In addition to the piece I ran on the C3 blog from Kevin Driscoll earlier today, I wanted to share another piece from my blog by C3 Graduate Student Researcher Xiaochang Li.
Here, Li interweaves her reflections on the Spy genre, especially Get Smart and Alias, and her own personal and family history. This distinctly cold war genre is deployed in an effort to understand her own identity as a Chinese-American. (Of course, though this will make sense to few outside our circle, but the most fannish gesture in this essay may be, in Xiaochang's case, the opening reference to Marcel Proust!)
Spy Stories
by Xiaochang Li
Marcel Proust, working from the sinking grave of his bed, tells us that we are creatures assembled from faulty memory, the eager sum of our desperate retellings, frantic optimists. Autobiography is not the province of excavation but construction, and even the most honest of us are careful architects of repetition and forgetfulness, deliberate amnesiacs working to amass reasonable explanations for what we have become. Recollection, I learned, is just another form of secrecy.
In the 60s spy satire, Get Smart, Maxwell Smart is a haphazard agent engaged in a long-term stand-off with an organization called KAOS, an epic battle against the perpetrators of general disarray. He fumbled his way through disarming death rays and and foiling assassination plots, assured in his aptitude even as he walked into the obvious traps and locked himself inside phone booths. This he taught me too: we are not always what we appear, even to ourselves.
Countdown to ROFLcon: An Interview with its Organizers (4 of 4)
This is the final part of my interview with the organizers of ROFLCon.
I have spoken before with Kevin Driscoll, one of the organizers, about how it is a very specialized niche group that is being heavily represented. Can you speak a little to that? Do you see Roflcon as addressing a set of groups?
Christina Xu: This has been one of the most problematic things to me about planning the conference. At some point in the conference, I looked back and sort of realized that we were representing SUCH a niche-y group: almost all white, almost all male, almost all fitting in the "geek" subculture. This is weird for me because I'm not even white or male, but in the context of "internet culture" it didn't even occur to me that this demographic may not be representative for such a long time. But I guess it's not that weird, because this was the culture I sort of grew up on--it's the one I know the most about and identify the most with. So I think we did a really good job of covering all corners of that internet, but that's definitely not the internet that everyone is on.
Countdown to ROFLcon: An Interview with its Organizers (3 of 4)
This is the third part of my interview with the organizers of ROFLCon.
What about the people? What is it like trying to organize an academic conference around a largely non-academic list of panelists that may not have a lot of experience doing public (non-virtual) speaking? What were some unique considerations you had to take into account?
DIana Kimball: I think a lot of our guests were surprised to even be invited. There's still this holy grail of "real-world legitimacy"; even if you've gotten millions of views on YouTube, there's always this dream of being plucked out of a crowd and given a shot at something "real." I guess that's one of the main questions of this conference, and one of its main goals: what is "real" in an internet age?
Natalie Bau: Particularly with our keynote speakers, we tried to identify people who would do well with public speaking. Luckily, because so many of our keynotes are so invested in the internet, there are usually youtube videos which we can check out. I think we did have some questions about charisma early on. Over all though, I think we found people whose popularity on the internet really suggests that people want to hear what they will have to say.
Early on, we sort of just sent out a lot of emails asking people to come and we got over all, this really positive response from the community. However, a couple of people did ignore us - Jeph Jacques from questionable content comes to mind. A few months later, when we really started getting press people started asking us to be allowed to come instead. Its amazing how much reputation on the internet matters.
Countdown to ROFLcon: An Interview with its Organizers (2 of 4)
This is the second part of my interview with the organizers of ROFLCon.
Why do you think something like ROFLCon is necessary? Are there gaps in the current discourse around online/digital cultures that you hope to fill?
Christina Xu: I mean, these days my personal goal has shifted to not failing out of school...but otherwise no =P Often times I can be found raising a cautionary voice in the conference because I'm always really afraid that the convention/conference balance will be broken and we'll get too academic-y. I really don't want to alienate the internet community we're trying to give a voice to. If anything, my involvement with the conference planning has only emphasized that more.
But basically, yeah: internet culture is interesting in that a large number of the people involved in its creation are highly educated and really well-spoken, but no one had really asked their opinions on why this Internet thing got as crazy as it did. Also, we really wanted to meet Goatse in real life....sort of.
