Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities in the Digital Age: An Interview with Sonia Livingstone (Part Two)
A real strength of your new book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, is that it combines ethnographic and statistical, qualitative and quantitative approaches. What does each add to our understanding of the issues? Why are they so seldom brought together in the same analysis?
I'm glad you think this is a strength, as it's demanding to do, which may be why many don't do it. The simple answer is that I am committed to the view that qualitative work helps us understand a phenomenon from the perspective of those engaged in it, while quantitative work helps us understand how common, rare or distributed a phenomenon is.
Personally, I was fortunate to have been trained in both approaches, starting out with a rigorous quantitative training before launching into a mixed methods PhD as a contribution to a highly qualitative field of audience research and cultural studies. While I don't argue that all researchers must do everything, I do hope that the insights of both qualitative and quantitative research can be recognised by all; as a field, it seems to me vital to bring these approaches together, even if across rather than within projects.
You begin the book by noting the very different models of childhood which have emerged from psychological and sociological research. How can we reconcile these two paradigms to develop a better perspective on the relationship of youth to their surrounding society?
I hope that the book takes us further in integrating psychological and sociological approaches, for I try to show how they can be complementary. Particularly, I rebut the somewhat stereotyped view that psychologists only consider individuals, and only consider children in terms of 'ages and stages', by pointing to a growing trend to follow Vygotsky's social and materialist psychology rather than the Piagetian approach, for this has much in common with today's thinking about the social nature of technology.
However, this is something I'll continue to think about. It seems important to me, for instance, that few who study children and the internet really understand processes of age and development, tending still to treat all 'children' as equivalent, more comfortable in distinguishing ways that society approaches children of different ages than in distinguishing different approaches, understandings or abilities among children themselves.
One tension which seems to be emerging in the field of youth and digital learning is between a focus on spectacular case studies which show the potentials of online learning and more mundane examples which show typical patterns of use. Where do you fall?
Like many, I have been inspired and excited by the spectacular case studies. Yet when I interview children, or in my survey, I was far more struck by how many use the internet in a far more mundane manner, underusing its potential hugely, and often unexcited by what it could do. It was this that led me to urge that we see children's literacy in the context of technological affordances and legibilities. But it also shows to me the value of combining and contrasting insights from qualitative and quantitative work. The spectacular cases, of course, point out what could be the future for many children. The mundane realities, however, force the question - whose fault is it that many children don't use the internet in ways that we, or they, consider very exciting or demanding? It also forces the question, what can be done, something I attend to throughout the book, as I'm keen that we don't fall back into a disappointment that blames children themselves.
As you note, there are "competing models" for thinking about what privacy means
in this new information environment. How are young people sorting through these
different models and making choices about their own disclosures of information?
There's been a fair amount of adult dismay at how young people disclose personal, even intimate information online. In the book, I suggest there are several reasons for this. First, adolescence is a time of experimentation with identity and relationships, and not only is the internet admirably well suited to this but the offline environment is increasingly restrictive, with supervising teachers and worried parents constantly looking over their shoulders.
Second, some of this disclosure is inadvertent - despite their pleasure in social networking, for instance, I found teenagers to struggle with the intricacies of privacy settings, partly because they are fearful of getting it wrong and partly because they are clumsily designed and ill-explained, with categories (e.g. top friends, everyone) that don't match the subtlety of youthful friendship categories.
Third, adults are dismayed because they don't share the same sensibilities as young people. I haven't interviewed anyone who doesn't care who knows what about them, but I've interviewed many who think no-one will be interested and so they worry less about what they post, or who take care over what parents or friends can see but are not interested in the responses of perfect strangers.
In other words, young people are operating with some slightly different conceptions of privacy, but certainly they want control over who knows what about them; it's just that they don't wish to hide everything, they can't always figure out how to reveal what to whom, and anyway they wish to experiment and take a few risks.
You reviewed the literature on youth and civic engagement. What did you find? What do you see as the major factors blocking young people from getting more involved in the adult world of politics?
I suggest here that some initiatives are motivated by the challenge of stimulating the alienated, while others assume young people to be already articulate and motivated but lacking structured opportunities to participate. Some aim to enable youth to realise their present rights while others focus instead on preparing them for their future responsibilities.
These diverse motives may result in some confusion in mode of address, target group and, especially, form of participation being encouraged. Children I interview often misinterpret the invitation to engage being held out to them (online and offline) - they can be suspicious of who is inviting them to engage, quickly disappointed that if they do engage, there's often little response or recognition, and they can be concerned that to engage politically may change their image among their peers, for politics is often seen as 'boring' not 'cool'.
In my survey, I found lots of instances where children and young people take the first step - visiting a civic website, signing a petition, showing an interest - but often these lead nowhere, and that seems to be because of the response from adult society. Hence, contrary to the popular discourses that blame young people for their apathy, lack of motivation or interest, I suggest that young people learn early that they are not listened to. Hoping that the internet can enable young people to 'have their say' thus misses the point, for they are not themselves listened to. This is a failure both of effective communication between young people and those who aim to engage them, and a failure of civic or political structures - of the social structures that sustain relations between established power and the polity.
Sonia Livingstone is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is author or editor of fourteen books and many academic articles and chapters on media audiences, children and the internet, domestic contexts of media use and media literacy. Recent books include Audiences and Publics (2005), The Handbook of New Media (edited, with Leah Lievrouw, Sage, 2006), Media Consumption and Public Engagement (with Nick Couldry and Tim Markham, Palgrave, 2007) and The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (edited, with Kirsten Drotner, Sage, 2008). She was President of the International Communication Association 2007-8.
If you've enjoyed this interview, you can hear Sonia Livingstone live and in person this summer at the 2009 Conference of the National Association for Media Literacy Education
(NAMLE)to be held August 1-4 in Detroit, MI. Her keynote address for this biennial conference -- the nation's largest, oldest and most prestigious gathering of media literacy educators -- is scheduled for Monday, August 3 at 4:00 pm in the Book Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit.
The conference - four days of non-stop professional development on topics such as teaching critical thinking, gaming, media production, literacy, social networking and more! -- will feature more than sixty events, including keynotes, workshops, screenings, special interest caucuses and roundtable discussions. Among the special events are the launch of the new online Journal of Media Literacy Education, the Modern Media Makers (M3) production camp for high school students, and a celebration of the 50th
anniversary of Detroit's famous "Motown Sound."
The conference theme, "Bridging Literacies: Critical Connections in a Digital World" speaks to the educational challenges facing teachers, schools and administrators in helping young people prepare for living all their lives in a 21st century culture. Complete details and online registration are available here.
May 4, 2009
"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part Two)
A close look at the recent presidential election shows that young people are more politically engaged now than at any point since the end of the Vietnam War era. 54.5 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted last November, constituting a larger proportion of the total electorate -- 18 percent -- then Putnam's bowlers, people 65-years-and-older (16 percent). The youth vote was a decisive factor in Obama's victories in several states, including Indiana, North Carolina, and possibly Florida. John Della Volpe, director of polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics, told U.S. News and World Reports that the desire to make the world a better place was "baked into the millennials' DNA" but "they just didn't believe they could do that by voting." Political scientist Lance Bennett has argued that unlike Putnam's bowlers, this generation's civic identities are not necessarily defined through notions of "duty" or through once-every-four-years rituals like voting; rather, he argues, they are drawn towards "consumerism, community volunteering, or transnational activism" as mechanisms through which to impact the larger society.
The Obama campaign was able to create an ongoing relationship with these new voters, connecting across every available media platform. Log onto YouTube and Obama was there in political advertisements, news clips, comedy sketches, and music videos, some created by the campaign, some generated by his supporters. Pick up your mobile phone and Obama was there with text messages updating young voters daily. Go to Facebook and Obama was there, creating multiple ways for voters to affiliate with the campaign and each other. Pick up a video game controller and Obama was there, taking out advertisement space inside several popular games. Turn on your Tivo to watch a late night comedy news show and Obama and his people are there, recognizing that The Daily Show or Colbert are the places where young people go to learn more about current events. This new approach to politics came naturally to a candidate who has fought to be able to use his Blackberry and text-messaging as he enters the White House, who regularly listens to his iPod, who knows how to give a Vulcan salute, brags about reading Harry Potter books to his daughters, and who casually talks about catching up on news online. The Obama campaign asked young people to participate, gave them chances to express themselves, enabled them to connect with each other, and allowed them to feel some sense of emotional ownership over the political process.
What has all of this to do with schools? Alas, frequently, very little.
Let's imagine a learning ecology in which the youth acquires new information through all available channels and through every social encounter. The child learns through schools and after school programs; the child learns on their own through the home and family and through their social interactions with their peers. They learn through face to face encounters and through online communities. They learn through work and they learn through play. The skills they acquire through one space helps them master core content in another. Through the New Media Literacy project, we have been developing resources which can be deployed in the classroom, in afterschool programs, and in the home for self-learning, seeking a more integrated perspective on what it means to learn in a networked society. Yet, right now, most of our schools are closing their gates to those cultural practices and forms of informal learning that young people value outside the classroom and in the process, they may be abdicating their historic roles in fostering civic engagement.
In a 2003 report, CIRCLE and the Carnegie Corporation of New York sought to document and analyze "the civic mission of schools." Historically, schools had been a key institution in fostering a sense of civic engagement. While their parents were bowling, their children were getting involved in student governments, editing the student newspaper, and discussing public affairs in their civics classes. The Civic Mission of Schools reports: "Long term studies of Americans show that those who participate in extracurricular activities in high school remain more civically engaged than their contemporaries even decades later.... A long tradition of research suggests that giving students more opportunities to participate in the management of their own classrooms and schools builds their civic skills and attitudes.....Recent evidence indicates that simulations of voting, trials, legislative deliberation, and diplomacy in schools can lead to heightened political knowledge and interest." Yet, the committee that authored the report ended up sharply divided about how realistic it was to imagine schools, as they are currently constituted, giving young people greater opportunities to participate in school governance or freedom to share their values and beliefs with each other. Student journalism programs are being defunded and in many cases, the content of the student newspaper is more tightly regulated than ever before. Schools no longer offer opportunities for students to actively debate public affairs out of fear of a push-back from politically sensitive parents.
In reality, young people have much greater opportunities to learn these civic skills outside school, as they "hang out," "mess around," and "geek out" online. This may be why so many of them use social network sites as resources to expand their contact with their friends at school or why they feel such a greater sense of investment in their game guilds than in their student governments, or why they see YouTube as a better place to express themselves than the school literature magazine. Meanwhile, our schools are making it harder for teachers and students to integrate these materials into the classroom. Federal law has imposed mandatory filters on networked computers in schools and public libraries. There have been a series of attempts to pass legislation banning access to social network sites and blogging tools. Many teachers have told Project New Media Literacies that they can't access YouTube or other web 2.0 sites on their school computers. And the Student Press Law Center reports that a growing number of schools have taken disciplinary action against students because of things they've written on blogs published outside school hours, off school grounds, and through their own computers.
In other words, rather than promoting the skills and ethical responsibilities that will enable more meaningful participation in future civic life, many schools have sought to close down opportunities to engage with these new technologies and cultural practices. Of course, many young people, as the Digital Youth Project discovered, work around these restrictions (and in the process, find one more reason to disobey the adults in their lives). Yet, many other young people have no opportunities to engage with these virtual worlds, to enter these social networks, on their own. These school policies have amplified the already serious participation gap that separates information-haves and have-nots. Those students who have the richest online lives are being stripped of their best modes of learning as they pass into the schoolhouse and those who have limited experiences outside of classroom hours are being left further behind. And all of them are being told two things: that what they do in their online lives has nothing to do with the things they are learning in school; and that what they are learning in school has little or nothing of value to contribute to who they are once the bell rings.
One of the goals of Project New Media Literacies has been to bring this participatory culture into the classroom as a key first step towards fostering a more participatory democracy . This isn't a matter of making school more "entertaining" or dealing with wavering student attention. It has to do with modeling powerful new forms of civic life and learning, of helping young people acquire skills that they are going to need to enter the workplace, to participate in public policy debates, to express themselves creatively, and to change the world. As we are doing this work, we are bumping up, again and again, against constraints which make it impossible for even the most determined, dedicated, and informed teachers to bring many of these technologies and cultural practices into their classrooms. It isn't simply that young people know more about Facebook than their teachers; it is that for the past decade, schools have sought to insulate themselves from these sites of potential disruption and transformation, hermetically sealing themselves off from these social networks and from the mechanisms of participatory culture. The first we can overcome through better teacher training, but the second is going to require us to rethink basic school policies if schools are going to pursue their traditional civic missions in ways that enhance these new forms of citizenly engagement.
This article was written for Threshold Magazine's special issue on "Learning in a Participatory Culture." Read more about Project New Media Literacies here.
May 1, 2009
"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part One)
On the eve of our conference at MIT on "Learning in a Participatory Culture," Cable in the Classroom has joined forces with Project New Media Literacies to edit a special issue of Threshold which centers on the work we've been doing and the vision behind it. Among the features are a wonderful graphic showing the new learning environment and how informal, individual, and school based learning can work together to reinforce the core social skills and cultural competencies we've been discussing; a transcribed conversation with Benjamin Stokes, Daniel T. Hickey, Barry Joseph, John Palfrey, and myself about the challenges and opportunities surrounding bringing new media into the classroom; James Bosco adopting a school reform perspective on these issues; and a range of pieces by the core researchers on our team describing what happened when we introduced some of our materials into schools or after school programs.
If you wanted to attend the conference but just couldn't make it to Cambridge, you can follow along through the live webcasts of the event. Check here for details.
Over the next few weeks, I am going to be showcasing the work of Project New Media Literacies and introducing you to some of our curricular materials which are just now going public. Along the way, you will get a chance to read several pieces from the Threshold magazine, including one from our award-winning research director Erin Reilly, get some reflections from some of our students about how they learned about and through popular culture, and learn about how spreadability may impact education. Today and next time, I will be running the essay which I wrote for the magazine, which maps the ways I am starting to think about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy.
And if that's not enough New Media Literacies thinking for you, check out this great podcast put together by Barry Joseph and others at Global Kids, one of our research partners, which includes a conversation between Mimi Ito and myself and an interview with Constance Steinkuehler.
"Geeking Out" For Democracy
by Henry Jenkins
In his book, Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam suggests that many members of the post-WWII generation discovered civic engagement at the local bowling alley. The bowling alley was a place where people gathered regularly not simply to play together, but talk about the personal and collective interests of the community, to form social ties and identify common interests. In a classic narrative of cultural decline, Putnam blames television for eroding these strong social ties, resulting in a world where people spent more time isolated in their homes and less time participating in shared activities with the larger community.
But what does civic engagement look like in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? All of these new platforms are reconnecting home-based media with larger communities, bridging between our public and private lives. All offer us a way to move from media consumption towards cultural participation.
During a recent visit in Santiago, I sat down with Chilean national Senator Fernando Flores Labra who believes that the guild structure in the massively multiplayer video game, World of Warcraft, offers an important training ground for the next generation of business and political leaders. (Guilds are affiliations of players who work together towards a common cause, such as battling the monsters or overcoming other enemies in the sword-and-sorcery realm depicted in the game.) The middle aged Labra, with his slicked back hair, his paunchy midsection, and his well-pressed suits, is probably not what you expect a World of Warcraft player to look like. Yet, he's someone who has spent, by his own estimate, "thousands of hours playing these games, with hundreds of people, of all ages, all over the world."
Labra recently invited leading business and political leaders to come together and learn more about such games, explaining: "I am convinced that these technologies can be excellent laboratories for learning the practices, skills and ethics required to succeed in today's global environment, where people are increasingly required to interact with people all over the world, but still have a hard time working with their colleagues in the office next door, never mind with their new colleagues, whom they have never met, on the other side of the world. If an organization is to survive and thrive in today's era of globalization, its leaders must ensure that members of their organization become experts in operational coordination among geographically and culturally diverse groups; build and cultivate trust among their various stakeholders, including their employees, their customers and their investors, all of whom may be culturally and geographically diverse; cultivate people that are able to act with leadership in an era of rapid and constant change."
Playing World of Warcraft requires the mobilization of a large number of participants and the coordination of efforts across a range of different skill groups. Experienced players find themselves logging into the game not simply because they want to play but because they feel an obligation to the other players. Participants often network outside the game space to coordinate their efforts and soon find themselves discussing a much broader range of topics (much like Putnam's bowlers). Participants develop and deploy tools which allow them to manage complex data sets and monitor their own performances. And the guild leadership, many of whom are still in their teens, learn to deal with their team member's complex motivations and sometimes conflicting personalities.
Whatever these folks are doing, they are not "bowling alone." If Putnam's correct, bowling was more than a game for post-war citizens, and World of Warcraft is more than a game for many students in your classrooms.
But let's take it a step further. Game guilds and other kinds of social networks are as central to what we mean by civic engagement in the 21st century as civic organizations were to the community life of the 20th century. If bowling helped connect citizens at the geographically local level, these new kinds of communities bring people together from diverse backgrounds, including adults and youths, and across geographically dispersed communities. Such dispersed social ties are valuable in a world where the average American moves once every four or five years, often across regions, and where many of us find ourselves needing to interact with colleagues around the planet.
I use the term "participatory culture" to describe the new kinds of social and creative activities which have emerged in a networked society. A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.
The work we are doing through the MacArthur Foundation's emerging Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a network of scholars, educators, and activists , starts from the premise that these new media platforms represent important sites of informal learning. The time young people spend, outside the classroom, engaging with these new forms of cultural experience foster real benefits in terms of their mastering of core social skills and cultural competencies (the New Media Literacies) they are going to be deploying for years to come. While much has been said about why 21st century skills are essential for the contemporary workplace, they are also valuable in preparing young people for future roles in the arts, politics, and community life. Learning how to navigate social networks or produce media may result in a sense of greater personal empowerment across all aspects of youth's lives.
In a recent report, documenting a multi-year, multi-site ethnographic study of young people's lives on and off line, the Digital Youth Project suggests three potential modes of engagement which shape young people's participation in these online communities. First, many young people go on line to "hang out" with friends they already know from schools and their neighborhoods. Second, they may "mess around" with programs, tools, and platforms, just to see what they can do. And third, they may "geek out" as fans, bloggers, and gamers, digging deep into an area of intense interest to them, moving beyond their local community to connect with others who share their passions. The Digital Youth Project argues that each of these modes encourages young people to master core technical competencies, yet they may also do some of the things that Putnam ascribed to the bowling leagues of the 1950s -- they strengthen social bonds, they create shared experiences, they encourage conversations, and they provide a starting point for other civic activities.
For the past few decades, we've increasingly talked about those people who have been most invested in public policy as "wonks," a term implying that our civic and political life has increasingly been left to the experts, something to be discussed in specialized language. When a policy wonk speaks, most of us come away very impressed by how much the wonk knows but also a little bit depressed about how little we know. It's a language which encourages us to entrust more control over our lives to Big Brother and Sister, but which has turned many of us off to the idea of getting involved. But what if more of us had the chance to "geek out" about politics? What if we could create points of entry where young people saw the affairs of government as vitally linked to the practices of their everyday lives? "Geeking out" is empowering; it motivates our participation and in a world of social networks, pushes us to find others who share our passions. If being a "wonk" is about what you know, being a "geek" involves an ongoing process of sharing information and working through problems with others. Being a political "geek" involves taking on greater responsibility for solving your own problems, working as a member of a larger community, whether one defined in geographic terms or through shared interests.
Maybe "geeking out" about politics is key to fostering a more participatory democracy, one whose success is measured not simply by increases in voting (which we've started to see over the past few election cycles) but also increased volunteerism (which shows up in survey after survey of younger Americans), increased awareness of current events, increased responsibility for each other, and increased participation in public debates about the directions our society is taking. "Geeking out" might mean we think about civic engagement as a life style rather than as a special event.
We still have a lot to learn about how someone moves from involvement in participatory culture towards greater engagement with participatory democracy. But so far, there are some promising results when organizations seek to mobilize our emerging roles as fans, bloggers, and gamers. Consider, for example, the case of the HP Alliance, an organization created by Andrew Slack, a 20-something activist and stand up comic, who saw the Harry Potter books as potential resources for mobilizing young people to make a difference in the world. Slack argues that J.K. Rowling's novels have taught a generation to read and write (through fan fiction) and now it has the potential to help many of those young people cross-over into participation in the public sphere. Creating what he describes as "Dumbledore's Army" for the real world, the HP Alliance uses the story of a young man who questioned authority, organized his classmates, and battled evil to get young people connected with a range of human rights organization. Slack works closely with Wizard Rock bands, who perform at fan conventions, record their music as mp3s, and distribute it via social network sites and podcasts. He works with the people who run Harry Potter fan websites and blogs to help spread the word to the larger fan community. So far, the HP Alliance has moved more than 100,000 people, many of them teens, to contribute to the struggles against genocide in Darfur or the battles for worker's rights at Wal-Mart or the campaign against Proposition 8 in California.
Many parents and educators grumble about this generation's lack of motivation or commitment, describing them as too busy playing computer games to get involved in their communities. For some teens, this may be sadly true. But, Global Kids, a New York organization, has been using Second Life to bring together youth leaders from around the world and to give them a playground through which they can imagine and stage solutions to real world problems. Global Kids, for example, used machinima -- a practice by which game engines are deployed to create real time digital animation -- to document the story of a child soldier in Uganda and circulate it via YouTube and other platforms to call attention to the plight of youth in the developing world. Much like the HP Alliance, Global Kids is modeling ways we can bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy.
April 10, 2009
Critical Information Studies For a Participatory Culture (Part Two)
One of the most productive things to come out of the University of Virginia conference was some rapproachment between political economy (which dominates the current media reform movement) and cultural studies (which has been much more closely associated with the participatory culture paradigm). The cliche is that political economy is all structure and no agency and cultural studies is all agency and no structure. We are, as Robert McChesney suggests, at a "critical juncture" because there are structures and constraints which could be locked down, resources that can be lost, and rich potentials which are fragile. In such a time, we need to look at both agency and structure and so we need to end the theoretical conflict in favor of identifying shared goals -- working together when we can, working separately but in parallel where our goals and tactics differ, but wasting little time on squabbles on the borders between fields. I learned more from conference participants about what steps had already been taken within the media reform movement to embrace some of these same principles. What follows might be described as a partial agenda for media reform from the perspective of participatory culture, one which looks at those factors which block the full achievement of my ideals of a more participatory society.
"The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself": Right now, much of our public policy is being fueled by fear and anxiety about cultural change. There is a gender dimension to this politics of fear -- we fear our sons (through anxieties about media effects, school shootings, and video game violence) and for our daughters (through anxieties about sexual molestation through social networking sites or sexual exposure through content-sharing sights). Such fears surfaced in response to recent efforts by the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce to shift the terms of the debate about youth's digital access. The group dared to question the "sexual predator" myths which currently shape public policies, only to become the target of aggressive smears by sensationalistic news, cultural warriors, and political leaders, who have found fear-mongering a productive strategy for raising money, capturing eyeballs, and mobilizing voters. As Anne Collier (Netfamilynews) recently suggested, people can not meaningfully participate in these emerging social and cultural structures if they are worried about their physical well being or emotional safety, yet safety concerns should not be deployed to block access and restrict participation. Rather, there is a need for education which stresses ethical responsibility and civic awareness; trained teachers and librarians need to help young people to grasp the potentials and route around the risks of online communication. Before we can make progress on most of the other policy issues here, we need to develop strategies for decreasing the role of ignorance and fear in public debates about new media.
From Digital Divide to Participation Gap: For the past decade, there has been a concerted effort to wire schools and libraries as a means of overcoming the digital divide and insuring that every American child has access to networked computers. This ongoing struggle around technological access has brought about some real changes, but it has also revealed deeply cultural divides. The participation gap refers to these other social, cultural, and educational concerns which block full participation. Ellen Seiter, for example, has explored how inequalities in cultural capital undermine school-based programs for media education. Unequal access to free time outside of school and the workplace make it much harder for some to contribute content or participate in online communities than others. Much as the old "hidden curriculum" determined which young people did better in schools, the new "hidden curriculum" is shaping who feels empowered and entitled to participate.
Remaking Schools: The MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative has brought together hundreds of researchers around the country who are seeking to reinvent public institutions (schools, libraries, museums) to reflect this alternative understanding of participatory culture. Mimi Ito, Michael Carter, Peter Lyman, and Barrie Thorne's Digital Youth Initiative has undertaken a large scale ethnographic study of the many different sites (inside and outside schools, inside and outside homes) through which young people connect with the online world and the kinds of informal learning which occurs through their friendship-based and interest-driven networks. Their project maps a "learning ecology" based on participatory culture principles yet many of the most valuable practices -- especially those which involve young people linking through social networks or producing and sharing media -- are blocked by federal and local educational policies. While schools and libraries may represent the best sites for overcoming the participation gap, they are often the most limited in their ability to access some of the key platforms -- from Flickr and YouTube to Ning and Wikipedia-- where these new cultural practices are emerging. As these insights get translated into curriculum and pedagogical practices through schools, we need to avoid narrowing this emphasis onto 21st Century Skills which prepare young people for the workplace rather than the model of expressive citizenship suggested by the MacArthur Foundation's emphasis on New Media Literacies. The reliance on standardized testing is in some cases shutting down the potentials for intervention through education and in other cases restricting our understanding of these new skills to only those which can be tested and measured.
Rethinking Collective Intelligence: As writers like Yochai Benkler, Jane McGongel, Thomas Malone, Axel Bruns, and others have suggested, activities such as writing Wikipedia or solving Alternative Reality Games offer vivid examples of the ways that social networks may pool their resources, share their expertise, and solve problems more complex than any individual could imagine. O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" model, consciously or otherwise, blurs the line between Pierre Levy's notion of "collective intelligence" and James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds." Levy's model is deliberative, depending on people forming communities to work together towards shared ends, and he sees it as a cornerstone for any future vision of democracy in the digital era; Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds" is aggregative, relying on a model of a market driven by individual consumer choices. Needless to say, the "wisdom of the crowds" model is proving much easier to assimilate into corporate logic since it still relies on the autonomous and isolated consumer rather than a recognition of the collective bargaining potential of networked publics. We need to continue to push for alternative platforms and practices which embrace and explore the potential of collective intelligence so that we better understand what kinds of ethical, pedagogical, and political principles must be in place before we can realize new forms of citizenly engagement.
Promoting Diversity: While expanding who has access to the means of cultural production and distribution has the potential to broaden the range of stories and ideas in circulation, other mechanisms are working to contain the diversity of the online world. As John McMurria has noted, the most visible content of many media-sharing sites tends to come from members of dominant groups, even as minority content continues to circulate within minority communities. Most models for user-moderation of content start from majoritarian principles with no commitment to diversity. Minority participation is intimidated through the hate speech which goes unregulated on the forums surrounding such sites. At the same time, writers like danah boyd and S. Craig Watkins are arguing that social networks act like gated communities, cementing existing social ties rather than broadening them. As people seek out "like minded individuals," social divisions in the real world are being mapped onto cyberspace, reinforcing cultural segregation along class and race lines. John Campbell has explored the ways that online affinity portrals, which claim to serve minority communities, serve the interests of advertisers for data mining and impression management more than they serve any identity politics agenda, further isolating minority participants from being able to speak to a more generalized audience. We might add to this more generalized concerns raised by Trebor Sholz and others about how social networks lock down our membership by making it hard to move our own data or friendship networks from one commercial site to another, suggesting that the segregation of cyberspace may be difficult to overcome.
Reasserting Fair Use: As writers like Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Jessica Litman, and others have suggested, struggles over intellectual property may be the most important legal battleground determining the future of participatory culture. While corporations are asserting a "crisis of copyright", seeking to police "digital "piracy," citizen groups are seeking to combat a "crisis of fair use" as the mechanisms of corporate copyright protection erode the ability of citizens to meaningfully quote from their culture. D.J. Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Music and Culture brought together contemporary artists and media makers who saw remix and sample practices as central to their own artistic expression, undercutting the claim that such battles are being fought in the name of author's rights. The Center for Social Media has launched a series of "best practices" documents designed to help remix artists, documentary filmmakers, and media literacy teachers to identify and assert their fair use rights to build on the existing cultural reservoir. Sites like YouTomb are mapping the ways that web 2.0 platforms are responding to these corporate pressures, often by sending out "take down" notices to their contributors, which would stretch well beyond any existing legal understanding of copyright. And now, because these "take downs" are being automatically generated by the company itself, it is increasingly difficult for contributors to overturn them on the basis of fair use arguments. The Organization for Transformative Works has emerged from the fan world as a way of redefining fan practices as falling within the protections of fair use, creating a place where fans can turn when they receive cease and desist orders, while another grassroots organization, Tribute Is Not Theft, has been deploying YouTube itself as a platform to educate fellow contributors about their Fair Use rights and about the value of remix practices.
Critiquing Free Labor: Tziana Terranova was among the first academic critics to call attention to the "free labor" model which remains implicit in O'Reilly's discussion of "Web 2.0." As one joke puts it, "we produce all the content, they make all the money." Talk of an "architecture of participation" masks over the often conflicting interests of grassroots media producers and the commercial platforms they increasingly rely upon for the distribution of their works. The lack of revenue sharing, for example, has been charged with further undercutting the economic base for independent media production, with outsourcing creative labor at the expense of jobs for industry professionals, and commodifying yet not protecting long-standing grassroots practices of cultural production which were historically based on gift economy models. Some are responding with the development of alternative platforms for distribution based on other kinds of political or economic models, whether those which Witness is developing for distributing videos produced by human rights activists or those being developed by the Organization for Transformative Works to protect the rights of fan media makers. Initially, it has been a struggle even to get a recognition that the creation of "user-generated content" should be understood as a form of creative labor as opposed to simply a new form of consumption or an alternative kind of play. As such, the debates over "free labor" represent the most visible part of a larger effort of consumers and citizens to reassert some of their rights in the face of web 2.0 companies, including increased scrutiny over terms of service, growing concerns about issues of privacy and surveilance, and expanded understanding of the consequences of ceding control and ownership of personal data more generally.
Designing Civic Media: As the economic crisis deepens, American newspapers are folding, news media are tightening their budgets and reducing their coverage, and journalists are losing their jobs. While some have argued that we are moving from an age of informed citizens to one based on a more monitorial model, all of these discussions of civic engagement rest on having a source of reliable and meaningful information which can form the basis for our deliberations and collective actions. The idea that professional journalists will be replaced by a volunteer army of "citizen journalists" is profoundly misleading, even if citizens may deploy new technologies to serve other informational needs of their society. Talk about "citizen journalists" is like talk of "horseless carriages," an attempt to understand an emerging system by mapping it onto legacy technologies. American University's Center for Social Media, The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, Harvard's Berkman Center, and MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, among others, are exploring alternative systems for the production and distribution of documentary, alternative resources which support community building and information sharing, and alternative tool sets which allow citizens to transform their society. Huma Yosuf's study of the use of civic media in Pakistan during the recent national emergency suggests that citizens can use these tools to work around censorship, to organize in the face of oppressive regimes, and to alert the outside world about what was happening in their country. Yet, in many cases, these alternative practices still rely on the raw materials provided by professional news coverage and thus we all need to be concerned about the health and independence of the news media.
Thinking Globally: The emergence of new platforms for media sharing and social networking represent alternative models for thinking about the politics of globalization. Throughout the Bush years, when the American super power embraced a unilateral perspective on world affairs, a growing number of American young people were consuming media produced from outside our national borders, often by deploying illegal or semi-legal channels of distribution which connected them directly with fans from other parts of the world. Activists who in the future may be engaged with the politics around poverty, AIDS, environmentalism, energy, or Human Rights, may have first connected around the trade of anime, Bollywood films, telanovelas, or K-Dramas. The practices surrounding the circulation of such materials can be eye-opening as participants discover the protectionist policies and practices which block timely access to international media.
Restructuring Activism: Many of the battles we are describing here are being fought by grassroots organizations framed according to new models of citizenship and activism which emerge from participatory culture. In his recent book, Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe makes the case for a new model of social change which is playful and utopian, channels what we know as consumers as well as what we know as citizens, and embraces a more widely accessible language for discussing public policy. We can get a sense of what such a new model of activism might look like by examining movements like the HP Alliance which uses J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter franchise as a shared framework for discussing human rights and social justice issues or the Anonymous movement which deployed imagery from V for Vendetta to mobilize protests against the Church of Scientology. There's much we need to know about what this new kind of political discourse looks like, what its strengths and limits are, and whether it can effect meaningful change. How do we build a bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy?
In each of these debates, there is a need for critical theory which asks hard questions of emerging cultural practices. There is also a need for critical utopianism which explores the value of emerging models and proposes alternatives to current practices. There is a need for theory which deals abstractly with these shifts in cultural logic and there's a need for interventions which test the value of that theory through practice. There is a need for academic scholarship which trains the next generation and there's a need for conversations which overcomes the isolation between the various groups which are struggling over these issues. There is a need for people who stand outside the system throwing rocks and there's a need for people who can move into the boardrooms and engage in conversation with those in power. It is too easy to draw false divisions between these various causes, too hard to identify the common ground. I am hoping that this conference will allow for meaningful exchanges around these shared concerns.
Sources The following might be a basic reading list for those of you wanting to understand more about media policy and participatory culture. Most of these names will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, though a few of them have recently been added to my own reading list and will figure in future posts.
Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bruns, Axel (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. London: Peter Lang.
boyd, dana (2008). Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. PhD Dissertation. University of California-Berkeley, School of Information.
Campbell, John Edward (2008). Virtually Home: The Commodification of Community in Cyberspace. Dissertation in Communication at University of Pennsylvania.
Lessig, Lawrence (2005). Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penquin.
Levy, Pierre (1999). Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. New York: Basic.
Litman, Jessica (2006). Digital Copyright. New York: Prometheus.
Lyman, Peter, Mizuko Ito, Barrie Thorne, and Michael Carter, Hanging Out, Messing Around, And Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2009.
Malone, Thomas (2004). The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life. Cambridge: Harvard Business Review.
McGonigel, Jane (2008). "Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming" in Katie Salens (ed.), The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning.Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation.
Miller, Paul (2008). Sound Unbound: Sampling Music and Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
O'Reilly, Tim (2005)."What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software."
