That's Me All Over: Catching Up With Myself Over the Holidays

I've always loved that moment in The Wizard of Oz where the flying monkeys have knocked (not to mentioned pulled) the stuffing out of the Scarecrow. His body lies like an empty sack. His head's been thrown someplace else. And the straw lies scattered on the ground. And he looks out and says, "well, that's me all over." There are many days when I know how he feels and also appreciate his self-deflating sense of humor.

All of this is by way of saying that I flew too much, spoke too much, and otherwise stretched myself way too thin in 2008 and I hope that the steps I've taken at the end of the year will put me in a position to slow down a little in the coming year.

That said, today's post is intended to share with you some of the digital traces which survive from some memorable speaking gigs that I did last year. Each of these represents content I had planned to post at some point last year and never got around to sharing. I figured I'd start the new year by clearing out my inbox.

For example, the day before the election, I spoke at the University of Oregon in Eugene, sharing some of my thoughts about the role of new media and popular culture in the 2008 presidential campaign. While I was there, they got me into the studio to tape a segment of the University of Oregon Today, which recently went up on the web. I was in a particularly reflective frame of mind, talking about some core themes of my work -- especially about the shifting relations between fandom and academia, about the goals and ideals of the Comparative Media Studies Program, about convergence culture, and about politics as a transmedia practice. I will especially value this interview as recording many of the core talking points about the Comparative Media Studies Program just a few weeks before I announced my decision to leave the program. It should give you some sense of why it was so hard for me to walk away from what we had built at MIT.

Earlier in the year, I participated in a lively and spirited exchange at the Consumer Research Conference here in Boston. Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and I had been invited to represent the Convergence Culture Consortium in a mock debate with some of the key thinkers in the field of Consumer Research. We begin the debate slinging zingers at each other, but as the conversation went along, we all became so engrossed in the points of contact between the two fields of research. Consumer Research shares many core assumptions with the Cultural Studies tradition which informs my own research but it has by and large taken shape in a business school context. To be honest, few of my cultural studies colleagues have ever walked across campus to talk with their counterparts in the business school and we know very little about the research being done there, even when it explores some of the same themes or developments shaping our own research. I'm very lucky to have made contact many years ago with Robert Kozinets who has been a key thinker on the topic of "brand communities" and who has been my bridge into the Consumer Research space.Such interdisciplinary conversations should occur more often. I know that I have many readers who come from industry or Business School backgrounds and so I'm grateful that you've been open, on your part, to such dialog.

My former student, Vanessa Bertozzi, now works as a community organizer inside Etsy, an online arts and crafts community. The community had been struggling with issues of copyright and fair use as they were more and more attracting fan artists. Bertozzi, with whom I did research on Young Artists for an essay that ended up in the recent book, Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life (edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey), asked me to join her online for a real time but virtual conversation about the nature of fan art, about appropriation as a transformative and expressive practice, and about the legal and ethical implications of a world where many of us create in response to existing media texts. In many ways, this exchange brought me back to ideas I first explored in Textual Poachers almost twenty years ago.

While I was speaking at the International Communications Association in Montreal last spring, I was asked to do an interview about mobile communications, new media literacies, user-generated content, and privacy for a multimedia web project being developed by Steven James May, an MA candidate at Ryerson University. I had no idea how creative May was going to get in terms of the context for the interview. He talked to me out on one of the main streets of one of Canada's busiest cities, standing inside a phone booth, and holding an outsized early mobile telephone. People were stopping on the street to stare at the strange configuration of media and at one point, an academic associate stopped, yanked out his cellphone camera, adding one more layer of mediation and telecommunication to the mix. May's project is now up on the web and my somewhat befuddled interview now lives alongside interviews with Greg Elmer, danah boyd, Toby Miller, Jonathon Zittrain, and David Weinberger, among others.

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

Tourists and Collectors Enter the World of Tomorrow: An Interview with Angela Ndalianis (Part Two)

You suggest some connections between the birth of Superman and the 1939 World's Fair with its theme, "A World of Tomorrow." Explain.

The New York World Fair of 1938-9 reflected a mindset of the times that saw utopia as becoming an achievable reality in the not too distant future. The birth of Superman was also very much a product of a culture that nurtured this mindset; Superman was a character from a science fiction reality, and the product of a technologically advanced society as represented in his home planet of Krypton. His arrival on Earth was very much presented as the arrival of a god-like being who offered humanity its own utopian potential. In the real-world context of the late 1930s, visionary futures were considered realizable as a result of advances in scientific knowledge, technological development, and urban planning. As early back as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, World Expositions and Fairs - especially in the U.S. - had explored the concern with creating idealized cities but it was the 1938-9 NY fair (and the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-1934 that preceded it) that took the first important steps in forging a relationship between science and society. But more significantly, these concerns were integrated with the visions and consumer pleasures that were offered by science fiction and entertainment. The futuristic, technologically reliant cities found typically in science fiction examples like the Buck Rogers comic strips, sf novels of Edward Bellamy and H.G.Wells, and sf magazines like Amazing Stories collided with science at the New York World Fair. In particular, living up to the Fair's motto "Designing the World of Tomorrow", the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes created his 'Futurama' exhibit - a City of the Future in 1960. Designed as a diorama, viewers sat high above this miniature city while a motorized belt moved them around the exhibit. Drawing heavily on the aesthetics of flight - both through the technological capabilities of aviation and the biological capacity of the Superman body - the omnipotent view point from above was further empowered by the sensation of flight. To cap it all off, on July 4, 1940 the fair hosted 'Superman Day' (with the actor Ray Middleton playing Superman) and a further association between Superman and the U.S. was sealed. Superman's first appearance was in Action Comics #1, in 1938, and his own series began in 1939, but 1939 also saw the publication of New York World's Fair Comics and the two issues that were released at the 1939-40 exposition featured both Superman and Batman visiting the New York Fair to solve crimes. The new figure of the superhero was clearly seen as playing an important role in envision a future, utopian America. In the 1980s, the All-Star Squadron comic book series would return to these origins by placing their superhero team in the 1940s with their headquarters based in the Trylon and Perisphere - the iconic buildings created for the fair.

