Comics from the 19th to the 21st Century: an Interview with Jared Gardner (Part One)

Jared Gardner's Projections: Comics and the History of 21st Century Storytelling was the first book I read in 2012 and it was the ideal choice. Gardner makes an incredibly valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship within comic studies, tracing the history of American comics, from the early comic strips at the dawn of the 20th century, through new digital manifestations of sequential art, at the dawn of the 21st century. Projections combines critical analysis of key comics texts with close engagements with the history of their production and reception, making significant new discoveries around figures and events we thought we already knew, and expanding in important ways the canon of which comics justify our research. There are two elements here which are close to my own heart:

First, the degree to which Gardner consistently understands comics as a medium (not a genre) and one which has to be understood comparatively in relation to the other modes of communication at the same time, so comics are discussed in relation to photography, cinema, television, newspapers, books, games, and other digital media, and we remain attentive to patterns of cross-influence across their history.

Second, Gardner makes some significant discoveries about the role of comic fans at key junctures in the evolution of the medium which help flesh out forgotten chapters in the history of participatory culture. His chapter on comics in the context of collector culture touches on some of the same authors and themes I want to explore in my own book project on comics and material culture, so I was delighted to have someone with whom I could bounce some of my ideas about retroconsumption against.

In the following interview, we discuss the relations of comics to other media and the role of fans and collectors in comics history, among a range of other topics. This was an interview I had to do. I kept jotting down questions as I read the book, eager to engage with the author, who surprisingly I did not know, and learn more about the thinking which guided this project. I hope you will enjoy his thinking as much as I have.

The book's subtitle, "the history of 21st Century storytelling," frames your account of the evolutions of comics as a medium in relation to the present moment, which you characterize in the book's conclusion as one of convergence and transformation. In what sense do you see comics as "21st century storytelling"? Is it possible that comics were also embodiments of 19th and 20th century storytelling at other moments of their evolution?

Absolutely! The title is in part an an appeal to scholars interested in narrative and media to take comics seriously as providing a century long history of engaging with transmedial and multimodal storytelling. Narrative theory has become increasingly interested in comics, particularly for the ways in which it complicates its traditionally text-based models and theories; but for media theorists comics often look decidedly "old media"--associated with forms (illustrated magazines, comic books, newspapers) that seem firmly rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is in fact precisely the adaptability of sequential comics since its full development in the late nineteenth century that has contributed to some degree to this association. Sequential comics first developed in the pages of illustrated magazines in the U.S. & Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the illustrated magazine was largely cannibalized by the Sunday newspaper supplement as pioneered by publishers like Pulitzer and Hearst, and as cartoonists moved over to this new venue their work was shaped by the new affordances of the weekly newspaper supplement: color, seriality, a larger and more cacophonous frame within which to tell their stories. As adventure comics in particular began to move into a new format in the 1930s--what would come to be called the comic book--the form again adapted, changing the ways in which it engaged with readers, told its stories, and explored the relationship between text & image, panel and page. So, as you say, comics have always found ways to adapt new media environments and to explore the possibilities of what we might somewhat anachronistically call an interactive, multimodal approach to storytelling from the 19th century on. One of the interesting questions with which I conclude is why, given this history, comics has been so very slow to adapt itself to digital environments in the 21st century.

I do think comics as a medium are at a crossroads, but I am optimistic that comics will survive the translation into digital forms of production, distribution, and consumption--although what emerges on the other end will likely look as different from the comic book or graphic novel as the comics in the 19th-century illustrated magazine do when compared to those found in the Sunday newspaper supplement. So I guess I would not describe it as a crisis, but I do think that it is time for the best creators working in the form to step up and take more creative risks--and for some brave publishers to give them a safety net.

My biggest concern--and I have written about this probably too much in other venues--is that people involved in comics are understandably overwhelmed by the dramatic contractions of the traditional print mediums in which they have long worked and end up retreating into a kind of elitist stance, making expensive "art books" for an increasingly smaller, older and wealthier audience. That truly would be a crisis for comics, which is why I get anxious when I see, for instance, alternative cartoonists abandoning the traditional "floppy" comic book not for new digital platforms and possibilities, but for $20 hardcover comic books that have no hopes of bringing new readers and communities to comics.

But, I also understand the reluctance of comics creators--especially those who are established--to turn to new media platforms with their work. There are so few working models out there that demonstrate that comics creators, historically among the most exploited and underpaid of our modern storytellers, can hope to receive remuneration for their work on the internet. The big mainstream companies--especially DC and Marvel--are exploring digital distribution models both for the iPad and for personal computers, but for the most part these are simply bland digitizations of traditional comic books. And there is every reason to suspect that these digital comics will continue to diminish the viability of traditional comics stores and the communities they have enabled for the past forty years.

Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in the long run that the traditional comics store can or will survive the next twenty years, again with the exception of some well-placed boutiques. But as we see the loss of serial comics books and comic book shops, we see the loss as well of the spaces and the places for collaborative interpretation and shared ownership that is very much at the heart of comics. Certainly, this should be something the internet can find a way to replace, but I am not convinced that Disney (Marvel) or Time Warner (DC) have much interest in nourishing collaborative readers with a sense of shared ownership in their serial narratives. Which is why I don't believe, no matter how much revenue the big companies are ultimately able to move through digital distribution networks (and so far the jury is out whether they can make much at all), that the model represented by platforms such as Comixology on the iPad or Marvel's Digital Comics for the PC is one in which comics will thrive and grow as a form.

What we need are more creators ready to bring their best work to the internet in order to explore the possibilities of the digital environment: comics that break free from the limitations of the printed page--rolling out into an infinite ribbon or inviting new modes of navigation that open up the page to exploration in new dimensions and directions. But we also need new publishers ready to come in and create a place and a business model where this kind of experimentation can be rewarded and find new readers and new investments. Disney and Time Warner already largely see the comic book part of their business empires as loss leaders or promotional tie-ins for their Hollywood enterprises. We need instead a 21st-century Pulitzer or Donenfeld to imagine the business of digital comics in which a 21st-century George Herriman or Siegel & Shuster can thrive.

In truth, in some way comics have less influence today than they have in the past century, despite their surprising visibility. Comics sales are down by any measure in almost every corner of the industry and the notion of a "comics scare" of the kind the nation experienced in the early 1950s is truly unimaginable today. The marketing and merchandizing of comics properties is up, of course, making a very few people wealthy and successful, but little in the vast majority of adaptations of comics on film suggests that Hollywood has any interest in learning from comics in terms of how comics have historically told stories and engaged with readers.

For better or worse, the current love affair between Hollywood and comics will likely cool, perhaps with this year's Avengers, which has so much money riding on it at a time when audiences and critics are growing restless with the decade-long tide of comics movies that it seems almost doomed from the start (then again, I loudly proclaimed the iPhone was going to be a flop, so I would not trust my powers of prognostication). And Hollywood has its own crisis to face, one which it has been kicking down the 3-D road for the past few years.

So while I am truly happy for any cartoonist who secures a retirement from a movie deal, outside of the success of scattered individuals I don't believe the future of comics lies with Hollywood. But they may belong with film. Independent films like American Splendor and even the rare Hollywood production like Scott Pilgrim point to the possibilities of comics and film listening to and learning from each other in ways they have not since their shared origins more than a century ago, but Scot Pilgrim of course was accounted a failure by any Hollywood metric. The best hope for comics and film going forward is to create new sites of convergence where creative success and the bottom line will be measured outside of the blackbox accounting of Hollywood.

You describe in your Coda the shifts which have occurred in film viewing as a result of having ready access to a digital archive of favorite films which we can watch and manipulate as we choose. This access to comics starts earlier, yet there has also been a dramatic increase in comics reprints over the past few years. How has this effort to preserve and represent early comics influenced your decisions about where to place emphasis in this book?

I don't think this book would have made any sense to write had it not been for what we affectionately call the golden age of comics reprints, a period of publishing that has seen long-lost newspaper comics and comic books returned to print. I am fortunate to have daily access to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum here at Ohio State, but until recently without such privileged access extensive reading in historical comics was virtually impossible. Of the comics I focus on extensively in the early chapters in the book--Happy Hooligan, Mutt & Jeff, Krazy Kat, Superman, Spider-man, R. Crumb's underground comix, etc.--almost all are now available in accessible reprint editions. The big exceptions here were Sidney Smith's The Gumps and Ed Wheelan's Minute Movies, pioneering serial strips from the 1920s, but I am now working with the Library of American Comics to get one and possibly both into an affordable reprint edition in the near future. Of course, this "golden age" will end long before we recover all of our lost comics history. In the long run, what we really need is a vast digital comics archive of the kind that licensing and copyright laws makes sadly impossible to imagine at the moment.

In the end, though, I see less evidence than do others of clear influence on the level of the fundamental grammar. Cartoonists and filmmakers ultimately learned to tell stories in unique ways as they explored the unique affordances of their respective media. But there is little question that comics helped provide early film with both a model of "celebrity" with the remarkable national success of early comic strip characters such as Happy Hooligan and Buster Brown and with a clear model for how graphic narrative could provide an opportunity to make knowable the often overwhelming experience of modernity.

As I argue, however, there were ultimately lots of reasons--both economic and formal--for film to go its own separate way very early, and it did. Despite their shared origins, comics and film ultimately did not interact a tremendous amount for much of the twentieth century, all of which makes their convergence in the beginning of this century more interesting--especially as that convergence has extended well into its second decade now, a lifetime in term of the half-life of Hollywood film genres.

Jared Gardner is professor of English and film at the Ohio State University, where he also coordinates the popular culture studies program. In addition to Projections, he is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature (1998) and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (2012). He blogs (far too irregularly) for The Comics Journal and Huffington Post.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Is It All About the Hips?: Sangita Shresthova on Bollywood Dance (Part Two)

To me the themes of nostalgia and orientalism have emerged as a bit of a paradoxical relationship in the case of Bollywood dance. On one hand, Indian dance has functioned, among other things, as a lesson in Indianness for first, second and even third generation Indian dance. Though less rigid in its adherence to protocols and certainly more hybrid in content, Bollywood dance has also approximated this function for Indian-American youth. The West's growing interest in Indian dance both complicated and perpetuates these desires for Indianness as both are shaped by a particular imagined India. Both the nostalgic and orientalized gaze tend towards opulent and recognizably Indian movements, gestures and costumes. But unlike the nostalgic gaze, the foreign interest in India, particularly the one in continental Europe, sometime borders on a slightly condescending fascination with kitsch. To me, this labeling of Bollywood with kitsch and the slightly condescending (though perhaps well intentioned) interest that this generates is where the legacies of Orientalism are perpetuated through Bollywood dance. As I write in my book, I see Bollywood dance as unintentional kitsch.

Though very different in intention, Bollywood dance driven by nostalgia and Bollywood dance informed by orientalism can at times look very similar as they both tend to highlight a idealized kind of Indianness. That said, there are differences in the nuances of how these motivations for Bollywood dance manifest. These nuances, however, may only be intelligible to a very small percentage of audience-members.

The simple answer to this question would be to say that, given the large number of Hindi films produced every year and the global reach of the industry, we should not be surprised that there are conflicting definitions of what Bollywood dance means and does. There is certainly some truth in this especially when we consider that the various narrative contexts of the song-and-dance sequences. Conservative heroines need to move in ways that are appropriate to their convictions. Worldly heroes need to demonstrate this through their globally informed dance style. Narratives demand that Bollywood dance incorporate many cultures and styles. Live Bollywood dancers can then just pick and choose the movement content that best suits their needs and preferences.

There is, however, a more complex answer that builds on this inherent narrative diversity. I believe that it is really the hybrid mixing of dance styles and cultures, which defined Hindi film song-and-dances since early days of cinema, that lies at the heart of Bollywood dance. This mixing also supports the various at times conflicting definitions of Bollywood dance. The hybridity of movement contained within Bollywood dances in turn allows people to pick and choose the elements that most reflect their personal preference and aspirations. This is why Bollywood dance can mean different things to different people in different contexts. The specific meanings associated with the genre of Bollywood dance can thus become extremely localized while at the same time remaining connected to the Hindi cinema's international trends and flows.

Yes, Bollywood song-and-dance sequences live outside films as much as they live in them. Hindi film songs (and the accompanying videos) are often released months before the actual film to help promote the film. The recent case of the surprise hit "Kolaveri Di" is an exceptional example of how effective this strategy can be. Notably, Kolaveri Di, did not actually contain any choreographed dance. The song spread quickly through the internet, garnering more than 37 million views in advance of the release of the Tamil language film 3 that it was composed for:

A portion of the many people who saw the song on Youtube.com (or one of its many response "avatars") surely made plans to actually see the film when it is released in 2012.

Similarly, there are many instances when a song-and-dance sequence endures even as the popularity of the film that contained it fades away. The "Choli Ke Peeche" (What is behind the blouse?) song-and-dance sequence from the film Khalnayak (1993) is a perfect example of this.

That said, there are many layers of meaning within a song-and-dance sequence. Audiences who have seen the film that contained the sequence are more able to interpret the nuances in a song-and-dance that refer directly to the plot. If they are very familiar with Hindi films, they may even be able to pick up on some inter-textual references that connect that particular film and dance to other earlier cinematic works. Inter-textual references to other films, subplots and even real-life events outside the film's narrative are quite common in Hindi films. Audiences familiar with neither the film nor the references that it contains are left to their own devices in interpreting a song-and-dance sequence that circulates outside the film.

Both the narrative and extra-narrative circulation of song-and-dance sequences have implications for Bollywood dance. Dance instructors need to be aware of the possible meanings that may be associated with any given Hindi film song before they teach it to their students. This seems to be particularly true to Bollywood instructors outside India where the appropriateness is a key consideration in choosing songs.

In a stark departure from the scorn it used to receive, Bollywood has gained prominence in academic and other intellectual circles in India in recent years. There is even talk that it is now hip to study Bollywood! In that sense, I am happy to note that my book has been released at a good time and the overall positive response I have received so far confirms it. A few valid minor quibbles aside, the reviews of my book in both Nepal and India have been overwhelmingly positive. I have also been quite surprised with how much attention my book has garnered given the saturated book market in India. I have even been featured in Marie Claire! Flatteringly, the Sunday Indian said my is "a fine blend of in depth research, humour, and astute cultural sensitivity." So far, the reviewers have also generally voiced a general agreement with the points I put forward in Is It All About Hips? In Nepal, a positive review of my book in the Nepali Times (a prominent Nepali weekly) elicited an interesting exchange in the comments section with some commenters suggesting that I was "another Nepali turned Indian" and that "Bollywood makes for some cheap and easy popularity." Paradoxically, these comments actually confirmed my observations about Nepalis national identity and troubled relationship to India. As the Marie Claire (December 2011) feature on the book states: "Whether you love 'em or hate them, the world cannot resist Bollywood."

You can find out more about Sangita Shresthova's work on Bollywood and dance at: www.bollynatyam.com.

Sangita Shresthova: A Czech/Nepali scholar, filmmaker, dancer and
media scholar, Sangita's work has been presented in academic and
creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin),
AIGA Boston/ATE Massaging Media Conference (Boston), the Other
Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival
(Seoul), the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), and Akademi's Frame
by Frame (London, UK). She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of
World Arts and Cultures and earned a MSc. degree from MIT's
Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on Hindi film
dance. Sangita is also founder of Bollynatyam (www.bollynatyam.com).
She currently works with Professor Henry Jenkins on questions related
to participatory culture, new media, and civic engagement.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Is It All About the Hips?: Sangita Shresthova on Bollywood Dance (Part One)

Sangita Shreshtova, a 2003 Alumni of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, recently published an informative and engaging new book, Is It All About the Hips?: Around the World With Bollywood Dance, which explores some important questions at the intersections of transnational media, participatory culture, and film performance. She writes with the experienced eye of someone who is herself a gifted dancer and choreographer and with the theoretical sophistication of someone who has gone through several top academic programs.

This engaging ethnography explores the ways Bollywood dance is moving off the screen and into the everyday lives of fans all over the planet, through attentive close studies of what performance means in a range of different local contexts (from London and Los Angeles to Kathmandu). Shreshthova knows from her own work as an organizer of the Prague Bollywood Film Festival that these films, their music, and their dance cultures, are traveling not only to places where there is a strong South Asian diasporic community but also into places which have had limited history of contact with India before. This is part of the fascination of our current moment where popular culture is being circulated across traditional borders in ways which produce unexpected consequences.

I have been lucky enough to have worked with Shreshtova, first as my graduate student at MIT and now as the research director on the CivicPaths project here at USC, so it is a source of great pride and pleasure to be able to share with you this interview. Here, she shares both her own journey to write this book and some core insights about the transnational contexts within which contemporary popular and participatory culture operates.

In your acknowledgements, you describe Bollywood dance as "a messy, yet appealing, reflection on my own scattered cultural identity." What aspects of your autobiography did you draw upon in shaping this book? Is there something about Bollywood entertainment which speaks especially to the diasporic experience?

While my book is based in ethnographic and academic research, there are certainly some autobiographical elements that informed its final shape. For one, my initial encounters with Hindi films are interwoven with my own cultural struggles to define my Czech-Nepali mixed race identity growing up in Kathmandu. It was during this time that I was first drawn to the hybrid content of Hindi film song-and-dance sequences. Much later, I was once again drawn to Hindi films as a homesick undergraduate student at Princeton University. At that time, I was so grateful to the Indian students who shared their Bollywood audio and video collections with me. The songs and images became an accessible way for me to feel connected to a familiar culture in ways that somehow eased the profound isolation that dominated my initial years in the United States. Watching the films also connected me with other students in similar situations.

Films like Pardes (1997) really catered to diasporic nostalgia. Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardes_(film)

When I returned to the study of Bollywood as a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, I, of course, drew on these early experiences with Bollywood. I then combined my research with my training in dance and media.

So yes, to me, Bollywood films, in general, are very well suited to the diasporic experience. For one, they provide accessible familiar content that can be shared in the community. To me, the hybrid nature of the films themselves is also particularly well suited to the fragmented identities that emerge out of particular diasporic experiences. And, Bollywood dance specifically is an eloquent commentary on the juxtaposition of the global flow of media enabled by media technologies and the physical experience of these images on a local level. This is why I am particularly cautious about the nostalgic urge to treat Bollywood film content as representative of Indian (and at times even explicitly Hindu) culture. To me the richness of Bollywood (dance) is its portable mixing of cultural content that enables multiple (related) meanings to emerge in multiple locations.

There are many practices associated with Hindi film (and more recently Bollywood) fandom, including keeping up with current trends within the industry, organizing screenings, creating art inspired by films and actors, and following references to other films and actors within a given narrative. To me, the shared memory of films is really central to Bollywood fandom. This pleasure may further be encouraged when audiences make watching Hindi films a group activity - to be shared with relatives and friends.

As one of the organizers of the Prague Bollywood Festival, I had the opportunity to witness and encounter many Bollywood fans. (image source: www.bollywood.cz)

In many ways, Bollywood dance grew out of these shared pleasures. Put simply audiences wanted to experience the films first-hand. The also wanted to share these pleasures with others through performance. In this context, thresh-hold to participation in Bollywood dance was very low and took place in the privacy of people's homes or at community gatherings. Anyone could participate. By emulating particular movements from films, dancers could summon up the shared memories of those films. They would also teach movements to each other and invite others to join in as best they could. In many ways, Bollywood dance movements became a shared language of Bollywood film fandom. To me, this is what makes Bollywood dance a participatory culture.

In some ways, current trends towards a more "professional" Bollywood dance as live performance are now changing these practices. There is, however, no indication that the Bollywood dance as fandom is about to fade any time soon.

The relationship between Bollywood dance and the Indian classical dance world is quite controversial and has been for some time. For the sake of clarity, I will situate my answer within the United States and limit my observations to this context. The growing popularity of Bollywood dance and its frequent positioning as representative of Indian dance has indeed caused much concern among Indian classical dancers in the United States. While I am not sure about the actual enrollment numbers, there is a general sense that Bollywood dance is gaining in popularity at the expense of Indian classical dance and many classical dance teachers have expressed their distress at this trend. Often this distress also is tinted with a slight disdain for Bollywood dance, which classical dance teachers tend to see as a less refined, dislocated and even crass from entertainment. There is also a sense that Bollywood dance is in some ways riding on the coat tails of the hard work that many Indian dancers have done to establish and raise awareness about Indian dance outside India. The popularity of Bollywood dance is also a source of concern for those advocating the preservation of specific (conservative) elements of Indian culture in the lives of Indian-American youth who may otherwise only feel a very tenuous connection to Indian culture. 

Students of Bollywood dance often feel that Bollywood dance is much more accessible, malleable, learnable, and fun than Indian classical dance. As source material, song-and-dance sequences from Hindi films are today quite readily accessed through sites like Youtube.com. Students can quickly adapt movements to suit their skill level. They may be in a position to show off their moves to their friends quite quickly as well. In contrast, music to classical Indian dances is often a closely guarded and will only be shared once a teacher deems the student is ready to make a public appearance. There are very few or no compromises made to accommodate student's skill level. They have to master set dances. It may take years before an Indian classical dance student actually has a dance to show and even longer before he/she is ready to perform in public.

Reflecting on these realities, several Bollywood and Indian classical dance teachers have been searching for new ways to address this situation. More and more often, Bollywood dance teachers and dancers make a very active effort to integrate Indian classical elements (and at times actual full classes) in their teaching. They often also actively encourage that their students study classical Indian dance. On the other hand, Indian classical dance teachers make efforts to add Bollywood (or as they prefer to call it Hindi Film dance) components into their repertoire. Drawing on the Indian classical dance Kathak, Anjani Ambegaotkar has choreographed an ode to Hindi film dance in "Made in Mumbai", and Made in Mumbai II.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Funny Pictures?: An Interview on Hollywood Animation with Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (Part Two)

Both cartoons and comedy shorts have a relationship to the Hollywood studio system which is different from the feature films which have dominated film studies. What do we learn about the logic of the studio system by recentering our focus on this level?

CK & DG: To a certain degree, these shorts operated on the margins of the studio system. The units set up to produce them even occupied a separate space within the studios, physically reinforcing their marginality. In many ways, like the B-film, shorts were the poor step-child of the studio family, less highly regarded than the A-level feature, but a indispensable part of the distribution mix.

Even if the studios didn't value the work of the animators to the degree that they might have, the studios did provide an outlet for these animators to ply their craft and the sheer volume of cartoons produced during this period is quite impressive.

Looking more closely at these marginal products of the studio system reminds us that it wasn't only about stars and valued literary properties; the studios were responsible for turning out a varied array of products for mass consumption and both diversity and reliability had equal weight in the industry's calculations. If we consider the role of
works such as cartoons within the broad aims of the studio system, it allows us to see that system as the complicated, hierarchical, sometimes ungainly method of operating that it was. It also helps to reveal some of the ways in which the studios did resemble factories, because turning out animated works relied on so much repetitive labour. Scott Curtis's consideration of boredom in the work of Tex Avery is an incisive look at how that repetitious labour finds itself replicated on a formal level.

The essays here certainly cover the canon of American animation, including the Fleischer Brothers, Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Tex Avery, and Frank Tashlin. What new insights do we gain about these familiar figures as a result of the comparative approach this book adopts?

CK & DG: The most obvious insight is amplified context. Focusing on the studio period means that we don't isolate particular figures as aberrational geniuses. But when exceptional work was produced, we can still understand its relationship to the traditions and tendencies evident throughout the period. Directors like Tashlin and Avery were distinctive, but as various of the contributors point out, they were beholden to broader tendencies enshrined within the system and influenced by comic conventions passed down from other comic forms. By focussing on the basic common element of animated humour, one can begin to see th continuities linking these figures to a larger representational system, to widely-held cultural values, and to a pre-existing industrial context.

CK & DG: Well, we hope that readers will take their cue from Rob King's eye-opening chapter on Charley Bowers and pay more attention to this largely forgotten hybrid figure. More generally, the volume's tacit message is that much of animated work from this period remains underexplored. Again, there are so many films being made during this time that to watch even a fraction of the output requires a lot of time. Representative works of interest are highlighted in the volume, by authors such as Richard Neupert and Donald Crafton, just to take two examples of contributors who focus on largely unheralded cartoons from the 1930s.

But the same could be said of almost any decade within this period: there is a lot to see and a lot to discover. And the work on sound, primarily represented (in very different ways) by Philip Brophy and by Daniel, reminds us that we shouldn't ignore the sonic dimension of these funny pictures.

All that said, this anthology can only scratch at the surface; our main aim was to come at the vast amount of material from a key perspective that had largely been overlooked--that all of these films were made with an aim to get audiences laughing.

CK & DG: One of the more interesting aspects of the gag from an analytical perspective is the constructed nature of it. And yet, as familiar as the gag may seem to a viewer, it must still be produced with an eye to conveying a spirit of spontaneity, else the responsive laughter will be diminished.

For both live-action and animated films, a lot of preparatory labour goes into the mounting and execution of the gag. In live-action, practice makes perfect, whereas in animation, it's all achieved in the process of drawing. Yet the result is so similar. The gags often play to the spatio-temporal strengths of the cinematic universes created by film comedy, the seeming defiance of gravity, the manipulation of objects, the emphatic, almost parodic violence of the pratfall.

Because the intent--to elicit laughter--runs across both live-action and animated comedy, gags are surprisingly similar in both forms, even if the means differ substantially. As might be predicted, animated gags don't have to go to the lengths of live-action to impress us, as it's all ultimately on the page and almost anything is possible.

CK & DG: By stressing the comic conventions that underlie so much of what comes out of Hollywood, live entertainment and the print media, our anthology tries to draw through lines that suggest productive intermedial cross-fertilization. Popular culture is always a product of diverse and not always completely compatible factors. This was true early on, as evidenced by Mark Langer's demonstration of the debt that the Fleischer Brothers owed to vaudeville and the comic strip. Similarly, J.B. Kaufman shows how silent live-action comedy exercised an influence on early sound-era animation. And both Paul Wells' article and your own remind us not to forget that popular comic forms also intersect with modernist tendencies in intriguing ways.

Dealing with these genres, your authors necessarily have to confront the history of stereotyping, especially racial and ethnic stereotypes, in American humor. What new insights do we gain?

CK & DG: Nic Sammond's work on racial masquerade and early American animation is a game-changer, in our opinion. He asks the hard question: how do we reconcile our ready laughter with the fact that many of these cartoons are irredeemably racist? Rather than simply condemning these works, he tries to understand the roots of their racist humour and why they still strike us as funny. There are no simple answers available, but the questions demand asking. And as we say in our Introduction, this is equally true of much of the uncomfortable laughter that these cartoons often engender as they trade in stereotypes, demean women or adopt ideologically reprehensible positions. But by so insistently focussing their energies on being funny, they draw our attention to why we laugh in the first place.

CK: The studio-era cartoons have become a part of our shared cultural heritage and especially in this 'age of allusion,' their importance to present-day animators cannot be ignored, because it is constantly on display. The technology of animation may be changing at a head-spinning rate, but its basic impulse--to keep audiences laughing--remains pretty much the same. So these earlier works will never cease to be a source of inspiration for animators nor of delight for viewers. Our anthology is a reminder that the pleasures of studio-era animation, as palpable as they are, demand careful consideration, as surely as do our often visceral reactions to those pleasures. We designed Funny Pictures to supply that consideration while never denying the satisfaction of the belly laugh. We didn't want to lose sight of the indelible fact that cartoons are funny--while still providing room for reflection.