Seiter, Ellen (2008). "Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital" in Tara McPherson (ed.), Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected. Cambridge:MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation.
Sennett, Richard (2009). The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scholz, Trebor (2006). "Collaboration and Collective Intelligence." Panel organized as part of the Media in Transition conference at MIT.
Sureicki, James (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor.
Terranova, Tizianna (2004). Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press.
Yusuf, Huma (2009). Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008, Center for Future Civic Media.
Watkins, S. Craig (Forthcoming). The Young and the Digital. Boston: Beacon Press.
April 8, 2009
Critical Information Studies For a Participatory Culture (Part One)
Last Saturday, I spoke at a conference being organized by the Media Studies Program at the University of Virginia, Connections: The Future of Media Studies. Among the others speaking were Jeff Alexander, Michael Delli Carpini, Henry Jenkins, Eric Klinenberg, Marwan Kraidy, Sonia Livingstone, Robert McChesney, Paddy Scannell, Jonathan Sterne, Lisa Gitelman, and Eszter Hargittal.
I thought I would share my remarks for the "critical information studies" panel through the blog since they represent a pretty good summary of some of the things I've been thinking about and working on over the past few years.
Tim O'Reilly's concept of "web 2.0" was first promoted at a 2004 conference of key industry leaders and later spread via his "What is Web 2.0" essay. "Web 2.0" has become increasingly institutionalized as the definitive account of the business plans and cultural practices defining the digital realm in the early 21st century. O'Reilly's concept is now spreading into discussions about politics and government, education, and grassroots cultural practices, becoming increasingly defused as it travels. There have been surprisingly few attempts to seriously understand its core assumptions or propose other models for describing the shifting relations between media producers and consumers.
O'Reilly's original essay encoded the "best practices" of those companies (Amazon, Yahoo, Google, among them) which had survived the dotcom meltdown, offering advice for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who wanted to seize the next new business opportunity. O'Reilly describes a world where companies are able to "harness the collective intelligence" and circulate "user-generated content" from their consumers, where the key component of any new digital service or platform involves designing an "architecture of participation," and where user-led innovation fuels the ongoing innovation and retooling of new technologies. The term, "Web 2.0" arrived just in time to offer a handy explanation for Wikipedia, YouTube, Second Life, Facebook, and Twitter.
Initially, the discourse of "web 2.0" was embraced as offering a progressive alternative to the alienation of the consumer from the means of cultural production and circulation and these companies have been understood as enabling a more diverse media culture. Yet, over the past few years, struggles between users and owners (still operative distinctions in most web 2.0 companies), such as debates around FanLib (the attempt to commodify an existing participatory culture), Live Journal (the attempt to censor user-generated content), Facebook (shifts in privacy standards and the terms of service), and YouTube (automatic take-downs which impinge on fair use), are starting to reveal some of the contradictions and conflicts masked by O'Reilly's "architecture of participation."
There is an urgent need for serious reflection on the core models of cultural production, distribution, ownership, and participation underlying "web 2.0." Almost everyone involved sees our culture as moving in a more participatory direction, yet struggles over web 2.0 will help to determine the terms of our participation.
As we seek to complicate and modify the "web 2.0" model, academic theory needs to move beyond blunt critiques, which read these new developments as "business as usual" and reflect a knee-jerk distaste for consumerism, towards more nuanced accounts which understand the specific mechanisms being deployed and understands the public's stake in participation. The pitches of web 2.0 companies respond to real shifts in the ways that the general public understands their role in the culture or their political agency which need to be respected. The platforms represent a radical change in mechanisms for filtering and circulating media content which need to be acknowledged if we are to fully understand what's at risk in these discussions.
At the same time, those of us who have long advocated for a more "participatory culture" need to better define our ideals and identify and confront those forces that threaten the achievement of those ideals. This should be a moment for renewed communication across theoretical paradigms and political perspectives so that we may frame cogent responses. As we learn from each other, we need to adopt a multifront perspective: offering critiques of the corporate web 2.0 model, shoring up the alternative grassroots model of participatory culture, promoting educational and political reforms which may empower more people to meaningfully participate in the production and circulation of culture.
Theory -- both academic and vernacular -- becomes a key resource in these struggles, but only if we can build bridges between university researchers and those involved in other sites of media change. Academics need to be engaging with policy makers, media producers, fans, citizens, educators, and other constituencies who are part of the ongoing conversations which will redefine our cultural future. Right now, our theories are struggling to keep up with the change and falling far behind what's needed on the ground as people think through their own relationships to new cultural systems and emerging corporate practices.
Across a range of recent projects, I have been returning to a term I coined very early in my career, participatory culture, and seeking to refine it into what might be considered an alternative model for understanding the shifts in cultural production and economic relations. "Web 2.0" is not the same thing as "participatory culture," though its promoters often seek to absorb grassroots expression fully into its business model. In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, I made the case that our current cultural landscape is being changed as much by bottom-up pressures from consumers and citizens as from top-down pressures from media conglomerates. Across the 20th century subcultural deployment of emerging technologies have paved the way for a greater public expectation that they will be able to meaningfully reshape the media they consume. The rise of digital networks is facilitating new forms of "collective intelligence" which are allowing groups of consumers to identify and pursue common interests. Alternative forms of cultural production, such as those surrounding fandom and other subcultural communities, are gaining much greater visibility as they move through emerging platforms. Skills acquired through participation in popular culture are spilling over into education, politics, and religion, reshaping the operations of other core institutions.
In Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, a white paper drafted for the MacArthur Foundation, I develop a framework for thinking about educational policy which reflects these changes, identifying eleven social skills and cultural competencies we believe need to be fully incorporated into educational practices if all young people are going to become full participants in this shifting media landscape. There, we offer one definition of participatory culture:
"A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement."
More recently, I have been seeking to better understand the mechanisms by which consumers curate and circulate media content, rejecting current discussions of "viral media" (which hold onto a top-down model of cultural infection) in favor of an alternative model of "spreadability" (based on the active and self conscious agency of consumers who decide what content they want to "spread" through their social networks. This work argues that what I am calling participatory culture might best be understood in relation to ideas about the "gift economy" developed by Lewis Hyde in The Gift. "Web 2.0" might then be read in terms of negotiations around value and worth which occur at the intersections between commodity culture and the gift economy. Richard Sennett's recent book, The Craftsman, offers a rich account of how cultural labor has historically been motivated by forces other than pure profit, reflecting desires for personal achievement and expression and for a "job well done," which might help explain what motivates the pro-am productivity within our current digital economy.
This new emphasis on "participatory culture" represents a serious rethinking of the model of cultural resistance which dominated cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Cultural resistance is based on the assumption that average citizens are largely locked outside of the process of cultural production and circulations; De Certeau's "tactics" (especially as elaborated through the work of John Fiske) were "survival mechanisms" which allowed us to negotiate a space for our own pleasures and meanings in a world where we mostly consumed content produced by corporate media; "poachers" in my early formulations were "rogue readers" whose very act of reading violated many of the rules set in place to police and organize culture. Increasingly, audience participation is factored into the business plans and are central to the design of media franchises; media companies alternatively seek to court and control an increasingly unruley audience as fans and other consumers recognize that collectively we exert much greater influence on the cultural agenda and are helping to generate the content that others are consuming.
As consumers and citizens have taken media into their own hands, they are becoming more aware of the economic and legal mechanisms which might blunt their cultural influence and are defining strategies for using these new platforms in ways that promote their own interests rather than necessarily those of their corporate owners. In this new context, participation is not the same thing as resistance nor is it simply an alternative form of co-optation; rather, struggles occur in, around, and through participation which have no predetermined outcomes. Both producers and consumers may now be understood as "participants" in this new media ecology, while recognizing that they do so from positions of unequal power, resources, skills, access, and time.
Next time: I will identify some of the core conflicts/issues which are shaping media policy and critical information studies in the early 21st century.
March 27, 2009
Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part Two)
Today, we continue our discussion with Jessica Clark, co-author of Public Media 2.0, an important white paper recently issued by American University's Center for Social Media.
What does your research suggest about the relative roles of professional media producers and Pro-Am media makers in the new ecology of public media?
Professionally produced content is central to public media 2.0--right now, more people than ever are consuming and linking to newspapers and broadcast news sources. Some forms of public media are expensive to produce and difficult to make using only volunteer energy and resources: investigative journalism, long-form documentary, international coverage. Those should continue to be subsidized by taxpayers, by new business models for news, and by social entrepreneurs interested in supporting "double bottom line" projects.
What's different in this new ecology is the way in which publics are using content. They are adopting roles up and down the production chain --funding news and information through projects like Spot.us, collaborating in investigations on sites like Talking Points Memo, reporting directly via mobile phone from war zones using tools like Ushahidi , analyzing and critiquing news sources at sites like NewsTrust and disseminating relevant content through social networks, Twitter, Digg, and many other channels. This fundamentally challenges the agenda-setting powers of legacy media, making it much harder to create and maintain an artificial consensus, a "conventional wisdom."
Jay Rosen writes about this in a January Post on his PressThink blog titled "Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press."
In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized--meaning they were connected to BigMedia but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people
to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the echosphere of legitimate debate as defined by journalists doesn't match up with their own definition.
In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the echo chamber, which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what's really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.
We can see this expansion of public dialogue in action via new tools for visualizing connections and authority online. One really fun tool is the Political Video Barometer, designed by Morningside Analytics. This shows the dissemination of online videos across the spectrum of the political blogosphere. Some of these videos are clips from mainstream media, some are produced by advocacy groups, some by individuals. Some are strident, some are artistic, some are snarky. The range of expression and debate is wider than we got used to seeing on TV, but now these new forms of communication are expanding the boundaries of legitimate public discourse.
You note that public media is "rarely loved," yet participatory culture is passion driven. How can you build the base of support for public media in the absence of the passions that fuel other kinds of fan culture?
Audiences are actually passionately loyal to public broadcasting, and for many it's the most trusted source for news. Politicians sometimes love it less, because it can generate controversy or cast a critical eye. The main problem is that many of the programs and stations haven't kept up with either technological changes or shifts in tone
over the last two decades. It's hard to make the case that public broadcasting, especially PBS, serves the whole country adequately--the programs tend to appeal to the very young and those approaching or enjoying retirement. Finding ways to connect with people's civic passions through new platforms and new voices will be paramount if
public media is to maintain a broad base of support as its core audiences age. The idea that the populace at large is apathetic is not only wrong, it's condescending; by opening up and innovating, public broadcasting can evolve into public media 2.0.
Does Public Media 2.0 rest on the assumption of a generalized public or do the same arguments apply to smaller scale niche audiences and social networks?
We think the concept of a generalized public is a fiction perpetrated by pollsters and demagogues. Not only are there very few issues that engage the entire adult population of a country, but in our framework, publics can form across national boundaries, and in places that don't yet have stable democratic governments. For example, online censorship is an issue that mobilizes a discrete but impassioned group of people around the world. The Global Voices Access Denied Map is an example of public media 2.0 dealing with that issue. Here's how they describe it:
The Access Denied Map will lead interested readers to content that enables them to support anti-censorship movements and keeps readers abreast of the filtering situation in various parts of the world. It will also facilitate collaboration between activists, allowing them to find each other, share tactics and strategies and experiences.
So, public media 2.0 definitely applies to niche audiences and social networks. In our definition, we privilege debate over partisanship. The idea isn't to make media that attracts a group of like-minded users around an issue or a figure--what you note as "pools" or "hubss" in the terminology of Lara Lee from Jump Associates. It's to offer up high-quality content around an issue and provide contexts/platforms that allow people to grapple with it.
A public is also distinct from a "community," which might form casually through physical proximity or shared interests. Publics can rise out of communities, but are more pointed.
Your report defines public media around primarily political and civic functions, yet public broadcasting has tended to define its mission much more around cultural programming--in part because of the ideological climate around its funding process. Does the new media environment free media producers to embrace a more explicitly
political mission?
Right now what we're terming public media 2.0 is in its "first two minutes"--many projects are taking place outside of the context of federally funded outlets or production companies, which means they can be as political as is appropriate to the issues being tackled. In the future, separating the funding and production of content from that of online engagement will help to heat-shield public media 2.0 from political attacks. If publics themselves are producing, curating and discussing content, it's harder to unilaterally dismiss them as biased or hegemonic. Individual discussions and projects might draw fire from partisans, but the idea is to create contexts and platforms that allow users from across the political spectrum to access and engage with reliable information. The result will be more wide-ranging, honest and authentic interactions. Of course, there will be flame wars, commercial incursions, and propaganda in the mix. But those existed in the analog world too. We're still early in the process of negotiating new standards and rules for open media, but we'll get there.
A range of explicit policies will be needed to support public media 2.0. These range from infrastructure policies (net neutrality, universal broadband access), to support for content (via taxpayer funding and tax incentives), to copyright reforms (for instance,
making it easier to use copyrighted works when you can't find the author, or orphan works) and copyright education (for instance around the utility of fair use), and support for public engagement and media literacy.
Some forms of public media have historically been paternalistic-- giving people what they think is good for them rather than commercial culture's desire to give people who they desire. There are all kinds of problems for this framing, but in so far as this stereotype has some truth, how do we shift this mindset to embrace much greater public participation in framing issues and shaping content? Are most of the current public media producers ready to embrace the kind of relationship to the public you describe here?
We're seeing all kinds of interesting experiments within traditional public broadcasting, many of which we document in our white paper. There is also a long-running strain of participatory media in public media, as embodied in projects like StoryCorps or This I Believe. Sharing significant cultural and social experiences, crafting personal narratives, capturing reality in all of its bumpy, quirky texture-- these are all impulses intrinsic to oral history and documentary, practices central to legacy public media. The difference now is that people can participate directly in producing public media 2.0.
Jessica Clark is the research director of the Center for Social Media at American University, where she heads up the Future of Public Media project. She is currently working on a book about the evolution of the progressive media sector with Tracy Van Slyke of The Media Consortium. Together they edit a related blog, Build the Echo. She is also the editor-at-large for In These Times, an award-winning monthly magazine of progressive news, analysis and cultural reporting.
March 25, 2009
Where Citizens Gather: An Interview with The Future of Public Media Project's Jessica Clark (Part One)
Amidst all of the dire talk these days about the fate of the American newspaper, the Center for Social Media at American University has issued an important white paper exploring the future of public media more generally. When most of us think about "public media" these days, we are most likely to be talking about Public Broadcasting, where the Public refers as much to Public Funding as it refers to any conception of the Public Sphere. The report, Public Media 2.0, embraces the affordances and practices of an era of participatory culture and social networks to identify strategies for public media which emphasize its capacity to attract and mobilize publics. This reframing of the issues shows ways that we can expand who produces and who consumes public media, taking advantage of new stakeholders -- independent media producers, engaged online communities -- who have not always felt well served by the increasingly conservative fair on offer from public broadcasting.
After several decades of getting caught in the crossfire of culture war politics, PBS and NPR sometimes seem a bit gun shy. The new report suggests ways that we can use emerging technologies and practices to enable a more rigorous discussion of public policy, one which bridges across generational gaps and racial divides a like. Public Media 2.0 imagines ways that civic discussions can engage people like my students who are much more likely to seek out information via The Daily Show than Washington Week in Review.
My hope is that this report will spark informed discussion across a range of different publics and in that spirit, I am presenting over the next two installments an interview with Jessica Clark, the director of the Future of Public Media Project and one of the two primary authors (along with Pat Aufderheide) of the report.
Can you share your definition of Public Media 2.0? How does it differ from what you are calling "legacy media"? What are the biggest factors shaping this change?
"Legacy media" is top-down, one-to-many media: print, television, radio, even static web pages. We're advancing a more dynamic, relevant definition of public media--one that's participatory, focused on informing and mobilizing publics around shared issues.
"Publics" can be a slippery term: we don't simply mean audiences, or the general populace (i.e. "the public interest"). Instead, it's a term based on the work of theorists like John Dewey and JÃrgen Habermas, who suggest that media are intrinsic to democracy itself. Publics are what keep the powers-that-be accountable--government, corporate or other--by investigating them, discussing them, and deliberating about how to deal with them. Publics are networks of people--often ad hoc, sometimes organized--with a shared civic purpose. Media content, tools and platforms are needed for publics to form, because face-to-face communication is too inefficient--especially now that we all operate within a global economy.
Typically, legacy public media have been contained in noncommercial zones within the commercially defined media system: public broadcasting, cable access, satellite TV set-asides. But in our white paper, we note, "The open digital environment holds out the promise of a new framework for creating and supporting public media--one that prioritizes the creation of publics, moving beyond representation and into direct participation.This is the kind of media that political philosophers have longed for." In other words, Web 2.0 platforms are fantastic vehicles for democratic communication and action. Voila: public media 2.0.
If you think of public broadcasting as the Pachelbel canon (again), Wayne's World and Antiques Road Show, then the concept of public media as an active process of forming, informing and organizing publics may seem like a completely different animal. But really, our definition isn't that far from the original goals for public broadcasting.
When he signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, Lyndon Johnson said "At its best, public television would help make our Nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all the citizens." We're seeing glimmers of that with the promises that the new administration has made about government transparency, but also in the work that bloggers and open government activists do to haul controversial documents out into the open and debate them online. (See the Sunlight Labs for examples).
Johnson also said "I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge--not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use." We've got that capacity now, and are continually adding both old and new content. The challenge is making sure that
citizens can retain access to that network, and learn how to use it creatively and responsibly.
What lessons can we take from the 2008 election in terms of understanding the public's desire for new forms of information and new modes of participation?
This election demonstrated both the power and the appeal of participatory, digital communication. A campaign is a very instrumental way to use Web 2.0 technology. Its goals are simple--get users to identify with the candidate, pony up cash, and turn out voters. Having such focused goals makes it easier to measure outcomes: dollars raised, districts won. But the campaign's outreach strategy had a qualitative impact too: an increased sense of hope and connection that's still translating now into widespread trust that Barack Obama can get us out of the fix we're in. For a number of reasons, Obama is very easy for people to relate to--he's equable, not entirely white or black, Midwestern (recently at least), he doesn't come from a privileged background, he's got a family that he clearly loves, and a sense of humor. But what's more, Web 2.0 tools allowed voters to relate to one another. Participatory platforms facilitate identification; as Kurt Vonnegut noted, "Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.' "
Public media 2.0 will allow for even richer, more complex interactions around a variety of issues and events--from the financial crisis to environmental issues to gay marriage and well beyond. Users are already crazy about participatory platforms--in the white paper we identify five rising habits around media: choice, curation, conversation, collaboration and creation. Applying those habits to the issues that they care about creates new possibilities for connection, coproduction and investigation. My hope is that the election served as training wheels; that we'll all learn to go faster and farther with participatory practices.
Under the Bush administration, several FCC chairmen have argued that the diversification of the media environment has rendered many traditional notions of public service media obsolete. Why do we need PBS when we have the History Channel, Discovery Channel, BBC America, Nickelodeon, etc? You seem to be making the case, though, that there are urgent needs for public media in this new media environment. How might you counter the diversity and plenitude arguments? What functions should public media play in this era of exploding media options?
The primary goal for public media should be to support the formation of publics around issues. Given the radically disruptive ways our familiar economic and information regimes are shifting, it's more important than ever that people have reliable sources for learning, communicating and innovating around shared problems. Traditional forms of public media--educational content, journalism, documentary films, current affairs commentary, performing arts--can all play a role in this process, whether they are produced by commercial or noncommercial outlets.
Scarcity of information is no longer the central problem. The pressing need now is for content and contexts that allow users to make sense of the multiple inputs. High-quality public media 2.0 projects set standards that make it clear where information is coming from, provide contexts for users to engage in civil discourse, and connect users with other relevant sources. They engage users directly in issues via interaction, problem solving, creation and imagination. Take World Without Oil, a multiplayer alternative reality game produced by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) that attracted almost 2,000 gamers from 40-plus countries. This is an example of the hybrid nature of public 2.0, in which content moves fluidly across noncommercial and commercial sites, across boundaries of professional and amateur producers, and from online to off. Participants submitted reactions to an eight-month energy crisis via privately owned social media sites, such as YouTube and Flickr--and made corresponding real-life changes, chronicled at the WWO Lives blog. As it turns out, many of the real-world reactions to the spike in oil prices mirrored the in-game reactions.
Wikipedia provides another model for public media 2.0. It sets a context for interaction--a familiar form, the encyclopedia article. It sets standards for participation--the "neutral point of view" policy, which states "All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources." Within those parameters, users debate the truths about contested issues. In the white paper, we write about the furor that erupted around Sarah Palin's entry when it was announced that she'd be John McCain's running mate. Someone involved with the campaign made a number of flattering changes to the Palin entry, and then others came in to correct them, setting off a firestorm of editing. In the past, this sort of debate would have been mediated by reporters and pundits. In this instance, it was hashed out by Wikipedia users directly, creating a coherent, crowdsourced entry and forming a public in the process.
What's the government's role in ensuring that public media 2.0 can continue to evolve and flourish? We argue that there are two clear needs: support for content, and national coordination that will ensure stable, robust platforms for engagement around media. This doesn't mean that there will be some Big Brother overseeing users' conversations around issues, or that the national platform will be controlled from inside the Beltway. What it means is that we can't depend on commercial sites like YouTube and Twitter to indefinitely provide platforms for public engagement. We see the current system of public broadcasting stations as a possible scaffolding for a national network that has deep local roots and inputs from a variety of media sources outside of traditional public broadcasting, including citizen media makers. But they would need to transform their agenda, which currently is focused on delivering a broadcasting signal filled mostly with syndicated content, into an agenda focused on engaging people where they live, work and meet around issues of public importance. Decoupling content creation from engagement gives publics more power to dynamically form around issues that they identify as important, rather than being forced to respond to the agendas set by reporters, editors and newsmakers. We think this will help to increase the diversity of content and conversations, and to make public media 2.0 vital.
Much research suggests that there's an age gap in terms of who consumes current public media (skewing older and older) but also in terms of who participates in the online world (skews younger). How might Public Media 2.0 be used to close the gap between these two demographics?
Younger people are already creating many forms of public media 2.0-- they just don't call it that yet. We're hoping that giving this constellation of practices a name and a focus will help to create pipelines, networks and hubs for future generations of public media makers. One good example of this is the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), which provides an interface between independent and citizen radio producers and traditional public stations. They recently convinced the FCC that the public deserved a stake in satellite radio, given the merger of XM and Sirius. Now, PRX is starting to program a 24-hour satellite channel with content that moves well beyond the stereotypical NPR sound that many of us have grown up with and often like to mock. (See the NPR Dancers).
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Another recent project that provides a segue between the old and new media worlds is Mojoco.org, a project of the National Black Programming Consortium, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "Mojoco" is a short name for "Mobile Journalism Collective," and the project is designed to provide resources, tools and coproduction opportunities for "Mojos" interested in making new forms of public media.
Add these sorts of projects--explicitly tied to legacy public media forms--to the new kinds of content being created by citizen makers such as those working with The Uptake, Global Voices or Current. Each of these media projects has produced content that made its way onto legacy print or broadcast platforms. Soon these distinctions will become meaningless, as more and more viewers of all generations are consuming converged content on mobile devices. Public media 2.0 will be one of the many choices a media consumer has, and will become particularly relevant in times of crisis, or moments of local/national/ global decisionmaking.
Jessica Clark is the research director of the Center for Social Media at American University, where she heads up the Future of Public Media project. She is currently working on a book about the evolution of the progressive media sector with Tracy Van Slyke of The Media Consortium. Together they edit a related blog, Build the Echo. She is also the editor-at-large for In These Times, an award-winning monthly magazine of progressive news, analysis and cultural reporting.
March 11, 2009
Locating Fair Use in the Space Between Fandom and the Art World (Part One)
Earlier this year, I received the following account of the experiences of Stacia Yeapanis, a young artist who straddles the art world and fandom: she produces videos which appropriate footage from popular television shows for the purposes of critical commentary and artworks which use as fannish television shows or deploys The Simsgame world as their raw materials.
Her videos, produced for art installations, very much resemble those produced by female fan vidders. As an experiment, she posted one of her vids on YouTube to see how people would respond and as a consequence, she found herself confronting the mechanisms by which corporate media regulates the production and circulation of participatory culture.
I found that her story raised important issues which I wanted to focus attention on through this blog. It came at a time when organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been raising concerns about YouTube policies to police content which push well beyond established norms in copyright protection and erode Fair Use rights of contributors. The EFF's Fred Von Lohmann posted some important critiques of YouTube's new practices in early February, including some recommendations which would have a big impact on the vidding world: "YouTube should fix the Content ID system. Now. The system should not remove videos unless there is a match between the video and audio tracks of a submitted fingerprint." While I have sometimes been critical of the EFF for adopting stances which undercut the Fair Use rights of fans, this time they are defending the rights of anyone to make transformative use of media content via videos.
Today, I am sharing her story and her video. On Friday, I will be sharing response to the stories from others who have been on the front lines of the struggles over fair use and grassroots expression. I'm hoping this will spark some further discussions in fandom, in the art world, and in the circles that shaping intellectual property law.
"Confessions of an Aca-Arta-Femi-Fan"
By Stacia Yeapanis
On December 1st, 2008, I received a takedown notice from YouTube in reference to my first fanvid "We Have a Right to Be Angry." Fox Broadcasting had blocked the video using an automated video ID system that identifies copyrighted content. After much anxiety, I removed my video on December 5th.
In "We Have a Right to be Angry" I appropriate footage from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Charmed. It is edited to "Invincible" sung by Pat Benatar. By uniting the fictional feminist icons of my adult life, Buffy, Xena, and the Halliwell sisters, with a real-life feminist icon from my childhood, Pat Benatar, I explore my own complicated position as a feminist in contemporary society. The women in the video vacillate between running, lying low, and fighting back. As these women from different TV shows pass a sword around, they share collective power that extends beyond the boundaries of their fictional universes. They are fighting cultural patriarchy on its own terms and they are doing it together.
During the 5 days between getting the notice and removing the video, I was extremely conflicted about what to do. As an appropriation artist, I already had a basic understanding of copyright law, and I believe my video falls under fair use. But I was only vaguely aware of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the takedown notice procedures. For example, YouTube did inform me that I had the option to dispute Fox's claim, but I didn't know how long I had to make this decision. If I took too long to consult an attorney, could the situation escalate to an official Cease and Desist letter? If I disputed based on the doctrine of fair use, would Fox back down or take me to court?
I watched my own fanvid over and over again. It seemed to have the answers. In light of the takedown notice, a new meaning that was floating beneath the surface emerged for me. The video was always about the struggle of any feminized (read: marginalized or disadvantaged) group. It was about aggression and injustice. It was about collective power that takes place on many fronts. But now it is also a metaphor for the struggle over meaning between producers and consumers. Mass media corporations are clinging to rigid ways of thinking about who controls meaning and how meaning is made. The feminist icons in my video are now also fighting outdated copyright laws that have begun to prevent the free flow of culture. Their swords are metaphors for fair use. I felt that if I didn't dispute, I would be letting Buffy and the others down. I wanted to fight with them.
At the same time I also began to worry about the difference between theory and practice. Theoretically, fanvids fall under fair use. Most legal scholars who are writing about fanvids in law reviews come to this conclusion, at least where the video is concerned. I would argue that even the uncut audio, which is more often assumed to be infringing, is transformed merely through juxtaposition with the video. But there don't seem to be any case precedents to this effect. Theoretically, appropriation art also falls under fair use. But as we learned from Rogers vs. Koons, conceptual art that rests on a foundation of postmodern theory does not fare well in court. Understanding appropriation art, like fanvids, it isn't a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of having specialized information and understanding how context affects meaning. The Art World is a subculture that is as misunderstood by non-members as Fandom is.
In all of my research since the takedown notice, I have yet to find any discussion online about the shared interests of the Contemporary Art World, Media Fandom and Media Scholarship. Professional appropriation artists seem to have flown under the radar, except in cases when the artist begins to make a lot of money. The few cases I know of (Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince) have all involved appropriation of printed images and only Koons actually had his day in court. (He lost.) At this stage in my research, I'm not aware of any cases involving appropriation art that uses video or audio. The distribution of contemporary art seems to still have the invisibility that fanvid distribution used to have before the advent of the Internet.
I have this suspicion that if I just show my work inside the traditional gallery system, I will be safer from litigation. But if I want to reach across the boundaries of the art world and blur the line between mass-media culture and fine art by posting my work on YouTube, I better watch out. It's almost as if the law is barring me from pursuing hybridity. And that's really the foundation of my practice. My work is a synthesis of conceptual art, already a synthesis of cultural theory and art, and fandom. I'm responding to the ironic appropriation art of the '80s and '90s by adding my sincere Fandom into the mix in order to question cultural hierarchy (i.e. the idea that "high" culture is better or more important than "low" culture). If I can't appropriate, then I can't make my work.
I removed the video from YouTube with the intention of arming myself. It was clear I wasn't quite ready for the big battle against the Big Bad. I want to be part of the movement for reform of copyright law, but there are two problems. One is financial. I don't have any money to go to court. Even if I were to win the case, the costs alone could have a devastating effect on my life. I am an emerging conceptual artist. That means I don't really get paid to make artwork at this point in my career. And two, I'm not sure if I could win. I fear that my hybrid position as artist/ fan and the fact that my art practice rests on conceptual, not visual, strategies would be detrimental to my case and to the cause.
In the next 5 years, maybe this fear will seem absurd. Maybe by then, the law will have stretched itself to make room for the various cultural developments of the last 40 years, namely, postmodern theory and the destabilization of cultural hierarchy through appropriation art, fanvids and other forms of remix culture. In the meantime, it would be beneficial to have more conversation about the parallel development of appropriation in the Art World and in Fandom. It seems pretty significant that fanvids and appropriation art have been developing simultaneously since the '70s and yet their creators seem utterly unaware of each other. There needs to be a stronger acknowledgement of the overlap in the cultural work we are all doing as scholars, artists, fans and lawyers. We are all producers and consumers of our culture. We are all warriors, slayers and witches.
Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based emerging artist and a media fan. Using strategies of accumulation, collection, appropriation and juxtaposition, she explores the emotional, political, and philosophical significance of various forms of cultural participation. By creating hybrid works that employ the histories and languages of both "Low" Culture and "High" Culture, she reveals the cultural and personal spaces where these binaries overlap. Yeapanis currently uses embroidery, video and photography to explore how individuals create meaning from mass media products.
March 6, 2009
Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Three of Four)
Dayna Cunningham: Thank you for reminding me that we are talking about institutions and cultures and politics and that media are nothing more than tools within these contexts. We need social organizations, not just technology. Drat. I was hoping for a quick fix.
I saw a Washington Post poll, reported on Inauguration Day, of black and white Americans asking their views on the persistence of racism in the US. Only 44% of African Americans polled said that racism is still a major problem. A majority of blacks said it was not (whites, true to past patterns, in large majorities said that racism is no longer a major problem). However, a follow up question asked whether the respondents still witnessed or experienced racism in their daily lives and a significant majority of African Americans said that little had changed for them in their local communities and in their daily experience of racism. Most blacks reported continuing denials of service and jobs, less access to housing, and racialized police harassment.
Yet, the majority of blacks interviewed chose to say that racism is no longer a major problem. I think that shows a pretty sophisticated parsing of the moment--its huge symbolic significance and its limited practical reach. I think that black responses to the poll suggest that perhaps patriotism, the flag, the Capital building, the White House, and other icons that have been very fraught for African Americans for a very long time, have a more elastic meaning than they did before this election. See, Funkadelics, "Chocolate City" for a longer and more danceable discussion of the cultural possibilities of a black presidency. I believe that this moment is not just an artifact of a black person having been elected: Obama's personal integrity, intelligence, political stance and skillful communication have done a lot to create it. And while this is not always the substance of freedom discourse, it certainly sets a welcoming stage.
Thinking about that welcoming stage, and in the vein of the barbershop comment you mentioned, there have been mountains of micro-gestures since the Inauguration that have gotten a lot of air time (mainly phone conversations in my case) in the black community but appear largely to have gone unnoticed in the mainstream. Small as they are, I have to say that these gestures have evoked very strong positive reactions for me and, I imagine, for many other African Americans. Rev. Joseph Lowery began his benediction with "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Negro National Anthem. He did not sing it. He simply spoke it as a prayer. He did not name it and the black audience at the Inauguration did not openly respond to it in the moment. Just a quiet reminder amongst the folks that this was Black President Day. Several friends sent me the links to it on You Tube. My heart leapt each time I heard it and I felt full of energy, optimism and even ambition. There was footage of the new President doing the Bump, a very popular dance in our college days. Perhaps I am over-thinking it, but these clips said to me that this man has shared cultural and social experiences that defined our coming of age as black people making our way as the first generation to integrate at some scale into elite white institutions. The quip was that he went home and played Parliament and the Funkadelics ("One Nation Under a Groove") in the (black) Inauguration after-party at the White House.
My black friends are also gleeful about the moment, replayed again and again in the press, when Biden is cutting up before the second swearing-in and Obama, deadpan, grabs his arm, turns him firmly in the direction of the podium and signals it is time to get to work. When I told a friend about it, a cultural linguist, he said, "thank you, that story is a gift." Another came from an unlikely source: Nancy Pelosi in her remarks first made reference to Malcolm X's "ballot or the bullet" before invoking King. Hmmm, interesting, that she began there.
Obviously these are each the smallest of gestures that could mean nothing. We can recall that Clinton, when first elected made a few choice micro-gestures: playing the saxophone, visiting black churches, showing obvious comfort in the company of blacks, even earning himself the now patently insulting moniker "first black president" in some circles--but in my view, he quickly squandered the trust and enthusiasm those signals generated when he failed to make a significant investment in urban policy, anti-poverty measures, civil rights laws and other matters important to blacks.
Yet, much in the same way that racism and degradation are often conveyed in tiny signals that over time crush the spirit, Obama's little moments, I think, so far are building hope and a sense that something might shift. They are creating space. I see a broad discourse now evolving, an Obama mythology celebrating his wisdom, principles, strength and resoluteness against the Republicans. His daily triumphs--one day against corporate greed, the next, his kids' Midwestern flintiness in the face of DC snow. I hear the stories again and again told by people hungry for strong humanist leadership and feeling relief as they begin taking stock of how bad things became under Bush. They speak of enjoying and sharing with friends the moments that are available on YouTube. I always participate in these happy exchanges, adding my own favorites--and of course I replay the savory moments on YouTube. This little ritual fixes the small daily victories in my mind and prepares me to continue the struggle another day.