Countdown to ROFLcon: An Interview with its Organizers (1 of 4)
As many of you already know, on April 25th and 26th, MIT will be hosting ROFLcon, a convention/conference hybrid about internet memes and online popularity: what it is, how it work, and what it can do. Even in the growing tradition of events that are functionally both fan conventions and academic conferences (and the argument might be made that academic conferences are their own form of fan convention anyway), I doubt that there has ever been anything, for better or worse, quite like ROFLcon. The guests are a mix of academics, advocates, artists, and other people that don't fit neatly into any of those categories who did stuff that somehow made them famous on the internet. The panel topic range from civic media to meme infrastructure to advertising and marketing (I'll be moderating that panel, for those who plan to be in attendance). There is an entire panel devoted just to LOLcats, as well as a number of unmoderated talks, screenings, and presentations, including our very own Joshua Green's analysis of participatory systems and YouTube, and fellow CMSer Kevin Driscoll presenting on department favorite, Soulja Boy. Not to mention, with Brawndo as one of the sponsors, we will all be uncomfortably energetic.
Given the unique nature of the event, its guestlist, and its history, I managed to get a few of its insanely overworked organizers -- Christina Xu, Natalie Bau, Diana Kimball, Dean Jansen, and Rachel Popkin -- to take some time out from watching YouTube videos to answer some questions.
Give me an origin myth! Tell me how ROFLcon began: when you sat down and decided to put all of this together, what were you hoping to accomplish? What was the impetus for organizing something structured like this around internet memes? Why did each of you choose to get involved?
Last weekend, Cadbury launched the "sequel" to its hugely successful "Gorilla" dairy milk advert. The original "Gorilla," launched in August 2007, features a man in a life-like Gorilla costume drumming passionately to the Phil Collins hit "In the Air Tonight" and consequently spawned numerous mash-ups, remixes, and spoofs. The ad got roughly 7 million youtube views and launched 70 community groups on facebook, according to the Telegraph UK, and went a long way in restoring Cadbury's reputation after the Salmonella controversy in 2006.
The sequel, "Trucks," which hopes to garner similar viral success, features pimped-out luggage trucks drag racing down airport runways set to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now." The design of the trucks is great -- they look like an 1980s version of what cars in the future should look like (brightly-hued and somewhat demented and in complete defiance of any consideration for aerodynamics) -- and the lighting is lovely, but one has to wonder if it'll live up to its considerably less elaborate predecessor.
So far, the comments on blogs and youtube postings have been significantly more mixed than the "Gorilla" video, some criticizing the song choice, but most of the criticism suggests that it simply isn't as good as the original. Part of this might be attributed to the fact that "Trucks" is visually and narratively more complex than "Gorilla," which may work against it as viral content. "Gorilla" worked largely because it was so straight-forward in its delightful absurdity: it's a Gorilla drumming, and the surprise and pleasure of the ad comes simply from the strangeness of the juxtaposition of two unexpected elements. On the whole, it's has elements of parody and nostalgia and gestures to some pop culture clichés that might lead to deeper levels of reading, but those are an added bonus and work as easily as cultural touchstones to help keep the surreal content within the bounds of comprehension as they would as access points for deeper consideration. "Gorilla" works without a lot of work on the part of the viewer, but it also leaves its message broad and generous enough allow for an active engagement in creating meaning if the viewer so chooses.
More on LiveJournal Activism Through Strike/Boycott
Last time, I wrote about LiveJournal's recent fiasco over not informing their users of large-scale policy changes on the site. After much debate back and forth between users and administrators, and the (fairly brief, due to protest) temporary reinstatement of an interest search filter, a call spread on LiveJournal for users not to post any content on Friday, March 21st, in protest. The discussion around the move, intended to show that LiveJournal's value was content-driven, and therefore user-generated, raises some fairly interesting issues regarding the growing pains of large, for-profit user-generated content sites.
What was immediately notable was that there was a lack of consensus over what a large-scale, one-day disruption to posting constitutes: content strike or content boycott? The terms seemed to be used interchangeably, varying from announcement to announcement (the woman cited as the originator of the idea uses the term "strike"). At the most basic level, a "boycott" would suggest action by consumers, which strike implies action taken by a labor force against the corporations or institutions that profit from their production. There appears here a certain ambiguity over the role of LiveJournal users, wherein they feel responsible for the creation of content and networks that makes LiveJournal a viable business, but also recognize the role of LiveJournal as a service provider.