Daniel Goldmark is Associate Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Charlie Keil is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking 1907-1913 and American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, and Practices.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Funny Pictures?: An Interview on Hollywood Animation with Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (Part One)

A few years ago, I featured here the draft of my essay, 'I Like to Sock Myself in the Face': Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism,"which updated some concepts first introduced by J. Hoberman about American comedy in the 1950s and sought to make a case that artists such as Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Basil Wolverton, and Olsen and Johnson, among others, were part of an informal "school" or "movement" which straddled media platforms. Now, the book for which this essay was written -- Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil's Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood -- has been published and I am featuring this week an interview with the two editors about the collection.

For those of you who are interested in either the history of American cartoons or in live action comedy, this collection will be a rare treat, one which brings together many of the key people working in this space today, including Mark Langer, Donald Crafton, Richard Neupert, Susan Ohmer, Paul Wells, Nicholas Sammond, Philip Brophy, Rob King, Scott Curtis, and Linda Simensky. The contributions extend from considerations of the silent films of the Fleischer Brothers to the echoes of the studio era cartoons in contemporary animation practice, from discussions of racial stereotyping to the role of the musical score. Collectively, the essays both map the familiar and the less well known and contribute enormously to our understanding of how comic texts do or do not fit the logic of the classical Hollywood film as articulated by recent film scholarship. At its core, the book is making an argument that the history of live action comedy and animation are intertwined in ways more complex and more decisive than anyone had previously suggested.

In the interview which follows, the book's two editors, Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil, chose to speak in a collective voice, offering their insights onto their goals for the project and what they've discovered along the way.

Let's start with the question you use to frame your book. Is Hollywood animation a subset of the broader field of comedy or is the cartoon a particular (and distractingly popular) strand of animation practice?

CK & DG: One of the points we wanted to make in putting together this anthology involved acknowledging the hybrid status of the Hollywood cartoon: it is both an example of studio-era comedy and of animation practice. Insofar as American animation developed primarily within versions of the studio system, it became indebted to principles and practices of that system pretty much from the outset. In fact, the routinized labour involved in producing animation would seem to exemplify Fordist principles of manufacture sometimes associated with the studio system. So animation could be seen as the consummate studio product.

But the Hollywood cartoon, with a few notable exceptions, also aligned itself with comic traditions, derived from comic strips, vaudeville, and other pre-existing forms of humorous representation. In that regard, it has strong ties to other forms of comedy coming out of Hollywood at this time.

As we say at the beginning of the book's introduction, Hollywood made efforts to define itself as a purveyor of entertainment, and nothing epitomized that moreso than the relentlessly comic cartoon. And yet there is the proviso: Hollywood cartoons often resist the pull of verisimilitude that we associate with classical period norms, and the cartoon's indebtedness to comedy often manifests itself in an admittedly bounded tendency toward anarchy.

As someone who works in comics studies, I am well aware that both comics and animation are constrained by a tendency to imagine them as a genre rather than as medium and from an assumption that they are, as your title suggests, just "funny pictures." What steps can or should be taken to break out of that ghetto?

CK & DG: One is to rethink the concept of genre, a move that has been undertaken productively by many different scholars in the field, Rick Altman being just one notable example. That would help us imagine the generic category of comedy more expansively, so as to see logical connections between the work of live-action comic directors and those working in animation. There are numerous points of overlap even if there are relevant medium-specific distinctions.

Another is to stop thinking about animation as a genre, period. That makes little sense, as animation is a broad type, in categorical terms, akin to documentary or experimental cinema. What links Hollywood cartoons to other animated work is the fact of animation, not any generic affiliations.

But what binds cartoons to their humorous live-action counterparts is the common aim of trying to evoke laughter from an audience: whether that makes all such films part of the same broad genre or mode is a separate matter. But at a certain level, Rabbit of Seville has more in common with A Night at the Opera than it does with Begone Dull Care, so the fact that these are FUNNY Pictures should not be undervalued

Does focusing a book on the comic aspects of animation run the risk of reinscribing the stereotypes or does it allow us a way to think past them?

CK & DG: Admitting to the inherently humorous nature of these films addresses an historical reality borne out of production decisions made at the time. Studios could have made serious animated films had they wanted to, and Disney certainly infused its features with a high degree of dramatic material (though rarely the shorts). But the cartoon as comic short remained the studio norm for decades, and even now, as Linda Simensky shows when writing about television animation in the 1990s and its indebtedness to the studio era, the vast majority of American animated film and television material is still designed to make audiences laugh.

Rather than seeing this as a stereotype, our volume seeks to understand how and why this happened. Many of the contributors take very seriously the cartoon's impetus to make us laugh and that proves to be a valuable analytical endeavour. From Susan Ohmer's examination of how Disney engaged in forms of audience response research in the 1940s to ensure that their cartoons maximized the production of humour through animation to Ethan de Seife's attentiveness to Frank Tashlin's mise-en-scene-based comedy, the essays in our volume demonstrate in quite varied ways how paying closer attention to the comedic aspects of American studio-based animation reveals a new dimension of a seemingly familiar period of classical filmmaking.

Tish Tash: The Animated World of Frank Tashlin

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Comics and Graphic Storytelling: A Sample Syllabus

Last week, I featured an interview with the editors and contributors to a new anthology, Critical Approaches to Comics, suggesting that it signaled the solidification of Comics Studies as a field of academic research. As it happens, I am putting the final touches to a syllabus I have been developing for a Comic Studies course which I will be teaching in the Spring here at the University of Southern California, one which makes extensive use of that collection.

Today, I thought I would share with you the basic blue print of this class, which is designed to expose students to a range of different methods for studying the medium and to as broad a sample of (primarily) American comics and graphic storytelling as I could cram into one subject. I've found in the past that undergraduates often know a pretty limited sample of comics -- sometimes the mainstream super heroes, sometimes independent titles -- but they lack a depth of historical perspectives and a mental model of a full range of what comics can and are doing. As a consequence, the most valuable thing we can do as teachers is to expose them to as many comics as it is humanly possible to read in a semester and to diverse ways of reading and discussing what they are reading. At the moment, I have probably pushed this past the breaking point and I am most likely stripping down some of what is currently listed, but having pulled together such a rich list of materials, I figured why not share them with my readers.

JOUR 499 Special Topics: Comics and Graphic Storytelling
Henry Jenkins

"Comics are just words and images. You can do anything with words and images" - Harvey Pekar

In this class, we will take apart Pekar's core claim about the nature of his medium. Our approach is emphatically exploratory. While we will deal with many of the dominant figures of historical and contemporary comics, we will not necessarily observe proper boundaries (between high and popular art, between independent and mainstream comics, between historical and contemporary comics, between American and international comics). We want to explore the full range of different uses which have been made of this medium.

Our central focus will be on comics (including comic strips but primarily comic books and graphic novels) as a medium rather than as a genre - that is, we believe that the formal practices of comics can be deployed to tell a broad range of different kinds of stories and speak to diverse kinds of audiences. We want to put this proposition to the test by developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium and then looking at how artists have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts.

To do this, we will need to read lots and lots of comics - don't complain. I am assuming you are taking this class because you like, no, love, comics. Some of them will take you outside your comfort zone. Some of them will deal with controversial material. Some of them will look ugly or strange when you first encounter them. Some of them may frustrate or confuse you. But most of them, when everything is said and done, will entertain you. Few of you will read as broad a range of comics as you will encounter here, so use this reading to map the territory and expand your tastes. While I hope you like the comics I've chosen, I care more that you come to understand and appreciate them for what they tell us about the comics tradition.

Objectives

By the end of the class, the student will:

• Be able to deploy a range of different methods for analyzing comics (including formal technique, genre, authorship, and intertextual analysis)


• Grasp how comics tell stories through words and images


• Be able to describe the basic vocabulary of graphic storytelling


• Be familiar with the core figures who shaped the history of comics as a medium


• Discuss the continuing relevance of the superhero genre as an window into understanding American life.


• Be aware of the differences between American comics and the graphic traditions of other leading comics-producing countries, including Japan and France


• Understand the differences between mainstream, independent, and underground comics traditions


• Understand the relationship between the comic strip and comic book traditions


• Developed a model for thinking about the ways comics have been a vehicle for journalism, history, autobiography, and social commentary


• Explain how contemporary comics artists have built upon materials borrowed from the larger tradition, using past themes and icons to shed light on contemporary culture


• Be able to discuss how women and minority authors have carved out a space for themselves within the comics tradition

Formal analysis paper - The student will select one of the comics we've read this term (or another of their own selection, with the approval of the instructor), and write a concise five page paper applying one of the methods of formal analysis we have examined in the first part of the class (McCloud, Eisner, Smith and Duncan) with the goal of helping us to better understand the techniques the graphic storyteller is deploying and how they contribute to the overall meaning and expressiveness of the book. Where possible, ground your analysis in the readings, though do not simply replicate what the critics we are reading have already done. Please provide concrete examples to support your claims. (20 Percent) DUE DATE (Feb. 22)

Author Analysis - Select a favorite comic book author, preferably one we have not read in the class, and develop an concise five page analysis of their specific qualities as an author, informed by the Randy Duncan essay we've read on Alan Moore. Draw examples from multiple texts from their body of work to show repeated patterns or themes. Discuss their relationship to their genres and to the comic book traditions which have informed their approach. Again, the paper will be evaluated based on the quality of the argument and your ability to support your claims with concrete examples. (30 Percent) DUE DATE (April 2)

Character analysis paper - Select a character from comic strips or comic books who has been especially meaningful to you. Write a concise five-page paper which explores some of the following questions: What do you see as the primary qualities of this character and how have they emerged over time as we have watched the character interact in a range of different situations and stories? What has changed and remained the same about the character over time? How have shifts in authorship impacted the character? Again, ground your analysis with concrete examples which support your claims. The paper will be evaluated based on the quality of the analysis and of the supporting evidence. (20 Percent) DUE DATE (Exam Week)

Books

(A Word to the Wise: Comics are expensive, and we are going to be reading lots of them in this class, so my recommendation is that you form a buddy or club system, much as you did when you read comics when you were younger. Go in together with 2-3 people and swap off the comics, so you each carry a more reasonable part of the price.)

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper, 1990, 224 pp.)

Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011, 328 pp.)

Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library, Number 16 (self-published). (64 pp.)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road (Portland, OR: Dark Horse, 2000, 296 pp.).

Peter Kuper, The System (New York: DC Comics, 1997, 192 pp.)

Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, DayTripper (New York: Vertigo, 2011, 256 pp.)

David Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp (New York: Pantheon, 2009, 344 pp.)

Craig Thompson, Blankets (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2011, 592 pp.)

David B., Epileptic (New York: Pantheon, 2006, 368 pp.)

Al Capp, The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002, 144 pp.)

James Sturm and Guy Davis, Fantastic Four Legends: Unstable Molecules (New York: Marvels, 2003, 128 pp.).

Keith Chow and Jerry Ma (eds.) Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (New York: New Press, 2009, 200 pp.)

Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke (New York: DC, 2008, 64 pp.)

Mike Carey and Peter Gross, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (New York: Vertigo, 2010, 144 pp.)

Joyce Farmer, Special Exits (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010, 208 pp.)

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2004. 160 pp.).

The rest of the Readings will be on Blackboard.

Schedule

Week 1
Monday, January 9 - Getting Started

• Scott McCloud, "Setting the Record Straight," Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 2-24

Wednesday, January 11 - Caricature and Illustration

• Scott McCloud, "The Vocabulary of Comics," Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 24-59.


• Joseph Witek, "Comic Modes: Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family's Dirty Laundry", in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 27-42.


• R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Excerpts from The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics (San Francisco: Last Gasp Comics, 1993), pp. 6-41.


• R. Crumb, excerpts from The Book of Genesis Illustrated (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), Chapter 1-9 (28 pages)

• Scott McCloud, "Blood in the Gutter," Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 60-93.


• Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library, Number 16.

Week 3
Monday, January 23 - The Shape of the Page

• Will Eisner, "The Frame," Comics and Sequential Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), pp. 39-102.


• "Will Eisner, The Spirit," in Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (eds.) A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1981), pp. 269-294.


• Will Eisner, "A Contract With God" and "Izzy the Cockroach and the Meaning of Life," The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 3-62, 187-204.

• Wednesday, January 25 - Visual Storytelling in the Japanese Tradition


• Pascal LeFevre, "Mise En Scene and Framing: Visual Storytelling in Lone Wolf and Cub" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 71-83.


• Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road (Portland, OR: Dark Horse, 2000).

Week 4
Monday, January 30 - Wordless Comics

• David A. Berona, "Wordless Comics: The Imaginative Appeal of Peter Kiper's The System," in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 17-26.


• Peter Kuper, The System (New York: DC Comics, 1997).

• Scott McCloud, "Time Frames" Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 94-117.


• Richard McGuire, "Here," Raw Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 69-74.


• Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, DayTripper (New York: Vertigo, 2011).

Week 5
Monday, February 6 - Line and Color

• Scott McCloud, "Living in the Line" and "A Word About Color" Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 118-137, 185-193.


• Randy Duncan, "Image Functions: Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in Asterios Polyp," in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 43-54.


• David Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp (New York: Pantheon, 2009).

• Andrei Molotiu, "Abstract Form: Sequential Dynamism and Iconostasis in Abstract Comics and in Steve Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man," in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 84-100.


• Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, "The Final Chapter" in Bob Callahan (ed.) The Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Stories: From Crumb to Clowes (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 2004) pp. 122-141.


• Stan Lee and Jim Steranko, "The Strange Death of Captain America" in Bob Callahan (ed.) The Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Stories: From Crumb to Clowes (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 2004), pp. 64-84.


• David Mack, "Chapter One," Daredevil/Echo: Vision Quest (New York: Marvel, 2010), pp. 1-23.

Week 6
Monday, February 13 - An Art of Tensions

• Charles Hatfield, "An Art of Tensions: The Otherness of Comics Reading", Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 32-67.


• Craig Thompson, Blankets (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2011).

• Douglas Wolk, "David B: The Battle Against the Real World," Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (New York: Da Capo, 2007), pp. 139-146.


• Herge, "TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn, " Herge's TinTin Adventures, vol. 3 (London: Methuen, 1990).


• David B., Epileptic (New York: Pantheon, 2006).

Week 7
Monday, February 20 - Presidents' Day - No class.

Wednesday, February 22 - Comic Characters

• Walt Kelly, The Ever-Loving Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 27-69.


• Al Capp, The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002).


• Carl Barks, "The Second Richest Duck," Uncle Scrooge Vs. Flintheart Glomgord (Prescott, AZ: Gladstone), pp. 1-20.


• Jeff Smith, "The Great Cow Race," Bone: Book Two (Columbus, OH: Cartoon Books, 2004), pp. 153-258.

• Peter Coogan, "Genre: Reconstructing the Superhero in All-Star Superman" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 203-220.


• Grant Morrison, "The SunGod and the Dark Knight," Supergods (New York: Spigel and Grau, 2011), pp. 3-26.


• Jerome Siegel and Joe Schuster, "Superman," in E. Nelson Bridwell, Superman From the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Crown, 1983), pp. 23-127.


• Grant Morrison, Excerpts from All-Star Superman (New York: DC Comics, 2008), TBD.

Wednesday, February 29 - The Legacy of a Genre: The Superhero 2

• Scott Bukattman, "X-Bodies: The Torment of The Mutant Superhero," Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 48-80.


• Gary Conway, Gil Kane and John Romita Sr., "The Night Gwen Stacey Died," Amazing Spiderman 121-122, 1973, pp.1-25.


• Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, "The Incredible Hulk #1," The 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time (New York: Marvel, 2001), pp.1-25


• Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, "Monsters Among Us," Marvels (New York: Marvel, 2010).


• Brian Michael Bendis, "Side-Tracked," Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 5 (New York: Marvel, 2003), pp. 1-22.

• Paul Chadwick, "A Stone Among Stones," The Complete Concrete (Portland, OR: Dark Horse, 1994), pp. 11-38.


• Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, "Fantastic Four #1," The 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time (New York: Marvel, 2001), pp.1-25.


• James Sturm and Guy Davis, Fantastic Four Legends: Unstable Molecules (New York: Marvels, 2003).

• Keith Chow and Jerry Ma (eds.) Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (New York: New Press, 2009).


• Stanford Carpenter, "Truth Be Told: Authorship and the Creation of the Black Captain America," in Jim McLaughlin (ed.) Comics as Philosophy (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 46-62.

March 12-17 - Spring Recess - No class.

Week 10
Monday, March 19 - Authorship (The Writer)

• Matthew J. Smith, "Auteur Criticism: The Re-Visionary Works of Alan Moore" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 178-189.


• Alan Moore and Rick Veitch, "How Things Work Out," Tomorrow Stories 2, not numbered (10 pages)


• Alan Moore, "Secret Origins," Supreme: The Story of the Year (New York: Checker, 2002), pp. not numbered (23 Pages)


• Alan Moore, "The Radiant Heavenly City", Promethea Vol.1 (New York: America's Best, 1999), pp. 1-36.


• Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke (New York: DC, 2008).

• Julia Round, "Is This a Book?': DC Vertigo and The Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s," in Paul Williams and James Lyons (ed.) The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), pp. 14-30.


• Jean-Paul Gabilliet, "Production," Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 111-132.


• Neil Gaiman with Charles Vest and Malcolm Jones III, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," in The Absolute Sandman Volume One (New York: Vertigo, 2006), pp.495-519.


• Bill Willingham and Lan Medina, "Old Tales Revisited," Fables, 1, no pages (aprox. 32 pages)


• Mike Carey and Peter Gross, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (New York: Vertigo, 2010).

Week 11
Monday, March 26 - Crossing Borders

• Douglas Wolk, "Gilbert Hernandez: Spiraling into the System" and "Jaimie Hernandez: Mad Love," in Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (New York: Da Capo, 2007), pp. 181-202.


• Jaimie Hernandez, "100 Rooms," Locas: The Maggie and Hopie Stories (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004), pp. 60-90.


• Gilbert Hernandez, "Heartbreak Soup," Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004), pp. 13-57.

• Amy Kiste Nyberg, "Comics Journalism: Drawing on Words to Picture the Past in Safe Area Gorazde" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. .
• Joe Sacco, excerpt from Palestine (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002), pp. 81-141
• Joe Sacco, excerpt from Safe Area Gorazde (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002), pp. 1-56.

• Joseph Witek, "'You Can Do Anything With Words and Pictures: Harvey Pekar's American Splendor," Comic Books as History (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), pp. 121-156.
• Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, excerpts from Local (Oni, 2008), no pages (aprox. 60 pages)
• Harvey Pekar, excerpts from American Splendor (New York: Ballatine, 1987), pp. no pages (aprox. 30 pages).

• Joyce Farmer, Special Exits (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010).
• C. Tyler, "Gone," Late Bloomer (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005), pp. 96-102.

• Hillary L. Chute, "Graphic Narrative as Witness: Marjane Satrapi," Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 135-174.
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

• Joseph Witek, "Comic Books as History: The First Shots at Fort Sumter," Comic Books as History (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), pp. 13-47.
• Ho Che Anderson, excerpt from King: A Comic's Biography (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010), pp. 94-153.
• Howard Cruise, excerpt from Stuck Rubber Baby (New York: Vertigo, 2011), pp.41-85.

• Henry Jenkins, "Comics as Debris: Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No Towers" (work in Progress).
• Art Spigelman, excerpts from Breakdowns: Portraits of the Artist as a Young %@*! (New York: Pantheon, 2008), pp. . No Pages (13 Pages)
• Basil Wolverton, "Powerhouse Pepper: A Nightmare Scare," Raw Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 175-180.
• Jack Cole, "Plastic Man: Plague of the Plastic People," in Art Spigelman, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (New York: DC, 2001), pp. . No pages (13 pages)
• Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman, "Superdooperman," Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (eds.) A Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1981, pp. 311-318.

• Harvey Kurtzman, "Corpse on the Imjin!," Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (eds.) A Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1981), pp. 305-311.
• Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Jack Davis, "Foul Play," Grant Geissman (ed.) Foul Play! (New York: Harper, 2005) pp. 83-89.
• Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Joe Orlando, "Judgement Day," Grant Geissman (ed.) Foul Play! (New York: Harper, 2005) pp. 147-153.
• Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Reed Crandall, "The High Cost of Dying," Grant Geissman (ed.) Foul Play! (New York: Harper, 2005) pp. 217-223.
• Bernie Kriegstein, "Murder Dream," B. Krigstein Comics (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004), pp. 179-184.
• Charles Burns, "Teen Plague," Raw Vol. 2, No.1, pp. 5-25.

Week 15
Monday, April 23 - Comparative Perspectives

• Henry Jenkins, "Should We Discipline the Reading of Comics?" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1-14.
• Kim Deitch, "Karla in Komieland," Raw Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 59-68.
• Kim Deitch, "The Cult of the Clown," Beyond the Pale! (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1989), pp. 43-52.
• Kim Deitch, "The Stuff of Dreams," Alias the Cat! (New York: Pantheon, 2007), pp. no pages (23 pages)

• Scott McCloud, "The Infinite Canvas", Reinventing Comics (New York: Harper, 2000), pp. 222-228.
• Scott McCloud, "Planet Earth," "The Conversation," Zot! 1987-1991 (New York: Harper, 2008), pp. 17-64, 517-534.
• Scott McCloud, "Hearts and Minds," Zot! Online, http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/zot/index.html
• Scott McCloud, "The Right Number," http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/trn-intro/index.html
• Scott McCloud, "My Obsession With Chess," http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Whither Comic Studies?: A Conversation with the Editors and Contributors of Critical Approaches to Comics (Part Two)

Many American fans know little to nothing about comics beyond the United States, Japan, and maybe France. What steps can we take to insure a more global conception of Comics Studies, one which engages more fully with the development of the medium in a range of different national contexts?

Leonard Rifas: Many (most?) of the American and other students who sign up for my class arrive claiming to know little to nothing about comics in the United States, Japan or France! To emphasize a more global conception of comics in the lesson on defining comics, I have passed out examples of cartooning in various formats from around the world (China, Nigeria, South Africa, Italy, Mexico, etc.) and asked them decide which of these specimens are "comic books" or "graphic novels" and for what reasons. I assign as a final project that they do presentations based on research questions of their own choosing, and some of those projects have focused on comics from Korea, Chile, and other nations. I introduce my lessons with news items about comics, and in the first three weeks of this quarter, these items have included news pertaining to comics or cartoonists in Syria, India, Brazil, Japan, and other places (but especially the many comics-related events here in our own city, Seattle.)

David A. Beronä: Associations like the International Comic Arts Forum and journals like the International Journal of Comic Art have been important avenues in opening up our understanding of global comics and cartoonists. Incorporating comics from other countries into our libraries and classrooms would support this effort. As a scholar of the wordless comic, I also believe this specific genre is the best ambassador for cultural understanding between countries and provides a context for commonality.

David A. Beronä: I believe the role of the comic scholar is essential in raising an understanding of the comic creator's work that is enjoyed or sometimes overlooked by fans. I see this relationship in the shape of a triangle, with each role important to the other two. The creator must have fans but also scholars to open up interpretations and insight that heighten not only the experience for the fans but also for the creators--providing them with a serious interpretation of their work beyond the entertainment value.

A recurring fear among students is that the academic study of popular medium, such as comics, will destroy our pleasure. This seems especially strong with comics given the history of dealing with comics as "subliterate" or "transgressive," often defined in opposition to school culture. How might we address those concerns?

Randy Duncan: Some creators, such as Dave Sim and Frank Miller, have an antipathy toward comics scholarship because they worry that studying comics in college will make them too respectable and analyzing comics will suck all of the fun out reading them. However, I find that for the vast majority of my students understanding more about the evolution of the art form, understanding how words and images work together, and knowing how to look for intertextuality and subtext makes reading a comic book or graphic novel a richer, more satisfying experience.

Leonard Rifas: I have built my class around the history of how comics earned their low reputation and how they went on to gain legitimacy. Attendance at the lecture which deals with the most disturbing images is optional, and every quarter some students chose an alternate assignment because they prefer not to have to see those images.

Randy Duncan: Will Eisner used to stress that comic book writing is not simply the words. To Eisner the act of writing a comic involved choosing both words and images and weaving them together as one unified art form. He felt the best work was done by a cartoonist, a writer/artist, and that the art form was compromised when the act of writing was artificially divided between a scripter and a penciller. It is true that much of the collaborative work produced in the industrial process of mainstream comics is not very unified; the individual contributions are often stitched together like some sort of Frankenstein's monster. Yet some collaborations (e.g. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso) seem to produce comic book writing as tightly woven as that done by a cartoonist. In these instances it makes no sense to consider the scripter the author of the work; they are clearly co-authors.

Matthew J. Smith: I think that the larger social stigma attached to comics has been historically more pervasive in academia than anywhere else, but I don't think academics are entirely to blame for holding a poor perception of the medium. When the gaming and internet have come under attack, those industries have not overcorrected in response to criticism the way that comics publishers did in the 1950s, inaugurating decades of self-censorship through the Comics Code. When the bulk of your material is ghettoized as comics was, it's difficult for a wider audience of academics to consider the medium's potential. Thankfully, several of our intellectual forebearers were not so narrow-minded as to dismiss comics outright, and we'd like to think that the arrival of this book takes the field one step closer to wider acknowledgment as the legitimate field of study it is.

Granted, the field has some work yet to do, and Randy and I have talked about the lessons we could learn from early Film Studies in particular in a post on the Comics Forum.

David A. Beronä: American culture has always been more accepting of both artists' books and picture books than comics, though it has been comics, under the guise of graphic novels, that has gained a growing acceptance by readers. There is a cross over that is being address in each of these forms and ultimately display not a comparison of forms but simply our insatiable appetite for visual storytelling. The stuffy didactic generations who were "told" a story has evolved into a generation that wants to be "shown" a story, which allows a greater personal interpretation of content and hopefully for change in our lives.

Randy Duncan: One of the reasons we wanted distinct sections (i.e., Form, Content, Production, Context, and Reception) was to be sure the book offered a significant number of models that went beyond formal analysis.

Matthew J. Smith: Indeed, my contribution is an adaptation of film studies auteur theory (which itself has been previously adapted to television studies). Thus, the text not only covers formalist approaches, but moves beyond them to address ethnography, historical approaches, political economy, etc. By selecting a broader range of contributions, we wanted to demonstrate the vitality of the field where multiple approaches to the generation of knowledge are welcomed.

Randy Duncan: In this postmodern age canons are considered elitist and exclusionary. Yet, many scholars who feel that way cannot resist the urge to makes lists. A number of the Critical Approaches contributors took part in the Best Comics Poll at the Hooded Utilitarian site, and then we had great fun debating those lists on the Comix-Scholars List. And, of course, canons are inadvertently established by what scholars choose to study. For this project Matt and I didn't want to be the canon makers so we let each contributor chose the work they wanted to analyze. We had recruited a diverse group of contributors so we were confident the works chosen would be suitably diverse.

Leonard Rifas: No particular work is essential for understanding comics, but some works have deservedly become common reference points for comics scholars, and I introduce my students to many of those works, beginning in week one with McCloud, Eisner, Harvey, Cohn, Groensteen, and Horrocks, and later including Wertham, Dorfman & Mattelart, Schodt, Hatfield, and others. The canonical creators I introduce include Töpffer, Kirby, Crumb, Hergé, Tezuka, Barks, Spiegelman, and more. The value of a canon includes recognizing the particularly successful examples of work in this medium.

David A. Beronä is a woodcut novel and wordless comics historian, author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008) and a 2009 Harvey Awards nominee. He is the Dean of the Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire, and a member of the visiting faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Randy Duncan is a professor of communication at Henderson State University. He is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (Continuum, 2009) and co-founder of the Comics Arts Conference. Duncan serves on the boards of the International Journal of Comic Art and the Institute for Comics Studies.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California and the former Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. His 14 published books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, and the forthcoming Spreadable Media: Tracing Value in a Networked Culture.

