Out title, paraphrased from Jeff Gomez’ paraphrasing of  Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, as included in Nick de la Mare’s article “The Power of Transmedia Experiences - Another approach to knitting narratives together” in Creativity (online), (phew!), is not really anything new to artists, and seemingly not that new to media “creative” types (read advertising, PR and other marketing communications ilks), either.  That doesn’t mean that it’s not interesting; it is.  It’s essentially what “multi-media art” has been about for, well, forever.

De la Mare’s take on it makes it all, naturally enough, more easily discussed, designed, manipulated, produced and, in the end, billed to clients (the cost of which will be included in the products these “clients” sell, and so, in the products we buy from them, meaning everything we buy).  The technology is here (or there), or most of it is, and our collective technology/media behavior is certainly about up to par.  So, in the probably not particularly distant future, we will no longer see a TV show made into a movie made into a video game with all of the associated products (t-shirts, and all that) developed along the way.  What we will see, it seems, is the use of each of these media to tell their part of the story in their own quintessential way thus, in the end, offering us the aforementioned “richer narrative” and the, no doubt refreshing, opportunity to “immerse ourselves in other worlds”.

So churns the minds of those whose mission, so critical in this time of global economic crisis, is to motivate us to buy more things.  Rest assured, the future is in good hands.

However, and honestly, the simplicity of tone and “terminology” in the article offers perhaps a less abiguous way to look at and discuss the idea of “transmedia experience” as distinct from “multimedia experience”, and that’s nice.  Isn’t it.

nothingisinvisible@live.fr

• Link vía @Carina Maguregui

I read an article the other day on John Merrow’s blog, titled ‘Technology in Schools: Problems & Possibilities.’ In it, he outlines three fears he has concerning the implementation of emerging media technologies into education:

1. the digital divide (gap between people with access to technology and those without)
2. schools will resist innovation and become irrelevant
3. schools will not use technologies in a strategic way

I spend a lot of time thinking about social technologies and the role they’re playing in our lives now and into the future, and I feel that though John’s fears are justified, they may prove to be unfounded as time progresses. Here’s why:

Fear #1: The Digital Divide

I agree that access to technology may be an issue (for now), but the barrier is continuing to drop. Frame it in terms of Moore’s Law or Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, but either way, the rate at which technologies become more powerful and robust continues to increase, while the costs associated with producing them goes down. Based on this, the question of whether an individual from a lower income bracket can gain access to technology may become a moot point.

And I don’t think that means that all of a sudden everyone is going to have a computer at home. But what it could mean is that the ‘have-nots’ will get on equal footing via technological leapfrogging. As upcoming mobile technologies continue to transform cellphones into portable, handheld computers, it’s not hard to imagine that there will be a segment of the population that goes straight from no access to having smartphones that keep them fully connected. If you take a look at the latest Mobile Metrics Report by Admob, you’ll see that the mobile web has been experiencing massive growth globally. (ReadWriteWeb summarized the report nicely here).

So, in my mind, we don’t have to be in fear of a growing digital divide – if anything, we’re going to see it exponentially shrink.

Fear #2: Schools Resist Innovation

Yes, I certainly agree with this. Schools, like governments, are institutions that are notoriously slow to adopt new practices and adapt to change. By resisting integration of some technologies and blocking access to others, schools are creating the potential for a huge shake-up in the trust and validity we put into them.

Social Media isn’t a wild animal that needs to be caged and trained before it’s allowed to be pet by the neighbors. Social media is a paradigm shift in how humans communicate. If schools stop teaching students communication skills, we’re in trouble.

I don’t know if this is a case of ‘innovate of die,’ but if educational institutions don’t wake up, there will be a groundswell, and ‘the people’ will create solutions that are not dependent upon traditional learning structures.

I’d argue that in many ways this is already happening just in the act of participating in the social web. There’s so much to be said on that idea alone, I’ll save my expansion on it for an upcoming post.

Fear #3: Schools Embrace Technology Incorrectly

Like any project that is pursued with enthusiasm but without structure, trying to integrate social technologies into the classroom without a framework will fail. There are many, many individuals and organizations busy developing guidelines and best practices for how to teach ‘new media literacies’, so I will just provide a few examples as a reference. The MacArthur Foundation launched a $50 million digital media and learning initiative a few years ago, and has funded many great projects already. One that immediately comes to mind is New Media Literacies, a project pioneered by Henry Jenkins and the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, which has a wealth of information to help educators effectively integrate new media into the classroom.

