Race in Digital Space (Revisited): An Interview with Sarah N. Gatson (Part Two)

Your work on Buffy Fandom, specifically the Bronze, explores the ways that online communities empower some participants at the expense of others. What lessons might we take from this research which would help us to better understand the ways that racial exclusion operates in fandom?

Last week I was reading the N'Gai Croal commentary on the Resident Evil 5 trailer - I read both his interview with MTV and the online discussion that followed, and I think that the interchange is a good representative of the ways in which a fandom community (or in this particular case, a fandom public sphere or audience) exposes its multiple boundaries The dominant themes therein were 1) that talking about race is racist, 2) that Croal and anyone else that saw anything racist about the trailer were, in addition to racist, unhealthily focused upon race and/or crazy, and 3) that if the trailer did contain disturbing racial imagery, it was not the intent of the designers, and thus those who did see such imagery should either ignore it, or forgive, forget, and move on, since the fault of seeing it was their own problem. While Croal kept making the point that he was talking about the trailer, not the game (which no one had seen or played), and that he was talking about it in its larger cultural context, the general exhortation to "move on" from race was repeated quite a bit.

This audience response contains several classic narrative points in what we might call the post-civil rights or indeed post-racial era, discussed in #1 above, that critical race scholars have identified. 1) Rearticulation of race and racism (Omi & Winant; Feagin; Bonilla-Silva; Moore); 2) Innocence/Intent (Moore) (usually of whites, but in the commentary responding to Croal it is extended to the Japanese game designers, as if Japan has no history of its own racial and ethnic constructions); and 3) Rearticulation of objectivity. Critical race scholars argue that the frame that only racists see race functions to turn the legal notion that race is a suspect class on its head by decontextualizing it from its historical and legal intent.

This whole framework can be seen in this statement from one of the responses to Croal: "Well, how about you flip that around and consider the possibility that you are trying to make something out of nothing. Maybe these gamers don't see the racism because they aren't racist and they don't see it as an issue of color. If you want to know what is keeping racism alive in America, then I suggest you start by looking in the mirror and build from there."

Croal and a few members of the audience/fandom address this framing of the issue several times in the course of the discussion, although the dominant narrative likely remains the take-away message, as the bulk of the comments remain in the post-racial frame. The discussion is itself an example of a great deal of discussions about race in the U.S. - people mostly talking past each other with a distinct lack of empathy - I saw the exact same narratives played out during the recent election, particularly in comments responding to Obama's speech on race that appeared online at the New York Times, with one of the most mind-boggling (to me, a biracial person whose family members don't seem to be all that angst-ridden about having discussions about race and racism) being a comment that Obama was a horrible, horrible person for talking about his grandmother's having told him about her own fears of black men. That outing her in this way was disrespectful.

That this is a framework reflective of available cultural narratives, and not something which naturally resides in people based on their group memberships per se is reflected in that comments in the critical race frame are made by whites, and comments in the dominant racial frame are made by non-whites,

Michelle says: July 22nd, 2008 at 2:07 am Hello, Im black...I've seen the trailer... It is a video game; if you dont like it don't watch it or play it! Maybe you, instead of writing about a video game trailer, you should be discussing something important like the AIDS problem in Africa or anything else of importance in the world. Games are for fun; an escape. Nothing else. Sucka.

This comment also reflects the frame I noted above that entertainment media, being non-serious, does not matter. Anything goes because it's "for fun," and to "escape" the real world where serious and "important" problems occur. This frame is addressed by some in the discussion, as they argue that media is art, and games involve artistic expression, and thus have cultural meaning, which is as appropriate an arena for serious discussion and deconstruction as anything else.

I'm reminded how integration is defined by whites (10% black) and by blacks (50% black) (see Larry Bobo's work on residential integration). I'm also reminded of Herbert Gans's argument that people are entitled to the culture they want. That we value different media because we have different taste cultures shouldn't be either surprising or problematic per se. I think it becomes a problem when, in part because we're mainly talking about commercial products, taste cultures reflective of smaller and/or less powerful parts of the overall potential audience don't actually get to reach the audiences that are entitled (in Gans's terms) to access those media. The Tyler Perry empire is an interesting phenomenon - his media is extremely popular in the African-American community, and within that market segment, he dominates stage, TV, and film; he's a mogul, and in "mainstream" venues like Entertainment Weekly, his success has come as quite the shock, although his stage work has a deep connection to the historical "chitlin' circuit." Obviously, his success reflects not just an existent market for black multimedia, but a change in the buying power of those who make up that market - this segment can support not just media, but multiple forms of media, and increasingly expensive media. It's one thing to have your market segment and "mainstream" audiences buy your work (see hip hop); it's another to gross $5,000,000 on one play in 5 months in one city when the vast majority - if not all - of the audience comes from one group. These are market concerns that producers are certainly paying attention to. As I suggested above, I don't think audiences are necessarily as segmented as we are when we are talking about things like residence - media flows more freely than does real estate. Perhaps the most a particular fandom community might do in terms of diversity is recognize that freer flow, and not police their boundaries quite so vehemently when it comes to discussions of race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. vis-à-vis their favorite media products.

Okay, here I guess I should provide an autobiographic brief, so here are some possibly relevant facts about me: I am a 39-year-old, heterosexual, biracial African American woman, nominal Unitarian, sociologist who is 8 1/2 weeks post-partum with my first child, and married to a white man. I was born and raised in Kansas City, MO, attended college in Iowa, and graduate school in Illinois. I now live in Texas. I'm about as Midwestern (and I'd like to deconstruct that identity with you when you have the time) as you can get, although I am also fairly well-traveled and not particularly "small-town," and due to my advanced degrees, part of a statistical elite. I was raised, by both my parents, as a feminist, and self-labeled as such before the age of eight. I'm a geek, and get my original fan cred mostly from Trek and comics. This is what you get when you're raised by Linc and Julie in their real world sci fi/comic fan, history/political science major, social worker incarnations. Or something.

Anyway, this is the answer in which I get more ranty, and less academic. A while ago, I was reading an article about the Sabbath in Israel, and I was struck by the following, "Who talks of 'public culture' anymore? Everybody talks about popular culture, but ours is the era of segmented markets, when hip-hop fans share no common ground with, say, OC addicts. Communitarians talk of civil society, but the voluntarism and community activity they demand is (and ought to be) local, not national; there's no obvious way to bring all those Knights of Columbus councils and bowling teams in contact with each other."

This part in particular is what chapped my hide: when hip-hop fans share no common ground with, say, OC addicts.

Because. You know. I think that's a creation of marketing and market research which, I think, is like a lot of survey research - people are more likely to be forced into boxes, and those boxes are more likely to be reified into mutually exclusive categories, when you only have boxes to check, and when your analysis is driven by a methodology (e.g. regression analysis) that forces you towards parsimony. It's not that there aren't patterns and segments, but I think a lot of that may be overdrawn... I mean, if I have to read one more article about fanboys that ignores the documented history of the myriad of ways in which women have participated in the fan-culture of the supposedly male bastion of science fiction, I may have to hit someone with my shoe. I think this Slate author is ignorant of fandom in general, and did the thing that many do - looked at the surface of hip-hop and The O.C., and decided he knew who the actual audience is for each, and that never the twain shall meet (and he also ignored the already widely documented potential of the Internet to bring together Knights of Columbus bowlers). That's easy to do when the face of the product is fairly homogeneous, but from this example alone, it seems to me that he never talked at length with any hip-hop or O.C. fan - just on my LJ flist alone I can name five people who like both of these things. I myself have been known to put Missy Elliot, the Dixie Chicks, Bob Marley, and The Clash in the CD player (yeah, I don't have an iPod) while I read back issues of X-men. It's possible that I am just weird, and that I just hang around with weird people, but as a researcher, I prefer to think we should at least investigate audiences before pronouncing who likes what and who doesn't talk to whom...

