans are fickle and unpredictable; that one can go crazy trying to understand their tastes or listening to their criticism. Entertainment Weekly hits that second point especially hard. (Sorry but that article is only accessible to subscribers to the magazine and I bought my copy on the newstand, so no links.) EW writes about Spider-Man III: The opening also proves the studio can successfully premiere a movie that was scrutinized and dissected on the Internet throughout its entire production, probably more so than any other film in history. Such is the new reality for filmmakers behind high-profile comic-book adaptations and blockbuster sequels, who increasing depend on the Net as a vital marketing tool -- but must also contend with fans who rabidly pick apart, analyze, and leak early peeks at upcoming projects online. "I'm at a loss to know how to deal with that," says Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi, "But it's the world we live in. I just have to adapt." The article describes how studios have made their peace with the spoiling community, actively courting influential fans as grassroots intermediaries the way they once courted powerful gossip columnists in the Golden Age of Hollywood -- because they can help you if they like you and destroy you if they don't. EW calls it "befriending the enemy," a phrase which preserves the separation between consumers and producers, even as it describes the process by which that distinction is starting to break down. It's interesting, though, that EW describes fan culture entirely in terms of the consumption and circulation of information about commercially produced works and has nothing to say about the things that fans themselves create through their appropriation of the raw materials that commercial culture provides them. At least Time wrote about fans who "blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos." This media attention on "fan boy" culture comes at a moment of increasing debate within the aca-fan community about the gender dimensions of fan research. I wrote briefly about this topic a while back in response to some comments which got made at the Flow conference about the segregation of fan boy and fan girl scholars who are writing on similar topics but through different language, around different topics, and more often than not, on different panels. And I followed up a few days later with a second post on this topic. The discussion of topics such as the complexity of cult media narratives, transmedia storytelling, engagement, and convergence are being discussed seperately from long-standing work around fan fiction and fan culture more generally. There is some risk of taking up the industry's own atomistic conception of the fan rather than embracing the more collective vision represented by the concept of fandom. More generally, as I have written here before, phrases like "the architecture of participation" that surround web 2.0 suggest the degree to which network culture is really fan culture without the stigma. At the same time, some of these shifts may reflect growing pains in the ways fan culture gets studied as more men begin to write about their own experiences and interests as fans. We certainly do not want to lose the important insights which feminist scholarship contributed to our early understanding of fan culture -- and indeed, the consciousness-raising tradition of feminist scholarship made it possible for us to write about our own experiences as fans. Yet, if fan studies is going to remain a viable area of research, we necessarily need to broaden the range of theoretical and methodological perspectives which get brought to bear upon it. We need to expand the range of fan cultures we study and the kinds of fan productivity we talk about. It is also worth noting that this work is being produced in a larger context, one where at least some aspects of fan culture are gaining real visibility and influence, while others remain largely hidden from view. This is in part why I opened this post with a nod to Time and Entertainment Weekly, both of whom seem to understand the rise of fan influence in Hollywood along gender specific lines. Fan scholars may simply be reproducing, unconsciously in many cases, the dividing lines which structure the general culture's response to fan culture. A heated and yet highly productive discussion of these issues has been raging over at Kristina Busse's blog, where her somewhat angry response to the discussions of these issues at the Media in Transition conference has so far generated 83 responses from a range of leading fan girl and fan boy academics. I can't begin to do justice to this multi-layered discussion here. If you haven't been following it yourself, you should check it out. But I am concerned about the prospect that male and female scholars may be talking past each other rather than engaging with each other's work. The past few years have seen a range of new books on fan culture, including several important anthologies, that reflect the work of a new generation of fan scholars. So, earlier this week, I wrote to nearly 30 of the key researchers in this field and ask them if they would be willing to participate in what I am jokingly calling "Fan Boy/Fan Girl Detante." Throughout the summer, this blog will be hosting a series of conversations among male and female researchers doing work on fan productivity, participatory culture, cult media, transmedia narratives, and so forth, designed to try to better understand the common ground and gender differences in the ways they are approaching their topic. Kristina and I have been working together to select researchers from a range of disciplines and national contexts, whose research spans not simply science fiction and fantasy, but also soap operas, Bollywood, popular music, games, and a range of other forms of media. The entertainment industry loves big summer events: well, consider this to be a big summer event for those of us who are studying popular culture. While I will be spotlighting two scholars each week, many of the scholars have agreed to jump in both through the comments section here and through their own blogs to expand the conversation. I certainly hope that other fan researchers who have not been contacted about this first phase of the project will get in touch and let us know about the work they may be doing on these topics. Earlier this week, Sibauchi, a media studies graduate student from South Korea, wrote to ask us about the value of fan studies. I am hoping that this series of exchanges will provide many valuable answers for Sibauchi and anyone else who wants to enter into this thriving area of research. I am still hearing back from the scholars I contacted (so some of your favorite scholars may not be included here), but so far, the following folks who agreed to participate. For the Red Team: Nancy Baym, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of Rhiannon Bury, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, University of Waterloo Kristina Busse (PhD) Independent Scholar Melissa Click, Assistant Professor, Communications, University of Missouri-Columbia Francesca Coppa, Associate Professor, English, Muhlenberg College Abigail Derecho, Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literary Studies and Radio/Television/Film, Catherine Driscoll, Chair, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Karen Hellekson, (Ph.D.) Independent Scholar Lee Harrington, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Miami University in Ohio. Deborah Kaplan, (M.A.) Independent Scholar Anne Kustritz Ph.D. Candidate, American Culture, University of Michigan Lisa Morimoto, Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University Roberta Pearson Chair, Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham Ksenia Prassolova Ph.D. Candidate, University of Kaliningrad Julie Levin Russo Ph.D. Candidate, Brown Robin Anne Reid, Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, Texas A&M Louisa Stein, Assistant Professor, San Diego Rebecca Tushnet, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University Law Center Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager disability and media technology blogger Cynthia W. Walker Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, St. Peter's College Editor's Note: I originally identified this as the Pink team but have changed it by popular demand.