What I enjoy about adopting this approach is exploring and unraveling the dynamic process that is history, and trying to understand the connections that exist across diverse media that may, on the surface, appear to be radically different to one another, but which on closer inspection share a great deal in terms of perceptual, cognitive and sensory responses they may want to extract from their audiences, despite the temporal and cultural gaps. One of the things I'm primarily interested in my research is the history and development of entertainment media. How have certain experiences remained the same, and how and why have they altered. In my (almost finished!!) book on theme parks for example, I look at the parallels that exist between the aristocratic villa gardens of C16th-C18th and theme parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios. In addition to the layouts and design of the park spaces (which have much in common with the plans for villa gardens), I love comparing the minutiae - all the smaller gadgets and media toys that make these places generate delight and pleasure.

Take the trick fountain, for example: in the gardens of Versailles, Louis XIVth and his followers were entertained by the sudden spurts of water that would spray them as they walked by a statue or seat that were rigged as trick fountains. The Alice in Wonderland labyrinth in Disneyland Paris and Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure have almost identical entertainment features that are similarly rigged to trigger gut, sensory reactions of laughter, surprise and joy from their recipients. I remember the fabulous little fountain in the Lost Continent section of the Islands of Adventure. The fountain didn't pretend to be anything other than a fountain, but this one seduces you into its world by acknowledging your presence and by clearly being able to see your actions; just when you feel comfortable with it and engage it in conversation, a spurt of water erupts from one or two of the many barely visible holes that are on its surface and sprays you in the face or body. Hysterical! Crowds of people stand around waiting to see the next victim become part of this slapstick routine. What does this tell us? Well, humans are still entertained by similar toys but with one dramatic difference. The space that's home to this fountain no longer belongs to royalty and to a select few who wield power over the masses. This is now a space that entertains the masses. But are the masses the new royalty, or is this now the role performed by the multinational corporations? Lots of questions that need untangling but which are not necessarily easy to find answers to; I think there's more to be gained from opening up and presenting more questions that complicate these relationships between the past and the present, than providing black and white answers that simplistically draw conclusions (e.g. 'the new royalty are they corporations who are the new oppressors of the people' - it would be easy to conclude this, but I think it would offer a myopic understanding of the complex relationships and conclusions that can be extracted via, in this case, a comparison of trick fountains and their function in entertainment spaces past and present).

A new research project I've just started also adopts a media historical approach. I'm looking at emerging examples of artificially sentient beings, in particular, robots like QRIO, Asimo and Zeno and artificial intelligence programs used in computer games and film effects - in other words, examples from within an entertainment context. But I'm also researching their historical precedents, the intention being to place current robot and AI technologies within the context of the diverse media, trans-temporal and cross-cultural history that they belong; it's through such an approach that a deeper awareness of the historical and cultural implications of humanity's continued fascination with artificial life will emerge. The automaton, for example, is a mechanical predecessor of the robot and harks back to medieval times but reached its peak in popularity in the C18th and C19th in Europe and Japan. While the automaton was reliant on clockwork mechanics and lacked any form of sentience, it shared something crucial with the contemporary examples: a product of technological and scientific invention was presented as entertainment. Like Sony's QRIO, entertainment was the vehicle that delivered the automaton's performance as technological display of the possibilities of new science and technology. To date, no study has asked why? Why entertainment? I guess, I want to ask 'why'?

The amusement park and, especially the theme park, is the example of media convergence par excellence. In some respects, it serves a similar role to the earlier World Expositions and Fairs. It's in the theme parks that the latest in entertainment technology is trialed and first exposed to the public. The most cutting edge examples of film technology, for example, has first been experienced in the theme park - the Omnimax experience offered by the Back to the Future ride in the 1980s, or the 3D Imax extravaganzas of the Terminator 3D and Spiderman rides at Universal studios more recently. But these weren't only film experiences. The theme park, and its ride technologies, bargain on engaging the audience on intense and immediate multiple sensory levels and the way this is most effectively achieved is through media convergence. Let's take the Spiderman ride: it's a truly multimedia experience that immerses the participant in cartoons on television, sculptured and architectural environments that reproduce the spaces of the Daily Bugle and New York, filmed environments in 3D on IMAX screens, and amusement park roller coaster technology that flies us seamlessly through all these different media. Add to this the fact that Spiderman originated in comics, then became a series of animated cartoons and tv shows as well as a series of highly successful blockbuster films and a phenomenal theme park attraction and you have the ultimate in media convergence. The thing with the theme parks, though, is that the convergence is more literal and in your face.

Yes, I'm co-writing a book with Jim Collins from the University of Notre Dame, which is tentatively (and possibly permanently) titled Curatorial Culture. What we're interested in is the radical transformations that have occurred in collecting culture in light of the central role that entertainment media conglomerates and digital technologies are playing in global culture. New delivery systems are redefining what going to a movie or watching TV means at the beginning of the C21st, just as they have also transformed the "display" of images at art museums throughout the world, and the accessibility and portability of digital information has given rise to a curatorial culture in which seemingly anyone can assemble their own music, film, television and art libraries. I know someone (who shall remain nameless) who owns every Superman comic book ever published - and it's stored on his/her hard drive. I mean, that's phenomenal! Do you know how much physical space you'd need to house (let alone actually find copies of) every Superman comic every written? Our book asks how the omnipresence of the personalized digital archive has altered our understanding of what acquiring culture means, whether it be in the form of an iPod playlist, a media home library, or a public art museum.