I suppose, then, I would mobilize my autobiography and the autoethnographic technique - in the same way I already do - to question the clear-cut boxes of market segments and fandom identities. Both of these ways of seeing the audience are focused upon a concern with boundaries - on the one hand, the audience is defined by outsiders (the market researcher) and on the other the audience is being defended from outsiders by those on the inside (the fans), race is ultimately about group boundaries as well. Examining how these three concepts interact and overlap would, I think, be useful in a course on fandom.

I am seeing more and more stories out there discussing Barack Obama's
background as a fan (someone who cites Star Trek in casual conversations, who reads comics, who enjoys Harry Potter, etc.). What kind of role model might Obama represent as we rethink the relationship between race and fandom? How does this geek image connect to historical constructions of black identity in the United States?

Hmmmm. I think the relationship between race, media and fandom, like that between gender, media and fandom, is very interesting - again, media constructions of media geeks tend to be dominated by images of white heterosexual men, and my personal favorite media-geek-media (is that a word???) are those that acknowledge that reality, and comment upon it. Free Enterprise's Eric when he says, "Robert. Dude. Great party but... where are all your friends of color?" The same film's Claire, who takes down Robert in the comic book store for assuming she's buying a comic for her boyfriend. Chasing Amy's Hooper X, the gay black comic artist who must front a particular black identity to be taken seriously. Currently, I'm sort of in love with The Big Bang Theory, as it's peopled with academics who are media geeks, even if it mostly does replicate the fanboy stereotype... I have conversations like those guys do, that start in my professional jargon and end in letting everyone know that Ho-ho's are a vital part of my cognitive process. In a subculture that is into dressing up as our favorite characters, Black geeks usually have Uhura on one end, and Urkel on the other - liking geeky pop culture is different than getting any kind of cred by actually being a geek. But really, Wu-Tang Clan is pretty damn geeky if you ask me, especially The Rza. I mean. Wu-Tang Clan. Let's announce our geekstyle love of subcultual fandom in a more blatant way!

Geek and Black are not normalized co-identities, but really, if geeks' specialized knowledge is more or less impenetrable to outsiders, who's geekier than Samuel R. Delany?

Have we ever had a geek president? The intellectual aspects of geekitude (geekness? geekosity?) have certainly always (okay, mostly) been present in the oval office. But there's a certain aspect of pop culture savvy to being a geek, however much we might be marginalized by the, um, extremity of our fandom love. If Barack Obama's election says something about deconstructing aspects of political power as white, it says just as much about deconstructing elite intellects as bastions of whiteness, and deconstructing the geek as a white's only identity...

Sarah N. Gatson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University-College Station. She earned her B.A. at Cornell College in 1991, and her M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. at Northwestern Univserity (1999). In addition to her work on Internet community (Interpersonal Culture on the Internet - Television, the Internet, and the Making of a Community, with Amanda Zweerink, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), she collaborated on a NIH/NIDA-funded project looking at Computer-Mediated Communication as it intertwines with Rave and Drug-using subcultures, which has just been released as a book: Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online, edited by Edward Murguia, Melissa Tackett-Gibson, and Ann Lessem (Lexington Books). Her research interests are centered on how people organize themselves in terms of community and citizenship. Her graduate work focused upon gender and race as they intersect with these processes, their significance as cultural systems, and as ideologies that permeate all our lives. Her work has moved back and forth from a focus on policy and law, and thus the more formal process of citizenship, to a more generalized focus on the micro- to macro-level processes of identity, community, and citizenship, and the connections between these processes. Some of her work has been published in Contemporary Sociology, Law & Social Inquiry, Research in Community Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Research, and Feminist Media Studies. Currently, she is a collaborator on a project whose focus is the development of scientific learning and professional communities and future scientists, particularly focusing on access to education, mentors, and scientific networks for underserved segments of the population. Innovation in both offline and online methods to increase access are being explored. This project currently has NSF funding as a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site, a Research Experiences for Teachers site, and a Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institute site, and NIH funding as an R25 site to increase diversity in research personnel, and is housed at the TAMU College of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Physiology & Pharmacology. Her teaching interests include the sociology of law, race and ethnicity, popular culture, qualitative methodology, marriage and family, and the introduction to sociology; all her course are framed with attention to intersections of race, gender, class, & sexuality.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Race in Digital Space (Revisited): An Interview with Sarah N. Gatson (Part One)

"In Cyberspace, nobody knows your race unless you tell them. Do you tell?" Several years ago, I put this slogan on a poster advertising an MIT-hosted public forum about race and digital space. The resulting controversy was an eyeopener.

Like many white liberals, I had viewed the absence of explicit racial markers in cyberspace with some optimism-seeing the emerging "virtual communities" as perhaps our best hope ever of achieving a truly color-blind society.

But many of the forum's minority participants-both panelists and audience members-didn't experience cyberspace as a place where nobody cared about race. Often, they'd found that people simply assumed all participants in an online discussion were white unless they identified themselves otherwise. One Asian American talked of having a white online acquaintance e-mail him a racist joke, which he would never have sent if he had known the recipient's race. Perhaps covering up for his own embarrassment, the white acquaintance had accused the Asian-American man of "trying to pass as white." Even when more than one minority was present in a chat room, the forum participants said, they didn't recognize each other as such, leaving each feeling stranded in a segregated neighborhood. If they sought to correct ignorant misperceptions in online discussions, they were accused of "bringing race into the conversation." Such missteps were usually not the product of overt racism. Rather, they reflected the white participants' obliviousness about operating in a multiracial context.

Perhaps when early white Netizens were arguing that cyberspace was "color-blind," what they really meant was that they desperately wanted a place where they didn't have to think about, look at or talk about racial differences. Unfortunately, none of us knows how to live in a race-free society. As Harvard University law professor Lani Guinier explains, "We don't live next door to each other. We don't go to school together. We don't even watch the same television shows." Computers may break down some of the hold of traditional geography on patterns of communication, but we won't overcome that history of segregation by simply wishing it away.

This passage comes from an essay I published in Technology Review in 2002. (The article still periodically generates whole class sets of angry letters when it gets taught at various universities. Almost no one wants to accept that the taken-as-given "color-blindedness" of cyberspace could be anything other than the realization of Martin Luther King's Dream.) The forum the article describes was held four or five years before that and was intended to foreground the relative lack of research on race and cyberspace.

Yet, I fear that the same conversation could be held today (though I am less likely to make the same mistake in my framing of the event) and despite some ground breaking work on race in digital spaces by writers like Anna Everett and Lisa Nakamura, among many others, there is still far less scholarship about race in digital theory than there is about gender, generation, or sexuality. You should certainly check out Anna Everett's edited collection, Learning Race and Ethnicity, which is part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning book series and can be read for free online.

This gap between gender studies and critical race studies looms especially large in research on fan and geek culture, as was suggested again and again in the conversations we held here last year about "Gender and Fan Culture." I've been struggling ever since to try to figure out the most productive way to open this blog to conversations around this topic. All suggestions welcome.

Knowing of this interest, Robin Reid, a participant in those discussions, recently introduced me to a colleague of hers, Sarah Gatson, whose work straddles fan studies, digital theory, and critical race studies, who is currently organizing a conference on race and digital media, and who is co-editing with Reid a forthcoming special issue of the Transformative Works and Culture which tackles this topic.