Leonard Rifas teaches about comics at Seattle Central Community College and the University of Washington, Bothell. He founded EduComics, an educational comic book company, in 1976.

Marc Singer is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is the co-editor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (Ashgate, 2009) and the author of a monograph on Grant Morrison, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi.

Matthew J. Smith is a professor of communication at Wittenberg University. He is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (Continuum, 2009) and former president of the Ohio Communication Association. In 2009, Wittenberg's Alumni Association recognized him with its Distinguished Teaching Award.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Whither Comic Studies?: A Conversation with the Editors and Contributors of Critical Approaches to Comics (Part One)

Even as a child, I knew that reading comics demonstrated a thorough lack of discipline -- it was something I did in the summer or at home, sick in bed. In a world before comics shops and subscriptions, my generation would grab whatever was available to us on the spin-racks at the local drug store -- there was not yet a canon (fan or academic) to tell us what we were supposed to read. We read for no purpose other than pleasure -- there was no method to tell us how we were supposed to read. Indeed, many adults were there to remind us what a monumental waste of time all of this was -- there was nothing like Publish or Perish pushing us to read more comics. We read in secret -- under the covers by flashlight, hidden in a textbook in class -- with the knowledge that there was something vaguely oppositional about our practices. You didn't stand up in front of a classroom and do a book report on what you'd read, let alone frame a scholarly lecture or essay.

Or at least this is the myth of what it meant to read comics as it has been constructed nostalgically by several generations of fans turned critics and intellectuals. Of course, like all of the other aging "boy wonders" constructing that mythical golden age, I should know because I was there.

Given this collective history, why should we discipline the reading of comics?

This is the opening from my essay, "Should We Discipline the Study of Comics?," which serves as the introduction of an exciting new anthology, Critical Approaches to Comics, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan.

The appearance of such a collection marks a significant turning point in the emergence of comic studies as a field for academic investigation, bringing together more than twenty respected comics critics and analysts to describe their methodological and theoretical assumptions and apply them to specific works. The result is intended as a textbook for use in the expanding number of courses in comics and graphic storytelling, being offered in universities and colleges. Indeed, I plan to use the book as a key secondary texts running through my own comic studies class, which I am teaching this spring at USC.

The book's essays are organized into units structured around Style, Content, Production, Context, and Reception. These categories reflect the diversity of disciplinary perspectives which have been brought to bear on comics. I have gotten to know many of the contributors through our participation in the comic studies track at the San Diego ComicCon, but it says something that we are more likely to run into each other at a fan-run event than at any academic conference.

Critical Approaches to Comics is going to be an important book in terms of defining and organizing this field, which has been surprisingly late to coalesce, given the centrality of comics as a medium to any discussion of popular culture in the 20th and 21st century. As such, my introduction was intended as a reflection on what lessons comics studies might take from other closely related fields such as film, television, and game studies, and an outline of other potential moments when some form of comic studies might have emerged. Specifically, I suggest what the study of comics would have looked like if this collection had been pulled together in response to the writings of Gilbert Seldes in the early 20th century, Frederic Wertham at mid-century, or more recently, Scott McCloud and Art Spigelman, each of whom would have different thoughts about what texts should be studied and why, about who should be included in the conversation and what languages we should be using, and about the core issues which comic studies would most urgently address.

I've used the event of this book's release to collect thoughts from the editors and some of the contributors on some core issues surrounding the current state and future directions of the academic study of comics.

The publication of a methods case book represents a key step in the institutionalization of Comics Studies as an academic field. As I suggest in my introduction, I experience this process with some ambivalence having gone through the establishment of other academic fields studying popular culture, including television or game studies. How do you characterize the current state of comics studies? Should it remain a multidisciplinary field of investigation or should it take on the properties of a discipline?

Matthew J. Smith: Given the increasing numbers of books, academic conferences, and college-level courses focused on the study of comics, I think Comics Studies is already coalescing. However, I do not think our aim is to build another silo on our college campuses but to preserve the open commons we seem to be interacting with one another in. Right now the field's greatest strength--and the one we celebrate in Critical Approaches--is its multi-disciplinarity. Moving forward from this point in history should involve how to capitalize on that and still forge a more coherent identity that universities can acknowledge and appreciate.

Marc Singer: We don't have to equate institutionalization with the formation of a single discipline. Comics studies should be and probably always will be multidisciplinary because comics themselves fall across the intersections of multiple disciplines--art, literature, mass communications, economics, and so on. But building an academic field doesn't have to mean codifying a single critical approach. Institutionalization supports research and teaching by exposing new scholars to earlier work, preserving their work for future generations, and modeling standards of academic scholarship. The challenge for Comics Studies is to build the professional practices and institutional support of a mature academic field without narrowing the range of disciplines, methods, and approaches available to scholars.

David A. Beronä: Just as graphic novels are being taught more in college and universities, a new generation of readers is enthusiastically reading comics without any preconceptions from older generations. This growing readerships is evidenced in school libraries where graphic novels account for a large percentage of the circulation. There is also a cross over of graphic novels with picture books, which encourages a wider readership of young readers growing into adulthood who will look for more adult themes in comics to reflect their growing interests.

Randy Duncan: I think we are already at that point. Graphic novels are being read in book clubs and selected for university Common Book programs. Certainly comics scholars are tired of having to make the legitimacy argument and many of them are simply refusing to do so in their work. Of course, the argument will still have to be made within the institution when we have to convince a chair or dean to add a comics course or consider comics scholarship in tenure and promotion decisions.

At most comic shops I know, there is a physical separating out of independent/alternative and mainstream comics. How have you dealt with this cultural divide in the book and to what degree does it shape the field of Comics Studies?

Randy Duncan: We chose to ignore the divide. A lot of the scholars we admire are quite comfortable slipping back and forth across that divide as if did not exist - writing a book about alternative comics, presenting a paper about Kirby's Devil Dinosaur, posting about an early 20th century comic strip, teaching a course on superheroes, and so on.

David A. Beronä: A comic is a comic is a comic is a comic! From the serious tone of the woodcut novels by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward to the edginess of the Vertigo line of comics; from manga to mini comics, this media provides a visual story which may be thought provoking or not but is forever entertaining.

Contributors

David A. Beronä is a woodcut novel and wordless comics historian, author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008) and a 2009 Harvey Awards nominee. He is the Dean of the Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire, and a member of the visiting faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Randy Duncan is a professor of communication at Henderson State University. He is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (Continuum, 2009) and co-founder of the Comics Arts Conference. Duncan serves on the boards of the International Journal of Comic Art and the Institute for Comics Studies.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California and the former Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. His 14 published books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, and the forthcoming Spreadable Media: Tracing Value in a Networked Culture.

Leonard Rifas teaches about comics at Seattle Central Community College and the University of Washington, Bothell. He founded EduComics, an educational comic book company, in 1976.

Marc Singer is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is the co-editor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (Ashgate, 2009) and the author of a monograph on Grant Morrison, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi.

Matthew J. Smith is a professor of communication at Wittenberg University. He is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (Continuum, 2009) and former president of the Ohio Communication Association. In 2009, Wittenberg's Alumni Association recognized him with its Distinguished Teaching Award.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

When Outlaws are Innovators: An Interview with Jonathan Taplin (Part Two)

There's a recurring focus here on the influence of technology on the creative process, though the picture we get seems somewhat inconsistent -- sometimes limited means and low tech generate creative strategies, while other times artists embrace the emergent properties of new media. How would you describe the relationship between artistic experimentation and technological innovation?

Well you know sometimes I'm a skeptic about the promise of technological innovation leading to artistic breakthroughs. We used to talk about the 80-20 rule in movies and music. 80% of the business would be done by 20% of the content. Professor Christian Sandvig showed me some data last week that on You Tube maybe 3% of the content gets 90% of the views. And most of that content is music videos from major artists. Now I realize that You Tube allows any filmmaker to get their work seen and I'm not interested in going back to the days of the early 1970's. If I had been unable to sell Mean Streets to one of the majors in 1974, it would have literally disappeared. There were no "indie" distributors of any consequence.

The other side of this relates to some work we have been doing with T Bone Burnett on the future of the music business. Bone makes the point that the digital revolution has actually taken us backwards in the quality of the sound we listen to. In other words, that vinyl album of Jimi Hendrix--Are You Experienced, was much fuller and warmer than listening to the MP3 with a pair of ear buds.

The other part of the work is figuring out how the musicians get paid as well as the songwriters do. When you go into a Gap store, you are paying for the music they stream in the store. The same with restaurants or bars or elevators. But that money only goes to the music publishers, so all my friends who were songwriters in the 1960's are doing quite well and all who were just drummers or singers are poor as church mice.

So while the digital revolution is certainly democratizing the distribution of media, we need to understand that there are winners and losers. Just look at the relative fortunes of Google and The New York Times. Has Google built a $30 billion ad business on the back of other company's content? Maybe?

I think the "modern arts" have done more to shape a multicultural society than almost any other force. I say "modern", in the sense that in 19th Century America, the most popular kind of public entertainment was the minstrel show.

So the modern art of jazz changes that completely. Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong bring this incredibly original music to a white audience that had entertained itself by watching white men do blackface routines of the most grotesque caricatures. When Benny Goodman played at Carnegie Hall with a black piano player, Teddy Wilson, in the early forties it was considered incredibly daring. So we have come a long way and the artists have been the ones to push the edge of the envelope. Even as late as 1957, right wing writers were railing against rock and roll because they thought that if a young white kid loved Chuck Berry, it would inevitably lead to "race mixing". And of course that was true.

You describe throughout how crisis in capitalism provoke great art. What does this suggest about our current moment? Will the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements be equally generative? Why or why not?

I think the jury is out on this question. Certainly the artist's role in the "Great Refusal" that Marcuse describes, does not seem to be present right now. There is no Woody Guthrie or Joan Baez singing to either OWS or the Tea Party. The crisis of capitalism that was the great depression certainly generated a lot of art because the government thought it was just as important to keep artists off the unemployment line as auto workers. So the WPA in the 1930's funded cats like Jackson Pollack and Orson Welles. They sent Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange out into the deepest pockets of rural poverty to take photographs that inspire us still today. I think if Obama proposed a Federal Arts program like that of the 1930's he would be probably decried as an chardonnay drinking elitist and denounced by both the radio talk show hosts and the House Republicans. Certainly you see the meager amounts of money provided to the NEA and NEH being cut back each year. The City of Paris spends more money supporting artists than our Federal government.

The second part of the current disconnect stems from the weird balance between the current anger and the utopian optimism of many of the Vanguard movements I wrote about in Outlaw Blues. As someone pointed out Martin Luther King's most famous speech was "I have a dream", not "I have a nightmare". It's very hard to sustain a social movement just on anger, which is why the Tea Party movement has probably already peaked. As for Occupy Wall Street, my sense is they really believe in direct democracy. When I visited the New York encampment, it was organized like a late 1960's commune. Now the history of communes in America, which I talk about in the book, has been a real struggle to demonstrate (in Martin Duberman's words) "that individual development and group membership are complimentary not contradictory goals". That is really hard if you are living and working with the same people 24/7 like at OWS or in a commune in the wilds of New Mexico. But it's not so hard to reconcile these two forces, as you and I know, around the groups we support in our academic lives like Project New Media Literacy or the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Steve Jobs was a hero to me because he somehow was able to bring Art and Science together in a way that I strive for. He was versed in the humanities and was curious about technology. Its clear to me that Wozniak was the coder and Jobs was the marketer at the beginning of Apple. When I hear educators talking about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), it drives me crazy. Our schools are art and humanities starved as it is and they think the solution is teaching MORE STEM.

As Steve Jobs pointed out to Walter Isaccson in the new biography, if he had never taken calligraphy at Reed College, the attention to font, which distinguished the early Mac, would have never happened. We are good in the country at building objects of desire---I Pads, Scorsese movies, Springsteen songs, Harley motorcycles. I'm not sure our comparative advantage over India and China is STEM. Its what Steve Jobs did, which was STEAM---Art plus technology. I think that is the vision that shapes almost everything we are doing at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. If somehow we can blend the humanities and engineering in one lab, we will have succeeded. We certainly feel our early efforts to team communications scholars from Annenberg with engineers from Viterbi have been rather successful.

What are you able to accomplish by publishing this book electronically, which would be hard if not impossible to achieve through print?

When I first got the I Pad, I instantly knew it would make a new kind of book possible. Outlaw Blues has over 100 embedded videos that are an integral part of the text. I don't think the story would have been half as interesting if I had not had the videos. I could describe the scene at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan first went electric, but you would never understand it as well as being able to see the video of that moment.

What is so cool is that this circles back to this relationship between art and technology. In doing the film research, I realized an explosion of video source material right after World War II. So the 16 MM optical sound film was really perfected by Kodak in 1935, but it was World War II that the war cameramen embraced it because the cameras were so much lighter to carry around while dodging bullets in battle. After the war, a whole new documentary style using light weight cameras begins, and with it the ability to record on film almost everything. So Cartier Bresson's "decisive moment" gets extended to the "decisive 5 minutes"---the length of an early reel of 16 MM film.

T-Bone and I are both concerned about two problems in the contemporary music business. The first is sound. The current MP3 track, heard through ear buds on your I Phone is a pale approximation of what the musician heard when he finished the mix in the recording studio. The basis for the MP3 was invented in the Bell Labs in 1979! Remember the early modems in the 1980's were 24 KBPS, so you needed to strip out a huge number of frequencies to compress a music file to travel over a 24 K modem. But today we have 10 MBPS wireless bandwidth with 4 G. Why should we be confined to this shitty audio codec?

The second part is to figure out how to get musicians paid for recordings. As I said before, the songwriters get paid for every stream:in a bar, restaurant, clothing store, elevator, internet radio station, etc. But the musicians don't get a cent and must rely only on CD sales and I Tunes downloads. As long as most of the world thinks its cool to listen to pirated content, then the musicians don't earn a dime. Some of my students say, "well the musicians make their money from touring, the records are just a portion for their concerts." So you are telling me that Aretha Franklin, having made some of the great music of the 60's and 70's has to continue to tour, just to survive? That doesn't seem fair when millions of people are listening to "Respect" this year.

The best solution we've come up with is a broadband access license of a couple of dollars on top of your broadband bill which goes into a general copyright fund and is paid out to artists based on how many of their songs were listened to illegally per month around the world. A company called Big Champagne already has the data by crawling the web. It wouldn't be hard and it would generate about $2 billion per month for content creators.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Taplin is Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . Taplin's areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival seven times.

In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia. In May of 2010 he was appointed Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

When Outlaws are Innovators: An Interview with Jonathan Taplin (Part One)

My new USC colleague, Jonathan Taplin, is like the cool older cousin that everyone of my generation always wished they had. He was at Woodstock and was hanging out with Bob Dylan and his mob at the Newport Folk Festival the day Dylan went electric. He organized The Concert for Bangladesh and produced Mean Streets. He went on tour with The Band and he was behind the scenes helping to negotiate the deal which saved the Disney Corporation. Now, he's best buddies with T. Bone Barnett and he's the founder of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

And he lived to tell the tale. In fact, his new book, Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars, recounts these and many other events which changed popular culture (especially popular music). His memory is vivid, his attention to detail is sharp, and his writing is compelling.

But, Outlaw Blues is more than simply Taplin's memoirs, fascinating though it is to read these stories. Taplin sees the big picture, and he uses the book to document what he calls the "American Vanguard", which he traces back to Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain (suggesting that these "dead white guys" were as lively and controversial in their own times as Eric Clapton was in his.) He writes about Louis Armstrong, Upton Sinclair, Orson Welles, Jackson Pollack and Edward R. Murrow, with the same vivid attention to details and personality as he describes what happened when Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock or discusses a young Martin Scorsese's uncomfortable reactions tof Hollywood hedonism.

His account connects these phenomenal artistic accomplishments to issues of technological innovation, shifting business models, and above all, the dramatic social, political, and cultural debates of the period. Before everything is said and done, Outlaw Blues ends up being the hidden history of America from the mid-19th into the early 21st century, one full of lessons for those who are trying to make sense of the media changes that are helping to define our present moment.

But, Outlaw Blues is still more than that, because it is the first publication of a new Annenberg Innovation Lab initiative which is seeking to re-imagine the affordances of the book. Most existing ebooks slavishly and mechanically reproduce printed books and utterly fail to take advantage of the properties of this emerging platform. So, when they made the Kindle version of Convergence Culture, my publishers had trouble reproducing the sidebars, which are a central feature of the book, and were designed to approximate the juxtapositions we associate with the web. But the Annenberg Innovation Lab believes that ebooks can be media rich and interactive, even participatory, experiences. But, they can achieve that goal only if they are "born digital," only if they are designed for this platform from the get-go.

Outlaw Blues, thus, included hundreds of clips, allowing us to see parts of the musical performances the book describes, and thanks to Taplin's behind-the-scene's perspectives, watch them with new eyes, because we have a clearer sense of what the people on stage are thinking. And the musical bits exist alongside bits of interviews, documentaries, and other key media texts of the period. Here's where you go to learn more about this "innovative" project.

In this interview, I asked Taplin to focus on some of the larger themes -- about the nature of creativity and popular culture, about art and politics, about technological change and personal expression -- which run through the book.

Throughout Outlaw Blues, you describe the "American Vanguard." What do you see as the characteristics of this tradition? What roles did it play in shaping American Arts and Letters?

I guess I prefer the term "vanguard" to French "Avant Garde", but I think they have the same intent. Webster's defines it as "An intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts". Emerson returned from Europe in 1837 and said that we had had quit our "extreme Eurocentrism" and celebrate a unique American culture. Almost from the beginning, that literature found itself in cultural and political opposition to the establishment. Whether it was Emerson's break with Protestant theology or Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, where he took on both slavery and imperialism; the Vanguard was ahead of even the most progressive politician in America. And I think this tradition continued up through Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Pete Seeger---all the way to Bob Dylan's famous song "Oxford Town", with these lyrics:

Oxford Town in the afternoon/ Ev'rybody singin' a sorrowful tune/ Two men died 'neath the Mississippi moon/Somebody better investigate soon

But beyond the political, I think the more important element was their role in experimentation. Two trumpet players, Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong basically invented the idea of improvisation and the solo in jazz. Jackson Pollack helped invent the language of abstract expressionism. Orson Welles reinvented both the radio drama (with War of the Worlds) and the motion picture (with Citizen Kane). So somehow the combination of experimentation and willingness to stand in opposition to the conventional wisdom are the defining characteristics of the American Vanguard.

You often define the "American Vanguard" is opposition to the commercial culture of the same period, yet many of those you discuss -- from Louis Armstrong to Dylan, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Elvis -- are among the most popular artists of all time. So, what relationship are you positing between being an "outlaw" artists and the commercial marketplace?

The funny thing is that when Bob Dylan started making records, Frankie Avalon and Fabian were on top of the hit parade. When Elvis first started making records, Frank Sinatra, who was the king of pop music in 1955 said that rock and roll, "is sung, played and written by cretinous goons." The difference between what we think of as mainstream culture and what the kids were liking has of course been with us for a long time.

When Mezz Mesrow and Eddie Condon, two white kids from the suburbs went down to a black club in Chicago in 1935 to see Louis Armstrong, they were both pissing off their parents and potentially the patrons of the club. The fact is that youth culture did not became the dominant commercial culture until the mid 1960's. Mitch Miller and his Orchestra were the largest selling act for Columbia Records in 1963. So in a sense the Vanguard musical artists changed the nature of commercial culture. As Andy Warhol pointed out, what was weird about the 1960's was not that artists became more commercial, but rather that commercial culture became more artistic.

I had been studying what the Austrian economist Schumpeter called "Long Waves"---the notion that history and economics move in 60 year cycles. This was all part of his theory of creative destruction. So I definitely felt like I had been lucky enough to live and work in one of those periods of creative revolution from 1963-1982 and so I was curious about those other periods when Vanguard artists were really altering the cultural dialogue.

So I started with the Transcendentalists in the 1830's and then sixty years later there was Twain, the invention of cinema and radio, the phonograph record, Buddy Bolden, jazz. And then sixty years later were the beats and bebop, leading to the sixties cultural explosion. I'm not saying the Long Wave is a perfect way to look at cultural history, but these upheavals do tend to come in waves.

So from that basis I tried to put the book together. I didn't want it to be a memoir, per se, but I knew my own personal experiences with some of the important artists of the late 20th century could add to the story.

In that sense, Dylan is really carrying on a poetic tradition from T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, who so radically changed the nature of narrative poetry in the early part of the Century. I had studied poetry at Princeton with Walton Litz, a truly inspirational teacher and he gave me such an appreciation for Auden and Eliot that I felt that somehow I could carry my own students back to an appreciation of that work. After all, the poetic tradition of hip hop has roots that could even be traced back to Gertrude Stein and Dada. It's just that a lot of kids don't have much sense of where their culture came from. It's like Jay Z and Tupac are in a "folk" tradition, just like Robert Johnson was. They are just taking from the past and reinterpreting it.

Your chapters are structured around a series of moments or scenes where a number of artists, often working in different media, seemed to thrive. What do these scenes have in common? What factors contribute to the emergence of these kinds of creative moments?

This is such a fascinating topic. Jacques Barzun has a wonderful theory about the Renaissance. You had all of these amazing artists living literally down the street from each other in Florence. They went to each other's studios and probably drank together in the evenings. So they were both rivals and friends and that rivalry pushed them to experiment more. The physical proximity---the scene---was critical.

I certainly witnessed the same thing with The Band, Dylan, Clapton and Van Morrison. They hung out together and they pushed each other to really excel. My reading tells me the same thing was going on in Paris in the 1920's and certainly in New York in the 1940's when both Abstract Expressionism and Bebop were being birthed in very close quarters. In fact I could name the bars, Mintons for the jazz scene and the Cedar Tavern for the artists. This leads me to wonder if all these notions of virtual communities can have the same creative juice as the physical presence of jamming at 2 AM in Harlem.

So if the first factor is the competitive scene, then the second factor is a general sense that the "canon" of the moment is moribund. The only reason Marty Scorsese, Terry Malick, George Lucas and Bob Rafaelson got to make their first films in the early 1970's was that the Hollywood system, that had been turning out failing movies like Hello Dolly and The Molly McGuires, was bankrupt. The studios had no money, so they were open to this new generation of film school brats that were willing to work for peanuts and make films for $500,000.

I think a lot of what you write about and study---the rise of Transmedia---comes out of this same kind of Interregnum. As Gramsci said, "The old is dying and the new cannot be born." Much of the underpinning of the music, TV and Film businesses are being destroyed by the digital revolution. The DVD sell through business that created 55% of movie revenues is dying. The album, which allowed music companies to sell you 12 songs when you only wanted one, has been unbundled. TiVo completely is undercutting the advertising revenue of TV.

What we need to see is if new scenes will arise to reinvent these businesses. I guess that is part of our task at the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Taplin is Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . Taplin's areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival seven times.

In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia. In May of 2010 he was appointed Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part One)

I have had a chance to watch Anne Balsamo at work in many different contexts -- as a junior faculty member at Georgia Tech focusing on cyberfeminism and reconceptualizations of the body; as a designer in residence at Xerox Parc where she was developing devices intended to embody alternative conceptions of the future of publication and reading; as someone dispatched by the MacArthur Foundation to encourage us to reflect on the nature of "design literacy"; and most recently, as a colleague at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC where we are working together to launch an expanded ebook project. She is someone who has been able to pursue a shared research agenda in a range of different contexts (both academic and industrial) and in the process, to build upon the work of others around her, to carry with her what she's learned into these new spaces. What I love about Balsamo is her fearlessness in moving beyond her own comfort zone and her ability to inspire creativity and reflection in those she finds around her. I am so blessed to have a chance to work with people like Balsamo and her other colleagues at the Innovation Lab on a regular basis.

Her newest book, Designing Cultures: The Technological Imagination at Work, could only have come about as a result of her experiences working in these many different environments. It is one part autobiography, one part portfolio (she shares some of her great projects through an attached disc), and one part theoretical reflection. Above all, it is an intervention by someone deeply rooted into the humanities into the current debates about technological innovation. Her conceptual models and frameworks are sure to spark discussions at digital humanities labs around the world, but my hope is that they do not end there, that they offer engineers and programmers and designers a way to reflect on their own contributions to culture (and their own contexts of innovation).

In this interview that follows, we talk together about some of the key themes of her book, which, as the title playfully suggests, deals both with the design of culture and with the cultural contexts where design takes place.

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Early in the book, you make the statement, "the wellspring of technological innovation is the exercise of the technological imagination." Can you break that down for us? What is the "technological imagination" and how does this concept bridge between technology and culture?

Inspired by the concept of the "sociological imagination," first developed by C. Wright Mills in the 1960s, I define the technological imagination as a mindset that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. This imagination is performative: it improvises within constraints to create something new. It is through the exercise of their technological imaginations that people engage the materiality of the world, creating the conditions for future world-making. Most importantly, this is the capacity to understand that all technologies come from somewhere, that they could always be different from what they are, and that they always have multiple and contradictory impacts.

In the active engagement between human beings and technological elements, culture too is reworked through the development of new narratives, new myths, new rituals, new modes of expression, and new knowledges that make the innovations meaningful. When people participate in the activities of producing "innovation," their technological imaginations are engaged in a complex process of meaning-making whereby both technology and culture are created anew.

Innovation is a process, not a product. Innovation changes how life will be lived in the future. I think that many people--industry pundits and government spokespeople--believe that innovation is a "thing." I make the distinction between "invention" which implies the creation of new things--new applications, services, devices, processes--and "innovation" which is the process whereby the elements of human life are rearranged such that life in the future is lived differently.

You suggest that a key aim of the book is to get your humanities colleagues more engaged with the process of technological innovation. Why? What will they gain from participating in a process which may seem alien to many of them? What will humanities people bring to the table that is currently missing from our conversations around technology?

I argue that the process of technological innovation is actually NOT at all alien to humanists; it is the process of engaging with technologies to change the shape of the way culture is lived, reproduced, and expressed in the future. This is an abiding interest and contribution of the humanities that is more commonly understood as the process of education through their engagement with a range of technologies of literacy (i.e., the book, historical narrative, aesthetic materials of expression). If one believes, as I do, that innovation is the process whereby culture is rearranged, then it is easy to see the valuable role of humanists in providing the tools and the critical frameworks for understanding not only how culture might change in the future, but also how current cultural arrangements structure conditions of possibility of any effort of innovation.

How a Robot Got its Groove from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Our colleague, Tara McPherson, has argued that issues of gender and race tend to be pushed aside when people talk about designing new media. How and why do these questions surface throughout your book?

This book, indeed the entire project that goes by the name "Designing Culture" is a direct outgrowth of my earlier work on the biotechnological reproduction of gendered bodies. In my first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke 1996), I examined the cultural implications of what were then (in the 1980s-1990s) emergent bio-technologies. What I learned through that project was how to critique the technocultural arrangements that reproduced gendered identities for the bodies that engaged with new technologies (body building, cosmetic surgery, surrogate motherhood, computer-mediated communication, and virtual reality). By the time I finished, I realized that if I were to take my feminist political commitments seriously, it was not enough for me to critique the ideological work of emergent technologies, I had to go further to examine how the critique might suggest ways of doing things differently in the future.

In some sense, all my work is influenced by Donna Haraway's assertion that "all technologies are reproductive technologies." Whereas the first book examined a broad range of BIOLOGICAL reproductive technologies that were innovative during the last two decades of the 20th century, the new work examined what I believed were going to be the DOMINANT reproductive technologies of the 21st century: digital media technologies. This "turn to reproduction" is but one way in which feminist theory--as a way of thinking gender--informs all my research.