We're looking at the relationship between private and public archives as a shifting continuum that depends increasingly on the convergence of media space and museum space, and we're investigating this continuum by concentrating on five distinct sites of convergence-personal media technology, the private home, the public art museum, the retail store, and the urban landscape. So in addition to looking at ipod culture and p2p downloading and collecting, we're also interested in the fluid exchange between high culture and pop culture aesthetics - what Jim calls High Pop. Retail centers like those owned by Nike, Apple, Sony and Prada hire 'star' architects like Koolhaas, Hadid, and Gehry who have designed destination museum sites to design their retail spaces as unique consumer experiences, while also displaying their consumer products as if they're original artworks on display in a gallery. Or, to give you a couple of examples from the city of Las Vegas.... The new CityCenter residential-retail-entertainment complex being built on the Strip (and owned by MGM Mirage) will include a $40 million public Fine Art program that will distribute contemporary masterpieces throughout CityCenter's public spaces - the gaming areas, hotel and residential towers, and the retail and entertainment districts will now all serve the role of public gallery. Las Vegas represents--in intensified form--the ways in which our urban environments and leisure experiences are transforming into a collecting and display culture that has collapsed traditional boundaries that demarcated spaces of art display and those of consumerism and mass pleasures. In very real ways, the city of Las Vegas does precisely this: it visualizes global, conglomerate culture at its most intense point and, in the process, transforms itself into a living museum. In the Bellagio Casino Hotel, for example, traditionally cultural opposites collide: a visitor can tempt fate by feeding slot machines, and then walk out of the gambling hall and into the Bellagio Fine Art Gallery that's situated down the corridor to view the works of Picasso, Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh (who were on display when I visited). Even more bizarrely, in the Bellagio's Picasso restaurant it's possible to taste and smell the delights conjured by the "legendary" Spanish chef Julian Serrano, while being surrounded by the paintings and drawings of that other legendary Spaniard, which decorate the walls of the restaurant. Picasso's name now serves a dual function: Picasso the artist who created masterpiece artworks, and Picasso the restaurant that now promises to feed its customers with masterpiece food creations. What Vegas is lacking is a Superheroes casino and entertainment complex. When that happens, I'll be packing my bags and moving to the city of lights.

Angela Ndalianis is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on entertainment media and their histories, and she's especially interested in the aesthetic and formal implications of media collisions between films, computer games, television, comic books and theme parks - an area she has published widely in. Some of her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), and the anthologies The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures, which looks at the historical and cultural influence of and on the theme park, and is co-authoring a book titled Curatorial Culture with Jim Collins.
She can be contacted on angelan@unimelb.edu.au

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

Defending the Bats: An Interview with Angela Ndalianis (Part One)

In the summer of 2005, I went to Melbourne to attend Men in Tights: A Superhero Conference, hosted by the School of Art History, Cinema, Classical Studies, and Archeology at the University of Melbourne. It was like a dream come true for this particular comics geek to be able to hang out in Australia with comics scholars from around the world. Well, now you get a chance to share some of the fun, because highlights from the conference are being published as The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, a new book edited by one of the conference hosts Angela Ndalianis. (My own essay on superheroes, multiplicity, and genre theory appears in this book. I ran an earlier draft of this essay on my blog a while back.)

Since I like to use this blog to keep people up to date on new work in comics studies, along with fan studies, games studies, new media literacies, and a number of other topics, I wanted to flag this book for your attention and in doing so, direct your attention to its editor Angela Ndalianis. Angela's work should be of interest to anyone who cares about comparative approaches to media: her first book, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, manages to cover Baroque art and architecture, special effects, science fiction, comics, and amusement parks -- what's not to like. She's been teaching a course for several years which take Australian students to places like Disneyland and Vegas to study location-based entertainment and now this fieldwork is resulting in a forthcoming book on the history and theory of public amusements. And recently I learned that she's collaborating with James Collins on a fascinating new project dealing with collector culture and digital media.

In this first part of a two part interview, I grill her about her work on superheroes. Next time, we catch up with some thoughts on amusement parks and collector culture.

Your introduction to The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero begins with some autobiographical reflections on your childhood experience of reading comics. As many have noted, the autobiographical turn has been central to alternative comics and to comics scholarship, though most often, the story told has a decisively male focus. What do you think your experiences as a female comics fan brings to this discussion?

I guess, primarily it undermines these gendered assumptions. It's hard to say - especially when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s - how much the association of comics and male readers was a socially generated pressure (of 'correct' tastes and interests becoming to little girls and little boys) , and how much was 'naturally' ingrained in our make-up as individuals. I actually lean towards thinking it's a socially induced taste-behaviour - sort of like the early game arcades, only this attitude has persisted. If anything, having more female readers engaged with their comic book experiences may open it up, both in terms of giving expression to the voice of female readers, and opening up the way to new female readers.

There may be shared gendered comic book experiences for male and female readers (like identifying with the empowered super-muscled male superheroes in the superhero comics; desiring the mega-bazooka female superheroes; rolling eyes in disbelief at those very same heroes but nevertheless becoming engrossed in their stories) but we need to also keep in mind that the reasons and ways we each consume our favourite comics carry with them their own personal reasons and associations. As I explain in the Introduction to the book, my father handed me my first comic as a 3-year old, and I was hooked from that point. All I remember about the comic was that it was a superhero comic - I don't remember which superhero. And there was something about the entire ritual of 'reading' comics (at this stage in my life it only involved reading the images): the touching and flipping of pages, the texture of the paper and the colours and images that the pages contained, and the sense of intimate possession associated with holding these comics in my hands. This sense of comfort I felt through sensory possession is still one of my oldest and happiest memories. Then there was the way wonderful worlds opened up to me in each panel on the page, and the immersion and intense relationship I developed with the superheroes and their stories. (It was nearly always superheroes, although, I did occasionally become sidetracked by the adventures of the Archies, Disney characters, and Hollywood stars like Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis). Comics and cartoon shows are the two popular culture objects that left an imprint on my early memories and I still associate both with a combination of fondness and a feeling of being at peace with the world. I've always been a television junky, but there was something about the ability to physically possess comics in a way I couldn't possess my favourite tv shows that made them weave into the autobiographical and the personal more intensely - for me, at least.

And, from the perspective of female readership, I can say with certainty that, as a girl, I rarely felt short-changed or undermined by the fact that I was drawn to so many male superheroes. I cannot tell a lie, Batman was (and is) an object of desire for me. Somewhere in the fantasyscape of my brain, I still dream that there may be a reality in which he exists, and when I cross into that parallel universe, our future together will be guaranteed. Aside from my feelings for the Dark Knight, however, for me, Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Batgirl existed on the same level as Batman, Superman and Spider Man. It was their power, sense of their humanity and values, and ability to resolve crises that I associated with. I don't want to turn all academic on you here, but, I think it's Yuri Lotman who talks about hero roles not being gendered but associated with narrative action: it's society that imposes the 'norms' that associate active characters with the male, and the more passive roles with the female. Maybe 'society' never got its 'how to' ideological claws in me as a little girl and, I must say, my parents never encouraged me to play passive or victim roles - far from it. I think children don't start to fall prey to performing gendered roles till they approach their teen years, until then, they're fluid. I look at my 3 nieces (who are 4, 6 and 10) and am overjoyed to see that they in no way feel hemmed in when it comes to their abilities. In their minds, they're invincible. The difference is that they have more female superhero and hero roles to choose from - especially in animated cartoons - than I did as a kid, and that's more liberating for them as girls.