Participation and User Value: LiveJournal's Latest Debacle
The social blogging site LiveJournal.com has had quite a tumultuous past year, starting last May with what has been called Strikethrough 2007 by users, wherein hundreds of community and fan journals with content ranging from fanfiction to abuse and molestation survivor support groups to discussion groups for Nabokov's Lolita were deleted on claims of child pornography.
Then there was the licensing, then sale, to Russia-based company SUP toward the end of last year, which, according to Wired, raised suspicions of censorship among Russian users and general wariness of change amongst US users.
To ease the transition, a LiveJournal advisory board was created with founder Brad Fitzpatrick, Professor of Law at Stanford Lawrence Lessig, Internet investor and journalist Esther Dyson, and danah boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Despite some changes made to the abuse policies, the change in ownership caused little uproar amongst LiveJournal users, until now.
Last week, it was revealed that LiveJournal had made a drastic policy change, without bothering to inform current users. LiveJournal began with two account options, "basic" and "paid," with a former having less features than the "paid" account in exchange for being free. In 2006, LiveJournal introduced a "plus" account option, which offered more features than the "basic" in exchange for hosting ads.
Last week, they did away with the "basic" option, so that all new accounts would have to pay a fee or host ads. While this is an annoying (and arguably poor) decision, what really angered users was that there was no announcement of the change on the LiveJournal news feed, the news traveling instead by word of mouth. Users were angry that they were not notified of such a significant change in policy, and the revelation that at least three of the four members of the appointed advisory board had spoken out against the decision.
MIT Communications Forum: Prime Time in Transition (2 of 2)
Questions from the Audience
Question: Given the rich spectrum of human drama that's available, I've always thought that cops and robbers as the least common denominator. Is the obsession with crime drama a feature of the TV industry, the audience, or some combo of the two?
John Romano: I think it's hardwired in the human being. The question of whether or not you're breaking the law is central to Antigone. Prof. David Thorburn told my class at Yale that a cop stands at the junction of social forces, and yet has to go home and be a person. The great foundational works of narrative fiction found cops very interesting, and the odd social place they occupy as perfect for a narrative exploration for our social issues. The fundamental question of how we can stand each other, how we can live with each other.
MIT Communications Forum: Prime Time in Transition (1 of 2)
Here are notes from Thursday night's MIT Communications Forum presentation called "Prime Time in Transition", focusing on transformations of narrative storytelling in the last 20 years in light of cultural, social, and political events, as well as the recent writer's strike and changes in the media landscape with the rise of video online. I'm including notes from the presentation itself here, and I will also includes some notes on the Q&A portion of the event tomorrow.
The speaker is John Romano, writer and producer on more than a dozen shows including Hill Street Blues, Party of Five, and Monk as well as creator of Class of '96, Sweet Justice, and Michael Hayes. His screenwriting credits include The Third Miracle, the Coen Bros.'s Intolerable Cruelty, and the forthcoming Nights in Rodanthe. In a previous life, Romano taught English literature at Columbia University and wrote a critical study of the novelist Charles Dickens.
The talk was moderated by David Thorburn, a professor of literature and television at MIT and John Romano's former professor at Yale.
"Your Move on Scrabulous!": Hasbro's Legal Facebook Faceoff
Around late November of last year, I stopped playing the popular Facebook application Scrabulous, because it was wrecking havoc on my productivity.
Back in January, I started up again, spurred on by Hasbro's crease-and-decist order and have since been nervously awaiting the outcome of the Hasbro versus Scrabulous legal faceoff. With Mattel having also joined the battle, every move might be my last (most recently played: Pledged, for 22 points). But it's telling that I decided to reintroduce the game into my still-overpacked schedule because of the need stake my claim while I still could: whether or not I plan to keep playing, I felt compelled to make known that I supported its right to exist.
According to a recent New York Timesarticle, I'm not the only one who feels this way. Not only have multiple "Save Scrabulous" Facebook groups cropped up, some with several hundred thousand members, but the executive director of the National Scrabble Association, John D. Williams Jr., noted that "People believe it to be in the public domain . . . The idea that Scrabble belongs to a corporation is something that people don't or are unwilling to accept."
Stopping the Signal: Another Look at China's "Great Firewall"
With the Beijing 2008 Olympics fast approaching and the recent announcement by the International Olympics Committee to allow athletes to post personal blogs during the games, so long as they follow fairly limiting content guidelines, talk is buzzing again around China's so-called "Great Firewall," now with the addition of the "Golden Shield" -- an elaborate filtering system that prevents undesirable internet content from being viewed.