There will be a learning curve, especially since best practices are still being established, but fear cannot be the determining factor in whether technologies are implemented or not.

(BTW, for any ’social media expert’ out there who wants to devote some time to learning how to apply their craft to the educational setting and do some consulting, there’s a huge opportunity there for a lucrative business model.)

Final Thoughts

I think this whole conversation requires a reorientation of how ’social media’ is approached. Defining it as something that can exist separately from education is simply misguided. Information is coming at us at a dizzying pace, and social technologies are tools that help us filter the flow. They allow us to share, discover, and grow. We can digest information together, collaboratively refine our thinking, and restate ideas in new ways to help make sense of it all.

In essence, social media is a mandatory 21st century literacy, a set of communication skills that MUST be learned if we want to prepare today’s youth to be able to participate effectively in the global marketplace.

Segnaliamo l’appunto di Loredana Lipperini fatto al nostro testo “Non multa sed multum: qualità della vita, qualità letteraria”, nella sua apparizione domenicale su Carmilla online. La Lipperini, pur elogiando il nostro invito al “rialzo” del letterario, intravede il rischio di accademismo anti-partecipativo nel nostro concetto di qualità, invitando(ci) a rileggere il blog di Henry Jenkins. Al di là del fatto che non crediamo che Jenkins sia l’unica Bibbia del Secolo 2.0 -perché no Latour, piuttosto che Foster, o lo scettico Compagnon, per comprendere la volatilità del concetto di letterario?- vi invitiamo a dibattere e commentare nuovamente. Visto che, sì, la qualità, per noi, si potrebbe dire, è questione di vita o di morte. O meglio di buona vita o pessima morte (della letteratura, stavolta senza marameo postmoderni). Di nuova ossigenazione per una generazione, come la nostra, senza nazione.

Qualcuno sostiene ci sia una tendenza in atto che caratterizza l’informazione al tempo della Rete: quella della snack culture.

Ci si nutre in modo rapsodico e compulsivo, tra uno spazio di vita e l’altro, di spezzoni di informazioni da consumare in superficie e velocemente. Questa bulimia del frammento è fatta di feed RSS, di articoli brevi con molti-link-che-poi-mi-saranno-utili, di molte letture sparse di post contro poche di quotidiani, di tranci tv sbattuti su YouTube che deresponsabilizzano dalla necessità di guardarsi un intero programma di approfondimento (o di intrattenimento).

Qualcun altro sottolinea come questa sia, di fatto, un’illusione e che in realtà ci troviamo di fronte ad un ambiente mediale mutato che ha fatto crescere la sua offerta culturale, rispondendo in modo differenziato ai bisogni e saturando la dieta mediale con offerte che si legano in modo nuovo e diverso ai nostri spazi/tempi. E poi, aggiunge qualcun altro ancora, c’è il piacere delle “schifezze” che condensano esperienze e gusti differenti in moltissimi modi, per cui se per qualcuno si tratta solo di junk food per qualcun altro diventa l’unico modo di sfamarsi, o di farlo nei tempi che la vita ti concede, tra uno spostamento e l’altro, ecc.

Sia come sia, c’è necessità crescente di coniugare le esigenze di “fame” informativa – con appetiti diversi e diverse esigenze spazio/temporali di consumo- e la capacità di muoversi tra i percorsi dei produttori informativi “dispersi” – professionisti e non – in un’epoca di convergenza culturale e di socializzazione di massa alla Rete.

Così parte Filtr, nella sua provvisorietà da versione alpha, che pensa (anche) ad un rapporto di socializzazione informativa alla rete della classe media digitale. Come scrive Granieri:

Probabilmente, se sei uno che sguazza su Friendfeed, usa un client per Twitter e va dal barbiere con l’iPhone, Filtr non è per te, o lo è solo in parte (poiché hai già probabilmente la tua rete di riferimenti). Il tipo di lettore cui pensiamo, giocando con questo numero zero, è quello che che non ha il tempo (o la legittima voglia) di costruirsi i suoi strumenti di analisi e ricerca di informazioni. E a cui può far piacere un po’ di vita semplificata.

