Opening Note

The fourth part of this six-part series from C3 Director Henry Jenkins looks further at the use of YouTube for the 2008 presidential election. This series provides an advance version of Jenkins' latest essay, which will be featured as an additional chapter for the paperback edition of Convergence Culture and as part of a forthcoming book from Jonathan Gray, who was one of the speakers at the Futures of Entertainment 2 conference. The previous three pieces in this series have ran in prior Opening Notes.

Traditional campaign rhetoric stresses the seriousness of the choices Americans face, rather than the pleasures of participating within the political process. Both progressives and conservatives have displayed discomfort with the tone and content of popular culture, especially in the current "culture war" context. Most attempts to mobilize popular culture towards political ends are read contemptuously as efforts to dummy down civic discourse.

In a recent book, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in An Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe offers a different perspective, arguing that politicos need to move beyond a knee-jerk critique of popular entertainment as "weapons of mass distraction" and learn strategies for "appropriating, co-opting and most important, transforming the techniques of spectacular capitalism into tools for social change" (16). Playing on Noam Chomsky’s critique of propaganda (Manufacturing Consent), Duncombe calls on progressives to learn new strategies for "manufacturing dissent":

Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it (17).

Duncombe cites Billionaires for Bush as a primary example of this new kind of political spectacle. Billionaires for Bush used street theater to call attention to issues, such as campaign finance reform, media concentration, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Seeking to dodge attempts by conservative critics to paint their efforts as "class warfare," the group adopted a more playful posture, dressing up like cartoon character versions of the wealthy, showing up at campaign stops, and chanting along with other Bush supporters. Similarly playful tactics were adopted by True Majority, an organization founded during the 2004 presidential campaign by Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream). The group sought to increase voter participation and rally support behind a progressive agenda in part by embracing what Cohen described as "serious fun." True Majority produced a mock preview for an episode of The Apprentice during which a disappointed Donald Trump fired George W. Bush for driving the economy into the ground, using lies to justify a war, and spending way over budget. (For more on TrueMajority, see pp. 206-207 in Convergence Culture).

As YouTube's cultural visibility has increased, more activists have followed True Majority’s example, making parody videos as a more playful and pleasurable mode of political discourse. Save The Internet tapped the talents of diverse online media producers to help raise public awareness of impending policies that they argued threatened net neutrality. To dramatize the diversity of the current web community and thus the potential impact of the proposed policy changes, Save The Internet encouraged members to make and circulate their own videos explaining the issues to their own niche constituencies.

Their website offered a central hub for distributing the videos, juxtaposing serious documentaries with more playful parodies, mixing commercially produced content (such as a Bill Moyer's PBS special or a segment from The Daily Show) with those by amateur and semi-professional groups (such as Ask a Ninja and This Spartan Life, two of the more successful internet comedy series).

The Ask a Ninja series, created by Los Angeles improvisational comedians Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, featured a Ninja who speaks with a surfer dude accent. This Spartan Life, created by the startup Bong + Dern productions, stages a weekly talk show within multiplayer XBox Live sessions of Bungie Studio's first person shooter video game Halo 2.

One of the segments featured during the CNN/YouTube Debate came from a similar source -- Red State Update. Two west coast comics, Travis Harmon and Jonathan Shockley, have perfected the online personas of Jackie Broyles and Dunlap, two rednecks from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who offer colorful commentary on the campaign and candidates. Red State Update receives upwards of 3 million views on YouTube and another 1.2 million more via MySpace; the segments are also syndicated through Salon and replayed on the DirecTV network. (See more on this in Jim Ridley’s Nashville Scene article "Country Boys Can Survive".

Most writing about the CNN/YouTube debates gets framed in terms of amateur media makers and commercial network, overlooking how many videos were submitted by semi-professionals (such as the web comedy troops referenced above) or even by editorial cartoonists for various newspapers and magazines.

We might better understand the videos produced for the debates (or those circulated by Save the Internet) as emerging from the mixed media economy Yochai Benkler describes in The Wealth of Networks. Media producers with different motives -- governmental agencies, activist groups, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, fan communities -- operate side by side, using the same production tools and distribution networks. YouTube constitutes a shared portal through which these diverse groups come together to circulate media content and learn from each other’s practices.

In this shared distribution space, short-term tactical alliances between such groups are commonplace. On YouTube, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between videos produced by fans as a playful tribute to a favorite media property, by average citizens seeking to shape the agenda of the campaigns, by activist organizations to promote a specific political objective, and by small-scale comedy groups seeking to break into the commercial mainstream. Content produced for and distributed through YouTube, then, might have complex and sometimes contradictory motives.

A case in point might be the series of Obama Girl videos. The initial video, "I Got a Crush...on Obama," was produced by advertising executives Ben Relles and Rick Friedrick in collaboration with actress and model Amber Lee Ettinger and singer/comedian Leah Kauffman. These media professionals wanted to use their sexy and irreverent content to generate a buzz that might draw attention to a newly launched on-line comedy site. In the original video, the scantly clad Obama Girl describes how she fell in love with Obama during his talk to the 2004 Democratic convention, signals her growing passion for the man and his ideas through stroking his campaign posters, kissing his photograph on a web site, and has the candidate's name printed on her panties.

News commentators often reduce women’s political interests to which male candidate is most attractive, reading them less as concerned citizens and more as groupies for the campaigns. The Obama Girl videos turn such representations around, transforming the candidates into beef cake embodiments of these women's erotic fantasies. The rapid-paced images and the multi-layered wordplay reward careful decoding, requiring consumers to learn more about the campaigns in order to "get" the jokes. But like the other media "snacks" associated with YouTube, they may also be consumed on a more casual level and we can not easily account for the range of meanings which emerged as these videos were spread within different online communities, passed between friends and coworkers, or mobilized by activist groups and campaign workers.

Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows. The buzz pushed the giggling Obama Girl onto the cable news circuit, while the producers announced a partnership with Voter Vision, a multi-media political campaign marketing program which wanted to demonstrate the political value of "viral video." Somewhere along the way the videos had moved from entertainment to activism, from a parody of the campaign into something that was explicitly intended for activist purposes. The slippery nature of such distinctions is suggested by the name of the company’s name -- "Barely Political."

This hybrid media environment and the active circulation of content beyond its points of origin make it hard to tell where any given video is coming from – in both the literal and the metaphoric sense. Increasingly, we are seeing fake grassroots media being produced by powerful institutions or economic interests – what has become known as "Astro-turf." Consider the case of Al Gore's Penquin Army. This cut-up animation spoof of An Inconvenient Truth was first posted by a user named Toutsmith from Beverley Hills but further investigation revealed that it was professionally produced by the DCI Group, a commercial advertising firm whose clients included General Motors and ExxonMobil; the firm also had historically produced content for the Republican Party. (See more on this from The Wall Street Journal.)

One of the best known internet parodies of the 2007 campaign season, a remix of Apple's "1984" commercial where Hillary Clinton stands in for Big Brother, has a similar dubious history. The video turned out to be the work of Phil de Vellis, an employee of Blue State Digital, an internet company that provided technology to both the Richardson and Obama presidential campaigns. de Vellis was forced to resign his job as both the company and the campaigns sought to distance themselves from his activities. He told the readers of The Huffington Post:

There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it--by people of all political persuasions--will follow. This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens. The campaigns had no idea who made it--not the Obama campaign, not the Clinton campaign, nor any other campaign. I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs....The game has changed.

The game has indeed changed but it isn't necessarily clear what game is being played here or by whom. Will we see other such videos circulated by groups or campaigns which hope to maintain a "plausible deniability" about their roles in generating their content? Are the candidates losing some control over the campaign process?

Next week, in the Opening Note, Jenkins provides the fifth part of this six-part series.

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Closing Note

Arguably, companies in almost every area of media creation as well as on almost every scale level increasingly rely on computer-based tools, often in their day-to-day routines. Programmed and partially programmable technologies from asset management and versioning tools like NXN Alienbrain over collaborative writing environments like Writeboard to scriptable content creation systems like Autodesk Maya fundamentally shape the way media companies work today, yet at the same time have become so evident that the built-in contingencies of their pervasive usage are usually being overlooked.

For that reason, a quick initial look back at the well-studied implications of Fordian industrial innovations and their socio-technological implications might provide a suitable methodological canvas for assessing the use of programmable technologies within the media industry. Ford's primary innovation was the dissection of work processes into subtasks which could be handled by less skilled labor, leading to standardization and mass production of products. This paradigm both re-interprets the work process and the final products; Fordist urban planning with its tiered, centralized model of concentric ring-shaped zones was but one manifestation of the socio-economic effects that key technologies like the conveyor belt produced. Similar considerations can and should be applied to the implementation of programmable tools in business contexts, starting with very basal elements like using a shared calendar integrated with a company's email and messenger system as in Novell's widely used GroupWise collaborative work environment.

Later on, elements of mathematical game theory were being prominently proposed as blueprints for economic processes, first in macroeconomics and politico-economic theory to approximate consumer behaviour but later (notably in the mid-1990s) also in more pratical areas like business administration, applied in concrete case studies to "shape strategy." Essentially, the approach suggested by Adam M. Brandenburger and B.J. Nalebuff in their July 01, 1995, Harvard Business Review piece entitled "The Right Game: Use Game Theory to Shape Strategy" suggested "design[ing] a game that is right for their [i.e. a manager's] companies" (58) which involves understanding the work processes in a company as a 'game' in the first place.

The most obvious advantage of using game theory which Brandenburger/Nalebuff demonstrate e.g. using the General Motors credit card (59) and the NutraSweet patent expiration (61) as examples is the opportunity to anticipate the behavior of multiple other 'players' (like e.g. competitors) in the game by iterating mathematically modelled 'game' sessions. As a result from the 'macro perspective' obtained from the constant application of these game theory techniques, Brandenburger and Nalebuff suggested "changing the game" as a radically new perspective which promised great potential from defying or rather modifying the very game rules whose application game theory promoted (65).

The authors illustrate this point e.g. by pointing to Nintendo of America's strategies of harnessing "the buyers' power" to counter the dominance of retailers like Toys R Us and Wal-Mart in the early 1990s. The notion of iterated game sessions obviously is one point of transition to programmable media, i.e. both digital games and simulations, as implied role models in theories of business administration. Rather than 'changing the game,' this new perspective suggests questioning the established simulation parameters and 'algorithms'; one company to exemplify this shift is again Nintendo which 're-set the simulation' with the Wii in 2006 by adopting the 'Blue Ocean' strategy formulated by Kim/Mauborgne and thus required a broader public as loosely related 'agents' (or 'objects' according to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)), inter-acting through online forums and other 'discourse algorithms', to adjust their stance towards video games as a medium in society and towards Nintendo as a company.

By analogy, the goal of this three-part series will be to review one exemplary popular theory of business administration and demonstrate how it intrinsically draws on the notion of companies as 'programmable' entities, specifically following the OOP paradigm and, as a second step, to exemplify how this knowledge can be and is being translated into successful, novel business constellations.

The second part of this series, looking at program code logic in the critical chain, will appear in next week's C3 Closing Note.