Here's the call for papers for Gatson's forthcoming conference:

Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media April 30-May 2, 2009

The Race & Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University convenes a symposium every other year, and the proposed theme for the 2008-2009 year is Shifting Terrains: Inequalities in the 21st Century, and the symposium itself is to focus on Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media. The explosion of work on New Media (including the Internet, mobile devices, Web 2.0) and the juxtaposition and overlap between 'old' media (radio, television, film, and mass-print media) and New Media is a rich field of cultural production and scholarly research in which scholars of race and ethnicity have not been particularly well-represented. However, there are cutting edge scholars who do indeed explore various aspects of race/ethnicity and (New) Media (including audience/fan studies, representations of racial and ethnic identities in a variety of media, identity-focused online communities, etc.). We invite such scholars to submit papers with the intention of presenting work that deals with these topics during a 2 1/2 day interdisciplinary symposium, with several keynote speakers, including Dr. Lisa Nakamura and Dr. Henry Bial. We intend that a number of these papers will be compiled into an edited volume intended for publication, and that all papers and participants will have the opportunity to upload their papers on our developing interactive website for scholarly exchange on working papers.

500 word abstracts or full papers of no more than 8000 words (including notes and references) should be submitted to: gatson@tamu.edu and resi@tamu.edu by December 31, 2008. Submissions will be reviewed by an organizing committee, and authors will be notified of acceptance/rejection by March 15, 2009.

You are currently organizing a conference on "Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media." Almost a decade ago, I was part of a group at MIT, UCSB, and USC which organized a series of similar events on "Race in Digital Space." There has been a massive amount of research and reflection on digital media over that decade. Why do you think there has been relatively little reflection on the place of race in the new mediascape?

A recurring myth is that the online world is essentially color-blind. As the classic cartoon explains, "in cyberspace, nobody knows you are a dog." What is wrong with this argument? Why do you think it carries such persistent force?

I think this second question is the beginning of an answer to the first. Since I think that discursive and narrative frames have some influence on how people understand things - especially new things with which they may actually have very little direct experience - the insertion of the color-blind (or post-racial) discourse into the online context is important. On the one hand, color-blind discourse has as one of its often implicit foundations the idea that racial identity in particular is or should be invisible. This idea is obviously rooted in the discourse of the civil rights movement itself, but its use after the last successes of this movement in 1968 has arguably (as pointed out in the now classic work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States) been turned on its head (or, rearticulated in Omi and Winant's terms). Instead of focusing on race and what it does (what we make it do, what it does to us) in the real world, we are told not to focus on race because in an ideal world, it does not (should not) matter. Cyberspace, as in some ways it is the ideal "ideal world" (this is arguably one of the two dominant narratives about cyberspace), fits very well with this post-racial/civil rights discourse. I think that sometimes we don't want the problems of the "old world" invading our shiny new cyberspace, especially when so much of what many of us ordinarily do online involves leisure and entertainment.

Obviously issues of access to media are important, especially when we are talking about access to the creation and dissemination networks involved in the processes of media production. While it is understood generally that new media technology - being both expensive and powerful - is pervasive, its relative lack of penetration into and use by racial minority communities, some of the most prominent research on the digital divide however (e.g. Van Dijk's most recent book) is fundamentally disconnected from the vast literature on race and ethnicity. The digital divide framework in one sense replicates one strand of race/ethnicity theory (I think it tends to be more grounded in assimilation theory), but does not engage with more contemporary theories.

I think the starting point for a fruitful discussion between these two research agendas would be first and foremost understanding fandoms as bounded groups (with more or less permeable boundaries). A crucial component of critical race theory (which is influenced by black feminist theory) explicitly examines the interplay between salient identities, how they interact, and how they are prioritized in macro and micro situations, by both those who hold the identities, and everyone else. Like any other group-identity, one's membership in a fandom may have more or less salience given a particular situation. While one might assume that a fandom identity takes the ultimately salient position in a fandom space, what exactly might that fandom identity entail, and who is to say what is the "appropriate" salience a fan's other identities should take in that fan-expressive space? Not talking about race, gender, class, sexuality - or being pressured not to do so - in a fandom space ends up offering a "generic" or "normalized" fan. If that fan is generic, what has typically been the go-to generic fan identity? The fanboy, who also has a presumed race, class, and sexuality, right? We're being disingenuous if we pretend that this isn't so.

Going online, we have to make decisions about self-presentation and identity in more purposeful ways than in offline situations. At least initially, we control a great deal more information about ourselves when we decide to go online - we may even present ourselves in anonymous ways not available to us offline (while letter-writing and graffiti are in many ways analogous to anonymous posting, the opportunities for near-thorough anonymous synchronous discussion are unique to cyberspace). However, those self-presentations still involve our offline identities, both those aspects we have more control over, and those we have less control over. Assuming either that these selves are or should be shed before entering into online space, or fandom space, or indeed online fandom space, is highly problematic.

Sarah N. Gatson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University-College Station. She earned her B.A. at Cornell College in 1991, and her M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. at Northwestern Univserity (1999). In addition to her work on Internet community (Interpersonal Culture on the Internet - Television, the Internet, and the Making of a Community, with Amanda Zweerink, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), she collaborated on a NIH/NIDA-funded project looking at Computer-Mediated Communication as it intertwines with Rave and Drug-using subcultures, which has just been released as a book: Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online, edited by Edward Murguia, Melissa Tackett-Gibson, and Ann Lessem (Lexington Books). Her research interests are centered on how people organize themselves in terms of community and citizenship. Her graduate work focused upon gender and race as they intersect with these processes, their significance as cultural systems, and as ideologies that permeate all our lives. Her work has moved back and forth from a focus on policy and law, and thus the more formal process of citizenship, to a more generalized focus on the micro- to macro-level processes of identity, community, and citizenship, and the connections between these processes. Some of her work has been published in Contemporary Sociology, Law & Social Inquiry, Research in Community Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Research, and Feminist Media Studies. Currently, she is a collaborator on a project whose focus is the development of scientific learning and professional communities and future scientists, particularly focusing on access to education, mentors, and scientific networks for underserved segments of the population. Innovation in both offline and online methods to increase access are being explored. This project currently has NSF funding as a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site, a Research Experiences for Teachers site, and a Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institute site, and NIH funding as an R25 site to increase diversity in research personnel, and is housed at the TAMU College of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Physiology & Pharmacology. Her teaching interests include the sociology of law, race and ethnicity, popular culture, qualitative methodology, marriage and family, and the introduction to sociology; all her course are framed with attention to intersections of race, gender, class, & sexuality.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Obama: The Candidate For All Platforms

Whew! I am still trying to collect my thoughts after the Obama victory last week, which has come during a particularly hectic period of the term for me. I haven't been able to keep pace with the journalists and professional pundits who have already written much of what I might have had to say, but I did promise you folks a few reflections.

I've been traveling around the country in recent weeks, giving talks on the relationships between politics and participatory culture. A key theme of the talks has been that political campaigns, much like wars, pushing existing technologies to their breaking points and often give rise to innovations and experimentations which have a lasting impact on our mediascape. This has certainly been the case this go around where Obama has been the man for all platforms -- a campaign which was as comfortable on YouTube or Second Life as it was on network television (think about that final informercial, for example) and more importantly, understood the political process through a lens of media convergence, seeing old and new media, grassroots and corporate media working hand in hand to shape his public image and the campaign messages. The Obama campaign broke so much new ground (in the use of user-generated content, social networks, mobile technologies, and game-based advertising, in particular) and set new records (in the use of the web to raise money or track supporters). Digital media were absolutely central to his much praised "get out the vote" efforts and critical to his ability to court younger voters. By contrast, the McCain candidacy failed across all platforms -- not exploiting fully the potentials of new media and often, getting hurt by its mismanagement of traditional media (Think about Sarah Palin and Katie Couric).