Thus I formulated new research questions that directed my attention to study and participate in the processes whereby new technologies are developed which enabled me to build a framework to understand the techno-social-cultural conditions of technological innovation. Put simply, I continued to study the processes of technologically-assisted cultural reproduction...but with the new project the focus was on the creation of new digital media technologies rather than on biological technologies.

To follow these questions, I turned my attention to the investigation of the practices of technological design and I immersed myself in projects that would allow me to learn how to use new media technologies to create new digital applications. My first project--to create the interactive documentary called "Women of the World Talk Back"-- was the result of my experiments with a range of (what were then) innovative new media digital authoring tools for the purposes of creating feminist activist interactive media. Through collaborations with colleagues and students--who had a much more developed set of technological design skills than I did--my technological imagination was inspired and shaped to think differently about the cultural possibilities of new technologies.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part Two)

You worked at Xerox PARC, which, as you note, has become a mythic locale in the early history of digital technology. What do you think the current myths about Xerox PARC get right and what do they misunderstand?

Among the many lessons I learned during my time working at Xerox PARC is the understanding that the future is created first in the imagination, and then is enacted through the many activities of the research laboratory (among other places). Contrary to the old adage--that the best way to predict the future is to invent it--what I came to appreciate is the important role of narrative in creating an imaginary relationship between the FUTURE and the present. The first act of innovation is an act of story-making--which involves the spinning of a narrative that features technologies, materials, beliefs about "needs" and "opportunities," and is performed by researchers who (as in the case of Xerox PARC) are employed in the business of innovation. I'm not sure how that matches with the cultural work of Xerox PARC today--the scene has changed in the decade since I left. But I suspect that the researchers there are still eagerly engaged in the cultural processes--and performance--of innovation.

You argue that technologists should "pay attention to the technological literacy of the intended users off the technology-under-development." What advice can you offer to technologists about the best way to "pay attention"? What are the "ethical responsibilities" of technologists in regard to those who will be left behind if their tools and platforms are more widely adopted?

My approach to the topic of "paying attention" is grounded in the theory of "strong objectivity" developed by the philosopher of science, Sandra Harding. This argument is best situated within the debates about objectivity, scientism, and relativism of the late 1990s that were spurred by important work in critical feminist science studies. Harding argues that we need NOT to abandon ideals of "scientific objectivity"--as some feminists might have than been accused of advocating--but rather we need to be more RIGOROUSLY objective in understanding that reality is multidimensional; and that science, to be a truly objective explanatory enterprise needs to engage the minds and points of view of people who have been trained (socialized) to see the matter of the world from different perspectives.

Perhaps the key issue here is that what we are to "pay attention to" is multidimensional; thus the ethical responsibility of any technologist is to actively seek to see the world through different eyes, and not to assume that the point of view that one embodies is privileged as the only "point of view." Haraway calls this the "god trick." The ethical response is to understand how one's perspective is always partial, and to seek out other points of view (as it were) when developing or experimenting with the creation of new technologies.

I don't see the issue as one about people who will be "left behind"--because I understand that technologies are not simply objects, but rather a whole technocultural formation. Everyone lives in a current technological cultural moment that is constantly unfolding; an individual's position within that technocultural formation is what we really need to address when we think about "access to technology." No one is actually "left behind" in a cultural formation; they are differently positioned, constrained, enabled, empowered, with different (and often unequal) access to resources such as tools, knowledge, economic goods. I would argue that issues that are framed in terms of "people left behind" do not reflect a complex understanding about the nature of technoculture and cultural reproduction. To frame this question in this way presupposes an answer that puts the emphasis solely on "access to technology." Yet we know that simply providing access--dumping computers into classrooms for example--doesn't work to address the broader issues of inequality in power, economic resources, and intellectual support. Its time to start thinking more complexly about strategies for rearticulating dominant technocultural formations to allow for more liberatory and equal participation.

What is Literacy? from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

What does your book's focus on "design" contribute to the larger conversation around New Media Literacies and Digital Learning which has been sparked by the recent interventions of the MacArthur Foundation?

As I elaborated in the book, I make explicit the connections between the processes of design thinking and the skills and sensibilities that you list as key 21st century literacies. I argue that we need to teach designing practices across the curriculum; I support the notion that "design is a new liberal art." The issue of designing (design thinking, critical design skills) emerges as an important topic as we come to appreciate the many ways in which young people use new digital technologies to create and participate in innovative learning experiences. As they are called to be "designers/authors" of their own learning experiences, they will be well served (I assert) by learning also important design methods and critical frameworks for the analysis of their designed efforts.

The central premise of the book is that the work of design is one of the most important sites of cultural reproduction in a digital age. When I turn my attention to the designing/authoring efforts of students, I understand that even when these students think they are making it all up for the first time, they are actually engaged in the process of reproducing cultural understandings that came before them, and setting up the conditions for the reproduction of these understandings in the future. Thus for me to teach design also requires the teaching of ethics and the training of the historical imagination....both of these concepts are less fashionable to speak of these days

DML efforts might cast these concerns as "civic engagement" or as topics for "learning games." While there is nothing wrong with that approach--who could argue against "civic engagement" as an important topic for contemporary new media and digital learning--as I elaborate in the book I believe that there are additional insights to glean from discussions about ethics and about history in the context of understanding the praxis of designing and the reproduction of culture.

Given your discussion throughout about the need to reimagine the book, I am curious about the process which led you to develop Designing Culture as a print based book with digital extensions. What do you see each medium contributing to our experience of the whole?

The book and the digital projects were designed/authored simultaneously; but at any point, one creative project would take precedence over the others. This is because I'm not really good about multitasking at the broadest levels. It is also because the knowledge making process that is invoked during the course of creating digital media applications is different for me than the knowledge making process that emerges through the act of writing/authoring.

I wrote the book, as I explained in the conclusion, for personal, professional, and theoretical reasons. One of the most salient theoretical reasons is that the book is well suited to one of the most critical, but most commonly overlooked stages of designing: the stage when the designer returns to the design effort (and outputs) to critically assess the lessons learned and the cultural impact of the project. This stage of self-reflexive assessment is not easily accommodated in digital media genres of the museum exhibit, videos, interactive applications, and such.

The technological form of the printed book allows for the theoretical elaboration of abstract concepts and of self-reflexive accounts of designing practice. The book I wrote was neither a factual account of a series of moments long past, nor was it a simply a work of speculative design fiction. It was an authored account that was both factual and fictional; that was highly determined by my own biography and set of theoretical commitments, but not able to be reduced to either biography or theory.

If we return to C. Wright Mills notion of the "sociological imagination" we will hear him call for this kind of disposition--the sociological imagination for him was the capacity to make the connections between one's own personal biographies and the broader social and institutional forces and formations that invariably shape those biographies. This is the deep theoretical tradition I was trained in as a cultural theorist: to seek to make connections between my personal investments and biographical moments and the broader technocultural formation that I participate in as a subject/author and that I am "subjected to" through the work of ideology and other shaping forces.

Moreover, the DESIGNING CULTURE project is an example of the technological imagination at work in that the project manifested across a range of media technologies: where each part of the project was realized and expressed in the modality that was best deployed for my particular authorial objectives. Here I borrow Mill's insight to suggest that the technological imagination is the disposition that allows one to make the connections among technological forms and more personal/authorial objectives. Other people might call this paying attention to the "media specificity" of different modalities of cultural expression. Indeed that is what a good story teller always does: chose the best medium for addressing the desired audience that is matched with the story one wants to tell.

My work with the Annenberg Innovation Lab is very exciting for me because it offers an opportunity to collaborate with other people on the project of technological innovation that begins by taking culture seriously. This is the challenge that is laid out in the book: it is time to treat culture as a serious concept in our discussions, learning activities, design projects, and technological inventions.

Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, invokes the mantra for the lab as such: Every day culture eats strategy for lunch. This assertion resonates strongly with the main thesis of the Designing Culture project and sets the stage for a whole range of interesting experiments in the design of innovative technologies and the exercise of the technological imagination.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part Two)

Some have argued that the criteria for evaluating news has shifted from
impartiality to transparency. How would you rank mainstream news and citizen
media in terms of their embrace of transparency as a civic virtue?

An effort to be impartial - or "objective," to use the word most journalists revere - is not a bad thing. The problem is that it's impossible to achieve in the real world. We all come to our jobs with life histories, world views, and sometimes outright biases.

That said, transparency is a definite virtue. It's one of several principles - though not enough by itself - that information providers of all kinds should embrace. Add transparency to thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independent thinking, and we're getting somewhere.

I would rank traditional media organizations low on the transparency scale. They're still among the most opaque institutions around. But there are glimmers of openness, here and there, that give me some hope that journalists are beginning to understand why they need to do this. Bloggers and others we might put in the "citizen journalism" sphere vary in their openness, too, though I'd say bloggers tend to be somewhat more transparent than professional journalists.

It's about trust in the end. For people who are honorable in the way they work, transparency inspires greater trust.

What role should the news media itself play in fostering basic civic skills,
including those of critical reading and thinking? For example, how should
the news media be responding to persistent rumors about Obama, such as those
promoted by so-called Birthers? Is this a "teachable moment," as one would
say in the Education Schools, and if so, how should teaching taking place
via the news media?

I wish the news media had made this a core mission a long time ago. They didn't, and still haven't. That's a real shame; it would have helped not just their audiences but themselves - because audiences would have gotten a better idea what it takes to do quality journalism and had more respect for it.

If I ran a news organization and learned that a sizeable percentage of people in my community believed something that was false - birtherism, for example - I would make it part of my mission to help them learn the truth. That sounds easier than it would be, because people who believe lies are invested in those beliefs, but teachable moments abound in today's world.

You also advocate in the book that in an era where many of us are playing
more active roles as citizen journalists, that the status of journalism
classes in colleges and universities shifts from training professionals to
training all citizens. Should journalism now be a required subject as part
of a newly configured liberal arts education?

The principles and skills of journalism map extremely well to every other endeavor, when you think about it. They're part of being an engaged citizen in a variety of ways.

So, yes, I would make some kind of 21st Century media literacy - call it journalism or whatever - a part of the core curriculum. At several schools, "news literacy" is becoming a required course, though in the ones I've seen the emphasis (for practical reasons) is on consumption of news. The emphasis should be on critical thinking as consumers , but we are not literate unless we are also creators.

Many argue that the key difference between citizen and professional
journalism is the role of fact checking. Yet, your book describes many
different mechanisms on the grassroots level which are designed to check
facts and otherwise insure the integrity of information, while, for many
reasons, the place of fact checking in professional journalism is declining.
So, how long can we frame this as a meaningful distinction? And if this is
not the best way to think of the differences between amateur and
professional journalism, what would be productive ways of understanding
their relationship?

I don't agree that the key difference between citizen and pro journalism is fact-checking. It can be a difference, but as you note, sloppiness is growing in traditional media and lots of bloggers are doing work that I trust a great deal.

The real issue is that we all have to take more responsibility for what we know, and what we say. Certainly we have to trust some sources more than others, but we have to be skeptical in varying degrees of everything, and the more important something is to us the more we need to look deeper. I don't buy a car based on an advertisement, and if I see a story about some alleged medical breakthrough - especially if I am personally a candidate for that treatment - I'll check further.

I'm trying to blur the distinctions between "pro" and "amateur" in the information world rather than highlight them, by improving the practices of both and encouraging audiences to take more responsibility.

There's no question that traditional journalism is in trouble as a business, and that some parts - vital parts - of what these organizations have done will go missing for a time. Consolidation of the traditional media into an ever-smaller number of corporate hands is also a reality.

At the same time, there's never been more quality information about all kinds of things in some profitable niches, such as politics, technology, fashion, sports and a host of other things. Meanwhile, in a host of unprofitable (as media companies) niches, domain experts are telling us what matters. And new techniques for providing information, using APIs and databases among other tools, are leading to an explosion of social news gathering and dissemination.

We're also starting to see some genuine innovation in business models, That's key to what needs to happen.

Are we where we need to be? Not even close. But I have to stress that we're very early in this transition. If it's a baseball game we're in the bottom of the second inning or top of the third.

What practices might emerge around citizen journalism which would increase
its accuracy and reliability?

The main one would be a recognition on the part of the information provider that it's better to be trusted than distrusted - and that following some basic principles (the ones outlines above) are the road map to be trusted.

I stress principles because they don't change much, if at all. The rest is simply tactics, which do change, but if tactics have principles as a foundation, we'll be fine.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part One)

"We're in an age of information overload, and too much of what we watch, hear and read is mistaken, deceitful and dangerous. Yet you and I can take control and make media serve us -- all of us -- by being active consumers and participants."

This language appears at the top of the website Dan Gillmor, long time advocate for citizen journalism, has constructed around his most recent project, Mediactive, and beautifully captures his particular contribution to the media literacy movement. Gillmor's approach acknowledges the challenges and opportunities the new media landscape presents us in a way which is at once pragmatic and empowering. He certainly knows the risks to democracy posed by waves of misinformation and disinformation being spread across an array of media channels and the challenges of a context where we do not always know who created the media we are consuming. He also recognizes the value of expanding who has access to the channels of communication and thus the democratization which occurs when a broader range of citizens are producing and sharing media with each other. What he demands is that we each take ownership over the information we consume and share with each other, and taking ownership for him starts with skepticism.

Gillmor's book provides a solid foundation for anyone wanting to work with young people or adults about news literacy, one which is as invested in new forms of civic media and citizen journalism as it is concerned about the future of professional news. In this interview, we get a glimpse into Gillmor's current thinking about what it means to be a discerning citizen in the digital age and what the obligations of journalists are to help foster core civic skills and competencies.

Your new book, Mediactive, seeks to encourage "skepticism" about news and information. What do you see as the core virtues of skepticism and how does it differ from cynicism, which some would argue is wide spread in the
current context?

Skepticism is an essential part of being well-informed. It starts us off in the right place: assuming nothing but learning to trust some sources of information more than others.

Skepticism differs from cynicism in one key way: A cynic has essentially given up any hope that an information provider can do a good enough job to ever earn trust. A skeptic recognizes that there will be flaws, but also believes that trust can be earned.

Let's look at agriculture as an analogy for a second. American factory farming is an ecosystem, but highly non-diverse - nearly a "monoculture" in many crops where a single variety overwhelmingly dominates the market.

The news ecosystem has been something of a monoculture in recent years, at least in the newspaper business in most U.S. communities that support daily papers, where typically there's a single surviving one. Broadcast is close to that - just a few entities with government-granted airwaves that no one else can use.

We've come to understand the danger of monocultures. They're inherently unstable, because when they fail they do so with catastrophic results. (Remember Wall Street in 2008.)

A diverse ecosystem, by contrast, isn't as threatened by individual failures, because the parts of the ecosystem are less dominant. If the dominant food variety fails, we can end up with a serious food shortage, or worse. If a few big banks can kill the global economy when they fail, similar forces are at work.

In a diverse and vibrant agricultural system or capitalist economy, the failure of a specific crop varietal or business is tragic mostly for the farmers who planted it or that business. It doesn't cause a wider catastrophe.

That's the kind of news/information ecosystem we need, and which is coming. It's why I'm optimistic.

It's much more a shift of emphasis. I was cautious about quality in my last book, which some folks misconstrued as an uncritical celebration of citizen media. I continue to celebrate the fact that so many more people are creating media, but while the quantity is surging, it would be crazy to declare victory when it comes to quality.

In the book, you advocate what you call "slow news." Can you explain this
concept and why you think the speed of current journalism is partially to
blame for the circulation and perpetuation of myths, rumors, and other
inadequacies?

I've been a fan of the "slow food" movement for some time (even if I don't adhere as well as I should to its ideas). Slow news, a term that was coined in this context by Ethan Zuckerman, is the notion that we should not hurry to assume we know what's actually happening, certainly not when we're getting news at the rapid pace we hear and see it today.

When you combine the amount of information pouring over us with its high velocity, the need to take things a little more slowly - as information providers but especially as info consumers - becomes obvious. And it's not just random blog posts and tweets that can lead us astray.

We need only look to last January's horrific shootings in Tuscon, Arizona, for evidence. NPR and a number of other news outlets (most relying on NPR as a source) reported that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had died in the supermarket parking lot. She had not died, as we learned fairly quickly.

My own approach is to force myself to consider how sensational a report is along with how soon it comes after the alleged event. And the closer it is to the event, the more I put it in a category of "interesting if true" - with emphasis on "if".

I recognize that this goes against human nature to some degree. But if we can persuade ourselves to keep in the back of our minds that sliver of skepticism, we'll be fooled less, at a time when the consequences of being fooled are growing.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

Dan's latest book, Mediactive, aims to encourage a better media supply in part by creating better demand -- to spur people to become active media users, as consumers and participants. His last book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People was the first to explain the rise of citizen media and why it matters. Dan also writes an online column for the Guardian and blogs regularly at Mediactive.com.

Dan has been a co-founder, investor and advisor in a number of media ventures in the for-profit and non-profit worlds. From 1994 until early 2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Three)

As you describe the many kinds of anxieties, uncertainties, disappointments, and frustrations which surround technology in everyday life, it sounds like many people are unhappy with current configurations and most have harsh judgments of the uses of new media by others in their friends and family, yet few people are breaking out of the patterns you describe. Why not?

I think that we are at a point of inflection. Our lives are enmeshed with our new technologies of connection and ever more so. We now have more experience of what this means for us as individuals, for our relationships with our families, with our parents, with our children, with our friends, with our neighbors. We are coming to a greater understanding of what this means for us as politically, both in our own country and globally.

It has taken time for people to understand where life with this new kind of technology has brought them. Things came to them one gadget at a time. A phone, a navigation system, a way to listen to music, a new way to read books, books "on tape" became something else . . . . and now we catch up to the idea that positioning and navigation translate into surveillance and that using social media as though it were a neutral "utility" ignores important issues about privacy and ownership of personal data.

I don't think that we grownups who "gave" this new communications regime to our children thought it through on several of its critical dimensions. What is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? These are not easy questions. But they are starting to be questions that people are thinking about. They begin to have concrete meaning as people come to a new kind of life and have enough experience to take its measure.

On the simplest level, when I talk to parents who realize that it makes them anxious to walk to the corner candystore with their child without taking their cell phone, who cannot go to the playground with their child without bringing their e-mail enabled device, who text in the car while driving with their children in the back seat, it seems clear to me that we are not at a point of stable equilibrium. These people are not happy.

So my qualified optimism about change comes from my sense that the people to whom I have been talking are not happy and are genuinely searching for new ways of living with new technology. I hear more and more about "Internet Sabbaths" during which families disconnect for a day or a weekend. Some families modify the Sabbath and declare two hours a day as off-the-grid family time.

There is no option in which we give up on our new devices. They are our partners in the human adventure. What we have to do is find a way to live with them that is healthier. A digital diet that is better for our health and the health of our families. It took a long time for Americans to learn that a diet high in sugar and processed foods was not healthy. It is going to take a long time for people to develop strategies, individually and collectively, to live with our new technologies in the most healthy way. But the stakes are high and we can get this right.

In the domain of communications technology, one of the things that excites me the most is when technologies of the virtual enhance our experiences of and in the physical real. So, ironically, one of the earliest uses of the Internet as a social media, how MeetUps were used in the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, remains an inspiration to me. People "met" online for a political purpose and then "met up" in the physical world. They did not fool themselves into thinking that political action consisted of just giving money online or visiting a website and leaving a "thumbs up" sign on it. MeetUp continues in this tradition as do many other online groups that organize in the virtual and connect in the physical. We have seen this play out on the most dramatic scale in political life where despots may be challenged by groups brought together by social networking in all of its many forms.

I am often asked this question: "You are so critical of social networking. But what about Egypt" My criticism of social networking boils down to the necessity for us not to redefine the social as what the social network can do. The social encompasses a great deal more. This is not to put the social network down, it is simply to put it in its place. So there is no conflict between the magnificence of what the social network can do for the overthrow of tyrants and how it can get in the way of the development of teenagers who need to engage with each other face to face.

On a personal note, I recently attended a reunion of my fifth grade class. This was the fifth grade class from PS 216 Brooklyn. This fifth grade class would have never had a chance of meeting had it not been for Facebook. One person from the class had been connected with several others and then searched Facebook for a few more names she remembered. Those people remembered a few more names. Within six months, our fifth grade class was on the roof terrace of the Peninsula Hotel in New York. It was a small miracle. It was a gift, a profound gift. Yet in the annals of the social network, my story is banal.

I think it is easy to make distinctions in this domain. A parent who uses social media to keep up with a child living away from home or a child who uses social media to keep up with a parent in a different city - one recognizes and respects these cases when one sees them. My concern is with very different kinds of cases. Parents who cannot tolerate their eight year old child not having a cell phone. Children who have developed a style of relating that I characterize as "I text therefore I am" or "I share therefore I am."

To put it too simply, things have moved from a style of relating where one thinks: "I have a feeling, I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text." In other words, the act of sharing a nascent feeling becomes part of the constitution of the feeling.

The problem is that when we use other people in this way, as needed elements on the path toward our having our feelings, we can move toward a misuse of others. We are not relating to them as others but as what psychologists call "part objects." We are using them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.

This takes the notion of an "other directed" self to a higher power. Our technology supports a culture of narcissism digital-style. It is a kind of self that does not tolerate being alone. And yet, psychology teaches us that if you do not teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. We are forgetting this lesson in our culture of hyper-connection. These kinds of anxieties of connection are different from the "rational responses" to staying in touch to far-flung family and friends.

What both nexting and stalking have in common is the objectification of people who we meet on screens. We do not consider them in their humanity. They have a profound similarity. And this, too, is one of the major themes of Alone Together: we are at a moment of temptation. It is to treat machines as if they were people and to treat people as if they were machines.

In what ways has the persistence of information online forced you to revise earlier arguments about the potential to protean plays with identity? It seems these days, on the internet, everyone knows you are dog and many know what dog food you eat.

Henry, this is beautifully put. My earlier enthusiasm for identity play on the Internet, for what Amy Bruckman called the Internet experience as "identity workshop" relied heavily on the work of psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Erikson wrote about the developmental need for a moratorium or "time out" during adolescence, a kind of play space in which one had a chance to experiment with identity. In the mid-1990s, I wrote about the Internet as a space where anonymity was possible and where one could experiment with aspects of self in a safe environment.

Today, adolescents grow up with a sense of wearing their online selves on their backs "like a turtle" for the rest of their lives. The internet is forever. And anonymity on the Internet seems a dream of another century, another technology. People still use game and virtual world avatars and social network personae for identity play. But the expectation of a parallel, distinct, and anonymous virtual life is no longer a clear starting expectation.

It cannot be. Many of these experiences begin by registering with a credit card.

No matter how much the metaphor of addiction may seem to fit our circumstance, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. It does not serve us well. To end addiction, you have to discard the substance. And we know that we are not going to "get rid" of the Internet. We are not going to "get rid" of social networking. We will not go "cold turkey" or forbid cell phones to our children. Addiction--with its one solution that we know we won't use--makes us feel hopeless, passive.

We will find new paths, but a first step will surely be to not consider ourselves passive victims of a bad substance, but to acknowledge that in our use of networked technology, we have incurred some costs that we don't want to pay. We are not in trouble because of invention but because we think it will solve everything. As we consider all this, we will not find a "solution" or a simple answer. But we cannot assume that the life technology makes easy is how we want to live. There is time to make the corrections.

I wrote Alone Together to mark a time of opportunity. So for example, the essence of my critique of the metaphor of Internet "addiction" is that it closes down conversation, because it suggests a solution that no one is going to take. Addictive substances need to be discarded. We are not going to discard connectivity technology.

We need to form a more empowering partnership with it, one that shows (for example) greater respect for our needs for privacy, solitude, times of non-interruption. In some areas the need for empowerment has reached a state of great urgency, for example, in the area of privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, has declared privacy to be "no longer a social norm."

In Alone Together, I question such assumptions. Privacy may not be convenient for social networking technology, but it seems to me essential to intimacy and democracy. This is one of the conversations I wanted to contribute to. Others include conversations about child development, connectivity, autonomy, and narcissism. I think one of the most important sentences of my book is "If we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely." I want people to talk about this when they give their eight year olds smart phones.

And yet much of the reaction to Alone Together criticizes me as though I have told the world to "unplug." As though I have accused technology of causing a new epidemic of mental illness. And as though I have said that technology is making us less human. I have been portrayed as an anti-technology crusader. Reviewers analyze why someone like me, someone who was once on the cover of Wired magazine, could now, not "like" technology. Commentators talk as though technology and I were dating and I, capriciously, have decided to cheat on him.

This rhetoric points to a serious problem. Technology is not there for us to like or not like. Our job is to shape it to our human purposes. When you say a technology has problems that need to be addressed, people are quick to interpret you as saying that it offers nothing. In Alone Together I write of "necessary conversations" that lie ahead. I wrote the book in the hope of sparking some of them. I'm glad that people are talking. But sometimes it can be hard to know if you are in a conversation if people are shouting.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Two)

In many ways, both of us have been profoundly shaped by our time amongst MIT Students. And you wrote very explicitly about MIT hacker culture in The Second Self. What do you see as the strengths and limitations of MIT as a testing ground for your ideas?

I don't see MIT as a testing ground for my ideas. I would say rather that MIT is the place where my ideas are most challenged because there is a tendency at MIT to want to see human purposes and technological affordances as being one. Technology has purposes; technology is made by people. Technology and people are at one in their purpose.

From my point of view, every technology offers an opportunity for people do ask: "Does this technology serve human purposes?" and this is a wonderful thing because it enables us to ask again what these purposes are. We are well positioned to create technology whose purposes are not in our best interests. And then, it is time to make the corrections.

So, from this point of view, I find that my favorite sentence in my books is "Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think that the Internet is all grown up." From my point of view, this is a distortion of perspective, one that is very common at MIT. From my point of view, we are in early days and it is time to make the corrections.

Perhaps the greatest ongoing difference of opinion I have had with close colleagues at MIT has been about the meaning and prospect of sociable robots. I take a very strong position in Alone Together that nanny-bots and elder-care bots who pretend affection are seductive. And that my research shows that we are vulnerable to them. We are alone with them, yet we feel a faux-intimacy with them.

Indeed, the arc of the book is that with robots, we are alone and feel a new intimacy. In our new mobile connectivity, we are together with each other, and yet experience new solitudes.

I worked on my studies of sociable robots with colleagues at MIT who are some of the most brilliant and creative developers of sociable robotics. We had deeply-felt, serious conversations about the purposes and possibilities of these machines. Some think that their ultimate significance will be profoundly humanistic. I'm listening, but I am not convinced. Conversations with robots about love, sex, children, the arc of a life - in other words, about human meaning - to me, this has no meaning. These are things that the robot has not experienced. These are not appropriate topics for conversations with robots. So, being at MIT has kept me more aware than I would ever have been about the broad differences of opinion in what the purposes of machines can be.

I took you to task, ever so mildly, in my blog a while back about some of your comments about MIT students and multitasking in the Digital Nations documentary. You can see what I said here. I wanted to offer you a chance to respond to my arguments.

I most often run into our disagreement about multi-tasking in the context of parents who say, "Well, is it so bad if I text while my kid is in the kitchen with me; my mom used to do the dishes while I hung around?" Or, "My dad used the read the newspaper when we watched sports on TV; what's the difference between that and my doing my email while I watch sports with my son on Sunday?"

Having interviewed the children who feel abandoned by their parents, who feel almost desperate for parental attention, has led me to do a lot of thinking about the kinds of attention that digital devices require. We don't give them the kind of attention we gave to doodling or to a newspaper or for that matter, to cooking or watching TV. We are drawn in in quite a different way. This is made apparent when I interview teenagers who say things like "When I was little I used to watch Sunday football with my dad and we would talk. Now, he is on his BlackBerry and he is in the 'Zone.' I can't interrupt him." Or, stories, many stories of daughters who come into the kitchen to hang out with their mothers and find them texting and cannot make eye contact with them and who are shushed away. I observe parents and children in the playground with children desperately trying to get their parents attention; parents are absorbed in their devices and cannot "multi-task" attention for their kids.