The struggle. No surprise, as the Washington Post respondents testify, the real work of unwinding the racial privilege and disadvantage produced in the last several centuries continues and we need much more than symbols. The critical question for us, then, is can we fill this new space Obama is creating? Can we create or revive the practices, institutions, and discourses that you talk about, such that we might advance black freedom discourse, and through that, improve democracy? What might it actually look like to do so, and how might technology help?
Let's be specific. Everyone loves a good crisis (paraphrasing journalist, P. Sainath). The economic collapse and Obama stimulus package give us a chance to fix some of the more polarizing weaknesses of the New Deal which, with labor protections, mortgage and educational assistance, gave whites a powerful pathway back to the middle class and, by withholding these protections and benefits from black and brown, created new tools to entrench and racialize poverty. The stimulus will likely provide enough material aid to cities, where the majority of black and brown people live, to make some progress and Obama's powerful populist messaging inspires hope. At the same time, the money is coming fast and many of the current institutional arrangements, from community revitalization and workforce development protocols to banking practices to local government procurement policies will likely help reinforce the inequitable status quo.
Yet, a good chunk of the money to cities is infrastructure spending and, in an amazing turn, the Building Trades, once seen as among the most conservative and racially exclusive unions in the labor movement, have come to understand that the future of their unions as older white members begin retiring en masse in the next five years, is black and brown youth. They train 100,000 new workers a year and have made a commitment to open their doors to black and brown youth as the stimulus opens up the job market for their members. Finally, a lot some of the money is targeted for green infrastructure, an area so new that there may not be as much establishment in place to thwart opportunity.
What practices, institutions and discourses might help avoid the dangers and align the possibilities now arising to address poverty and exclusion in a fuller and deeper way? There are loads of community organizations in minority and white communities that will need to figure out right now how they will respond. What role could black freedom discourse and your idea of a "self-consciously multiracial and multicultural community of practice" have? How can the world of networked publics help here?
A customary black discourse about the dangers of this moment ("Remember, the New Deal threw us overboard") is entirely in keeping with the historic role of the freedom discourse to remind us that the best-laid plans can overlook or punish the vulnerable and despised. But historically the discourse coupled dire warnings with inspired hopes and perhaps the Obama presidency gives inspired hopes new grounding--not just in micro symbols but in a senior White House staff that includes black people who know the full, sad, history of the New Deal, lived the multi-generational consequences of its exclusions, and have the expertise and the authority to help avoid the same mistake. A Facebook network (my son created a page for me about a year ago and it remained completely inactive until last month when about 10 people my age sent me friend requests) like the one used to support Prop 8 in California could help build base support for their efforts, bringing pressure through on-line mobilization where they need it and pressuring them when they veer off.
But we need more to get this opportunity right. We have to figure out how to use new media to go beyond what, at its best, I think it currently does best for most people-- serving as an exchange for faith-sustaining or mobilizing stories.
We need vehicles to quickly transmit legislative developments and funding implications to networks of community organizations as the stimulus hits the states and cities.
We need technology-enabled learning environments to share lessons about implementing government funding programs and best practices in green building.
We need creative platforms for community groups to collectively discover overlooked local resources like brown fields that could be redeveloped, and then to collectively plan how to rebuild their neighborhoods.
And perhaps this is where your idea of consciously multiracial hush harbors comes in: we need spaces for older white workers to explore how they can find common identity and make common cause with the young black and brown turks coming into their hiring halls and apprenticeship programs.
I desperately hope that these ideas aren't just more of my ill-advised hope for a quick technology fix and that somewhere, better minds than mine are already at work on tools that can help these projects. What do you think?
March 4, 2009
Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part Two of Four)
Henry Jenkins: Thanks for this really rich provocation, Dayna. These are questions which we need to be discussing as a society and they should be central to our understanding of "civic media," "social media," whatever we want to call it.
As a media scholar, my first response to any request to develop new "tools" is to ask what we are really looking for. As I review your language in the closing paragraph, you variously call for "media technology," "new spaces," "tools and platforms," "venues and mechanisms." This range of terms suggests the degree to which it is not easy to separate out technological resources from the cultural practices which grow up around them.
So, the African American Press was powerful not because of specially made tools (the newspaper had a long history) but rather because of the institutions which emerged that allowed those tools to be used in a way that served a specific community, because of the editorial decisions made by Black journalists, editors, and readers which allowed newspapers to serve a particular kind of community (one defined along racial rather than purely geographic terms and thus in some senses a virtual community in our modern sense of the term), one which allowed for the emergence of a particular kind of discourse which took shape through news coverage, editorials, and letters to the editor, and so forth. Similarly, the black church wasn't so much a technology or a platform as a particular kind of social organization, a particular appropriation or articulation of religious oratory to serve historically specific needs of the black community.
At the risk of betraying my MIT heritage, my first response is to say that the issues you pose are least likely to be addressed on a purely technological level. These are fundamentally cultural, social, political, economic, and institutional problems and only secondarily issues of technology. It isn't as if what the world lacks is a hammer and then suddenly we can nail everything down.
It may be that what's required is getting existing tools into different hands or insuring that those who are apt to deploy them for certain communities have access to the skills and resources they need to turn them towards new purposes. So, rather than looking for new "tools," we should be looking for new practices, new institutions, and new discourses. And indeed, everything else here points us in that direction, starting with your emphasis on "black voice."
One of the challenges of achieving a "black public sphere" in the modern media landscape is precisely the porousness of contemporary communications. Most of the historic institutions and practices you discuss here were hiding in plain site. Historians have talked about the "hush harbor" tradition in black America -- going back to slavery days -- the need to find black-only spaces where communication could occur within the race. Both the black press and the black church as you discuss them here are in some senses "hush harbors" where blacks could communicate with blacks largely outside of the vision of white America.
Yes, in theory, as a white southerner growing up in Atlanta, I could have read the black Atlanta press. I certainly knew it existed. I may have even seen a copy or two. But it wasn't something that I would have regularly come into contact with. Watch a documentary series like Eyes on the Prize and one of the most powerful things you get is the sense that black camera crews working for black broadcasters captured very different voices and perspectives, saw the world through fundamentally different eyes than white camera crews working for "mainstream" broadcast networks. There was a sense that what was said in the black church stayed in the black community. What was said in the black barbershops and beauty parlors, to cite another important locale for framing black critique, stayed there. A black public sphere was possible because African America was in many very real ways a bounded community.
Now, let's compare this to what happened to Rev. Wright, whose sermons were directed at a predominantly but no longer exclusively black congregation, who would have understood them as part of this tradition of "freedom discourse." But in the modern media scape, messages are much harder to contain; they travel and spread everywhere. So, the Wright videos get inserted into a platform like YouTube, which embodies what Yochai Benkler (Wealth of Networks) might discuss as a shared space for differentially interested groups to conduct their communications business. The videos get picked up by bloggers and podcasters; they get broadcast and reframed on Fox News; they end up in the Washington Post; they get discussed on talk radio; they get referenced in political debates; they get reframed in political advertising; etc., etc., etc.
What Wright's comments might have meant in a black-only or black-dominanted discursive space is very different from what they meant once they got inserted into these other contexts. And that's the very nature of the modern media landscape: messages can't be locked down; they move fluidly from community to community. The black and white churches or barbershops were in different neighborhoods. Today, black-oriented and white-oriented websites are only a mouse click apart. In an odd way, the kind of autonomous black voice you are discussing may be a byproduct of segregation. Not that America today isn't in many ways still a deeply segregated society but segregation operates through different mechanisms, follows a different logic, and so this requires a new set of communication strategies and practices.
We need to distinguish between "black voice" as directed at a bounded black community ("the hush harbor" model) and black voice as directed at a mixed audience. Clearly someone like Frederic Douglas who you cite here was very adept at both kinds of communications. His historic impact had as much to do with his ability to form alliances and maintain relations with white journalists, activists, and literary figures and to speak to white audiences as it had to do with his ability to communicate within the black community. The same would be true of someone like Sojourner Truth, who got a large chunk of her support from those white middle class women involved in first wave feminism.
Implicit in your model here, though, is the idea that there needs to be a relatively independent space for communications within a racial minority where ideas can be formed, tested, debated, and refined, where communities can be mobilized, which may function outside of spaces which are primarily focused on communications across the races.
Is there no possibility that in the future "freedom discourse" will come through a self-consciously multi-racial and multi-cultural community of practice rather than within one defined through segregation? I am not talking about a "post-racial" society which seeks to imagine that racial categories (and the injustices attached to them) are no longer operative. But rather, some kind of communication space where people of mixed backgrounds come together to identify common interests as they work through our complex and troubling history of racial relations. I'm not sure we know yet what such a community looks like in practice, but does this theoretical possibility necessarily mean a loss of "black voice"? Can "black voice" only be defined in isolation? Maybe I'm just looking for a revived and retooled version of what Jesse Jackson used to call a "rainbow coalition".
Obama's strength has been his ability to communicate across the remaining racial divides in our society -- to speak a language which can gain acceptance from white, hispanic, and Asian-American voters even as it inspires high participation by black voters. Early on, there was some speculation that he might not be able to gain the support of the black community because he did not speak the language of the black church and the civil rights movement. In some ways, he does borrow their metaphors and cadence when he speaks, but as you note, he's had to distance himself from some of the spaces where black critique has historically been framed.
In one of the interviews after the election, Obama suggested that he was no longer able to go to his barbershop to get a haircut. The "mainstream" media treated this comment as an example of how the president-elect gets cut off from the practices of everyday life, ceases to be an "average American." But, given the historic role of the barbershop as a "hush harbor," it struck me that the comment could be read at a deeper level as suggesting his growing isolation from the black community and its critical practices and political discourses.
One is tempted to argue that African-Americans (and other minorities) enjoy greater opportunities to communicate beyond their own communities now than ever before. But we need to be careful in making that claim. Recent research suggests that there are far fewer minority characters on prime time network television shows this season than there were five years ago. There remains an enormous ratings gap between white and black Americans: the highest rating shows among black Americans often are among the lowest rated shows among white Americans. The exception, curiously enough, are reality television programs, like American Idol, which historically have had mixed race casts.
We've seen some increased visibility of black journalists and commentators throughout the 2008 campaign season -- and they may remain on the air throughout an Obama administration -- but we need to watch to make sure that they do not fade into the background again. But, if we follow your argument, even those figures who make it into the mainstream media are, at best, relaying critiques and discourses which originate within the black community and at worse, they are involved in a process of self-censorship which makes them an imperfect vehicle for those messages.
The paradox of race and media may be that black Americans have lost access to many of the institutions and practices which sustained them during an era of segregation without achieving the benefits promised by a more "integrated" media environment. And that makes this a moment of risk -- as well as opportunity -- for minority Americans.
I suspect we are over-stating the problem in some ways. There are certainly some serious constraints on minority participation in cyberspace but a world of networked publics also does offer some opportunities for younger African-Americans to deliberate together and form opinion, which we need to explore more fully here. But before I move in that direction, I want to throw this back to you to react to what I've written so far.
March 2, 2009
Can African-Americans Find Their Voice in Cyberspace?: A Conversation With Dayna Cunningham (Part One of Four)
One of the most powerful sessions of my class on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement last fall came as a result of a visit from Dayna Cunningham from MIT's Community Innovators Lab shortly after the 2008 election. Cunningham challenged me and my students to think about whether new media tools and platforms might help address the erosion of the black public sphere. She argued that the structures that had sustained the black community during the Civil Rights era were collapsing without the emergence of new structures that would provide the basis for strong critiques of the operations of power and that might be used to hold Obama accountable to his own community. And she asked those of us who were trying to build tools or curriculum to support democratic citizenship to factor these concerns into our design and planning process.
Wanting to bring this exchange to a larger audience, I asked Cunningham if she would be willing to engage in a written conversation which I could share with the readers of this blog. Such conversations across disciplinary and racial borders are rare these days even as the election of the first African-American president mandates that all of us re-examine our country's racial politics from whatever vantage point we may see the world. This exchange took place over more than a month's time. I will be sharing it here in four installments, hoping that each piece may spark further reflection and conversation within the community of people invested in better understanding the future of media and its impact on our society. What follows ranges from the history of the black press and the black church to speculations about the design of democratic structures in cyberspace.
Dayna Cunningham: It was great to have the opportunity to talk to your Comparative Media Studies class and pose questions about how new media might help to address the paradox I have been grappling with: the US has elected its first black president at a time when black institutions are weak and black civil society is in deep disarray. What will happen to black voice now that we have this black president? By black voice I mean in particular the longstanding tradition of bottom-up critique of American culture, society and democracy by one of its most despised groups.
Let me start by saying that from where I stand, collective discourse, debate, dissent and demand are crucially necessary for building the political will to advance African Americans' equity claims. Black voice is critical to this process. I am focused here on that part of black voice that prioritizes political strategies and collective action. Thus, I use the terms "black voice" and "freedom discourse" interchangeably. Because our struggles are counter-majoritarian, because therefore, the "sensible" thing to do is to ignore them and go on with the existing frameworks that make these struggles invisible, it is critical for black people to be able to come together and make sense of their conditions, determine what they want to change and then to figure out how they will make change. This is very different activity from supporting a particular candidate or even a legislative agenda. Electoral and legislative campaigns by definition demand cultivation of the white electoral majority's opinions and carry inherent risk that they will censure claims or interests that are unpleasant to that majority. Without a prior agenda-setting discourse enabling African American communities to arrive at some collective decisions about their shared future, I can't imagine either innovation in support of, or accountability to, black concerns.
Black voice stems from the schizophrenic daily experience of being un-free in a society that claims freedom as its first principle. Black voice provides a unique, and I would argue, necessary, perspective on the failures of American democratic institutions. Frederick Douglass, asked to address an abolitionist group on the subject of Independence Day, captured it best when he chose to "see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view:"
[Y]our high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. . . .. The
rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your
fathers, is shared by you, not by me. . ... This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.
You may rejoice, I must mourn. . ."
Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" July 5, 1852
Black voice has been shaped throughout its history by a vibrant and diverse intellectual and popular tradition with wide-ranging debate about black conditions and freedom strategies. From Frederick Douglass's Abolitionist Movement in the mid-1800s, through the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and '70's, each successive wave of African American intellectual and political currents also was supported by organization in the black community that enabled discourse, agenda-setting and collective action. All of these elements were critical to the unfolding of black freedom movements. The multiple intellectual, political and cultural sub-currents that emerged from these movements also led to the formation of a diversity of local organizations and efforts.
Black voice cannot be separated from the black church and its prophetic tradition--an unsparing, scripturally-grounded moral judgment against the immoral exercise of power and a calling to account of the government and powerful institutions for mistreating the powerless. From Douglass, who compared the US to "a nation whose crimes. . . were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin!" to King, who declared, "America is going to hell if we don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life," the African American hope for freedom is bound up with God's love of justice and there is little separation between the struggle for justice and the preaching of the word.
The African American press also played a crucial role in popularizing and deepening black freedom discourse and in inspiring collective black political action. The nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal began in 1827 with the declaration: 'We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.'' The Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier were among the largest national black newspapers, reaching circulation in the hundreds of thousands. The Defender was read extensively in the South, smuggled across the Mason/ Dixon line by black Pullman porters and entertainers, passed from person to person, and read aloud in barbershops and churches. Both the Defender and the Courier engaged in explicit and effective political campaigns such as the Defender's support of the Great Migration that saw the exodus of over 100,000 people from the South to Chicago, and the Courier's "Double V for Victory" campaign, joined by most of the other major black newspapers and advocating an end to racial repression in the US as the US fought fascism overseas.
In addition to the general circulation papers, many black political organizations had their own organs--the NAACP's Crisis Magazine, first published by WEB Dubois; Marcus Garvey's Negro World, and during the black power movement in the 1960s and '70s, black nationalist, Pan- Africanist or socialist papers. These publications at times reached circulation in the hundreds of thousands with polemics about the relative advantages of various ideologies for addressing the conditions of African Americans and featuring sharp political debates on critical issues from segregation and joblessness, police brutality and education system failures to southern African freedom movements, and the war in Vietnam.
The great diversity and pervasiveness of black freedom discourse throughout helps to explain the generally progressive bent of African American politics today. However, I would argue that today, black politics has largely been reduced to the electoral and legislative spheres; African American media too often promote black celebrity and individual advancement, and along with much of the black civic infrastructure, rarely focus on freedom discourse as a means of exploring strategies for collective political action and accountability to black interests. Perhaps only the Church has survived as an independent space for black voice--and even the Church is sometimes compromised by "prosperity gospel" preachers who have little time for freedom discourse . Moreover, the uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, (whose preaching that the US risked damnation as a result of its role in the Gulf War was not unlike King's prophesizing that America would be damned for its failure to address poverty, or for that matter, King's condemnation of the US role in Vietnam) silenced even the progressive black Church for the duration of this election. While every white Democratic presidential hopeful in memory has, as a matter of course, cultivated highly visible relationships with black clergy, Obama, was forced to renounce his ties. More than an attempt to alienate whites and to cut Obama off from his core base, many African Americans saw this as an effort to de-legitimate black voice.
Has Obama's election signaled the dawn of a post-racial moment in which black voice no longer is relevant or necessary? Not likely. African American progress has ground to a halt since the early 1970s, coinciding with a series of policy assaults that shifted massive state and federal resources from increasingly-black cities to suburbs. These policy assaults, cutting social advancement while criminalizing poverty, occurred during Democratic as well as Republican administrations and at all levels of government regardless of the presence of black elected officials. Black elected officials continue to be isolated on major policy issues of concern to black communities within federal and state legislatures. These conditions and political dilemmas are structural in our majoritarian polity and are unlikely to change significantly with the election of a black president. The majority of whites did not support Obama (according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, McCain/Palin carried the white popular vote nationally, 55-43 percent). They are even less likely to support the kinds of radical policy interventions needed to reverse the last thirty years' conscious and systematic disinvestment in black communities. Without a revivified black freedom discourse and politically energized black public that articulate and press for accountability to its
legitimate claims and join forces with immigrants and other dispossessed groups also struggling for a foothold of inclusion in US society, such interventions will never happen.
Has Obama's campaign, now being institutionalized as an ongoing organization, with its highly effective organization, social networking, face-to-face outreach, and vast fundraising capabilities, rendered black civic space obsolete? Can it substitute for black black freedome discourse? If not the Obama post-election process, where will the new spaces for black freedom discourse exist?
I would argue that though it will create rich opportunities for people to gain political experience and to engage in important forms of collective action, the Obama post-election process is unlikely to be a sound substitute for the political process of black freedom discourse. Like the campaign, singularly focused on electing the candidate, an ongoing effort to support his presidential initiatives is unlikely to be structured to invite discourse, debate, dissent or demand. How would it provide opportunities for people to hear a range of policy proposals and decide which ones they prefer? How would it enable debate? How would it give access to deeply marginalized black voices--gang-involved kids, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, HIV/AIDS survivors? What if important sectors of black communities fundamentally disagree with the first black president on issues of great urgency and concern to them? What if Pres. Obama wants to do the right thing but needs public pressure to accede?
The need for a 21st century freedom discourse is paramount. The Obama campaign proved that the connection of media technology and organizing holds much promise for constructing electoral movements. Now, how can that technology help us construct new spaces for black and other subaltern voice? Which tools and platforms will help collective deliberation and debate, not just aggregate or pass on information? What venues and mechanisms will aid formation of political identities of dispersed and despised groups? How can these groups find opportunities for speech back to the majority? On these questions, Henry, I look to you and your colleagues for help.
Dayna L. Cunningham is Executive Director of the Community Innovators Lab at MIT. CoLab is a center of research and practice within the MIT Department of Urban Planning. Combining on-the-ground planning and development expertise of DUSP faculty and students with local community knowledge, CoLab helps community residents and leaders create innovative experiments and living examples that address urban sustainability challenges. In 2006-2007, Cunningham directed the ELIAS Project, an MIT-based collaboration between business, ngos and government that seeks to use processes of profound innovation to advance economic, social and environmental sustainability.
Cunningham was an Associate Director at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1997-2004. At Rockefeller she funded initiatives that examined the relationship between democracy and race, changing racial dynamics and new conceptions of race in the U.S., as well as innovation in the area of civil rights legal work. From 2004-2006 she was associated with Public Interest Projects, a non-profit project management and philanthropic consulting firm based in New York City, where she managed foundation collaboratives on social justice issues.
Before coming to the Rockefeller Foundation, Cunningham worked as a voting rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, litigating cases in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere in the South, and briefly as an officer for the New York City Program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Cunningham is a 2004 graduate of the Sloan Fellows MBA program of the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and a juris doctor degree from New York University School of Law.
January 16, 2009
Loomings 2009: What Obama Might Have Learned from Moby-Dick
The following post was written by Wyn Kelley, a Melville scholar, who is collaborating with Project NML (New Media Literacies) on our teacher's strategy guide on "Reading in a Participatory Culture." The work we've been doing on Moby-Dick would not have been possible without Wyn's passion for the topic and her commitment to teaching. More than any one else, she helped me to see that there are fans of serious literature just as there are fans of popular culture and that we have much to learn from each other about how we engage with texts that really matter to us. She recently shared with me these interesting reflections on Obama's reading preferences and what they might tell us about his vision for the country. I wanted to share them with you -- along with my own best wishes on the dawning of a new era in American history.
"Loomings 2009"
by Wyn Kelley
"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
After September 11, 2001, some commentators wondered if Melville's phrases in the opening of Moby-Dick prophesied a twenty-first-century war in Afghanistan. This year, as we observe a new inauguration, his words about an election for the presidency might seem strangely apt as well. Few have considered, however, whether "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL" matters to the government of the United States.
Now, apparently, it does. According to a statement on his homepage at Facebook, as well as in various interviews and profiles, incoming president Barack Obama's favorite books are Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. What does this information suggest about our new president?
Song of Solomon, the story of an African-American man searching for his identity, seems a likely inspiration for Obama's account of a (somewhat) similar quest, Dreams from My Father. But Moby-Dick? One would hardly associate Obama with Captain Ahab, a man of furious passion bent on revenge. Nor does he much resemble Ishmael. As verbally inclined as Melville's narrator, Obama nevertheless has assumed political leadership, whereas Ishmael prefers the role of observer.
Perhaps he is an island prince, like Queequeg? Yes, he comes from a distant Pacific island, but Obama has taken his place within American society as Queequeg never does. Does he, like Bulkington, have a soul that can "keep the open independence of her sea"? It may be too soon to tell.
One possible answer appears in Obama's book, Dreams from My Father. In contemplating an early failure when working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama describes himself as like "the first mate on a sinking ship" (166). Call me Starbuck?
Ishmael portrays Starbuck as a "long, earnest man." He admires his valor: "Looking into his eyes you seemed to see there the yet-lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life." Ishmael pays tribute to his "august dignity," which he associates with a "just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!"
Starbuck, however, goes down with the Pequod. Obama took the helm of what he saw as a sinking ship and steered it to Washington.
On further reflection, we might conclude that Obama is less like Melville's human characters and more like the whales, who maintain their equilibrium in widely diverse regions. "Oh, man!" says Ishmael, "model thyself after the whale! . . . Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. . . . [L]ike the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own." Perhaps our new president has the whale's "rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness" with which to endure the hazards of nature--or American politics.
Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Faculty at MIT and has published
extensively on Melville. Other projects include working with the New Media Literacies
group at MIT and the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
in New Bedford, MA.
November 28, 2008
What Media Literacy Educators Need to Know About Fair Use...
Some time ago, this blog ran an interview with Pat Aufderheide (Center for Social Media) and Peter Jaszi (The Program on Informational Justice and Intellectual Property) about the work they have been doing developing Codes of Best Practices for Fair Use for a variety of different communities, including documentary producers and the DIY media world.
Last week, the team, working with long time media literacy veteran upstart Renee Hobbes Renee Hobbs (The Media Education Lab), released a new report, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. It is a follow up to an earlier report which described "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy." The report comes with the endorsement of many key Media Literacy organizations including Action Coalition for Media Education, Media Education Foundation, National Association for Media Literacy Education, National Council for Teachers of English, and the Visual Communications Studies Division of the International Communications Association.
I've been watching this initiative develop over time, sharing the team's belief that copyright law (and confusion about fair use) represents one of the biggest obstacles for the development of meaningful resources for supporting media literacy education. We hosted a brainstorm with media educators at the last Media in Transition conference. I am particularly pleased to see that the report moves beyond the issue of what individual teachers do in their own classroom to address how and when we might share curricular materials with each other, an issue I've been pushing hard in my conversations with the authors.
In our own work, we regularly encounter teachers who are anxious about introducing any copyrighted works in their classroom and I've had at least one project shut down by university attorneys who were convinced we were exceeding our Fair Use rights in quoting from films and other existing media texts. We have been struggling through the work we are doing on New Media Literacies to get enough room to be able to show short segments from the media we are discussing. To date, we've been developing our materials using the best practices statement for documentary filmmakers and we are excited to see further clarification of what these principles mean in the specific context of media literacy education. As you will see if you look at the materials we are producing, we rely on Creative Commons content where-ever possible and where it is not possible, we are creating very strong markers of attribution. I know that many media educators read this blog, so I wanted to flag this new report for you.
Thanks to the work of Hobbes, Aufderheide, and Jaszi, many of us can walk into our classrooms with greater confidence that what we are doing falls squarely within current understandings of intellectual property law.
November 24, 2008
"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.
Parents and teachers often want to structure young people's time online. Yet your research suggests that some of the most productive experiences come when young people are "hanging out" or "messing around" with computers in relatively unstructured ways. Explain.
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.
You write about "genres of participation." Explain this concept. What are the most important genres at the present time and why?
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.
You note throughout the report a broadening of who gets to "geek out" in today's youth culture. Explain. What factors are reshaping cultural attitudes towards "geek experiences"? Who gets to "geek out" now who didn't get to do so in the past?
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.
You are using terms to describe these experiences which are much closer to those which might be used by young people than those deployed by parents and teachers. What are the implications of that shift in the terms of the discussion?
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 see changes in discussions about learning and education, youth voices and perspectives need to be brought to the table.
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.
Patricia G. Lange is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her areas of interest for the Digital Youth Project are centered around using theories from anthropology and linguistics to understand the cultural dynamics of video creation, reception, and exchange among kids and youth. She is studying YouTube as well as video blogging groups to gain insight into the cultural aspects of video sharing and how these practices change ideas about the public and private. Lange is exploring how the content and form of videos as well as material video sharing and response practices serve as sites of identity negotiation, emotional expression, and promotion of public discourse in increasingly video-mediated, online milieu. She has recently published articles in a variety of journals including: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Discourse Studies, Anthropology of Work Review, First Monday, and The Scholar and Feminist Online.
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.
November 21, 2008
"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part One)
On Thursday, the Digital Youth Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, released "Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out," a report on a massive ethnographic investigation into the place of new communications and media technologies in the lives of American young people. I have had the distinct honor to watch this research take shape over the past few years, to get to know the core researchers on the team, and to attend meetings where they struggled over how to process the sheer volume of data and insights they have gathered. The team is a model for collaborative research with senior faculty and graduate students working side by side across disciplines and universities to make sense of problems which none of them could fully understand on their own. You will get a sense of the dialogic nature of this research in the interview which follows, a conversation which involves nine members of the research team, sharing insights from their own specific research projects as well as expressing the rich synthesis that emerged from their collaboration. The report represents one key outgrowth of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Learning and Youth initiative, which also funds our own Project New Media Literacies initiative, along with providing support for such key educational researchers as Sasha Barab, James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Howard Gardner, Howard Rheingold, David Buckingham, and Katie Salens, among many others.
"Hanging Out..." is staggering in its scope and in its implications. The researchers take seriously young people, their lives online, their subcultural practices, their identity play, their nascent civic engagement, their dating and social interactions, their involvement with fan production practices, and much much more. What emerges is a complex picture of how they are living through and around emerging technologies, how they are innovative in their use of new tools and platforms, and how they are struggling with the contradictions of their lives. This report is in no simple way a celebration of the digital generation, though it respects the meaningfulness of their involvement with digital and mobile technologies: it raises questions about inequality of access and participation; it points to conflicts between adults and youth around the deployment of new media; it identifies risks and opportunities which sites such as MySpace and YouTube pose for their young participants. Those of us who care about young people and education will be struggling with some of the implications of their research for a long time to come. I am proud to have a chance to offer this interview with some of the key members of the Digital Youth Project team over the next three installments of my blog.
By way of background, here's how the Digital Youth Project is described on their homepage:
Since the early 1980s, digital media have held out the promise of more engaged, child-centered learning opportunities. The advent of Internet-enabled personal computers and mobile devices has added a new layer of communication and social networking to the interactive digital mix. While this evolving palette of technologies has demonstrated the ability to capture the attention of young people, the innovative learning outcomes that educators had hoped for are more elusive. Although computers are now fixtures in most schools and many homes, there is a growing recognition that kids' passion for digital media has been ignited more by peer group sociability and play than academic learning. This gap between in-school and out-of-school experience represents a gap in children's engagement in learning, a gap in our research and understandings, and a missed opportunity to reenergize public education. This project works to address this gap with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies: communication, learning, and play.
The Principal Investigators on this project are Peter Lyman at the University of California, Berkeley, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito at the University of Southern California, Michael Carter of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, and Barrie Thorne of the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, the project is administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change. With the help of a large number of graduate students and postdocs, a variety of projects are under way in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.
The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.
This project is sponsored by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Can you give us some sense of the scope and scale of the project?
Mimi Ito: This was a study that was conducted over three years, with 28 researchers and research collaborators. We interviewed over 800 youth and young adults, and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations. This was done in the form of 22 different case studies of youth new media practices. Some of the studies looked at particular online sites, such as YouTube and social network sites. Other studies looked at interest groups, such as gaming groups and fans of anime and Harry Potter. Other groups also recruited youth from local institutions such as afterschool programs, parent networks, and schools. We believe that this is the most extensive qualitative study of contemporary youth new media practice in the U.S.
What were your goals with this project?
Mimi Ito: Our goal was really to capture youth perspectives and voices to understand what is happening in the online world today. We wanted to look at how young people are incorporating new media into their everyday social and recreational lives, in contexts that they found meaningful and motivating. Our thought was that it was only by looking at these kind of youth-driven contexts that we could get a grasp of what youth were learning through their online participation, and how that activity was changing the shape of our media and communications landscape.
Ethnography often gets praised for its process of discovery. What was the biggest discovery your team made through this process?
Mimi Ito: One of the strengths of the ethnographic process is that it involves listening and learning from people with different perspectives, and having that inform our research frameworks. One of the big things that we learned from doing this with such a large research team, was how it was that different kinds of youth practices and social groups were related to one another, either in a synergistic way or a more antagonistic way. We learned that the main thing that distinguishes different kinds of youth new media practices was the difference between what we call "friendship-driven" and "interest-driven" participation. Friendship-driven participation is what most youth are doing online, and involve the familiar practices of hanging out, flirting, and working out status issues on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Interest-driven participation has to do with more of the geeks and creative types of practices, where youth will connect with others online around specializes interests, such as media fandom, gaming, or creative production. It wasn't the just usual things like gender and socioeconomic status that necessarily determined the big differences, but it also had a lot to do with categories in youth culture, like is considered "cool," "popular" or "dorky."
Heather Horst: In addition to friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, we also identified three genres of participation and learning - hanging out, messing around and geeking out. Hanging out is when kids are using technologies like IM, Facebook or MySpace to hang out socially with their friends. Messing around is when they are looking around online for information, or tinkering with media in relatively casual and experimental ways. Geeking out is when they really dive deep into a specialized area of knowledge or interest.
What is important about this framework is that it's not about categorizing kids as having a single identity or set of activities. What we are doing is identifying different ways that kids can participate in media culture, and this can be quite fluid. For example, we talk in our chapter on Media Ecologies about a teen named Derrick who participated in Christo Sims' study of Rural and Urban Youth. He uses Instant Messaging and his mobile phone to coordinate hanging out with his friends. Yet, and like many other teens, Derrick has also earned a reputation for geeking out through his interest in locating and downloading movies through BitTorrent. He also uses the Internet to 'mess around', such as the time he did a search on Google until he found tutorials and other information to help him build a computer. The diversity of practices reflect differing motivations, levels of commitment and intensity of use which frame Derrick's (and other youths') engagement with new media.
Mimi Ito: These genres of participation were things that we found across the different case studies that we looked at. In addition, each individual case study discovered a wealth of interesting details and findings that were specific to each case. What was unique about this project was that we discovered things that were grounded in the specifics of deep case studies, which is typical of ethnographic work, as well as identifying these broader cross-cutting patterns.
Parents often express concerns that young people are interacting online with people they don't know while those excited about social network sites talk about the ways they allow us to escape the constraints of local geography. Yet, your report finds that young people often use these tools primarily to interact with people who they already know. What can you tell us about the relationship between the online and off-line lives of teens?
danah boyd: While there are indeed examples of teens meeting others through these sites, it is critical for adults to realize that these sites are primarily about reinforcing pre-existing connections using mediated technologies. Youth's mobility is heavily curtailed and they desperately want to hang out with their friends from school. These sites have become that gathering space. Just because they can be used by youth to connect to strangers does not mean that they are. By focusing on the possibilities of risk, adults have lost touch with the benefits that these sites afford to youth.