What has your experiences running the original conference and editing this book told you about the current state of comics studies?

I couldn't believe the amount of interest both during and after the 'Men in Tights: a Superheroes Conference'. The conference was held in mid-2005, and to this day I receive emails about follow up events and conference publications, as well as queries about whether courses are offered in comics studies at my - or other - universities. I've also had an increase in the number of PhD students I have who are writing on comics and superheroes. In your essay in the anthology, you write about the tendency in public consciousness to collapse the superhero genre into the comic book medium and given that the superhero's been such a driving and sustaining force behind the medium, it's not surprising. There are a number of anthologies and books that have come out in recent years that have taken a more serious and academic approach to comics and, in particular, superheroes in comics. This anthology, and the one I co-edited (Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman) emerged from the conference in 2005. The current anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero focuses more specifically on comics and superheroes, whereas the earlier book centred more on predecessors and mythic prototypes. In addition to scholars I know who are currently writing books or essays for future publication on the topic, the healthy growth of comics studies is also evident in books like Comics as Literature (Rocco Versaci), A Comics Studies Reader (edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester), Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (Roz Kaveney), Film and Comic Books (edited by Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich and Matthew McAllister), and Superhero: the Secret Life of a Genre (Peter Coogan). To add to this, there was the Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy exhibition and mini-conference that was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in mid-2008. If anything, the exhibition revealed the extent to which the superhero - as representative of comic book culture - is woven deeply into the consciousness of so many people. Even if their first exposure to the superhero has been through film or television, most people know that it's the comics that gave birth to them. I should also add that the Institute for Comics Studies was unofficially launched by its Director Peter Coogan at the Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy mini-conference event which was held at the MET in June 2008. The official launch will take place at ComicCon in 2009 and what's exciting about this Institute is that it aims to address and support the thirst for knowledge that's out there by providing scholars, professionals and fans with a contact point that can direct them to comics resources, courses being taught, conferences, as well as encouraging and organizing events with the industry. I'm really excited to be on the Board of Directors, which, in addition to including other academics such as yourself, also includes comics creators, distributors and producers.

One of the funniest outcomes of the Men in Tights conference had to do with my Batman obsession. In Melbourne, we have a problem with fruit bats. At the time of the conference they had over populated our botanical gardens and before the more logical solution of capturing the bats and migrating them to outer suburbs was achieved, a bunch of trigger happy stooges were going into the gardens and killing off bats by the hundreds. The organizer of an group called "Save the Bats" had attended the conference and heard me talk about my love of the Batman - and soon after the conference, I was contacted by this guy who asked me to become a Bat-Spokeswoman and to get the word out to students to attend protests and be more active in saving the bats of the Botanical Gardens. So how could I say no? My students thought it was hysterical - I still remember making an announcement about a save the bat protest (complete with the backstory) at the beginning of a lecture in my Genre Studies course and they cracked up in fits of laughter. In their eyes, the sequence of events made sense. Of course I'd become the spokeswoman for bats - I had, after all, shared my Batman fascination with them for years!! And this story did find sweet closure. When the Melbourne City Council eventually did move the bats out of the city, many came to settle in my suburb. So now, if I go out into the garden at night, I can sit on a bench with my cats Bats and Elektra, and look up at the giant pear tree in my back yard and listen to the very audible crunching sounds that are made by the giant fruit bats that visit my garden. Happy times!

Your introduction links the contemporary superhero to much older mythic traditions. What do we learn by searching for more "universal" themes underlying contemporary comics? What are the limits of this mythological approach to contemporary culture?

I've always been fascinated by myths and myth studies and, in particular, by the fact that heroic patterns of behaviour, hero types, and hero stories are repeated again and again throughout time and across different countries. I've always been a fan of ancient Greek and Old Norse myths and their heroes, and despite the fact that surface details may change there was so much that was similar - especially in the stories radiating around Asgard and Mount Olympus, with their shared epic tales of superheroic battle related to creation and apocalypse and everything in between. I guess it's the idea that there may be a shared desire that crosses temporal and geographic boundaries and that's fundamental to human nature (and to our understanding of the world around us) that I find so impelling. What really does my head in is trying to come to terms with 'why'? Why these stories of grand heroic battles where humanity and the universe itself is under threat? Of fearsome heroes with superhuman strength who face dark, monstrous doubles that threaten the social balance? Why have basic narrative patterns of hero myths repeated themselves across time and across different cultures? What human needs, desires, or fears does this repetition fulfil?

Having said that, there are so many limitations to universal myth models. Once you locate the repeated themes and hero types, what then? What about all of the specifics? Sure Superman may have much in common with ancient characters like Hercules and Zeus; and Thor may be named after and serve similar actions to his Norse namesake, but there's so much more to Superman and Thor as contemporary superheroes that speak to our own times. Both emerged within the specific context of C20th culture and that specificity has to count for something. Superman and Wonder Woman's origins, for example, were nurtured by the realities of Nazism and Hitler's 'perfect man'. The creation of the Fantastic Four through exposure to cosmic rays while on a scientific mission in outer space can be place very firmly within the 1960s, the rise and faith in science and technology and the emerging Space Race. And as retcons and continuity rewrites have shown us, the identity of comic book superheroes don't necessarily remain fixed across the decades: they've been revised, deleted from history, and rewritten into a new history. Beyond such socio-cultural reflections, newer superheroes like Animal Man, Hitman, Planetary, the Invisibles, the Authority - especially in the hands of 'auteur' artists and writers - tell us as much about the processes at work behind creating, reading, interpreting and refashioning comic book heroes across many decades of their production and consumption. If the fluidity of the superhero mythology shows us anything it's that a universal model of interpretation fails to come even close to understanding the nature and rationale of such dynamic processes of production.