Will Brooker, Senior Lecturer, Film Studies, Kingston University Sam Ford M.A. CMS, MIT Jonathan Gray, Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University Sean Griffin, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television Studies, Southern Methodist University Matt Hills Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies Cardiff University Mark Jancovich, Professor, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia Derek Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wisconsin, Madison Robert Jones, Ph.D. NYU Dereck Kompare, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television, Southern Methodist University Robert Kozinets, Associate Professor, Marketing, York University Christian McCrea, Lecturer in Games and Interactivity, Swinburne University Jason Mittell, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Film & Media Culture, Middlebury Martyn Pedler, Independent Scholar Aswin Punathambekar, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Bob Rehak, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College All joking about Pink/Red and Blue teams, aside, my hope is that we will discover that there's more common ground and shared interest here than might first seem apparent to those reading this work in isolation. I hope we all learn things that will inform our work and pushes us in new directions. By pairing scholars on the basis of gender, we insure two things that are often missing from this discussion: we insure that gender remains central to the discussion throughout and we insure absolute equal numbers of male and female participants. I am personally hoping that one of the things which will come out of the discussion, however, is some challenge to the essentialism which can run through discussions of this kind. I don't think all of the work here is going to break down clearly into Red and Blue Teams at all. I welcome further suggestions about people who should participate actively in this discussion. I note, for example, that while this list is very inclusive in terms of gender, it does not yet feel very inclusive in terms of race and ethnicity. I'd love to find some more scholars of color who would like to join this conversation and am very open to suggestions. We will start the conversations here in a few weeks. I will post more details once they are known. By the way, I am posting this tonight from my hotel room in New Orleans where I am attending Phoenix Rising, a major conference of fans and academics who love Harry Potter. I hope to write more about the conference in my post later in the day tomorrow. If you happen to be here at the conference, say hey! I'd love to meet you.
May 16, 2007
The Whiteness of the Whale (Revisited)"I'm talking morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick." -- Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino) explaining his unique interpretation of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" music video in Reservoir Dogs (1992) Like many Americans of my generation, I read Moby Dick in high school. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I was supposed to read Moby Dick in high school. I was assigned the book for Mrs. Hopkins' Biblical Allusions class. We never actually discussed the book in class, as I recall, but rather, we were supposed to read the "Great American Epic" (as it says on the cover of my copy) by the end of the term and then spell out the ways that it built upon religious themes. I remember starting out the novel with high hopes. I had read the Classics Illustrated comic book and had a picture book which stressed the boy's own adventure elements of the story -- from Ishamel's first encounter with QueeQueg to the final destruction of the ship and the death of Captain Ahab. I knew this book was going to be full of blood and thunder. What I hadn't anticipated was the "Whiteness of the Whale," the notorious Chapter 42, which is where my efforts to make it through the book ran aground. The book is full of the 19th century equivalent of a data dump, where Herman Melville tells us everything he knows about whales, whaling ships, whaling rigs, the melting of blubber, and in this case, the color of the beast. Today, we might describe this as a richly detailed world. When I was 16, it was just boring. Somehow, I never got past that chapter. I tried to bluff my way through the paper and Mrs. Hopkins, who was a Sunday School teacher at our church, called my bluff, leaving me with a big red C and with a note expressing her disappointment in my performance. The fact that I never got past the "Whiteness of the Whale" remains a black mark on my intellectual record down to the present day. Well, I have taken a vow to read Moby Dick this summer and this time, I plan to eat the "Whiteness of the Whale" for breakfast. My decision to return to the scene of the crime and overcome my childhood trauma is the result of my recent encounters with a truly remarkable man -- Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the artistic director of The Mixed Magic Theater based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Last weekend, my wife and I drove out to Pawtucket to see a truly remarkable theatrical production -- Moby Dick: Then and Now -- which has awakened in me a tremendous hunger to dig deeper into the world of Melville's novel. I first met Ricardo in the fall through the agency of Wyn Kelley, a colleague in the MIT Literature Section who is a leading expert on all things Melville. (Check out Wyn's essay about Moby Dick and digital media.) Ricardo had launched a remarkable project to get a group of incarcerated and at risk kids to read