Christo Sims: As danah says, most of our participants used social network sites to complement their offline social relationships rather than to experiment with identity or to make a bunch of new "friends" from around the country or world. With that said, there were instances where youth developed online relationships that extended beyond school, neighborhoods, and local activity groups. Youth that were more marginalized in their local social worlds would often go online for friendship and intimacy. We heard several stories of gay and lesbian youth using internet-based tools in these ways. Similarly, we heard stories of immigrants and ethnic minorities connecting online despite being widely distributed geographically. Then, there's youth who engaged in interest-driven online participation who often interacted with folks far beyond their local region. When friendships did develop they grew over sustained participation in those interest-driven activities, not out of more friendship or intimacy seeking behavior as you'd find in an online dating site. Finally, we did hear several stories of youth developing pen-pal like relationships with other teens. These interactions tended to be conversational, sharing accounts of what life was like in their respective towns or cities, discussing the challenges and confusions of being a teenager. These sorts of interactions more closely resemble the self-exploration and identity-play that earlier accounts of online participation tended to emphasize - a sense of anonymity, a degree of freedom from the trappings of one's identity in the family or at school - yet they weren't anywhere close to the dominant day-to-day uses of these tools.
Dan Perkel: Just to follow up on a point that Christo alludes to, there are in-between categories of people that might be overlooked in the split between "people you do already know" and "strangers." For example, there are people who are friends of friends, or friends of cousins, who you may not know, but go to neighboring schools, or live in the same area of town. We heard from participants in San Francisco, the East Bay, and I believe in Brooklyn as well, stories of people meeting up and getting to know people who they knew through others but only "met" using MySpace or another site. We also heard stories or in some cases watched people play out situations where they had met someone offline, and gotten their MySpace username so that they could contact them later. This was one way of facilitating dating (like asking someone for a phone number). In this case, this is someone that they have met, but is not necessarily someone they "know" or at least have any other contact with before back and forth conversations using social network sites. The point is that we learned how confusing it can be to even categorize who is a stranger versus a known person. How some of the participants use online media happens in the space inbetween.
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.
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.
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.
October 15, 2008
Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part Two)
Universite de Montreal is developing a new web strategy, they intend to
integrate web 2.0 features. They are thinking about letting students become
publishers, but they fear a teacher backlash. Is this fear reasonable? What
would be the worst case scenario?
When we create more open platforms, we destroy old monopolies of information. That can be a brutal blow for those who gain their self worth from their role as the dispersers of that information. So, yes, when you open it up to students to submit materials, teachers feel threatened. There are some legitimate concerns here, having to do with the credentializing of information and the liabilities of the university. For most of us, credibility on the web is situational: we are not so much assessing content as we are assessing the reputations of the sources of that content. We tend to put our greatest trusts in the institutions we would trust for information in the physical world. So, many people who sought information from Universite de Montreal or MIT will make a general judgment about the reputation of the institution and then apply it to all content which gets circulated.
For me, a lot of this has to do with how we frame the materials -- as a reference work (which meets certain criteria of reliability, which many faculty members would be hard pressed to meet) or as a space for investigation, deliberation, and discussion (where there are ongoing conversations about the value of different content being circulated). Most academic web resources represent the former; Wikipedia and YouTube would be better understood as the latter. The need is to be clear about who is contributing the content and then you need to create a context where the community has the literacy practices and collective intelligence processes to take ownership over critically engaging with the materials being shared.
Everyone in the university would need to have a stake in insuring the integrity of the process and that means being highly critical and skeptical of anything that gets submitted, whether by a student or a teacher.
Can a platform upstage the learning process ? By that I mean that students
would get lost in a pile of information and would no longer be able to know
what to use ?
A platform certainly can upstage the learning process if by a platform you mean a technology. It is not at all unusual for faculty members to become enchanted
with one or another kind of hardware and not think through its pedagogical implications. We can see some of the ways universities have embraced Second Life as an example of this process. Second Life has some remarkable affordances which can support powerful new kinds of learning, but it's also a challenging technology to learn how to use. There's no point in using it for things that can be done just as easily through more traditional learning platforms and there's no point in using it if it takes much longer to learn how to use the program than it is going to be possible to use the program for instruction. In
other words, we have to do a cost/benefit analysis and know why we are using this platform, why it is better than traditional means, what it allows us to do that we couldn't do otherwise, what challenges it poses to learners, and so forth.
On the other hand, I would argue that a process or a community is less likely to upstage learning because for the most part, it comes with its own pedagogical logic and if you work within that logic, everything you do will ultimately contribute to learning. Again, the choice of the community needs to be aligned to the pedagogical goals, because the community will impose its own goals which will often be more deeply motivating.
Is there more value in sharing ( as with OpenCourseWare) or in mashing and
allowing expression ?
For me, they are two parts of the same process. When I hand you a printed book, which couldn't be more fixed in its content and couldn't be harder to reconfigure, you are still going to pay attention to only those parts that are of interest to you; I can't determine whether you read the whole thing; I can't determine what parts you cite in other works you write; and indeed, the book only becomes valuable when you can take out your yellow pen, mark up the passages that are meaningful to you, compare them with other books on your shelf, and use them as resources for your own explorations and ruminations.
So, why should we imagine that digital resources are any different? Once you share them, they are going to be sampled and remixed, if they are of any value to the person who receives them. That's at the heart of the learning and research processes. So, the question isn't whether to allow remixing; you can't stop it and you really wouldn't want to if you could. The question is whether to facilitate it or for that matter, whether to increase the visibility of what readers do with the content you provide. In the end, that boils down to the question of whether you want to be part of a conversation or whether you simply
want to publish.
In our participatory culture, though, keep in mind that publishing as an end unto itself is having diminishing return and people are much more likely to be drawn towards spaces which enable and support meaningful dialog. You can try to block it, if you wish, but you are also cutting yourself out from the marketplace of ideas, so what's the point?
Should all this self-expression be recognized ? Where can we draw the line between « artistic self-expression » and bad work ?
The point is that I don't draw the line; the community draws the line. A society where there is lots of bad work out there is ultimately more generative than one
which supports only excellent work. It provides points of entry for more people who are encouraged to try things, be bad, get feedback, and do better. A society which circulates only excellent work creates too strong a barrier to access and thus discourages most people from producing anything. The result is that we lack the diversity we need for collective decision making or shared cultural experiences.
So, the goal should never be to get rid of bad work; the goal should be to develop mechanisms which helps us to identify what we see as valuable or meaningful work according to our own criteria. There are a number of different mechanisms which allow us to do so: we can have gatekeepers who curate the materials and use their personal reputation to bestow recognition on work they consider valuable; we can have some kind of system of aggregation, such as Digg, where many people vote on what's valuable and the "best" stuff rises to the top; we can have some system of collective deliberation in which we have ongoing debates about what constitutes good work and what works are
good. All of those mechanisms can be found at work in one or another site online.
We still don't fully understand how these mechanisms work and what kinds of areas each works best. And universities would have a lot to contribute into research in these areas if they would free themselves from the burden of feeling like they can only support excellence.
A lot of bad work could tarnish the reputation of a university. How can it reconcile openness and the promotion of itself as a supplier of good knowledge?
It depends on what the university is trying to sanctify: is it seeking to guarantee the integrity of the product (in which case, every bit of content needs to be vetted) or the integrity of the process (in which case, the university is creating a space where people learn through vetting each other's content.) Is the reputation of a university based on the fact that they gather together lots of people who know things or is it based on the fact that they create a context where the ongoing questioning of information takes place?
What is the role of universities in this new « knowledge society » ?
Universities have gathered together many forms of expertise into one institution and they have provided the time and space for those expertise to be exercised
around compelling questions. They have developed processes by which questions can be asked and answers can be debated, where information can be produced, exchanged, and evaluated, and where expertise can be exchanged between many different minds. So, how do universities expand those functions and processes beyond their brick and mortar campuses? How do they open up these conversations to include a larger public who wish to continue learning beyond their undergraduate years or who wish to learn things that are not available to them at their local level? Universities can potentially play an enormous role here but it requires them to rethink their interface with their public and indeed, requires them to expand their understanding of what constitutes the constituency for higher learning.
Note: In response to the first installment of this interview, reader Chris Lott asks why the Creative Commons license for MIT's Open Courseware initiative constitutes a "conservative" approach to Fair Use. I am not, in this case, concerned about reader's making Fair Use of my materials. They are welcome to use them with attribution as far as I am concerned. But my problem is that as a media scholar, I need to be able to provide excerpts from other people's media -- especially corporate media -- if my teaching materials and approaches are going to be accessible to people around the world who may not have ready access to American media. MIT's position is that we have to clear rights for every piece of material that we include in our course materials, rather than asserting a broader understanding of Fair Use which would define such materials as being circulated for the purpose of critical commentary. I apply such a broader notion in my own blog but so far, the Open Courseware people will not accept this perspective and as a result, I've been locked out of contributing to this program. People often ask why not use materials under Creative Commons license and the problem is that the kinds of materials currently circulating under Creative Commons tends to be indie media, which is great, but in teaching media studies, I also have to deal with material by mainstream media and universities feel themselves vulnerable to the exagerated assertions of copy right by many corporate rights holders. I hope this further clarifies my position.
October 13, 2008
Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part One)
I was recently interviewed by a Canadian journalist, Alexandre Cayla-Irigoyen
Chef de pupitre - Societe Monde, about OpenCourseWare, Collective Intelligence, and the modern university. Somehow, the interview questions sparked me to dig deep on some ideas that I hadn't really formulated before and I figured the answers might prove interesting to blog readers. So I asked the reporter if I could run the transcript here, once he had gotten what he needed from it for his story.
I read your book (Convergence Culture) and also a couple of other of your publications. You argue that, right now, the school system is failing its children because they are learning more experimenting outside class than in it. Do you think that Internet and the tools that are being developed will help change this situation ?
The internet is improving opportunities for learning for at least some portion
of our youth, but most of what is most valuable about it is locked outside of
schools. For example, many American schools block all access to YouTube, to
social network sites, even to blogging tools, all of which are key sites for
learning. Schools are discouraging young people from using Wikipedia rather
than engaging with it as an opportunity to learn about the research process and
to engage with critical discussions around issues of credibility. The schools are
often frightened of anything that looks like a game to the point that they lock
out many powerful tools which simulate real world processes, encourage a 'what
if' engagement with history, or otherwise foster critical understanding of the
world.
As long as they react to these developments as risks rather than resources, then those kids who have access to this online world are going to be de-skilled as they enter the schoolhouse gates and those kids who don't have access are going to be left further behind because they have been abandoned by the institutions which are otherwise best situated to address the digital divide in terms of technical access and the participation gap in terms of access to skills and experiences. So, yes, informal learning is taking place outside of school for those who are able to access it but the refusal of schools to engage with it further amplifies the inequalities between information haves and have nots.
Can such changes be implemented in university classes? Flexibility seems to be the key aspect of this new approach whereas the university classroom is typically governed by a rigid student-teacher relation (at the undergrad level at least).
Whatever their limitations in terms of bureaucratic structure, most university
instructors have much greater flexibility to respond to these challenges than the average public high school. Unfortunately, by the time we get to college, these gaps in experiences, skills, and resources will have already had a near lethal impact on those kids who are being left behind. It isn't just that we will need to have a head start program to get them the technical skills they need to deploy these technologies. It is going to be much harder to give them the sense of empowerment and entitlement needed to allow them to feel fully part of the online world. They are going to be much less likely to play and experiment with the new technologies because they will be afraid of failing and looking dumb in front of classmates who will have been using these tools for more than a decade.
That said, we certainly do want to integrate these skills into college classes, because they are key to higher order thinking an research in most of our disciplines, because doing so is the best way of reaching a generation that expects to be able to participate in social networks and manipulate data through simulations. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we can fix a decade's worth of neglect through the public schooling system.
How can an institution recreate the type of communities you spoke about in your book ?
The kinds of communities I discussed in the book are what Cory Doctorow calls "ad-hoc-cracies." They emerge quickly in response to shared interests and concerns. They last as long as people need the community to work through a common problems or query. They vanish when they are no longer useful to their members. They are radically interdisciplinary or I'd prefer, "undisciplined," in that they draw together people with many different expertises and they deploy social networks which observe few of the barriers to interaction we experience in the physical world to bring people together who should be working together. They develop informal yet very powerful systems for vetting information and for carrying out deliberation.
Almost none of this holds with the average college class which has a fixed duration, a prearranged sequence of materials and problems, a disciplined border, a geographically narrowed location, etc. So, if we want to integrate these into our classes, they require
much greater flexibility in imagining what constitutes an educational context. They certainly involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and requires students to build on each other's work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goals since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like.
MIT has the OpenCourseWare program that seems to follow a more open logic. Does MIT have other programs that would help it achieve (or create) a more open, flexible and creative environment ?
The Open Courseware Initiative has very worthy goals -- indeed, the vision
behind it is deeply inspiring to me. Universities like MIT should be opening up their resources to the planet. We should being supporting independent learners and providing materials to support education in parts of the world which do not have what major research institutions have to offer. The scale on which Open Courseware is operating now is astonishing and a real tribute to the people who developed it.
That said, I do not myself participate in Open Courseware. I freely give away my own content through our various blogs, podcasts, and online materials. But MIT has failed to assert a strong Fair Use defense which allows instructors to meaningfully quote from and repurpose existing materials as part of their instructional process. As a media scholar, my teaching centers on helping students understand other people's media content and if I can't quote from and share that content with the users of the Open Courseware, I can not meaningfully reproduce my instructional practices online. MIT had an opportunity to be a leader in the arguments about Fair Use, especially given the good will they have gotten through Open Courseware, yet they have chosen to take a very timid and conservative legal approach to these matters and as a consequence, I feel like it severely compromises the goals and ideals of the Open Courseware initiative.
I am thus a conscientious objector in my relation to this project. I am going into this here not to slam the Open Courseware people but to suggest that the ideals of free distribution of content by educational institutions are compromised by the current intellectual property regime and that we are not going to be able to meaningfully achieve the full ambitions of such a project until we develop stronger defenses around Fair Use.
At the present time, MIT is thinking about its next step in its Internet strategy (after the OpenCourseWare project), what are the options ? What should a university try to implement ?
Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations. In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it. As I think about what makes YouTube YouTube, I see a number of factors:
Anyone can submit content at anytime and thus doesn't have to operate from a base of academic and institutional authority. It respects multiple kinds of expertise, understands people are differently motivated, and appreciates that information can be posted for many different reasons.
YouTube content can be embedded on any website, blog, or social network page. It is spreadable and it gets value as it gets inserted into these various contexts, because they represent different social communities which are having ongoing conversations. YouTube sees information as something that can be used, not something that is simply stored.
YouTube provokes responses. Indeed, the most valuable content on YouTube is content which inspires other users to talk back, reframing and repurposing materials, coming at them from many different angles.
The content on YouTube can be reconfigured many different ways. It is not part of a structured curriculum; rather, it is modular, nonliner, unstructured. And as such, we are encouraged to play with it rather than being disciplined to approach it in set ways.
So, I don't know for sure what the next stage of an academic content system looks like but my own sense is that it should look MORE like YouTube and less like what university lawyers and department heads think will be "something like YouTube".
October 6, 2008
Some of My Best Friends Are Pirates
In mid-September, I went to Singapore to meet with some of our collaborators on the MIT-Singapore GAMBIT games lab and to speak to the Games Convention Asia about "Games as Transmedia Entertainment." In the course of the weekend, I gave an interview to a very thoughtful young reporter from the Philippines Daily Inquirer in which I was asked about the implications of the concept of convergence culture for the developing world. To be honest, I didn't think much more about the interview until some of my comments about "piracy" began to surface in western blogs within the gamer realm. The story spread through news portals focused on Asia to the gamer world, which is often keeping a close eye on developments in the Asian games sector and often gains prestige by being early importers of Asian-produced games before they are legally on offer here in the west.
One American blogger even "pirated" one of my portraits, which was doctored to depict me as a pirate. I figured that "pirating" it back is only fair game.
Indeed, the time lag between the interview appearing in a Manila-based newspaper and its surfacing on western blogs could be counted in a matter of hours, rather than days. At no other time in human history would such a flow of information have been imaginable. In the past, an American academic giving an interview in Singapore would in all likelihood have been locked down in a very localized context. And so in many ways, the circulation of this story demonstrates in pretty powerful ways what I saw as the central thrust of my comments -- that media companies can no longer realistically lock down their content into predictable zones and roll it out on their own time table. The moment content emerges anywhere in the world, it creates a hunger around the planet among potential consumers which will be met illegally if it is not met legally.
When I was in Shanghai last January, I learned a good deal about how fans of popular western programs such as Prison Break operate: within a day of an episode appearing on American television, it has been digitized, translated into various Chinese languages by an army of dedicated fans, and begins circulating throughout the Chinese hinterland and across the Chinese diaspora. In many cases, this is content which would never have been commercially available in China as a result of nationalistic and protectionist policies limiting the amount of American media that can be marketed to their country. And if this content was made available commercially, then few Chinese locals outside of the most wealthy and cosmopolitan cities would be able to afford it. So, in what sense can Hollywood be said to have lost markets that it could not have reached and could not have sold to in the first place?
Yet, it is clear that exposure to American media in the developing world often awakens desires and fantasies that can only be satisfied by more such content; it is part of the process of westernization and modernization which is impacting many sectors in Asia at the present time. A growing number of researchers are finding that these same tendencies are operating in reverse across America and Europe, exposing western consumers to Asian-produced media (Bollywood films, Anime, K-Drama, and the like), and gradually creating viable commercial markets where they didn't exist before. In many cases, those fans who have taken these materials without permission, done the hard work of translating them into English from their original language, taken on responsibility for educating consumers about the contexts from which they came and the conventions under which they operate, have gone a long way to open up markets which would previously have been closed to Asian media producers. Here, "piracy" becomes "promotion."
Does it make sense to refer to such practices as "piracy"? It's a debatable proposition but for the moment, many in the media industries are inclined to think of such consumer practices through a language of copyright theft and piracy. If we adopt that framework, then yes, I think there's a solid case to be made that "pirates" actually expand markets, over time, even if they cause short term "losses" for the initial rights holders. That said: I recognize that not all "piracy" follows such a pattern. There are a significant number of people out there who are exploiting the intellectual properties of others for their own financial gain and there are some who buy these materials because they don't want to pay the price being asked for this content. Nothing we say is going to change this basic dynamic, but the media industries could reduce some forms of "piracy" by better understanding what motivates it and reading it as symptomatic of the marketplace reasserting demand in the face of failures in supply.
For example, should we be surprised that protectionist policies surrounding media imports no longer work effectively in a global networked culture? Whatever gets stopped by customs the border will spread easily online and reach geographically dispersed consumers. Should we be surprised that consumers no longer want to wait to view content that they know is already available in other markets and is being actively discussed by others in their online communities?
For example, relatively few hardcore American fans of Doctor Who or Torchwood are willing to wait the six to nine months it is taking these episodes to cross the Atlantic and get aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. Many of them are seeking online channels, mostly illegal, to gain access to this material in something close to the same time frame as British fans are consuming it. This has not necessarily reduced sales of the DVDS or viewership of the cable airings of this content here, but it has pushed many hardcore fans to step outside of the law in order to access content they would most likely willingly pay to access if it was made available to them in a timely, accessible, and legal manner.
In my heart of hearts, I think most people would prefer to work within legal structures if they are available to them and I'd suggest that the relative success of iTunes in the face of readily available "free" sources for much of this content points to a deep desire to behave "honestly" when media companies do not create strong incentives to behave otherwise.
We can also understand this piracy as part of a breakdown of the moral economy between producers and consumers. Here's what I mean by a moral economy: Underlying all economic transactions are certain social understandings between buyers and sellers that reflect their sense that exchanges are just and fair to both sides. We can call this a moral economy.
When the rules of exchange shift, they are accompanied by certain social disruptions as both sides seek to legitimate their new practices and thus secure a higher ground in the emerging moral economy. We can see the deployment of terms like "piracy" or "sharing" as different bids to legitimate these evolving practices. It's a kind of rhetorical war for moral legitimation, which reflects the fact that both sides want to see themselves as behaving fairly. When there is a perception of unfairness, then there is a much higher likelihood that parties will step outside of established mechanisms and adopt practices which the other side sees as illegitimate. And clearly over the past few years, technological and cultural shifts, not to mention the legal battles that have emerged around them, have gone a long way to undermine the existing moral economy and thus create a crisis of trust between producers and consumers. Until media companies find a way to restore the balance, they are going to find themselves increasingly subject to behaviors which undercut their perceived economic interests and such behaviors are likely to be increasingly labeled as "piracy."
Such "piracy" is a global phenomenon, but it occurs in particularly overt ways in much of the developed world, which has historically been used as a final dumping ground for media goods that have played out in the rest of the world. As more and more young people in the developing world go online, have access to information about such content, and desire stronger connections with their counterparts elsewhere, these inequalities of access to media content becomes more and more frustrating. And "piracy" is emerging as the "great equalizer" to insure they have a chance to participate more fully in our emerging media landscape. Such young people, long term, represent the most likely market for western produced media, and this early, often illegal exposure is part of what will make them a desiring market for such materials over time. Framed in these terms, the debate about "piracy" becomes about short term losses versus long term gains for the media industries.
"Piracy" enters the developing world in another way as well: the production of local knock-offs of western media properties. Consider, for example, almost twenty years of the production and circulation of "Black Bart" T-shirts in intercity and impoverished neighborhoods around the world. These appropriations of The Simpsons have been a source of revenue for the small scale entrepreneurs who produce and sell them and they have been another way of connecting to the larger media franchise. Throughout much of the developing world, the images of western media are being translated into local folk art practices and then sold back to visiting tourists from the West. When I visited Shanghai, for example, I came back with hand-woven Chinese New Year decorations which deployed Mickey Mouse to signify the "year of the rat." Such goods were clearly not authorized or licensed by the Disney corporation. Yet, they represent another way that those in the developing world were attaching themselves to Western media franchises and do represent a form of grassroots convergence.
I am not making a moral argument here. I certainly understand why many media companies would feel that all of this represents a serious threat to their livelihood and that it constitutes another example of how they are "losing control" over their content in a networked culture. All I am arguing is that current inequalities of access to media content and the fraying of the moral economy between producers and consumers work together to create a context where more and more consumers, not only in the developing world but here in the west, are stepping outside of legal mechanisms to acquire access to content. We can call this "piracy" or not. But it will continue to be a reality until the media companies develop a more sophisticated understanding of what factors motivate such behavior and the ways that such practices reflect breakdowns in the market mechanisms surrounding the creative economy.
So, in conclusion, I just want to say "Aargh!"
October 3, 2008
Video Games Myths Revisited: New Pew Study Tells Us About Games and Youth
Some years ago, I published an essay, "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked" in conjuncton with the PBS Documentary, The Video Game Revolution. At least once a month, I see the article has been discovered by another blogger who is bringing it to the attention of his or her community, so I know that there continues to be interest and uncertainty about many of the issues that it sought to address. A recent report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project offers some valuable new data about the place video games play in the lives of American young people. T
At the most basic level, game playing has become more or less universal. Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games. 50% of teens played games "yesterday." I'm thinking about all of the moral reformers who note, whenever there is a school shooting, that they knew the suspects would turn out to be a gamer. I'd say the current statistics suggest that the odds are very much in favor of them being right but the claim is now meaningless. Indeed, many are suggesting that in such a context, the term, "gamer," may be obsolete -- at least as a description seperating those who play games from those who don't. It may, however, still work much like the term, "reader," to distinguish those who gain some kind of social identity through their relations with games from those for whom game playing is simply one activity among many.
The Pew research may also force us to rethink once again the assumption that there is a gender gap in terms of who plays games: "99% of boys and 94% of girls report playing video games. Younger teen boys are the most likely to play games, followed by younger girls and older boys. Older girls are the least "enthusiastic" players of video games, though more than half of them play. Some 65% of daily gamers are male; 35% are female. Girls play an average of 6 different game genres; boys average 8 different types."
A decade ago, when Justine Cassell and I edited From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games the picture was dramatically different: many were worrying that girls were being left out of this particular version of the digital revolution and that there would be social and educational consequences of this "gender gap." The new statistics show that this gap has significantly closed and that even other patterns people have observed (that boys play games more often, that boys play more different kinds of games, and that boys play games over a longer period of their lives) are starting to shift, though we can still see traces of these earlier patterns in their data. If you are interested in the gender-specific nature of game playing, you should check outBeyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Edited by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner and Jennifer Y. Sun) and due out from MIT Press any day now. This book updates our earlier collection with cutting edge perspectives from a new generation of games scholars who grew up with this medium. Justine and I wrote a new piece for the book reflecting back on the context of gender and games in the mid-1990s and looking forward to new challenges confronting the industry today.
The Pew Data complicates easy generalizations about the place of violent entertainment in the lives of American teens. For example, the five most popular among young Americans are Guitar Hero, Halo 3, Madden NFL, Solitaire, and Dance Dance Revolution. Of these, only Halo 3 would qualify as a violent game. Over all, non-violent genres were the most popular. But, 50% of boys name a game with an M or A/O rating as one of their current top three favorites, compared with 14% of girls. (0ne of those places where gender really does make a difference in how people relate to games.) 32% of gaming teens report that at least one of their three favorite games is rated Mature or Adults Only. 12- to 14-year-olds are equally as likely to play M- or AO-rated games as their 15- to 17-year-old counterparts.
The Pew Data further challenges the idea that game playing is a socially isolating activity. The researchers found "65% of game-playing teens play with other people who are in the room with them. 27% play games with people who they connect with through the internet. 82% play games alone, although 71% of this group also plays with others. And nearly 3 in 5 teens (59%) play games in multiple ways -- with others in the same room, with others online, or alone." As someone who has watched games over the past two decades, I would argue that game play has always been more social than many non-gamers expect. I recall my son and his friends going to each other's houses as a kind of victory house when they beat a level in a challenging game, showing the others how to do it and helping them over the hump. Indeed, playing a game alone is often seen as a rehearsal mode, getting ready for more social forms of play, much like a kid bouncing a ball against a house and catching it, because there aren't people around to play ball with. The Pew data suggests that for many kids, games is sometimes social, sometimes solitary, but most have a healthy range of different ways of engaging with the games medium.
The Pew Research does indicate some areas where parents should be concerned about the gaming lives of their sons and daughters. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of teens who play games report seeing or hearing "people being mean and overly aggressive while playing," and 49% report seeing or hearing "people being hateful, racist, or sexist" while playing. However, among these teens, nearly three-quarters report that another player responded by asking the aggressor to stop at least some of the time. Furthermore, 85% of teens who report seeing these behaviors also report seeing other players being generous or helpful while playing. Many of us believe that cyberbullying is a much more real concern than the worry that playing violent games might somehow make young people more aggressive in the real world. A decade ago, the digital world felt like a safe space for many young geeks, especially when compared with school hallways or gyms, but now that everyone is playing games and going on line, the bullies are showing up there too and young people are having to confront in cyberspace those problems which haven't been resolved in the real world. It isn't that games make kids more aggressive; it may be that real world aggression and conflict is spilling over into games.
The Pew Research also challenges the prevailing myth that most parents are worried or alarmed about their young people's relations to games. 62% of parents of gamers say video games have no effect on their child one way or the other. 19% of parents of gamers say video games have a positive influence on their child. 13% of parents of gamers say video games have a negative influence on their child. 5% of parents of gamers say gaming has some negative influence/some positive influence, but it depends on the game. I see this data less as an indication of the "actual effects" of game play on children but rather as an indication that most parents have come to accept games as a normal part of American childhood and that more of them now see positive benefits than negative harms. After all, a significant number of contemporary American parents were part of that first Nintendo generation, grew up playing Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog, and are thus less likely to be panicked by an unfamiliar technology in their living rooms. Many discussions about games and parenting fail to reflect this generational shift in who these parents are and how they think about this medium.
There's lots more to chew on in the Pew report, including some interesting suggestions about the civic impact of games and whether online play has the same social value as face to face play. I am hoping that this new data will further sharpen the conversations around games.
For more interesting insights on these questions, check out the podcast of a recent CMS colloquium, "The Myths and Politics of Video Games Violence Research," featuring Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, authors of the recent book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. If you don't know this book, you should since like the Pew research, it challenges many common assumptions about this issue, daring to ask and find answers to basic questions about the place of violent games in young people's lives.
September 24, 2008
Framing the Candidates (Part One): A Closer Look at Campaign Biography Videos
George Lakoff's book, Don't Think About an Elephant, has been one of the most influential arguments about the nature of American politics to emerge in recent years. Lakoff, a linguist, turned his attention to the "framing" of political discourse. If you want to look more closely at his argument, "A Man of His Words" is an online excerpt which pulls out most of the ideas that are going to interest us here.
Lakoff argues that the Democrats lose elections even though they often have the facts on their side because the Republicans typically frame the debate. Consider for example the ways McCain has transformed the current energy crisis from one which might deal with the environment or economics or alternative energy to one which rises and falls on the question of off-shore drilling. Or consider the ways that the Republicans have deployed terms like "maverick" and "reformer" to distance themselves from the Bush administration. To turn this around, the Democrats need to reinvent themselves -- not by shifting their positions but by altering the frame.
As Lakoff explains, "Reframing is social change.... Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense." Much of the early excitement around Obama was that he seemed to offer the most compelling new way to "reframe" progressive politics and thus offered a way out of failed rhetoric of the past. For some, this is about style over substance or a matter of "just words," but Lakoff argues that framing is about a structure of ideas that gets evoked through particular words and phrases but has its own deep logic that shapes how and what we think.
In a simple yet suggestive analysis, Lakoff characterizes progressive and reactionary politics in terms of what he calls the Nurturing Parent and the Strict Father frames. According to the Strict Father model, Lakoff writes, "the world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. ...Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right." The strict father "dares to discipline" his family and supports a president who will discipline the nation and ultimately, the world. According to the progressive "nurturing parent" scenario, "Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. ...The parents' job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others."
Swing voters share aspects of both world views. The goal of politics, Lakoff suggests, is to "activate your model in the people in the middle" without pushing them into the other camp.
We can see this as almost a reverse of old-style Christian doctrine in which the relation of a husband to his wife or a father to his child is supposed to mirror the relations of God to man. In this case, the family becomes a microcosm through which we can understand the relationship of the president to the nation and the world.
This is consistent with an argument that I put forth in the introduction to The Children's Culture Reader that the Republicans and the Democrats both use the figure of the child as a rhetorical device in talking about their visions for the future of the country, but they understand the family in very different terms. In an analysis of the 1996 GOP and Democratic national conventions, I contrasted Hillary Clinton's deployment of the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" with oft-cited Republican images of the family as a "fort" defending its members against a hostile world.
As a teacher, I've found that one of the best ways to introduce this important argument to my classes has been to engage in a critical comparison between the official campaign biography videos, shown at the national conventions, and intended to link the candidate's personal narrative with the larger themes of the campaign. Here, we can see very explicit connections between the ways that the two parties understand the family and the nation. These videos are easy to access on the web and bring into your classrooms.
Over my next three posts, I will look more closely at first the videos for the two Presidential candidates, then the bios for the two Vice Presidential candidates, and finally parodies of these videos produced for The Daily Show. I am hoping that this will provide inspiration for educators who might want a way to talk about the campaigns, the differences between the parties, and the role of media in the process.
First, a few general points. Students often react to these videos when they first see them as if they were documentaries, straight forward presentations of the facts of the candidates' lives. If Obama and McCain tell very different stories, it is because they led very different lives. And this is of course partially true. The videos mobilize elements from the candidate's biographies to construct narratives about them which are designed to introduce them to the American people. For many votes, these videos and the acceptance speeches are the first time they are paying attention to these candidates.
Yet, keep in mind the role selectivity plays here -- we can't tell everything about their lives in a short video, so get students to think about what they decide to include and what they leave out of these videos. There's also the question of framing -- what gets said by the candidate, by the people in his or her family, by others, and by the narrator -- which helps us to understand this person in specific ways. And then there's the matter of technique -- what kinds of images do we see, what role does the music play in setting the tone for these stories.
I've found that these videos work best in a classroom setting where I show them side by side so that the students compare the differences in their approach. On one level, there's a well established genre here -- a general framing, followed by childhood experiences, early career, courtship and marriage, education, national service, early political life, fatherhood and family, and launch of the campaign. These similarities make it easy to see the differences in framing at work. If you are pushed for time, as I was in class the other day, you are better off showing the first 2-3 minutes of each, and then getting the discussion started, than showing one through all the way. It is through the comparison that we really understand how these videos deploy melodramatic devices and images of the family to shift how we think about the candidate's relationship to the nation.
Obama and the Nurturing Parent Frame
From start to finish, the Obama video is focused on constructing the ideal image of the nurturing parent who will insure the well being of all Americans. The very opening lines of the video already evoke the image of childhood: "It is a promise we make to our children that each of us can make what we want from our lives" and the climax of the video comes when we return to that opening statement and build upon it: "It was a promise his mother made to him and that he intended to keep." Think about the difference between talking about the "American promise" and the "American dream," and you know a great deal about the ideological differences between the two parties.
The idea of "empathy" is a central cornerstone of the family as depicted in this video. It emerges most powerfully in the story about Obama's mother urging him to "imagine standing in that person's shoes. How would that make you feel." and again, by the end of the video, this concept of empathy becomes a cornerstone of Obama's relationship to the nation, as he describes how he remembers his mother as he travels "from town to town." Empathy runs through the list of values Obama tells us that he and Michelle want to pass down to their children: "hard work, honesty, self-reliance, respect for other people, a sense of empathy, kindness, faith." And we can see this respect for nurturing and empathy when he talks about the death of his mother, who was "the beating heart" of their family. Indeed, moments when candidates talk about personal losses of family members and loved ones are often potent appeals to the viewer's own empathy, since many of us feel our common humanity most powerfully through our shared experience of mortality.
And this logic of empathy emerges through the suggestion that Obama knows first hand the suffering and anxieties felt by average Americans: "I know what it's like not to have a father in the house, to have a mother who's trying to raise kids, work, and get her college education at the same time. I know what it's like to watch grandparent's age, worrying about whether their fixed income is going to be able to cover the bills."
We can see this last comment as part of a larger strategy in the video to depict Obama's personal narrative as the "story" of America and his "search for self" as a quest to better understand the nation that gave him birth. As the narrator explains, "By discovering his own story, he would come to know what is remarkable about his country." And this is an outgrowth of the first thing we are told about his mother, that she knew her son was an American "and he needs to understand what that means."