Why do you think the superhero has been such a persistent figure across the history of 20th century popular culture?

Let's face it! On a basic level, they're exploits, dramas, relationships, stories and fashion sense are just great fun and the comic books invite repeat performances on the part of the reader. On a more serious level, like the cowboys of the western superheroes have embodied ethical codes and moral structures that society needs to embrace in order to survive. Despite their excess and hyper-humanity, they've always represented the voice or, more precisely, the various voices of the people, reflecting the social dilemmas and belief systems of their time. Even when the superheroes became darker in the late 80s, propelled by writers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, they still reflected abstract moral crises of their era. Significantly, individual superheroes have consistently reflected the changing times that they belong to, learning to adapt to each decade that passes and the cultural changes that come with the passing of time. The Spider-Man of the 1960s, for example, is not the same Spider-Man of the 2000s - they're identities that are the product of different societies at different times that have reached different audiences. The superheroes who have survived across each shifting decade have been able to adapt their form, and connected to this is the superhero's capacity to translate and cross over into other media. This has been a huge plus in extending and familiarising audiences with the superhero stories. The Flash, Superman, Wonder Woman, Catwoman, the Hulk, Elektra - while originating in the comic book format, have also migrated media to appear in radio, television, B-film serials, blockbuster films, novels and computer games.

Angela Ndalianis is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on entertainment media and their histories, and she's especially interested in the aesthetic and formal implications of media collisions between films, computer games, television, comic books and theme parks - an area she has published widely in. Some of her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), and the anthologies The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures, which looks at the historical and cultural influence of and on the theme park, and is co-authoring a book titled Curatorial Culture with Jim Collins. She can be contacted on angelan@unimelb.edu.au

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:49 AM | Permalink

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)

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part Three)

In his recent book, The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein writes, "In an average young person's online experience, the senses may be stimulated and the ego touched, but vocabulary doesn't expand, memory doesn't improve, analytic talents don't develop, and erudition doesn't ensue." What kinds of evidence did you find which might support or challenge this assertion?

Becky Herr: I don't think that Bauerlein's claim (as quoted here) is completely off the mark. For many young people, including some of those who we interviewed and observed in the Digital Youth Project, the Internet is a "vast wasteland" of flash games shrouded by banner ads, websites full of inaccurate information, and corporations looking to make money off young eyeballs. However, unlike Bauerlein, I don't think this is the fault of the kids. I think it's our fault as adults--particularly adults who are parents, educators, and media makers--for not making an effort to understand the Internet from a kid's point of view and for preventing kids from having the time and space to mess around in ways that encourage them to learn to evaluate what they come across online.

I think what's important to unpack with respect to Bauerlein's claim is that his criticism is rooted in specific, class-based assumptions about media and about childhood. These are not new assumptions, nor are they new criticisms. Similar issues of media damaging young people's hearts and minds have been levied in relation to earlier forms of media. In talking with parents and teachers about our research, I hear echoes of Bauerlein's concerns in their complaints about students writing essays in "IM speak" or eschewing activities parents prefer (for reasons of nostalgia or cultural capital) in favor of playing video games or surfing YouTube.

Mimi Ito: It is tempting to blame the media or a new technology for social or cultural problems. But research has shown that things are much more complex than that, and using media as a scapegoat obscures some of the important underlying issues. A new technology grows out of our existing norms and practices. The fact that many youth are not part of the kind of culture that Bauerlein describes is not a problem caused just by the technology, but is much more deeply embedded in, as Becky notes, existing social and cultural distinctions. If kids are doing things online that seem unproductive or problematic, we don't feel that the answer is to ban the media. Instead we think that it is important to look at and try to shape the underlying social issues. That may be the commercialization of online spaces, lack of connection between kids and teachers, or the fact that academic knowledge seems irrelevant to many kids. It is rarely something that is being driven by the technology alone.

Lisa Tripp: While increasingly young people of all social classes in the U.S. have opportunities to go online and use new media, the nature and quality of access still varies greatly. A lot of poor and working class youth still rely on schools, for example, as their primary source for access to the Internet and digital media production tools. Whereas interest-driven and friendship-driven genres of participation are fundamentally "kid-driven" in terms of growing out of youth interests and motivations, schools typically incorporate media into instruction in ways that are "teacher-driven" and heavily constrained by institutional and adult concerns. This can be seen in many "technology-integrated" assignments that address the standard curriculum without engaging students' interest or curiosity. It can also be seen in school policies and rules that aim to keep out participatory media, such as by blocking social network and video sharing sites, instant messaging, etc. While young people find creative ways to use media at school towards their own interests and goals, those who rely on schools for access to new media are at a disadvantage from other kids. For them it can be a challenge to find the time, space, and resources to experiment with media in more open-ended ways, and to engage in the media practices that youth tend to find the most meaningful.

In the cases where we interviewed parents, we also saw class disparities in how parents approached computers and the Internet. For the middle class families in our study (who were also very tech savvy), parents provided significant scaffolding and encouragement of their children's friendship and interest-driven practices with new media. In contrast, for many of the poor families in our study, the parents had little or no experience with computers (and often learned what they did know from the kids in the family). While in both cases there were opportunities for intergenerational collaboration around the computer, in the case of the middle class families young people had access to a great deal more support to pursue their own interests online. In the case of the poor families we interviewed, parents wanted their children to focus on using the computer for homework. Many had heard scare stories on the news about MySpace and were hesitant to let their children go online unsupervised. Some parents even took the modem or cable with them when they left their children home alone. This represented a well-intentioned effort to protect children from perceived online risks, but it also made it harder for the young people in these families to mobilize online opportunities. I think these examples speak to the ways that young peoples' access to new media is determined not just by economic factors, but also social and cultural factors.

danah boyd: In my fieldwork, during the 2006-2007 school year, I started witnessing a divide in social network site usage between MySpace and Facebook. While this divide was extremely complex, it can be understood through the lens of Penny Eckert's "jocks and burnouts." These two social network sites became digital turf and usage reflected social categories. While many teens opted to use both sites, the division that did occur took place along lines of race and class. This may not look like a traditional participation gap as both groups were participating, but divisions in usage that reinforce dynamics like race and class require us to pause. Consider for a moment that Facebook is the "preferred" tool on most college campuses. What does it mean that some teens are already engaged with the normative collegiate tools while others are not? How does high school nonparticipation shape early collegiate life?