So, I think that the narratives we use to think about our students multi-tasking in class needs to be informed by the nature of what it is to absorb oneself in digital media. Beyond this, I am persuaded by the research that suggests that when we multi-task, our performance degrades for each task we multi-task, even as we receive a neurochemical reward for our multi-tasking. So, through no fault of our own, our biology has us feeling better and better even as we do worse and worse.

I do think that smitten by what computers enable us to do, we have allowed multi-tasking to seem like a twenty-first century alchemy. I think that classrooms, will soon be in the position of being the places where uni-tasking is taught, places where students learn to concentrate and where, additionally, they learn to cultivate the capacity for solitude.

I think that the two learning skills that are in the most jeopardy in our hyper-connected world are the ability to concentrate on one thing and the capacity for the kind of solitude that replenishes and restores.

I am going to be running a summer-long conversation on this blog about the value of the autobiographical voice in cultural criticism. You have now edited a series of books where people share autobiographical reflections on what you call evocative objects. Can you explain what you mean by evocative objects and what you think is the contributions of these kinds of reflections?

Evocative objects are objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves or on other things. Put otherwise, they give us materials that help us to do this in new and richer ways. Objects can be evocative for many different reasons. Some of these reasons have been widely studied. So, for example, objects that are "betwixt and between" standard categories are classically evocative because they cause us to reflect on the categories themselves. This is why computational objects, standing between mind and not-mind, between the world of the animate and not animate, have been so evocative as objects-to-think-with.

Other evocative objects partake of elements of what Winnicott called "transitional objects." These are objects that blur the boundaries between self and not-self, object that we experience as being in a special, blurred, sometimes fused relation to self. Here, too computational objects have had a special role to play. From the very beginning, people experienced a kind of "mind meld" when using software, saying things such as "When I use Microsoft Word I see my ideas form someplace between my mind and the screen." Now, in talking about always-on-them digital devices, there is an ever greater sense of the device being part of the body.

Evocative objects provide a special window onto life experience, one that is grounded and cannot avoid issues of depth psychology. Science studies, sociology, anthropology have each in their own way welcomed the study of objects but have been hostile to depth psychology. When one pays careful attention to evocative objects, one "hears" psychodynamic issues, one "hears" family history, one "hears" a close attention to personal narrative and the texture of a life in all of its peculiarity and deeply woven interconnections with others. In science studies, studying objects and life narrative has the additional virtue of making the point, which seems to need making for every new generation of students, that technologies are not "just" tools, that our relationships with objects are profoundly interconnected to how we make meaning out of lives and think through who we are as people.

There are of course important differences in how people who grew up with a given technology appropriate it in contrast to those who adopted it in adulthood. But what most fascinates me these days are common vulnerabilities of grownups and younger people, both in the area of communications technology and in the area of sociable robotics. I did many interviews with people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are willing to entertain the idea of a robot that might love them, care for them. But certainly, the sensibility of the "robotic moment," the idea that we are ready for robots that might care for us is most apparent among the young.

Their science fiction and imaginative toy and game worlds suggest to them that robots may soon be in a position to teach people how to love; they have a way of thinking about the nature of aliveness that considers objects with a new pragmatism. That is, previous generations talked about computational objects as "sort of alive" or "kind of alive." This new generation talks of computational objects as "alive enough" to do certain jobs. Robots are thus considered "alive enough" for the job of care and companionship, at the limit, alive for affection.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

'Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part One)

After more than twenty years of living in the heart of the machine, I have concluded that there are two ways of doing humanities at MIT (perhaps anywhere): the first is entrenched and embattled, defending the traditions, from a broom closet, trying to civilize those who see virtue in the technological and who undervalue the cultural; the second is engaged, confronting the technological and demanding that it serve human needs, asking core questions about the nature of our species, and exploring how the cultural and the psychological reasserts itself through those media which we make, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, into extensions of ourselves. There is at MIT no greater advocate for humanistic engagement than Sherry Turkle, whose work on technologies as "second selves," as "evocative objects," as intimate tools and "relational artifacts", the central theme of her work.

It has been my joy and honor to consider Turkle my friend for more than two decades. Our paths crossed too rarely in the years I was in Cambridge, but each time they did, I left the conversation changed by her insights about core questions which shaped both of our work. Here is a video recording of our most recent in-person exchange, a public dialogue about solitude and participation in the digital age, which we conducted at the Scratch conference hosted by our mutual friend, Mitch Resnick, at the MIT Media Lab. It will be clear there that our shifting alignments, sometimes agreeing, but often coming at the world a bit askew to each other, brought out some fresh thinking from both of us.

Sherry Turkle shared with me some years ago the insight that we are both victims of the public's desire for simple answers. No matter what Sherry says, which is often layered and sometimes paradoxical, about the complexity of human's relations with technology, there will be those who see her as too pessimistic and no matter what I say, people are going to see me as too celebratory. In both cases, at the heart of our work is the desire to "complicate" our understanding of technological change through a focus on core human experiences.

I was reminded of her statement when I saw the response to her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. Critics and supporters alike tended to read the book as a diatribe against new media and as thus a turning of her back on the work of many at MIT who stress the ways new tools are expanding rather than constraining human potentials. Many wrote to ask me what I thought of the book, often with the expectation that we were fundamentally at odds with each other.

I should have known better, but I found myself entering the book on the defensive, looking for points of disagreement, and there are certainly some of those as the following exchange will suggest. But, as I read, I found myself struggling to answer the challenges she posed, and finding the book anything but simplistic and one-sided. She is demanding that we all enter a new phase of the "conversation," one which accepts that technological changes are fundamental and unlikely to reverse course, but one which demands that we shape technologies to core human needs and goals rather than the other way around.

This is the great theme which runs across the remarkable interview I am sharing with you this week, resurfacing again and again as she presses beyond simple one-sided perspectives and forces us to address our fundamental "vulnerability" to technological shifts. Do not enter into this interview expecting to disagree with Turkle or to simply reaffirm your own comfortable and well rehearsed arguments. Rather, use her comments to reshape your thinking and to redirect your energies to some of the core struggles of our times. What you will find throughout this discussion is a powerful intellect engaging with the shifting borders between the human and the mechanical, between psychology and technology, and between pessimism and skepticism. As always, I learn so much from reading Turkle's work, even where, or perhaps especially where, we disagree. But, again, I would stress, we disagree far less often than many, ourselves among them, might imagine.

I was struck by one of the very first sentences in the book: "Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies." Can you dissect that evocative phrase a bit for me? In what forms does the proposal take and how do we signal whether or not we accept?

From the earliest days that I came to MIT, struck by the intensity of people's emotional engagement with their objects - and most especially with their computational objects - there were many people, and especially many colleagues, who were highly skeptical of my endeavor. And yet, I am inspired by Winston Churchill's words, who said, before McCluhan rephrased: "We make our buildings, and in turn, our buildings make and shape us." We make our technologies, and our technologies make and shape us. The technologies I study, the technologies of communication, are identity technologies. I think of them as intimate machines. They are not only, as the computer has always been, mirrors of our mind; they are now the places where the shape and dimensions of our relationship are sculpted.

I think of the technological devices as having an inner history. That inner history is how they shape our relationships with them and our relationships with each other. Another way to think of this is in terms of technological affordance and human vulnerability. Technologies have certain psychological affordances, they make certain psychological offers. We are vulnerable to many of these. There is an intricate play between what technology offers and what we, vulnerable, often struggle to refuse.

I think there are two ways of answering your question. The first is to say that technology has never been cold, impersonal, and industrial. We simply chose to understand it that way. Technology has always had a role in shaping the inner life, the intimate life. The telephone - surely a shaping force in the making and shaping of self. The telegram, the letter, the book.

As a teenager living in Paris in the 1960s, I remember the telephone being shunned as too "impersonal" - for significant apologies, a request for a meeting, an assignation - it was explained to me that one sent a pneumatique. All the post offices of Paris were connected with pneumatic tubes. One wrote a letter in a sealed envelope. It was picked up at one's apartment and brought to the post, put in the tube, sent to the post office closest to the destinataire's address and hand delivered. The pneumatique had the touch of the hand on the correspondence. This, too, was intimate technology. There was nothing cold about the letter.

Nor was there anything cold about how industrial technologies such as cars and trains shaped our sensibilities, our sense of self, of our sensuality, our possibilities. If we have succumbed to an ideology of technological neutrality that is something that needs to be studied as an independent phenomenon; it is not to be taken as a given.

But there is another way of approaching this question. And that is to say that I do believe that information technology and the digital revolution has changed something fundamental in our way of seeing the world. There is something new in our current circumstance. The computer is a mind machine, not only because it has its own very primitive psychology but because it causes us to reflect upon our own.

From the very beginning, people saw the computer as a "second self" - an extension and reflection of self. The computer seemed much like the psychologist's inkblot test: the computer as Rorschach, a projection of personal concerns. Indeed, I got the title of my first book on the computer culture from a thirteen year old who said, after an experience with computers: "When you work with a computer, you put a little piece of your mind into the computer's mind and you come to see yourself differently." A second self. So, one might say that in a context where I believe that all technologies shape and make us, the computer takes this vocation to a higher power. Or perhaps, one might say, this vocation is a centerpiece of its identity. I think of it as an intimate machine.

This vocation has been heightened in the age of always-on/always-on-you communications devices, which of course are the focus of my current work. They move from being tools or perhaps prosthetics to giving people the sense of being near-cyborg. The devices seem like a phantom limb, so much are they are part of us.

This is a very important question for me. I have been tracking the flowering of a genre - there are of course antecedents - but now we have a flowering - of the robot who teaches people to love, and more than this, and crucially, teaches people how to be human. For me, the prototype here is WALL-E. The people have forgotten their sensuality, their capacity for love, their capacity for interconnectedness. It is a robot designed for industrial cleanup who rediscovers all of this, who falls in love and who, transcendent in this capacity, is in a position to teach it to humanity. In fact he saves humanity not just in the physical sense, but in the spiritual sense as well.

In Alone Together, I talk about our having reached a "robotic moment." This is not because we have robots who are capable of loving us, but because so many of the people I interviewed say that they are prepared to be loved by a robot. There is no question that imaginative literature and film have been part of this shift. We used to look to machines for physical help. Now we feel we are missing things on an emotional and spiritual dimension and we look to the machine world.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Back to School Special: Syllabus for Science Fiction AS Media Theory

As I've done in previous terms, I am sharing here the syllabus for my graduate seminar this fall. The focus is on science fiction AS media theory: i.e. we are looking primarily at science fiction texts (mostly literary) as ways of thinking through the implications of media change and we are looking at media theories for the implicit utopian or dystopian claims they make and for the ways they have drawn on metaphors from science fiction. I have taught science fiction as literature before -- at MIT -- but this represents a new approach for me in terms of how I engage with SF texts in the classroom.

Science Fiction as Media Theory

This class explores the ways that science fiction--sometimes known as speculative fiction--has historically functioned as a form of vernacular theory about media technologies, practices, and institutions. As recent writings about "design fictions" illustrate, these speculations have in turn inspired the developers and of new technologies as well as those who create content for such platforms, helping to frame our expectations about the nature of media change. And, increasingly, media theorists--raised in a culture where science fiction has been a pervasive influence--are drawing on its metaphors as they speculate about virtual worlds, cyborg feminism, post-humanism, and afro-futurism, among a range of other topics.

This seminar will explore the multiple intersections between science fiction and media theory, reading literary and filmic fictions as theoretical speculations and classic and contemporary theory as forms of science fiction. The scope of the course ranges from technological Utopian writers from the early 20th century to contemporary imaginings of digital futures and steampunk pasts. Not simply a course on science fiction as a genre, this seminar will invite us to explore what kinds of cultural work science fiction performs and how it has contributed to larger debates about communication and culture.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• describe the historic relationship between speculative fiction and media theory


• explain key movements in science fiction, such as technological utopianism, cyberpunk, steampunk, and discuss their relationship to larger theories of media change.


• trace the roots of contemporary media theories of cyborg feminism, afrofuturism, and trans/post-humanism, back through science fiction films and literature


• develop their own critical account of how ideas about media and technology have been shaped by the discourses associated with science fiction.

Required Books:
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End
Nalo Hopkinson and Upphinder Mehan (eds.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy
Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
All other readings can be found on the class Blackboard site.

Assignments:

1. Blackboard Posts: Each week, students will post a reaction to the readings via the class blackboard site. The reaction might be a comment, a question, a provocation, and often will be a complex mixture of all of the above. It can be informal and need not be more than a few paragraphs, but it should show the student's thinking process in response to the topics and materials being encountered that week. This is the primary mechanism by which I will be monitoring your mastery of the core concepts of the class. You need not respond to every reading each week, but there should be signs there of close reading and critical engagement. (30 percent)

2. Media Analysis Paper: Applying the concepts of science fiction as a "design platform" that we will encounter in the first class session, students will choose a film, television series, or game which they feel offers a particularly vivid embodiment of a science fiction concept and provide an analysis which considers the thinking behind this representation of future media or technology, the ways this concept gets deployed through the story and the values which become associated with it, and how this concept may be deployed as a springboard for creative thinking about the development of future media tools, platforms, or processes. Along the way, students might consider the differences between embodying these concepts in an audio-visual media as opposed to the ways they might be dealt with in a literary text. The result should be a short but impactful essay (roughly 5-7 pages). (20 percent)

3. Theory Analysis Paper: A key theme in our discussions has been the idea that science fiction functions much like theory to speculate about the implications of current social, economic, political, cultural, or technological practices and to envision potential outcomes of current trends. In this paper, students will reverse their lens and examine theory as a form of speculative fiction. Students will select a work of media theory and discuss what they see as its vision for the future (whether implicit or explicit). What does it have to say about the nature of media change? Does it see people as moving towards a utopian or dystopian future? What, if any, explicit use does it make of metaphors drawn from science fiction as it constructs its vision for the future? What kinds of response does it seek from its readers to the problems or potentials that it has identified? Students shall produce a short, impactful essay (5-7 pages) which demonstrates close reading of the theoretical text and an ability to push analysis beyond what's explicitly on the page. (20 Percent)

4. Final Paper: Students, in consultation with the professor, will develop a distinctive project which emerges from the intersection between their research interests and the course content. The result can either be a creative project or a paper, though either should show the ability to construct an argument and mobilize evidence in support of their core claims and should show a grasp of the basic conceptual framework of the course. Students will be asked to give a short class presentation, sharing their project and its implications with their classmates, as part of the process of developing and refining their ideas. (30 Percent)

Wednesday, August 24th
Week 1: Science Fiction as Design Fiction

Readings:

* Brian David Johnson, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction (Morgan and Claypool, 2011)
* Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report," Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 227-264.

The students will watch Minority Report prior to the first class session.

Guest Speaker: John Underkoffler, technical advisor to Minority Report; Brian David Johnson, author of Science Fiction Prototyping

Rec. for Further Reading:

• Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, "'Resistance is Futile:' Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing," forthcoming.
• Bruce Sterling, "Design Fiction," Interactions, May-June 2009.
• Mark Pesce, "Magic Mirror: Science Fiction as a Software Development Platform," Media in Transition conference, 1999.
• David Stork, "The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001," Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

Wednesday, August 31st
Week Two: Technological Utopianism

• Howard P. Segal, "The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism" and "American Visions of Technological Utopia," Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 10-44.
• Sina Nafai, "Underworld: An Interview with Rosalind Williams," Cabinet, Summer 2008, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/najafi.php.
• Edward Bellamy, Excerpt from Looking Backward, Chapter 1-12, pp. 3-72.
• Katharine Burdekin, excerpt from Proud Man.

Wednesday, September 7th
Week Three The Origins of Science Fiction

• Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsbeck Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 100-135


• John W. Campbell, "Twilight;" (40-63) Lester del Rey, "Helen O'Loy;" (62-73) and Theodore Sturgeon, "Microscopic God," (115-142) in Robert Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, (New York, NY: Orb Books, 2005).


• Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (pp. 35-48); Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (pp. 49-64); Nobert Wiener, "Men, Machines, and the World About" (pp. 65-72), in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (ed.),The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Wednesday, September 14th
Week Four: Postwar Dystopias

• Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communications, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action," (pp. 18-30) and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry Reconsidered" (pp.31-37) in Paul Marris and Sue Thornham (ed.), Media Studies: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
• George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
• George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One. http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 1-44, 117-131
• Ray Bradbury, Fairenheit 451.

Wednesday, September 21st
Week Five The Space Merchants and American Advertising

• Vance Packard, excerpt from The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Ig, 2007), pp. 31-64.
• Jules Henry, "Advertising as a Philosophical System," Culture Against Man (New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 45-99.
• Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (New York: St. Martins, 1958)
• Frederik Pohl, "Tunnel Under the World" (pp.1-34) and "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus" (pp.62-85), The Best of Frederik Pohl (New York: Sidgewick and Johnson, 1977)
• Henry Kuttner, "The Twonky," The Best of Henry Kutner (New York: Ballantine, 1975), pp.167-189.

Wednesday, September 28th (Henry out of town)
Week Six Cordwainer Smith and Psychological Warfare

• Paul M.A. Linebarger, excerpt from Psychological Warfare (xxx), pp. 43-92.
• Cordwainer Smith, "Scanners Live in Vain" (pp.65-95); "The Dead Lady of Clown Town"(pp. 223-286); "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (pp.401-417) "A Planet Named Shayol," (pp. 419-448); "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," (pp.xx) The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (Boston: Boston Science Fiction Association, 1993)

Wednesday, October 5th
Week Seven Altered States

• Alvin Toffler, "Diversity" from Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 283-322.
• Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name"(pp.57-78) and "The Crisis in Women's Identity" (pp.123-136) The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001).
• James Tiptree Jr., "The Women Men Don't See," (pp.255-279) and John Varley, "Lollipop and Tar Baby," (pp. 357-374) in Brian Atteby and Ursula K. Le Guin (eds.) The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 255-279.
• Octavia Butler, "Blood Child," Blood Child and Other Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp.3-30.
• Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe" in Pamela Sargent (ed.) The New Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 100-119.
• Kate Wilhelm, "Baby, You Were Great," in Pamela Sargent (ed.) Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 139-158.

Wednesday, October 12th
Week Eight Cyberpunk

• Bruce Sterling, "Preface;" James Patrick Kelly, "Solstice;" (pp. 66-104) Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, "Mozart in Mirrorshades;" (pp. 223-239) and John Shirley, "Freezone;" (pp. 139- 177) in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Ace Books, 1988).
• William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic," Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1986), pp.1-22.
• Samuel R. Delaney, "Some Real Mothers: An Interview with Samuel R. Delaney," in Silent Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 164-185.
• Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., "Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism," in Larry McCaffrey (ed.) Storming the Reality Studio: A Case Book of Cyberpunk and Post-Modern Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 182-193.

Wednesday, October 19th
Week Nine Cyborg Feminism

• Anne Balsamo, "Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture," in Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (eds.), Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 347-368.
• All of Balsamo's online articles can be found here
• Anne Balsamo, "Feminism for the Incurably Informed," Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 133-156.
• Veronica Hollinger, "Something Like a Fiction: Speculative Intersections of Sexuality and Technology" in Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (eds.), Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction, (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 140-160.
• C.L. Moore, "No Woman Born," Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 261-300.
• Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers (Orion, 2000).

Recommended Reading:
Donna Harroway, "Cyborgs at Large," in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds.) Technoculture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1-20.

Guest Speaker: Anne Balsamo, USC

Wednesday, October 26th
Week Ten The Space Merchants Revisited

• Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, "The Consumer as Explorer" (pp. 68-80) and "The Consumer as Rebel" (pp. 137-151), in The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).


• Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (New York: Tor, 2003).


• George Saunders, "Civil War Land In Bad Decline," Civil War Land In Bad Decline (Riverhead, 1997), pp. 3-24.


• Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, And Gomorrah," Aye, and Gomorrah: Stories, pp.91-101.

Wednesday, November 2nd
Week Eleven Posthumanism and Transhumanism

• Jussi Parikka, "Insects in the Age of Technology," in Jussi Parikka (ed.), Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. ix-xxxv.
• N. Katherine Hayles, "Towards Embodied Virtuality," in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1-24.
• Ray Kurzweil, "The Six Epochs,"(pp.7-34) and "Eich bin ein Singularitarian," (pp. 369-390) The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (London, England: Penguin, 2006), pp. 7-34.
• Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End (New York: Tor, 2007)

Wednesday, November 9th
Week Twelve Afrofuturism and the Global Imagination

• "What is Afro-Futurism?: An Interview with artist/educator D. Denenge Akpem," Post-Black, March 2010, http://postblackthebook.blogspot.com/2010/03/afro-futurism-interview-with.html.
• Catherine Rameriz, "Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin," Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33(1), Spring 2008, pp. 185-194. http://americanstudies.ucsc.edu/csramirez/Afrofuturism.pdf
• Andrea Hairston, "Girots of the Galaxy;" Larissa Lai, "Rachel;" Vandana Singh, "Delhi;" Tamai Kobayashi, "Panopte's Eye;" Karin Lowachee, "The Forgotten Ones;" Greg Van Eekhout, "Native Aliens;" Celu Amberstone, "Refugees;" devorah major, "Trade Winds;" and Carole McDonnel, "Lingua Franca," from Nalo Hopkinson and Upphinder Mehan (eds.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004).

• Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (New York: St. Martin's, 2010)
• Rebecca Onion, "Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice," Neo-Victorian Studies 1(1), Autumn, 2008, pp. 138-163.
• Henry Jenkins, "'The Tomorrow That Never Was': Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter," in Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling (eds.), Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence,(New York, NY: Continuum, 2010), pp. 63-83.

Wednesday, November 30th
Week Fourteen Student Presentations

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An interview with David Gauntlett (Part Three)

In talking about Star Wars Uncut, you touch on an issue very important to my own work - can we build creativity onto borrowed materials? Does it matter if those raw materials are physical objects (recycling of trash or driftwood, say, as the basis of new artworks or fabric scraps as the basis for quilting) or media content (as in many forms of fan productivity)? How would you situate fan culture within the larger logic of DIY Media?

Ah, this is interesting - this is where I think my priorities might be a bit different to yours, Henry, perhaps. Of course there's lots of lovely, amazing stuff out there made by fans. I talk about Star Wars Uncut in the book as one of the things that led me to reflect that the kind of tangible joyfulness involved in the process of creativity, which you can get a sense of in its outputs, is more important than the empirical originality of the outputs. Star Wars Uncut is a project by fans to remake Star Wars in 15-second chunks. There's a huge amount of inventiveness on display in the many different kinds of animation and recreation which fans have used to produce this amazing patchwork, and it's the funny little homemade details that make it especially touching.

Star Wars Uncut "The Escape" from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

But the thing that I don't like about the emphasis on 'fans' as the new generation of creators is that they are inevitably positioned as, to some extent, subservient to the producers of the big, mainstream (or at least industrial or professional) media thing or things that they are fans of.

So on the one hand, the fans do very clever, very creative things within their fan practice. But at the same time, they are not the 'ultimate' creators, but instead take their inspiration from the successful professional media producers who are, in this sense, the 'ultimate' creators. So it seems a bit of an odd emphasis to me. There's so much wholly original stuff out there in the DIY/online creative world, and I think the focus on 'fans' may tend to feed the egos of professional media producers who feel they are the rightful creators of original content - the kind of authentic creative work that ordinary mortals could not make and which such mortals could, at best, only be 'fans' of. Do you know what I mean? As advocates of a new, alternative participatory culture, I don't think we should always pick examples that are derivatives of, or in some way dependent upon, the offerings of the traditional established media.

Henry Jenkins: We may have to agree to disagree on some of this. Yes, fans are not the only form of participatory culture out there and part of what I love about this book is that you really engage with a broader array of DIY practices. For me, participatory culture would refer to any form of cultural practice which is open to a broad range of participants who have access to the means of cultural production and circulation. My own work has focused primarily on fans because this is a form of cultural production I have been tracing -- and engaging with -- for more than thirty years, but in my forthcoming book, Spreadable Media, we deal with a much wider array of participatory culture communities. Sites like YouTube and Flickr and Etsey have certainly increased the visibility of these other sites of grassroots production. Fans interest me because they inhabit the intersection between the old media culture and the new and thus they illustrate the contradictions of a moment of media in transition. But I am not saying that they are more creative than any of a range of other communities who are similarly transitioning from the pre-digital to the digital.

As critics, we may be interested in these objects from many different vantage points. A media scholar might be interested in what the fan work says about the program to which it responds, but I might also be interested in the relations between the fans and leave the commercial producer out of the equation altogether. I might, for example, studying how different DIY communities pass along craft and knowledge from more experienced to newbie participants, and in that study, the sources of the raw materials are going to be less important to my analysis than the sources of the knowledge being exchanged between participants. But in terms of whether the participants are being "creative" or not, these differences in source materials are not that important to me.

David Gauntlett: Yes, you're right of course - everything builds on some things that have come before, whether it is ways of using materials, or styles and genres of creative work, or the elements and practices of storytelling. I certainly did not mean to suggest that fans who make stuff within an already-existing narrative are 'less creative' than other makers. It was just that it means that the grand narratives, or the powers to create original story universes, remain in the hands of traditional media. But no matter. As you say, creative fans are just as interesting as creative anybody, and working at the 'intersection' between old and new media can be especially revealing.

I was struck by the passage you quote from Ivan Illich: "A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenges known." It struck me that you could swap out "educational system" with "communication system" and come up with a pretty good definition of what I and others call participatory culture. By these criteria, how would we evaluate the current state of web culture?

I agree, it's a good aspirational definition of participatory culture, or for the Web in general. We are not there yet, but the potential is still there. Some commentators write as though the Web has already been entirely taken over by the big commercial companies, such as Google, or that Web 2.0 has been entirely absorbed by them as a profit machine. I would really hate for that to happen. But to act like it has already happened is, in a way, giving up, I think; and reveals a lack of awareness of what's really going on.

Well basically I argue that those people who are only interested in saying that Web 2.0 is about the exploitation of free labour are making a category error, and using an exclusively economic lens where that actually isn't the best way of understanding what's happening. Someone who makes an original music video, say, to share with their friends, and with anyone else who wants to take a look, and who chooses to do so by putting it on YouTube, a convenient and free platform, is hardly being 'exploited' in the way we would normally use the term in a Marxist analysis of labour. Obviously those services do seek to make profit from the advertising revenue, and from the value of the user data that they capture, on the back of stuff provided for free by users. But users themselves see it as a decent bargain - the site hosts your material for free, and enables you to engage with a community around it, and in return it gets to keep that associated revenue. In most cases, the value associated with any particular video or other piece of content will be very small, and it is only when it is multiplied by millions of other bits of content that it becomes a viable business.

These arguments create confusion about what Web 2.0 is about. A really great, archetypal example of Web 2.0 in action would be if there were an encyclopedia which was entirely written by users around the world, writing about the things that interest and engage them, and collaboratively editing it to make it get better and better. And it would be owned and run by a non-profit foundation. What an outrageous and unlikely idea! But that already happens, of course, and it's called Wikipedia.

Another archetypal example of Web 2.0 in action would be if an international consortium of organisations - such as, say, a collaboration between the Library of Congress, and the British Library, and perhaps the BBC, and some of the great European museums or cultural institutions - would set up and support, but not interfere with, a non-commercial platform for creativity, along the lines of YouTube, where people could share their creative works, comment and rate the work of others, and form supportive groups and communities of practice. That one hasn't happened yet, but there's no reason why it couldn't.