This video works hard to combat images of Obama's background as exotic, as outside the mainstream. There is no reference here to Hawaii and only an implicit nod to the fact that he spent part of his life overseas, even though this last detail has been central to the candidate's appeal internationally. The focus is on the most "heartland" aspects of his family background -- a strong focus on his grandparents who come from Kansas, and their experience of the Depression and World War II. Obama got into trouble for suggesting that some people in rural Pennsylvania were "bitter," so the video is careful to say that his grandparents were not "complainers." When it comes time to capture his sense of pride in his country, he tells a story about sitting on his grandfather's shoulders and waiving a flag at the return of the astronauts.
The representation here of his marriage might be summed up with the old feminist slogan, "the personal is the political." Michelle describes the moment she fell in love with Barrack: watching him deliver a speech in the basement of a community center in which he spells out "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be." This story collapses Obama's hopes for his family and his hopes for his country in a sublime moment of utopian possibilities. Michelle emerges as the ideal arbiter of his political integrity because she can testify that he lives these values through his personal lives.
And the final statement of the "nurturing parent" model comes when Obama tells us, "One person's struggle is all of our struggles." The government becomes a mutual support system that looks after its weakest members in a world which is often unjust. The president's job is to insure that all of his children gets what they need and deserve and that the "American promise" gets fulfilled and transfered to the next generation.
McCain and the Strict Father Model
If the Obama video sets up issues of nurtering and empathy from its first images, suggested by the long panning shots across American faces and a voiceover about the "American Promise," the McCain video opens with us staring directly into the face of the candidate as a young naval officer, trying to read his character and understand the relationship of this national service to the "mission" ahead. The opening narration starts with descriptions of him as "a warrior, a soldier, a naval aviator, a Pow," before pulling us down to the family -- "a father, a son, a husband", then into his political career. And then we get that surprising moment when he is called "a mother's boy," one suggestion of softness amid a series of hypermasculine sounds, images, and terms. My students suggested that the reference to the mother helps him deal with issues of age and mortality, yet it also seems part of a strategy to manage the negative associations which many independents and Democrats may feel towards the repeated references to his toughness throughout the video.
Strength of character and conviction, coupled with physical toughness as proven through war, are the central virtues ascribed to McCain by the video and they are introduced here once again through the narrative of his family. As suggested by the gender specificity of the "Strict father" construction, the family here, except for the references to the mother, is represented almost entirely through patriarchal bloodlines -- again a contrast to the absent father and strong mother image in the Obama video. We learn about his grandfather who died the day he returned from World War II; we learn about his father who ordered the carpet bombing of a country where his son was held captive, even as he waited at the border hoping for his return. When we see him with his son in the opening series of shots, he is standing alone with his offspring on the side of a mountain. Fatherhood is an extension of manhood and it gets expressed through discipline and competition more than through images of cuddling and craddling.
The critical moments here, of course, deal with his Vietnam war experience which require a recognition of vulnerability and weakness even as the larger narrative centers around his toughness and will power. Consider this key description: "Critically injured, his wounds never properly addressed, for the next five and a half years, John was tortured and dragged from one filthy prison to another, violently ill, often in solitary confinement, he survived through the faith he learned from his father and grandfather, the faith that there was more to life than self."
So, again, we see the passing down of civic virtue through male bloodlines as a central motif in this video. There's no question that the video constructs these experiences as a form of martyrdom out of which a national leader emerged: "The constant torture and isolation could have produced a bitter, broken man. Instead he came back to America with a smile -- with joy and optimism. He chose to spend his life serving the country he loved." or consider the phrase, "he chose to spend four more years in Hell." Or the ways the video depicts his role in the normalization of relations with Vietnam -- "Five and a half years in their hell and he chose to go back because it was healing for America. That's country first." Note this is one of the few places where metaphors of "caring" or "healing" surface in the video and it is specifically in relation to the pain of wartime. A more complex metaphor emerges as Fred Thompson reads aloud a passage from McCain's autobiography about "living in a box" and ends with "when you've lived in a box, your life is about keeping others from having to endure that box."
This toughness and individualism carries over into the discussions of national policy. McCain doesn't believe that the country should care for each of its members but rather he has "a faith in the American people's ability to chart their own course." He is "committed to protect the American people but a ferocious opponent of pork barrel spending and would do most anything to keep taxes low and keep our money in our pockets." What is implied by that contrast between "protecting" the public and "pork barrel spending" and "higher taxes"? There is a clear sense that as a stern father he will give us what we really need but protect us from our own baser urges and desires.
While the Obama video distributed its points across a range of different voices, including a large number of women, the McCain video tends to rely on a voice of God narrator who speaks the unquestioned truth about this man and on comments from McCain himself. All of this creates a more authoritarian/authoritative structure where truth comes from above, rather than emerging from listening to diverse voices, and reflects this notion of stern responsibility rather than nurturing.
This centralized discourse is consistent with the videos focus on experience and its tendency to read McCain as "superior" to others -- "no one cherishes the American dream more," for example, but also no candidate has had his experiences in public service. There is an underlying suggestion here of predestination -- "McCain's life was somehow sparred -- perhaps he had more to do." In this case, the hint is that he is fulfilling God's plan for him and for the country. This issue of predestination resurfaces near the end when the video repurposes some of the core themes of the Obama campaign, including some that McCain has criticized and turns them around, "What a life, what a faith, what a family! What good fortune that America will chose this leader at precisely this time. The stars are aligned. Change will come. But change must be safety, prosperity, optimism, and peace. The change will come from strength -- from a man who found his strength in a tiny dank cell thousands of miles from home."
There's so much more that we could say about both of these videos and that's the point. They are great resources for teaching young people to reflect critically on the ways the campaigns are being "framed." Next time, I will look more closely at the Vice Presidential videos.
July 14, 2008
Fans, Fair Use, and Transformation
Earlier this year, I ran an interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi from American University's Center for Social Media about their work articulating the "fair use" rights of documentary filmmakers and media literacy teachers.
I have been lucky enough to be one small part of a team they pulled together of media scholars and lawyers focused on better understanding how fair use might apply to remix practices now common online. Other members of the team included: Mimi Ito, Lewis Hyde, Rebecca Tushnet, Anthony Falzone, Michael Donaldson, Michael Madison, Panela Samuelson, and Jennifer Urban. Last week, the Center released their findings.
The resulting report offers a very strong, legally credible defense of many now common remix practices, including some language which should prove especially helpful in helping fan vidders to know how far they can go and stay within a common sense understanding of fair use rights. The report's recommendations center around two core questions:
Did the unlicensed use 'transform' the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?
If the answers to these two questions are 'yes,' a court is likely to find a use fair. Because this is true, such use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.
I was happy to have a chance to share news of this report when I spoke to Portus, a gathering of Harry Potter fans in Dallas this weekend, where the news generated lots of interest.
This focus on "transformation" clearly compliments the focus on "transformative works" in recent fan conversations in the wake of the creation of the Organization for Transformative Works.
And the report's findings will be especially relevant to fan vidders, who have been struggling to decide how public they want their work to be, given their historic vulnerability to legal prosecution and yet their concern that other remix communities are gaining greater visibility in the era of YouTube. The report certainly doesn't address every concern vidders will face -- in particular, it raises questions about whether vidders would be legally better off drawing on multiple songs rather than basing the entire video on a single piece of music. But the authors hope that the publication of this document will spark further conversations.
July 2, 2008
Adopting (and Defending) Little Brother
I don't get to read very many novels. The nature of my work means that there is always a massive pile of nonfiction for me to plow through and when I have time to relax, I tend to consume other media rather than read literary fiction (comics being the exception). But I always make time for the latest work of Cory Doctorow, who is my favorite contemporary science fiction writer.
When I heard Cory's new novel, Little Brother, had hit the book shelves, I grabbed it to take with me on my long flight to Australia. (Gee, I've managed to get three blog posts just off of the media I consumed between here and Australia!) It turned out to be ideal reading on one level -- I didn't want to put the book down once I started reading it -- and less than ideal on another -- the book left me really paranoid dealing with airport security and customs people and when I tried to read it to cope with my jet lag in the hotel room, I stayed up all night just to finish it. Don't try this trick at home, Kids. But you will want to read Little Brother, the sooner, the better, because this book has the makings of a political movement.
The title of Little Brother pays tribute to George Orwell, but the content is shaped by our own "9/11 changed everything" society. It's as timely as the day's headlines: literally since I started reading the book just as the Supreme Court was ruling that Habeas Corpus applied at Gitmo. The book was written for young adult readers but, as the cliche goes, it's fun for children of all ages.
Marcus, the book's protagonist, is a hacker/gamer/geek who has learned how to work around the various control mechanisms of his school but he is ill-prepared for confronting what happens after a terrorist attack destroys the Bay Bridge in San Francisco and takes out a chunk of the BART tunnels as well. Homeland Security basically occupies San Francisco, which becomes more and more like a Police State as the book progresses. He and his friends, who had skipped school to play an ARG, are taken into custody, shipped off to a secret prison camp on Treasure Island, and subjected to torture -- well, assuming waterboarding DOES count as torture.
When Marcus is released, he takes everything he has learned about technology and uses it to try to overturn what the federally-sanctioned thugs have done to America's tradition of freedoms and liberties. He hacks game systems and deploys them as an alternative social network which allows young people to communicate under the noses of their parents and teachers. Along the way, the book addresses some core debates about whether we should trade off some of our freedom to insure greater security in a post-911 political landscape and provides very specific instructions on how to create an alternative political culture and technological infrastructure.
If the details supplied by the novel aren't enough on their own, the book ends with Afterwords by digital security expert Bruce Schneier on the importance of good Crypto and by XBox Hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, as well as a bibliography for where to go to learn more about the technoculture and political dimensions of the narrative. And Doctorow has partnered with the DIY website, The Instructables, to provide some How To pieces. And the book takes seriously what we are calling the New Media Literacies, including the ability to network and pool knowledge to accomplish tasks far bigger than any individual can accomplish on their own. Indeed, I plan to assign the book in a class I'm teaching this fall on Civic Engagement and New Media Literacy. All of this reflects Doctorow's unique perspective as a key player in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as one of the masterminds behind Boing Boing.
So far, I've made the book sound a bit too much like agit prop -- on the right side, to be sure, but pedantic at best -- but it's also a damn fine read. Sure, there's a little bit of preaching to the choir going on here, no doubt. I found the book affirmed many of my most deeply held political beliefs and as such, it is one which I plan to pass along to some of the young adult readers in my family in hopes of undoing the job the public schools have been doing on them lately. At heart, the book is about the right, no, the obligation to question authority and to stand up for the American tradition of civil liberties even when -- especially when -- it is hard. Little Brother articulates a very different notion of patriotism and what a hero is than we've seen from the dominant media in recent years.
The young people quickly adopt a slogan, "Don't Trust Anyone Over 25," which they think reflects the generational gap in perspective between those who grew up online and understand how the security hysteria is destroying cyberculture and those who didn't and who are drawn towards a more authoritarian mind set. But the book itself keeps complicating that distinction between Digital Natives and Immigrants, offering vivid vignettes of a teacher who forces the students to think for themselves even if it means that he will ultimately lose his job, of a reporter who is willing to speak truth to power, and of parents who stand by their kids when they need their support the most. Doctorow wants his young readers to take their own political agency seriously, to find their voice as citizens, and to tap the resources that are available to them to transform their society, but he also wants them to recognize allies where-ever they may find them and continually situates Marcus's contemporary resistance in a much longer history of countercultural politics.
It doesn't hurt that Doctorow fills the book with local color details about San Francisco, a city he knows well, or that he makes every step in the process seem plausible and only slightly amplified from things we've already seen happen in the past eight years. It also doesn't hurt that Little Brother is also the best plotted book Doctorow has ever written. Up until now, I've liked the tone and world building of his fiction better than the plots; like many contemporary SF writers, he has a tendency to build rich and interesting societies and then not really know what to do with them. I'm OK with that because Eastern Standard Tribe and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are some of the best drawn worlds I've seen in SF since the original cyberpunks.
But this time, he held his plot together throughout, allowing the action and relations to build chapter by chapter, and taking his protagonist on the trajectory from Rebel Without a Cause to the leader of a youth movement, even as he deals with the anxiety, fear, and confusion someone in that position would face. He manages to throw in issues with his peers, parents, and teachers, as well as a touchingly drawn first love story, which adds some emotional resonance to the high flying political drama. Most adults for young readers stop there, acknowledging all of the fears and uncertainties of growing up, without leaving their young fans with any sense that they hold in their hands the potential to change the world. Doctorow trusts his readers enough to take them seriously as political agents and in that sense, I am hoping it will do for my young nephews's generation what books like the ACLU Student Rights Handbook or Jerry Farber's The Student as Nigger did for mine.
Neil Gaiman has been similarly smitten with this book and shared on his blog his own hopes for how it will impact young readers:
I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder.
Indeed, there are early signs that young readers are responding to the book's challenges by putting some of its ideas into action. Doctorow has created a website which documents the various ways his work is being appropriated and remixed. And there are already some interesting stories to be found there. For example, one group of coders is hard at work developing the ParanoidLinux program described in the novel:
Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)
When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode's irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!
Doctorow has shared a YouTube video produced by some young readers who dfamatize the opening passages from the novel:
A reader and former Senior House resident Alec Resnick wrote me to ask me whether I could think of another book which had been so carefully designed to launch a resistance movement. Certainly science fiction authors have been trying to use the genre as a means of political commentary since before any one thought to call it science fiction. H.G. Wells saw himself as a political novelist and was only retrospectively understood as writing SF. The Futurians were an influential group in the early history of science fiction fandom who saw the genre as a tool for social change. They included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, and Frederik Pohl. Check out Space Merchants for a good example of the kind of social criticism these guys smuggled into what were then dime paperbacks. On the conservative end of the spectrum, we could certainly read a writer like Robert Heinlein as making the case for mandatory military service as tied to voting in Starship Troopers, for example. We can see the feminist science writers of the 1960s as explicitly bound up with movements for social change and science fiction was very popular with the leaders of the anti-war movements of the 1960s. And then, of course, there's George Orwell himself who certainly saw the value of mixing politics and speculative fiction -- I'm never sure whether we can call 1984 science fiction or not but it's certainly swimming in the same stream. Many of these books include commentary on current developments and sometimes blue prints for alternative social structures.
But I don't know of another book which provides so much detailed information on how to transform its alternative visions into realities. And as such, this may be the most subversive book aimed at young readers in the past decade. I fear that in the current political climate a lot of teachers and librarians are going to end up battling school boards and angry parents to make sure young people have access to this book. If they do so, it will be a battle worth fighting.
If you want to sample the book, Doctorow has made it available for free download, but trust me, you are going to want to own a copy. What good is a political page turner without any pages to turn!
June 18, 2008
What Does Popular Culture Have to Do With Civic Media?
The following post originally appeared on the Media Shift Idea Lab blog, which is run by the Knight Foundation as part of their ongoing focus on civic media and citizen journalism. If you don't know this blog, you should. Regular contributors include such key thinkers in this area as Dan Gilmor, Jay Rosen, Gail Robinson, Ian Rowe, J.D. Lasica, Leslie Rule, Mark Glaser, Lisa Williams, and many others. It is a great space to go and learn about how new technologies and cultural processes are being deployed to enhance civic engagement. I had the chance to hang out with many of these folks last week at a conference we hosted at MIT.
The Center for Future Civic Media is collaborating with the MIT Communications Forum to host an ongoing series of conversations about media and civic engagement. This past term, we hosted two such exchanges --- "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," an exchange between University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge) and Harvard University law professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) and "Youth and Civic Engagement" with University of Washington political science professor Lance Bennett, actvist Alan Khazei (Be the Change), and our own Ingeborg Endter (formerly with the Computer Clubhouse project, now a key player at the Center for Future Civic Media.) These events are now available on audiocast: you can find "Our World Digitized" here and "Youth and Civic Engagement" here. What follows are some personal reflections on a theme touched upon in the first exchange and explored more deeply in the second -- the relationship of popular culture to civic engagement.
Despite its title, the goal of the Benkler/Sunstein exchange was not to sort through which of us was "the good, the bad, or the ugly" or even to present a debate between an Internet critic and an advocate. My own sense is that both Sunstein and Benkler have more complex, more multivalent perspectives on contemporary digital culture than is generally acknowledged. I know that both writers are ones I regularly teach in my classes and both raise questions which we need to address if we are to develop a sophisticated understanding of how and why civic engagement operates in the digital era. Our discussion was far reaching and defies easy description or summary here. You will have to listen to it yourself.
Near the end of the session, one of my graduate students, Lana Schwartz (bless her soul!), asked a question about how popular media and participatory culture fit into their ongoing discussion about the state of American democracy. Neither speaker was fully prepared to address this question, though Sunstein showed in the process a previously unsuspected enthusiasm for Lost. As a moderator, I had not felt it was my place to introduce my own perspectives on this question so I wanted to take advantage of this space to spell out a bit more about why I think Sunstein should pay more attention to the way popular culture gets discussed on the web.
A core premise running through Sunstein's two most recent books, Republic.com and Infotopia is this concern that despite or perhaps even because of the dramatic expansion of the information environment brought about by the introduction of the web, most of us are accessing a much narrower range of opinion than previous generations in part because of our tendency to filter out news that is not personally interesting to us, in part because many of the forums we frequent do not have strong mechanisms for insuring diversity of perspective, and in part because such groups tend to develop very firm yet polarizing consensus over time which further narrows what gets said. I first read Sunstein's argument when I was asked to be a respondent to his article, "The Daily We," for Boston Review.
Sunstein assumes that we join virtual communities primarily on the basis of ideological identifications. Yet, many, if not most, Net discussion groups are not defined along party affiliations but rather around other kinds of shared interests--hobbies or fandoms, for example--which frequently cut across political lines. The fact that you and I both watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer may or may not mean that we share the same views on gun control. Many ideological questions may surface in such contexts: aviation buffs debate the naming of an airport after Ronald Reagan, the fans of a particular soap opera debate the moral choices made by a character. Sometimes these exchanges produce flame wars, sometimes mutual understanding. Still, they bring together people who would have had little or no prior contact and thus constitute contexts where more diverse opinions can be heard. We should not underestimate such exchanges by maintaining a crisp separation of political dialogue from other kinds of social interaction.
Then as now, I find Sunstein's argument most convincing when he is speaking about those communities which are defined explicitly around political communication, i.e. the kinds of communities that law professors are most likely to spend time studying. Yet, they seem to break down as we move towards other kinds of communities, such as the fan communities which I most often explore.
While ideological perspectives certainly play a role in defining our interests as fans and media consumers, they are only one factor among others. So, we may watch a program which we find entertaining but sometimes ideologically challenging to us: I know conservatives who watched The West Wing and laugh at The Daily Show; I know liberals who enjoy 24 even if they might disagree about the viability of torture as a response to global terrorism. Television content provides a "common culture" which often bridges between other partisan divides within the culture, even in the context of culture war discourses which use taste in popular media as a wedge issue to drive us apart.
So, a fan group online is apt to be far more diverse in its perspectives than a group defined around, say, a political candidate or a social issue. This is not to suggest that fan communities do not form firm consensus perspectives which block some other ideas from being heard, but they form them around different axis -- such as desired sets of romantic partnerships between characters -- which may or may not reflect ideological schisms. There may be rich discussions, then, about the philosophy of education which should rule at Hogwarts, just not on which character constitutes the most appropriate life partner for Harry Potter.
At the same time, the nature of popular culture means that it continually raises social, political, and ethical issues; popular media projects something of our hopes and fears and as such, it provides us a context for talking through our values. Research for example shows that fans of reality television shows spend more time talking about ethical issues than trying to predict the outcomes. Indeed, on a fan discussion group, there is an active desire for diversity of background and perspective to sustain the conversation and allow all participants to get new insights which refreshes their relationship with the series. In some cases, the community is engaged in a collective activity of problem solving, as in the case of the Survivor spoilers I discussed in Convergence Culture or for that matter, the various groups online trying to figure out the mysteries of Lost.
In many cases, these groups are seeking to make predictions which have, in the end, right or wrong answers: someone's going to win Survivor; someday, we hope, we will know what's really going on on that island. As such, they split around competing theories, often adopting perspectives which are adversarial in the same sense that a court of law is adversarial: competing sides contest each claim made in the hopes of getting closer to the truth. Such communities, thus, have mechanisms built into them that insure that competing truth claims get heard and that the relationship between them get played out at a fairly deep level. Many of these mechanisms look very much like the solutions which Sunstein proposed for insularity and polarity in Infotopia, but they are being applied to less "serious matters."
Again, though, we can't assume that no important civic discussions take place here. Consider, for example, the representation of an American political campaign depicted in the final season of The West Wing, which was depicted as a contest between Alan Alda as a thoughtful maverick Republican (closely model on John McCain) and Jimmy Smitts as a minority candidate who refuses to play old style race politics (modeled on Barack Obama). In the course of the season, both fictional candidates rehearsed themes, issues, and rhetorical styles which were designed to play to a "purple America" and were intended to be a utopian alternative to the 2004 campaign cycle. More and more, it looks like this fictional campaign was in fact a rehearsal for our current presidential season and that the program, in effect, market tested a range of new ways of framing the relationship between the two parties. Surely, we have to see such a process as deeply bound up with our contemporary understanding of civic engagement. The program both educated us about core civic concerns and gave us a new framework for thinking about what a good candidate might look like. And because the program was watched by people from all ideological stripes, it offered a context for a bi-partisan or "post-partisan" exchange at the same time we were incapable of talking to our neighbors about politics in the real world.
In Convergence Culture, I argue that we are learning through play skills which we are increasingly deploying towards more serious purposes: in this case, a generation of young people may have found their voice in online debates and discussions around their favorite television programs. In this space, they felt empowered to express and argue for their points of view, precisely because talking about popular culture lowered the stakes for everyone involved. And it was through these conversations that they developed a strong sense of social ideals and values which they carry with them as they venture into real world political debates. I am unshamed to say that much of what I now believe about diversity and social justice I learned growing up watching Star Trek in the 1960s, watching a multiracial crew operate as friends and team members on the bridge, seeing how they responded to the challenges posed by alien societies radically different from their own.
And this brings us to the second of the MIT Communication Forum events on youth and civic engagement. For me, one of the most exciting development of the past year has been watching the dramatic increase in youth participation in the Democratic and Republican primaries, seeing so many young people vote for the first time. Our speaker, W. Lance Bennett, edited an important new collection of essays for the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Learning and Youth series at the MIT Press, which is essentially reading for anyone who wants to understand what current research tells us about young people's civic lives online. You can read the book for free online.
In his introduction to that book, Bennett outlines conflicting claims about young people's relations to civic life: one which sees them as apathetic, ill-informed, and disinterested because they tend to shy away from traditional civic organizations, tend to get news from nontraditional sources, and tend to be skeptical if not cynical about the claims made by political leaders. The other sees strong signs that their experience as media producers and participants in online communities, are giving them a much greater sense of empowerment, creating a stronger sense of shared social responsibilities, and are leading them to feel more comfortable speaking out about what they believe in. Bennett argues that those who want to get young people more involved in the political process, including the designers of future civic media or the developers of school curriculum about politics, need to spend more time studying the kinds of civic lives young people do find engaging and examining the language which speaks to this generation.
Bennett notes that most campaigns spend little time addressing young people's concerns because they are seen as a hard to reach demographic which rarely makes a difference in elections. We will see whether these patterns hold, given the amount of attention now being paid for the centrality of the youth vote to the Obama campaign. As we look back through the aftermath of the current campaign season, we will certainly want to think long and hard about what impact YouTube parodies, Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and Stephen Colbert had on young people's engagement and participation in this election and will want to pay attention to how each of the major candidates have tapped into references to these shows as a way of reaching young voters.
So, what does popular culture have to do with civic media? More than many law professors might assume...
June 4, 2008
"What Is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part Two)
What criteria should we use to evaluate good and bad remixes?
I think that, as with any work of art, the criteria for judging whether a remix is 'good' or 'bad' is largely subjective and what some people passionately love, others will think is a complete waste of time. I believe there is no artistic work in existence that everyone on planet earth would unanimously agree is 'good.'
Having said that, for the purposes of the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, I have set some general criteria for the public and for the judges to use as guidelines when rating the videos. These are overall impact, which will account for 50% of the marks, creativity for 25% and communication for the remaining 25%. If you were to analyse a video remix that is generally accepted as being 'good', for example Titanic 2: the Surface by Robert Blankenheim, we can see that the video is exceptionally well produced, so much so that you could easily believe that is a genuine trailer for a new Titanic movie! The basic idea behind the piece is very clever and well executed on every level. Personally, I think that believability is a recurring theme in many of the most popular and well received video remixes. For these types of remixes, it is a huge challenge to convince the viewers that what they are watching is real. There is a long history of people messing with media channels to communicate a message effectively, e.g. Orson Welles War of the Worldsbroadcast and I feel that speaking to an audience in a language that they are intimately familiar with, e.g. movie trailers, is an excellent way to communicate a message. The Adbusters movement have been 'culture-jamming' for decades, mostly in the medium of print, but I expect a lot of video remixed work to emerge in this niche in the future.
But what about 'bad' remixes? Well, it is fantastic to see that so many amateur video makers are trying their hand at producing video remixes, however, as with every art form, the ratio is usually about 10% quality, 90% garbage. The ratio holds true in the case of video remixes. Here is an example of a particularly poor effort, but hopefully the creator will stick at it and improve as they produce more work. Having said that, production skills are not necessarily the be all and end all. Sometimes, the idea is strong enough to bring the video popularity even if the production values are not 100%.
An interesting debate has sprung up around so-called 'YouTube Poop' videos. To some people, these types of videos seem to make no sense, are offensive and are even difficult to watch. People said similar things about punk. Personally, I think that YouTube Poop videos are some of the most potent examples of remixed videos out there, and although they may not be attempting to communicate a particular underlying message, bearing more resemblance to stream-of-consciousness poetry, they have their own artistic merit. But I am certain that many people would consider them to be 'bad' remixes.
The statement above implies that you think the current influx of remixes and recuts is a product of shifts in the technological environment. Yet, we could point to a much older history of cut-ups, collages, montages, scratch video, fan video, running back across much of the 20th century. Remix was part of 20th century life well before digital tools and platforms arrived. What factors do you think have given rise to our current remix culture?
I agree with you that remix itself is by no means a new phenomenon. In fact, it dates back as far as we can trace human history. The earliest example I am aware of is the anagram, which is essentially taking the building blocks of a word, i.e. the letters, remixing them into a new order that creates a new word and a secondary meaning and association by connecting the first word to the newly formed second word. There have been examples of remix in every creative art since time immemorial. For example, in art, the obvious one is collage. In music, folk music was spread by word of mouth, and so when one person would learn a new song from someone else, they would often apply their own variations to it, essentially remixing it to suit their own style.
In more recent times, in the history of recorded music, music remixes date back at least to the 1950's, when Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman remixed Orson Welle's War of the Worlds with various musical snippets. In the world of film and video, recuts and remixes have been in existence since the art of editing was invented. Some of the most well known filmmakers that experimented in the field of remix and montage as far back as the 1920s include the Russians, Sergei Eisenstein and his mentor Lev Kuleshov. Joseph Cornell and Hans Richter also experimented in the genre in the early part of the 20th Century.
The distinct difference between the work that was produced by these masters and the video remixes that we see today on Total Recut and YouTube, are that now the tools of production have been democratized. What was once an art form confined to professionals who could afford expensive film-making equipment and distribution companies with established networks and connections, is now affordable to the majority of creators in the western world. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection today can produce and distribute their work for costs close to zero. Every new computer comes shipped with editing software, video content is widely available on video sharing networks like YouTube and the Internet Archive, and it is easy to reach a potentially large audience by uploading your video to one of these sites.
The net result is that the medium is evolving. Video remix includes everything from movie trailer recuts, political parodies, music mash-ups, subvertisements, fan made vids, machinima, overdubs and many others. There is no doubt in my mind that many other sub-genres will evolve as more and more people begin to experiment in this area.
In your thesis, you suggest that video recuts are "stifled by overzealous copyright owners who are over-protective of their work." What can you tell us about current legal responses to the remix community? Are there any signs that the studios are becoming more accepting of remix culture as remixes become more widespread on sites like YouTube and are finding their way back into commercial media channels?
Of recent times there has been a serious crackdown on video sites like YouTube where copyright owners have made claims of copyright infringement and the videos have been taken down, in compliance with the DMCA. Unfortunately, many remixed videos that legitimately make fair use of copyrighted content are being caught in the crossfire of outright piracy. I feel it is very important to highlight the distinction here as this is possibly the number one reason why the remix community gets targeted and bullied by 'overzealous' copyright owners. If somebody rips an episode of Lost from DVD, for example, and uploads five ten minute segments of the episode to YouTube unchanged and without permission, this is piracy and should definitely not be condoned. ABC Studios would be completely within their rights to request that YouTube remove these infringing videos from their site. However, if someone were to sample small clips from various episodes of Lost, recut them, add effects and overlay a soundtrack from the classic 80's TV show The A-Team, this would clearly be a fair use of the copyrighted material.
Unfortunately, the filtering technology that has been developed to track copyrighted material cannot distinguish between these different types of videos, and fair use video remixes are being wrongfully taken down from YouTube every day. One of the problems here is that the creators of these ingenious videos are unaware that they are within their rights to file counter notifications against copyright infringement claims that they believe to be false. In my own case, I had three of my remix videos removed by the BBC, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, which led to my YouTube account being disabled. Three strikes and you're out. Each of the videos were less than three minutes long, and the use of copyrighted material in them was clearly fair use. I filed counter notification claims with each of the allegators through YouTube, which is a relatively straightforward process. The BBC conceded that my video was a fair use and the other two companies did not respond within the DMCA time limit and so my three videos were put back up and my account was reinstated.
I am certain that there are many other people out there who have had similar experiences but did not realise they could do anything to get their videos put back up. I would encourage anyone who feels that their work is fair use to file counter notifications and to make sure that their videos are put back online. Alternatively, they can upload them to Total Recut!
On a more positive note, I have noticed a trend among some of the larger media corporations that suggests that they are becoming more accepting of user generated remix videos that sample from their copyrighted material. Some, including Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and Warner Bros have even dabbled with remix contests of their own to coincide with the release of their movies including School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly and Rambo. We have also recorded a significant exponential increase in the number of video recuts being uploaded to the web every day and less being taken down, which suggests that more people are getting interested in the area and that copyright owners are beginning to realise the potential benefits of allowing, and possibly even encouraging their fans to play with the content they produce.
In my opinion, video remixes are a free form of advertising for copyright owners and also create more devoted fans of the original work. In a few years, we will all look back and it will be mind boggling to think that big media companies tried to stop fans of their content from creating remixed videos that actually served to promote the original work, as well as being entertaining pieces in themselves.
Your site features a space for political remixes. Do you see remix as an important form of political speech?
I personally feel that remix is one of the best ways for people to voice their opinions and increase their chances of being heard. What better way is there of communicating how you would like George Bush to act than to literally change the words that come out of his mouth? With the current build up to the presidential elections in the United States, we are seeing and hearing a lot of media surrounding the actions and words of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. A plethora of remixed videos have sprung up with Obama , Clinton and McCain as the subjects. I think that having the tools to be able to create videos like these and express personal opinions to a wide audience is extremely empowering for individual users in the digital age. Members of Obama's campaign realise the potential power of grass roots creativity and a video contest has been hosted this month by the folks at moveon.org with a view to creating a 30 second spot for the presidential candidate that will air on national television. No doubt, many of these will be video remixes and we look forward to seeing the finished pieces.
Many people use political parodies as a way to highlight the issues that particular politicians are facing and suggesting courses of action. When Tony Blair was considering his resignation as Prime Minister, a fantastic remix appeared illustrating Blair's internal debate. Another classic video that has done the rounds is the Blair Bush Endless Love remix. This video is interesting in that it pokes fun at the perceived notion of the apparently odd relationship between a submissive Tony Blair and a dominant George Bush.
I have tried my own hand at one or two political remixes in the past. Being from Ireland, I decided to poke a little fun at the two candidates for the Irish General elections last year, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, the two candidates for Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the country at the time. One video showed Enda Kenny as if he was auditioning for American Idol and coming up against a decidedly unimpressed Simon Cowell. The other clip showed Bertie Ahern as if he were pitching a business idea in the Dragons Den I think it is very important that citizens of a country can air their views about their political leaders, and I feel that video remix is one of the most powerful ways to do this.
What are your hopes for the future of remix culture? How do remixes relate to the larger Free Culture movement?
I see remix gradually becoming more mainstream and more widely accepted as a creative form in its own right. Ever more examples of commercialised remix are appearing on our TV and computer screens every day. Many people involved in remix culture detest the idea of the commercialisation of this type of work as they see it as a grass roots, perhaps even rebellious movement, and one that gives a voice to the individual. I don't see this going away. Even if a lot more commercial remix work is created, the tools that enable individuals to transform and recreate the media and culture around them and the new channels of free distribution that enable their work to reach huge audiences are here to stay. My hopes for the future of remix culture would be for this type of work to seep into all walks of life. I would love to see even more educational institutions adopting it as a technique of learning, for example, asking students to create a remixed video about George Washington rather than handing in a written report. In the professional arena, I would love to see more video remix artists being headhunted by studios based on the remix work they showcase online or being commissioned to create new work.
Before this can happen, however, remix artists need to stop being afraid of frivolous legal threats. A large number of remix artists are very careful about revealing their true identities online and use anonymous alter-egos for fear of being sued. I would hope that remix artists will eventually feel as though they don't need to do this anymore, as it could be stifling potential opportunities for them. The copyright issues surrounding remix work are a headache for everyone interested in freely expressing themselves using digital media. Of course, fair use enables the use of small samples of copyrighted material for non-commercial purposes, but I envisage new business models emerging around copyright cleared remix work in the not too distant future.
In terms of the larger Free Culture movement, there are many people and organisations doing fantastic work to help combat the ongoing problem of corporate greed that has seen the copyright term extended to a ridiculous degree in the latter half of the 20th century. Organisations such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Social Media, the Convergence Culture Consortium and FreeCulture.org are all doing incredible work to prevent the scales from tipping too far in the wrong direction and of course individuals, such as our judging panel for the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, provide invaluable insights through their written and spoken words that help to raise much needed awareness of the issues surrounding remix culture.