CJ Pascoe: What I tended to see as I studied kids in urban and suburban public schools was that teens constantly tried to work around the constraints the school administration placed on their internet use. Schools blocked the students' access to Facebook, MySpace, certain search terms and instant messaging programs. In response teens developed a sort of knowledge network in which everyone knew which kid could find the proxy servers that would allow them access to these sites (though of course none of them knew the name for proxy servers). Interestingly many of the teachers at these schools found these rules too stringent. One teacher listed off several students who were the proxy server "experts" when one of her students needed to access a forbidden site. Similarly when one of his students was writing a paper on breast cancer a teacher let the student conduct research on the teacher's computer because the word "breast" was blocked from the network to which the students had access. In light of these restrictions it seems that adults are not an undifferentiated mass, that some find certain restrictions of teens Internet use problematic. It seems that what the more restrictive adults are afraid of is teens access to information and ability to process that sort of information as well as the fear that teens might not concentrate on the task at hand - school - if they could be hanging out on MySpace. To those adults I would say that banning information or certain sites does not prevent teen access. Instead it creates a community of mistrust. Thus adults should be working with teens on issues of media literacy, how to process the sort of information that appears on the banned sites, rather than forbidding teens to visit them.

Heather Horst: We saw parents across the socioeconomic spectrum express considerable concern about the threats and vulnerabilities their kids faced in the contemporary media ecology. Parents worried about the type of information that circulated and, given the timing of our research, the ability of sites like MySpace to be used as a way to access and exploit their kids. They also worried about multitasking and 'wasting time' online. In addition, because there's fear of kids hanging out outside of the home, and their lives can often be overscheduled, young people genuinely felt that they had very little face-to-face contact with their friends. The use of Instant Messaging and online sites like MySpace, Facebook and so many others are now a part of kids everyday lives, part of peer culture. In addition, the kids who were doing the most interesting things talked about having (or finding) the time to 'mess around' and explore in a way that did not have 'serious' implications (e.g. being graded. To deny participation in this space is to fail to acknowledge the importance of sociality in kids' lives.

danah boyd: I commend parents and teachers for being engaged and concerned, but I worry that their concerns are often based on inaccurate understandings of danger. As is well documented by researchers at the Crimes Against Children Research Center, the mythical image of the online predator is a completely inaccurate portrayal of the actual dangers youth face online. Yet, I found that fear of predators prompted many of the restrictions youth face. When restrictions are driven by fear rather than risk, we do a disservice to our youth. I think that it is very important for parents and other adults to know the data. The findings that we share in our report focus primarily on the positive opportunities for learning and social engagement, but in a different role, I have aggregated all that is known about the risks and dangers youth face. For more information on this, check out this Literature Review, a product of the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force.

Heather Horst: In addition to knowing the data, as danah suggests, we also want to emphasize that the 'dangers' of online participation must also be understood within the wider context of kids' lives. For example (and too channel CJ Pascoe), part of the reason going online is so compelling for GLBT teens is that they lack the opportunities for dating that are available to heterosexual teens in their local communities as well as the social support of other GLBT teens navigating complex relationships. At the same time, the lack of local support from peers, parents and teachers also makes many GLBT teens vulnerable to individuals who might take advantage of them online. Developing an understanding of these problems from a youth perspective may help to bridge the gap in understandings risk and vulnerabilities - blaming the medium merely distracts us from the root of these complex social problems.

A key argument throughout your book is that young people are often using new media to do things that teens historically did off-line such as spend time with friends or dating. Why have so many of these activities moved into the realm of "networked publics?" What kinds of new activities or social relations have emerged as a consequence of the affordances of new media platforms?

Christo Sims: I always feel funny writing as an authority on teenage flirting and dating as it certainly wasn't what I went into the field intending to find. But, of course, this was a big oversight on my part since flirting and dating is so central to teenage culture in the U.S. I think these practices are a good example of how existing offline practices are moving online. The practices are the same, but being reshaped in some new ways. In terms of flirting and getting to know someone, the primary advantage of doing so online is that the entire process can be simultaneously more controlled and seemingly more casual. The asynchronous exchanges afford more time for composition. Plus there are far less cues to manage when compared to being on the phone or interacting face-to-face: tone-of-voice, posture, and a host of other non-verbal cues don't have to be managed. Additionally, each round of messaging is, at least initially, quite brief and seemingly low key: a short little message is "no big deal." I've called this "composed casualness" because often quite a bit of effort and time goes into composing that seemingly casual and lightweight message.

Another advantage of flirting online is that it doesn't have to be done in front of a bunch of peers at school. Boys in particular mentioned how rare it was to be able to talk to a girl at school one-on-one. Girls are in groups and almost any interaction you have is witnessed. While the Internet can amplify this sense of acting in public it also affords more private communications. Messaging features on sites like Facebook and MySpace, and well as SMS on cell phones, allow teens to carry on one-on-one conversations outside earshot of friends and family. Online communications also make rejection easier, or less confrontational, during the flirting stage. Rejection is often signaled by not responding to a message. Such a passive strategy is easier for the one doing the rejection but it also allows the person being rejected to save face since they never "officially" got rejected, the conversation just stopped. In terms of dating, sites like MySpace and Facebook offer a stage for announcing and performing the relationship. My take on this is that most of the negotiations over relationship status are handled more privately, between couples (although these too might be mediated), and when they've agreed on an "official" status they announce it to the peer group.