and rewrite Moby Dick for a contemporary audience. As Ricardo explained, he chose this novel because "everyone was already there," because the book included a multiracial cast of characters and thus offered an alternative vision of what America looked like in the 19th century. He claims that Moby Dick speaks to contemporary concerns even as it encouraged us to look back to the past and understand how we got to where we are today. He knew the book was going to be a challenge to these young men -- a kind of literary rite of passage -- but he also knew that he could inspire them to work through this material and something amazing would come out the other side. The first time I met Ricardo, he was still fresh from the process of working through the novels with this first group of kids. He stood in my office, reciting lines from their script, in his deep resonant voice, and he spoke with absolute conviction that he was going to be able to translate their script into a theatrical experience. Ricardo wants to get thousands of people to read Moby Dick so that they can participate in conversations with young people about their experience of the novel. Those of you who attended the Media in Transition conference heard Ricardo speak about his vision for the play as part of our plenary session on Learning Through Remixing. If you weren't there, you should check out the podcast here. For the past few months, CMS graduate student Debora Lui and Project nml staff members Anna Van Someren and Margaret Weigel have been documenting the process by which the Mixed Magic Theater brought this script to the stage, interviewing the cast and crew, and recording their creative process. When it is finished, this documentary will be a centerpiece to a curricular package we are constructing around Melville and remixing, in collaboration with Kelley. Basically, our curricular guide will start from the premise that Moby Dick might be understood as a kind of "mashup" of the Bible, Homer, and 19th Century American culture more generally. Thinking about the "Great American Epic" as a mash-up helps to make sense of the ways that it mixes multiple genres of writing, suddenly stopping the adventure story for sermons, newspaper headlines, or lectures on cytology. Understanding Melville's work not through a lens of original creation but as part of a larger process of sampling and remixing stories and themes already in broader cultural circulation gives us a way to think about the poetics and politics of contemporary grassroots creativity. This idea about appropriation as a core literacy skill was a central concept in the white paper our team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation last fall. The stage production, Moby Dick: Then and Now interweaves two versions of the story: an adult cast re-enacts the saga more or less as Melville wrote it while a youth cast stages a contemporary version which unfolds in parallel. In the contemporary version, Alba, the Asian-American female leader of a multiracial street gang which calls itself The One, seeks revenge for the death of her brother, Pip, and ventures, with her posse (Que, Stu, Daj, and Tasha), into the heart of the city in search of the "Great White." Where-as Melville's work dealt with the 19th century whaling trade, this new version deals with the consequences of our modern day drug wars. The juxtaposition -- old and new -- is aptly suggested by the Scarface t-shirt worn by one member of Alba's crue -- Ricardo has told me that in some ways, the themes of revenge and self destruction in the Al Pacino film spoke to his young students in much the same way that Moby Dick spoke to him. (Somehow, I pictured Mrs. Hopkins pursing her lips when he said it.) There's a really amazing moment early in the production when Ishamel in the 19th century and Stu in the 20th century are both reading a newspaper report: "Grand contested election for the Presidency of the United States.... Bloody Battle in Afghanistan." The passage comes from the end of Chapter One in the original novel but as the program notes suggest, it could have come from the front page of a contemporary newspaper. The adult version of the story contains its own insights into the book. While Ahab in many media versions can seem a one-dimensional character (a mad man relentlessly pursuing his vengeance and his own destruction to the ends of the earth, unapproachable and immovable in his goals), he is portrayed here as someone who struggles with self doubts, who hears the protests of his crew and feels the pleadings of the Rachel's captain, but can't turn back from the path he sees as his destiny. Around the edges, I saw the glimmers of a political allegory with emphasis placed on Ahab as a man who is lead by his guts and not by his intellect and Starbuck seen as a man whose sage caution gives way to timidity, speaking out against dangerous actions but unable to exert the will to stop them.
May 15, 2007
Anatomy of A Game Secret (Part Two): Animal CrossingYesterday, I ran the first part of a selection taken from Kristina Drzaic's thesis on game secrets, during which she confessed to having invented a secret which has become part of the mythology surrounding the Zelda games. Today, she continues with a discussion and comparison to the way secrets operate in and around Animal Crossing. This passage is interesting in part because of the way she brings together an analysis of game mechanics with a discussion of the grassroots fan culture surrounding the game. In case you are wondering, I am finally starting to dig my way out from the term and hope to start making at least some of my own posts again soon.