We are hosting the Total Recut Remix Challenge primarily to the same end, and we invite anyone with an interest in this area to enter the contest and help us to raise awareness of the changes that need to take place so that we can build a society where copyright owners are fairly rewarded for their artistic labours and artists can freely express themselves by drawing inspiration from the culture around them. Every voice counts.
June 2, 2008
"What is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part One)
Several weeks ago, I announced here that I was serving as part of a panel of other "remix experts" as judges for a video competition being hosted by the website, toralrecut.com. Participants are being asked to submit videos which address the question, "What is Remix Culture?" The contest is intended to help educate the public about the debates surrounding remix, copyright, and fair use. As someone currently developing a teacher's strategy guide for teaching remix in the context of high school literature classes, I am very interested to see what kinds of materials emerge from this competition. The submissions will become visible on the site soon and the public is being encouraged to help rank the submissions.
In the spirit of sparking further conversation around the issues the contest is exploring, I asked Owen Gallagher, the mastermind behind TotalRecut, if he would respond to some questions about the contest and about remix culture more generally. Alas, his responses got lost in my dreaded spam filter and are just now seeing the light of day. In this two part conversation, he explains why he created the site and sponsored the contest, identifies some of his favorite videos, and offers some insights into the politics and aesthetics of remix video.
Here's a brief bio Owen shared with us:
Owen Gallagher (28) is a graphic, web and digital media designer, an accomplished musician and a graduate of the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland with a first class honours Masters degree in Design Communications. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he has been travelling around the United Kingdom and the United States for the past 12 months as part of the NCGE / Kauffman Foundation Global Scholars Entrepreneurship Program. Gallagher is the founder of TotalRecut.com, an online social networking community for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups that facilitates online collaboration between video artists. Total Recut has been shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards including the Golden Spiders Awards, the NICENT 25k Awards and the BBC Innovation Labs.
Gallagher is the CEO and Creative Director of GDG Interactive, a web design and development business based in Ireland. In his spare time, he dabbles in video art and has created a number of political video remixes that received significant media attention in his home country. He is an avid piano and guitar player and has composed and recorded over 100 songs as well as performing in various bands since he was 16. He is a qualified music teacher and has taught piano and guitar to a number of students. He has also acted as a part time Assistant Lecturer of Design at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland teaching web design, flash animation and digital video production.
Gallagher is passionately involved in remix culture and has a particular interest in Intellectual Property law as it applies to creative content. His Masters thesis, entitled 'Video Recuts and the Remix Revolution: Whose Rights Are Being Infringed?' explores some of the issues surrounding the appropriation of previously published content, focusing on the delicate balance between copyright and freedom of expression.
What can you tell us about your new contest? What are its goals? What kinds of videos are acceptable?
The Total Recut Video Remix Challenge is a contest that we are hosting to try to encourage people to think about the issues around remix culture and creating remixed media. We want people to create a short video remix that uses footage from any source to communicate the message: 'What is Remix Culture?' The video can be anything from 30 seconds to 3 minutes long. The idea of the contest is to produce a series of videos that raise awareness and help people to more clearly understand what is going on in the world of digital content creation, remix and intellectual property. Ideally, the videos will be educational and will communicate a clear message but we essentially want our entrants to be creative and portray what remix culture means to them. The prizes include a laptop computer loaded with all of the software needed to create high quality remixes, a digital camcorder, a digital media player and lots of Total Recut goodies.
The contest began taking entries in May and judging will begin in June. We have an exceptional judging panel of some of the elite thought-leading personalities involved in remix culture today including yourself, Larry Lessig, Pat Aufderheide, Kembrew McLeod, JD Lasica and Mark Hosler. The contest is open to everyone so I would encourage anyone who is even slightly interested in video remix to put a video together and enter the contest in May to be in with a chance of winning.
The Video Remix Challenge was an idea that developed out of my Masters project at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, which was very much focused on Remix Culture and intellectual property issues as applied to the digital creative arts, in particular, online video production. As part of the project, I developed a basic version of the Total Recut website and set up a small scale video remix contest where the idea was to create a 60 second PSA commercial using found footage to portray a particular theme e.g. Environmental Issues, Safe Sex or Drug Abuse. At the time, I was also working as a part time lecturer, teaching an interactive design class to undergraduate students at the University of Ulster, so I decided to use the students as guinea pigs and get them to produce a remixed video for their project, which had to be entered into my contest, as a requirement of their design brief. It worked like a charm and the end result was over thirty highly creative remixed videos on a diverse range of socially conscious issues which the students themselves rated and commented on, before a small judging panel decided on the final winners. Following the success of this contest and the ongoing development of Total Recut as a whole, I decided that I wanted to try and host a larger scale contest. My original idea was to try to open it up to other Universities in the U.K. and Ireland and build from there, but it has now scaled to the point where it is open to anyone who wants to enter. The basic premise of the Video Remix Challenge is to create a short form video remix that portrays what 'Remix Culture' means to you, using found footage from any source.
The reason this is such an interesting theme to pursue is because of the ongoing debate about copyright and freedom of expression in the developing landscape of user generated digital content. This is a debate that a lot of people feel very strongly about. There are extremists on both sides, some advocating the complete freedom of all content and others fighting tooth and nail to extend copyright terms and protect their assets. Then there are those who are trying to seek a middle ground - a balance between these two opposing views. This is where Total Recut and this contest reside.
The current landscape places too much emphasis on the copyright owner's control over how their content is used and leaves little room for new artists to exercise their rights to freedom of expression. However, a free-for-all where all content is free would result in no compensation for copyright owners, which would mean less incentives for people to produce new creative works. The balanced approach enables copyright owners to make money from their work, but also enables other artists to freely use samples from the entire pool of creative works to express themselves. This contest encourages people to draw inspiration from the culture around them, from the culture they grew up with and to use these images and sounds to produce something innovative with a brand new meaning.
The goals of the contest are to generate a number of creative video pieces that will help to raise awareness of these issues and perhaps help to educate people about the true nature of copyright, which is to promote the production of new creative works for society at large, by providing creators with a degree of protection over their work for a limited time. This message has been twisted and distorted almost beyond recognition by the likes of Disney and some of the larger corporations that own the copyrights to most of the content out there. Instead of creative works existing to benefit society, some of the corporations feel that creative works exist to make more money for them, for as long as possible. That is why they lobby for copyright term extensions and unfortunately, they have historically been successful in these attempts.
Ironically, many of Disney's most successful works are based on Public Domain stories, which they would not have been able to create in the first place, had the original copyright owners tried to exercise the kind of control that Disney now displays over their works. There is an excellent educational remix video created by Eric Faden of Bucknell University, that uses short samples from Disney movies to communicate messages about copyright and fair use. Here's the link.
In terms of the types of videos that are acceptable in our Video Remix Challenge, we are encouraging our entrants to be aware of, and exercise their fair use rights. The Center for Social Media at the American University of Washington have some excellent resources and guidelines. We are also encouraging people to use Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed material in their work, many of which can be found at the Internet Archive and Creative Commons respectively.
The videos will first be rated by the public and whittled down to the ten best videos, which will then be given to the judges to decide on three winners. We are very excited to see what kind of work will be produced. Going by my previous contest, there will be quite a mix of quality in terms of production skill, but sometimes the best ideas simply shine through.
Tell us more about Total Recut. How did this site come about? What are your overarching goals? What kinds of resources does it offer the remix community?
I remember very distinctly when I came up with the idea for Total Recut. I was lying out in the sun in Portugal, contemplating what I might consider putting forward as a proposal for my then upcoming Masters Degree, and the idea came to me. I wanted to create a collaborative environment for artists to be able to take existing media, remix it in some way and produce something completely new.
My interest in remix stemmed from an early age - I have always been into collage and mixed media and studied Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland before undertaking my Design degree in Donegal, but even before that, I always remember playing with toys as a young boy. My brother and I were the proud owners of many Star Wars figures and vehicles, Transformers, Thundercats, MASK, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Action Man and a whole host of other toys from various movies and TV shows. Our games always consisted of us combining these different realities and storylines, mixing them up and making up our own new narratives. It was not unusual to have Optimus Prime fighting side by side with Luke Skywalker against Mumm-Ra and Skeletor. So, from a very early age it seemed completely normal for me to combine the things I loved in new ways that seemed entertaining to me. I think that my generation and those younger than me have grown up expecting this sort of interaction with their media, on their own terms.
The idea that some corporation can tell you that you are not allowed to play with media seems ridiculous and wrong. Unfortunately, there are many who seem to believe that their control over how content is used should be absolute and unquestioned. I created Total Recut as a way to gather people together who believe that we, as a society, should be able to freely build on the works of the past. If this is successfully prevented by corporations, the practical result is that people will stop making new things out of old things for fear of being sued. Innovation will chill and the overall quality and quantity of new work being produced will be lower. Luckily, there are millions of people who refuse to accept the corporate line and they are continuing to produce new work, despite the veiled shallow threats by overzealous copyright owners.
So, when I was considering how to practically put a community of this nature together, my initial idea was to create a site for digital artists - I had the idea of taking public domain paintings and posting the images on the site, cutting them up into squares and then asking participants to choose a square each and reinterpret it in their own style. The remixed square would be uploaded to the site again and the end result would be a very interesting collaborative collage of styles inspired by the work of an artistic master.
Through my Masters research, I realised that one of the hottest technologies at the time was online video and so I decided to refocus the project to centre on remixed video work. I discovered a thriving underground community of video producers who were creating work as diverse as movie trailer recuts and machinima to remixed political parody and mashed-up music videos. One of the first remixed videos I saw was a movie trailer recut, created by Robert Ryang, of the Stanley Kubrick movie, 'The Shining', which casts the classic horror in a completely new light. Another amazing video remix that I came across early on was a political piece created by Chris Morris where segments of George Bush's State of the Union speech were recut to create a new narrative. Some of the most technically accomplished and entertaining remixes I have seen were created by a Parisian remix artist called Antonio da Silva, known online as AMDS Films. He created a number of remixes, one of the best of which is Neo vs Robocop.
So, I set about creating a site 'for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts and mash-ups that provides resources and collaborative opportunities for video remix artists in a social networking environment.' The end result was Total Recut, but the site is constantly developing. Each week, something new is added or changed based on the feedback from our members and advisors. The main focus at the moment is the Video Remix Challenge but we have a plethora of new ideas and potential directions of where we are going to steer the site in the future.
The site works on a number of different levels. Primarily it is a place where people can find and watch entertaining or thought-provoking remixed videos. Our current categories are Movie Trailer Recuts, Political, Machinima, Advertising, Educational, Music Videos and Others. This category list is by no means exhaustive and we are looking at adding to it in the near future.
Secondly, the site acts as a showcase for video remix artists, to enable them to put their work in front of the eyes of a receptive audience. We also provide a growing library of Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed video work for people to download and remix in their own projects. We are working on developing our Tutorials section, which will eventually become a 'Remix Academy' with courses and grades for people to learn everything they need to know to produce a video remix. Information and links to literature and websites about remix culture, intellectual property issues and key players in the scene are included in the Remix Culture section. We also provide remix tools where users can gain access to video editing software, conversion tools and video downloading software. The community section includes a blog, forums, user profiles and job opportunities. Virtually every aspect of the site is set up to be similar to a wiki environment, which essentially means that all registered members have the ability to add things to the site or update information about any of the content.
With regard to long term goals for Total Recut, we would love to build up the community to the point where we are considered the primary online location for people to find the very best in video remix work and talent. We intend to host more regular contests and provide links between our remix artist members and potential employers. As the site scales up, we intend to take it global and offer a multilingual version of the site to accommodate the Asian and European markets and eventually become a truly global community website for remix culture.
You write, "Video recuts...are a new art-form enabled by the convergence of emerging technologies." How do you respond to those who ask whether remixes and recuts are not creative because they build on the works of others rather than working with original material?
This is an area in which I have a huge amount of interest and have considered pursuing as a research area for my PhD - the origin of originality. It is of particular interest to me because I am what I consider to be an 'original content creator.' I write songs and lyrics using nothing but my mind, a pen and paper and a guitar. Are my songs original? If I use a combination of different chords and a variety of words to create sentences that rhyme, am I not using elements that have been used by other people in the past? What makes my songs original, in my opinion, is the unique way in which I composite the words, chords and melody. In this way, every song is created using the basic building blocks of language and music, but combined in a slightly different way.
Coming from a Graphic Design background, I often come across other designers who are adamant that their work is completely original. The nature of a Graphic Designer's work is to combine elements from different sources in creative ways to produce new pieces of work. Similar to a collage artist who takes pieces of different photos, images etc and brings them together to create new meanings. Is the finished piece not original because it is made up of building blocks from a variety of sources? In the same way, when a video remix artist combines pieces of video from different sources in new ways to create new meanings, is this not original and innovative?
Yes, remix artists build on the works of others. But do so-called creators of 'original material' not build on the works of others also? Would you consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to be an original piece of work? Even though the idea was based on a story by William Painter, which was based on a poem by Arthur Brooke? No matter how far back you go in the origin of a piece of work, you will find that the idea was built on or inspired by the work of someone else before it. I consider remixed videos to be original works. The finished piece is more than the sum of its parts.
April 30, 2008
My Mary Sue: What Fanfic Noobdom Reveals about Scholarly Methods
This is the third in a series of "intimate critiques" or autobiographical essays produced by graduate students in the Comparative media Studies Program. This essay, in particular, works through some of the methodological issues we've been studying this term, having to do with what one sees as an ethnographer working inside or outside the group they are studying. It also connects to an ongoing conversation we've been having in the program about whether or not the concept of "fandom" can be applied to talk about our relationships to high art or middle brow culture. Here, Lana's essay explores how seeing Les Miz on Broadway made her an active and appropriative fan of a literary character, even if she saw what she was doing as somehow distinct from fan fiction.
My Mary Sue:
What Fanfic Noobdom Reveals About Scholarly Methods
by Lana Swartz
When I was in the seventh grade, we went on a class trip to New York City. I attended a public arts magnet school, so our tour filtered the city into an art shrine. We went to all the museums, the concert halls, and of course, to see a Broadway show. It was 1993 or so, so Les Misérables was well into its long run at the Imperial Theater but had lost little of its gusto. I can remember thinking, a year or so later, that my life could be divided into two halves--the time before I saw Les Misérables and the time after. Yes, I actually did think that very phrase. I probably even wrote it down. Even now, as I joke about it, I don't want to describe what it was like to see the play because the doing the work of that describing would be too emotionally intense. Seriously!
And here is list item #1-- Be Respectful. See how terrifying this is? Everyone feels this vulnerable when they talk honestly about their lives. It is absolutely essential that we as qualitative researchers not cut corners, not totalize someone else's life to fit into our academic goals. As hard as it is write about our passions, to be prepared to present them to our peers, it is a lot more difficult to read what someone else has said about them. Joan Didion, that scary lady, once wrote, "Writers are always selling someone out." That may be unavoidable, but we can try. And maybe that's the difference between writers and scholars? And maybe we--and by "we," I mean, "I"-- can remember the paralysis I felt just a few paragraphs up when I tried to write about something very pleasant that happened close to fifteen years ago.
But okay here goes. The most important thing about Les Miz is that there is a character named Enjolras. Enjolras is not a main character. He's the leader of the young would-be revolutionaries who chastises a fellow would-be revolutionary, the dreamy Marius, for falling in love, as love simply distracts from revolution. Enjolras (he was played by Ron Bohmer--an actor whose autograph I currently possess) is tall and blond and uncompromising. He dies heroically, though, sadly, more as more of a symbol than an agent of change, atop the barricade, waving his big red flag. I was would say it was hot because is it ridiculously hot, but that would be a cruel understatement.
The rest of New York was a blur. The next thing I remember (at least in this reconstructed, narrativised memory) was being at home and tearing through Victor Hugo's novel. In the book, Enjolras was even better. Check out what old VH had to say:
Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. He was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view. Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman. He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrow the obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he ignored spring, he did not hear the caroling of the birds; the bare throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing except to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the Republic. He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired, and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of soul. Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him! If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien, those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.
And then, comparing him to his comrade:
Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous evolution of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington, who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an eagle.
Yes, I know that Hugo writes in long paragraphs, and I know that I have done little to summarize them, and I know that this is supposed to be a five page paper, but when the opportunity arises to direct a reader--even a solitary one--to the experience of the description of Enjolras, I can't resist.
But back to the story. Basically, I was in love. Certainly more in love than I'd ever been at 11 or 12, but, honestly, the feeling would certainly hold up against a few grown-up boyfriends I'd later claim to love. I felt almost immediately that Enjolras needed a woman. Someone... someone like me! Except better! Someone worthy of him. And this is where it gets embarrassing. I began to write stories that I thought belonged in the book, about a character that I thought, too, belonged in the book. Someone with, uh, long red curly hair and brilliant green eyes. Someone with a firey personality who must overcome her own pampered upbringing to come to understand the true meaning of the revolution. God! This is embarrassing. Knowing what I know now... You see, this person, this character I lovingly created and cared so much about? There's a word for it. It's not a nice word, either. Mary Sue.
Okay this is where I'm going to jump back into my list. #2 Don't be afraid to be stupid or wrong or look silly. All semester, I have been terrified to put things in writing, even on our class's weekly forum postings. When we write things down, they become relatively permanent. That which is posted to the internet should be thought of as never going away. But the fact is, we were all noobs once. Noobs to fanfiction. Noobs to scholarship. But we have to start somewhere and not be afraid to do so. Graduate studentship is nothing if not institutionalized noobdom. Also, fear leads to boring scholarship. What if Clifford Geertz or certainly Erica Rand had been afraid of looking silly? The earliest media thinkers at MIT--Bush, Wiener, and certainly the later Stallman and Negroponte--were objectively "wrong" about many things, but that doesn't mean that their work and the ideas generated around their work, even (and especially) when those ideas pointed out problems, were useless. I know this all sounds simplistic and obvious, but I think that it should be acknowledged that doing academic work is scary. One feels vulnerable even when one is not writing about their own life, their own Mary Sue.
Did I ever get past my fanfic noobdom? Not really. I never wrote a non-Mary Sue fanfic story. I never really even became part of a fan community. I searched AOL profiles, because that was how I accessed the internet, and found someone named Heather. She was about my age and into the same things I was--Les Miz, War and Peace--and we both hated the same things--The Phantom of the Opera, anything having to do with the 1960s. In War and Peace, she liked Pierre and I like Andrei, who I saw as an iteration of the Enjolras archetype (a complex a very different iteration, an Enjolras without a cause). We had long IM conversations where we pretended that Pierre and Andrei had been transported to the future, were married to us, and fought over the Sizzler buffet was a good place to eat (Pierre says yes, Andrei said no).
But back to Angelique. Yes. Angelique. That was her name. Angelique de Cadinet. Did I mention that she was beautiful? And rich? And feisty... it's so obvious now. Heather did not point out that Angelique was a Mary Sue. We didn't really have that vocabulary. Though we didn't know what to call it, and we didn't know how to contextualize it as a larger cultural practice, we brushed up against fandom, but not usually very good fan fiction. Heather and I regarded those we met online who wrote Les Miz fanfic as lame. Of course, most wrote stories centered around Eponine, a character we did not like, and paired her romantically with Marius, a relationship of which we did not approve. Because we regarded this subject matter as immature at best, we looked at our own work as somehow more legitimate. I know now, of course, it's pretty common for fandoms to split off into sub-fandoms in which certain relationships are verboten and that our persnickety preferences made us more like fan than less like them. In fact, we probably would have been able to criticize the Eponine stories as Mary Sue stories. Mine was, too, but maybe if I had been more overtly part of fan discourse, I would have been able to get past that.
Which brings me to lesson #3-- Do your research and be merciless about your limits. Certainly, it is possible to get away with dilettantish knowledge when you are working outside the expertise of your audience. When I told people about my experience, I didn't have the discourse to say fan or fanfic, so I would engage them in my experience on terms I felt were appropriate to the situation. Maybe I wanted to relate that I was a passionate but a quirky literary type person. Or maybe I'd use Enjolras or Prince Andrei to describe the kind of guy I liked, or the kind of guy I didn't ever want to date again. Or maybe I'd frame it with a little hipsterish irony--what strange creatures we all were in our adolescence. Once, I was able to charm the professor of a Russian literature class into a better grade than I probably deserved on a paper by describing my Prince Andrei thing. Anyone cares that much about Tolstoy probably deserves another 5 points added to their grade, right? I even got some scholarship money for an essay I wrote about Angelique as "an influential person" in my life. In most cases, the novelty of my experience was a foregrounded. But at some point, all dilettantes will encounter someone who can see right through their bullshit, even if isn't bullshit so much as lack of due diligence (though sometimes they amount to the same thing).
Years later, as a post-college almost grown-up person, I came in contact with academic writing about fandom and I began to realize that what I had been doing with Les Miz and War and Peace was a lot like fandom. I even began to consider myself a fan, even though my actual experience with fandom was clearly very limited. I even applied to CMS in part because I was excited about the way thinking about fandom liberated other kinds of thinking. The fan (perhaps as a metaphor?) reconciled and clarified a lot of frustrations I had-- about how to acknowledge the emotional stakes we all have in the work, about appropriation and authorship, and about cultural hierarchies. Does this make me an acafan? Right now, I would feel a lot more presumptuous about saying yes than I would have a year ago.
It began to be clarified when I came to visit CMS at MIT5. I was sitting in an Au Bon Pain with some aca-fanboys. We were talking about--of course--fandom. I cutely (I thought) told my Angelique story. Everyone laughed. I caged the whole thing with enough "Ah, youth" to get away with it. And then one of the acafan-boys asked, "So you wrote Mary Sue stories?" Everyone laughed again and I faux-solemnly admitted to it. But the thing was, I had no idea what he was talking about. Dear reader, imagine the fate that would have befallen me if I had dared--DARED--to enter into some sort of research with that kind of hubris? Imagine, even, if it had been aca-fangirls that I was casually talking to? The gender dynamic is another issue entirely, but the question still stands.
Clearly, this lesson (as I hope all in this paper do) applies to entering any kind of community. For me, a Mary Sue in fandom puts the matter under scary fluorescent lights. Perhaps this is why so many writers, before talking about fandom, include a disclaimer or caveat about the extent to which they might be considered fans. We might assume that (and this would follow the logic of Camille Bacon-Smith's work) that it's because they're nervous about associating themselves with a marginalized subculture. But it may be (and this would follow the logic of many fan reactions to Camille Bacon-Smith's work) that the writers are justly nervous about overstating their level of insider status. Fans have the ability to write back. And they're often really good at it. What if all ethnographers worked were required by their "subjects" to be so responsible?
The mention of Bacon-Smith's work brings up another point. #4 The kind of answers you get depend on the kind of questions you ask. A lot of what happened between Angelique and I (if I can put it that way) impacted my adolescent development. Angelique, as is the partial definition of Mary Sue characters, was a stand in for me. And though she was beautiful and rich and French and perfect, she was sort of like me. Or like the me I wanted to be. Particularly, Angelique was sexual. And everyone (yes, everyone) wanted to have sex with her. And she usually went for it. Through her, I was able to imaginatively play with my own emerging sexuality. "Being" her in fiction enabled me to actually get closer to being like her. I was able to play with my identity and reflect upon the way I conducted myself in my everyday life. What Would Angelique Do? This experience resonates with James Paul Gee's idea of "projective identity" in gaming. I was able to, as Gee describes, "project [my] values and desires onto the virtual character" and "see the virtual character as [my] own project in the making." Writing and thinking about Angelique, and her indeed her life after Enjolras's death, allowed me to have an immersive experience in which I questioned and projected my own sexual values and lifestyle as I hoped and expected it would be.
Between Heather and I, it was a way of interacting with texts socially. But it was definitely not for, as Bacon-Smith writes, "mutual healing, for protection from the outside, or to ponder the most pressing questions of our lives." I was learning something about how to be myself, but I wasn't converting the risks I'd have to take as an emerging adolescent into fanfiction. There was pain, yes. I walked around everyday with the pain of Enjolras's death in my heart, and to a lesser extent the pain of not being the same world as him. To be honest, I sometimes thought I was crazy! But the purpose of entering into that world was certainly not to ask, ask Bacon-Smith suggests of the fans she studies, "why does life hurt so much?"
Yes, my narrative might have fit into my understanding of Bacon-Smith's schema--a kinda' nerdy 7th grader uses fanfiction and (a two person, in this case) community to sublimate the fear of my own emerging identity as confident sexual being--but it doesn't really ring true for me. And, more importantly, it doesn't really ask the questions I'm most interested in. As someone who is most interested in the social and cultural process of fandom, my own story looks, at least until I start asking new questions, to be too psychological oriented to be of much interest.
As I interrogate even my own experience, I am compelled to look at things more culturally and less psychologically. Sometimes, as is true in this case, those questions push me beyond my personal experience. And I have to remember that all data points, even mine, are singular and thus may not individually reflect the most interesting aspect about a given phenomenon. #5 Your own experience should not limit the kind of thinking that you do.
In retrospect, it seems possible that, if Heather or I were aware of the word at all, we thought of the Eponine/Marius stories we detested as fan fiction and our own process as something else, something more "original." During that time of my life, I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be able to publish my finished work as my own sovereign creation. I know now that I was caught up in notions about authenticity and authorship that I would probably feel a lot more ambivalent, at the very least, about today. I thought that in order to make my work real, to make it count, I would have translate it into something unrecognizable as rooted in Les Miserables. I tried everything--converting it to the American Revolution but keeping the characters essentially the same, which didn't really work because that time period just didn't do it for me. Eventually, I began to get bored. I knew what I was writing would never be publishable, and my interest began to drift. If Heather or I had made the write social connection with the right fan--or perhaps if Les Miserables or War and Peace had a larger fandom--I would have found the community to help me appreciate the value of the appropriative work that I was actually doing, but I didn't. My idiosyncratic experience limited me from extracting--at least not until years later--some of the more intriguing potential meanings I could have made out of it.
Heather and I remained in touch, but we began talking about other things--starting High School, getting involved with new kinds of music and subcultures. Soon I wanted to be Courtney Love or Kim Deal, the amazing female bass players from the Pixies. And soon after that I wanted to be Joan Didion. Funny, now, at 26, I find myself again needing a fictionalized avatar self. Maybe she could give me direction toward one of these careers--and, really, lifestyles--that do not yet exist. Got any suggestions? Another methodological journey never hurt anyone
Deja Elana Swartz
University of Florida, BA English, 2002
Deja Elana Swartz grew up on a houseboat in Miami, Florida. She graduated with a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from the University of Florida in 2002. After graduation, she taught high school English in Houston, Texas as part of Teach For America. She's also worked in nonprofit development and in autism education and research.
Here at CMS, she is a researcher specializing in learning and user insights at Project New Media Literacies and serves as the liaison to the Harvard GoodPlay Project. She is fascinated by taste-making. Her own tastes currently include nail-art, knock-off fashion, fast food breakfast sandwiches, soap opera comic strips, and Tolstoy.
April 3, 2008
the following post is [about] anonymous
The following blog post was prepared by a CMS graduate student who, appropriately enough, wishes to remain anonymous. S/He has been watching with some interest the emergence of the Anonymous movement, a grassroots effort to protest against the Church of Scientology organization, which has adopted a range of references and models from popular culture to further its goals. It offers a rich reference point for those of us in better understanding the ways that participatory culture can offer a spring board for civic engagement. It seems like an appropriate followup to the interview I ran earlier this week with Witness's Sam Gregory in that it represents another example of how video sharing might contribute to civic discourse. The author closes the post with a call for academic discussion of the implications of this phenomenon. S/he and I offer this post as a resource for further study.
On March 15, 2008, over 9000* people worldwide took to the streets to protest practices of the Church of Scientology organization. Without any clear leadership, masked individuals descended upon local organizations with signs and flyers. They stood outside, chanting phrases like "tax the cult" and "why is Lisa Dead?" They gave speeches, recruited new members, and granted press interviews. Then, they sang and danced to Rick Astley's epic 1987 hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up."
Hi, We're from the Internet
The protesters call themselves "Anonymous" and their movement originated on several loosely affiliated web sites. The long-standing site Something Awful had built a community through its forums and a popular image manipulation competition called Photoshop Phriday. Other sites spun off of or grew up in parallel with Something Awful, including the always-offensive image posting site 4chan.org. The most popular "board" on 4chan was "/b/", which featured doctored photos, inside jokes, and porn. Through 2007, the community was pulling online pranks like taking down web sites and defacing Myspace pages. Their culture grew out of the pursuit of these sophomoric "lulz" and spawned several internet memes. Perhaps most well known is the LOLCats. Their language became filled with sarcastically self-referential bastardizations of English.
The community began coordinating "raids" against various sites, online games, and people that they deemed idiotic (or, in their words, had broken "teh Rules of teh Internetz"). They successfully shut down a white supremacist's page, lashed out at a site that copied one of their images, and flooded virtual games that they considered inane. They coordinated these efforts through several sites, but most prominently through a collaboratively maintained wiki. Plans would form as a result of many proposals, one of which would gain a critical mass of support. There were no leaders. At some point, the group decided to start calling itself "Anonymous," inspired by the largely anonymous web-posting tools they used. On July 26, 2007, KTTV Fox of Los Angeles did a news report on the group, calling them "hackers on steroids" and "domestic terrorists." The Fox report was quickly spread, parodied, and made fun of. It also formed the foundation for the group's ironic self-identity, and cemented the "Anonymous" moniker for months to come.
Throughout, Anonymous maintained a rough edge. Their "raids" often seemed more like cyberstalking or bullying. Their image boards continued to feature mostly porn, gore, and insults. Their conversations were peppered with what sounded like hate speech -- constant references to "fags" or "niggers". To be sure, it was a community made up largely of young white males acting somewhat immaturely. On the other hand, there have emerged more subtle undercurrents in their behavior. To some extent this language is used ironically and critically. Anons are equal opportunity offenders, and they seem to value free speech far more than they feel true hatred. They also use this harsh language when referring to each other just as much as when discussing the targets of their attacks. In a way, the phrases have been removed from their contextualized meanings in standard English discourse and reappropriated as part of the memetic language of the group.
On January 15, 2008, the online gossip site Gawker posted an internal Church of Scientology video featuring Tom Cruise riffing on the wonders of Scientology. The church had already successfully used legal tactics to remove the video from other sites, but Gawker claimed, "it's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it." Lawyers for the church claimed copyright infringement, and Gawker claimed fair use. At some point, some members of Anonymous became incensed at what they saw as an attempt to silence free speech and violation of internet principles. Debate ensued, and one member stated:
"Gentlemen, this is what I have been waiting for. Habbo, Fox, The G4 Newfag Flood crisis. Those were all training scenarios. This is what we have been waiting for. This is a battle for justice. Every time /b/ has gone to war, it has been for our own causes. Now, gentlemen, we are going to fight for something that is right. I say damn those of us who advise against this fight. I say damn those of us who say this is foolish. /b/ROTHERS, THE TIME HAS COME FOR US TO RISE AS NOT ONLY HEROES OF THE INTERNETS, BUT AS ITS GUARDIANS."
Scientology had thrown down the gauntlet, and Anonymous awoke. In a YouTube video addressed to the church, Anonymous explained that, "for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment, we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." Anonymous promptly took down Scientology's web sites, endlessly faxed them black sheets of paper, and called their public phone numbers with loops of... you guessed it... "Never Gonna Give You Up."
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the LULZ
The initial objective of the campaign was a success. By all accounts, Anonymous was frustrating the Church of Scientology and generating amusement for Anonymous. The church replied publicly, counter-attacked Anonymous sites through legal (and, allegedly, technical) means, and was forced to move its servers to a more robust and costly provider. Soon, long-time Scientology critics began to take notice. Some of these critics had worked to expose the organization's practices for decades, and the massive influx of energy was both exhilarating and frightening. One critic, Mark Bunker, replied via YouTube:
"I think it's incredibly exciting to have an army of young, passionate people wanting to do something about Scientology's fraud and abuse. However, I think you're making some major mistakes that are going to hurt in the long run. They're going to make you look bad, they're going to get you in trouble... they're going to get us in trouble, those of us who have been long-time critics of Scientology. Scientology is good at tar-and-feathering us with other people's actions. It may seems like fun and games, but Scientology is serious, you have to be prepared... I'm mainly concerned because you shouldn't be doing things that are illegal. You just shouldn't. It's not morally right, it's not right when Scientology does it, and it's not right when we do it... a better way to get at them would be to try to get rid of their tax-exempt status... now I know that doesn't sound anywhere near as interesting as attacking their websites. It sounds dull, but that's going to hurt them. Going out and protesting, that's wonderful. I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but please please please reform your movement the way we want Scientology to reform their movement."
Bunker later commented that "I thought they'd lash out at me." Instead, they celebrated him and named him "Wise Beard Man." In his video, he sounds like an earnest and concerned parent. It's hard to imagine such an uncouth and authority-hating group taking him seriously. But, they did. They began to educate themselves about Scientology's various alleged abuses, including the 1995 death of Lisa McPherson who was under the care of the church at the time she died. When someone posted a YouTube video claiming to speak for families that had been torn apart by Scientology, one Anonymous replied:
"Fucking rise up, sons and daughters of the Internet. Rise the fuck up and stay up. Let 'em know we'll take the fight to them, and that we'll help every single person that wants to leave the cult. We have lawyers and social workers and therapists in our ranks, and we can, and will, give aid to those who want out. We are Anonymous. For the lulz, but moar than that now. For teh most epic win. Revoke Scientology's tax-exempt status. Great Justice for Lisa McPherson."
Nearly overnight, Anonymous shifted focus. The Anons began planning for a worldwide protest, they compiled research, started a lobbying campaign, and cranked out flyers and informational pamphlets. On February 10, they staged their first major protest with several thousand participating. Many Anonymous donned "guy fawkes" masks, made famous in the film "V for Vendetta", as a symbol of their resistence to oppression and their commitment to anonymity. There is a long history of Scientology protesters allegedly being harrassed and otherwise attacked by the church. When anonymous translated its digital anonymity into real-world anonymity, Scientology faced something it had never before experienced.