Ovviamente c’è una complicata dose di ambiguità che sta dietro ad un tentativo come questo: cos’è, giornalismo dal basso? cos’è, un aggregatore? cos’è, un modo per mettere in relazione agenda dei media e agenda della Rete? o di mettere in agenda cose che sono uscite o sono proprio fuori dall’agenda mediale? cos’è, un racconto dell’informazione in chiave locale? cos’è, un riassuntino dei fatti del giorno ma neanche tutti? cos’è, un modo di pettinare i flussi? cos’è, una selezione fatta dalla gente per la gente?

Per me è semplicemente una realtà adatta alla convergenza culturale, che mette in connessione (dal basso) la realtà informativa del sistema (mainstream) dei media e i flussi online, miscelandoli in un condensato in cui gli sguardi, esterni ed interni alla Rete, si relazionano. Una realtà in cui consumo informativo di superficie e di profondità si intrecciano; con la collaborazione del lettore che può segnalare articoli “irritativi” a chi viene dopo di lui.

Una realtà in evoluzione, dunque, un progetto collettivo che forse non può essere definito in positivo ma solo attraverso ciò che non è: Filtr non è snack culture. Non lo è se pensiamo a questa cultura come puro consumo di info streaming – per capirci la lettura con sguardo distratto delle breaking news. Ma è una forma adatta alla realtà dell’informazione all’epoca della snack culture, se pensiamo ad una dieta informativa che miscela personalizzazione ad approfondimento, superficie e profondità.

This blog is part of a course in communication and technology, which I am taking at Jönköping University. The aim of the blog, according to the study plan, is for me to use it to “reflect about the course content, lectures and thoughts [I] have”. I will try to do this, and this is the first post in a series I have chosen to call What have I done?. In these posts I will account for what I have actually been doing in the course this far.

26 October: I had the course introduction. First thought: I’m a dead girl. How will I ever manage to pass the course? It’s all in English, I haven’t run a blog for ages and I certainly don’t know anything about interaction design (Or do I?). Second thought: It should be a fun challenge, and, after all, I do have a passion for both communication and technology. Conclusion: I will, probably, survive the course.

27 October: I am given a lecture on the basics of Photoshop. I have never used Photoshop before and therefore have no experience of it, but it seems to be a fun program to work in and I would love to learn more about graphics processing, which I currently know very little about.

I am also given a lecture on how to use Microsoft Producer, which is an add-on tool for Ms Office PowerPoint. The purpose of Ms Producer is to let you incorporate audio, video, HTML files and still images with your PowerPoint presentation. In the course I will use Ms Producer in a project called Techno AutoBiography, which I will explain in more detail later on in the course.

My third lecture this day was about WordPress and RSS. This is something I am much more familiar with than Photoshop and Ms Producer. Although I haven’t run a blog for a couple of years (and that was based on Blogger, not WordPress) at least I have some experience from it. But, even though I haven’t been running a blog of my own for some time now, I am an avid blog reader and have been for a while. Currently I am following 186 blogs and my Google Reader is constantly ready to burst because of all interesting thoughts and ideas. Wonderful!

28 October: I have been working on my blog, which I registered at WordPress the day before. During the day I wrote the About page, added som widgets and changed the header. I found the header here, were you can download some quite nice-looking blog headers for free.

I also wrote a message in the discussion forum for the course. I will re-post the message here, so that also people who are not taking the course will be able to read it. (Edit: You can now read it here.)

I watched the documentary Triumph of the Nerds, and I will post my reflections about this film later today (29 October).

I started reading the course literature, which is Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins and The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper.

Lev Manovich’s chapter on “the poetics of augmented space” defines the differences between traditional cinema and open art installations and their, often dynamic, three dimensional quality. Art installations and their challenges to a stationary spectatorship encourage active participation over passive consumption. Exemplified through artists and workshops at Artengine, through works from John Cage, and initiatives such as Beautiful City Alliance that promote new ways of creating funding for art in public spaces. Post-modern aesthetics in public space-canvases has been explored in many countries both officially as in Iceland and un-officially from the Graffiti Research Lab and their L.A.S.E.R. or the more immersive uses of projectors at OpenFrameworks.