The New York Time's David Carr and Brian Selter ran an especially strong article about "campaigns in a web 2.0 world" in the final days of the campaign, which perfectly describes the interplay of media platforms which shaped this election cycle. Here's a few highlights:

• "We should be careful of these zero-sum games where the new media drives out the old," said Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News who consults for the Monitor Group. "I think what we see is growing sophistication about making the channels work together effectively."
• "What is striking here is not the dominance of any one medium, but the integration of various channels," said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.



• "I think that this time around, campaigns got used to the fact that anything that they put out there could be pirated, remixed, mashed-up and recirculated," said Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It is a much more rapid environment."



• "At a time when almost anyone can check voter turnout in certain neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, I don't think everyone is going to sit there and wait to be spoon-fed the election results in the order Brian Williams thinks is appropriate," said Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon, referring to a closely watched county in Ohio.


This last comment seems especially cogent. I was struck watching the election returns on CNN by how little the networks recognize that they no longer have a monopoly on information. Again and again, they were showing state-wide returns which were relatively meaningless without drilling down to explain what districts were reporting and what their previous voting patterns have been. One consequence of the Democrats having run in all fifty states during the primaries was that the news has already educated many of us about the local specifics of many of these districts and we know to be skeptical if the returns reflect a particularly skewed sample of the state. There was for example a moment when Texas was running something like 51 McCain- 49 Obama and it is clear in hindsight that this must have been heavily skewed towards returns from Austin and San Antonio, yet the newscasters were giving us no way of knowing what we were looking at. Anyone who was watching simultaneously with a wireless laptop in their hands could find very sophisticated data on a precinct by precinct level emerging in real time, making some of the information delivery functions of cable news more or less obsolete.

But it's not clear the anchors really understand how porous the information environment was. At one moment, CNN had just announced the results from Ohio, which produced wild cheers from Grant Park, where the Obama supporters were gathered, and the newscasters were asking whether the people there understood what this meant. (Of course, the newscasters themselves were being coy about the full implications of this moment, since they did not want to declare Obama the victor before voting closed on the west coast, and so they were hinting but not saying that Ohio was the end of any hope for McCain's candidacy.) But, in a year where people have had unprecidented access to state by state, day by day polling, and where there have been countless news stories about every "battleground" state, it's hard to imagine anyone in Grant Park didn't know exactly what the Ohio outcome meant for their guy.

At another moment, they suggested that the televisions were turned off at McCain's headquarters so no information was getting through. Come on! Has anyone at CNN heard about cell phones, blackberries, and wireless internet connections? The point is that the networks are going to need to start thinking about what their function is in a world where a growing number of people are processing election returns through multiple platforms rather than one where the only information they are receiving is streaming through cables into their televisions.

Then, there were all of the new devices the networks were using to display their results. Some of them -- like the manipulable maps we've been learning how to use all year -- have started to develop their own rhetoric and serve specific functions. Though much parodied on places like The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, I love the ways the news has created new ways to visualize contingencies and hypotheticals, running through different game plans. This device was at its strongest when they were trying to show -- but not state directly -- that McCain had lost the election even before returns came in from California and the Pacific Northwest.

The much publicized use of "holographic technology" by CNN, on the other hand, seemed like a display device with no clear function: what new information value was conveyed by having the ability to look at remote reporters from every possible angle? So far, we don't know. Isn't the point of having the reporter be on the ground that we can see the context where the events is ocurring? So what happens when we send them into a tent, cut them off from the crowd, and "beam" them back to CNN? Isn't the point of the use of holography for distanced communication that it allows participants to feel a stronger sense of telepresence? But then what happens when the anchor and the reporter are both still staring at a monitor and the 3d effect is layered in for the audience only?

And of course the newscasters couldn't decide which metaphor was operating. Early in the evening, when it was first displayed, I said to my wife, "Obama-Wan, You are Our Only Hope!" and no sooner were the words out of my mouth then the announcers was making her own Princess Leia jokes. And that metaphor really did capture the texture of this new device which was still more than a little patchy. But later, they started cracking jokes about the transporter in Star Trek, which seemed to this fan boy to be particularly bad news. Any time a transporter signal has been this broken up, it's been early warning of an impending red shirt death, their atoms scattered rather than collected by the technology.

Late in the evening, though, we saw television do what television did best. It was an extraordinarily powerful moment when the news anchors called the election for Obama and we cut to the faces of the people in Grant Park -- including tears streaming down Jesse Jackson's face, Oprah's joy, the wild excitement of his young and minority supporters -- or when we saw Martin Luther King's daughter struggling to be heard over the background noise of the choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. What television communicated so well was the immediacy of the experience, the social connection we felt with people across the country and around the world, and all of the emotions which surrounded this moment of political transformation. People who only followed the data on line missed the intensity of that experience. In my discussions at the Center for Future Civic Media, we often have debated whether civic engagement is a structure of information or a structure of feeling. CNN seemed to lose the battle to the internet in terms of providing meaningful access to information but it won the war in terms of offering us a shared emotional experience which may be vital to connecting the nation together in the wake of hard-waged campaign.

Ellen Hume has shared with me a particularly rich site which gathers together the front pages from newspapers from around the country and across the globe the morning after Obama's victory. It's a great resource for teaching, since it allows you to see how the same news gets a different spin depending on the headline and imagery used.

So what happens next? Will Obama deploy the convergence between old and new media as effectively to govern the country as he did to campaign for office? More and more, we see presidents in continuous campaign mode, trying to build public support behind their policies and preserve their public approval ratings between election cycles. Will we see Obama tap his social network of supporters to organize collectively when Congress balks at his legislative agenda? Will he use the web to gather collective intelligence about public policy issues and to conduct "national conversations" about core challenges confronting the country? Some hints may be seen at the Change.gov site which the Obama transition team put up the day after the election. "The story of the campaign and this historic moment has been your story," the website states. "Share your story and your ideas, and be part of bringing positive lasting change to this country."

If this is the first step in the process, it already suggests a desire for real input from diverse groups and a commitment to transparency which will be a breath of fresh air after the secrecy culture and executive privilege claimed by the Bush administration.

Is Obama now America's most powerful fan boy? Early returns suggest that it may just be the case: there are so many stories now about the Obama family voting on American Idol and reading the Harry Potter books together. The President-Elect is rumored to know how to give a Vulcan salute (to Leonard Nimoy no less), to drop casual references to Star Trek and other science fiction and comics texts into conversation. He's even alleged to have attended San Diego Comic Con one year. Of course, some of his street cred as a fan was damaged by a story in Newsweek during which he was qouted as comparing Michelle's belt buckle to "Lithium Crystals." Any Star Trek fan worth their salt monster knows that should be "Dilithium Crystals." We can only hope that the reporter misunderstood what he said but if so, he should demand an apology for the slander it poses to his fannish reputation. Let the fun begin!

Be sure to check out the new blog and website for the Center for Future Civic Media.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

What Would You Say to The Corporations?

One of our CMS grad students, Flourish Klink, has taken the opportunity to speak to some media companies about fan fiction, and she's looking for input. She asks:

What would you say to the people who own the stories you write fanfic for?

I'm going to have a number of opportunities in the future (some of them in the immediate future) to talk to media companies, the people who set policies about how their company views fanfic. To them, I'm a window into the fan community. I'm an expert. I'm a chance for them to learn more about what we all do. But I don't want this to just be about what *I* think. I might forget something that's important.

So what would you like to say to the corporations? What would you tell them about how they can work with fans? What would you explain to them that they don't understand? How would you suggest that they balance their interests and yours? I want to know. And if you tell me, I might be able to pass them on.