Nevertheless, just before the second wave of protests on March 15, the CoS began agressively pursuing members of Anonymous that it had managed to identify. In some jurisdictions, local anti-mask laws had actually made it difficult for Anons to protest anonymously--a sharp contrast to their accustomed protections online. The church posted videos "outing" members and accusing them of hate crimes and terrorism (Anonymous responded by cloning the site and replacing the videos with Rick Astley). The CoS claimed to have filed criminal complaints at federal agencies, with these allegations. It tried to get an injunction against protestors in Clearwater, and failed. The worldwide protests grew, and Anonymous declared March 15 a success. The protests had been timed to coincide with the birthday of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Anonymous donned birthday hats, ate cake, and danced to a cheesy song with the lyrics, "When it's time to party we will party hard."
After the March protests, CoS sent nastygrams to some de-masked Anons via at least two lawfirms, which in themselves constituted no legal action. In a couple of limited cases, CoS actually took demonstrable legal action. It accused LA-based Sean Carasov of making death threats, and the LAPD dismissed the charges. It also filed a complaint of Trespass and Criminal Harrassment against Boston-based "Gregg" who knocked on the door of the local CoS and attempted to give them fliers. Gregg has yet to be heard in court, but Anonymous feels confident that the legal merit is weak and that the actions were filed solely as an attempt to intimidate.
By all measures, the intimidation isn't working. The next protests occur on April 12th, and are focused on bringing attention to the families that have been "disconnected" by the CoS. Anonymous plans monthly protests for the forseeable future.
An Academic Opportunity
Anonymous presents an array of opportunities for interesting scholorship. It is a cultural community, a political movement, a legal battleground, and more. It straddles between internet and "real world" existence. We need to study Anonymous... and to study hard.
Academics from cultural studies, media theory, and anthropology might seek to better understand what holds this unique community together. How have they appropriated anime and internet culture into the core of their identity and used it to unify their movement? How do neighbor communities like cosplay and video gaming cross pollinate with Anonymous? How does Anonymous connect with the earlier Internet vs. Scientology effort? What do we make of their obscure and offensive language?
Legal academics also have a great deal to consider when it comes to Anonymous. How do our laws regarding online vs. real-world anonymity differ? For example, should a Kentucky bill banning anonymous online posting pass or should a New York statute banning anonymous protesting in real life be overturned? Is the CoS using official-looking lawyer letters to intimidate and chill free speech? What can be done to defend Anons who claim that they are the target of fair-gaming through the legal system? What about the larger questions of Scientology's tax-exempt status and their controversial 1993 settlement with the IRS?
Political scientists studying movements and agenda-setting might want to consider how this group organizes and affects political change. What has made Anonymous able to grow and adapt so dynamically? How can such a decentralized, leaderless collective maintain potency in the long term? What are the means that the group is using to lobby and advocate anonymously? How is the movement gaining newcomers while staying on message and not becoming fragmented?
Some academics have already begun to take notice, but their work is preliminary. PBS's digital news project "Idea Lab" recently posted a thought-provoking article on the Anonymous transition from the Internet to the "real world." Anonymous demonstrates the principles of digital learning as they translate their online skills into collective action. They leverage viral-like promotion strategies through efforts like youfoundthecard.com. They use language and tactics from the video game world. They have developed a decentralized news making and gathering service in support of their cause. What can academics learn from this?
Rise up, sons and daughters of the academy.
More About Anonymous A Sample of Anonymous Media Coverage
From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part Two)
Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with human rights advocate Sam Gregory, who I met at USC's DIY Media event earlier this year. In this second part, Gregory explains why Witness is creating its own video distribution site, discusses the role of remix in the realm of human rights activism, and explores what it might mean to "do it with others" rather than "do it yourself."
Tell us more about The Hub. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of creating a platform specifically for distributing human rights videos as opposed to tapping into the power of shared or general portals like YouTube?
The Hub, WITNESS' most recent project tries to address what's missing in the online media sharing ecosystem for human rights activists. It's in Beta at the moment, and launched on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2007. In our first four months of quiet beta, we've had in the region of five million views of media, and going on eight hundred items of media uploaded.
It's envisioned as the human rights channel for the online community, as a place where anyone can upload human rights-related footage, share it with others and self-organize into affinity groups, comment on material there, and most importantly access online tools for action, and guidance on how to turn their video into compelling advocacy material. It places a strong emphasis on security both for the uploader and for those filmed, on providing contextualization for imagery wherever possible, and also seeks to provide normative leadership around the impacts of participatory media creation and distribution in oppressive contexts. For me, that option to act is critical. There's nothing worse from the activists' point-of-view than risking your life to film a piece of footage, and to then to have that experience dismissed. From the viewer's point-of-view there's nothing worse than being exposed to scenes of misery, and to have no way to take action. It's deeply draining and de-motivating for people to watch and not be able to act, it misses the opportunity to engage support, and it contributes to the compassion fatigue that we all already experience.
We're not in favor of walled gardens, and to create something like that would be to waste so much of the potential of the networked online environment. So why not just use YouTube? (or Daily Motion? LiveLeak? etc.). In fact, many of the videos on the Hub have also been placed by activists on YouTube (it is possible to use YouTube or any other commercial or non-commercial site to host content, and then embed it on the Hub), and in many cases we can see real value in drawing on the mass public reached by YouTube. The power of YouTube is that it is increasingly becoming the most prominent platform (at least in the global North, and for English-language media) for video online - although finding an appropriate human rights video can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. From an advocacy perspective, we can see how IF a video achieves either prominent placement, or takes off virally on YouTube it can take off in terms of public prominence. Similarly for many non-governmental advocacy organizations that are trying to engage a general public either with a single video or via a channel, YouTube is likely to be the first place that public will look. And we also recognize that YouTube is a pushing-out point for footage that finds homes in many other subculture-specific media systems, including human rights, where it is embedded and re-contextualized - I particularly appreciate Michael Wesch's commentary on this.
However, we see some significant current limitations on YouTube as a platform for human rights activism. For some publics - namely concerned citizens on a global scale concerned about security, looking to ensure that their footage galvanizes action, and suspicious of corporate and government surveillance, it may not be the best choice. These issues of concerns include questions of being a small fish in a big pond raised by the Center for Social Media's report last year, opportunities for meaningful community and to generate action, and the dilemmas raised by the Transmission network and others of commercial exploitation of human rights imagery, safety and security for the uploaders and filmed, surveillance by corporations and state, inflexibility in redistribution, downloading and sharing, and where editorial control is vested.
To illustrate one of these points, human rights video is generally among the least-viewed content on YouTube amidst the proliferation of music videos, parodies and commentary. A March 2007 Center for Social Media study found (though this was before the launch of the YouTube Nonprofit Channel which has increased slightly the visibility of social issue videos, and the pro-active work of the Citizen Tube editor at YouTube), public-issue videos find themselves 'small fish in a vast sea' . The most popular social/public issue video in the Center for Social Media study had 150 times less viewers than the most popular video on YouTube, and the terms on which they must compete for the public audience are the co-option of the characteristics of humor, celebrities, popular culture touchstones and music that are most common in the top-ranked YouTube videos. You yourself talk about the vaudevillian aesthetic of online video in which 'the best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared'. Some human rights video can play in this field. A powerful example is the 'Waiting for the Guards' video developed by Amnesty UK for their Unsubscribe-me campaign that feature a recreation of the stress position enhanced interrogation technique used by the CIA, as the center-piece of a web 2.0 campaign focused on action via social networking sites. But with some exceptions much human rights material is not immediately powerful performance, and may not be most effectively or honestly presented in that mode.
Another aspect is what happens to grassroots human rights video on YouTube if it does secure viewers. WITNESS' own experience with YouTube has included two videos that were very fortunate to be picked as Editor's Picks - 'Shoot on Sight,' produced by partners Burma Issues documenting military attacks on ethnic minority civilians in eastern Burma, and picked during the height of the crisis in Burma in autumn 2007; and 'Awaiting Tomorrow' highlighting lack of access to HIV/AIDs treatment in Democratic Republic of the Congo, produced by locally-based partners Ajedi-Ka, and placed on YouTube's homepage on December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day. Both videos received reasonably high viewer levels (approximately 380,000 and 225,000 as of now) and significant levels of comments ('Awaiting Tomorrow' ranks among the top forty most-discussed ever videos in the Non-Profit and Activism Channel with almost 1,400 comments before comments were disabled preventing further belligerent commentary). These levels of viewership are great in terms of reaching an audience that would know little about ethnically-targeted violence in eastern Burma, or access to anti-retrovirals in the Congo. However, the comments ranged from the constructive to the racist, and conspiracy-theory obsessed, and the framework of the YouTube page does not lend itself to using individual videos to focus action of the type WITNESS or local human rights advocates seek, or to foster discussion.
From the point-of-view of human rights advocacy, it was very hard to turn a transitory audience into an engaged public, or to measure the transition from viewing to action or impact. For human rights activism you want a community oriented towards action, recognizing also that online environments where no-one 'listens' to others and responds constructively are the opposite of the empowerment of voice that grounds WITNESS. As Howard Rheingold has observed in relation to youth participation online, in an analogy that could easily be extended to over-stretched, marginalized human rights advocates, "it isn't "voice" if nobody seems to be listening". Our experience illuminated the need for a channel dedicated to human rights and related action.
Recognizing that YouTube should not be viewed solely as a single site, but as a nexus of content that circulates in more detailed, niche contexts, I should note that the most effective uses of the YouTube version of 'Shoot on Sight' were in blog postings where it was embedded in additional context, commentary and recommendations for action, and in its use by venues such as the Facebook 'Support the Monks in Burma' action group.
As additional factors to consider -- in contrast to many commercial platforms -- the Hub carries no advertising, does not track IP addresses and advises users on how to avoid surveillance, and will soon include functionality allowing downloads so that people can use it in the most appropriate setting to generate action. Although we do currently have an editorial process to ensure fit of videos to guidelines, our hope is that the community will eventually monitor, rate and control the content that is on the site; and WITNESS does not claim ownership on the footage and allows the user to choose a Creative Commons license that will exactly lay out how they would like their work to be used
What, if any, kinds of remixing are appropriate in the space of human rights video? How can we reconcile this mash-up aesthetic with the evidentiary claims made for traditional documentaries?
Remixing is one of the most powerful aspects of the new participatory culture. From a human rights advocacy point-of-view, the positive dimensions of this are clear: the narrative possibilities of remixing footage are extensive and build on an increasingly reflexive contemporary media literacy, and there is a possibility to benefit from the creativity and capacity of a distributed network of peer production which can rework the 'raw' audiovisual material to appeal to diverse communities of interest, and within which the opportunity to be a 'co-'producer rather than just a user may promote sustained engagement.
Some of the most powerful political commentary in the US over the past 5 years has featured powerful remixes of news, archival and user-generated footage, especially around President Bush and his actions in Iraq, and groups WITNESS have worked with at a local and regional level around the world have used karaoke remix formats to communicate effectively around human rights issues. One example of the karaoke remix style I've seen in Southeast Asia is a video by one of our Video Advocacy Institute alumni, Dale Kongmonts's from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers. The rub is in how this remix culture relates to a human rights culture that is concerned for the dignity and integrity of victims and survivors, and the role of ethical witnessing. We love seeing George Bush remixed, but where would we draw the line? For me, that's a bigger concern than the evidentiary aspect. I think we have to recognize that the process of narrative creation is always subjective.
The remix question raises the underlying problem that bothers many human rights advocates when they consider visual imagery. WITNESS has wrestled for years with how to try and ensure that people filmed in human rights contexts understand how the video will be used, and the implications both positive and negative (we produced a whole chapter on 'Safety and Security' in our recent 'Video for Change' book), emphasizing model that relies on presenting worst case scenarios for impact, to enable genuine informed consent to be given. Simultaneously, human rights culture emphasizes the value of the integrity and dignity of the individual survivor of abuse on the basis of the first principle that every human being is possessed of 'inherent dignity', a concept which runs through every right articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A particular concern in the victim and survivor-centered human rights model is to avoid re-victimization either directly or indirectly (as can happen when an image is distributed and exploited inappropriately). The most graphic issues - of violent attacks, or at the most extreme, sexual assault - is seen as the material that most easily translates into a loss of dignity, privacy, and agency, and to the potential for real re-victimization. Individuals featured in videos who are not victims or survivors, but bystanders or witnesses, are also understood to be in positions of vulnerability and risk.
But that's a practice that's difficult enough to promote in the 'professional' documentary world, and impossible to sustain in an online participatory media culture of user-generated citizen media. How do we support emerging norms in the emerging online culture that, promote respect, tolerance and an understanding of risks? Over at Internet Artizans Dan McQuillan talks about "propagating an online culture pervaded by a sense of fairness & justice" and suggests "writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in to all web 2.0 Terms of Service". I think this is really one of the key tasks ahead for a concerned community online, only brought home more and more as we increasingly experience global human rights crises - Burma, Tibet - via imagery circulated online. The urgency of this normative work is clear if we think about the implications of increasing live eventcasting from cell-phones facilitated by technologies like Flixwagon and Qik. These technologies will have powerful positive implications for sharing footage and engaging constituencies immediately, but at the same time consent and security norms become even more critical once more video is streamed immediately rather than edited/uploaded after the fact?
You are an advocate of a "DWO" (Do With Others) approach to video production.
Explain. What value does collaborative production and distribution bring to the field of advocacy and activism?
The biggest concern for human rights activists is how video can be deployed to create real change. Alongside renewed opportunities for individual production and targeted advocacy both online and offline, I think collaborative production, distribution and advocacy offer powerful new possibilities for a network-centered video advocacy.
This DIWO (Doing It With Others) recognizes the advocacy possibilities of drawing on some "audiences" as collaborating publics both between themselves and with you, and as co-producers and not just as consumers or passive distributors of advocacy video. This means attention to how to facilitate meaningful and responsible ways in a many-to-many environment for people to speak to each other and create locally-specific and contingent media.
Collaborative production, distribution and advocacy allows for the possibility of drawing on all the potential resources in a given advocacy community. At the most simple format, it includes efforts like the video collages created by campaigns including 24 Hours for Darfur, which gathers expert, citizen and refugee voices to speak out on the situation in Darfur and join an online montage of voices, that was also screened at the UN. It also includes the YouTube and MoveOn.org approaches to user-generated or citizen-generated video contests, and what Greenpeace did last year in the environmental community, where it provided a stock of footage to supporters and encouraged them to "... Download our footage from the e-waste yards in China and India to edit and use in your video. Use it to make your own video about e-waste and how Apple should be a leader in helping tackle this problem...only limitations are please use the logo provided, a positive campaign message and the website URL somewhere in your video"
What is often most effective in advocacy are trusted voices, and often advocacy videos are blunt weapons in terms of finding a trusted voice that will speak to a broad and divergent audience. You either do it by finding a powerful story of a non-famous individual and find ways to engage your audience emotionally, or you take a default option of going with figures with a broad-based of 'authority' or just plain recognition, such as a celebrity. But with collaborative production of advocacy video you can go beyond that - you can mix together, say the footage from Burma or Darfur with the most trusted voices for a specific audience, to create locally-specific advocacy videos.
As a concrete example of this approach, I am currently working with the US Campaign for Burma, which has student chapters across the country on how to facilitate student action around divestment campaigns in universities. One idea in involves collaborative video editing, in this case using a software called Kaltura. At an online editing site they will find a set of stock clips of what is going on in Burma, including some interviews and visual footage as well as tips and advice from the coordinators and their peers about how to construct an effective advocacy video. They will then shoot their own material (for example, someone at University of Iowa could include a clip from a supportive academic or community leader) and create a localized video. All these clips, as well as the contingently finished films are shared online for all the student groups, so that another group has the option to borrow a useful video from others in the campaign, use it straight or remix it, or if they like just one of U-Iowa's local-specific clips borrow it for their own.
This is an example of a situation where collaborative production produces a range of advocacy videos, each locally-specific and targeted. We see the potential here for pressuring at a local level, by using shared footage and adding material that taps into local power dynamics - drawing on influencers and authority figures with specific resonance, or who have the 'ear' of a key person - and by making calls to action as specific as possible. You could also imagine collaborative production being used to produce one product that drew on the capacity and collective knowledge of many to create a more effective advocacy strategy
This approach - which relies on dense information connections to allow individuals to draw on and act with networked, shared resources has been termed 'network-centric advocacy' by Marty Kearns. As he defines it, network-centric advocacy differs from traditional advocacy in the strategy used to 'form and deliver an argument as well as the methodology used to build alliances across stakeholders'. Where traditional advocacy involves the advocate organization picking and packaging an argument for delivery to an audience, a network-centric approach 'asks the network to find, package and select the arguments (think MoveOn Bushin30Seconds example). The network picks the message.' Similarly whereas a traditional advocacy campaign has a core communications team at its center 'managing' the campaign, a distributed network campaign trains 'many spokespeople to speak their own voice'. We're seeing this in political campaigns in the US - see for example the excellent analysis by Connect US (which is doing work on doing network-centered advocacy here in the foreign policy community in the USA) of Obama's campaign.
March 31, 2008
From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part One)
I came back from the USC DIY Media Event with a whole range of new contacts. One hallmark of this outstanding conference was that it brought together people from very different social networks -- people who are working in parallel across different communities to explore the potentials of participatory culture. I've already featured through this blog an extensive interview with independent filmmaker and critic Alex Juhasz exploring her efforts to teach through and about Youtube. Today, I want to showcase another participant in the USC event -- human rights activist Sam Gregory. Gregory's comments about the strengths and limitations of Youtube as a site for media activism were eye-opening to me and I hope you will find them equally illuminating. In the interview which follows, Gregory describes the evolution in the thinking of his organization, Witness, from the aftermath of the Rodney King video, to the recent use of Youtube as a platform for the Burmese democracy movement. Drawing a phrase from Jamais Cascio, Gregory speaks here about the "participatory panopticon," the potentials of a world where citizens can use light weight portable cameras, including those built into their cellphones, and video distribution platforms to alert the world about human rights violations in their country. The past decade plus of DIY activism has taught veterans to be skeptical about some of the more utopian claims of the previous generation, even as they are learning to be more effective at exploiting every available opportunity to capture and distribute harsh realities that much of the world doesn't want to watch.
Sam Gregory, Program Director, is a video producer, trainer, and human rights advocate. In 2005 he was the lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007 he lead the development of the curriculum for WITNESS' first ever Video Advocacy Institute. Videos he has produced have been screened at the US Congress,the UK Houses of Parliament, the United Nations and at film festivals worldwide. In 2004 he was a jury member for the IDFA Amnesty International/Doen Award. He was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where his Master's in Public Policy focused on
international development and media. He has worked as a television researcher/producer in both the UK and USA, and for development organizations in Nepal and Vietnam, and holds a BA from Oxford University in History and Spanish. He is on the Board of the US Campaign for Burma, and the Tactical Technology Collective. He speaks fluent Spanish, conversational French and basic Nepali.
Can you tell us something about the thinking which led to the creation of WITNESS? How has your organization's vision shifted over time in response to shifts in the nature of participatory culture?
In the late 1980's, our founder, Peter Gabriel had been participating in the Amnesty Human Rights Now Tour, travelling the world and meeting human rights activists at each concert stop. And in many cases, it struck him that their stories were not being heard, and that new tools like the consumer video-camera could perhaps change that. Fast-forward a couple of years, and the Rodney King incident brought the possibilities home. From the window of his apartment George Holliday filmed a sequence of graphic human rights violations that generated massive media attention. That provided the impetus for the creation of WITNESS - founded in the assumption that if you could place cameras in the hands of the people who chose to be "in the wrong place at the right time", i.e. human rights advocates and activists around the world living and working with communities affected by violations, then you would enable a new way to mobilize action for real change.
For the first decade of our work we wrestled with how best to operationalize this idea. In the early 1990's we were focused on the technology. We distributed hundreds of cameras to human rights groups around the world, assuming that they would be able to gather footage that could get on television or be used as evidence -two polar extremes of usage, one very specialized and targeted at a judicial fact-finder or jury, the other playing to a vast, undifferentiated court of public opinion.
In those first years we learnt that without technical training, you could shoot raw video but you could not create the finished narratives that matter in most advocacy contexts outside of providing raw footage to the news media. We evolved to a strategy of working intensely with a select group of 10-12 'core partners' - human rights groups on the ground who approach us to collaborate in helping them integrate video into their campaigns; as well as doing extensive trainings, producing online training materials like our Guide to Video Advocacy and writing books like 'Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism' to promote effective ideas in our community. And most recently we embarked on a new project, the Hub, which is the most DIY part of our work - a participatory media site where individuals and organizations can safely upload footage of abuses and finished advocacy videos, share it, learn how to deploy it in their campaigns, and present clear context and links to more information, groups working to address the issues, and actions that viewers and supporters can take.
Over the past fifteen years, a number of factors came to characterize the WITNESS approach. We focus on the empowered voices of those who are closer or closest to rights violations - including victims, survivors, community members and engaged advocates on behalf of affected communities. And until recently we've generally sought to use "smart narrowcasting" rather than "broadcasting" to reach key audiences. So for example, the video 'Bound by Promises' was framed for and used in screenings to government officials and legislators in Brazil to push them to prioritize concrete programs to reduce rural slave labor. Our work has also always blurred the line between amateurs and professionals in terms of using video -we are training human rights workers, and now concerned citizens, to use video as an everyday facet of their work, rather than to turn them into documentary film-makers.
We've seen a progressive expansion of the participatory possibilities of video: first, increased access to cameras, the increased access to editing capacity, then the dramatic growth of online video-sharing for distribution. And in the past three years we see the possibilities for increased collaboration in editing and production, for online distribution, and for more immediate and widespread filming - all facilitated by a digitally-literate youth, by mobile technology with still image and video capability and by new online tools.
What role does do it yourself video play in heightening public awareness of human rights issues around the world?
I would identify three spheres of usage of DIY video in raising awareness of human rights issues around the world: advocacy videos, witness documentation and perpetrator video. All three are facilitated by ubiquitous technology for documentation (via video-cameras, digital still cameras with video functionality, and cell-phone cameras), by increasing digital literacy, and by increased opportunities for sharing, remixing and re-circulating.
To date most of our focus has been on advocacy video and on working to find the spaces where bringing the visual story into the virtual or real room can make a difference. Here we're trying to change the vernacular language of human rights advocacy, to make a space for the voices from outside, and to push a new way of communicating around rights abuses.
Frequently we've promoted an approach that's all about smart narrow-casting, speaking to a particular audience at a particular time, and seeking a distinct change in policy, behavior or practice. Videos are always part of a continuum of action -- and a strategy -- rather than stand-alone. Here we're working in the middle ground between the extremes of undifferentiated mass media attention and direct evidence in the courts. This could include showing video to an international or regional tribunal (we've been involved in a precedent-setting case to present video before the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, on land rights in Kenya), it could involve bringing to the voices of victims and the visual evidence of abuses in Burma into a Congressional briefing or a meeting of Security Council representatives, and it can involve engaging communities themselves to take action on a rights issues, for example by showing a video on voluntary recruitment of child soldiers in villages across eastern Congo. Videos always provide a 'space for action' by the audience, encouraging them to participate in solving the problem.
The scope of this use of video is increasing by the day, alongside more traditional human rights documentaries. We can see it on the Hub, where many of the videos uploaded are produced by NGOs, both at a national and an international level - for example, Video Volunteers' 'Stop the Privatization of Water, films by Amazon Watch, and 'Drying up Palestine.
The two modes that we're seeing now in increasing prevalence are witness documentation and perpetrator footage. Both are circulating increasingly in online video sharing contexts, and in the blogosphere. It's partly in response to the radically increased possibilities for participation in creating human rights video online that we've created our Hub project. In some senses with both witness documentation and perpetrator footage you're revisiting a Rodney King moment - only this time, there is a potential global audience of both activists and publics who can have access to the footage, and there are distribution options to get it to them, and knowledge about how to frame action around them. It's an exciting moment as people experiment with what can work with this radically expanded access to production and distribution.
Our founder, Peter Gabriel talks sometimes about "little brothers" and "little sisters" watching Big Brother, and this world of the 'participatory panopticon' as Jamais Cascio calls it - is one filled with emancipatory potential as long as we can make sure that the footage that circulates helps facilitate voice and change, rather than enable repression.
You've written that the project was initially shaped by assumptions about the "transparency" of the video medium. Explain. What happens to human rights video as we become more self conscious about the properties of the medium and the ways that it can be manipulated?
Our starting point was what the scholar Meg McLagan has succinctly termed a moment of "1990s technophilia and (with a) model of change based on the transparency of media". So it was very technology-focused and grounded in a perhaps naïve belief in the indexicality of the image - a firm conviction that 'seeing is believing' and that seeing would create action, in the same way that the Rodney King had seemingly inspired mass outrage and in the same way that at first.
Our initial assumptions about audience and how footage would be perceived and used, were not correct. In those days before widespread online video sharing, the modes to access broad publics were ineffective. We focused on video in judicial processes, and sharing video with the mass media - both of which are premised on the 'evidentiary' value of human rights footage. Yet both news media and evidentiary settings were challenging to access. The Rodney King experience was anomalous. Although George Holliday's footage permeated the mass media and was used in the subsequent state and federal trials, the overwhelming majority of human rights video cannot and does not reach those venues. And if it does, as many marginalized groups have experienced in their media advocacy, it is often presented in ways that are contradictory to the desires and intentions of the communities affected by the rights violations. The reasons for this - of course -- vary. But the result is the same. In some countries it may be that media is government, or corporate-controlled, or won't screen graphic imagery -- or is only interested in screening graphic imagery. And in many cases news media focuses on episodic framing that emphasize individual actions, victims and perpetrators, and is less interested in structural violence, systemic challenges or the ongoing problems that characterize many of the most pernicious abuses, and especially violations of economic, social and cultural rights. So, for example, a group I work with in Papua, Indonesia documents the systematic, ongoing and pervasive exclusion of indigenous Papuans in an economy dominated by migrants from other parts of Indonesia, and in a justice system that moves rarely against the powerful. In seeking widespread media attention they will face the triple barrier of government censorship, popular neglect and an issue that is not easily reduced to blow of a security force baton.
Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence frequently does not work. The rules of evidence are hard to navigate. And even if the evidence is admitted, we need only see how the Rodney King footage was flipped around and manipulated both to prove that the Los Angeles Police Department officers were following the training they had been provided to deal with a resisting suspect, and to demonstrate the grotesque abuse of power evident in the fifty-six strikes delivered on Rodney King.
So what this boiled down for us - alongside some re-thinking on audience --- was the need for framing and narrative to create effective advocacy videos. This framing can come both within the video and in the way it is presented within a campaign. Rather than relying on the 'visual evidence' in and of itself, you have to place this in a rhetorical framework that explains it, and offers ways to act. Seeing may be believing, but it may also lead to pessimism, and compassion fatigue in the absence of opportunities to act. We're not promoting a journalistic model of studious neutrality - our experience is that marginalized voices are excluded enough, without the need to balance their voices in a one-for-one ratio to the voices of authority or perpetrators. So most advocacy videos do have a point-of-view and an outcome in mind, but the best do this with clear respect for the facts of the situation.
You've argued that some of the most effective videos for dramatizing human rights issues have come not from activists but from the oppressive regimes themselves. Can you cite a few examples? Why were these videos produced in the first place? What new significance has been ascribed to them as they move into new contexts?
The futurist Jamais Casco has suggested that the 'Rodney King' moment of the digital camera era may hav e been the Abu Ghraib photos, and I would argue that the analogue for cell-phones was the footage of Saddam Hussein's execution. Yet both sets of images were filmed by perpetrators or by insiders, not by concerned citizens, advocates or observers. More broadly we can see a proliferation of images, particularly of torture by police, security force and military personnel.
One of the most viewed videos on the Hub is a redacted version of footage shot by Egyptian police in which they humiliate a Cairo bus driver by slapping him repeatedly. These and other more graphic videos that include the sodomization of another driver were filmed by the police themselves. They were then used to humiliate the victims - including by sending the images to other drivers-- and to intimidate other people by demonstrating what would happen if they didn't follow police orders. They share many similarities with the psychology of happy-slapping: adding for the victim the humiliation of the act of filming, as well as the humiliation of the probability of preservation, and allowing the perpetrator to relish the memory, and share it with their friends. Similar cases have galvanized debate in Greece, Malaysia (the notorious Squat-gate incident) and a number of other countries. And of course, footage is also shot increasingly by government to document and apprehend protestors and dissidents - here in the US, there has been the contentious suit around the NYPD and activists filming at the Republican National Convention in 2004, while most recently we can see official cameramen in the footage of protests from Burma and Tibet (for example, at 00:32 in this clip).
What happens is that these videos then circulate beyond the circles for which they were intended - and are re-ascribed new meanings. For example in Egypt, bloggers and journalists lead by Wael Abbas and Hossam el-Hamalawy circulated leaked cell-phone videos to challenge repeated denials of accountability for police brutality and torture by the government. By circulating the videos, and connecting online to both a local and international audience, they were able to generate media attention, and force an official response. Although the government initially tried to discredit the activists, it was very hard to deny the truth of the images, and for the first time, there was an investigation into the conduct of police officers in two of the leaked videos leading to a prosecution.
One issue that does arise is around the re-victimization of individuals featured in the footage. They are often doubly humiliated in the first instance - by what happens to them in custody, and by the act of filming, and then they are further exposed as the footage achieves widespread circulation. We've tried to address this in our own practice - for example, by respecting the victim's wishes in the Squatgate case and not re-posting the video on the Hub pilot project, but I think the most important thing we can do institutionally is to support the growth of norms in the online video community that are respectful of individuals' dignity and rights (the Transmission community has been leading on this concept)
Human rights videos, you've claimed, need to be thought of as "transnational stories." What are the implications of that statement? What factors insure that the video will achieve its desired effect as it encounters alternative audiences?
Much human rights activism is still about speaking to distant audiences, often to generate a 'boomerang' effect in your home country. In these cases you are telling transnational stories that must speak to an audience inevitably less grounded than you in the everyday realities of the oppression. So, the footage in the video produced by our partners working undercover in Burma 'Shoot on Sight' must speak to activists not only within Asia, but to government officials, decision-makers and solidarity supporters in North America and Europe. Most human rights situations are embedded in contexts of structural complexity, long histories of repression and reaction and many actors with different agenda. As activists and concerned citizens create human rights advocacy videos they face a dilemma. They want to resist a globalization of local images stripped of their meaning, by keeping intact local voices in local contexts, and in a way that is faithful both to the direct visible violence of a situation as well as the underlying structural causes. But at the same time as you move testimony and images between different advocacy and media arenas it often 'helps' to strip out some of the markers of specificity. From experience, I know that with many audiences too much analysis of the particularity and nuance of a testimonial story may undermine it as an advocacy call.
You are balancing the ethical demands to be true to the people who speak out, a recognition of the real complexities and the desire to make viewers genuine ethical witnesses, against the need to convince, shame or horrify a distant audience with a medium whose power often lies in directness both visually and in narrative. You also have to make tough choices in balancing the visceral power and problems of raw visual evidence (for example, of graphic violence) with the use of testimony.
Now as human rights video circulate increasingly unmoored from its original location - i.e. embedded, shared, remixed - it becomes key to place context and ways to act within the video and imagery itself rather than outside it since no sooner has your video been forwarded from YouTube, the Hub or elsewhere it becomes de-coupled from options to act unless those are built into the video itself, and unless your message comes through loud and clear.
March 7, 2008
Multimedia in Spanish Classrooms: Harry Potter Comes to School
The Comparative Media Studies Program often provides a temporary home to scholars from all over the world who want to learn more about our approaches to research and teaching. At the present time, we have scholars in residence from Spain, Denmark, Austria, China, and the Czech Republic. Spain's Pillar Lacasa has come back for a second stay with us. Her background is in psychology and her current interests center around the educational use of computer games and other digital resources. She and her collaborators shared some of this research during the Media in Transition conference a year ago. Here, she shares some more of her impressions and insights based on field work in Spanish schools -- in this case, work which involves teaching children and adults to think about what we call transmedia navigation. Here, she is using the Harry Potter franchise to encourage a closer attention to what each media platform brings to our experience of this popular adventure saga.
SPANISH CLASSROOMS AS MULTIMEDIA CONTEXTS: CHILDREN, FAMILIES, TEACHERS AND RESEARCHERS WORKING TOGETHER
by Pilar Lacasa
Recently, Henry shared some field notes about the place of digital media in Chinese society, considering not just how particular people use these media, but also how this use has a specific meaning in the Chinese political and cultural context. He was speaking about the rhetorical use of the "games addiction" concept, which specifically considers that "playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive" i.e. that game-playing is taking up the time of young people that they could better be spending doing their school homework and preparing for standardized testing. Henry's comments suggested to me that very similar reflections could be made about these debates in many other parts of the world.
Let me explain a little bit about Spain, my own country. Our team has been working in Spanish schools as participant researchers and ethnographers, exploring how games and other digital tools might be used to enhance education. Many families, some teachers and even school principals have complained to us about how children waste their time playing games or surfing the Internet looking for information that adults do not regard as very suitable for children. What are the reasons for these opinions? Put simply, many adults are afraid to approach these new worlds and digital universes that they don't know how to explore or don't find interesting.
When chatting with such adults and exploring these thoughts in more detail, we begin to understand than behind this less than enthusiastic approach to digital tools lie much stronger beliefs about what learning in and outside of school actually means. For many we spoke with, the idea of learning is related only to schoolwork, the content of the curriculum, and particularly those specific materials that have almost always been present in the classroom: books, paper and pencils, textbooks, etc. All of these cultural tools are associated with the academic culture and the school context. What people think is learning is closely related to the formal context in which people have traditionally always learnt; that is, the schools and the tools that have been used there for centuries. However, as educators we believe that an important challenge today is to redeploy certain technologies that were originally designed for leisure-time use towards educational purposes.