The immersive aspects of digital technology such as video game interfaces and interactive art installations have common ground with traditional cinema as Brenda Laurel explores in her book “Computers as Theatre”. She underscores the performance aspects of both media-technologies, however the more engaging variety allows for the ‘actor’ to, at once, also be the viewer. This shift in proximity to the content being consumed is the sort of experience that is becoming more and more ubiquitous to the entertainment industry. The rise in revenues from online gaming, (MMO-RPGs) such as WoW or the upcoming SWTOR, has grown to surpass the film industry in revenues and budgetary funding. Many of the successful franchises, such as The Matrix or Dead Space, employ cross-platform or transmedia releases of their narratives to flesh out more storyline and engage audiences beyond the screen. The use of transmedia storytelling allows for the narrative to become a collaborative effort where the online performances help steer the outcome. A democratic element emerges at this level wherein a group or alliance of players can team-up and effect changes in the narrative. Henry Jenkins visits this idea and its educational uses in one of his blog posts: “Geeking out for Democracy“. Now if students could perform as well in the classroom as they do with their virtual avatars that would be an interesting level of participation.

By Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Editor, Policy Issues

I always liked that discussion about the body falling down the stairs and how it looked from various perspectives. I consider myself a change agent and that got me called into the office, moved from school to school, and actually allowed me to work for the President of the United States.

The answer is not on the page

KidsNetwork National Geographic and the laser disk programs I had (old technology) made me think in new ways, especially when the kids wanted to know why they couldn’t use the technology that I was using, computers, digital cameras, story boxes, etc. With laser disks, you could capture frames and create presentations. I also had a lumaphone from Hawaii somewhere, and we could see the people we talked to. This was revolutionary. You know what? Even though that stuff is old hat and we have moved on, there are people still looking for the answer on the page.

So what changed was me. I was not looking for the answer on the page. The kids were free to think, read, and use other sources. Dr. Hilda Taba did this without the technology. She used pictures. But that was way before the Internet. There have always been people seeking to create change. Change is chaos to many and quite frightful.

Perhaps you used to be a teacher and you learned what was in the book, so you dropped the book or lost it — easily replaceable — and you could look every kid in the eye while standing your ground. It takes courage to do anything else. I don’t believe I know how classroom management is taught for computer use, nor do I know how people estimate the variables of change over populations not used to being given permission to think, explore, search. That’s a whole discussion for another day.

How do you manage different populations of students using technology?

I learned classroom management for technology through NASA and National Geographic. The Challenger Center and various groups demonstrated and taught as much as they could about different approaches. Earthwatch did some of this too. Everything you teach is not going to be interesting, but there are different ways of teaching.

I made up my own matrix, a game, some books, a classroom display and resources, a field trip, and local and international resources. But I can cheat because I live in Washington, D.C. What expert is not available to me? What gadgets and gizmos, intriguing laser disk lollipops, giant insects, lizards walking on water, astronauts coming in to tell kids how they got started? With the magic of multimedia, though, you can have access to the things that go on in D.C. In fact, most of this stuff have migrated to the web. Now the problem is that there is too much information and too many things to do, and someone has to make choices.

I used the standards that I knew, and the students and I would apply them in reviews of their individual and group projects. Not hard to do except for the first time. I sent home the objectives I wanted to accomplish at the start of every big unit. A mistake?

No. Three things happened. Parents who could help, did. Parents who did not understand or know about the topics asked to come in to learn it and help me. (That was scary, at first.) Kids who were not in my class, unfortunately, wanted in on some of the action. You can see how I was a nuisance.

We did the Challenger Center’s Marsville project in my class. I asked other teachers to be a part of it, but they refused. At that time, I almost had an accident while going home. As I rounded the curve in the neighborhood, I saw a giant Marsville that my kids had built for their friends.

Teaching as a passion

For social studies and geography, I did a study of the Chesapeake Bay, the great shell bay. The Fish and Wildlife Service helped me with field trips; National Geographic had a video and lesson plans, and the map was wonderful. We read sections of the book Chesapeake and learned more than the three paragraphs in the social studies book. We knew the history, the science of the estuaries that lead to the sea, and we seined for crabs, did water turbidity and salinity studies, and examined microscopic organisms. Click here for the lab part — where I work.

One teacher told me that when they decide how to do technology and get it right, she would make an effort to learn. I suppose she is still waiting. Another teacher I knew watched me and asked to be a part of the project. So we worked together. This woman was such a good teacher that we joked she could teach the dead to read and write. No kidding, she could get a child up to grade level in about a year. Immigrant kids.

Deloris Davis. What she did was not to do all the work. We had a parent committee who did most of it for us. I never thought of that.

Teachers in Hawaii — I went there to learn about the long canoes. I have a friend from New Zealand who is a book publisher. I studied Hawaii, the islands, and the history in depth because if you are a National Geographic trained teacher that’s what you do.