My experience with glitches in Ocarina is not solitary. A search on youtube.com for "Zelda Ocarina Glitch" yields well over one thousand hits. What is interesting is often users will use the language of design in describing their glitches. One user 'btermini' writes of their video: I came upe with this idea after doing my test of super mario 64 cartridge tilting glitch i remebed The Legend of zelda ocarina of time is built of the same engin as in super mario 64. so i did some tests....see for your self What this user is saying is that he came up with this glitch from experiences with glitches in other games, he tested it out and it worked. Finally he invites players to try out the glitch and enjoy his design. What btermini did then is plan, design, and display his glitch. Other users often talk of authorship in terms of their glitches. User 'Banana555">Banana555' writes: "**I Found this Glitch by Myself so I dunno if its been found, even though every glitch known to man has been found for OoT lol** Interestingly many other users chastise him for attempting to claim ownership. User 'rkonbon' replies back: "yeah, you didnt find this out, this is one of the oldest tricks in the book for OoT anyways." What this shows is that these users see glitches as something designed by them and not gaming companies. These glitches are described as creative endeavors! For one final example the user 'Nam8Macs' posts "his" glitch the "Zelda Ocarina of Time Super Bounce Glitch" along with credits for editing, camera work, and gameplay. His glitch is not simply a secret game moment but also a production! He writes of his work: "These Rooms are 100% real and have never before been found! i find it a privalage to be able to show you the secrets of Ocarina of Time =D" What we can distill from this then is that players, in their engagement of glitches feel a sense of authorship and design control over the way they interact with and subvert the rules of the game. The intention of these gamers is to strive to redesign or warp the gamespace and then claim credit. They are the designers of the glitch. These players make their own secrets. The premise of Animal Crossing is that the player moves to a village populated by animals with only the clothes on his or her back. A conniving raccoon named Tom Nook swindles the player into buying a house on a loan. The player is told to pay off one's mortgage (eventually) and to do so the player will have to devise ways to make money. Thus Animal Crossing draws on a secret-based form of gameplay in that the player is never told directly what to do in the space or how to make money, rather the game is open for exploration, design of game goals etc. Once a player pays off the house the game keeps going and in fact never ends. As such the player must devise their own game goals and find secrets in order to expand the playability of the game. Animal Crossing offers a variety of gameplay options that serve to significantly change the focus of the game. Animal Crossing allows one to fundamentally change the space and mood of one's animal village through textual manipulation. For example, as a rule there is a keyword or two added to the end of each animal villager's orations. The cat 'Tangy' might say at one point "I love toast in the morning meow" However, when the player is given the option to change the characters speech a simple substitution of words can completely change the connotations of the previous phrase. For instance Tangy's previous phrase could become "I love toast in the morning idiot" effectively transforming Tangy from a simple cat to an aggressive character. By changing the meaning of a character with the game, the player is allowed to participate in a perceived subversion of game rules. Indeed this textual manipulation is not limited to character speech. Players can post signs, send letters, name the town and engage in other atmospheric manipulations. These mechanics, when used in this manner function like a game glitch. The player can inject nuances of character into the villagers that were not designed in the original game. This is a perfect example of how a game designer can design a secret and a player can take it and subvert it into a new type of game design. This mode of secret interaction is carried over into the game function that controls the ability to design and modify the walls, floors, clothing and umbrellas of the villagers. This option gives the player the power to decide how the village looks and how the villagers portray themselves, which in turn allows a huge amount of individualization within a game. No Animal Crossing village looks like any other. For instance, gamers Filip and Zvonimir Sola transformed their village into an ethnically Croatian one. They made their animals wear Croatian colors, designed a Croatian flag, and made their animals speak Croatian phases, (certainly a modification the programmers never imagined.) In contrast, gamers Will, Neil, Nic and Dan Secor, in their village "E" caused all the animal villagers to wear naked human clothing. This modification effectively transformed the village into a nudist colony, another unsanctioned alteration within the game. The game itself does not suggest modifications to the game image, rather, it allows the characters the liberty to customize their own villages for their own pleasure. Further, Animal Crossing lacks clear game goals and spurs the player to develop their own. For example, here is a game goal design created by a user of the game: 1st: Player goes to the store to buy candy.
2nd: Player lacks the funds to buy candy.