How can digital technologies, not just computers, be of value as learning tools? This is the question. To recognize the question is easy, even simplistic, but, for the time being, to achieve this goal demands the participation of teachers, families, investigators, companies and, not least, children. One of the first steps in meeting this challenge will be to introduce digital tools other than computers into classrooms, not just occasionally but on a permanent basis, at least as much as other traditional objects. But how can they be used? Could specific tools that have being designed just for fun also be used in schools? From our perspective new ways of teaching and learning need to be explored, enabling children's and adults' activities as active learners, capable of creating new knowledge by using the tools that they use in their everyday life.
Adopting this perspective, our team of researchers in Spain are exploring the possibility of constructing these new educational innovative settings, in which families, children, teachers and researchers, and even industry, working together, learn to use some of the digital tools that are present in everyday life. Why are these digital technologies especially appropriate for supporting new approaches to learning? Through our project, teachers and researchers begin to prepare relatively innovative school homework in which parents and children could collaborate in interesting tasks that motivate them to bring to the schools topics and ideas from their everyday life, such as family stories, real problems people need to solve in their own work, and so on. We were thinking about how to open the school doors to topics beyond the curriculum. This homework was usually presented in the form of paper and pencil tasks. What happened in these families after they had been working for at least three months in this way with their children? We recorded many conversations at home when parents and children were working together, but contrary to our expectations, no innovative educational settings appeared. Family members were acting at home as teachers do into the classrooms, but in an even more traditional way. They were evidently using the same strategies by which they were taught many years ago.
After this experience we began to look for new educational tools, which we found in the mass media. We brought Newspapers, television, videogames, consoles and any other new technology that the children use in everyday life into the classrooms. But how should we use these new tools? In the course of the past ten years many questions have arisen in our classrooms that discussions and readings at the Comparative Media Studies are helping us to answer. It is obvious that it is not enough to introduce all of them in the classrooms. It is also necessary to design new educational settings within which to develop the new media literacies in order to deal with these new media in a critical, creative and responsible way.
When teachers bring movies, newspapers, television programs, or the internet into their classes, one of the most important conditions for a successful experience in terms of children's motivation and reflective processes is that the teachers should feel secure with the materials that they are using. But bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms is still an especially challenging experience. At the moment, adults are much less familiar with games than other entertainment mass media. Today, commercial videogames are far from what many families or even teachers think could be used in classroom instruction.
Given our starting goals, it was clear that we wanted to integrate games into learning, but we weren't sure how to do so. Our previous work in Spanish schools tell us that at least three main conditions need to be present for innovative experience to be successful in both teaching and learning processes:
First, to establish close relationships between teachers, families and researchers
Second, to be involved in a multimedia context in which games are only one of the possible tools we can use
Finally, to establish a working methodology that attempts to bring into a multiplicity of expressive multimedia codes that children and adults can learn to use together.
Let us show you how these three conditions are present in the Spanish classroom in which we are working. I will try to help you to observe this situation and to construct the meaning that the situations has for us as ethnographical researchers. Please, think for a moment of the context involved. It is January 2007 in a working-class neighbourhood near Madrid. The children and their teacher are waiting for the "new video game teachers", this is the name that the children give to the University of Alcalá research team. They have become used to meeting once a week with some people who do not belong to their school, but who are participants in their classroom; the children understand that we teach in other schools where they are going to be teachers in the future. For the whole of the school year we have been coming to work with them once a week, with the goal of learning together, children and adults, using new media.
This particular day we are going to begin a workshop on Harry Potter; in the previous session we had chosen the topic by reflecting on the pros and cons in a large-group discussion. We all voted for our favourite video game. By this time each of us had different expectations about what would happen on subsequent days in the workshop. Given our previous experiences with other children, the teacher and the researchers tried to find a common task for the workshop: after having talked, played and reflected about Harry Potter, we will write our opinions of the game in our blogs, so that other children should know about our adventures with Harry Potter. Both children and adults will be journalists; people who write so that others members of the community and all over around the world will know the opinions of the class.
During the next three or four session the children were playing at home and in the classroom with the PlayStation 2, with family members and the research team, to find out much more about Harry and his world.
Now let us move on a little further in our schedule by observing a more advanced session during this workshop. As always, this new session begin by talking about Harry Potter. The children knew more than the adults about him. They even bring from their homes objects related to his adventures; they all belong to the popular culture based on Harry and represent this heroic figure, who is very popular in Spain at the moment. For example, there is a game of chess designed with the main characters of the Harry Potter books, films and games, an album of stickers, T-shirts with his image, card games, etc. By showing these treasures to all the participants in the workshops and discussing them, the children showed that they were conscious that Harry is not only the main character of a video game, but it is also present in other media.
In order to look in more depth at Harry's presence in various media, a new activity was designed. We decided to compare selected parts of the film and game based on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. After an introductory discussion on the film, we all watch together the chosen chapter. Later, we talk about Harry and invented a new collective oral story about him. By doing so, the children learn not only to tell stories but also to understand how stories spread across media systems. Moreover, by writing in their blogs the children understand that many other people, such as their families and friends, will be able to read the work that they have done in class, and in that way they begin to understand that there exists an audience that can read their texts and look at their drawings although it is not present in the classroom.
Let us see now the text that two children wrote together to be published in their blog after watching a small part of the film and discussing its relationship with the game.
Blog of Sergio and Miguel
Session 8, 02-06-07
Hello, we are Sergio and Miguel:
In the class today we played with the videogame Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and have seen a little bit of the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Today we learned what are the differences and similarities between the video game and the movie. They look alike in that the characters are the same, as are the magic spells and the adventure involved. And they differ in that in the video game you move the characters and in the movie they move by themselves. The movie is more fun, thinks Miguel. Sergio prefers the video game because you can play.
This brief description of the experience enables us to comment on what conditions need to be in place when introducing entertainment games into the classroom.
First, the text shows that the children are conscious that stories can be told via several different channels of communication. Moreover, the children also knew that each of them has different, ways of expressing particular messages. At that time they were exploring various ways of being in touch with Harry Potter's adventures; e.g. the movie, the video game, the objects that the children had brought to school, the information that they had found on the Internet and the texts that they themselves have published. But what did they learn? I would want to interpret this text by considering that these children show an understanding that each medium has its own rules. Conversations with teachers, researchers, and other students, helped to increase their grasp of abstract concepts such as audience, messages, and the different affordances of different media. How have they learned this? By talking, reflecting and publishing about new media, always being supported by teachers, researchers and families, as more expert members of the community. Doing such tasks at school helped them to understand their lives beyond the schoolhouse walls.
In order to understand this educational innovative experience a little better, something more needs to be emphasized. Let us focus now on the interpersonal relationships among participants. Collaboration between the teacher, the children, their families and the research team was probably the main driving force behind these experiences. This becomes clearer when we study the video-recordings of the workshop sessions or analyse our field notes taken as ethnographers and participant observers. Two main ideas emerge:
First of all, the classrooms were transformed not only through the introduction of games but also because relationships among participants changed in the course of the workshop. Both children and adults were learning from each other. In many cases, they adopted new and different roles. The relations between children and adults were much more symmetrical at the end of the workshops than they had been at the beginning, even though what each of the participants were teaching was really different. While the children were focusing on the procedural dimensions of the games (e.g. how to solve a specific problem to go to another game screen), adults were orienting the conversations towards a much more reflective level, e.g. how the individual media related to each other, what were their specific messages, who were the people for whom the children were writing in their blogs.
Secondly, extensive observations of recordings of the classroom conversations show that the participants' goals also differed according to their own particular roles. For example, when the games consoles arrived in the classroom, or when we compared the video game and the movie, the teacher's interest was vividly aroused by the way in which the children can learn from the game certain content that is closely related to the curriculum. In contrast, and just as was to be expected, the most important goal of the children was just to play the game; to become immersed in it. Their families, who know of their classroom work by reading their blogs or because they were working with their children at home became interested in the games consoles as learning tools. What is was our goal as a research team? We think that we tried to be "good mediators". At the end, we came to a deeper appreciation of just how difficult it was to address these different goals through a common workshop.
Pilar's background is in Psychology and Media Education. During the past ten years she has been working with her students at the University of Alcalá (Spain), collaborating with teachers and families to facilitate the acquisition of new forms of literacy that enable children and adults to develop as global citizens in their community, as producers as well as active receivers of media content. She's a visiting scholar at CMS where she's looking for new theoretical and methodological approach to a transmedia education. At this moment they are working on a collaborative project with Electronic Arts to define innovative educational settings, introducing specific video games and other new media into the Spanish classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools in both formal and informal contexts. She recognizes that when she was lost, looking for new perspectives to design these new educational contexts, it was very useful to discover Ravi Purushotma's work and the MacArthur Foundation's report.
February 6, 2008
Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part One)
I am posting tonight from the west coast, having flown out to California to participate in 24/7 A DYI Video Summit being hosted by the University of Southern California. The event brings together videomakers from a range of different communities -- everything from fan video producers to activists who use Youtube to get their messages out to the world. I am thrilled to be participating on a plenary panel on the future of DYI Video, featuring Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig, hosted by Howard Rheingold.
As I was getting ready to head out to the conference, I conducted an interview for the blog with media scholar Pat Aufderheide (of the Center for Social Media) and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University. I've long been interested in the work Pat and Peter have been doing promoting fair use in relation to a range of different communities of practice -- including documentary filmmakers, media literacy instructors, and producers of online video content. We featured some of the work they were doing through the Media in Transition conference at MIT last year. You can hear a podcast of that discussion online. I wanted to check in with them because in the past few months, they've issued several major new studies on the impact of copyright confusion on our culture, work which is setting the stage for efforts to identify "best practices" and to negotiate "acceptable use" standards to broaden the protections afforded those of us who are tying to integrate media production activities into our classrooms or who are involved in mashing up content as a form of expressive practice. Today, I am running the first installment of this exchange.
A recent study by the Pew Center for Internet Research suggests that almost 60 percent of teens on line have produced their own media content and a growing percentage of them are circulating that content beyond their immediate friends and families. What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?
PA: A more participatory media culture is definitely going mainstream. While it's still true that many more people watch than make at the moment, you're right to point out that young people are growing up as makers, and seizing upon blogs, online video and social networks to express and even form their identities. There are DaxFlame aficionados, and there are dozens of take-offs on "Dick in a Box," and "Dramatic Chipmunk" has spawned "Dramatic Snake" and "Dramatic Squirrel" and even compilation and fan websites for the phenomenon.
Many practices enthusiastically being pioneered and developed online involve use of copyrighted material. That's normal for new cultural creation. It builds on existing culture. Our culture is markedly commercial and popular, and our current copyright regime features default copyright (your grocery list is copyrighted when you've written it down) and very, very long terms (meaning that nothing you'd want to quote ever seems to fall into the public domain). So quoting of copyrighted culture will continue to be a key tool of new cultural producers.
Those new cultural producers often today believe that they're doing something illegal by quoting copyrighted culture. That's partly because of relentless miseducation on the part of corporate owners of content. They are justifiably terrified of peer-to-peer file sharing and other digital copying that threatens their business models. Their response has been to demonize all unauthorized use of copyrighted material as theft and piracy.
At the same time, they're desperately trying to revamp their business models for a digital era, and are making the blanket assumption that all unauthorized copying could be a threat to some as-yet-unimagined or as-yet-unpracticed business model.
Well, you wouldn't want to be them at this moment, it's true. At the same time, when they ignore the right of fair use, they are ignoring a very vital part of the law.
They're now worried about online video as a kind of "DVR to the world." So content providers like NBC Universal and Viacom are working out deals with online video providers like Veoh and MySpace, for specialized filters and software to identify copyrighted material. These filters will be able to "take down" videos that are copies of copyrighted material. The trouble is, nobody has yet figured out how to protect online videos that may be using copyrighted material legally, under fair use. As Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, it's like going tuna fishing without a dolphin-safe net.
Until now no one has known how big the problem of accidentally suppressing legal work really is. Our study, called "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video," (available at centerforsocialmedia.org/recut) demonstrates that it could be a very big problem indeed.
Many online videos, we showed, use copyrighted material in one of nine ways that are eligible for fair use consideration. (We weren't saying that they all are examples of fair use, only that these kinds of uses can be seen and in some cases have been widely recognized as fair use.)
Many of the precedents concerning fair use could be read as protecting specific classes of users -- the right of journalists or academics to quote for the purposes of reviews or critical commentary, for example. To what degree can or should those rights be extended to include amateur media producers?
PJ: It's really not a question of extending rights, but of making users aware of the right they already have. Fair use has been around as a judge made doctrine since the mid-19th century, and back in 1976, in its (for once considerable) wisdom, the Congress came up with a formulation of the doctrine that was general in its application rather than specific to any area or areas of practice. The problem for any group of practitioners is knowing how fair use applies to them and having the collective courage to rely on it. Some groups (journalists and academics are good examples -- and commercial publishers are another!) have done well at this over the years, and as a result they enjoy use rights that are apparently more extensive. But the truth is that documentary filmmakers, K-12 teachers, and on-line video producers have the same entitlement to fair use as everyone else.
That's why the "Best Practices" approach that we've been working on over the past several years is so important. It's an effort to help practice communities claim their legal rights by formulating consensus statements of what kinds of unlicensed use of copyrighted materials are necessary and reasonable for the creative work they do.
YouTube's impact has directed much greater public attention onto the work of these amateur media producers. In your white paper, you walk through a range of different genres of media appropriation and remixing. Which of these are the most clearly protected under current law? Which seem most at risk?
PA: First, a note: Because we're at the end of the mass media era, and because the pioneers of participatory media have been end-users or non-commercial producers, we think of this as an "amateur" movement. But it won't be for long. It'll just be expression in an open digital environment. Some of that expression, whether it's produced by professionals or not, will be monetized; much of it, most of it, will be available to be monetized. So the neat distinctions between professional and amateur, and between non-commercial and commercial use, are getting a lot messier and will soon be unhelpful. One thing we're very sure of is that we won't solve this problem by creating a non-commercial, amateur zone. Now, everyone's a player.
In our study, we identified a wide range of kinds of practices -- remix/remash (Ten Things I Hate about Commandments), quoting of a whole work for online commentary (The Worst Music Video Ever), critical commentaries (analysis of Fox news bias for instance), tribute videos (Steve Irwin), diaries (Me on Stage with U2 -- again!!), to name a few. We also saw a wide range of actual practices within those genres. One of the things we didn't do was to pass any lawyerly judgment on the fair use of any particular instance. We stopped at identifying kinds of practices as fair-use eligible, which is all that the survey we did permits us. We think this is very valuable because the kinds of practices are all clearly eligible for fair-use consideration. We hope that the next phase of our work, creating a best-practices code, will provide guidance to help people make judgments for themselves about what is fair use.
You can, however, make some generalizations:
It gets harder to claim fair use the closer people get to merely quoting the work without commenting on it, reframing it, or adapting it.
It gets harder to justify fair use the closer the copier's purpose is to the original.
It gets harder when the quotation is longer or more extensive than is justified by its purpose.
It gets harder to claim fair use the more the copier is intending to monetize the original item in order to compete with the copyright owner.
It gets harder when proper credit isn't given.
We also found that it's very easy for everybody to understand why it's o.k. to use copyrighted material for critical, political and social commentary. People understand that you can't critique something without referring to it, which in video would also involve hearing and seeing it. They also see critical speech as a great example of the First Amendment.
What's harder for people to grasp is that it's also o.k. to use copyrighted material to make new work that may be illustrative or celebratory or illustrative rather than critical, or may re-imagine the culture as remixes do, or may archive it, or may simply record reality that includes it. Why is that so hard to grasp? All this activity uses the same cultural processes, the building of new work and meaning on the platform of the old. We think it's because people have cultivated, in the mass media era, a cult of the author, a belief in creativity as the product of the genius of the individual creator. This of course flies in the face of everything we know about the creative process, which is a social, collective and iterative one. It also flies in the face of cultural evolution. After all, until very recently in the West, copying was homage, copying was learning.
Many of these amateur media makers know little about the law. Most of them lack the resources to seek legal advice about their work. What steps can or should be taken to protect their fair use rights?
PJ:We're suggesting that a "blue ribbon" panel of experts in law and communications should take on the task of developing a set of "Best Practices" for fair use in on-line video production. The first step would be to talk with a wide range of producers (and platforms) about what they regard as necessary and appropriate quotation. Then the panel would be in a position to craft a document that would be a useful reference for media makers themselves and for the platforms that make their work available – as well as for the content owners themelves. In particular, it would be a point of reference that platforms and content owners could use when they develop mechanisms (like filtering techniques or take down protcols) designed to block or disable infringing on-line content. Everyone seems to agree that mechanisms of this kind shouldn't interfere with fair use, but unless there is some consensus about what constitutes fair use in this new area of practice, these pious affirmations aren't likely to be translated into meaningful practice. In the extreme and unlikely case that an issue involving fair use and on-line video were to find its way to court, a "Best Practices" statement also would help to guide the courts. Following a long-standing (and sensible) tradition in fair use decision-making, judges in these cases pay close attention to practice communities' views of what is fair and reasonable. (More about tradition and its implications is at www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf),
And, of course, if a media maker working within the framework of a "Best Practices" document were to be sued or otherwise harassed, there would be a healthy supply of expert IP lawyers lining up to defend that person on a pro bono basis. IP progressives -- and there are plenty of them in the legal community -- always are looking for good "test cases" to demonstrate the reach of fair use. In fact, Stanford's Fair Use Project is actively looking for such cases, and would offer legal defense if it could find one.
Pat Aufderheide, one of American University's Scholar-Teachers, is a critic and scholar of independent media, especially documentary film, and of communications policy issues in the public interest. Her work on fair use in documentary film has changed industry practice, and she has won several journalism awards. She is the founder, in 2001, of the Center for Social Media, which showcases media for democracy, civil society and social justice. She recently received the Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation from the International Documentary Association.
Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. He was Pauline Ruvle Moore Scholar in Public Law from 1981-82; Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Awardee in 1982; and he received the AU Faculty Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Development in 1996. He is a member of the Selden Society (state correspondent for Washington, D.C.). Previously he was a member of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. trustee, 1992-94; International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property; National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., Animal Welfare Board, 1986-present; Library of Congress Advisory Committee on Copyright Registration and Deposit (ACCORD), 1993. He has written many chapters, articles and monographs on copyright, intellectual property, technology and other issues. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994 (with M. Woodmansee) (also published as a law journal issue, 10 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 274, 1992). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, Third Edition (Matthew Bender & Co., 1994).
October 17, 2007
Welcome to Idea Lab
Today, PBS and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced te launch of MediaShift Idea Lab Blog, a group blog featuring 36 wide-ranging innovators reinventing community news for the digital age.
Each Idea Lab blogger won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The writers will use the Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the online community.
Here are some samples from the first round of posts on the blog:
More than any time in human history, young people have more tools at their avail to consume - and create - information on the issues that are most relevant to them. So to figure out exactly what MTV's approach would be to truly engage young people aged 18-30 during this Presidential election cycle in this new, Wild West era of self-publishing and self-organization, we first had to listen to what young people themselves said they wanted.
The results were simultaneously disheartening and hopeful, in the way only young people can express themselves about their future. The MTV/CBS News/New York Times Poll revealed that younger Americans have a bleak view about their own future and the direction the country is heading: 70 percent said the country was on the wrong track, while 48 percent said they feared that their generation would be worse off than their parents'. But the survey also found that this generation knows their power: 77 percent said they thought their votes would have a great bearing on who became the next president.
By any measure, the poll suggests that young Americans are anything but apathetic about the Presidential election. Fifty-eight percent said they were paying attention to the campaign. By contrast, at this point in the 2004 presidential campaign, only 35 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they were paying a lot or some attention to the campaign. And these projected 2008 numbers followed actual record youth voter turnout: In 2006, 10 million 18-29 year-olds voted than in 2002 midterms (2 MM+ increase - largest youth turnout in at least 20 years in congressional elections.)
So clearly young people are ready to participate because they know how important the stakes are. Elections are no longer an abstract concept. Whatever their position on the decisions of the current Administration over the last seven years, it has become crystal clear to young people that who is elected as President matters and has consequences.
From Dori J. Maynard (Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education):
First, the Jena 6 story lived on the Internet. Bloggers, many of them black, members of list serves such as the National Association of Black Journalists and members of social networks like Facebook, used the Internet to spread the story before it took off with mainstream news organizations like CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR.
The fact that the "afro-sphere" has largely received credit for driving this story is important to keep in mind when we think about what is going on in cyberspace.
At a time when "the digital divide" is still code for "people-of-color-don't-have-access-or-know-
how-to-use-the-Internet," Jena 6 reminds us of the fallacy of that premise. African Americans used the web and alerted the world to what was going on in a small town and in a largely overlooked state.
True, there are still some significant hurdles for entry into a fully wired world. However, they are largely socio-economic. I once asked someone how many white homes in Appalachia have Internet access. Turned out not a lot. The digital divide is real. It's class, not race, that makes the difference.
The Jena 6 story also reminds us that while the Web may be a place where anyone with access and an idea can voice his or her opinion, it does not mean that every opinion gets the same amount of attention. Think of how quickly word spread about "Memo Gate" and how long it took the outside world to pay attention to Jena 6.
Not knowing what the model is, we go on. We go on with newspapers. We go on with Internet journalism, and the practice of reporting what happened. We go on with the ordeal of verification. We go on with the eyewitness account, and with the essential task of getting and talking about the news.
Reasons for my uncertainty about the newspaper in the combination we know it now were well stated recently by Doc Searls of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, who also writes about the Internet and keeps his own blog.
For metropolitian newspapers, whose problems I know best, it's not just the forced march to the Web and the decline in revenues from the printed product. It's not only that free content seems to be the standard online.
"The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work," Searls writes, "and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding -- or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it."
So (class) why does Searls say that the advertising model may be broken too? Isn't there advertising to be won on the Web? There is, and it is coming on. But underneath that something else is going on. "Harder to see..."
While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I'm not saying advertising isn't effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we've long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.
The inefficencies that created modern advertising are themselves under pressure from the Internet. That is what Searls argues, and I think we need to consider it. "The holy grail for advertisers isn't advertising at all," he writes, "because it's not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it's the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It's also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers -- on customers' terms and not just on vendors' alone."
Searls thinks sellers and buyers can increasingly get into information alignment without advertising and its miserable kill ratios in the battle to break through the noise and reach the few who are actually in the market.
The staff of Gotham Gazette is counting down to the day later this fall when our first online game goes up on our site. It's been an interesting process getting us this far.
First, of course, we needed a concept. In some respects, this was the easy part as brainstorming sessions over the summer produced literally dozens of ideas. We'd like to do them all -- and we will do some of them in the next two years -- but we decided to do the first one on garbage. What to do with tons and tons of garbage has long been a thorny issue in New York City, one that never seems quite resolved. It's something New Yorkers care a lot about and it provides policy options that can be clearly presented in a game format.
Our game will have two parts. In the first, players will be residents deciding how to sort their trash.Should it all just go in the garbage can (or, since this is New York, into a big black plastic bag). Or should some be recycled. Maybe you're willing to put your empty water bottle aside for recycling, but what about an apple core? And can you do anything with a soiled diaper?
Once the player sorts his/her trash, they move to the next portion and play policymaker. What would you do with the city's garbage. Send it to a city landfill,ship it acorss state lines, convert it to energy? And what about the recyclables?
At the end of the game, players will learn how much money they have spent, how much room they have taken up in a landfill and other costs. And they will send us their plans so we can convey their ideas to City Hall.
Now we just have to make this idea a reality -- a process we are in the thick of now. More on that in another posting.
These represent only four of the many voices represented on this new blog. Civic media and citizen journalism takes many different forms and the community of researchers which the Knight Foundation is assembling are tackling the issue of civic engagement from many different angles. What they have in common is a belief that we can deploy the affordances of new media in ways that strengthen bonds within geographically local communities.
September 5, 2007
How I Spent My Summer Vacation...
Several weeks ago, I played hooky from writing this blog to attend an Aspen Institute Forum on Communications and Society. At the time, I promised to share some of my experiences with you but have been so focused on starting the term that I am just now getting back to you.
Here's how the Aspen Institute described their goals for the event:
The purpose of the Forum is to develop recommendations for leaders in media, government, and other societal institutions to promote positive social and democratic values through the various communications media without undue governmental regulation. The Forum will explore how the new technological and behavioral environments are changing the way that media -- old and new -- will serve customers (advertisers/subscribers), users (readers/listeners/viewers/contributors), communities, and the broader social good. After an introductory plenary session describing the drivers and impact of the new media, the Forum will consist of three distinct roundtable tracks, exploring the ways that media may be used to promote an informed citizenry, civic participation, enhancement of community life, and consideration of intellectual property rights and interests.
The Forum brought together government leaders (including U.S. Representatives, current and former members of the Federal Communications Commission), the chief executives of major media companies (old and new), leading academics from a number of different disciplines, lawyers and policy makers, and heads of foundations and non-profit organizations with strong stakes in shaping the future of our media environment. The Aspen Institute events are legendary for creating a social and intellectual climate where people from very different perspectives can exchange views and arrive at meaningful compromises that move forward public policy on a wide array of topics. It was fascinating to watch this process work -- not only through formal events (including plenary conversations with heavy hitters like Michael Eisner, Arriane Huffington, Madeleine Albright, and Arthur Sulzberger, round table exchanges among clusters of participants, and more focused working groups designed to brainstorm and make policy recommendations) and informal exchanges (over breakfast, in the line for lunch, or at the cocktail parties and receptions in the evening.) Charles M. Firestone, the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society programs, was an adept moderator, making sure that every position got aired, cutting off conflict, and pushing us towards practical and pragmatic solutions.
One can get a sense of the caliber of the conversations by checking out the streaming webcast versions of some of the key events. While the videos don't preserve the work process, they do include some of the plenary exchanges which were a highlight of the event. (I am told that videos of the roundtables are forthcoming.)
Sparks flew during the opening session which featured Eisner, Huffington, music industry defender Jon Diamond, and advertising industry leader Lynda Resnick, for a passionate exchange about the current state of the media landscape. Taken as a whole, the group offered us some glimpses into the conflicted and sometimes self-contradictory thinking which is shaping old media's response to the emergence of a more participatory culture. Here, as throughout the sessions, disagreements about how to handle intellectual property in the digital age shaped more or less every other potential point of contact between old and new media companies.
Another memorable exchange, also available via webcast, paired current FCC chairman Kevin Martin with Vivianne Reding, his counterpart on the European Union's Commission on the Information Society and Media. Here, we were given textbook illustrations of the difference between how media policy operates under commercial and public service broadcasting models, as well as hints at the very different cultural and political traditions shaping media policy in Europe and the United States.
A third session on the Future of the Newspaper featured Sulzberger (New York Times), Caroline Litttle (Washington Post), Jake Oliver (Afro), Dean Singleton (MediaNews Group), Craig Newmark (craigslist), and Scott Moore (Yahoo!).
I was delighted to see new media literacies emerge as a central theme at the conference from the very opening session. An excerpt from our white paper was circulated to attendees as part of the packet they received in advance of the meeting and seemed to have heightened participant's awareness of the topic. The idea of young people's relationship to emerging media was posed by opening remarks from Jeff Cole (USC Annenberg School for Communication), who outlined a series of shifts in the ways younger Americans got their entertainment and information. By the end of the first roundtable, the need for robust and widespread media literacy education (for adults as well as for youth) had become part of the group's consensus.
This shared investment in media literacy provided me a context for raising what I saw as important issues about the ways that current ambiguities in copyright law are having a chilling effect upon our efforts to develop and circulate materials for media literacy education. It was clear that almost no one at the event had considered the connection between these two issues before.
Here's how I explained it: I am both a Professor of Literature and a Professor of Media Studies. As a Professor of Literature, I have a pretty good sense of what claims I can make on Fair Use in my work. In writing a printed work about a literary text, I understand roughly how much of a given work I can quote for the purposes of critical commentary and in what contexts; I also know when I need to seek additional permissions and where I can go to get those permissions; for the most part, a system is in place that allows me to pay an appropriate and reasonable rate for my use of those materials.
None of this applies to my work as a media scholar if what I want to do is directly quote from a media text in my own media work for the purposes of critical commentary. There is a pretty well established set of principles and agreements which allow me to show clips in class to my own students and even to break encryption if necessary in order to duplicate and archive those clips. But there is no such protection in place if I wish to circulate materials I have produced amongst other media educators.
Renee Hobbes, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi are doing research for the MacArthur Foundation, trying to understand teacher's attitudes towards copyright and how this impacts media literacy education. So far, they are finding enormous fear and much uncertainty regarding many standard pedagogical practices which involve reproducing and sharing media content. Their long term goal is to develop principles of fair use which would provide greater protection to educators, but the effectiveness of these principles rests in part on getting them accepted within the media industry itself. If you want to learn more about this work, you can listen to a podcast of a plenary session we hosted at last spring's Media in Transition conference.
For the most part, Hollywood has been so aggressive at defending its trademark and copyright control over their content (especially in the context of current battles over Napster and YouTube) that university attorneys typically tell us that we run a risk of legal action if we directly excerpt any segments of commercial media content for distribution in any form or in any context. Surely, these attorneys are being conservative and the courts would no doubt recognize at least some limited notion of fair use defending our use of these materials. But this fear of legal action is creating a chilling effect on the development of instructional resources for media literacy.
If educators wanted, however, to get studio permission for our use of these materials, the history has been equally problematic. There is no established clearing house for identifying and contacting rights holders. The studios often do not respond to our queries and when they do, they set arbitrarily high prices. In one recent case, a faculty member was quoted a price of a thousand dollars a minute for the use of Hollywood content for an educational project -- a price which would have quickly bankrupted the initiative. Some organizations are producing media literacy documentaries which include clips from mainstream media, but they have historically felt they were taking major risks in doing so and this has in turn impacted how widely they publicize their efforts.
Thanks to the Aspen Institute, my story was heard by some of the key policy makers and leaders of the entertainment industry. My hope is that this issue will be part of the policy recommendations released by the Institute in the aftermath of our session and that we can use this as a rallying point in brokering a meeting between the Hollywood establishment and key media literacy educators (a possibility raised by several of the industry participants at the event). None of us are ready to declare victory yet but the particular climate of Aspen, which brings key decision makers together in the same space to talk about vexing issues of cultural policy, has made it possible for us to make some real progress on this issue.
One final aside about Aspen: As I found myself making small talk with everyone from the heads of major media companies to former members of the Bush administration, the one topic which seemed to have captured everyone's interest was Harry Potter. Almost everyone had stories to tell about the experience of reading the final book in the series. In Convergence Culture, I suggested that fan communities might offer us better chances to talk about shared values across the ideological divides that currently shape American politics because they offer us shared fantasies and common reference points. Well, this was a pretty dramatic illustration of that principle at work.
September 3, 2007
Digital Media and Learning Competition Announced
I've written here often about the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative, which has funded our Project nml. The Foundation has made a 50 million dollar commitment over the next five years to help foster a field devoted to understanding "the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life" through their use of new and emerging media technologies. So far, the Foundation has tended to hand select researchers and community leaders to participate in the initiative, but earlier this month, they announced an open competition designed to identify innovative projects which might make a difference in this space. What follows are some excerpts from the press release announcing this competition:
"An open competition is an excellent way to identify and hopefully inspire new ideas about learning in an increasingly digital world," MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton said. "We do not yet know how much people are changing because of digital media, but we hope that this competition will help support the most innovative thinking about learning, the formation of ethical judgments, peer mentoring, creativity, and civic participation, all of which are increasingly conducted online."
Awards will be given in two categories:
* Innovation Awards will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. These innovations might range from a teacher add-on for MySpace that allows for safe assigning of a class group discussion, to a platform co-developed by teachers and students to facilitate digital literacy and peer-mentoring between college students and high-school drop-outs earning their GED degrees, to a digital learning festival for the leaders of a worldwide youth environmental campaign.
* Knowledge Networking Awards will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. For example, a team of teacher bloggers who already reach hundreds of thousands of readers may now seek to provide multimedia coverage and translation of MIT Professor Henry Jenkins' recent white paper on media literacy.
The open competition will be administered by a network of educators and digital innovators called "HASTAC" (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). HASTAC was founded and is primarily operated at two university centers, the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. HASTAC has a network reaching more than 80 institutions globally. The choice of HASTAC, one of a new breed of "virtual institutions," reflects MacArthur's goals in promoting next-generation learning.
"We are already teaching a generation of students who do not remember a time before they were online," said Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC. "Their social life and informal learning are interconnected. They don't just consume media, they customize it. These students bring fascinating new skills to our classrooms, but they also bring an urgent need for critical thinking about the digital world they have inherited and are shaping."
As part of their prize, awardees will receive special consultation support on everything from technology development to management training. Winners will be invited to showcase their work at a conference that will include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, educators and policy makers seeking the best ideas about digital learning. Applications are due Oct. 15, 2007, and prizewinners will be announced in January. Detailed information on the competition is available online at www.dmlcompetition.net.
"With the digital media and learning initiative, the MacArthur Foundation is playing a leading role in reshaping both institutional and informal learning practices," said David Theo Goldberg, HASTAC co-founder and director of the University of California's Humanities Research Institute. "Traditional learning practices are being supplemented and supplanted by new digital media, which both enable and extend their reach through virtual institutions like HASTAC. This is a natural partnership."
I know many of my readers are doing interested work in this space. I'd like to personally encourage you to pull together a proposal for this competition. Many of us have been frustrated by the climate of fear which so often clouds public policy as it relates to young people and new technologies. MacArthur is offering us another model -- one which is governed by reason and research rather than sparked by fear and ignorance, one which puts theory into practice to redesign public institutions and practices which touch the lives of children and youth.
August 13, 2007
Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics (Part One)
Earlier this summer, I shared with my regular readers some selected passages from this year's Comparative Media Studies thesis. Today and tomorrow, I wanted to share another sample of the kind of work being produced by our students. Peter Rauch came to CMS with a strong background in Philosophy; what he wanted from our program was the chance to employ those tools to think deeply about games, trying to explore in what sense it was appropriate to think of games as ethical and moral practices. In this section from his thesis, he walks us through his core framework for thinking about the ethical and moral dimensions of games. Next time, I will share a passage where he deploys this conceptual model to think about the game, Fable. Enjoy!
Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics
by Peter Rauch
Many dictionaries consider morals and ethics to be synonymous, but in common usage, at least in American English, the two words can have a variety of s