Lately there is always more to learn

So there is Web 2.0 and the new Blooms Digital Technology and TPACK. You can see why teachers who are used to a book might run screaming from the room.

In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Henry Jenkins talks about the new skills:

• Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking— the ability to search for , synthesize , and disseminate information
• Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives , and grasping and following alternative norms.

The school system did not like National Geographic, NASA, Discovery Channel, and others coming into my classroom to film because it made the other teachers feel bad. The teachers did not want to do the work, which I understood. Converting to technology is no easy task. It requires more than a leap of faith and a loss of total control, in some ways, of the classroom. It requires scholarship, diligence, and willingness to learn, and it also takes an inordinate amount of time. Few people appreciate that.

But it also leads to better classroom work. I was invited to leave teaching with early retirement and a bonus. Innovation and that kind of thing was not amusing to the school system where I worked even if I had worked for the President — which seems to have made it worse.

I was not a prima donna or a diva either. I simply love teaching.

“None of us really knows how to live in this era of media convergence, collective intelligence, and participatory culture. . . we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves.”

-Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (2006.)

We are living in a time of enlightenment.  In our present time, media is being put into the hands of the people in the most democratic fashion we have seen possibly ever in modern history.  Larry Lessig refers to this as the, “revitalization of the read write culture,” which exists in stark juxtaposition to the “read only culture.”  In the “read write culture” participants are encouraged through a democratic processes to engage, create, and share their world with a global community.  Henry Jenkins expresses these ideals as well.  No wonder then that in this birth of the information age, the most forward thinking leaders of the world are turning to literacy, in both the old and new forms, as the tool of exploration.  We are growing in ways that no one can predict where we are headed.  However, it is clear that the old ways will not suffice and that as world citizens we all have a unique responsibility to get on board this train. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama proclaimed October 2009 as Information Literacy Awareness Month.  Backed by clear research into the most progressive forms of education, Obama is calling on the citizens, the schools, and the business’ of our country to join the growing wave of information.  In his proclamation Obama declares, “Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation.” This is the “read write culture” of today.  No doubt that other enlightened Americans would also agree.  Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Richard Price, 1789, said,  “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;… whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”  Jefferson also stated, “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”  We hold these truths to be more applicable to in our world today than ever before.  Today alone there was over 9,000 hours of YouTube material uploaded, according to figures run by Michael Wesh.  Hence, information is growing massively all the time, and as our access to this information likewise expands, we must engage in this process as responsible citizens living in a democratic time.

“And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most certain and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787.

I mentioned last week I had been staying in on weekends and up at night trying to get everything I was thinking about out of my head. The space I feel was created in my head is amazing, leaving room to think about a bunch of other projects I have on the go but have also played second fiddle to this.

I’m not presenting the below presentation as gospel, if I may be so bold as to quote myself, I am not looking for right, just for least wrong, as one of the premises I state in the presentation is that so much of this space will continue to change for a long time to come.

The deck covers a lot of ground, mainly from the point of view of where we are right now in the evolution of the Internet and culture, and where I think we’re going. I welcome feedback of all kinds, from bursts of agreement to arguments against each and every slide.

If I have moved the conversation along in even the slightest way, I have succeeded. As always, thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time.

In addition to fanfiction, fanvids are one of the most common creative projects that fans take part in. A fanvid, or fan-made video, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like- a video made by a fans for or about their fandom’s TV show or film. In many respects it’s similar to fanfiction in goals, but it uses visual and auditory cues rather than the written word.

Henry Jenkins commented on fanvids in a response to a widely circulated Star Trek fanvid. He commented that they have become much more common in recent years due to technology making it easier not only to make videos (using digital software) but to distribute them (using sites like YouTube). He noted:

“YouTube is the place right now where work travels from one grassroots community or subculture to another. There are real advantages to such a site since it results in cross-influences and more innovation, experimentation, and diversity, yet there are also losses to this process of decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption.”

As with fanfiction, fanvids viewed by people outside the fandom can misinterpret or simply not understand what the fan is saying or why in the video. This is particularly true involving videos depicting romantic or sexual relationships. However, some fans have taken the technology posing this potential problem and turned it into a positive fandom project. A YouTube channel, Are You Watching Supernatural, contributes to fandom by making short promotional videos of Supernatural designed to attract more viewers to the show. Fans enjoy them because they are well-made videos that echo literary and social themes in the show and emphasize reasons Supernatural is great to watch. However, by targeting non-fans, the videos are also able to reach across the social lines a closed fan community can sometimes create in order to connect with those unfamiliar with the show and the customs and practices of fandom.