3rd: Player writes a letter to the store expressing anger
4th: With the threats unacknowledged the player organizes a town riot against high candy prices. While Nook cannot actually be hurt within the gamespace the creation of this gamestory shows that players can manipulate the game and its goals in order to engage in imaginative play. The player uses the ability to send letters to characters as well as the ability to post messages to the Animal Crossing community as a way in which to create their own game within the game. This player subverted the game structure and made their own secret! Fundamentally, the creation of player made secrets sustains Animal Crossing as a game. In effect, the rule modifications function as self-created attractions. Game play is maintained through the attraction of secrets and the display inherent in perceived subversion. The game has no narrative and no end, instead the player jumps randomly from self-made attraction to attraction. In essence, Animal Crossing is an endless jolt of surprise or (if you will) a video game of player-generated secret attractions. As soon as I entered the town, Friend No. 1 made his presence known by running tight circles around me while wearing a ninja mask...so I was wary until No. 1 calmed down and gave me a master sword, claiming it to be an idol from the original Church of Hyrule. We headed back to his house. He handed me plenty of other presents on the way, possibly to distract me from the state of his property, which might've been regarded by some as a call for help. Weeds and smashed fruit dotted the grass, and unfilled trenches blocked bridges.... It was time to leave. No. 1 urged me to stay a little longer and pray for prosperity and fertility at his master sword idol, but I declined. Oxford writes of another friend: Taking advantage of Animal Crossing's boundless opportunity for freedom of expression, No. 2 dressed as a male and spent a good part of my visit hitting on me. A sprite's orientation is their own business, but when a male who's actually a female makes a pass at you, you can't help but feel confused. And finally: Things were off to a great start when No. 3 met me at the town gate and began watering me. Apparently, I "needed nutrients." She then bestowed an owl clock on me, though whether through generosity or as a part of my newly prescribed diet, I'm still not sure. What all these interactions between Oxford and her friends show is that if we look at the behavior of each friend (the friend who ran circles and urged her to pray, the friend who hit on her, and the friend who watered her) each player put on a show for their visitor assuming distinctive behavior and exchanging text which effectively shaped the way their town was viewed. In Wide World players build off the secrets they design and create a gameplay experience for another player. As a game of secrets, Animal Crossing allows for the kind of play behavior that players strive for in their play with secrets and cheats. Warren Robinette wrote that his videogame secret in Adventure allows for players to reach the game's real conclusion: his name, his easter egg. Secrets today are about players reaching their own conclusion by designing and implementing their own secrets in a gamespace. Players have gained the ability to have some say into the nature of a given game design. Secrets then, while originally a place for designers to play with their designs has now become a place where players can create their own game within a larger gamespace. With the advent of online gaming across all technological platforms the manipulation of secrets has turned into a way for players to design for other players. Secrets have become player-generated game moments shared with other players the world over.
May 14, 2007
Anatomy of A Game Secret (Part One): Zelda's Sky TempleI am continuing to salute the graduating Comparative Media Studies cohort of 2007. Kristina Drzaic tackled a really interesting critical challenge -- how does one write meaningfully about an element which, by her definition, is not a necessary or even self-evident aspect of the game's style, themes, narrative, or game play. She recognizes that the pursuit and discovery of secrets may be deeply pleasurable to those who play games: indeed, there is a robust economy in the trade of information -- both sold by companies and freely shared on the web -- which might help players to find secrets. As this passage from her thesis suggests, there is even enough interest that some people even go so far as to "fake" secrets simply for the bragging rights for discovering them. To try to understand secrets, she found herself looking at phenomenon in other media -- what has been written about, say, gags in slapstick comedy, attractions in early cinema, and excess in art cinema, but none offers a precise parallel to the place which secrets play in games. Throughout all of this, Kristina was clear on one thing -- secrets were central to the pleasure she took in playing games and thus should be open to analysis. In the end, those of us on her committee felt she nailed it, making an original contribution to our understanding of game aesthetics. We hope you will agree. As she has worked on understanding secrets, she has been designing her own secrets for the game, Labrynth, which is being developed through the Education Arcade for Maryland Public Television. Kristina did much of the art direction on the game, doing character sketches and storyboards. The resulting game, when it is released, will be much shaped by her own particular sense of whimsy. The following passage describes her own childhood experience at inventing a secret in Zelda which has become legendary in the game world and why she thinks people were so ready to accept her fabrication. Anatomy of a Game Secret The year was 1998 and the game in which I became the toast was Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was at this moment in my life that I invented my own videogame secret. I was not a designer. Nor was I in the videogame business. I was sixteen years old, a single player and a fan. New to videogames at the time, I often frequented Zelda message boards and chat rooms for help with the game. Over the course of a few months I learned the space of the videogame, found all the recorded secrets, mastered Zelda and then I got bored. The message boards I frequented were full of less experienced players than I, players looking for unknown content, players who were gullible. One of the most often discussed topics in the message board was where one might find and collect a part of a Zelda game, 'The Triforce.' Rumor had it that there was a space on a certain screen that implied that this Triforce could be collected. In a moment of juvenile and rather silly behavior I decided to tell people I had found this 'Triforce' and they could find it too. I announced that if one went into the most confusing dungeon in the game and leapt through the air to hit a particular wall in just the right way they would be able to find a hidden chest that contained, of all things, wings for your horse 'Epona.' The wings would attach to the horse and she would and fly up into the air and take you into a hidden sky temple. There you would find the Triforce in all its glory.
This was not true. Honestly I did not even think it was all that believable. However when I went to research this paper I found endless accounts of people still discussing the Triforce and the sky temple I invented. I even found fan-sites dedicated to the journey players made there, photo-shopped images of the Triforce as it was supposedly found within the game and message boards fighting over the validity of the temple's existence.