According to a great article by James Fallows at The Atlantic, plans are in place to open up a range of IP addresses that the government expects to cater to foreign visitors for the length of the games.
The move comes as no surprise to anyone who's been inside a high-end Chinese hotel where the extravagant lobbies give way to mediocre rooms where the curtains don't hang right: China has been notoriously good at putting on a show for western visitors (and potential investors).
Recently, Google hosted their "Videocracy" event in New York, which was intended to be a "deep-dive, Cliffs Notes, YouTube 101 education" for advertisers, according to YouTube spokeman Aaron Zamost.
Among the featured guests number of youtube celebrities such as Lisa Nova, Tay Zonday, and the source of my own bit of YouTube infamy (see here and here), Soulja Boy.
Bloggers hit their keyboards soon after and several called the event an "upfront" -- a telling comparison since the goal of Videocracy seemed to be to present YouTube to advertisers not just as a video distribution platform, but also as a viable alternative content stream comparable to television wherein advertising was concerned.
News came over the weekend that the WGA strike seemed to be reaching an end, with the Guild approving a tentative contract and rumors that the writers could be back at their keyboards as early as Wednesday. It seems that both the studios and many writers, not to mention television viewers, are delighted at the prospect of new episodes, after the endless stretch of reruns and reality shows that has been dominating TV in recent months.
At C3, we've been following the strike fairly closely, with a discussion of its historical context in the blog last November and continuing discussions with striking writers and producers in class and at the FoE2 conference.
Fans, Producers, and when Real Person Fic actually becomes about Real People
As indicated by the recent piece for the C3 Weekly Update newsletter we distribute within the Consortium on Fanlib and my previous posts (here and here) about Friday Night Lights and fandom, I've been thinking quite a bit recently about the relationship between fans and media producers that results from fan production in general and fanfiction in particular.
Two recent personal incidents around this issue come to mind, the first regarding the discovery a couple of weeks back, of RPF (Real Person Fic, or fanfic about celebrities) about people that I actually know. It wasn't tongue-in-cheek meta-RPS like the infamous Henry Jenkins/Chris Williams, but unironic fan work about a couple of guys in a band who used to live around the corner from me in Brooklyn.
I found myself disconcerted and even a bit scandalized.
In my previous post on the topic, I voiced my frustration about Virginia Heffernan's combining a variety of "convergence culture" activities that I feel can't be so easily conflated in her recent piece on Friday Night Lights for The New York Times Magazine. Heffernan devotes a lot of attention to the lack of fanfiction in particular, and her take has been both praised and derided in fanfiction communities. While I think that some of her speculations on why Friday Night Lights doesn't have a lot of fanfiction do make sense, the way they are presented, and the reasonings behind them, are somewhat flawed and speak to a somewhat shaky grasp of fanfiction as both a social and artistic practice.
I finally started watching Friday Night Lights over Thanksgiving. Several people, including C3's own Sam Ford (see his post on FNL) had been hounding me to give the show a shot for months, but I had been resolute in my resistance. I had so little time for TV as it was, so why would I spend it on a show about high school sports? What did I know about football, or even Texas, for that matter? It wasn't until someone literally shoved the DVDs in front of me that I gave it a chance and immediately fell for the way it's able to convey with such astute, human tenderness a culture that had once seemed to me so alien and unwelcoming.
So I count myself amongst the "fans, critics, and even network suits" Virginia Hefferman mentioned in her New York Times Magazine article who had come to think of Friday Night Lights as necessary television. And, as a member of C3, a fan of many media properties, a consumer of transmedia content, a blogger, and a once-reader of fanfiction (back when I had time to read any form of fiction), I agree in general that entertainment and art are becoming increasingly collaborative and that fan engagement is gaining greater prominence as a marker for success.
Over the weekend, NBC launched the beta version of NBC Direct, the site offering full-length downloads of popular NBC shows that they announced back in mid-September.
This release appropriately coincides with reports of a study conducted at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania about television viewing habits online.
The study, which tracked a dramatic increase in television viewing done online over the past two seasons, showed that television content was being watched more despite the decrease in actual television viewing. Moreover, authorized web viewing in the past two years surpassed the increase in unauthorized viewing.