In addition to promotion of the fandom, fanvids let fans tell visual stories using methods unavailable to the fanfic writer. The combination of picture and sound produces a different effect on the viewer than a story does in its reader. For example, the video below (by KrokiRefur) edits clips from Supernatural of the characters’ car and pairs it with a song about a car-turned-serial-killer. A fanfic of this nature would be difficult to take seriously, but the video works because of the way she put it together.

This kind of video is what Jenkins calls a “constructed reality” video. The most sophisticated fanvids are not the ‘music video’ equivalent of a TV show or movie; instead, they use digital media to create an original story. As he puts it,

“…It creates a new story by linking together shots from the original series as opposed to using those shots simply to interpret or provide an alternative emotional perspective on events already depicted in the aired episodes.”

Another option afforded to fanvids unavailable to fanfiction is commentary on the show or movie’s cinematic style in the show’s own medium. For example, Ash is a fan who made this video to link Supernatural to various film traditions it employs in the show.

The resulting video is both entertaining and thoughtful to watch, as she uses the video to comment on Supernatural’s visual and historical ties to the Western, horror and film noir genres.

Recommendations

Searching on YouTube with a TV show or movie as the keyword is a quick way to discover many, many fanvids. One simpler way to do it, however, would be to use ‘vid rec’ communities such as this one, which is specific to Supernatural, or this one, which has multiple fandoms represented.

I would also recommend Deirdre-C’s fanvids. She ranges from funny to serious and is very good about matching clips to appropriate audio. She also has an ongoing list of recommendations which are helpful for me. I’ve found that often the best people to recommend fanvids are those who make videos themselves; they’re attuned to the visual cues which make a video great that I might only be subliminally aware of.

“-they’ve been there before — but they aren’t going to stop creating.”

-Henery Jenkins

“Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it.”

-Henry Jenkins

Convergence culture has no better friend than George Lucas.  Think the relationship of convergence media was good only for pop culture.  Fair use and collaborators are continuing to sell the Lucas trademark Star Wars films in ways that Lucas nor his high paid Hollywood allies ever dreamed.  In return, the fans have gained a generation worth of myths and tales (Jenkins, 2006).  This is a culture where everyone wins.  New and emerging artist take their stab at telling their own tales using the Lucas fantasy.  These new editors and filmmakers, armed with tools like Youtube and today’s wide range of cameras and editing software, now participate with an audience, engaged and interactive.  These are today’s storytellers communicating in creative voice to spread previous fantasies and myths of heroes and villains.  These new films push the original ideas into a new realm of interaction and engagement.  Communities of filmmakers learn from watching each other and furthering their own skills.

DJ’s have understood this since the 70’s when they started sampling beats, scratching records, and using vocals tracks to create what is hip-hop.  The original mash up culture may in fact be hip-hop.  The very nature of the DJ, MC, Break Dancers and graffiti artwork all feed off each other in a participatory fashion.  These elements started in the underground and drove quickly to the top.  Bringing with it, hip-hop inspired millions world wide, gave a voice to people of all types, and made billions of dollars in music sales, concerts, fashion, and film.   Even though people thought hip-hop would be a quick fad, it is here to stay 30 years later.  Suppose we criminalize hip-hop.   Would it go quietly back underground?

If societies are to progress, freedom has to be guarded.  The mind develops a memory of the tales of our time.  Once the tales begin to guide us, they cannot leave the psyche.  In the same way, though copyright exists to protect investment and self-preservation, it should not exist to limit the tales we tell or the way in which we tell them.  Nor will it ever be able to stop the new media entrepreneurs from building on solid foundations.  Collaborators will not be prohibited.   Literacy is advancing.  The forms in which our stories exist are being reinvented everyday.  There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them.  The people are speaking and speaking to audiences like never before.  The evolution of democracy is happening.  Billy Joel put it best, “We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.”

Reference:

Jenkins, Henry.  2006.  Convergence Culture.  New York.  New York University Press.

This Friday, I will be speaking at Blog World Expo 2009 on How To Make Your Blog Read Better. You’ve probably seen an earlier version of this presentation at Portland’s Beer And Blog, presented a year and-four-days ago—the weekend after my bike was stolen. This one will view practical steps to better legibility and readability of website text in light of what developments have occurred this past year.