What was it about my invented secret that caused such discussion that a small internet event in a fan community would still maintain vestiges of the discussion on the internet after eight years? What made this sky temple secret so believable as something that might be found within the game content? While all the factors involved here could potentially be overwhelming ranging from Mia Consalvo's gaming capital to the fan community makeup and more, I believe there are certain elements within the Zelda: Ocarina of Timetext itself that especially enable belief in this secret. I contend that examining what made my secret successful provides a window into the interaction between players and secrets and will allow us to look at the meaning of this interaction itself. I pose then that the credibility of my secret boils down to two factors within Zelda Ocarina of Time: narrative plot-holes and unresolved gameplay. Building on this I will demonstrate that the "Oh No I'm Toast" glitch moments within the game illustrate what players hope to achieve in their interactions with the secret.
May 11, 2007
Playing with Stereotypes in Wresling and Animation: An Interview with Nick Sammond (Part Two)Yesterday I ran the first part of an interview with media scholar Nicholas Sammond about the cultural politics of professional wrestling. In today's installment, we extend our discussion to deal with his new project -- a book in progress dealing with the connections between black-faced ministrels and the American animation tradition. For those interested in what he has to say below about Disney, you might want to check out his first book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, 2005). Tell us a bit more about your new project which deals with animation and race. How can we understand cartoons as bound up with the history of racial stereotypes in American culture? The new project is one that looks at the beginnings of American animation in the early 20th century, and how those beginnings are bound up with another American performance tradition that some would like to forget--blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was a tradition that stretched back to at least the early 19th century, in which white men covered their faces and hands with black makeup, put on curly-headed wigs, and acted as if they were African Americans. This was not complimentary: the African Americans they portrayed were stupid and lazy, the usual stereotypes of the poor, stupid Southern Negro, the watermelon-eating, chicken stealing, singing and dancing plantation stereotype. Spike Lee made a whole movie--Bamboozled--about this stereotype. Now, if you look at some of our most famous cartoon characters--such as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse--you'll see that they have characteristics that the minstrel had: white gloves, wide eyes and a huge painted-on mouth, and a complete lack of respect for authority. (This was truer of early Mickey of the late 1920s and early 1930s than it was of later Mickey.) What I am interested in is why those qualities of the minstrel were first used in creating trademark characters, and why, even after some of those explicit racial stereotypes became unacceptable to us, those markers of minstrelsy continued. It's important to make a distinction here, though. In the 1930s and 1940s in particular, there were some really racist stereotypes used in animation,particularly in relation to jazz music, which was called "jungle music" by some folks.
So, there were a whole range of associations of blackness with the jungle, with the plantation, with being primitive and close to nature, that had operated in blackface minstrelsy, but also showed up in other racist stereotypes. What interests me is that while those racist stereotypes eventually became widely unacceptable, and even though blackface minstrelsy became an unacceptable performance form, the idea of the minstrel continued in cartoon characters. And you can see it continuing long after in cartoons such as Animaniacs and the feature Space Jams, to name a couple. But even though I see what I call "vestigial minstrels" like Bugs or Mickey as different from racist caricatures such as those I mentioned above, there is a connection. The minstrel character has always been part of a system of what Eric Lott has called "love and theft," or what Stuart Hall has called the "ambivalence of stereotype." Even though the act of a white man imitating a black man is both offensive and oppressive, and always was, there is an element of desire and envy built into it that we have to look at squarely. What I am looking at, trying to understand as an historical phenomenon, is how the figure behind the minstrel--basically a slave or ex-slave--could be something that a white man, either a minstrel or an animator, could envy. And the very short answer to that is, I think, that they didn't envy the incredible oppression of the African Americans, but the modes of resistance to that oppression that they represented. And, references to the jungle and the plantation were about a fantasy of African Americans as being closer to nature than white people (just like "white men can't jump/dance..."), closer to the jungle or the cotton field. Minstrelsy as a performance form became widespread and popular as the United States industrialized, and workers who were white or becoming white were moving from agricultural and craft labor to brutal, routinized industrial labor. The minstrel, who was performed as lazy, shiftless, and slyly resistant to work of any kind, was a fantasy of escape from the rigors of that new economy. Something similar is true for animation, which in the first couple of decades of the 20th century shifted from a artisanal and craft model to an industrial model of production (Donald Crafton has described this history beautifully). So, the minstrel figure--itself a dehumanizing stereotype--represents resistance to dehumanizing regimes of labor. Now, that's obscene and wrong, but if we don't examine it closely, then it's a part of our history that we refuse to examine fully. An example of that might be Ted Turner's decision, a long time ago, to remove those racist Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons from circulation, to spare us the pain of looking at what our culture has produced. He made that decision when the mode of distribution was VHS. But now, with DVDs that contain commentaries and other interactive features, I think it might be possible to re-release them in a critical edition, to begin to confront that piece of our history