CJ Pascoe: As the other team member focused on teens' dating, romance and hanging out practices I'd like to build on what Christo is saying. Historically adults, particularly parents, have had a lot of control over teens' social lives and the scope of the social world from which they could draw friends. New media allows teens to move beyond the institutions in which they have been historically located (schools, churches, sometimes civic groups) to create relationships and friendships of their own choosing. So in many ways making friends or sustaining friendshps in these networked publics allows teens to create friendships independent (or at least less constrained by) the institutions in which they are located because of their age.

danah boyd: Networked publics offer new opportunities for social interaction, but they are also used to replace mobility and freedoms that have been taken away. When I asked teens if they'd prefer to socialize online or offline, face-to-face encounters consistently were preferred. Yet, for many youth, such interactions were often infeasible. The reasons for why are diverse. Some teens lack transportation to meet up with friends or do not have friends who live nearby. Others have no time because their lives are heavily structured with activities or, when they do have time, their friends don't. Many places in which adults gather do not allow youth to hang out and various laws forbid youth from gathering at certain times and in certain places. Some teens face heavy restrictions because of parental values or cultural norms. Yet, the most pervasive explanation for why youth were unable to get together with friends often came down to adult fears. All told, youth have little opportunity to gather with their friends, let alone their peers. Social network sites and other networked publics enable youth to gather in new ways, asynchronously and in different physical spaces.

Dan Perkel: In some of our case studies on creative production, we're also seeing interesting dynamics in how kids are extending existing practices in new ways online. Networked publics provide space for people to more easily share and circulate their creations to others. We've seen how for both kids and adults, many people are taking existing practices of sharing photos and video and moving them online. A lot of this reflects very familiar kinds of sharing with friends and family. Posting drawings and stories online may be a different story. Here there is the opportunity to find other people who you may not know offline, who are into the same thing you are. This is the difference between friendship-driven and interest-driven kinds of sharing. So if you are creating fan fiction or drawing fan art or making fan-related movies, you may have a few others in your school, or friends you might meet at a local comic book store that share your interests. But online there are many more opportunities to share and discuss this kind of work. Moreover, there may be more opportunity to not just post this work and talk about it, but to improve and learn from others over time. These dynamics point to how the online space can provide new kinds of learning experiences that wouldn't have otherwise been available to kids.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is an Associate Specialist at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. Becky's research interests include media literacy, teaching and learning with popular culture, and youth media production. Her dissertation, "Kids as Cultural Producers: Consumption, Literacy, and Participation," investigates issues of access and media literacy through an ethnographic study of media production projects in two mixed-grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) special education classes. Previously, she was a member of the research team for the Digital Youth Project and a graduate fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Before beginning her graduate studies, Becky worked as a production manager for companies producing original content for the web and multimedia museum exhibits. Her current work with the DMLstudio involves a literature review of institutional efforts related to youth digital media production. Becky recently completed her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

C.J. Pascoe is a sociologist who is interested in sexuality, gender, youth, and new media. Her book on gender in high school, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, recently received the 2008 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. As a researcher with the Digital Youth Project she researched the role of new media in teens' dating and romance practices. Her project "Living Digital" examines how teenagers navigate digital technology and how new media have become a central part of contemporary teen culture with a particular focus on teens' courtship, romance, and intimacy practices. Along with Dr. Natalie Boero she conducted a study titled "No Wannarexics Allowed," looking at the formation of online pro-anorexia communities and focusing on gender, sexuality, and embodiment online. C.J. is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Colorado College.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

Lisa Tripp is Assistant Professor of School Media and Youth Services, College of Information, Florida State University. Lisa received her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2002 and collaborated with the Digital Youth Project to study youth in Los Angeles-area middle schools and neighborhoods. Her research with the project emphasized classrooms incorporating media arts into instruction and the role of the Internet in the lives of Latino immigrant families. Before coming to FSU, Lisa was Associate Director of the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She has a background in developing media education initiatives and she continues to research new media literacy and digital inclusion.

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"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part Two)

Many writers talk about "digital natives" or describe these young people as "born digital." What do you see as the strength and limitations of these terms given what you found in your research?

Becky Herr: One potential strength of the term "digital generation" for describing young people and their relationship to technology is its acknowledgement that youth are using media and technology in interesting and important ways. Talking about kids as "digital natives" can be seen as a counterargument to pervasive discourses about kids as deviant users of technology--hackers, cheaters, wasters-of-time--or kids as victims of technology--the "prey" of online predators, for example. This is not to say that the term is used exclusively to describe positive interactions with technology; it also emphasizes the gap between the ways "digital natives" use technology and the ways non-natives (like adults) use technology.

What is worrying about the discourse of digital natives is that talking about young people as a "digital generation" risks romanticizing certain types of youth participation and ignoring important differences in access to media and technology, including barriers to access that are not tied to a lack of hardware--barriers like not reading and writing in English, being a girl and having to compete with boys in a classroom with limited resources, or parental rules borne out of moral panic. Further, the idea of a digital generation marked by shared characteristics (other than the dates of their birth) that outweigh other aspects of identity/subjectivity--race, class, gender, ability, (etc.) is problematic. What we have found in the Digital Youth project is that there is a huge amount of variation in the ways kids are using media and technology in their everyday lives. Yes, the ways in which these practices are enacted vary, often by peer group or by individual kid. We've also found that things like class, race, and gender continue to have significant influence in kids' lives.

In my own research, for example, I worked with kids at the middle school level who were using media production software (iMovie and PowerPoint) for the first time. At home, most of the students I observed and interviewed did not have a computer, Internet access, or any video equipment. However, they had other media and technology that was incredibly important to them and that they used in creative and sophisticated ways to find information, to express themselves, to communicate with friends, and to mess around in order to figure out things like game cheat codes or how to substitute a borrowed digital camera for an mp3 player. Some had vast music or DVD collections, others spent hours each day playing games on a video game console. Were they "digital natives"?

Christo Sims: There are also plenty of folks who weren't "born digital" who have developed incredible fluency in various forms of online participation. We also met numerous youth who weren't technically adept or comfortable participating online. By emphasizing a generational break we risk mystifying the factors that structure online participation, and equating competency automatically with age.

danah boyd: Many of those who use these terms often do so with the best of intentions, valorizing youth engagement with digital media to highlight the ways in which youth are not dumb, dependent, or incapable. Yet, by reinforcing distinctions between generations, we reinforce the endemic age segregation that is plaguing our society. Many social and civic ills stem from the ways that we separate people based on age. If we want to curtail bullying and increase political participation, we need to stop segmenting and segregating.