Next Wednesday, I will be lecturing at Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at USC on the topic of Transmedia and Social Change. I’ll talk about principles we can learn from disparate fields of study—specifically: video game, user interface design and architecture—to craft, design and built spaces that encourage players, users and inhabitants to do the right and ethical thing.

I will let you know if any of these two events will be made available via a live streaming channel or video recording.

Good night.

I’m sure many of you have heard of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. While it’s arguably the most famous of its kind, Wikipedia is only a single example of a wiki- a Web site created, updated and maintained by Internet users. Wikis represent a collaborative effort between many people who visit and contribute to the site.

Henry Jenkins recently recommended the new issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which included an article on wiki fandom and Lostpedia, the largest wiki for the TV show “Lost.” Author Jason Mittell notes:

“The basic definition of a wiki—a Web site that can be edited by its users via a simple Web interface—suggests a structure that privileges particular possibilities of use and creation. While wikis can be used on a small scale to allow a closed community of writers to collaborate, such as in a class, an office, or an organization, a wiki becomes exponentially more robust as its base of editors expands, as with Wikipedia, the world’s most famous wiki.”

In other words, when fans come together in increasing numbers, they can create an impressive project that could never be done by one person. Fandom wikis often act as a catalogue for the canon of a TV show, book, etc. (Canon is the published or broadcasted factual information for the show, including plotlines as well as things like interviews with the authors and pictures of the actors.) This serves as a wealth of information, but because anyone can contribute it can sometimes be chaotic, as Mittell says:

“Wiki content can appear and disappear according to a single user’s preferences, rather than by consensus or as a result of debate, even when a clear policy on such changes has been established—and often such changes are left in place, simply because nobody within the community notices the edit. While any wiki does reflect a version of consensus among the editing community at a given time, it is important to note that it is often a passively accepted status quo rather than an actively negotiated agreement. Active and vocal editors will be able to trump less forceful and less active users, even if their preferences or opinions are not widely shared.”

Fandom wikis, such as Lostpedia, differ significantly from sites like Wikipedia in that they allow users to add their own creative content beyond the bare facts. For example, it may allow such original research including examination of themes or analysis of storytelling devices. This is where fandom really shines: they can offer creative interpretations, theories and interconnections that enrich the viewing or reading experience.

Supernatural has a very active wiki known as Superwiki, which has a Twitter account as well. It serves not only as an information source for the show but for the Supernatural fandom as well. It catalogues interviews in the press with the show’s actors, writers and producers by season; it also has an academic articles page that links to published texts on issues such as gender and narrative within Supernatural.

What is truly notable about Lostpedia, Superwiki and other fandom wikis is that they offer information as well as a chance for dialogue. Other modes of discussion such as forums or blogs are limited by storage space, decentralization (not everyone has a LiveJournal account, for example) and the inability to widely circulate theories without becoming chaotic. Once fans start to build up the content and membership of a wiki, it can become a more universal place for a fandom to congregate, speculate and discuss at length the material it shares an interest in.

Henry Jenkins, MIT Professor and author of “Convergence Culture” talks about the new media landscape. Highest Common Denominator Media Group www.hcdmediagroup.com

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Converging cultures… Is this a new age way of describing the Melting Pot mentality of American immigration?  Or is this some way of describing a news broadcast being built by a teenager on a camera phone and sharing it with the world through an online medium?  Or is this talking about a culture that is due to arise but isn’t quite here yet?  Or has it arrived?  Or is this something bigger?

The reality is that converging cultures are everywhere.  Converging cultures include an integrated view of all of the afore-mentioned questions.  And the reality is that most of us have no idea where this convergence may take us or what the rules for this may be but we are on our way.

Most of us are wrapped up n this convergence concurrently and possibly unconsciously.  If you have ever used YouTube to catch up on the latest water cooler discussion you are participating.  If you have a cd player, an iPod, or cable music programming, you are participating.  If you have ever sent a text message or photo message to a friend you are using convergence culture.  What convergence culture really means is that our idea of independent media realms today is a blend of past independent fields mixing together to create a new sense of reality.  No longer do we talk about information coming to us from the news, be it T.V., radio, or newspaper.  Now we talk about our news coming to us via podcasts, blogs, and the most popular T.V. channel, YouTube, which isn’t actually a channel at all or a T.V. device.  When our worlds collide and the boundaries lift…convergence culture is here.