in a constructive fashion. Is this legacy something that still haunts contemporary animation? Is it possible to represent race in cartoons, which after all depend on high levels of stylization and simplification, without falling back on this vocabulary of racial stereotypes? First off, I think this legacy still haunts many parts of our culture. Look at the recent Don Imus event. What was it that made McGuirk and him go after successful young black women, to refer to them as "nappy-headed hos"? Here were some women who were actually fulfilling the American dream: through hard work, determination, and talent, they were making a mark. I think it's reasonable to ask whether the attack on them was because that dream is still primarily conceived of as white property. But more than that: we have to look at the reaction, too. Imus had been saying grossly inappropriate things for years, and a lot of quite famous people had played along with him. Suddenly, he's a sacrificial lamb for a set of social ills of which he is a symptom, not a cause. (The critic Gary Yonge said something very much like this in The Nation recently.) But if we treat him as a cause and not a symptom, then we don't have to look at endemic strains of racism built into the institutions of American society. What those guys did was offensive and wrong, and I have no problem with them being punished for it. But it's free speech that CBS and MSNBC had been making a lot of money off of for years, and if you don't look at that--at the profitability of racial (and gender and sexual) hostility and the willingness of large corporations to cash in on it--then you're really missing the larger picture. So, to get back to animation. I think it's possible to produce animation that minimizes or avoids stereotypes. But that's not the same thing as producing those seven-minute stories (or Disney features) we call cartoons. There, I think you do get stereotyping because, as you point out, there is a visual economy that the stereotype provides. But this then raises a couple of issues. First, what is the story story in which those images are deployed? We should ask whether it is possible to deploy stereotypes in stories that simultaneously challenge them. I think that might be possible, but it's very tricky. Consider, for instance, Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin. He believed that he was really trying to produce a hip, culturally progressive redeployment of stereotypes, in this case the Brer Rabbit stories (with Barry White starring, and apparently Bakshi has talked with Wu Tang Clan about a sequel). But the film met with controversy when it was released, and there was no consensus as to whether it was racist, or whether it challenged racial stereotypes through its story. This brings us to the second point: what the stereotypes accomplish very much depends on what sort of skills we as viewers bring to seeing those stories, and what sort of space is available for discussing them after we've seen them. When Coonskin was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, a fierce debate apparently broke out. That's good. And the Committee on Racial Equality condemned it, while the NAACP very cautiously endorsed it as a satire. That's good: it leads to more discussion about the meaning and potential of stereotypes. So, for me, the question is not so much whether we can make cartoons without resorting to stereotypes, but whether we can use stereotypes in a productive fashion. But this also brings me to an interesting issue of race and the production of animation. Many of us know that The Simpsons, for instance, has been produced in South Korea for years. A lot of TV animation, which has a very tight turnaround schedule, has been produced in South Korea. What I didn't realize till recently, though, is that a lot of production is moving to North Korea, Malaysia, and China, where labor is even cheaper. So, there is an issue of race and animation that has to do with the politics of its production as well as its politics of reception. Animation as a profession is very much caught up in struggles over the exportation of labor that other industries in the U.S. are engaged in. I'm not making a nativist argument about American labor here. But I am saying that issues of race and labor in animation aren't limited to its images. When we consider the choices and direction the industry is taking--for instance, if we engage in a debate about drawn versus computer-generated animation--part of what we have to bear in mind is that, besides being issues of aesthetics, these are issues of industrial labor, too. And, as I've suggested, in some cases there is a relationship between the two. What did you think of the news that Disney would be producing an African-American "Princess" in a future feature film set in New Orleans? As someone who has written about the history of Disney's construction of American childhood, what can you tell us about how such a project might fit within Disney's long term vision of American society? What challenges does Disney face if it wants to create a credible representation of African-American identity that doesn't fall back on the Minstrel stereotypes that shaped its previous minority characters? You know, there's something funny here. I was reading around about this movie, The Frog Princess, and one of the articles on it, in a Baltimore newspaper, quoted the director of an all-girls school as saying that maybe the movie would allow young girls to ask, "Can I be like this Disney character?" That is, a princess. Which would suit Disney just fine, because the company has a huge line of princess-related goods and services to sell. Now, I imagine that what the director of the school meant was something like, "Wouldn't it be great if African American girls could dream of being princesses, too?" Or, "Wouldn't it be great if white girls imagined themselves as African American princesses?" Underneath that is a desire for girls to see themselves as powerful and capable, and to live in a color-blind society. But woven into those ideas is Disney's skill at tapping into powerful social expectations and anxieties to sell its products. That is Disney's long-term vision of American society: as a market for its products. And one of the greatest anxieties that many people share in a highly competitive capitalist society is whether they and their children (if they have children) will be able to secure a good living for themselves--that they will have economic and social security. You can read those concerns being circulated and laid at