You can reply here or at the appropriate post on her weblog.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Aca-Fen Raise Their Banners High: Transformative Works and Culture

This week, the first issue of a new online, open source journal, Transformative Works and Culture, emerged, offering what promises to be an exciting new space for the work of my fellow aca-fen. The journal hopes to be a site for important new discussions around fan studies and cult media from a range of different disciplinary perspectives and represents the next logical step in the evolution of fan studies as a legitimate academic field. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson serve as the journal's primary editors.

The first issue includes essays, provocations, interviews, and reviews, featuring some of the smartest young writers working in this terrain, with topics ranging from politics (the relationship between the Obama and Clinton campaigns understood in terms of fan politics), horror, soap operas, digital media, fan labor, intellectual property law, and of course, lots about fan fiction, blogging, and vidding practices.

Think you know what academics have to say about fandom -- well, there's probably at least one essay here certain to provoke surprise, shock, even outrage, and that's part of the fun. And while they want to provide an academically respectable place for young scholars to publish their work, they also see the site as a point of contact between academic and non-academic fans, anyone who wants to go "meta" about their favorite shows and their followings.

I was honored to be
interviewed in the first issue. Here's part of what I had to say reflecting back on the "Gender and Fan Culture" conversation we ran on this blog:

What the gender and fan culture debate forced me to think about was that there might be a connection between my new emphasis on the relations between producers and consumers and the more male-heavy, less feminist-focused nature of my new work. I need to be concerned that one group of fans may be gaining visibility and influence while other groups are still being excluded and marginalized. My friend Tara McPherson has noted that in general, gender and race have dropped out of academic discussions of digital media, and we need to find ways to reintegrate them into this work. And so, rising to her challenge, I am working much harder now to try to reengage with issues of gender and sexuality through my work. As I note above, my most recent work is about the exclusions within participatory culture and about the unequal relations between corporations and different kinds of fan communities. I am struggling to reconnect my work on participatory culture with the latest rounds of work in feminist scholarship. Fan scholars should try to acknowledge and address these questions of inequality and exclusion in their work. It's one reason why I speak so much right now about the participation gap and make the point again and again that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse or inclusive culture.

Fandom is certainly not exempt from these concerns. For a long time, as a Star Trek fan, I was concerned that we spoke about "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," yet those attending conventions are overwhelming white. I now worry a lot about the generational segregation of fan communities. When my wife goes to Escapade, she hears lots of talk about the graying of fandom and sees far fewer fans who are not middle-aged; when I speak at a Harry Potter con, I am shocked by how young most of the fans are. What does this suggest about the social structures of fandom?

Might something similar be going on with race, where we define what shows count as "fannish" according to a set of criteria that may marginalize or exclude minority participants at a time when the shows watched by most white Americans are rather different from those watched by most minority Americans? Interestingly, reality television has been the point of overlap racially, so it would be interesting to know more about how race operates in the fandoms around reality television. But in most cases, reality fandom is cut off from the fiction-focused fandoms.

Incidentally, gender seems to operate differently within some of these fandoms: younger men and women are interacting more together through Harry Potter or anime fandom than was the case with the highly female-centered fan cultures I observed a decade ago.

We need to be asking hard questions within the fan community about how we define our own borders and how different groups of fans interact. They are also questions we need to ask as academics about how we bridge between different scholarly communities that are studying related topics through different language and that may be breaking down along the lines of gender or race. I hope that OTW and TWC can extend the conversation we started on my blog and build connections to other such discussions taking place in and around fandom. But we are only going to achieve that goal if we embrace the broadest possible understanding of what constitutes fan culture and what models might motivate fan studies research.

Many of those featured here -- including Louisa Ellen Stein, Anne Kustritz, Francesca Coppa, Catherine Tosenberger, Sam Ford, and Bob Rehak -- were participants in my extended series of dialogues on fan studies last year, but there are many new voices which I had not encountered before as well. Those who read this blog will be pleased to see an interview with
Wu Ming 1 as well as to discover the interesting and provocative collaborative, the Audre Lorde of the Rings.

Here are a few other excerpts from the journal that spoke to some of the topics we've been discussing here in recent months:

Francesca Coppa on how Star Trek influenced the origins of fan vidding:

"All of these vids work to heal wounds created by the marginalization, displacement, and fragmentation of female characters like Star Trek's Number One, restoring female subjectivity and community by editing together what was put asunder. To be a vidder is to work to reunite the disembodied voice and the desiring body, and to embark on this project is to be part of a distinctive and important tradition of female art."

Catherine Tosenberger on Supernatural's cult status:

"Supernatural's pedigree gives some clues to its popularity among slash fans. The format of the show links it to classic male-male buddy series such as Starsky and Hutch and The Professionals, both of which have venerable slash fandoms. Moreover, Supernatural shares not only a thematic resemblance but an actor (Jensen Ackles) with its lead-in show, Smallville....In addition, Supernatural is a direct descendant of The X-Files: in addition to similar themes, structures, moods, and styles, the two shows share many writing and production personnel. Supernatural's most striking inheritance from The X-Files is its focus upon the intense relationship between its two main characters: as critic Whitney Cox (2006) remarks, Supernatural "is fueled past its failings almost entirely by the chemistry between the two principals, the boys who, like Mulder and Scully, generate enough sexual tension to power a small city". The fact that Sam and Dean are brothers in no way detracts from the slashy vibe. In fact, as brothers, they are given a pass for displays of emotion that masculinity in our culture usually forbids, which intensifies the potential for queer readings. Executive story editor Sera Gamble described her conception of the show as "the epic love story of Sam and Dean" (Borsellino 2006); while she quickly avowed that her comment was made in jest to tease creator Eric Kripke, many fan writers consider her statement to be a perfectly accurate description of the show, and they use their own narratives to explore all the implications of the "epic love story." These fan-fictional narratives are known as Wincest."

Rebecca Lucy Busker on how LiveJournal is changing fandom:

LiveJournal ... is made up of many interconnected spaces, most of which are focused on individual people. On any given fan's LiveJournal, she herself is the topic, choosing what to discuss or not discuss. Even LiveJournal communities sometimes serve only as link repositories, taking a reader back to a poster's individual journal. The impact of this shift has been profound, and in many ways it has served to take the focus off the source and put it on the fan, and in turn, on fandom.

One such impact has been an increasing awareness of multiple fandoms. When LiveJournal was just beginning to overtake mailing lists as a dominant medium, one of the purported benefits was customization of the fannish experience. Simply put, each fan could choose which LiveJournals she did or did not read, and thus which other fans she did or did not read. However, this customization extends only to people, not to topics. Although LiveJournal does allow the creation of custom filters, a given journal can only be on the filter or not. No mechanism for filtering posts on a given topic exists. In concrete terms, a person who reads my journal for my posts about Batman must also see my posts about Supernatural (2005-present), at least for however long it takes her to scroll past them. And that assumes I keep my fandoms in discrete posts. Pressure not to spam one's friends list with multiple posts (not to mention just our own pressures on time and attention) encourages the posting of several topics in one post. Thus, if I watch Doctor Who (2005-present) and The Middleman (2008) in one night (something more and more likely the age of TiVo and torrents), I might very well comment on both in one post. The fan who wants to see my reaction to the new Who episode will thus at least run her eyes over names like Wendy Watson and Ida.

As a result, fans have an increased peripheral, and sometimes even very specific, knowledge of other fandoms. Indeed, a popular meme that recurs every so often involves posting "what I know about fandoms I am not in." The results are sometimes humorous, but are also often fairly accurate. There was a time I could perhaps identify one song by *NSync if I heard it on the radio. And yet I knew the names of all the members, I could identify them by sight, and I even knew a few personal details.