Business’ have started to recognize this shift.  Look at the focus of movie producers to add bonus features to their dvd’s, their release of video games to take the story further than the on screen performance, and simply the cell phone as a music player, film, sound and recording device, in addition to accessing the internet, and text messaging.  If you are wondering how the former news industries are responding to this shift, take a look at the new New York Times.  In this The Atlantic monthly article, “End Times” we get a glimpse of the new reality that business’ marketers are facing.

Will the New York Times face a slow death like many of the nation’s other newspapers or will they emerge to re-define this convergence.  See what Marc Anderssen says about the print version of the times.

Possibly the most exciting aspect of this new approach to media, resides in the way we can now actively engage the media as producers of media.  Our home films are now the latest upload ready for the world to relive our family vacations with us.  We can even write our own material that will be read by millions.  It is this grassroots aspect of the new media convergence that is captivating more and more participants.  Just think about what MTV did to music in the 80’s and what YouTube is doing to T.V. today.

This response is in reference to:

Jenkins, Henry.  2006.  Convergence Culture.  New York.  New York University Press.

URL References:

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2008/10/30/end-print-edition-of-new-york-times-argues-netscape-co-founder/

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/03/the-converging-of-cultures-mtv-and-youtube-part-one.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/new-york-times

The Massachusetts Senate race could be a booty call for social media in political campaigns, as all the candidates are Twittering, Facebooking, YouTubing, Flickring, etc.

Campaign officials for the four Democratic hopefuls (Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, Rep. Mike Capuano, Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca, and City Year cofounder Alan Khazei) robotically remark that all types of media – paid, earned, and social – are extremely important, and that people are hungry for information, so “they’ll seek us out” in social media, as one strategist asserted.

Maybe, but that still leaves the question of who’s channeling Barack Obama and who’s simply Sam Yoon.

Regardless, social media will decidedly not decide this race. As MIT’s Henry Jenkins noted in his book Convergence Culture:

Candidates may build their base on the Internet but they need television to win elections. It’s the difference between a push media (where messages go out to the public whether they seek them or not) and a pull medium (which serves those with an active interest in seeking out information on a particular topic). The Internet reaches the hard core, television the undecided.

Odds are, there will be lots of undecideds as the December 8 primary approaches. The TV air war will then be the broadcast equivalent of the bombing of Dresden.

Good luck to all the civilians trying to escape the campaign carnage.

I’m starting a mini-series within my fanfiction series on fanfic genres. As with other literature, there are many different genres of fanfiction, but a few are more common than others. While not an exhaustive list, I’ll be going over the ones most often seen in fandom. Today’s topic: the alternate universe, often abbreviated AU.

photo credit: Shenghung Lin on Flickr

Note: the picture is a reference to the butterfly effect, an idea stemming from chaos theory that adjusting small actions can lead to an entirely different universe.

The idea of an alternate or parallel universe is not a new one. The basic idea is that writers take the main concept of their show (or book, or movie) and transplant it into another environment. This can be a literal environment: fans of a 1970’s buddy cop show might write an AU in which the characters live their lives as sheriffs in the Old West, for example. It can also be a different metaphorical environment: the  world may be the same, but AU writers may create a world in which personal circumstances have been altered. Basically, it’s a ‘what if’ scenario: What if person A didn’t die after all? What if person B chose this path instead of another? The possibilities are endless because the author purposely sets out to break with the established literary canon (that is, officially published/broadcast/sanctioned work) in at least one and often multiple respects.

Why is it that fans write alternate universes when they could easily stick to already established situations? Simple- the power of creativity. AU authors seek to explore characters, themes or relationships beyond what they have been given. They do not limit themselves but rather push the objects of their fandom into new territories. Henry Jenkins, a transmedia scholar, notes this explanation from a fanfic writer on his blog:

“I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or coldblooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation. We have given ourselves license to do whatever we want and it’s very liberating….”

In the “Supernatural” fandom, I recommend Minkmix’s fanfiction. She has several single stories as well as an ongoing AU series. Her master list is categorized by theme, so each link takes you to a listing of all the stories in that category. AU stories are so noted at the top of each page. Her writing is excellent and has a lot of variety of story type, including humurous slice-of-life stories as well as longer, plot-driven stories. Additionally, there are plenty of AU stories on fanfiction.net, but some are of higher quality than others.