Mimi Ito: In a lot of our case studies, we saw examples of kids picking up media and technical literacy through social and recreational activity online. When they were given time and space to experiment, they often were able to pick up knowledge and skills through messing around, whether that was learning how to make a MySpace profile, experimenting with video, or figuring out how to use cheat codes in a game. Some kids used this kind of messing around as a jumping off point towards much more sophisticated forms of creative production or engagement with specialized knowledge communities.

Christo Sims: One story that comes to mind is a youth named Zelan who we feature in one of the sidebars in the Work chapter. Zelan comes from a very rural area where most of his peers will end up in working class jobs, doing construction, building roads, working as mechanics. Zelan, who identifies himself as a computer geek, leveraged his technical know-how for economic gain starting in junior high school: fixing electronics, buying and selling gaming and computer gear, and servicing the computers of neighbors and teachers. His passion, though, has been video games. He started as a player but soon became an enthusiast, subscribing to game magazines, following the latest releases, looking for tips online. In addition to becoming a fan he started messing around with broken consoles, taking them apart to see how they worked, trying to fix them so he could play a better console or sell it for a profit. He did all this without seeing it as leading towards a career or success in school. It was only once he started seeing that he his gaming interest was actually valuable to others at school and in the community that he began to imagine how these interests could lead to a life after high school. When I first met him he was a Junior and was thinking of starting a computer service business when he graduated. When I saw him again last summer he was headed to a technical college on scholarship.

Dan Perkel: Another person featured in one of the sidebars is Jacob. Jacob was an African American senior who had moved from the East Bay to Georgia and back again. Jacob, like others we talked to in our studies, joined MySpace when someone else made an account for him. For a while, Jacob didn't understand how to customize his page--again like other new members to the site--and had other people do it for him. On the friendship-driven side he used MySpace as a way to communicate with people he met and friends he left behind after various moves. However, at some point he made the connection between changing MySpace profiles and the web design classes that he had gotten into at school. He then took the time to better understand how to customize his own profile and consider making and distributing MySpace layouts, something he had seen others do on the site. When I last talked to him, he was considering a career in web design and said he had been offered a job already.

danah boyd: It is important to note that "productive" engagement doesn't necessarily mean only traditional learning or media and technical literacy. As a society, we've never spent much time considering how youth learn to be competent social beings, how they learn to make sense of cultural norms and develop social contracts, or how they learn to read others' reactions and act accordingly. We expect youth to be polite and tolerant, respect others' feelings, and behave appropriately in different situations. This is all learned. And it is not simply learned by telling kids to behave. They need to experiment socially, interact with peers, make mistakes and adjust. Stripping social interactions from youth's lives does not benefit them in any manner. I would argue that even the oft-demeaned social practices that take place online are extremely productive.

Mimi Ito: We use the concept of genre as a way of describing certain social and cultural patterns that are available and recognizable. Friendship-driven and interest-driven practices are based on genres that youth recognize, have particular practices associated with them, as well as certain kinds of identities. For example, interest-driven genres of participation tend to have a more geeky identity associated with them, involve congregating on specialized and often esoteric interests, and reaching beyond given, local school networks of friends. This is a whole package of things that goes together, a recognizable genre for how youth participate in online culture and social life. We also think of hanging out, messing around, and geeking out as genres of participation.

When and how might the borders between friendship-driven and interest-driven forms of engagement start to blur?

Mimi Ito: As with all genres, there are a lot of things that don't totally fit, and a lot of blurring between genres. When kids engage in friendship-driven practices, they often get involved in messing around with technology, and that can become a jumping off point for more interest driven activities. For example, some kids will begin messing around with video or photos that they take with their friends, and then they get more interested in the creative side of things. Conversely, we find that kids who connect to others around interests will often see these groups become really important friendship networks, and an alternative source of status and identity that is different from the mainstream of what happens in the school lunchroom.

Mimi Ito: Now that digital media and online networking has become so embedded in kids' everyday social and recreational lives, there is a certain baseline of technical engagement that is taken for granted. Only certain kids, though, decide to go from there to what we consider more geeked out kinds of practices. Predictably, it tends to be boys who geek out more than girls. Even though girls are often engaging in highly sophisticated forms of technology use and media creation, often they don't identify with it in a geeky way. What does seem to be changing though, is the overall accessibility that kids have to more geeked out practices because of the growing accessibility of digital media production tools as well as the ability to reach out to interest groups on the Internet. Although our study didn't really measure this, this may be particularly significant for less advantaged youth who would not otherwise have had access to specialized creative communities or media creation opportunities.

Patricia Lange: Being able to connect with dispersed networked publics enables kids to explore skills and receive mentoring that may be difficult to gain from co-located peers or teachers who do not have the same interests or experiences. For example, in my study of the video-making culture of YouTube, accessing mentors or assistance in a "just-in-time" fashion is inspiring and encouraging, especially given kids' decreasing ability to connect with other adults and potential mentors in neighborhoods and local communities. One of the things we heard very often was that friends, family, and kids at school often did not understand why young YouTubers wanted to "geek out" making videos. YouTube participants' school peers did not always have the same familiarity and expertise with how media is put together in ways that kids on YouTube did. Many of the kids we interviewed have already had extensive experiences making media. They often have very sophisticated visual literacies and complex ideologies about what makes a good or bad video, what constitutes appropriate participation in technical groups, and how they think about online safety. Failing to engage with these sites in school means there is no hands-on dialogue between teachers and students that might help shed light on why some kids thrive by geeking out and why others have difficulty.

CJ Pascoe: In general we tried to take a Sociology of Youth approach to our findings in this book. In line with this approach we try to let the categories of analysis as well as the descriptive terms arise from the youth themselves, rather than imposing our adult categories on our findings. What this means is that we tried, for the most part to describe a social world from the point of view of its participants, rather than as (more powerful) outsiders. I think foregrounding our participants' terms, categories and experiences allowed us to challenge some of the common assumptions adults have about youth participation of new media.

Heather Horst: As is common in most ethnographic research, we integrate terms like 'hanging out', 'messing around' and 'geeking out' into our analysis in order to highlight the categories and perspectives that are meaningful to young people themselves. Throughout this project, we felt quite strongly that part of our role and responsibility as researchers as working to navigate the gaps between youth and adult-centered perspectives. While we recognize that this may involve some degree of translation work when talking to different audiences (e.g. educators, policy makers, etc.), if we really want to s