If any of this grabs your interest, there's plenty more where this came from. So, check out Transformative Works and Culture.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Informal Pedagogy of Anime Fandom: An Interview with Rebecca Black (Part Two)

To what degree are the pedagogical advances you saw simply a product of being motivated to spend more time writing? to what degree can they be traced back to Beta-Reading and Reader Responses providing greater feedback to the writer?

Well, I believe that one of the best ways to learn a new language and to improve your literacy skills is to practice using the language in meaningful, communicative tasks. So, I think that a good amount of the progress that the English language learners from my study made can be attributed to their motivation to write and read fan fiction and related texts. I also think that their success within the fan community allowed them to develop confidence and begin seeing themselves as people who write and use English effectively. For Nanako and Cherry-Chan, this was very different than how they were viewed in school--basically, in school they were seen as students who struggled with all literacy-based (as opposed to Math or Science-based) tasks. So, if you're constructed as "bad" at something for long enough, after a while you start to believe it. Fortunately, for Nanako at least, her success in the fan community helped her achieve success and popularity as an online author--which in turn provided her with motivation to continue writing and improving her English. Cherry-Chan, on the other hand, used her participation in the fan community to improve her social connections. Still, she used her language and literacy skills to make her own LiveJournal pages, forums, and web sites, and to post reviews of other people's fictions and to leave comments on other people's web pages.

In terms of the effect that beta-reading and peer-feedback might have had on their language abilities--it's important to note that they were both in English classes at school, so I can't really make any causal statements; however, over the 3 years that I followed her participation, Nanako's readers very clearly pointed out grammatical errors that she consistently made in her texts. And, she would acknowledge their feedback and then go back and correct her errors. In terms of second language acquisition, this is an important aspect of learning-- actually noticing errors and then figuring out how to correct them. For Nanako, sometimes her readers would tell her how to correct the errors, but other times they would simply point out the phrases, sentences, or paragraphs with errors and leave her to figure out how to correct them. In my opinion, I think these activities helped her to improve her English composition skills. Most of the fan fiction authors that I've talked with say that their reviewers and beta-readers were definitely responsible for helping them learn to be better writers.

I tend to agree that assigning fan fiction in classrooms would probably ruin its appeal for many students. However, other students might really appreciate having fan fiction texts or gaming-related texts available as options for their in-school composing. For example, many adolescents might feel more comfortable mastering the compare and contrast genre if they were able to write about subject matter that they have some expertise in, such as comparing and contrasting the merits of certain video game character classes or using Inuyasha or Harry Potter to discuss character development. Educators can create lesson plans that include or even encourage different options for students to incorporate their extracurricular literacy activities and/or interests in popular media texts into their classroom activities. Educators can also help students make the connections between their in and out-of-school practices. However, I think it ultimately should be up to students to decide to what extent their out-of-school activities will inform or work in concert with school-based tasks.

Well, one of the primary values that I see in studying fan fiction writing as a process is that it provides a mechanism for understanding the role of audience participation in the creation of texts. All of my focal participants' received a great deal of feedback from readers--for example, Grace has received around 9400 reviews, Nanako 7600, and Cherry-chan around 650. I don't know about you, but I've never had that many people respond to anything that I've written, especially not when I was a teenager. Hmmm... on second thought, you probably *have* had that many people respond to things that you've written. Anyway, the fan fiction audience often plays a significant role in determining the direction that a text will go in. As you pointed out in Textual Poachers, the audience has a vested interest in the media series, and they have strong opinions about what should and should not happen with the characters. So, they are happy to provide suggestions for how things should go and complaints about how things should not go in a story. Nanako in particular was very responsive to readers' suggestions about her texts. Sometimes she would incorporate their ideas into the narrative, other times she would go back and revise her chapters based on reader feedback. She would also use her Author's Notes to explicitly request guidance on certain parts of her texts, and the audience would respond to these requests. So, simply studying her fan fictions as a body of texts would be missing a great deal of the reciprocal interaction taking place as she goes through the process of writing, negotiating with readers, revising, and finalizing her texts.

Absolutely. I think we have this whole focus in classrooms that's based around "keep your eyes on your own paper," and testing for what each individual learner knows, and it really stifles a lot of the potential for collaborative learning. Using language to effectively communicate ideas, negotiate perspectives, and even collaboratively complete projects is important for all students, but it's especially important for English language learners to have these kinds of interactive learning experiences. Through collaborative interaction, they're able to build on and extend the knowledge that each participant brings to the space. And, they're able to further develop their own skills and knowledge by using language for authentic purposes in meaningful contexts.

Appadurai suggests that the contemporary imagination is collaborative in nature--that people are growing accustomed to creating and thinking through things in collaborative contexts. We can see examples of this in how many people will post their projects or ideas on a blog or publish their creative texts online and await feedback. It seems to me that this sort of approach to creation and even thought might be a very effective way to come up with robust representations, perspectives, and solutions to difficult problems. So, it may not just be a matter of social and collaborative forms of literacy, but rather a turn towards all sorts of collaborative activities that are facilitated by new media and technologies.

Well, after one of my talks, a professor from the audience told me that his daughter was actively involved in the anime fan community, creating fan art and scanlations (which are fan-created translations of Japanese manga) and suggested that I contact her. We stayed in contact a bit over the years, and when I started the book, she seemed like the perfect person to create the cover. I told her about the main themes of the book, and she came up with this fantastic cover with an original anime character actually drawing herself onto the page with a pencil. I thought this had a nice parallel with one of the points I was making in the book--that many of the focal participants were writing different aspects of their identities into their fictions. They weren't really writing Mary Sue's, but they did integrate different aspects of themselves and their lives into their fan fiction texts. The series editors, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, and the press, Peter Lang, were all very supportive of using this artwork for the cover. I think it speaks to a strong ethos of valuing the communities and the practices that are represented in the text.

Rebecca W. Black is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her research centers on the forms of literacy and social engagement that are emerging in online environments. In particular, Black has focused on the ways that popular culture-inspired environments, such as fan communities, provide adolescent English language learners with opportunities to develop their language skills, establish social connections with global networks of youth, and construct powerful identities as successful authors and knowledgeable fans. Her work has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Teacher’s College Record, and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. In addition, Prof. Black 's book titled Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction was recently published in the Peter Lang series on Digital Epistemologies.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:04 PM | Permalink

The Informal Pedagogy of Anime Fandom: An Interview with Rebecca Black (Part One)

One of the central animating idea behind the New Media Literacies movement has been the observation that young people often learn better outside of schools -- through their involvement in informal communities, such as those formed around fandom or gaming -- than they do inside the classrooms. Researchers have sought to better understand these sites of informal learning and the often unconsciously developed pedagogical practices by which they communicate skills and information to newbies. James Paul Gee has used the term, "affinity space," to describe such sites of grassroots creativity and learning. Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler deploy the "affinity space" concept to talk about communities of gamers. I've used the same concept in my discussion of young fan fiction writers.

Rebecca W. Black, one of Gee's former students, has recently released an outstanding new book, Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction, which uses the study of anime fan fiction as the focus for a consideration of informal learning. Her central focus are on how fandom helps students for whom English is a second language refine their linguistic abilities and sharpen their expressiveness. She argues fandom has allowed many young people -- especially those from Asia -- to find their voice and gain greater social acceptance because the community is so eager to learn what they know about the cultures where anime is produced and circulated. This book reflects some of the best thinking in the current field of educational research on the value of participating in popular culture and will be of interest to parents, educators, policy makers, and fans.

I had a chance to meet Black some years ago when she was at the beginning of her research; my early conversations with her and with Gee helped to inform my own writing about "Why Heather Can Write" in Technology Review and Convergence Culture. I am proud to share her insights through the following interview.