Web 2.0, or participatory culture, is not inherently commercial, and it might be healthier and more reliable in a non-commercial environment. One of the best things about non-commercial Web 2.0 services is that they make those comments about 'exploitation of labour' immediately redundant. The critics of the commercial services are not entirely wrong, but they are missing the most important thing that's going on.

Well, unsurprisingly, I favour educational processes which are about students exploring for themselves, asking questions, being curious, tinkering, and learning through making things. One inevitably thinks of that point made by Ken Robinson, in his very popular TED talk online, that we are meant to be preparing young people for the future but not one of us knows what that future will look like. What we do know is that people need to have powerful 'learning muscles', as Guy Claxton has put it, which means that they need to be creative, and questioning, and they need to be resilient - which means that when things go wrong then they are not crushed by this event, but instead know that things going wrong is a normal part of life and something which you can learn from. As educators we should model learning - in other words, show that we ourselves are learning all the time and are engaged in any number of 'learning projects' at once.

One thing I have been learning recently myself is how to make a Kindle book. Amazon enables authors to self-publish Kindle books, but the process is not quite as easy as you might expect, if you want to do it properly. For instance, to make a logical table of contents file I had to learn some XML for the first time. I became proficient in HTML fifteen years ago when you had to make Web sites by hand using Notepad, the standard function-free text editor in Windows. But I've shied away from trying to master XML - until this new challenge came along. I like new platforms for self-expression in general, and this is one I wanted to crack. Kindle books aren't restricted to people who own Kindle devices these days - there are free Kindle readers for iPhone and Android phones, iPad, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and probably soon for your toaster.

This looks like a complete aside, but actually is relevant because I have pieces on both the content of what I think media and communications studies should be about, and also on how we should try to orchestrate learning about it (you see I avoided saying 'teaching' there), in my new Kindle book which I am publishing in August 2011. It's called Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research, and pulls together some previously published but uncollected writings, and some new stuff.
Thank you very much indeed, Henry, for inviting me onto your blog to be interviewed. It's an honour to be here and I have really enjoyed it.

Links:
• Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, site for the new book (May 2011) with extracts and videos
• Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research, new short Kindle book (August 2011):
Amazon USA: I ($7.90)
Amazon UK: (£4.80)

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. His teaching and research concerns people's use of media in their everyday lives, with a particular focus on creative uses of digital media. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He has made several popular YouTube videos, and produces the website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk. He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world's leading creative organisations, including the BBC, Lego, and Tate.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An interview with David Gauntlett (Part Two)

One of the real revelations in the book for many readers will be in how directly the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris speak to contemporary issues in the Web 2.0 era. What do you see as the key value of re-examining their work now? What do you see as the most important continuities and discontinuities between their conception of craft and contemporary DIY culture?

I'm glad you liked that part. Thank you. I just thought it was very striking that these English Victorian critics, whose philosophy inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, who were writing 120-160 years ago, seemed to really chime with the spirit of Web 2.0, or at least the best part of it. By which I mean: fostering and encouraging everyday creativity, and giving people tools which enable them to share, communicate, and connect. And seeing the importance of things being made by everyday, non-professional people - and the power of making, in itself - rather than us all being mere consumers of stuff made by other people. That's what Ruskin and Morris's most exciting writings are all about.

And, of course, I like making these connections between things that at first look very different. What, for instance, could medieval cathedrals have to teach us about the ecology of YouTube? Well: John Ruskin was passionate about the gargoyles that you find on medieval cathedrals. They are often quite quirky and ugly, and rather roughly-done - not at all like 'fine art' - but that's precisely why Ruskin cherishes them: because you can see in them the lively spirit of a creative human being. And you can sense the presence of the person who spent time making it.

Then if you carry that way of seeing over to YouTube: there again you have quite a lot of quirky things, often roughly-done, and not like the kind of professional stuff you would see on TV; but that is what makes them so special, and exciting, because what you see there is people making things, and sharing them with others, just because they want to. They've got something they want to communicate. You can often sense that personal presence, and enthusiasm. So Ruskin's passion for one kind of craft really helped me to build an argument about the importance of another.

Then if you look at what William Morris did with Ruskin's ideas - Morris was more concerned with societies and communities than Ruskin, and he added a vision of communities connected through the things that they make: people filling their lives with the fruits of their own creative labour. It was especially important to him that people should be creators, not (only) consumers.

Morris felt you had to make things to understand them fully, which is part of the Make magazine positive-hacker ethos that is enjoying a revival today. Morris was a maker himself, and mastered a dazzling number of craft and construction techniques. So he was both a writer and a maker, but these were not two separate tracks in his life; rather, his writings and the things he made can be seen as two sides of the same project: 'visionary accounts of an ideal world'.

In ways that seem very relevant today, Morris argued that the route to pleasure and fulfilment was through the collection and dissemination of knowledge; communication between people; and creating and sharing expressive material. That's like a manifesto for Web 2.0 right there. So I think the continuities between these old arguments and our present situation are strong; and the discontinuities are the things that put us in a stronger position today, because today we have much wider access to tools to make and share things, which were denied to non-elite people in the past. Not everyone, of course, has access or the necessary skills, and the tools are often owned by big powerful companies, as we will discuss below; it's not perfect.

But I hope these ideas from Ruskin and Morris are therefore shown not to be just some kind of nostalgia, which just shines a little light upon our present situation; rather, they offer very relevant manifestos for what we should be doing today.

You write at several places about the "messiness" of everyday creativity as in part a virtue and not a flaw - the point which begins with Ruskin's gargoyles. Yet, our classic notions of crafts include the "value of a job well done." How might we reconcile these two claims about craft?

Well I'm less concerned about the approach to craft which is about doing the same thing repeatedly until you can achieve a very high level of 'polish'. But I think a lot of makers are very concerned to make something to the best of their ability. And I think the 'value of a job well done' can refer to how well something connects with others, or how effectively it communicates a message or an idea. The 'value of a job well done' can be about the self-esteem that comes from having made something which has touched someone else. So you could have something quite 'messy' which is still very successful in this other sense.

Some of your examples come from very traditional kinds of craft production, such as weaving, stitching, etc. How has the introduction of new media changed the practices of such communities? What has remained the same?

Craft people have taken to the Web with great enthusiasm. The essence of what they do often remains unchanged, but today they talk more, share more, and find it much easier to find other people who share their passions. So they get more feedback, encouragement, and inspiration. Often in the past, individuals had to be quite resilient to stick with their craft or maker interests, because their families and friends tended not to understand or be very sympathetic to their strange 'hobby'. Being able to find others who share their interests, online, has been an extraordinary source of support and encouragement for many of these people.

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. His teaching and research concerns people's use of media in their everyday lives, with a particular focus on creative uses of digital media. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He has made several popular YouTube videos, and produces the website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk. He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world's leading creative organisations, including the BBC, Lego, and Tate.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An Interview with David Gauntlett

The expansion of participatory culture and its relationship to the emergence of Web 2.0 is a theme which has run through my recent work, but it is also a key concern for researchers thinking about everyday creativity in all of its historical and contemporary forms. Over his past several books, British scholars David Gauntlett has been asking researchers to think more deeply about the nature of "creativity" and its place in our everyday lives. Gauntlett's exploration is central to his most recent book, Making is Connecting:The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, which I read recently with a sense of encountering a kindred spirit with whom one can have productive disagreements (as surface later in this exchange) and from whom one can draw core insights.

Part of the richness of this book is its expansion well beyond the sphere of things digital to place grassroots creativity and DIY tinkering in a larger historical and philosophical context, one which will be valuable in helping to further clarify the core point that Web 2.0 is simply one model for thinking about what happens when more people have the capacity to produce and circulate media and other cultural materials.

Gauntlett's accessible and engaging writing is a gift, all the more so given the urgency of his message. All of the above come through loud and clear in this interview, which I will run over the next few installments of my blog.

Let's start with something very basic - the title of your book, Making Is Connecting. What do you mean by making? By connecting? What do you see as the relationship between the two in an era of networked computing?

Well, I'm using these words in their recognised senses - I don't believe in making up new words, or jargon, for things that can be expressed simply. So, by 'making' I simply mean people making things. This can be with new technologies, or ancient ones, and can be on the internet, or offline. So it refers to James knitting a scarf, Amira writing a poem, Kelly producing a blog, Marvin taking photographs, Michelle making a YouTube video, Jermaine doing a drawing, Natasha coding a videogame, or hundreds of other examples like that.

And 'connecting' means social connections - people starting conversations, sharing reviews, providing information, or making friends. But also it refers, for me, to a connectedness with the world which we live in. So I say 'making is connecting' because you put together ideas and materials to make something new; because creativity often includes a social dimension, connecting you with other people; and because I think that through making things, you feel more of a participant in the world, and you feel more a part of it, more embedded - because you are contributing, not just consuming, so you're more actively engaged with the world, and so, more connected.

I think this is almost always the case, regardless of what technology is being used, and was the case for centuries before we had a global wired network. But in an era of networked computing, which you mentioned, I think that these benefits are amplified, and many new opportunities and connections are enabled. Creativity didn't begin with the internet - far from it. But in an obvious and well-known way, the internet enables people to connect with others who share their interests, regardless of where they live in the world - whereas previously, geography, and the practical difficulties of finding people, made it far more difficult to have conversations with others who shared niche interests.

Having easy access to people who share their passions means that individuals can be inspired by each other's work and ideas - which can lead to a positive spiral of people doing better and better things and inspiring more and more activity by others. This could happen before the internet, in clubs and societies, but it would tend to be slower, and the inspiring inputs would most likely be fewer, and less diverse.

Well I never wanted to get bogged down in arguments over a 'definition' of creativity. But in Making is Connecting I do put forward a new definition, basically to provoke a conversation around how we think about creativity, and to shake up the consensus which seemed to have formed which casually accepts and cites the definition put forward by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about 15 years ago. That definition emphasises that creativity is some kind of novel contribution or innovation which makes a visible difference within a domain of expertise, or in the wider culture. So it's a definition of creativity which requires us to focus on the outputs of a creative process; and then it actually goes further, and says that those outputs don't really count for anything unless they are recognised and embraced by a significant or influential audience.

Now, Csikszentmihalyi developed this definition for a particular purpose, for use in his sociological study of the circumstances which enable creative acts to be recognised and to flourish. So it's fine for his own purposes, and he clearly didn't mean any harm. But now, because Csikszentmihalyi is a well-respected expert in more than one area, widely cited in academic papers and featuring strongly in Google searches in this area, his definition pops up in all kinds of other contexts where someone wants a definition of creativity to put into their talk, article, or presentation.

So the unintended consequence is that creativity is increasingly likely to be understood, these days, as the generation of innovative products which become popular, or at least widely recognised. Now, that is one kind of creativity, but as a definition it seems much too narrow.

One problem is that it runs counter to our common-sense understanding of 'creativity', because it is far too demanding. I'm sure you can think of quite a few friends or colleagues whom you would say were 'very creative' - and you would really mean it - and yet they have not invented a new process which has revolutionised the field of architecture, and have not written a novel which sold over a million copies, nor done anything else which goes over the very high bar set by Csikszentmihalyi. But you still really believe that these are creative individuals. So that's one difficulty.

Another problem is that this now-standard definition is focused on outputs. Indeed, you can only assess creativity in this way by looking at the outputs of a creative process. I wanted to shift the conversation about creativity so it was more about the process, not the outcomes. But I also thought it was weird that this Csikszentmihalyi perspective on creativity meant that you literally could not say if something was creative or not without consulting an external system of experts or publications. Someone might show you an amazing work of art, or an invention, or a new way to do something, and you might exclaim 'oh that's very creative!', but in strict Csikszentmihalyi terms that would be inaccurate, unless this thing had already become influential or successful.

I talk about all these issues at some length in the book. But I arrive at a definition which emphasises the process of creativity, rather than outcomes, and prioritises feelings rather than levels of external success. It's a bit long. It says:

Everyday creativity refers to a process which brings together at least one active human mind, and the material or digital world, in the activity of making something. The activity has not been done in this way by this person (or these people) before. The process may arouse various emotions, such as excitement and frustration, but most especially a feeling of joy. When witnessing and appreciating the output, people may sense the presence of the maker, and recognise those feelings.

I also did a shorter one, trying to make it a single sentence:

Everyday creativity refers to a process which brings together at least one active human mind, and the material or digital world, in the activity of making something which is novel in that context, and is a process which evokes a feeling of joy.

This shorter definition is OK, although for the sake of brevity it misses out some bits that I thought were quite important. But in both cases you can see I have emphasised emotion - even the word 'joy', which comes through strongly in interviews with makers. They are not filled with joy all the time of course - creative work is often experienced as hard and challenging - but you get moments of pride and accomplishment which make it all worthwhile.

Understanding creativity is perhaps no more or less important today than at any other time. But we do see, I think, an explosion of visible, accessible, shareable creativity online, which it is interesting and important to study and understand, and which is so diverse, and done by people just because they want to, that I wanted us to have a working definition of creativity which embraced the key dimensions of this work - rather than sniffily dismissing it because it had not yet won awards, gone global, or made an auditable impact.

Well as you can tell, I'm not so bothered about an understanding of creativity which can be counted or quantified. So it's a bit like 'happiness'. On the one hand, as economists and social scientists have found quite recently, happiness is perfectly measurable - you can do large-scale surveys which ask people to say how happy they are with their lives, on a scale of one to five, for instance, and then you can compare with other data and variables, and build up a picture of the self-reported levels of happiness in different groups or areas, and the factors which are correlated with them. Those statistics are really interesting - and indeed I use some of them in Making is Connecting to show the importance of personal relationships and creative projects. But of course, this data doesn't tell you anything about what happiness feels like.

I think creativity is in the same boat. The most important thing about it is what it does for the person doing the creating - the sense of self-esteem, the sense of doing something in the world, being an active participant, feeling alive in the world - these are all feelings which are reported by people who make things in the physical world and, with striking similarity, by people who make things online. But the things they make are also important - those are the things which, at first, connect us with others, which say something about ourselves, and which perhaps contain ideas or inspiration which will make a significant difference to our own or other people's future experiences of the world. So the internal and external dimensions of creativity are both important, but I would say that the most important thing is just doing it.

I think there is a tendency to think of everyday people's acts of creativity as 'nice', on an individual level, but insignificant, in social or political terms. So it may be personally pleasing, or emotionally rewarding, for someone to make a toy for their child, or to maintain a blog about their everyday experiences, or to make some amusing YouTube videos, or to record and share a song - these all sound like 'nice' things, and nobody would really want to stop them from happening - but they are not considered to be much more than that.

And as you know yourself, Henry, there are people who work on the more obvious, formal 'political' issues in media and communications studies - government broadcasting policies, or the business practices of multinational corporations, or the impact of political advertising on public opinion - and they would not recognise an interest in everyday creativity as part of serious or proper critical study.

But I think these acts of everyday creativity are extremely important. You can cast them as just 'a nice thing' for individuals, and normally they are a nice thing for individuals, but they are much more than that. Every time someone decides to make something themselves, rather than buying or consuming something already made by someone else, they are making a distinct choice, to be an active participant in the world rather than an observer or a shopper in the world. And through the process of making, they get to enjoy, as I've said, that sense of purpose and connection, and satisfaction.

Taken one by one these are all small things, seemingly insignificant moments; but when more and more people make more and more choices like this, and then also when they go online to amplify and inspire further activities, it builds up to something really big, and powerful.

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. His teaching and research concerns people's use of media in their everyday lives, with a particular focus on creative uses of digital media. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He has made several popular YouTube videos, and produces the website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk. He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world's leading creative organisations, including the BBC, Lego, and Tate.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Three)

This is the final installment of my interiew with Brian David Johnson. Sorry for the delay in posting. I had some difficulty with email access during Comic-Con.

You talk in the book about "ubiquitous television." Many readers will not know this concept, so can you explain what it means and how it represents a significant shift from our current relationship to content?

Ubiquitous TV is built off the idea of ubiquitous computing. This was a concept pioneered by Mark Weiser while he was at Xerox PARC. Weiser saw computing existing in three stages: Stage one was the old mainframe computer. These were the computer the size of an entire room. The second stage of computing was the personal computer. This is the Mac or PC that we all know and love.

Now we should point out that the shift from stage one to stage two was massive. This shift defines the world of computing as we know it today. There was a time when it was fantasy to think of a computer that could fit in your pocket. But of course we all know that happened. And Weiser made a leap to the next stage of computing.

For Weiser stage three was where computing disappeared and literally could be found everywhere. It would be invisible. It would be ubiquitous. This has been a long standing area of study in the academic and corporate research worlds. In my book I took this approach and showed how it was actually beginning to happen in the world of entertainment. I also expanded it to how consumers and people would experience TV in their lives.

The idea of ubiquitous TV means that people would live with TV throughout their day and across all the digital devices or "screens" in their lives. What I always found lovely about the idea of ubiquitous TV was that it shifted the focus of the definition and experience away from the devices and to the lives of consumers. No longer would you go to your TV just to get TV. You wouldn't go to your PC to access the Internet and phones wouldn't just be for phone calls. The idea of ubiquitous TV really is the foundation of my idea of Screen Future.

For consumers it's not about the TV or the PC or the smart phone or any other devices. When our social scientists talk to consumers they hear that for real people it's just about the screens and the entertainment and social communication that these screens give us. That is truly a ubiquitous experience. It's not about one device to rule them all but about whatever device we have handy at the time. In this world of ubiquitous TV it is less about the device and more about how that device does, what we want it to do and how it gives us the experience we want.

When I think about ubiquitous TV now for me it is a real life actualization of Weiser's theoretical ideas. The world of ubiquitous TV is happening and gives us a real world glimpse and application of what we can expect to see In the future.

One could argue that there is a core tension between the idea of media as "personalized" and the idea of media as "socialized," something we consume through networks (whether old school broadcast or new school digital/social). This is not a new tension, but it seems hard for advocates for new models of television to keep both aspects in their heads at the same time. How do these two pulls impact the design of the next generation of television-related technologies?

You couldn't be more right. It has been hard for people to keep both of these concepts in their heads at the same time. But for me I approach it differently. For me I think about what consumers and people are telling us. Because ultimately it's about what they want and people have no problem managing these two ideas at the same time. The reason why it's easy for them is because they want it both ways. As we start to think about how to design for both the personalized state as well as the socialized state, I think we need to remember that for consumers both of these states are still TV. In the business of entertainment and even in the business of thinking and writing about entertainment, we like to create categories and systems for understanding what's happening in the modern media landscape. This certainly is important as we need to have these discussions but even as we discuss and debate we have to remember that for consumers they don't think this way. They are not thinking about the business or cultural implications of media. People are simply enjoying it as a part of their lives.

I realize this might sound a little over simplified but I've noticed over the past few years that many people I've been talking to forget this simple difference.

So as we start to think about designing for consumers we must remember that there is no line between personalized or socialized. It's about access and communication. I've written a few times that the goal of my kind of futurism is to ultimately become mundane.
People often quote Arthur C. Clarke's third law. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But I'd like to humbly add Johnson's Addendum to Clarke. It would say that yes - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - But come next Tuesday evening that magic will be mundane.

For us to design in this landscape we need to understand how people move through their days interacting with people and entertainment. If we remember that people want it both ways. They want to interact and socialize sometimes AND they want to just sit back and be passive sometimes PLUS they want to switch between these modalities freely then I think we are starting to approach a proper design sense.

BUT this is just a start! What I'm most interested in is not their either or approach that we are taking. We always seem to be talking about New TV and Old TV. That's fine. As I said above we have to remember that people want both and that's a good thing. But what I'm really interested in is the landscape I'm between these two experiences. The uncharted territory around these TV experiences. I'm worried we are still encumbered by our past prejudices and experiences. This is why I typically tell my students that they are the future of TV-- not me. I may be working out how people will be interacting with TV and computational platforms and screens and even you Henry will be writing about what's happening and COULD happen but they are the ones who will actually build these experiences. They are the ones who need to be unencumbered by the past. We always need to appreciate what consumers what and respect the TV entertainment experiences but there are so many places to innovate and invent.

I love the old ideas of where TV was going to go. People always said that it would all be personal; that mainstream broadcast media would shrivel and die. No longer would large corporation dictate to the people what they should watch. It would be a wild and wooly collection of intensely personal niche channels that would change and adapt to the needs and desires of people. Well yeah that's cool but it didn't happen exactly like that. It turns out people love mainstream broadcast TV. People all over the world love watching American Idol or Pop Idol or Indian Idol... And there's nothing wrong with this. Consumers love personalization and they also love watching Idol live. This is not hard for them to understand.

Look we have to be clear here. Our research shows that the majority of people all over the world still watch the majority of their TV on an actual TV in real time, in broadcast from traditional broadcast, cable or satellite. TV...traditional TV is still very important to people. But that doesn't mean it can't change. Obviously what has happened over the last few years with the delivery of entertainment via the internet to multiple connected computational screens clearly illustrates that people's imaginations can get captured with new entertainment experiences. But that's TV. It can be both things and it's an experience that is strong enough and robust enough to be up to the task.

Ah yes! At the end of Screen Future I wrote that I figured that by the time people read the book there would be a whole host of issues and technologies that were outdated.

But in Screen Future I really wanted to spend more time writing and talking to people in the gaming industry. I have always been a gamer. Pong and I were born in the same year. I grew up with a joystick in my hands. My generation is a generation of gamers and the affect that this has had on how we think about entertainment is massive.
I got to do a little writing in this in one of my columns. I spoke with a round table of gamers and game developers at the PAX convention in Seattle and that was really informative. Ultimately I think we need to rethink how we define gaming and that this could have a massive affect not only on the gaming industry but perhaps the entire media landscape.

I've joked that I could write an entire book on social TV. I feel in the book I barely scratched the surface. I really think the social activity is the future of TV and entertainment. Now really this is a bit of a copout because social experience has always been in the bedrock of TV but I do think there is so much more we can do.

What happens when TV and entertainment becomes the platform not only for being social for our friends and family? What happens when TV becomes the platform by which we are social with our government and with our culture and with education?

I'm thinking I should really explore this with you Henry. It's an amazing area and one that I think we need to keep our eye on. The future is going to be really amazing here.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Two)

What aspects of television can not change and have television remain the same medium?

That's a tough one because TV, like any good system or organism, has survived for so long because it adapts. This is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the history of TV. TV as a collection of technical innovations, business models, story structures, cultural indicators and motivators is in a constant state of change. I could give you the long list most of us take for granted: Black and white to color. Sponsored shows to the 30 sec spot. The big three broadcasters to cable and satellite. TiVo! The complex web of broadcasters and affiliates. The birth and refining and reimaging of the half hour sit com. The sit com or more pointedly the American sit com is really strange and deeply interesting...but I'm gushing

When I think about what would not change so that TV remains TV. I could defer to USC's own Jeffrey Cole from The Center for the Digital Future. He says TV is easy. TV is video. For most people they know TV when they see it and it's simply video.

Now some might think of this a being a little too broad but I like it because it puts the burden of the recognition of TV on the people who are consuming it. Which fits really. I also love it because it defines TV as an audio visual medium. Which keeps it broad and allows us to include not just broadcast TV or even Internet delivered TV but any video or games or even applications that is intermingled with video.

I should start off by saying that this fundamental shift to TV from digital to data has not happened yet on a broad scale. It's certainly coming. Some folks I've talked to peg 2015 as a possible date from this but I'm thinking now for mass consumption it might be a bit longer. At the moment the average consumer isn't experiencing the world that I described...yet. But behind the scenes it's certainly happening and happening right now. At Intel I've seen some really smart work in this area three years ago. I write about it in my book that we have been doing work in the fields of video analytics and computer vision. In a way you can think of it as computers warning TV. How do computers watch TV? What computers what TV what do they see and how do they see it?

In one of our labs in China we did some interesting work with computers watching soccer or football depending upon where you are from. The team created a system that would track the different players, identify them and even track the ball movement. The whole system would go crazy when one of the teams made a goal. It was great.

What was generated from this was a massive amount of data. Essentially TV, the football match, was turned from something that was a digital transmission to data. The tracking of the different objects in the frame and also the links that identified the players created a running data feed. This turned TV from digital to data and once you do that then we can do some really interesting things with. All this data allowed us to search the videos in ways we'd never been able to do before. We could also then pull that data apart and put it back together in some interesting ways. That shift from digital to data was key.

Now the real question is what do we do with that data? That's the question that I'm not sure we know what to do with yet. It's similar to the data mining and massive data set questions that are being discussed now. Practical examples might be the Net Flix prize (which I write about in the book). One way to look at this future of TV and entertainment is those who have the best algorithm to search this data wins. Fascinating!

But we aren't there yet. Although there is some really interesting work going on in universities and companies all over world we haven't got this technology to the point where we could take it to scale and roll the capability to the general public. But this isn't really I think what you are asking.

We aren't there yet. But we will be soon. It's not a failure of technology at the moment but a failure if imagination. What I mean by this is that I really believe we don't know what's possible when TV and entertainment become truly data based. What do we do with that data? How do we organize it? How do we search it? Who owns it? Who owns that data about us using that data?

These are the issues that are just coming up as the algorithms and technology get to the point that they become a viable business option. Once this goes to scale and consumers really begin to see it like you asked I think it's going to be really interesting.

Oh this is an easy one. You are throwing me a softball here Henry. Technology, the very technology we have been discussing has brought about the transformation of entertainment from a broadcast model or an appointment based TV experience to a more personated and engaged TV experience. Technology did this. No question. In the early days of the DVR is way ReplayTV and Tivo. Heck even to a very limited extent the VCR.

(Side note: The original goal of the VCR was really trying the bring engagement TV into the lives of consumers. The original slogan for the Sony Betamax was: "You don't have to miss Kojack because you're watching Colombo." But as we all know the VCR is a tale of unintended consequences. Although the VCR was originally designed to allow you to personalize your TV experience it really didn't do this. Very few people were recording live TV. Where the VCR shined was allowing consumer to bring home movies and turn their living rooms into a movie theater. In fact what was actually time shifting wasn't TV but the cinema. And it literally changed the underlying financial model of movies and Hollywood forever.

But this wasn't TV. It took the digitization of the TV signal to turn appointment TV to engagement TV. Little upstart companies like Tivo and ReplayTV slowly but surely changed how we acted and interacted with TV.

Of course it wasn't just being able to record TV that brought this change. It was also being able to manage the TV shows you liked (aka the season pass in TiVo) and also find new shows and even get recommendations. Although admittedly the initial accuracy of these recommendations was so questionable that it led to a sitcom spoof.

But even this was a perfect indicator that the world of TV had changed. Never before would the big broadcasters assume you were homosexual and change their broadcasting to meet you new preconceived likes and dislikes. That sitcom was a perfect mainstream digital marker that the world of TV had changed forever.

Enter the Internet. Hokey smokes. Think about all the various ways the Internet and it's accompanying apps and services have literally changed the face of the world. The delay in applying this to the world of TV and entertainment hasn't been technological. As we talked about earlier, the pressure from the technological changes have forced changes in other areas of business, unions, contract and distribution.

Now as I finish up here let me say that appointment TV is not going anywhere. Regardless of how technology transforms TV to an intensely personal experience, appointment TV will not go away. We will always have World Cup and the Olympics and American Idol.

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part One)

Shortly after I arrived at USC, Brian David Johnson from Intel came to the office to interview me for a book he was developing on the future of screens and entertainment. I was giddy from having taught the first session of my Transmedia Entertainment class, and we had a great exchange about the relations between consumers and technology and how it might impact our future relations to television and other entertainment media.