WGA Strike in Context: A Brief History of Labor Conflicts within Changing Media Landscapes
On Monday, the Writer's Guild of America finally went on strike. The WGA and the AMPTP spent just over three months mired in unsuccessful negotiations this time around, C3 has been following the conflict over Internet residuals since 2006, with posts from Sam Ford here, here and here. Also see Jason Mittell's post from earlier today.
But even beyond that, these sort of debates have been at the center of battles between the guilds and the studios for decades, and anyone familiar with the ongoing struggles over structures of compensation in the changing media marketplace would have seen this strike coming a long way off.
A Transformation of Our Own: Fanfiction Communities and the Organization for Transformative Works
I started reading fanfiction relatively recently, starting in the mid-to-late 90s with the rise of fandom on the internet. And in just the time that I've been watching and participating in fanfiction communities online, it has shifted through a number of technologies, spreading over newsgroups, bulletin boards, and blogging networks.
In the divide between the centralized mega-archives and the segmented, and in some ways more difficult to penetrate, LiveJournal fanfic community, I saw what appeared to be a tension in the dual nature of fanfiction as both a social practice and a body of creative work. While the archives worked to provide, to varying degrees of success, a place to store and aggregate fanfiction as a form of user-generated content, livejournal provided a place that could foreground the development, writing and sharing fanfiction as a social process.
Be Somebody: ClipStar, and the Myth of Internet Celebrity
Coming off of my Soulja Boy run (look here and here), it seemed appropriate to bring up a new UK-based video sharing community, ClipStar.
Unlike YouTube and other established video sharing sites, ClipStar sets out with the explicit purpose of being a channel for self-promotion and publicity. It's not just about sharing your videos, but sharing them with the right people (ClipStar appears to be affiliated with a number of talent agencies). They're even pushing it one step further than other self-promotion sites by introducing a talent competition, starting at the end of October, with an annual pay-out of one million dollars.
"Meet me at my crib . . .": Reading the official "Crank That" video
Last week, I brought up the phenomenon surrounding Soulja Boy and the "Crank Dat" dance craze that propelled him to success and touched upon a few of the things that drew my attention to this particular case. This week I thought I'd dig in a little further, and try to tease out some of the things that Soulja Boy really embodies for me (as a concept more than as a musician or performer) through a closer examination of his official music video, which touches upon a lot of these themes of production, participation, and distribution in the age of convergence.
Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon
A little while back, Kevin, one of my colleagues here at MIT, brought the Soulja Boy YouTube phenomenon to my attention while we were discussing an upcoming project.
Fast forward to October: Soulja Boy is fending off Britney Spears and Kanye West on the Billboard Top 100, and you can now watch a rag-tag team of MIT grad students, researchers, affiliates, and Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Movement, crank that:
(CMS program director Henry Jenkins even joined in the learn the dance, but sadly had to run off to something undoubtedly important before the video was shot.)
Lowes (tm) Sucks: Consumer Criticism and the Lowes Trademark Fiasco
We write rather frequently here at C3 on issues surrounding Intellectual Property (as well as things that suck, come to think of it), though, admittedly, home improvement falls a bit outside the usual area of focus. But, given some of the implications, both disturbing and humorous, of Lowes Home Improvement's recent trademark controversy, it seemed time to learn something about fence installation.
A couple of weeks ago, the register ran the story of Allen Harkleroad, a man who, after being frustrated by what appears to have been epically bad service from Lowes Home Improvement, went and did what we've all done on occasion: he complained.
Privacy and Information Ownership: The Rapleaf Controversy
The past few weeks, I've been following the controversy around Rapleaf, a company that got some attention in early 2006 as an expanded, more powerful version of Ebay's feedback system, which would allow people to build and look up the "reputations" of other by entering an email address. Profiles on Rapleaf can include everything from your age to your political affiliations to what books you want to buy, as well as testimonials from people who have done business with you (though it's unclear how Rapleaf verifies that these testimonials are legitimate). In short, Rapleaf billed itself as a way to find out what you were getting into before entering a business transaction.
That proposition quickly became rather ironic once controversy surrounding the company started picking up speed in late August 2007, when some bloggers received email notifications from Rapleaf informing them that they had been searched.
While some of the backlash was directed at the "spam" factor of receiving annoying email invitations to Rapleaf, the most vocal outrage was over the potential invasion of privacy.