The central claim of your book is that the practices and processes around the writing and sharing of anime-related fan fiction show many of the signs of a very robust and effective learning community. What aspects of fandom do you think support this kind of learning?

Well, for one I think that the openness and scope of the fan community really fosters learning. And, I should clarify that I don't just mean traditional school-based forms of learning but rather learning in a broad sense. For instance, in terms of openness, you don't have to pass any kind of a test, and there aren't any requirements for gaining access to all the sections of Fanfiction.net. Therefore, youth at all different skill levels have the opportunity to tackle any sort of communication or writing task that they choose. However, in schools the activities that students participate in are often determined by ability level. And while I think it's important to make sure that curricular materials are accessible, I also think that lessons are often oversimplified for certain groups of students, such as English language learners (ELLs) and struggling writers and readers, to the extent that these students aren't offered many opportunities to use language in rich and creative ways or to participate in challenging literacy activities. In contrast, ELL youth participating in the fan community often take on challenging tasks, such as writing stories with multiple chapters or creating their own fan-based websites. In addition, they're able to draw on an array of resources in the community for support. Other fans are available and happy to peer-review their fictions, they visit other websites to receive tips on how to compose their texts or to build their websites, to name just a few examples. Interestingly enough, schools often seem to discourage activities with these distributed forms of knowledge and resources, instead focusing on testing for what students have "inside their heads". However, I think it's just as important to recognize, evaluate, and help develop students' strategies for learning, collaborating, and accessing knowledge that they don't already possess, as this seems to be much more aligned with what we do as adults. I mean, I don't know all sorts of things, but I have pretty good strategies in place for finding them out.

Well, this is related to the previous question. For Gee, there are several defining features of affinity spaces that make them particularly effective sites for informal learning, and many of these features can be seen in fan fiction writing communities. For example, one defining feature is that experts and novices participate in the same areas and activities in affinity spaces. So, as I mentioned previously, novices aren't prevented from engaging in creative activities that they find interesting, even if these activities are challenging for them. And, through working in the same space as experts, novices are able to benefit from this exposure, by asking questions, collaborating, and by observing how experts go about certain tasks.

Another defining feature of affinity spaces is that they are organized around a common interest or goal rather than around age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender, or ability. One of the ways that this is really salient in anime fan fiction communities is in how they provide points of contact for individuals from diverse backgrounds. For example, the participants in my study had people from over 20 different countries reading and leaving feedback on their stories. I used to write fan fiction when I was younger, and the only people who read my stories were my closest friends who lived in the same town, went to the same school, and had similar backgrounds. And even they only saw the stories that I wasn't too shy to show them. Publishing on the web wasn't really an option back then. But now, the internet really provides unprecedented options for either anonymously (or somewhat anonymously) sharing content, and for exchanging information and ideas with people from all over the world. As one example, if a fan fiction writer wants to write a story that's based on high school students in Japan, s/he can post questions to a fan fiction forum asking for specifics about what everyday school and home life is like in Japan, and s/he can be pretty sure of getting some accurate responses from audience members who currently are living or have lived in Japan. And, the diverse and networked nature of affinity spaces also opens up a space for youth to discuss different culturally grounded practices and perspectives. For instance, one of my focal participants wrote a story that involved an arranged marriage between cousins. Now, this arranged marriage wasn't even a big part of the story, but it was something that several of the readers reacted pretty strongly to. Her response to this was to write a couple of fan fiction stories that focused on anime characters and their arranged marriages as part of a cultural practice that is grounded in familial duty. This was her way of pushing some of these readers to move beyond their limited scope of knowledge and learn more about a practice that is very common in many parts of the world.

These points of cultural connection also are providing many youth with the incentive to learn different languages and to find out about different cultures. I think this is related to the "pop cosmopolitanism" that you discuss in your book Convergence Culture. Many anime-based fan fiction texts are linguistically hybrid, in that they contain more than one language, and, as I mentioned previously, they're often set in Asian countries. But, it's important to note that this isn't limited to anime communities and Asian elements. Fan fiction authors use many different languages and cultural elements to enhance their stories. Sirpa Leppanen has some interesting insights into these hybrid language practices in the article "Youth language in media contexts: Insights into the functions of English in Finland". I think that reading and trying to write these hybrid texts creates a cosmopolitan sensibility and a culture of interest in learning about new things. For example, online anime translation dictionaries have become very popular; there are forums specifically for fan fiction authors trying to do historical and cultural research to make their narratives more accurate; there are discussions about the historical, cultural, and linguistic accuracy of fan fiction narratives taking place between authors and reviewers on fanfiction.net. And these are just a few examples that come immediately to mind. On a related note, Eva Lam has pointed out that these points of contact in online communities don't necessarily or automatically bring about empathy and acceptance, and the previous example about arrange marriages clearly supports this. Still, I think that the shared interest of the affinity space provides unprecedented exposure to other linguistic and cultural traditions that just wasn't available before, and exposure is the starting point for moving toward understanding.

What led you to an interest in fan fiction as a space for understanding informal learning?

Well, I was actually a fan fiction writer as a child. It started when I read Tolkien's trilogy for the first time. I was pretty upset that Arwen Evenstar had to give up her immortality to be with Aragorn. So, I came up with my own version of how this part of the story might go. I'd rather not go into detail about that particular fic, but I'll at least say that it involved a magic immortality potion and a bird carrying letters back and forth between Middle Earth characters. Unfortunately, I didn't really have any friends who were interested in this sort of writing; they were more interested in television and MTV, so I gradually abandoned these writing activities for others. Almost 20 years later I went to UW Madison to work on my doctorate with Jim Gee, and I started looking at the literacy practices of fans in gaming communities. This led me to online fan fiction, and to be honest, I was pretty excited to find that there were so many people like me, writing their own versions of popular texts. Also, my background is in linguistics and teaching English as a second language, so I became particularly interested in the communities where non-native English speakers were composing and interacting in English. At the time, there was very little discussion of fan fiction in relation to literacy--in fact, I think that only Kelly Chandler-Olcott & Donna Mahar and you had even remotely touched on the literacy aspect. So, I decided that a dissertation based on English language learners and online fan fiction might help us to understand how this literacy phenomenon might be impacting immigrant youth's literacy development and language socialization and providing a significant venue for informal learning.

You offer detailed accounts of how and what several young fans learn through their participation in the world of fan fiction. How was the world of fan fiction able to facilitate and support their different goals and styles as learners?

My focal participants were all in very different situations as English language learners, and they had very different goals for and outcomes from their participation in the site. For example, Grace lived in the Philippines, and she learned English as a third language there. Most of her experience with English had been in writing academic texts in her classrooms. In an interview, she explained that participation in fan sites helped her learn how to "speak American" and that made her feel more comfortable developing the texts for her own websites and interacting with people online. So, for Grace, the value of writing these texts in English was that it provided her with feedback and input on how to "Americanize" her existing English skills. Nanako, on the other hand, didn't learn English until she moved from China to Canada with her family when she was about 11. She used to start many of her fictions with an Author's Note explaining that she was just learning English and really wanted to improve her language and writing skills. And, the audience was pretty receptive to this. They would comment on her grammar and spelling errors, but in supportive or constructive ways. Some readers would give her very specific feedback on grammatical errors that were common in her writing, and she would take note of this and actually go back and correct these errors in her writing. The audience also would give her a lot of positive feedback about her plotlines which helped bolster her confidence enough to continue writing in spite of her early struggles with grammar and spelling. As a very different example, another focal participant, Cherry-chan, found it taxing to write the sort of long, narrative texts that Grace and Nanako would write (for example, Grace has one fan fiction that's 30 chapters long, and Nanako has one that's 14 chapters long). So, she got into Role Play (RP) Writing, which is a type of fan fiction that takes place on a synchronous medium such as instant messenger. RP writers will take on the personas of different characters and then take turns constructing the narrative from each character's point of view. Cherry-chan liked the social aspect of this collaborative kind of writing. RP writing also gave her immediate feedback on how her co-author was responding to her text, and it more or less forced her to continue writing.