The interview was included in Johnson's book, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices We Love, which was released last year. Johnson's book combines interviews with key thinkers about media's future from both academia and industry with his own reflections on recent technological developments being developed at labs and what their long term implications may be.

After years of teaching at MIT, I am often skeptical of work on media which starts from a technologist's perspective since they rarely factor in the social and cultural dimensions of media. Johnson is a notable exception -- a deep thinker who groks the interface between technology and culture, who may work for industry but also understands the consumer perspective on why we love television and what we want to get out of watching our favorite series. So, I recommend his book to anyone who wants to expand their thinking and learn about the visions of screen futures which are driving technological development at Intel and a range of other companies.

Johnson was nice enough to sign on to let me reverse the microphone, so to speak, and do an interview for this blog. Over the next few installments, Johnson will share some of his current thinking. Here, he talks about television in relation to such trends as ubiquitous computing and social media, and shares some of the factors which drove him to produce this book.

Here's Johnson's official bio which should give you a clearer sense of where he is coming from:

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.

You begin the book with Isaac Asimov's warning that predicting the future is a "hopeless, thankless task." Given this, what do you hope to accomplish with this book?

I love that quote! I have tremendous respect for Asimov not only as a science fiction writer and a thinker but also as a person who brought science and conversations about science into the mainstream. When I was writing Screen Future I actually had two books always within reach. The first was Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law - his collection of lectures and the second was a collection of Asimov essays The Planet that Wasn't. Asimov was such a good writer, easy to understand and quite funny - that people had no problem reading about the intricacies of planetary motion or the theoretical planet of Vulcan. Both Feynman and Asimov were passionate communicators and conversationalists. Feynman was known as the great explainer, while Asimov was the great popularize of science.

Getting people to have conversations about science is certainly important. But I think getting people to have conversations about the future is even more critical. The future is not a fixed point in time that we are all hurdling towards. The future is not set. The future is made every day by the actions of people. The of the most significant ways that we can all affect the future is to have conversations about it. We need to ask ourselves: What kind of future do we want to live in? What kind of future do we NOT want to live in? Having these conversations, when they are based on sound science can have a real affect on where we are going. Science fiction can do this - I believe science fiction gives us the language so that we can have this conversation about the future. But nonfiction can do the same thing. Both Feynman and Asimov knew this. The ultimate goal of Screen Future and the future casting work I do is to have conversations about the future.

Ultimately what I want to accomplish with the book is twofold:

First we are in an incredibly interesting time when it comes to technology and storytelling. For quite a while now we're been talking about telling stories, meaningful stories across multiple mediums, platforms and technologies. I don't have to tell you this Henry - you've done some of the best writing in this area. But I think something changed in 2010 and I really recognized it when I was walking around the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2011. Wondering the floor of that massive show, looking at all these different connected devices and screens it became really obvious to me that we had passed a kind of technological tipping point. What I mean by that is that for years most of the reasons why we've not really been able to take this screen future mainstream or distributed widely was because of technological limitations - the processors were to slow, there wasn't descent broadband connections, heck there really wasn't a robust Internet - things like that. But ultimately that's all changed.

We've really reached that tipping point where we have the processing power, battery life, storage, connectivity and human interfaces (small form factors, touch screens, etc) to be able to delivery people the entertainment and communication experience they want. And businesses have the ability to bring out not just one device - it's not just Apple or Sony or Samsung - it's a entire robust and sometimes zany collection of device manufactures that are bringing all kind of wonderful devices and screens and form factors to market. It's not a technological problem anymore getting across these experiences.

I think where we are now is smack in the middle of a new set of challenges which are very different in nature but just as important. Right now I think we are seeing the gathering of a business tipping point and an experience tipping point. Now forgive me for overusing the tipping point metaphor here but I think it applies. Right now we're watching some really interesting developments around the business of entertainment and computing. People a really beginning to explore what it means for their businesses to deliver these experiences. It has repercussions all over the world, in union negotiations, government regulations, mergers, long term strategic plans...anything that is touched by entertainment and computing industries. And what' most exciting is that we a right in the middle of it - it's happening right now.

I wanted to explore this in Screen Future. There's a lot of culture, history, technology and economics in the book to give us some background on this - but when the book gets really good is when we start having discussions about where things might go, how businesses might change and what are the underlying factors to this change. Since the book has been out and I've been on the book tour I've had some really interesting and well informed discussions and sometimes arguments about the business of storytelling and the business of delivery those stories to people using technology.

The second goal for writing Screen Future is a little more broad. As you know I travel around the world talking to people about the future and I'm always struck with how passionate, interested and engaged people are when they talk about their visions for the future. I wanted the book to be a place to gather together a wide range of research and opinions and offer up a vision for where we might be going. My process of future casting really isn't about prediction at all. Asimov was right THAT is a thankless task. Future casting is a little more pragmatic - I use things like social and computer science, global trends and conversations with experts and visionaries to construct a grounded vision for where we are headed. Then we use this vision to talk about what's good and bad about that vision - like I said before. But ultimately we're using this future casting to develop visions that we can build. In the book I wanted to capture the future casting process with all of its disparate inputs and show what a vision for 2015 might look like. Then use it as a way to have conversations with people about the future that they wanted and the future they were worried about

You describe yourself as a "Consumer Experience Architect." What does this entail? What kinds of expertise and insight shape your models of the consumer experience? What factors are shifting the consumer experience of television? Are the changes being driven by shifts in technology, in business practice, or in social and cultural expectations?

I'm going to give the answer that I give to my engineering colleagues. But I have to warn you that they hate this answer. So I kind of like giving it to them. The answer to your question is....yes. The answer is yes. All of the above. The changes in consumers experience with TV are due to all of the factors you mentioned. Let's look at each one and see if we don't uncover some more.

Let's start with "shifts in technology". Because I work in an engineering company this is the easiest to tackle. I've watched the evolution of TV technology first hand for more than twenty years now. In the early 1990s I worked on interactive TV deployments in Europe and Scandinavia. Now to give you an idea of the types of things I worked on I should tell you about one of our most successful projects. It was a huge success and we thought it really showed the way forward for "interactive TV". But thinking about it today in 2011 the sad truth is that it really illustrates the technical limitations of TV before recent improvements.

The project was done for British Airways. They were looking to sell vacation packages to Spain at the time. A big problem for them was lead generation, actually finding the right people who would be interested in the vacation package. Now the vacations they were selling weren't super expensive but they also weren't budget vacations either. They were right in the middle. So what BA wanted to do was use an interactive TV application to find the right people to market to.

To do this they produced a really slick commercial. I think it was about 5 minutes long. At the end of the advertisement the viewer was prompted to press a button on their remote control to request a glossy brochure for more information.

We launched the test in Cardiff Whales and it was a huge success as a pilot. We thought we were geniuses. The back end was pretty complicated. To actually make the thing work you had to send the request via the back channel on the set top box. It then had to interface with the head end, pull the subscribers address and information then send that information to the fulfillment center so that they could mail out the glossy brochure of beautiful beaches and smiling people. For BA it was great because they were gathering prequalified leads for their vacation packages, only sending the costly brochure to people who were interested. For many this type of lead generation is the holy grail of advertising. You actually get your potential customers to ask you for advertising materials.

Like I said it was a success and we thought we were geniuses ushering in the future of interactivity on TV. How pathetic is that? Press a button and get a brochure...that was the staggering brilliance of interactive design. A button that sends you a piece of paper mail!
Now I'm not trying to trivialize how difficult it was to pull off this project. It was actually kind of hard but I think it really illustrates the technical and infrastructure limitations of TV systems in the past.

Flash forward 20 years and look how far we have come technically. We all know the Internet really changed everything from a media and storytelling standpoint. But behind the scenes and inside the TV a lot of little and large changes have really turned the TV itself into a computational device. Two decades ago the TV technically look pretty close to the old RCA sets that used to bring I Love Lucy into American living rooms. Today TVs look more like computers and smart phones.

I guess that's really the big shift and one of the main points of my book. Today technically speaking TVs and PCs and smart phones and any connected device is just that; a screen that can connect to the Internet and give people the entertainment and communications they want. It's just a screen not a specific device. When you look at it this way the conversation is less about the TV or PC or whatever and more about the form factor, the size of the screen and they way it fits into your life; the way all the different screens you own fit into your life

That's a huge shift! I'm a TV guy and recasting the TV and entertainment experience like this is worlds away from where we were 20 years ago. Much of this shift has been started and brought about by the technological advances to both TVs and PCs; which really I just think about as computational devices across the board.

This isn't a completely linear story by any means but for the moment let's pretend it is. So, after all they technological advances, the introduction and popularization of the Internet, the reduction in the cost of computational power to consumers and the expansion of meaningful broadband networks then it really got interesting. Well let me restate that...what got interesting is what people did with all of these changes. (Here's a tiny aside: I wrote all of my notes for our conversation on my smart phone as I flew from London or LA or Mumbai - even how we compose and were has evolved!)

Few people have chronicled and explored these cultural shifts more fully than you Henry - so I'm not going to bore you with my poor summary of your work of which I am a huge fan. But let's just say people got involved in their entrainment. They got involved in making it, finding it, talking about it and did it on their schedule and to better fit their preferences not the preferences of the companies and corporation that were producing, distributing and advertising with this content

Now the entertainment industry isn't stupid. We often forget that these large companies are made up of many passionate intelligent people who mainly want to make the best stories possible on whatever medium they choose.

So around 2007 the media and technology industry really began to change and intermingle. A lot of writers cite the 2007 consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas as the turning point where all industries realized the fact that the future of TV and the future of entertainment was digital or a mix of traditional delivery mingled with the Internet. This was massive realization for these large global companies.

This really brought about and is continuing to bring about the business practice changes you asked about. And it's really these changes that we are witnessing and will continue to watch for the next few years. This is something I really came upon while working on my book. From a technological stand point we are there. When it comes to having technical capabilities to deliver the entertainment experience the majority of people want we have the engineering done. We might even be a little ahead. This of course will change but for today most of the technical hurdles have been solved.

We are now witnessing the business changes as they adapt to these technological advancements as they mix with expanded consumer expectations and habits. I find this fascinating! All you need to do is pick up The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Variety and even Entertainment Weekly and underneath many of the articles you will see the influences of these changes.

And the changes will come. They have to come. People want them. Now I'm not saying TV is going away or even that big budget entertainment is going away. That's not going to happen either. The main reason for that is that people love it. People don't want it to go away. They will still pay for it. But their habits and expectation for where they get it, how they get it and how they can participate with it are changing. The entertainment industry will adapt to this just as it has done the past. As I see it this is an exciting time full with a lot of juicy stories and incredible opportunity.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters...

Yesterday, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame announced a bold new online venture called Pottermore which has sent shock waves through multiple communities which I follow closely and I've had more than a few people already ask me to weigh in on my initial thoughts about what's taking place. Keep in mind that, as Will Rogers used to say, all I know is what I read in the newspaper. I have no knowledge of what's taking place here other than what's already in the press and what I can speculate about from my knowledge of the announcement's fit within a range of trends impacting social media, transmedia entertainment, Web 2.0, and fan culture.

Here's the video of Rowling's announcement, which you should watch, if you haven't already, so the rest of this makes sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

How The New York Public Library is Sharing "The World of Tomorrow" Now: An Interview with Deanna Lee

I am now the proud owner of an iPad. I'd been meaning to get one for some time, but what motivated me to make the leap was the release of Biblion, an extraordinary new app developed by the New York Public Library to showcase and contextualize their rich collection of materials surrounding the 1939 New York World's Fair.

I was honored to be asked to participate in this great new venture of the New York Public Library. The App includes an interview which describes the ways that the Fair translated early ideas from science fiction into a physical location which promised people a chance to see the World of Tomorrow and offers insights into the continued hold that the Fair has over the popular imagination, including its role in shaping "retrofuturist" trends in contemporary comics and novels. In the interview, I share a little about my own lifelong fascination with the Fair:

When I was a child, my godfather and godmother went to the 1964 New York World's Fair and brought back a program which described in detail each of the pavilions. I spent endless hours reading the descriptions and imaging what the buildings were like, somehow not quite grasping that the Fair itself was long gone. As I've gotten older, though, my interests has been drawn towards the 1939 Fair, in part because of my intellectual engagement with science fiction as a genre, and in part because of my personal fascination with the style of that period. I have started to collect artifacts from the fair -- through antique shops when I am lucky, increasingly through eBay -- which exist in my collection alongside other remains of older media practices -- magic lantern slides, a 1920s era dictaphone, wax cylinders, Victorian stereoscope slides, Winsor McCay comic strip pages. Much of this constitutes "residual media" or what Bruce Sterling has called "dead media."

I prefer residual media because it suggests the "undead" presence of such media in our culture, the sense that bits and pieces of them have been left behind, shoved into the corners, often forgotten but still shaping the way we understand ourselves and the world. When I moved to Los Angeles last year, we ended up moving into a 1930 era Art Deco building, which reflects similar aesthetic sensibilities. My interest in the fair has been fueled by the fact that my Mother-in-Law grew up in Brooklyn and came to the event as a child. She had valued a medallion shaped like a Heinz Pickle which had somehow gotten lost through the years. When my wife found the item on eBay, she ordered it and snuck it back into her mother's jewelry box, just to mess with her mind and see how long it would take her to find it. The item, a cheap disposable novelty at the time, was welcomed with tearful nostalgia and shared laughter.

As for myself, I was born far too late to have attended the fair, so it remains only a mental construct -- as much an object of fantasy as a historical reality -- yet one which has become more material for me as I have been able to claim some bits and pieces from the fair for my own collection. Ironically, one of the key events at the Fair was the creation of a time capsule which sought to choose representative items from the 1930s and preserve them for the next generation. The time capsule is premised on the idea of scarcity -- that much of the past will be lost -- while today, so much of the junk people bought at the fair is still in circulation, thanks to eBay.

There has never before been such a rich resource for 1939 Worlds Fair buffs than what the New York Public Library has pulled together -- a rich mix of documents, photographs, videos, and audio files, coupled with smart contemporary writing which puts the events of the fair into a range of contexts, from the history of American diet to the ways the Fair was impacted by the encroaching events in Europe, from its place in the history of American media and domestic technology to the spectacular showmanship that shaped the Midway attractions.

Much like the 1939 World's Fair itself, Biblion represents a chance to see the World of Tomorrow...Today. The emergence of new publishing platforms should not simply be greeted with fear by public institutions or by the simple reproduction of traditional print books into new delivery systems. Rather, we need creative people to explore what e-publishing can do that expands the capacities of authors to convey information in powerful new ways, that enhances and broadens the capacity of print to include a wealth of other affordances, and which gets readers thinking about the reading process from new perspectives. Biblion takes a bold new step towards achieving all of these goals and it's fitting that the New York Public Library, one of our most established and cherished national institutions, is helping to guide our progress towards distant horizons. After all, the future is where we are going to be living for the rest of our lives.

The following is an interview with Deanna Lee, one of the primary architects of the Biblion project, which discusses both the discoveries they made digging through the New York Public Library's collection and the ways the design of this new app reflects the library's larger vision for epublishing.

What has been the historic relationship of the New York Public Library and the Fair?

As early as 1936, the Fair's Director of Research and Library, Frank Monaghan, began discussing a "mutually advantageous working agreement" with New York Public Library Director H. M. Lydenberg. The Library would provide research and advice to the Fair--everything from information on previous fairs to input such as Lydenberg's questioning of what language Time Capsule materials should be written in (an exchange included in the app). In exchange, the Library would receive all of the Fair archives and materials "to be preserved for posterity" (and for Biblion readers!).

What are some of the discoveries you made in pulling together the materials for this project?

There were so many treasures that emerged from the collection; and the 700-some items contained in the app represent just the tip of the iceberg. There were the poignant pieces such as the letter from the Czech Consul's wife (actually William Grimes' discovery while researching his book Appetite City--unexpectedly contained in the food boxes), many heartbreaking, and others even ridiculous. A glossary for words coined for the Fair and folders full of letters from people who were desperate for money offering up family members to the sideshows are both cited in the application. All of the contributors made interesting discoveries in the materials--from the real story behind William Grant Still's supposed "color-blind" selection as composer of the Theme Music, complete with administrators' correspondence weighing the pros and cons of how the race issue might play, to the process of how the documents were originally arranged and catalogued.

Finally, a constant source of amusement and admiration were the charming, informative captions by the Fair's PR guru Leo Casey and other publicity staff. In this app, not only do you see the original source items, but also the original backs and captions of the items. Just take a look at Casey's captions throughout the "New York is Calling" story on the AT&T exhibit where visitors could make free long-distance calls (E. B. White's favorite exhibit) and you'll see captions like "'Hey Mom! Send me some money' says Robert Craig, 16 years old, of Akron Ohio. Craig, who hitchhiked to the New York World's Fair, won a free telephone call...and promptly called home for bus fare."

I think Robert Kohn, the Fair Board of Design member responsible for defining the "Building the World of Tomorrow" theme, would have fully appreciated the potential of e-publishing, and what we have tried to open the door to, with this digital publication. As one can read in the app, in a memo titled "Catholicity of the Fair's Design," his vision of Tomorrow was right in sync with our idea of "Know the Past, Find the Future"--building upon traditional presentations of the written word to achieve a new "variety of expressions." The Fair, he said, "is attempting to use the past and the present as stepping stones toward a much better future," using "things that are available in the world of today and with which, as tools, the 'World of Tomorrow' is to be built." This is a great time for content producers doing just that through new directions in publishing.

Biblion has elements of a magazine -- rich and compelling stories -- and of an archive -- primary documents, photographs, audio and visual materials. What does this suggest about the ways that the multimedia potentials of the ebook may be rewriting the genres of academic and scholarly publication?

Biblion aims to provide an "infoscape" within which readers can not only experience but pursue and explore different story lines--guided by curators and scholars, but towards more personal journeys of academic discovery. It includes a magazine-like compilation of stories, galleries and essays--but moving beyond the traditional magazine experience, each person's reading of a story may lead to different places. It also has the feel of a research archive--but moving beyond the experience of riffling through boxes of original source material to a process by which people group those multimedia source items into what become their personal stories.

There is a definite spatial aspect: the whole layout of information is metaphorically based on taking one into and through the Library stacks, entering through an exhibition wall as you might in a museum. After taking in that exhibition wall orientation, you often want to be able to choose which rooms you visit in which order, and which items to focus upon. Biblion is based on the premise that once original sources are given shape, infinite narratives emerge. We've referred to it as a multilinear reading experience, one in which you can jump from story to story, stack to stack, through multiple combinations of media.

For example, while reading Professor Ethan Robey's essay about the Westinghouse "Battle of the Centuries" competition between Mrs. Modern (with the new electric dishwasher) and Mrs. Drudge (hand-washing), one might follow an inter-story connection to see and learn about the model Electric Kitchen in the Town of Tomorrow. Another reader might be led to a second Westinghouse exhibit, the Time Capsule. Film of the Middleton family visiting the capsule can then lead to additional video of their other visits, or through the audio/video sort function to the "Cavalcade of Centaurs" soundtrack, newsreel, and more contained within the story lines; it's all very organic and integral. A particularly fun multimedia piece is an original piece--a recreation and remix of the Democracity exhibit. Using and incorporating designs, photographs, the script, score, and even lighting directions from the Fair records, we've made a video complete with 3D animation that rebuilds and imagines the experience of visiting the Fair's centerpiece futuristic city.

Overall, the presentation of multimedia was key--not as simple add-ons to written stories, but as elements one could experience in a variety of ways. And so, landscape or "gallery" view allows people to browse horizontally in a way that feels like research, flipping through and zooming in to photographs, memos, press releases, letters, telegrams, film, news clippings, posters, and more. At the same time, you have the option of experiencing the documents and media in a more traditional magazine-like way. In "reader" or portrait view, we've added text breaks to give the documents context and more of a story line, drawn from the extensive press materials by the Fair's public relations whizzes, and the extensive finding aid to the collection compiled by the Library's archivists and curators. The "discovery" here, for us, was actually about the idea of research--and translating it into a different, perhaps less intensive, activity. In order to bridge the ideas of searching/discovery and narrative--we had to provide context in which people would be encouraged to read the documents and see them as more than mere artifacts (things to look at instead of to read and to read about). Text breaks and narrative voice--providing just enough of an introduction as to encourage further exploration--ended up making the documents seem like entry points. In the end, the text breaks made the items feel more like actual content--parts of original and deep stories that in turn could lead to further narrative lines.

I would add that these last ideas came as a revelation to us--an evolution in how we came to present the material. We tried a variety of ways of incorporating and displaying media, including with differing amounts of text. What you see in Biblion today evolved from and is part of a whole discovery process in creating the app with the tremendous developers and designers at Potion.

Do you have other future projects planned? If so, can you share any details?

The Library has a number of new digital projects underway, including a crowdsourcing project now in beta, to transcribe tens of thousands of historical restaurant menus from 1840 to the present that are in our digital gallery menu collection (you can find out more and take part, at menus.nypl.org).

We're also preparing for next year's 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth a multimedia "living archive"--a website featuring music performance videos narrated by professional musicians, students, and anyone interested in contributing to the understanding of Cage's philosophy and the process of interpreting his music. The starting point is our Library for the Performing Arts John Cage Music Manuscript Collection; from there we want to bring the music alive through videos that encourage an exchange of ideas on not only how to perform Cage, but on the questions his work raises of what constitutes music, sound, art and more.

Finally, we're working on a web version of Biblion: World's Fair tied to our Digital Gallery at nypl.org, and an NYPL app allowing users to manage their accounts and search our catalog online from mobile devices.

Deanna Lee is the Vice President for Communications the Library, responsible for promoting the Library and its mission, activities, and collections through publicity, marketing, digital and print publications, multimedia content, and design. She came to NYPL from the Asia Society, and before that worked 20 years in broadcast news--as a senior producer for ABC's World News Tonight, documentary producer, and overseas producer for Nightline.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

What can Journalists Learn from The Daily Show: An Interview with Amber Day (Part Two)

What do these news comedy programs add to our understanding of contemporary life which may be missing from mainstream news?

What these programs excel at is deconstructing the scripted quality of the contemporary political conversation. Though we may be aware that politicians and corporate spokespeople are all carefully groomed and staged, and that their PR people are experts at getting the talking points on television, the news media rarely actually point this out, nor do they do the work of moving the conversation beyond the talking points. Satire, then, offers a way of satisfyingly breaking through the existing script. Stewart and Colbert (as well as their counterparts in other countries) have built a reputation on their repeated attempts to demonstrate the ways in which the public political conversation is being manipulated, and to gesture to some of the very real issues that are being obscured.

Journalists likely shouldn't start copying the fart jokes or sexual innuendo, but they could certainly learn how to hold public figures and pundits more accountable, how to push interviewees beyond the sound-bites, and - oddly- how to do more investigative reporting. When a politician suddenly does an about-face on an issue due to political expediency, Stewart and Colbert seize the opportunity to point it out by juxtaposing particularly revealing clips. Journalists should definitely not aim to ridicule public figures, but they should hold them accountable to their own statements and attempt to ask them hard questions.

How has the shift from broadcast to narrowcast impacted the nature of political humor on television? What do you see as the potential shifts that are occuring with the rise of online content in this site?

Narrowcasting has allowed for the development of much edgier, more critical satire. In the broadcast era, there were very few examples of true satire on television. Programs that did veer toward that territory typically attracted a great deal of controversy and did not last long, as producers were wary of alienating any of the viewing public.

Longer-running programs like Saturday Night Live have had moments of incisive critique (particularly in the beginning), but have stayed far more firmly in the realm of personality-focused political humor discussed above. In the age of narrowcasting, however, there has been an explosion of niche programming (including a great deal of satiric programs) designed to appeal to select audiences without as much worry about potentially offending viewers.

The rise of online content seems to be further fueling the changes brought about by narrowcasting in that it has become easier for content to find receptive fans and for fans to come together around particular material.

Your account of comedy news stresses the careful balance that needs to be achieved between being the clown and being the preacher. Your book ends before Colbert and Stewart staged their march for sanity on Washington. What do you think this event did to the public's perception of them?

That is an interesting question, and I think the answer depends on who you are. The press did not know what to make of the event. For the most part, they interpreted it as silly comedy with no larger message whatsoever. The preacher part of the equation totally went over their heads.

On the flip side, partisans on the political right interpreted it as narrowly political, either assuming that it was somehow meant to be in support of Obama and the Democrats, or that it was aimed solely at poking fun of Glen Beck.

Partisans on the political left were hoping that Stewart and Colbert would step forward as political leaders or activists and were ultimately disappointed.

However, most of the long-time fans I spoke with on the mall that day seemed ecstatic to be there. For fans, the rally was perfectly consistent with both the comedy and the critique they were familiar with from the programs. It highlighted the extreme polarization of political debate in this country and lambasted cable news for playing to the extremes, failing to investigate the facts, and wallowing in sensationalism. This critique was made in playful form throughout the variety acts and then by Stewart in a heartfelt plea at the end. The palpable excitement in the crowd that day was over being able to publicly perform support for that critique.

As far as the performers themselves are concerned, in interviews before and after the event, they were careful to continue maintaining the balance between political truth-teller and clown, and they have continued to do so since then. The subtle change, though, seems to have been the realization that they have earned the space to occasionally indulge in moments of heartfelt expression of their views, regardless of whether it makes for uproarious comedy. Stewart, for instance, dedicated several lengthy segments and then an entire episode to drawing attention toward political foot-dragging on passing the Zadroga act (for compensating sick 9/11 first responders), and crafted a dead-serious episode on his response to the Gabrielle Giffords' shooting.

What do you see as the strengths and limitations of satire as a form of political activism?

The limitation of satire as a form of activism is that it can exacerbate polarization and feed a form of in-group elitism. That being said, what irony and satire are good at is creating a feeling of community, which I would argue is a crucial component of political organizing. Ironic activism works to hail people who already might have similar beliefs or sensibilities and remind them that there are others who share their feelings, fueling the sense of community in opposition.

Many would dismiss that as merely "preaching to the converted," but I argue that the so-called "converted" are often discouraged or apathetic, or are simply not focusing on that particular belief at that moment in time. This sort of activism, then, fulfills the integral function of providing affirmation and reinforcement. Ironic activists challenge their audiences to not only get the joke and fill in the unsaid ironic meaning, but to actively identify with the issues as their own.

Additionally, ironic activism works to push issues that may be peripheral to the wider public debate into the dominant public sphere, ideally helping to incrementally shift or reframe that debate. What the genre is good at is engaging an audience, attracting attention, and rallying support.

I think it absolutely can do both. Certainly most satire is created in reaction to a situation deemed in need of critique. However, I think it does possess the capability of presenting alternatives or even painting a picture of a utopian future.

That is why I end the book with a discussion of the fake New York Times stunt engineered by The Yes Men (in cooperation with a number of other activist groups) in late 2008. About a week after Obama was elected they printed and distributed thousands of copies of a parody version of the New York Times, but rather than critique the state of the news media or spoof a particular story, the activists created a vision of the world they hoped to see in the not too distant future.

The physical object was a very convincing Times look-alike but the lead headline proclaimed the war in Iraq over, while the rest of the stories covered topics like Congress passing a "maximum wage law" and the creation of a national health care bill. The end result was a wide-ranging utopian vision for what they believed the new Obama era should look like. The overall message was that some of it could be possible if everyone got involved and pushed to make it happen. It was designed precisely to spark the collective utopian imagination.

Amber Day is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Bryant University. She is the author of the book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.