Disney's feet in the comments of the school director. Somehow, regardless of other economic, social, and institutional circumstances, seeing this film could be empowering for a little girl. Why? How? Will the film feed into minstrel traditions? Given that it is set in New Orleans in the 1920s, and is supposed to be about jazz, I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Minstrelsy was built on the idea of white "researchers" going to the south to witness real black behavior on the plantation. Cartoon shorts like Tin Pan Alley Cats or Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs played on stereotypes of the 1930s and 40s that referred to jazz as "jungle music." According to the most current info, the film's villain is a voodoo priest (named "Dr. Duvalier"...as in Papa or Baby Doc?) and another character is a jazz singing alligator (straight out of the swamp?) named Louis, so the minstrel possibilities seem rich. I don't think that means that Disney has racist intent. I think the company is playing on the contradictory desires of its viewing public. The American middle class--regardless of race--wants to believe that we live in a color-blind society in which anyone can get ahead if they try hard enough. If stereotypes are used in perpetuating this fantasy, this sort of thinking goes, the positive message of self-realization will outweigh any misconceptions...and after all they're only animated characters. This would be a good example of the point that Spike Lee was trying to make in Bamboozled: in a society that thinks in racist terms without realizing it is doing so, it is impossible not to make popular art that perpetuates stereotypes. Bringing this full circle, how would you compare the role which stereotypes (racial or otherwise) play in animation and in professional wrestling? There were two ideas (among others) in your book on vaudeville, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, that I really liked: affective immediacy and an economy of signs. Affective immediacy is the idea that to be successful, bits in vaudeville had to hit you in the gut: they had to make you laugh, cry, gasp...right away. An economy of signs is simply the concept that in a format where you only have a couple of minutes to do your thing, you have to have ideas, signs, that read really clearly, quickly.
May 10, 2007
Playing with Stereotypes in Wresling and Animation: An Interview with Nicholas Samond (Part One)The topic of stereotypes have long been central to work in media literacy. School children are often taught that stereotypes are unambiguously bad and that we should strive for more "realistic" or "authentic" representations. Yet, there are many problems with this formulation, as Richard Dyer pointed out to us years and years ago, starting with the fact that it doesn't address the reasons why popular art so often relies on stereotypes, it doesn't really acknowledge the degree to which our pursuit of more respectible images may itself result simply in the construction of new and improved stereotypes, and it doesn't acknowledge the many ways that artists -- high and popular -- play with stereotypes to heighten the public's awareness of their constructed nature. Today and tomorrow, I will be talking with media historian Nicholas Sammond about the place of stereotypes in popular culture, primarily read through the lens of two of his favorite topics -- professional wrestling and American animation. I reached out to Sammond in part because of the interest here in wrestling in the wake of visits from Jim Ross and Mick Foley this term but also because of work that Project nml is doing on animation for its exemplar library. I am also trying to convince Nick that he should take up blogging as an outlet for his itch to do more as a public intellectual. Here's a little background on Nick: Nicholas Sammond is Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, 2005), received the 2006 Katherine Singer Kovacs award from SCMS. He is also the editor of Steel Chair to the Head: the Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Duke University Press, 2005) and articles in such journals as Continuum, Television Quarterly, and Camera Obscura. Babes in Tomorrowland is a history of 20th century American childhood and its relation to popular media about and for children. Sammond's current work, tentatively titled "Biting the Invisible Hand," examines the place of blackface minstrelsy in the origins of American commercial animation. One of the guest speakers who came to Sam Ford's class, Lee Benaka, said that he faced great skepticism in the publishing world as to whether any market at all would exist for a book looking seriously at pro wrestling, since it was presumed that wrestling fans and academic audiences were incompatible. Did you face any of this skepticism at any point during the process of putting this book together? Yes and no. My publisher, Duke University Press, was very supportive of the book, even though they knew it would be tough to create a book that is both academically rigorous and accessible to a general audience. Wrestling fans are looking for smart work done on the topic, but I think they rightly mistrust material that seems pedantic or unnecessarily complicated. At the same time, academic power structures expect material that is complicated and pedantic (in the sense of teaching its readers about a topic). Professional wrestling, as a populist phenomenon, is not easy to pin down in terms of its politics. The WWE in particular seems to rail against socially conservative censors as it also pokes fun at activist liberal detractors as well. At the same time, wrestling plays both with and against cultural stereotypes. How does wrestling's complicated politics explain its place in American culture? First off, I have to say something about terms. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" are complicated. A few hundred years ago, they meant pretty much the opposite of what they do today. Liberals believed in free markets and a minimum of government interference (as much as there was a government in many places), while conservatives felt that the government had a vested interest in regulating civic and economic life. Now, those terms have become inverted. But more than that, at their worst, they've become meaningless shells, epithets that people use to insult each other without necessarily really thinking through what they are saying. Henry Jenkins is the co-founder of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. 
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