Angela Thomas has done some interesting work interrogating adolescents' identity construction in RP writing that helped me think about how this form of composition was a way for Cherry-chan to extend her social relationships and use the anime characters to "ventriloquate" some of her own identity issues and perspectives. I think this is a common element of both RP and traditional fan fiction-- in that the authors use the characters to represent issues that they are struggling with in their own lives. As one example (that might be a little bit off topic), while I was conducting my study, I came across a "suicide fic" in which the teenage author depicted the anime protagonist committing suicide. The author concluded this fiction with an Author's Note stating that this would be his final story. Basically, he was implying that he was considering suicide himself. What was so powerful about this event was the outpouring of support he received from the audience of readers. There were youth and young adults alike offering up supportive advice, encouraging him not to give up, and providing their instant messenger addresses so that he could contact them at any time when he felt like giving up. Now, I've had some people ask me if it was actually harmful to have all these untrained people offering this young man encouragement and wouldn't it be better for him to reach out to a suicide hotline or a counselor where someone trained in such matters could help? This is where I think the affinity space aspect of fan communities comes into play again. Specifically, I think a lot of youth who are in crisis might have a difficult time approaching total strangers with whom they have nothing in common. However, in the anime fan community, they feel at least some point of affiliation and contact with the people that they've been sharing stories and feedback with. This might make it easier for them to reach out within the affinity space where they feel comfortable, when they might otherwise not reach out at all.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

DJ Le Clown Rocks the Total Recut Contest

A while back, I posted an interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher to publicize their video competition around the theme, "What is Remix Culture?" I had been asked to join a panel of judges ranging from intellectual property expert Lawrence Lessig to fan vidder Luminosity in assessing the finalists in the competition. This weekend, Total Recut announced the winners of the contest and I wanted to give a shout out to the finalists here.

The First Place prize went to DJ Le Clown for his haunting and hypnotic Xmas in New York City. In his artist's statement, the DJ writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:00 AM | Permalink

Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File

During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. These images often got passed along via e-mail or posted on blogs as a way of enlivening political debates. Like classic editorial cartoons, they paint in broad strokes, trying to forge powerful images or complex sets of associations that encapsulate more complex ideas. In many cases, they aim lower than what we would expect from an established publication and so they are a much blunter measure of how popular consciousness is working through shifts in the political landscape. Many of them explore the borderlands between popular culture and American politics. I called this "Photoshop for Democracy" and the ideas got expanded in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

I thought back on my arguments there this past week as I've begun to search out some of the images being generated in response to John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Given the intense flood of news coverage around this decision, the ways that it has shaken up the terms of the campaign, and the ways that it challenges gender assumptions surrounding the Republican leadership, it is no surprise that it has provoked a range of response. And I thought it might be interesting to dissect some of these images here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

How Big a Geek Are You?

A few weeks ago, MIT launched a new video through its home page which was intended to prove to the world that MIT folks are not all geeks. (By the way, sorry not to be able to embed the video here but in the name of Youtube, the MIT geeks have decided they need to lock down their content rather than allowing it to spread!)

It's an effective video which calls attention to many of the things I love about MIT but it left me frustrated. For one thing, most of the folks they depict still come across looking like geeks, not that there's anything wrong with that! And I thought the video would have been more effective if it broadened our definition of geek to include all of the rest of us at MIT who don't participate in the robotics competition or spend most of our time talking to our shoes. I'm proud to be a geek -- and to be geekish about culture and art. To my mind, saying that MIT isn't all geekish because it teaches the humanities is another way of saying that the humanities are cut off from the things that made MIT famous and I don't accept that core premise.

So, rather than teaching our incoming students to feel proud because they aren't geeks, we hit them with a geek entrance exam, inspired by our colleague Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Diaz's writing is full of in joke references to games, comics, animated series, and pop music, all of which form the raw material for the various characters to construct their own personal mythologies.

Make no mistake -- Junot Diaz is a geek; he's also a hep cat. Both sides of his personality were on display during his appearance on The Colbert Report earlier this summer. In writing this book, it is clear that Diaz was struggling to make sense of his own geekish impulses and perhaps, this award winning book is his way of reflecting on how and why he belongs at MIT. It's an amazing book which I recommend to anyone reading this blog.

Every year we select a book to send to our graduate students to read over the summer. The books are carefully chosen to help set the tone and establish some key themes for the coming year. This year, we chose Oscar Wao and our graduate students are lucky enough to be able to sit down for a conversation with the author later this week. To get in the spirit, I put together a little quiz which includes many, though not all, of the geek references in the novel. We used it to break the ice as the graduate students got to show off their geek expertise. I thought you might also enjoy working their way through the quiz. I didn't bother to put together the answers. That's what Wikipedia is for, silly!

To show how geeky my students are, they ended up using ChaCha, the new text-message based research service, to track down answers to some of the hard to identify terms.

How Big a Geek Are You?
The following are geek culture references from Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao.

How many of them can you identify?
How many other CMS students do you need to talk with to figure out what they all
are?
What digital resources would you use to track down this information?

Muhammad Ali
Akira
Lloyd Alexander
Appleseed
Isaac Asimov
Atari
Jeans Pierre Aumont
Balrogs
Billy Batson
Battle of the Planets
"Beam Me Up"
Big Blue Marble
Biggie Smalls
Blake's 7
Ben Bova
Bon Jovi
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Captain America
Captain Horlock
Chaka
Chakobsa
Champions
Clay's Ark
Daniel Clowes
Dark Knight Returns
DC
D&D
Samuel Delaney
Deathstroke
DM
Doctor Who
Dr. Manhattan
Dr. Zaius
Dorsai
Dune
Eightball
Elvish
Encyclopedia Brown
The Exorcist
The Eyes of Mingus
Fantasy Games Unlimited
Final Fantasy
George Foreman
The Fountainhead
Galactus
Galadriel
Gamma World
Gen. Urko
Ghost
Gondolin
Good People of Sur
Gorilla Grod
Gary Gygax
Green Lantern
Hardware
Hector Lavoe
Robert Heinlein
Frank Herbert
Herculoids
Hernandez Brothers
Tracy Hickman
Harry Houdini
Robert E. Howard
Ill Will
Incredible Journey
Intellivision
Jabba the Hutt
Jack Kirby
Jedi
The Jeffersons
Kaneda
The Great Kazoo
Stephen King
Land of the Lost
Stan Lee
Ursula Le Guin
Lensman
Lothlorien
H.P. Lovecraft
Luba
Magic
Manhunter
Man Without a Face
Marvel
Mary Jane
Master Killer
John Merrick
Frank Miller
Minas Tirith
Miracle Man
Maria Montez
Alan Moore
Mordor
Morlock
My Side of the Mountain
"Nanoo-Nanoo"
Neo Tokyo
New Order
Andre Norton
"Oh Mighty Isis"
Palomar
Phantom of the Opera
Phantom Zone
Planet of the Apes
Roman Polaski
Project A
Rat Pack
Lou Reed
Return of the King
Robotech Macross
Rorshach
The Sandman
Sauron
Doc Savage
Shazam
Sindarin
Slan
"Doc" Smith
Robert Smith
Solomon Grundy
Sound of Music
Space Ghost
Squadron Supreme
Olaf Stapledon
Star Blazers
Star Trek
Street Fighter
Tom Swift
Sycorax
Take Back