Your comments are, as always, most welcome. Unfortunately, the comments feature here has had to be disabled due to persistent spam. In the meantime, if you want me to post your comments, send them to me at hjenkins@usc.edu, and signal your desire to have them posted.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

What can Journalists Learn from The Daily Show: An Interview with Amber Day (Part One)

In case anyone was wondering, I'm not dead...yet. I seem to have spent the past few weeks AWOL on this blog, having gotten my rhythm thrown off over a particular intense period of activity on my part. Every day, I've been deluding myself into thinking I'd jump back into the swing of things, and I've been busy planning some really cool stuff for the summer which I will be announcing soon, but I've been silent. Sorry, guys.

This week, I want to share with you an interview with Amber Day, the author of a fascinating new book, Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate. Day writes here about Colbert, Stewart, Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, the Yes Men, not to mention a range of international satirists (mostly British and Canadian) who are at the bleeding edge between comedy and documentary. She challenges those who think news-comedy is trivializing or cynical; she makes a compelling case for why these kinds of expression encourage healthy skepticism and earnest participation in the political process, helping to foster media literacy skills which can allow us to critically engage with political rhetoric (the so-called talking points) and the frames which the mainstream media constructs around current events. She certainly speaks to the controversies which surround such texts and as such, it is a helpful guide to contemporary debates about the relations between news, popular culture, and civic engagement, but she also offers cogent challenges to anyone who finds it quick and easy to dismiss the importance of what's happening here. This book is in dialogue with other contemporary writers on the theme of news-comedy including Stephen Duncombe, Meghan Boler, Jonathon Gray, among others, so I figured it would be of interest to many of my readers. Enjoy this interview with the writer, which will give you a taste of what's in the book.

Your book, Satire and Dissent, discusses comedy news casts (such as The Daily Show), satirical documentaries (such as those of Michael Moore), parodic activists (such as the Yes Men), and to a smaller degree, parodies on YouTube. What do you see as the major similarities and differences in these forms of political humor?

The impetus for beginning this research was the feeling that there was a sort of renaissance taking place in political satire and parody, one made up of strikingly earnest, deeply political forms of satire. So it was definitely the similarities that piqued my interest.

All of the different case studies I focus on have developed out of previous genres, but the contemporary incarnations differ from many of the previous forms in that there is a more complicated inter-penetration of the real and the satiric. Rather than relying on impersonations or fictional scenarios and one-liners about political figures, they are trespassing deeper into the realm of traditional political debate. Michael Moore, for instance, accosts real officials, forcing them to play themselves in the satiric script he has set up. Similarly, when Jon Stewart plays clips of a politician directly contradicting himself, it becomes evidence in the real political debate, while the Yes Men attempt to speak on behalf of real corporations as a way of hijacking the public conversation. All tend to be interested in actively intervening in the debate rather than just commenting on it.

The differences between them are primarily traceable to the different media forms, as there is a fairly wide distance between the aims of a television program and those of an activist group. However, it was the fact that there were so many striking similarities that made me want to investigate why these forms were all exploding at this moment.

I think it very much depends on the type of political humor. Most of the traditional late-night comedians like Leno and Letterman do traffic in a more cynical form of political humor. The jokes are primarily aimed at the personal foibles of particular public figures, sending the overall message that all politicians are corrupt/lazy/stupid, etc. and that there is not much we can do about it except feel superior. That type of political humor arguably does foster a cynical distrust of politics.

However, I think the satirists surveyed in the book are doing something far different. For starters, both the humor and the critique tend to be aimed at policy as opposed to just personalities. While someone like Jon Stewart, for instance, does not necessarily pass up all opportunities to take pot shots at particular people, his primary focus is more often on a particular bill, an ideological fight, or the way in which a substantive issue is being framed by the news media.

This type of humor is not ultimately about how useless it is to care about political issues; rather it is premised on the feeling that there are political issues out there that we should care deeply about. Indeed, Stewart's interview segments often then demonstrate an attempt to find solutions to problems through earnest debate with his guests.

Further, in the case of the documentarians and activists I examine, their work is aimed almost exclusively at getting people engaged, often imploring their audiences to take action, which is the antithesis of cynical withdrawal. Finally, the fan communities coalescing around these forms overwhelmingly demonstrate an avid engagement with the larger political debate.

As you note, many writers have assumed that parody and satire represent conservative forces on society, where-as many have seen the artists you are exploring as essentially progressive. How do you explain the disjuncture in how we evaluate political humor?

I don't think satire is inherently progressive or conservative. Rather, it can be mobilized in many different ways. There has been a tendency, particularly when examining classical literary satire, to assume that it functions conservatively because it has often been used (as discussed above) to criticize personalities rather than larger political systems or to disparage unconventional behavior, all while the satirists remain safely on the sidelines.

However, as I've said, these satirists are clearly not as removed from the political realm (often even using their own bodies as primary components of the stunts). They are also interested in pointing to alternatives and often in entreating viewers to take action.

Further, these forms of satire tend to be mobilized in a fairly populist register, as the satirists position themselves as stand-ins for the everyman citizen frustrated at the dissembling of public figures and the irresponsibility of the press corps.

I would definitely describe these examples of contemporary political satire as progressive. This certainly does not apply to all types of satire across all media in all periods of time, but it does demonstrate that satire has become a particularly attractive mode of intervening in the larger political debate at this moment.

Amber Day is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Bryant University. She is the author of the book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

In talking with fans, it is clear that many of them began "recording" programs well before the availability of videotape. That is, many fans of the Baby Boom generation used audiotape to capture and replay moments from favorite films (smuggling it into the theater) and television shows (using alligator clips attached to their set). What would we learn about the prehistory of video by extending your count back further in time to account for the capacities of audiotape as a means of preserving and exchanging media content? This example suggests some of the challenges, since I gather such practices are rarely discussed in official records of the period, yet loom large in the popular memory of many fans of my age.

It struck me that the histories of video, as they had been written, had not paid enough attention to audio. Not only was the technology for videotape based upon audio recording technologies, but it also seemed to me that popular uses and adoption of the format were similarly modeled upon audio cassette tapes. In addition, my thinking about the grain of videotape was enormously influenced by the histories on sound recording, sound art, and music--for instance, the way intentional distortion or snippets of tape played backward in a song calls attention to a technologically specific aesthetic. Of course video bootlegging had a prehistory in music bootlegging, and of course home taping started with audio. Such audio taping would have implicitly called attention to its own limitations: both in terms of low fidelity recording and the absence of a corresponding image. Yet, such recordings were deeply personal, and likely to either be listened to repeatedly or kept as part of a personal archive.

Your discussion of Superstar highlights Todd Haynes' origins as an independent videomaker who used "bootleg" practices to create and circulate his work. As I am writing these questions, my Tivo is already set to record Haynes' high profile version of Mildred Pierce for HBO. What might a fuller elaboration of Haynes' career tell us about the ways grassroots and independent media production is helping to shape the commercial mainstream? Has anything remained from the "bootleg aesthetic" as he has made this transition?

Todd Haynes was always a filmmaker rather than video artist, but his work is frequently citational. In other words, most of his work builds from pre-existing sources in cinema and popular music, which in and of itself suggests a sensibility of the video era, when one could have access to an array of old films from different periods, and to fan-based remixing. His appropriation has gone from unauthorized music use with Superstar to complicated fabulations of rock history with licensed and original music in Velvet Goldmine to a simulation of mid-century melodramas with Far From Heaven to a remake with intentions of fidelity in Mildred Pierce. Yet, even Mildred Pierce is filtered through 1970s cinematic representations of the 1930s. I don't subscribe to HBO, so I'll have to wait for the DVDs to be available on Netflix to see Mildred Pierce.

Much of the fascination with video has rested with the ability to form our own collections, archives, libraries of materials, which reflect our own idiosyncratic tastes and interests. As you write, "VHS and other analog formats have allowed users to own texts and to make texts their own: to keep them, study them, rework them, copy them, and share them with their friends." Yet, with the drying up of the DVD market, some are predicting we are moving towards a world where we rent access to media but may not be able to collect and own it. Do you think this is a reasonable prediction and if so, what do you see as the losses to our culture implicit in this move towards a new model of access?

I've already suggested something along these lines, but basically, as we move from a tangible media model based on purchasing an object (a physical cassette or DVD) to a streaming media model based upon licensing or subscription, we may lose access to a particular title at any moment when its contract expires or it goes offline. In the tangible model, what is paid for is the hard copy, not the "content", but that tangibility guarantees access to the recording until that copy becomes unplayable. In streaming scenario, we may find ourselves assuming that a particular video will always be available, only to find it's no longer there. I think we've probably all experienced this kind of unreliability with trying to watch something that has been pulled off of YouTube. But it can also happen on Netflix or Hulu. However, the content industry, as far as I know, has never gone to anyone's house and taken back VHS tapes and DVDs that someone has recorded or bought.

We can find numerous examples of using YouTube or other sites for posting and circulating grassroots, activist, or expose videos. But we also see a couple different conceptions of community video emerge. One is Kickstarter, which has become an important way for raising financing for independent media projects, which depends on social networks of friends pledging small financial contributions and an ethos that personal investments are increasingly necessary to mount radical work in an age of limited public funding. But there also continues to be a less overtly politicized model of fan communities forming around reworked media texts that circulate on YouTube yet that may do so in ways that seek to remain stealth. For instance, I have a friend who has recently become deeply involved in the numerous Glee fan videos posted on YouTube centering on Klaine (the relationship between Kurt and Blaine). The comments reveal intense emotional--and eroticized--responses to these videos that essentially form a community based upon feelings, but they are also clearly aware that the videos are uploaded without network permission. So the comments reflect contradictory impulses: the profuse emotional expressions are always in tension with self-policing tactics to never mention the name of the show in the comments, in the hopes that Fox will not track the videos and issue take-down notices.

One of the things that YouTube reminds us of is the complicated--and often seemingly arbitrary--rules of access for TV. Some broadcasts are truly fleeting, while other shows seem to never go away and recur in syndication with inexplicable frequency and longevity. But YouTube also expands and blurs our understanding of the boundaries of what counts as television by streaming network clips alongside webcam rants, fan remixes, and cat videos. When I've taught television, I have found it impossible to make any assumptions about what students watch now or what their cultural touchstones would have been growing up. The timeshifting of video, cable, and now YouTube only make this more complicated: new popular texts no longer have the same cultural dominance in their own moment, for better or worse, at the same time that our experiences of older texts seem to be less and less periodized. As YouTube comes to seem more everyday and less novel, we are amassing a history of viral videos, too, and so they may have less cultural penetration or staying power in cultural memory. What we see on YouTube are idiosyncratic viral phenomena and long tails.

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

What happened before YouTube?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

James Paul Gee from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

On April 4, I will be respondent for the Pullias Lecture, being hosted by the Rossier School of Education here at the University of Southern California. The primary speaker is James Paul Gee, who is going to address "Games, Learning, and the Looming Crisis of Higher Education." For those in the Los Angeles area, the talk is being held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC, 4-6 PM.

I was delighted to be asked to participate in this exchange, both because I was recently given an honorary appointment in the Rossier School and because I have such affection and respect for Gee. We've known each other for the better part of a decade now. We've appeared together many times, often in informal conversational settings, I like to call "The Jim and Henry Show," where we talk about our shared interests in participatory culture, games and learning, and the new media literacies. Gee has been one of the key thinkers about the kinds of new pedogogical models represented by computer and video games, seeing them as illustrating alternative forms of learning to those represented by our current schooling practices. Gee has been one of the core contributors to the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, helping to inspire a whole new generation of educational researchers, who are doing serious work not only on games but also modding, machinema, fan fiction, virtual worlds, and a range of other new media platforms and practices.

This semester, I have ended up teaching Gee's recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, in my New Media Literacies class. I was delighted when I first saw the book to see Gee expand upon his thinking about "affinity spaces" to think more deeply about what he and his co-author Elizabeth Hayes call "gaming beyond gaming." The term refers to the broad range of productive and social practices which have grown up around games, practices which strongly parallel what I've found in my own research on fan cultures. The book's focus on The Sims signals the importance of this game both as a breakthrough title which expanded female interest in the medium and as a model for all subsequent games which have encouraged players to build and share content with each other. Gee and Hayes are interested in the ways this game has become the jumping off place for lifelong learning processes for a range of women, young and old. It is a delightful mixture of compelling storytelling and thoughtful analysis, one which can easily be assigned to undergraduate students but which is profound enough to capture the imagination of advanced students and researchers.

As I was anticipating our mutual participation in the Pullias Lecture event, it occurred to me that I had never interviewed Gee for my blog, despite all of our other interactions through the years. What follows includes his reflections on the current state of games-based learning research, the state of American education, and the value of participatory culture. Gee was generous with his thoughts and so I am going to be running this meaty exchange over three installments this week.

We've both been involved in thinking about games and learning for the better part of a decade. What do you see as the most significant breakthroughs which have occurred over this time?

The breakthroughs have been slower in coming than I had hoped. Like many new ideas, the idea of games for learning (better, "games as learning") has been often co-opted by entrenched paradigms and interests, rather than truly transforming them. We see now a great many skill-and-drill games, games that do in a more entertaining fashion what we already do in school. We see games being recruited in workplaces--and lots of other instances of "gamification"--simply to make the current structures of exploitation and traditional relationships of power more palatable. We will see the data mining capacities of games and digital media in general recruited for supervision, rather than development. The purpose of games as learning (and other game-like forms of learning) should be to make every learner a proactive, collaborative, reflective, critical, creative and innovative problem solver; a producer with technology and not just a consumer; and a fully engaged participant and not just a spectator in civic life and the public sphere.

In general there are two "great divides" in the games and learning arena. The two divides are based on the learning theories underlying proposals about games for learning. The first divide is this: On the one hand, there are games based on a "break everything into bits and practice each bit in its proper sequence" theory of learning, a theory long popular in instructional technology. Let's call this the "drill and practice theory". On the other hand, there are games based on a "practice the bits inside larger and motivating goal-based activities of which they are integral parts" theory. Let's call this the "problem-and-goals-centered theory". I espouse one version of this theory, but, unfortunately, there are two versions of it. And this is the second divide: On the one hand, there is a "mindless progressive theory" that says just turn learners loose to immerse themselves in rich activities under the steam of their own goals. This version of progressivism (and progressivism in Dewey's hands was not "mindless") has been around a great many years and is popular among "mindless" educational liberals. On the other hand, the other version of the "problem-and-goals-centered theory" claims that deep learning is achieved when learners are focused on well designed, well ordered, and well mentored problem solving with shared goals, that is, goals shared with mentors and a learning community.

Like so many other areas of our lives today, the conservative version (drill and practice) and the liberal version (mindless progressivism) are both wrong. The real solution does not lie in the middle, but outside the space carved up by political debates.

What do you think remain the biggest misunderstandings or disagreements in this space?

Much of what I discussed above is really not about misunderstandings, but about disagreements and different beliefs and value systems, or, in some cases, different political, economic, or cultural vested interests. The biggest misunderstanding in the case of my own work has been people saying that my work espouses games for learning. It does not and never has. It espouses "situated embodied learning", that is learning by participation in well designed and well mentored experiences with clear goals; lots of formative feedback; performance before competence; language and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; and lots of talk and interaction around strategies, critique, planning, and production within a "passionate affinity space" (a type of interest-driven group) built to sustain and extend the game or other curriculum. Games are one good way to do this. There are many others.

The biggest misunderstanding in general is that technologies (like games, television, movies, and books) are good or bad. They are neither. They are good, bad, or indifferent based on how they are used in the contexts in which they are used. By themselves they are inert, though they do have certain affordances. Games for learning work pretty much the same way as books for learning. Kids learn with books or games (or television or computers or movies or pencils) when they are engaged in well designed and good interactions with adults and more advanced peers, interactions that lead to problem solving, meta-critical reflection, and connections to the world and other texts and tools. They learn much less in other circumstances. But we must humbly admit that humans have never yet found a technology more powerful than print. The number of people who have killed others or aided them in the name of a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Turner Diaries, Silent Spring) is vastly larger than those who have killed or helped in the name of a game, movie, or television show. Of course, this may change, but it does little good, in the interim, to pretend books are benign, but games are inherently perilous.

From the start, you were less interested in designing games for teaching than in using principles of game design that are grounded in educational research to reimagine the pedagogical process? To what degree do you think recent projects such as Quest to Learn have embodied those insights?

I see game design and learning design (what a good professional teacher does) as inherently similar activities. The principles of "good games" and of "good learning" are the same, by and large. This is so, of course, because games are just well designed problem-solving spaces with feedback and clear outcomes and that is the most essential thing for real, deep, and consequential learning. These principles include (among others): making clear what identity the learning requires; making clear why anyone would want to do such learning; making clear how the learning will function to lead to problem solving and mastery; making the standards of achievement high and clear, but reachable with persistence; early successes; a low cost of failure that encourages exploration, risk taking, and trying out new styles; lots of practice of basic skills inside larger goal-based and motivating activities; creating and then challenging routine mastery at different levels to move learners upwards; using information and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; performance before competence (doing as a way of learning and being); getting learners to think like designers and to be able themselves to design; encouraging collaboration and affiliation with what is being learned as part of an identity and passion one shares with others; good mentoring by other people, as well as smart tools and technologies.

These principles can be realized in many ways, not one. Chibi-Robo, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Quest to Learn all realize them, though Quest to Learn faces the vast stupidity of our current accountability regime and Chibi-Robo and Yu-Gi-Oh do not.

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

I am putting up the final installment of my conversation with Richard Grusin a day early as I am headed out of town for much needed R&R time with my wife. I will not be posting next week, but expect to return shortly thereafter.

History and Genealogy

RG: Speaking of history, though, I wonder if you would let me pose another question about the relationship between remediation and transmedia. One of our claims in Remediation (which has gratifyingly been borne out by a good deal of scholarship in the past decade and more), was that although the explosion of new digital media at the end of the 20th century made the double logic of remediation visible, remediation (and its double logic) had a very long history in Western culture, going back at least to the invention of linear perspective. By identifying the working of remediation in contemporary digital media, we have been able to look back on the history of mediation in Western culture to see it in a different light. Do you see a similar historical genealogy for transmedia?

HJ: Yes, depending on how broadly or narrowly we define transmedia. I have made the argument that the church in the middle ages was profoundly transmedia if you lacked the capacity to read. For the priests, the Bible stories were rooted in a text and everything else would have been understood as an illustration of that text. But if you couldn't read that text, you were absorbing bits of the stories from many different sources in the culture around you and the stories could be brought together via stainglass windows, tapestries, or paintings, where characters from multiple stories or symbols for many parables might exist side by side. Michelangelo is in that sense a profoundly intertextual artist.

I would also point to the great world builders of the 20th century -- especially L. Frank Baum, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Walt Disney as also contributing much to the current configurations of transmedia. Baum in terms of mapping Oz through books, stage plays, films, and public lectures, each adding new layers to the original. Tolkien developed a mythology much larger than he could communicate in Lord of the Rings as a specific narrative. And Disney in moving from the screen to location-based entertainment and in constructing a "world" or "family" of characters drawn from multiple stories.

RG: Your mention here of "world builders," and earlier "fictional worlds" or "universes," is helpful, I think, in clarifying another difference between our approaches. You're interested in how transmedia create fictional worlds. My approach focuses more on logics and practices of mediation in specific historical formations--although your sense that transmedia represents the current media formation of the infotainment industry is itself, I would argue, a historically specific claim.

HJ:
Derek Johnson and Avi Santos have been arguing for greater historical specificity in terms of how today's transmedia models emerge from the larger evolution of franchise entertainment across the 20th century. I also would argue that elements can be tied back to series books and film serials, not to mention to the practices of comic books, all of which link individual units to larger story systems, even if they remain largely within the same medium. A lot depends on whether we are tracing transmedia practices in terms of narrative, visual, or economic structures. I think that recognizing transmedia in contemporary media may similarly open up further historical investigations. I hope it inspires half as much generative scholarship as Remediation has done.

I am very interested in Kim Deitch's graphic novel, Alias the Cat, which depicts a story being created in the 1910s via newspaper serials, comic strips, film serials, and live stunts, all practices possible in the early 20th century, and all practices used in various combinations, although perhaps not in the hypercoordinated way depcited in the comic. For me, this story helps sort through the difference between a set of potential practices, each transmedia in its implications, and an overall logic which may be the current configurations of practices.

Transmedia in that sense is not totally new, yet it is unlikely that it would take its current shapes in the absence of networked communication. And that's why I started this by reflecting on the different ways that transmedia impulses work in the era of the cd-rom, of the web, and of the iPad.

Turning the lens back in your direction, is the history of remediation one in which the same dual logic repeats itself again and again or is it one of historical transition and transformation in which shifts in the media landscape enable or foreclose certain possibilities, certain models of creative practice?

RG:
As I mentioned earlier, remediation can be traced in visual media at least to the origins of linear perspective, particularly the invention of the idea that the canvas or picture plane should be treated as a transparent window through which to view the world. I will leave it to art historians who know much more than I do to determine if it can be traced back even further or into other artistic media.

But I do remember that, while we were writing the book, we used to have fun imagining with our students other arenas in which the twin logics of remediation, transparent immediacy and hypermediacy, had manifested themselves historically. Romantic poets like Wordsworth, for example, appealed to the immediacy of the vernacular and the heart or intuition, while someone like Blake demonstrated a form of hypermediacy especially through his illustrated poems. The scientific debate between scholasticism and empiricism in science might also be glossed in terms of the immediacy of the experiment and the hypermediacy of scholastic traditions. And it is hard not to see the contrast between the Catholic Church and Protestantism as one between hypermediacy and immediacy. These, however, were mainly speculative musings. As someone committed to historical specificity, I remain cautious in trying to think about transhistorical laws of mediation.

Nonetheless, in the historical period within which remediation does operate, I would argue that the double logic of remediation does not repeat itself in the same form but operates, as you say, in terms of "historical transition and transformation in which shifts in the media landscape enable or foreclose certain possibilities, certain models of creative practice." In my new book I situate the double logic of remediation both, as you plausibly suggest earlier, in relation to the invention of new stand-alone multimedia storage devices like the cd-rom, as well as in relation to the 1990s desire for immediacy represented most fully in technical fantasies of virtual reality which grew largely out of the cyberculture and cyberpunk imaginary of the 1980s. In the last two decades of the 20th century, immediacy was defined in terms of the erasure of mediation in an immediate, immersive encounter with the real, while hypermediacy was defined in terms of the kind of multiplication of mediation made possible by cd-roms, the world wide web, and other related media formats.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the emergence of social media has, I argue, shifted the ways in which immediacy and hypermediacy manifest themselves--and thus alter the double logic of remediation. In fact where in the 1990s the immediacy of the real was defined in opposition to the multiplicity of mediation, in the 21st century hypermediation is the mark of the real, as epitomized most dramatically in the Fox series 24, which depicted real-time not in terms of the erasure of mediation but in terms of its multiplication. In our current moment of mobile, socially networked media, immediacy is manifested as mobility, connectivity, and flow, the easy, almost seamless, interaction among our countless personal and collective media sites--FB, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, and countless others. Hypermediacy manifests itself not so much in the formal fragmentation and multiplicity of the visual space of the screen as in the multiplication of mediation among and across our networks, including the ways in which all of our socially mediated interactions are tracked, recorded, and archived by a state and corporate security regime for purposes of data mining, tracking, trendspotting, and preemption of criminal behavior.

Politics
RG: Perhaps because of the changing nature of our times, my approach to premediation, which I argue is the predominant form in which remediation manifests itself in the 21st century, is much more political than our approach to remediation was. While remediation was and remains a concept that can be useful for political means, premediation makes those uses much more explicit. This, then, raises for me another question about your approach to transmedia. Do you see a politics to transmedia, either as practiced in the corporate entertainment industry of as you deploy it in your work? Or is this not an explicit focus of your transmedia work?

HJ: In terms of corporate media, there is certainly a concern that the capacity to expand a story across multiple media platforms and thus blanket the society has a potential to be used for propagandistic purposes in ways which concerns me deeply. That said, as currently developed, the transmedia model comes attached with a very active and skeptical model of spectatorship -- one where collectives of fans work through complex challenges together in ways which encourage criticism and reflection.

Indeed, what we are seeing is the spill over of these forms of fan participation and emerging forms of activism, which are the focus of some new work which I am pursuing in collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation. For example, we are studying the case of the Harry Potter Alliance which has built a large scale network of young activists on the metaphors and narratives provided by J.K. Rowling's media franchise. Here, they are building on an existing transmedia system and on the infrastructure provided by media fandom to motivate political participation around a range of human rights and social justice concerns.

I am also interested in work which Sasha Contanza-Chock has been doing on what he calls "transmedia mobilization" in the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement. There's a tendency to think of transmedia practices as involving high end production values, but here, he is looking at how activists in Los Angeles are deploying a range of low end media to protest current U.S. policies around immigration and to get their message out to their supporters by any means necessary. Transmedia mobilization, in this case, might involve YouTube video, podcasts, mix tapes, graffiti, posters, and street theater, but it still follows principles we can recognize from other research on transmedia practices.

Finally, coming full circle back to corporate media, I am very concerned with the contradictions about participation embedded in current concepts of web 2.0 and user-generated content, issues in public policy which range from concerns about constraints on Fair Use in the domain of intellectual property to issues of "free labor" in the relations between participants in the creative process and the use of surveillance practices to monitor and monetize forms of audience engagement (of the sort you reference above). These issues are central to my new work on Spreadable Media.

A Friendly Ammendment?
RG:
Thanks, Henry. This has been really helpful for me. I hope others will find the discussion useful as well. I'd like to close by returning to where we began this discussion and offer what I hope you will see as a friendly amendment to your concept of transmedia.

In my Premediation book, I argue that the concept of new media, which was useful for both of us in making sense of the exciting and transformative changes that were occurring in the 1980s and 1990s, no longer does much work in the 21st century. In an era where old media like books, newspapers, radio, and television are created, circulated, and consumed through digital media, the distinction between old and new media becomes increasingly problematic. I argue, instead, that we should focus instead on "mediality," which I take to include all the forms of media with which we interact on a regular basis. I relate the concept of mediality to Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality, arguing that media today operate as aspects of governmentality in mobilizing and managing populations, which Foucault describes as networks of people and things. Thus rather than focus on the relations among "new" and "old" forms of media, I argue that we need to pay attention to the things that media do, the way they act and help govern the variety of human and nonhuman publics that proliferate at the present moment. From this perspective the political deployment and implications of transmedia that you have described could be understood as elements of governmentality in the 21st century, as a mode of what I would like to think of as "transmediality."

If we go down this path, then I would suggest (and here is the friendly amendment) that just as mediality allows us to undo or dispose of the distinction between old and new media, transmediality could allow us to undo the distinction with which our discussion began between stand-alone and networked media. In the most trivial sense, we could see that the interaction with a stand-alone DVD, with its extras and director's cuts and commentaries, could be seen as a form of transmediality similar to our interaction with transmedia artifacts on the internet. Of course, I recognize that this might remove (or at least minimize) the element of active hunting and searching that you see as part of the transmedia experience. But more significantly, I think that the distinction between stand-alone and networked media is increasingly coming to become unhelpful in the same way that I described in relation to old vs. new media. Whether we think of the transmediality of CDs loaded in iTunes, or the networked capabilities being built into BluRay players as just two examples, the distinction between stand-alone media and networked media seems increasingly unclear. And when you add to this the fact that the creation, production, and distribution of all digital artifacts are inseparable from all sorts of networked media technologies, I think that it will not be long before the distinction between stand-alone and networked media becomes moot. In making this friendly amendment, I mean not to weaken or minimize the concept of transmediality, but rather the opposite--to suggest that, like remediation did in the 1990s, transmediality in the 21st century names the condition to which all of our media will eventually aspire.

Thanks again, Henry, for suggesting this conversation. Let's do it again some time.

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interactivity and Participation

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

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